This is not meant to be confrontational?

Question

I have noticed alot of yahooers say that they used to be Christian or used to be Baptist but are now Atheist. I'm curious to know, what would make a person believe in God one minute and then disreguard his exsistence the next? share personal experiences please.

people you are taking it too literal. i know they don't believe im God one day and then don't the very next. i know its a process or an experience. this is what gets me, they go through a situation and say there is no proof that he exsist, when in fact they could be right, but there is no proof that he doesn't exsist either.

typo error: *in God

Answer 1

Good question. Not a matter of evidence. It is a matter of rejecting the authority of God over them. Not responsible to anyone for their actions.

Answer 2

I was raised catholic, but it just never really clicked with me. From the very beginning my parents also taught me to think and examine the world around me, which is part of what I would attribute to my questioning religion at a young age. When I left catholicism at the age of 13, I started becoming a pentecostal after the persistence of a friend got me to go to one of their "youth brainwashing sessions". That only lasted a couple of years before I was completely turned off to christianity altogether. After reading the entire bible and experiencing a good cross section of the faith, I realized that it could not be true. Not when you see that every religion claims to be the only truth about god. If god was real, either: 1. he was extremely unjust and prejudiced toward a certain ethnic group, with no one in the world really knowing which religion is the true one. or 2. All religions were somewhat true and that god just accepted all beliefs. Neither of these options make sense, and the third option I decided must be the only possible belief based in reality: No religions are true, they are all simply created by people in every area of the world to fit whatever their particular circumstances, and there is no god.
It is a long process to de-construct such deeply ingrained beliefs, and not an easy thing to do. But there was no choice, I simply could not force myself to believe in something that years of study and observation had made so completely implausible to me.

Answer 3

Can you handle the truth.

I was raised Catholic, became an Evangelical born-again in my early twenties, went to ministerial school and studied everything.........
to the point where what I was supposed to believe was not what the record was really saying, the inconsistencies, contradictions, and information about better documented more reliable histories came my way and I researched, studied, went back to school, learned about physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, psychology, logic, and most important, got a real solid understanding of the Scientific process.

Today I am a skeptic, proud to be the descendant of an ape like creature that climbed down out of the trees, stood upright and stole meat from the lions.

The process took many years to complete, it didn't happen in a minute or overnight.

Answer 4

I was a christian and believed in god when I was a kid, pretty much because that's why my family told me to believe. But once I was able to think for myself, I realized that the concept of God made no sense to me. By the time I was 12, I identified myself as an Atheist. My loss of faith didn't happen in a minute. The whole transition took about 2 years. I still remain open to listening to different theistic ideas, but until they are able to defend their claims with some real proof, I can't believe them.

Answer 5

I was a very devout Christian as a child, but when my parents divorced, things changed. My father married a woman who sang in a gospel band with her three sons, one of whom was also a minister. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, because I was always the church-goer in my family. God and Jesus were my best friends.

However, what we learned at my new church was vastly different from what I had been taught in my old. I started to question, and the more I questioned, the more I doubted. This is because no one was able to answer me without a lot of contradictions, and finally, they told me to stop asking so much and just accept.

This didn't sit well, so I questioned even more. By the age of 11, I was an atheist.

Answer 6

The three religions I belonged to disillusioned me against religion. So I decided to stick by the Bible. I studied it for five years, and from what I learned, I realized that the whole thing was just made up. It was just a collection of ancient stories. Without the Bible, there is no foundation for belief in God or in Jesus.

Reading "The Age of Reason" by Thomas Paine was a real eye-opener. I love that book.

I've done a lot of research and believe that all religions are equally false. I am a strong atheist in that I do not believe in anything supernatural as there is absolutely no proof that any of it is true. This goes for all gods as well as angels, devils, spirits, ghosts and demons.

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Answer 7

I was raised by my parents to be a Christian. Way back then I didn't know any better except to take my parents' word for it that the Christian bible was pure truth. I mean why would mom and dad lie to me? The only thing I can figure out is that they were deceived by multitudes of followers of the Christian religion.

Anyway, why is it written that rabbits chew their cud in Leviticus 11:6? Isn't the bible supposed to be the word of God? Why would God lie to everyone? Isn't he supposed to be all knowing and teller of truth? Obviously the bible is NOT the word of God. Now that science has proven beyond a shadow of doubt that rabbits don't chew their cud, that means the people who wrote the bible were delusional to think that God told them to write that stuff.

The only reason I used to believe in it was because I was gullible, naive and very impressionable as a child. But now that I know better, I'm very cautious as to consider taking any religious peoples' words as the truth. Just because they believe in the words they're saying, doesn't mean that what they believe is true.

Oh yeah, I'm not an Atheist - I'm Agnostic.

Answer 8

A long hard look at the tennants of my former belief system. Obvious injustice build into the core of the belief system coupled with intolerance and hypocracy by the so-called elders in the system.

Awakening to logical progression without hiding behind "God works in mysterious ways." or "God did it."

Failure to find any sort of reasonable proof for the existance of any diety, mine or anyone else's.

Long grueling arguments with bible thumping, hell wishing, "Nya Nya. You're going to hell and I'm not..." psychophantic people who were otherwise completely rational and easy to get along with.

And it took a lot longer than 'one minute', but I'm as firmly rooted in my current belief as I ever was in my former, and for better reasons.

Answer 9

Intellectual growth causes many individuals to question their faith. I for one have experienced this and find it increasingly hard to believe that some guy walked across the water and turned water into wine. I do believe that Jesus lived, but I find it hard to believe that he was the human embodiment of GOD.

I also feel that to have blind faith (the basis of all religion) without question is not what our minds have developed the unique ability to reason for.

I was a catholic but am now recovering.:)

Answer 10

I sometimes say that I am an ex-catholic atheist. This is because I was brought up in the catholic faith by my family. I never really believed in it, but I am 'recorded' as being a catholic. If there was a way to change this, I would.

Answer 11

It wasn't a minute by minute thing. It took years, partially b/c I was so non-confrontational.
Personal experience (people I met, questions I had with no reasonable or non-contradictory answer), Bible reading (and I always get high scores on Reading Comprehension!)