Are there any ATHEISTS,agnostics, that used to be Christians.....?

Question

What made you chamge your belief?
What did you find wrong with Christianity?
Thanks

Answer 1

Yes, I used to be Christian. It didn't make sense to me. I had questions as a child. I started really reading the Bible as a teenager and was so repulsed by God. Was this really my God? Was this a God I could really worship if it were God? I wanted to believe because my family and many friends did. So I started studying the Bible. The more I studied the more I came to the conclusion it was created by humans to teach ideas but wasn't actually a literal tale that necessarily represented God if it existed. The authors of the Bible widely employed what is known as midrash in writing the stories. This was taking existing stories and myths and inserting your own heros and deities and maybe adding a twist to get your particular idea across. This is particularly striking when you look at the story of Jesus. It bears striking resemblence to many preexisting pagan deities from virgin births, to ressurection, performance of miracles, etc...

So what I find wrong is it doesn't jibe with any sense of reality. I don't think God would give us a day to day reality so different from that depicted in the Bible and no evidence of itself and yet expect us to blindly believe or it will burn us in hell. I don't believe that a deity of perfect knowledge would be so wrathful and cruel and arbitrary as it is represented in the Old Testament. I don't we would have failed prophecy, or that had to be "reinterpreted" in order to get it to not have failed if it were the handed down word of God that God expected to make sense to most people. I don't believe Christianity is representative of reality but I don't think Islam or Judaism is either.

Answer 2

I consider myself to be Agnostic and I was baptized Episcopalian and then was Luthern for a few years. When it comes down to it...i do believe in some higher level of existance, but not necessarily a "god". I think i really started to question it at first commumion at about 10.

I just have too many questions to have such blind faith. And I dont agree with any of the versions of where we come from. Maybe a mixed evolution/creation theory but I find it hard to believe that such an all-powerful god that could create life, would just stay out of sight. What would be the point to create these beings if you dont have a purpose for them? And then, where did said god come from?

Mostly, I just dont believe in organized religion. I dont think that saying the exact same things over and over for about a century is going to do much but prove my stupidity and ignorance. Plus, religion was created by man. Dont even respond with god created it, because all religion is, is man's interpretation of a god's will. And man is inherently flawed and extremely biased. So everytime someone else is put in charge of something religious things change to their liking, however small or large.

And how about the bible? King James translated it to his liking how many years ago? Religion was power back then. I'm completely sure he didnt translate it word for word. He had to have changed and imbellished it. And then who has transleted it since, or even before for that matter? We are a LONG way off from any original version.

I'm not saying anyone is wrong, it's just I dont want other people telling me that I am wrong when there is so much evidience against them. I dont mind debating anything with civil and respectful people, but it's just those who feel that everyone else is wrong is the problem with the world. The fact is that until the end, noone knows anything. It's all speculation and INTERPRETATION. If the world developed a bit of tolerance, like i try to, then we wouldnt have the religious problems (wars, division of churches, etc.) that we do.

Hope this helps. And thanks for the two points.

Answer 3

I am a great example of this. Some believers try to say it is always emotional reactions that turn us against Christianity, but I am ruled by logic, not emotion. Mom's father was a preacher, and Dad's family mostly attended church too. As one may expect, I read the Bible and heard sermons every day. Mom says I could read some at age 2. She was reading at age 4, but I beat her. Mom's parents both were school teachers, as well as her father being a minister. They had many intersting books on all subjects, so I read much more than just the Bible. One of Grampa's books said creation was in 4004 BC. I later learned that was Bishop James Ussher's figure. I soon got some science books that said our earth is 4,700,000,000 years old, and they had much proof of that, while the Bible had none for indicating that it is much younger. I began to see many errors in the Bible. I corrected my teachers, even in the first grade, so I had confidence in my intelligence. My siblings feared to even question the Bible, but I did that at age 7, and I found it was wrong about many things. I saw ever more errors in it as I grew older and wiser. I am a math prodigy. I saw that two places in the Bible indicate that pi is 3.00. That was so absur that I laughed. From start to finish, the Bible says the sky is a solid dome (firmament) a few miles above us, so stars can fall to earth and the sky can roll up like a scroll. Such things were absurd to me, even when I was in elementary school.

Answer 4

I was raised Lutheran, but I never found enough "right" with Christianity. In high school I read the KJV cover-to-cover and decided it was just so much mythology. In college I practiced Buddhism (Nichiren Shoshu) followed by agnosticism, then briefly by Deism before gravitating back toward agnosticism and finally atheism. However, I very recently became a Pastafarian and joined the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Pirate gurls have more fun. Arrrrrrrr!

Answer 5

I was raised Christian, but when I was old enough to actually contemplate my beliefs, Christianity and theism in general no longer made sense to me or satisfactorily answered my questions. I considered people asking me to believe based on faith to be an insult to my intelligence. And when I decided to try and read the Bible cover to cover, like I would any other book, that was the clincher. I found the Bible to be confusing, archaic and not even particularly well written. I didn't see how anyone could actually read the Bible and think it was the word of an all knowing, all loving being.

Answer 6

Yup, there are many of us. I realized that I was following something because I was told to. I started to question my "beliefs" and realized that they were not mine. I was following blindly. I started to study; I read the bible over and over, I talked with people at the church, I read books on christianity, I wanted to know for myself. During the time (a couple years) I came to realize that it was all a bunch of crap.
Not only the lack of proof, but the lack of anything but a book. A book that was passed down by word of mouth for hundreds of years before it was written down. A book that has been changed/editted/translated more times than a child's diaper.

Many things are wrong with christianity. First, they preach honesty, integrity and acceptance, yet they do the opposite, they are hypocrites. They persecute anyone that doesn't agree with them, they lie by telling people that they are going to go to hell unless they follow them. They have no integrity, they try to buy their way into heaven by being good only because they must, or they will go to hell.

Answer 7

Born and raised Christian, atended and graduated from a private parochial school.

What made me change my beliefs was living in foreign countries and coming in contact with many other religions. I figured out that religion was nothing more than a form of market competition, with each religion vying for you to join them, so their coffers grew and the others lessened. I was told by Christian pastors that there were no CHinese people in Heaven - except for those that accepted Jesus. And, finally, much of what the Bible says cannot be believed alongside what science teaches us.

So, I stopped believeing it.

Answer 8

I was a Catholic, and was raised in the Catholic Church and received 5 of the 7 sacrements.

The Catholic religion never really resonated with me. Some of the stories of Jesus were certainly powerful and attractive, but some of policies towards women and their negative views of something natural like sex certainly turned me off. I liked a lot of the rituals, the stained glass and incense etc.

But I found myself feeling like I could not get into the whole idea of a real living God.

I went to a Jesuit University and had to study theology and philosophy and I came to realize that there were a lot of really smart people throughout history who hadn't been able to sort out this whole idea of God, so I realized I wasn't going to do it.

Then I started thinking that maybe the important thing wasn't whether God was real or not, but whether the idea of God was important to people and the way they lived their life.

I went religionless for 20 years and then for a lot of reasons felt I wanted some kind of religious affiliation. I found a Unitarian Universalist church that really felt right for me because they concentrated on the things I felt were important - what things unite people, how should we act towards each other, how do we grow as individuals - and eliminated concepts that I had rejected such as salvation and damnation. They concentrated on life instead of what happens after you die.

Since that time, I've read a lot more of the Bible than I did as a Catholic and I come to my own conclusions on what it says about human nature and our history of trying to be a good people. I have great respect for the teachings of Jesus, as exemplified by the Sermon on the Mount and the accounts of his direct ministry with the people and I reject the Christ mythology perpetrated by people like Paul, who never knew Jesus and who's interpretation of Jesus emphasized what I think are the worst parts of Christianity.

So, I am no longer a Christian, as defined by Paul, but I am a religious humanist, who greatly admires the ministry of the man called Jesus.

And thank YOU for asking.

Answer 9

I used to be a Christian. I was a Baptist, a Congregationalist and a Mormon. The biggest thing that made me change my beliefs was not one prayer answered, an emptiness where God should have been, empty promises, no sensible explanation for the Trinity and studying the Bible for five years really opened my eyes. I got to a place where I knew that none of it was true, it was a wishful fantasy.

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AD

Answer 10

Me too. I just lived life and saw that all the people that I was told were sinners were actually not doing anything wrong. It was then that I realized how under a spell I was...how much horrible advice I had given and how I just wanted to believe ini something so I didnt feel alone, not because It was true.