Atheist, who were once Christians ( Adults only please)?

Question

What was the defining moment or action that caused you to renounce your beliefs?
I am serious, Please no flippant answers.

ES- Thank you for your concern for my soul. However, that concern is misplaced. I am a practicing Christian, I am just curious about the beliefs fo others. Also, I don't beleive that I should worry about my soul to the exclusion of others. While I would never push my belief system on others, I do worry and pray for others.

You are all giving me great answers. I thought the majority of the answers would be related to the death of a loved one, but it looks as if those are the minority.

Excellent point Sir Richard. At face value, I can understand how other view our belief. We worship a man who died and came back three days later??? But, how much more beleivable is it that the Earth and everything on it was created by accident, from a spark that became an explosion?

Answer 1

Not so much a defining moment, but eventually I realized that I no longer believed what I used to.

My father was a preacher; I got positive attention from the otherwise abusive man by parroting religion. I sought approval by taking up the belief. Eventually I realized that the evangelical fundamentalist churches I grew up in were not right, but I still held on to the basic belief and the bible, and wondered what it would be like to find a 'true' Christian church.

In my thirties I discovered the Orthodox Church (pretty much by accident) and thought I had found the True Religion. I lived the fasts and feasts, the rites and sacraments, chanted ancient services in three languages, studied the Church Fathers, prayed and did prostrations in the smoke of incense by the altar in my home when I wasn't at church.

I was a seeker.

But after years of that, I had to be honest -- I couldn't hold on to some of the beliefs that the Church required. I read some Ayn Rand and began to challenge myself with being honest about my beliefs and motives. I began to have serious questions and doubts.

After some months of that, in a conversation with somebody one day I made some kind of observation and they said to me, "So, you're an atheist." And I thought about that and realized, yeah, I guess they were right.

Answer 2

No defining moment, much more a long struggle.

Teaching the bible, (and training people in bible study and evangelism) I only wanted to teach what was right.
That led to careful and deep bible study and research into the history of the church and its variant doctrines and movements.

It was a gradual dawning that I was having to contrive to see the bible as a whole and inerrant, when there was another possible reading of it and one that, in all honesty, made more sense.
Possibly it started with the divergent views of how Genesis should be understood.
But it didn't really end until about five years later, when I had exhausted all real possibilities of reconciling what I was finding with Christianity being, at core, what it claimed to be.


And yes, I understand the doctrine of
"A Christian who became an Atheist was never a Christian to begin with."
(as mentioned by Lion of Judah and supported by.Softlyinspired.)
I used to believe that too.
To them I can only say: if that is true, and I wasn't a real Christian, it's quite possible you are not too, but just don't know it yet. My belief was real, *then*, to me.

.

Answer 3

I love some of these answers: the story of God and the Bible is a joke, it doesn't make sense, it's impossible. Okay, but a compact dot of all the universe compressed into the size of a dot expanding outward and creating millions of potentially inhabitable planets from non-life is completely logical and possible, even though we have no real evidence that any of this happened. Lighting + Dirt + Water = amino acids, life -> complex life -> thinking man -> ??? We can't even make anything close to what we would need to make life from those combinations of what we think the world used to be, but we still believe in it like it's some sort of fact or something. That's a joke, and calling it science is a tragedy.

Answer 4

For most atheists there was no single event that caused any "remounciation". Usually it starts out as a vague discontent, followed by a great deal of research and/or questioning. Many of the stock answers given by Christians are not very satisfactory when closely analyzed. The process of disbelief can just slowly dawn on someone over time, or it can hit all at once.

Answer 5

Wow, that is a good question. I sometimes don't know if I believe in God or do just because I am supposed to. I know that the bible had to have come from somewhere.....I don't understand that if there was or is a God why people have to go through tough situations in their life. We aren't suppose to be given more than we can handle right? For instance my girlfriend lost a son in March to leukemia, then in June her only other son was shot in the chest "accidently" by one of those "Joe rent a cops" at a turnpike stop. Both her boys gone (27 and 29 y/o), who decided that? She is going through hell right now trying to be strong for 4 granddaughters and just doesnt' want to live. If there is a God why is she dealing with this. I am sorry to rattle on but it does make me wonder sometimes. I've never considered myself an atheist but just don't understand why God would put people through so much at once. Sorry if you don't agree........

Answer 6

I intended to become a pastor, so I attended Divinity School. As I moved along the educational pathway, I decided I wanted to engage in some serious scholarship. Who wrote the passages that are found in the Bible? What was the context? How do all the writings therein relate?
I learned that four books in the New Testament are forgeries. They are: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus and 2 Peter. When I discovered that, and after I learned that none of the Gospel writers personally knew this individual commonly known as Jesus bar Joseph, or Jesus of Nazareth, I realized none of the Bible is of God. Not long after that, I determined that there is no God whatsoever. I was shaken to my core, and spent some years in despair. But I gradually recovered, reconciled with reality and have lived peacefully without religion in my life for more than thirty years...

Answer 7

High school science class. About eight years ago I had a teacher who taught us the scientific method and defined science. A month later, she takes two classes to talk about creationism (this is a public school!), saying that its an alternative to the evolution we had just covered. I was astounded! She told us what science was, and then a month later she basically tells us that science is not right and creationism is. How can she teach science and creationism in the same class? They are opposites. This moment made me realize that so much of religion is faith, and this faith goes against many things science has proved. So to me, there is one choice: science or Christianity. You can't say I agree with science and then say the world was built in six days.

Answer 8

I was a Pentecostal Holiness the first sixteen years of my life. I was baptized at age five. I attended Churches services and bible study two days a week for eleven years. When I was 16 I was invited to spend the weekend with a friend. Her family was Atheist. They were the nicest most honest people I had ever met. They didn't encourage me they set an example. I decided that was what I wanted to be. I never attended Church again.

Answer 9

It was a series of things. I used to be VERY religious. I wanted to be a nun. Anyways, after a while it just didn't make sense anymore. It was illogical, and I still want to know why someone who could love someone so much would put them on this earth to suffer. I refuse to believe God would love me more than the starving children in the world. I refuse to believe God would love me more than the person who was born into a poor, drug addict family. Why are you so special that you had the chance to become educated?Why are you so special that you were born healthy? Why are you so special that you have food everyday, a roof over your head, a few luxuries? Why are you so special and other people in the world aren't? I'm just not that conceited.

Plus I got tired of people telling me everything was a test. According to you God is playing head games with us? That's kind of mean isn't it? It's like us putting lab rats in a maze and adding obstacle after obstacle to see if they will get the cheese. It's like killing a puppies mother in front of him to see if it will survive on it's own. It's like taking food away from a child to see if they will still love you. It's like putting a baby into a home where the caregivers are not capable of taking care of it and seeing if the baby will first live then love the person who placed them there.

If people were doing these experiments they would be considered evil and immoral. But because it's an invisble superpower in the sky it knows best and it's testing us. What a load of bull!

It's a lot easier to love your parents when your parents are good to you and give you what you need. It's a lot harder to love your parents when they molest, abuse and starve you. I would like to see how all these moral Christians would be towards God if they were the ones who were unproperly treated. Maybe we could test them like God tests all the other people in the world and see if they still love their God. We could starve, them, take away their house, put them on the street, make them drink contaminated water. it wouldn't be cruel, because according to these people God is all loving and all good but yet he does this to 3/4 of the world every day!

Answer 10

There was no god. The bible made no sense and was unbelievable. Going to hell for not believing. Works don't count only faith. Other religions. All the doctrines of Christianity believe different yet use the same book. No proof what so ever. The people in the religion seemed so.... Not right!