Atheists raised in a religion: Did you become an atheist in part because you perceived God as being unjust?

Question

Whether from a passage of scripture, or someone telling you that bad things happened as a result of God's will?

I know that was something that bothered me from a very young age. I believe it was the key issue in fostering my doubts.

Answer 1

Nope. For me it was an issue of relevance. For every explanation that involves God, a non-theistic explanation worked just as well. There may indeed be a god, but for certain it has yet to be realistically imagined.

The justice issue is confusing and self-contradictory. I understand the wish to see true "evildoers", the ones who make life miserable for others to benefit themselves, be punished, but the proportionality is wrong and it smells too much of human revenge. And so many believers distort their sense of justice to obsess about personality flaws rather than the needs of the poor and powerless. "Justice" gets confused with "fairness". It's not supposed to be proportional. That just means the rich always get more of it. So I gave up on "justice" long ago (theistic or otherwise), aside from what I can manage to generate myself.

It was just part of a growing realization that the rest of the system was not hooked up to anything either. I figured out that prayer was just a form of self-reprogramming or group networking. "Creation" was just a way of framing the natural unfolding of the universe. Everything divine had a natural counter-explanation. So why were we complicating things with an invisible, magic realm?

Answer 2

I am Agnostic but can I still answer?

It was religion that made me not believe, I never had a problem with god itself, in fact I ve never even meet him, I imagine that it's quite a nice infinite being as infinite beings go really, just sort of hanging out doing it's thing, I don't even know it, it never calls doesn't send a card on my birthday, etc...

But it those strange people who say they know (him), which is a little strange cos there's no Mrs God and then they you that we're like , so he's got form and you have to go to church right and you can't this and you can't do that. You must think this and you mustn't think that!
And there's all sorts of these mad people and they all say that they know god (a little name dropping) but it seem that they all know a different guy who says different things, but they all say that there's only and it's their and all the others are wrong and like this Devil guy, right!
And well it's a load of C*%? really.
Sorry I can explain it any better than, but niether can they for that matter!

Answer 3

My upbringing was fundamentalist Christian. I don't remember any time during my entire childhood, that I didn't think the stories in the bible were far-fetched & ridiculous. Perhaps it's just the way my brain is wired, but it just never made any sense to me - any more than the fairy tale books I read.
As a result of mental illness in my family & the strong belief system, physical abuse that led me to being taken away from my home at 12 yrs also pushed me in the other direction. I went from just not believing in it, to being quite resentful about the whole idea of Christianity - after all, what is there to like about it when you are an abused child in a violent home? I grew up believing that Christians were mean & extremely hypocritical, and that the religion seemed to bring out the worst in people - both at home and at the church. There weren't many people I liked in our family's circle of church friends - they all seemed insincere & self-absorbed to me.
As an adult, I have lost the resentment, realising that it wasn't Christianity that caused my problems as a child, but I still have the same disbelief. Every aspect of the religion is completely ludicrous to me.

Answer 4

I grew to dislike him because from what I had been taught, I perceived him as unjust. As a child, being told that half of your relatives and all your 'worldly' friends will die a torturous death for not subscribing to your brand of religion is a tad disturbing. I grew up seeing and reading things like this - it terrified me

http://www.culthelp.info/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=389&Itemid=8

It was all the more terrifying because I believed he was real and that all those horrible things would transpire. I began to realise that I could not serve someone I felt was cruel or unjust with a clear conscience.

That opened my mind to the alternatives. Having made up my mind to not pander to the will of what I saw as an unjust (but still real being), I had none of my previous guilt in exploring other faiths and philosophies. After a very short period of doing this, I came to the conclusion that no theology seemed to have a sound enough basis for me to feel comfortable committing to it.

The whole thing just started to appear incredibly wonky, and I saw less and less evidence for a deity, and ceased believing in one altogether.

I guess, indirectly, my perception that God was unjust led me to opening my mind to the possibility that he wasn't real.

Answer 5

Born and raised Catholic. Had many doubts early in life and asked lots of questions but stayed Catholic. After I left home I seriously studied the history of religion, where it came from, why it came about. I also took classes to study the bible. It was after all of this that I became an atheist. It was clear that religions in general are organizations created for the purpose of controlling the hearts and minds of people and the bible simply the tool. Man created god in his image, not the other way around.

Answer 6

I definitely thought of God as arbitrary. In the religion in which I was raised, there were days that you didn't eat particular foods (not just meat, but a fairly long list of foods). On all the other days, those foods were okay. I could never understand why God cared about that, and it was probably my first question that no one gave me an adequate answer for.

Answer 7

No, it was more that the whole "machine" surrounding god as reported in the bible, seemed totally made up the more I thought about it. It just felt fake and made up. But mostly, I sensed a lack of true spirituality in religion. IOW, people seemed to be doing it because they were supposed to, not because it was what they wanted or that they were connecting with something higher. Make sense??

Answer 8

No I became a deist from my perception of the Judeo-Christian god being unjust from my own experience.


I became an atheist eventually but not because of such.

Answer 9

Not really. The biggest thing for me is that I have never felt any sort of connection with God. Prayer feels like talking to myself. That instilled the most doubt in me.

Answer 10

Yes. This passage affected me a great deal:

Genesis 3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Fewer religious statements are more disgusting than this one. How can people still believe this simple, hateful document is divine?