The transition between faith to no faith.

[Mystic]

A lot of you at one point had faith. At one point it felt like you knew God. When that feeling started to go away how were you? Were you caught up with thoughts about God a lot? When it away, how do you know it was baseless?

[Tonus]

There wasn't a particular moment for me, because my deconversion was very gradual. Even as I picked apart my beliefs and kept running into dead ends, I didn't doubt that god was there because it was such an ingrained belief. By the time I finally admitted to myself that I didn't believe in god, I had long since stopped believing.

During that time, I guess I was more suspicious than anything else. Having spent decades convinced that the JWs were the conduit for god's will, it's difficult to separate at which point I was deconstructing the JW beliefs and at which point I was doing so to general Christian beliefs. I may have felt some measure of anxiety, excitement, and relief, because I think that I had subconsciously started to give up on my beliefs for some time. My lack of enthusiasm began to make sense as I realized that what I thought I believed was probably not true.

How do I know it was baseless? Well, that's another factor of my beliefs being ingrained from childhood. Among the things I "knew" to be true was that Christian/JW/Bible teachings had to be 100% true. Even so, the presuppositional beliefs were so strong that it took quite a few examples of fallible beliefs or teachings before I even considered letting go. But at some point there are so many leaks in the dam that you can't keep the structure from collapsing around you.

[Anomalocaris]

A lot of you at one point had faith. At one point it felt like you knew God. When that feeling started to go away how were you? Were you caught up with thoughts about God a lot? When it away, how do you know it was baseless?

I never had faith in God. I may or may not have felt he existed, I don't remember. One could never say I would have remembered if I felt he existed because I would never have deemed any feeling of his existence to of any important whatsoever. I always knew since the earliest times when I can remember thinking about these things that feeling something to exist doesn't mean jackshit because there is no credible mechanism that connects feels to reality. I would only rely on methods in which result bears demonstrate connection to reality, and absolutely nothing even vaguely suggests God to exist. For every reason people proposed God exists, I either detect hand waving over wish thinking, or the same reason could just as well function without God.

[Dystopia]

I never genuinely believed in god. At most, I felt like there was a god when I was a kid, mostly because it was the norm, and I didn't even know believing in god was psychologically possible. I easily realized it was all bullshit.

[Minimalist]

Wrong.

At one point I was forced to participate in catholic horseshit.

Big difference.

[Chad32]

After really thinking about the implications of Jesus' sacrifice, and thinking about all the things in the bible that just wouldn't fly even in this country that's mostly full of christians, it just made me doubt whether christianity was for me. I still believed Yahweh existed, but eventually I felt like I just couldn't call myself a christian, and thought maybe buddhism would be better. Eventually I just settled on atheism when I found out that there are people who just don't believe in gods at all. It's not that they believed Jesus was out there, but didn't worship him. They just didn't believe he existed.

[Jenny A]

I usually say blithely that I never believed but how for back can anyone remember really. I can say for sure that I never believed past the age of five or so. I can remember feeling guilty about having to pretend to believe that early.

The transition was going public.

[tjakey]

My trek from faith to non-faith lasted more than a decade. Raised Evangelical, caught up in the "Jesus Movement", bent toward fundamentalism, rebelling from the harshness and hate residing there, moving though the most liberal branches of Christianity, and finally admitting that the real cosmos without a god was a lot more interesting and, in many ways, a lot better place than the cosmos with a human centered god, is a long walk. (Not as long as that sentence, but close.)

I'm sure there were times when I wrestled with the fading of my faith, but it has been several decades now and most of those memories have faded. I do remember that last time I walked out of a church service as a "Christian". I got into the car and admitted to myself, "None of this is true."

Religion hasn't meant anything to me since.

[Whateverist]

I suspect the younger you are, the easier it is to get out. In first grade I would throw every other fritos corn chip over my shoulder for Jesus on the way home from school. In second grade I would have said anyone who didn't love Jesus was an ingrate. In early elementary school I used to imagine spending all eternity with Jesus who I thought of as someone who would know and do the best/right thing in any situation. My mission, as I defined it for myself, was to learn to do the best thing myself .. mostly in an empathetic way. I wanted to be worthy of His company and I imagined He'd be tired of sycophants who only made Him feel lonely. In my there by herself. By fifth grade I had started to suspect I was just talking to myself when I would ask for some sort of sign if He really was there. I didn't talk about it with anyone else. I thought I might be the only one narcissistic hubris, I wanted to be the Guy's peer.

I had the luxury of figuring it out for myself because my god-obsessed father was in the navy and my mother wasn't dragging all seven of us since everyone around me talked of god and crazy woo stuff like it was as real as mowing the lawn.

If you make it to adulthood going to a church where people are actively guiding your belief system that's got to be harder. If you read the bible and spend time defending it that would make it harder still. If you reach the point where you're proselytizing and engaging in apologetics, that probably makes it about as hard to leave religion as it is for a gang member who had been required to kill someone to join a gang.

But who knows. Everyone's experience is unique I suppose. It is hard to know for sure what its really like for anyone else. But having trained for the olympics of empathy in order to be God's buddy, I often think I know how others feel. Narcissism sucks .. but not as bad as its polar opposite, low self esteem.

[Thumpalumpacus]

My deconversion took a couple of years. I went through fear, curiosity, and finally simple review of the evidence ... but the big hurdle was learning how to think rationally.