(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: I'm interested in hearing from those of you who have come out of religion. What would you list as your sincere beliefs while you were a theist? For example:
Did you really believe there was a god,
Yes.
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: and if so, what did you feel you knew about him?
A full answer to that would take a lot of writing. I was raised a Southern Baptist, and, as a child, I believed the typical things most Christians believe about God.
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: Did you really think your holy book was divinely inspired?
Yes. That actually helped lead me away from religion, because I took the book seriously and tried to make sense of it. Since it is contradictory and silly, trying to make sense of it leads to thinking something must be amiss with it. If I had not taken the book seriously, then its problems would not have mattered. Of course, without something like the Bible, what reason is there to believe Christianity at all?
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: Did you have experiences which you really thought were divine interactions?
Not really. I, of course, had strong feelings about some things, and thought that
maybe some of that had to do with God, but I was not sure.
I was not crazy and did not hear voices or anything like that.
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: What else did you believe then that you don't now?
That is too broad of a question. I believed most of the usual things that Southern Baptists tend to believe. Such as, homosexuality is a sin, etc. That one is interesting because being told not to engage in homosexual acts was kind of like telling me not to stick an ice pick in my eye. I had no interest in doing that anyway, so I thought it was kind of a strange thing to make a big deal about. I could not relate to a man even wanting to engage in sexual activity with another man. (I probably thought that one must really hate God to do something like that just to upset God!)
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: I hope it goes without saying I'm not intending to make fun of anyone, I'm genuinely interested. Having never been the slightest bit religious, I can't even imagine what it must feel like to have any of these kinds of beliefs.
Did your parents teach you to believe in Santa Claus? If so, then you should have an idea of how it works.
In my case, my parents divorced, and I was raised by my mother. Both of my parents, however, were quite religious. But with my mother, she was reasonable about things generally, and, as far as I can remember, she did not ever lie to me. For example, she told me that Santa Claus was basically anyone who gave people presents at Christmas. She never tried to con me into believing that crap. In kindergarten, I remember saying something about Santa not being real, and some of my classmates were really upset by that, so I learned to keep my mouth shut about nonsense that other people believed. When my classmates eventually learned the truth about Santa and many cried over it, I thought that they had bad parents, who enjoyed lying to their children for their own amusement. (It is for the parent's own amusement, because children like getting presents, and do not care much who gives them the presents. Presents from mother are just as good as presents from some imaginary being.) That they had bad parents, I still believe. People who lie to their children, to feel superior to them, and to amuse themselves, are despicable. The claim that it is for the benefit of the children is pure bullshit, that no one without rocks for brains believes. If anyone seriously believes it benefits children, they are either thoughtless or stupid or both.
Although my mother was strict in a way, she always made me feel loved. My home life was pretty good, and I had no reason to believe my mother would lie to me about religion or anything else. Indeed, she did not lie to me about religion; she told me what she believed to be true. That she was wrong only means that she made an honest mistake. (She, too, had been raised to believe.)
I was taken to church every week, and prayers were said before dinner, thanking God for the food, etc. So I was raised with religion being taken very seriously.
Basically, I was told about religion in the same way I was told about other things, only that religion, I was told, was particularly important.
So, as a child, why did you believe anything your parents told you, that you did not see immediately in front of you? The answer to that should help you understand why someone raised to believe in religion would believe in religion.
(April 18, 2015 at 5:34 am)robvalue Wrote: How did they make you feel?
Thank you 
That seems a strange question. The beliefs, in themselves, did not make me feel anything. Just like believing that I am presently typing at a keyboard. I have a belief that that is what I am doing, but it would be strange to ask me how I feel about it. It is just the way things are.
Eventually, though, as I was growing, I had problems with various things that I was taught. So while still young, I thought that the Southern Baptist church I attended was wrong, but, of course, I was aware of the fact that there are quite a few other denominations (not to mention things other than Christianity), so thinking that the Southern Baptists, or, my particular church, was wrong about some things, did not show that religion was all bunk. (Just in case you know nothing about Southern Baptists, the churches are only loosely connected, and only have a very tiny amount of beliefs that they must adhere to, in order to be Southern Baptists, so the individual churches can vary much more than some other religions, like, for example, Catholicism.)
I briefly thought of joining up with a Quaker church, and probably would have, if one had been closer; I was not yet old enough to drive when I was thinking about that. But they did not address all of my problems with Christianity, so it would not have worked out anyway. (But unlike Jimmy Carter, who did not leave the Southern Baptists until he was an old man, I disliked their sexism as a child, and that was one of the things that made the Quakers more attractive to me. I am a man, by the way, so it isn't as if I were the victim of the sexism of the church.)
During my time of doubting things, I did not have anyone I could really talk with about this. This was quite a few years ago, long before the internet.
Over the course of several years, my doubts increased more and more. I read things about religion and philosophy to try to help figure things out. It was the most important thing to me, because I had been taught to believe in heaven and hell, and wanted to make sure I got things right. That wanting to be sure to be right got me to think long and hard about the issues involved.
Also, although I was taught that to question religion was wrong, that never made sense to me, because one can never prove the truth to be false. It is false religions that it makes sense to tell its followers to not question things, because false religions might be proven to be false. And, of course, most religions have to be wrong about some things, as they all disagree with each other. At most, one religion could be right, and the rest are wrong about something, and maybe about everything. So, thinking about that got me to question things and think carefully about it all, as I was highly motivated to get it right, and to not make a mistake about religion.
For the most part, my deconversion was from my own thinking about things. The few times I had brief conversations with others had some impact, but it was mostly thinking about it for myself. The nonbelievers I figured were trying to trick me (that is what Christians are typically taught), but the fact that no Christian ever had a sensible reason to believe was of more significance to me, though a few stupid Christians does not disprove Christianity. And, of course, while still a believer, I prayed for guidance from God, guidance that, naturally, never came, because there is no God. I was not stupid enough to let my feelings, and desire to believe, cloud my judgement too much on religious matters.
Eventually, I was an agnostic, and was unsure what to believe. And then eventually I became a
strong atheist.
The process of deconversion was painful and unpleasant in the extreme, but I am much happier now that I am an atheist. I am quite comfortable with the idea of dying, and have no wish for immortality, which seems to bother quite a few other people. I find Epicurus to be quite sensible on this point, and cannot relate to people who want to live forever. Those who die no longer have to deal with all of the dumb-asses of the world, and that is a very good thing. Thinking about that almost makes me want to off myself immediately. Almost.
Anyway, believing in religion is like believing in anything else. You are raised to believe various things about the world, and, when young, one is naïve and believes all sorts of things that one does not see for oneself. For example, most people believe the world is roughly spherical, but they do not usually see it for themselves, or even have particular evidence of it for themselves. (Photographs are pretty worthless as evidence; otherwise, one might believe that men can fly from watching
Superman, or that dinosaurs currently roam the earth from
Jurassic Park.) Yet not having the evidence themselves, does not prevent them from having a strong belief about it. In this example, of course, the belief is true (or maybe I am in on the conspiracy to fool you!
), but the point is that many truths are such that one does not have the evidence directly in front of one, and that does not prevent one from accepting it as truth. Many of the things that most people believe are based on being told about them, not from doing experiments oneself or directly looking at the relevant evidence.
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