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RE: How did you lose your faith.
January 24, 2013 at 10:43 am
My ex-wife had a miscarriage. Multiple miscarriages, actually. It hurt, for both of us. I identified as Christian at the time, but couldn't understand how a loving/compassionate/benevolent God could allow that to happen. Also, prayer offered no comfort. That's when I made a deal with any supernatural being out there: prove your existance to me and I'll dedicate my life to you. Until then, I live as though there's nothing supernatural out there. So far, no god has stepped up which leads me to believe that even if God exists, God wants me to be an atheist (and who am I to question God?).
I live on facebook. Come see me there.
http://www.facebook.com/tara.rizzatto
"If you cling to something as the absolute truth and you are caught in it, when the truth comes in person to knock on your door you will refuse to let it in." ~ Siddhartha Gautama
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RE: How did you lose your faith.
January 24, 2013 at 6:09 pm
I'm not altogether sure if I really had a religion to lose. I was probably sort of a Christian when I was at school school at least nominally but you tend to assume everyone is unless they're from a foreign country where they don't understand what the real version of events in history is for some reason. Any faith I may have had would have gradually faded away along with any belief in the supernatural in general over time there wasn't a clear cut realisation that I was or became anything. My view at the moment is that there could be something interesting going on but whether human made religions have anything to do with it is questionable. Whatever reality ultimately is will be reality regardless of what we think or would like it to be so it's best to concentrate on what matters to us in our own sphere, the stuff we know about. I could possibly be converted to a religion but it would have to be something particularly juicy in terms of evidence or a really seriously good argument.
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Re: How did you lose your faith.
January 24, 2013 at 7:13 pm
I deconverted once. I'd fallen into routine over feeling. A predominant thought was that I wasn't getting enough time to formulate my own ideas. I needed some space. I sat in the car and made a conscious decision to disbelieve. I had a euphoric feeling, maybe release. and I gradually came to not understand belief. I had come to harbour some hatred for hypocrisy I'd seen, and that kinda came to a head.
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RE: How did you lose your faith.
January 24, 2013 at 7:26 pm
I don't think I ever had it, despite being raised among Christians.
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RE: How did you lose your faith.
January 24, 2013 at 7:31 pm
It was a combination of disappointment with religion and coming to understand that science holds a monopoly over plausible explanations for how the universe works. In spite of how vitriolic I am about it now, I used to be quite into it.
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RE: How did you lose your faith.
January 25, 2013 at 12:38 am
I realized there were other options. A kid in my 11th grade english class was telling someone else how he was agnostic and what that meant, and I thought "huh, I've never really thought about religion, but I guess you can't prove god exists, so I should be agnostic. Though you can't prove he doesn't, either...".
I don't know if I felt there was some stigma to being an atheist that I didn't want or if I honsetly thought god might exist, but a few months later (the next time I contemplated this) I admitted to myself that the odds of god existing were so small that the theoretical possibility of his existence (due to the fact that god is unfalsifiable) was not worthy of acknowledging.
It might have happened sooner, but I never really thought much about religion, and my family is only moderately religious (maybe even a little less than that).