Still a Christian - ask me questions/tell me about yourselves

[Aroura]

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I think at this point, I'm hardly a "new guy", but yes, to answer your question about me still posting in here if I can't advertise my channel - I've been able to advertise it in terms of number of posts for at least a week and haven't. So yes, I'm still interested in being around here. With that in mind, tell me about what you do and how you got to this board (yes, including how you came to the point of atheism).

I would go so far as to say that having doubts and leaving a church does not make one an atheist. Just someone having a crisis of faith. I think he's being honest, but total misunderstandings like this is why people assume actual atheists are also simply having a crisis of faith.

I am sure they exist, but I have yet to meet anyone, online or in person, who claims to have gone from religion to atheism and back again. There are a couple of regulars here, even, and when questioned, they admit to confusion, anger and doubt. Never utter and complete reasoned lack of belief.
I do think there are people who are raised without any belief who can be converted, because they didnt reason their way into it, it was just at a default setting.

Anyway, welcome to the OP.
My only question is, why are you here?

I've never quite thought of it as a "crisis of faith", but that's an interesting point. Still, I'm not sure I agree, and here's my reasoning - my experience with people who have a crisis of faith is that it's a shorter experience. This was an experience that lasted at least four years (depending on how you look at my path back to God, there was no one moment for me like there was for some people). And I recently met someone who claimed to be an atheist for two DECADES, whose dad went through the same cycle of Christian-atheist for even longer until literally just about a month before he died. My question to you is if you would consider those longer periods crises of faith or actual atheist periods as they described? Because to me, "crisis of faith" is not being sure if God exists - atheism is being sure God doesn't exist and believing that.

To answer why I'm here - there's a lot of hostility in the world, and much of it doesn't make great sense to me because I come from a very diverse family, politically and religiously. Yes, I understand that family connections are different, but the fact is that we have some extremely liberal democrats in my family who are able to be very loving towards some highly conservative family members in other parts of my family (I firmly fall into neither category, if you were curious). I have friends with whom we don't agree on some very big subjects, and I know it's possible to build bonds with people you don't agree with because people are not their points. So tl;dr, I'm just trying to point out how people are people, and how we should try and get along despite having differences because I know it's possible, and hostility generally doesn't do anyone any good.

I don't think length of time affects if something is a crisis of faith or something else.  I think what the person actually believes, does.
Someone can be angry at God for most of their adult lives, and call themselves an atheist, then have a death bed "conversion", but since they believed in God that whole time, they didn't really ever convert either way, they just had a very long crisis of faith.

This isn't to say it never happens, BTW, just that I think it is much, much rarer than people state.  Also, converting on your death bed just doesn't cut it for me.  Fear of death a VERY strong emotional component.  If someone hopes there is a God when they finally realize they are actually mortal, and the other option is probably to wink out of existence...yeah.  It's not surprising that some people claw for that belief out of desperate fear. It isn't rational, or true, belief.