(May 1, 2017 at 11:51 am)pulzar Wrote: I am working on a research dealing with religion, conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. The goal is to find out what factors play the key role in deconversion from such ideas.
If you dropped your religious, conspiracy or pseudoscience beliefs, what made you change your views? I know it is usually very long and complicated journey, but try to zoom out on the main factors.
I am also interested whether any kind of ridicule / poking fun / comedy or calls for self-deprecation played any role?
For me it was cognitive dissonance plain and simple (i.e. being gay and a Christian). I was a Christian up until the age of 18. There was no desire to leave Christianity, nor any intellectual quest to disprove it. There was an intellectual quest of sorts though in the sense of trying to come to terms with and understand the Christian perspective on homosexuality... and to integrate it in my life... but there was never any point where I didn't want to be a Christian. Then one day, in a flashbulb memory event forever after imprinted on my mind (ie exactly where I was), out of the blue it just clicked... 'there is no God'. And that was it.
As to ridicule, no, that played no part in my deconversion. I was one of the few Christians in a predominantly atheist environment (and 'out' as gay from the age of 15) so I was used to ridicule... if anything it just made me dig in more.
