Shedding off religion

[Gwaithmir]

Welcome from Middle Earth! 

[soulnomore]

Welcome

Thanks!!!

[soulnomore]

Welcome from Middle Earth! 

Oh now I want to watch Lord of the rings again hehe!! Thank you!!

[HappySkeptic]

Welcome!

I left Christianity, but in slow stages, over years. I replaced it with a different church community (UU) and online communities such as this, which made the transition easier.

As you said, the final transition was one of relief. I'm much happier now, with exploring my own philosophies of life. Give it time

[brewer]

Welcome, glad you found us.

As far as "tips on how to deal with my deconversion" I think the best that I can offer is 'give it time, it will eventually fade away'. I think it's good that you're looking into science, evolution, logic, ethics and morality but I'm not sure that will help your leaving religion issues.

Best wishes.

Thank you very much for the reply. I also hope that with time, the ickiness from religion will die down. Also what do you mean by "I think it's good that you're looking into science, evolution, logic, ethics and morality but I'm not sure that will help your leaving religion issues."? Sorry but English isn't my first language...

I'm not convinced that learning new non-religious subjects will help remove the programming that religion instills. But it definitely won't hurt.

[Objectivist]

Hello soulnomore.  Nice to meet you.  I too have OCD, though it has waned over the years.  Now the only manifestation is that I wake up every night and think the house or the barn is on fire or I left something on somewhere that is going to start a fire.  So I get up, check, and then go back to sleep. I've learned to manage it without medication.  

 It is a very difficult thing to leave a religion.  You feel lost and don't know what to do and you face a lot of pressure to come back into the fold.   But your mind is the most powerful tool you have and it's all you really need.  There's only one remedy for bad ideas and that's to replace them with good ones.  For me, it was learning how to think and studying logic that was the biggest help. It's just like climbing a mountain.  Take one step and then take another and you'll get there.  You're are fortunate to have the internet.  It didn't exist when I left religion so I was pretty much on my own given where I lived in the southern U.S.   

I wish all the best for you and I'm ready to help if I can.

Hello there nice to meet you too! Thank you very much for the reply, I truly appreciate it!

I'm very sorry to hear you too have OCD, but glad to hear you manage it. Also CBT helps a lot, in my opinion, you should totally check it out. My current obsession is the fear that I may have HIV, which is totally absurd and unfounded. But that's OCD for you...

I agree with you. I do feel lost and I feel like my whole identity is gone. See, the years that people usually form the base of their identity, I was busy with religion. So now I have to go through a second "puberty" in order to figure things out for myself. Which is not bad, but I feel like I lost the train of life and that I'm behind on so many things. 

I'll take your advice and take it slowly and gently. Thank you again for taking the time out of your life to help a stranger and for your kind approach. Means a lot to me. 

Thank you, Soulnomore.  You are most welcomed. It's no big deal anymore.  Hopefully, yours will become less of an issue as you get older as well.  I never had the germ obsessions or the neatness obsession except for a few months when I was in college.  I couldn't stand for one thing to be out of place.  I would vacuum constantly.  My main obsession was that I would harm someone accidentally or through carelessness.   I had a job briefly setting up scaffolding on a construction site but I had to quit because I would drive back at night to check everything over to make sure it was safe.  As soon as I would start driving home, I'd be sure I had missed something and go back to check again.  If I passed a bicyclist on the road in my truck, after he was out of sight I was sure I had hit him.  I would get out to see if there was damage to my car and then I'd see the bicyclist catching up again and get in and drive away.  So yes I know the challenges you face.  I didn't get diagnosed until I was 34 years old and finally knowing what caused me to do these things helped a lot.  The way I look at it there are much worse disorders to have so I count myself fortunate not to have Schizophrenia or something equally terrible.

When I was young I was terrified that I was going to hell.  I'm not sure if that was an obsession because, at the same time, I started having ticks from Tourette's Syndrome.  I would be sitting in church listening to the sermon about hell and the whole while I was saying "I hate you God.  Goddammit, I hate you, God".  I couldn't stop no matter how hard I tried.  At the time right before this happened, I started to really question what I was being taught.  I remember hearing about Noah's Ark and the garden of Eden and thinking that it was all BS except I didn't know how to think at all.  The people around me would all talk about the holy spirit filling them and how they felt God's presence and I didn't feel anything at all.  So I went through a phase kind of similar to you where I threw myself into reading the Bible and praying and desperately wishing that God would talk to me or at least let me feel his presence.  Nothing.  I thought I was abandoned because of the cursing thing.  I was sure I was going down to the hot place.  I would get down on my knees at night, tears streaming down my face, and plead for Jesus to come into my heart and fill me like others said he did for them.  Nothing.  

One day I realized that It was all me.  I was doing all this work and imagining this god was there and it was listening and I stopped.  I stopped imagining and then I thought Oh, it's a test.  God doesn't want us to believe in him by faith, he gave us a mind and he expects us to use it.  I thought that the people who had faith would be the ones to go to hell and be punished and those who used their minds to reason would be rewarded.  So I was akin to a deist at that point.  

Then my grandmother gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged and it made me so angry that I vowed to prove every word of it wrong.  I remember throwing it against the wall but I couldn't put it down.  I tried for a year as hard as I could but in the process of reading it in order to find fault with it, I realized that it was all true and I couldn't refute it. I don't mean the story, I mean the ideas of rationality, self-interest, freedom, achievement, honesty, morality, etc. that the heroes of the story practiced. Then I said to myself that I have to learn this inside and out even if it takes me the rest of my life.  And my struggle with religion was over for good.  So I replaced the bad ideas that I had been taught with good ones and that is what finally freed me.  

But right now you have enough on your plate.  Get through this initial phase and then study logic and reason and philosophy.  No one can live without one.  Religion was a primitive attempt at philosophy and it was much better than what came before it. But now there are vastly better alternatives that don't require faith at all but they do require an awful lot of thinking.  

Never ever take anything on faith again.  Don't accept any idea unless you see for yourself in reason that it is true.  Place nothing higher than your own judgment.  That is the "narrow path", and few are the ones who find it.

[Peebothuhlu]

 

But this is the 'Introduction' thread do more from me  will await yourself out in the greater forum wilds.

*Hands Soulnomore weapon of choice*

"Be vewy, vewy qwiet. We're hunting fallacies."


Hehehehehe.  

Not at work.