Why did YOU start to lose faith?

[StupidWiz]

I used to be so religious, I'd done 5 times prayers, Friday salat. reciting Quran, and miscellaneous prayers, etc. I also used to hate gays as they are disgusting and sinners as I've been told since I was a little kid. When I realized that I actually had "strange" feelings toward handsome guys, that's when internalized homophobia started to wreck my life. I'd ruined my possibly bright future in prestigious college cause I self sabotaged myself. I was disappointed, angry and hateful at myself for being "abnormal", sinful, disgusting. I wasted 4 years of my life going through denials and finally the college dropped me out as I was having a seriously low GPA for 4 years. Tears had been shed, relationships broken, mental and psychological scarred but I kept praying and praying and praying that when I woke up someday Allah would make me "normal", straight so that I could fit into the society. Alas, Allah never heard my prayers, or maybe didn't care about my suffering. That's when I started to ask myself, "is this Allah thing real? Does he even exist?"

Before that, I realized that actually I've been having some doubts toward Islam. The big ones were 9/11 and Bali bombings, but I just brushed it off as "extremists" who just smeared the image of Islam as the religion of peace. So, when my personal dilemma started to sink in, it was encouraging these doubts as I couldn't stand bearing the hateful feeling toward myself any longer. So I had to make a choice, be happy and accept myself and ditch my religion, or  keep my religion and can still fit into the society but feel miserable inside for the rest of my life. I chose the former and never look back. I started to watch and read things about atheism on Youtube, interwebz and surprisingly they're just aligned to what I feel and think the whole time. I felt so relieved, like the whole time I've been blindfolded by this thing called Islam. I feel free inside, though still have to face the problem of fitting into the society here in my country cause it doesn't like people who doesn't have a religion. So I entered the closet for now, for being gay and atheist, hopefully someday I could go to a place, a home, where I don't have to worry to mention that I don't believe in any gods and don't swing that way.

[stromboli]

The only fear I had when leaving Mormonism was the effect on my family, which was huge. Once I figured out it was crapola, I was ready to leap. That is how I roll- I study the shit out of something, find it is true and am onboard for the duration. find it false, I'll drop it like a hot rock and walk. The reason it took so long for me to leave xtianity was because I caused my wife to lose whatever tenuous relationship she had with her family and took away most of her friends when we left Mormonism. I didn't have the heart to pull the plug on her twice, so it took awhile.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

The only fear I had when leaving Mormonism was the effect on my family, which was huge.

I don't know much about the Mormon religion so I have to ask, is this family thing built in to reduce the number of people who leave officially?

[AllPurposeAtheist]

I wasn't raised in the swill of any religion, but  tired to "find gawd" only to find there really was nothing to find. I joined the moonies even for  awhile, but still nothing stuck for very long.
I can even remember being really horny over a certain young lady and "praying it away", but that piece of ass sort of sealed the deal which was WAY MORE powerful than all the hand holding and dreaming up magic in church.
I spent a good deal of my life wallowing in self destructive shit and kept hoping god would magically remove those defects, blah fucking blah, but "he" didn't do doodly squat. I ran into "christian" after bible thumping asswipe christian who were ALSO engaging in the very same self destructive behavior, drinking WAY to much, shooting heroin, stealing shit, etc., and almost every single asshole I ran with would invoke the magic words.. "It's ok to be a total shithead because I'm already 'saved'" I'm of course paraphrasing,  but you get the gist.. Any bad behavior is peachy keen as long as you believe in Big Spooky. No amount of shitheadedness is to much for god. So...I gave up on that nonsense and now when I want to be a shithead I do it 100% guilt free except for the fact I do have a shred of dignity and at least apologize for being a shithead and stop being one instead of justifying it for god.

[MrsSassyPants]

I love that APA.  That is exactly right, "I am a total shithead, but its okay bc Ive got Gawd!!!" I was always the type that didn't enjoy being a shithead, so when I did fk up I thought I was the only one.  Once I got the opportunity to live in the church, I learned first hand that they are the biggest shitheads of them all.  And the have no remorse about it.

[theory816]

For me it started with the zeitgeist movie. Even though things in that movie may not be true, the message I got from it was that my beliefs could be wrong. Then I slowly started questioning if this Jeebus dude was legit with it. Mind you, I went to a all boy seminary during 4 years of my high school.

I took a year off after graduating because I wanted time to make up my mind if I were to give up my life for this Jeebus guy. So after 1 year of doing nothing but sitting home and playing games, I realized that if I dont get up and get a job, im going to starve to death. So it hit me, if its me thats getting my ass off and getting a job with my own strength and nobody elses, whats the point of Jeebus? guurrrrl O NO YOU DIDENNNNT.

I was scared of going to hell for questioning god so I keep regressing and going back to my old beliefs. But I keep going to websites like this and they reinforced my questions about god. Then I finally came out of indoctrination for good.  =D>

[St Giordano Bruno]

Seeing the work of "God's" weapons of mass distruction at work with famines in the horn of Africa and natural distasters such as a major earthquake in Peru in 1970. So much collateral damage and so much easier to come to terms with a God which is not there rather than making up complicated long winded excuses for him.

[PghPanther]

3 things...........

1) The realization from education that the scientific method results in working models within reality.....(aka applied technologies) whereas the faith I was raised in had no working models in reality.....such as faith healing and answered prayer.

2) The conflict of the results of scientific method working models with the claimed models of the Bible that didn't work.

3) And finally the death nail of it all............a serious 5 years study of the construction of biblical manuscripts and the canonization structure into a bible realizing it is all from oral stories by those having a vested interest not in objectivity but wanting it to be true regardless of the lack of evidence......

It took me 57 years of my life to reach the end point of #3 before I realized the emperor has no clothes..........until then I had been an evangelical apologist to varying weakening degrees over that time..........

My first science class in 8th grade was when I first thought............this is reality and what I'm taught in church isn't........

.......but I hung on from all the indoctrination and fear of hell for all that time............

...........silly now but serious then

[St Giordano Bruno]

Also the concept of an anthropomorphic entity in the sky "making the world" and "making us in his image" sounded increasingly more ridiculous and stupid the better scientifically informed I got.

[DavidQuinn]

I didn't fully lose faith until quite recently. I was christian when younger, agnostic from late teens to early 20's, but i'm definitely an avowed atheist now. I recently read a book in the UK that has been pushed by Dawkins and that had a major impact in finalising the ludicrous nature of the whole subject. I'll put a link to the free first chapter online as it's got a speech in there on religion that is genius - http://thechroniclesofhope.com/preview/

I wish i had jean-paul sartre's attitude towards religion as it frustrates me a little, hopefully that's the next stage of my religious evolution! He was a man so atheist he considered the whole topic beneath his level of intelligence to discuss

[aileron]

The first time I got really perplexed about religion was around age 5 or 6.  A friend who went to Catholic school told me what his nun taught him about how the world got here.  What puzzled me is that this nun told him the sun and planets formed from spiraling gas and dust millions of years ago.  

I asked my friend, who was not the sharpest tack in the box, "Don't the priests and nuns teach us that God created the world and Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago?"

My friend's response, "Go ask her.  She knows everything," didn't help much.  In any case, as a child I got my first education about how mainstream Christianity flips between science and religion the way an electron slips between a particle and a wave.

Just as maddeningly frustrating as it is trying to figure out of if electrons are particles, waves, neither, or both as they mess with our heads each different way we interact with them, Christian denominations change from being grounded in science to superstitious, to both, to neither depending on how we interact with them.

[SGOS]

The first time I got really perplexed about religion was around age 5 or 6.  A friend who went to Catholic school told me what his nun taught him about how the world got here.  What puzzled me is that this nun told him the sun and planets formed from spiraling gas and dust millions of years ago.  

I asked my friend, who was not the sharpest tack in the box, "Don't the priests and nuns teach us that God created the world and Adam and Eve a few thousand years ago?"

My friend's response, "Go ask her.  She knows everything," didn't help much.  In any case, as a child I got my first education about how mainstream Christianity flips between science and religion the way an electron slips between a particle and a wave.

Just as maddeningly frustrating as it is trying to figure out of if electrons are particles, waves, neither, or both as they mess with our heads each different way we interact with them, Christian denominations change from being grounded in science to superstitious, to both, to neither depending on how we interact with them.

Wow, that says a lot about your religious upbringing when a Catholic explains the real origins of the solar system to you.

Back a few years ago when everyone was reading the Da Vinci Code, I was reading my copy at a train station, and a kind of grumpy looking guy next to me asked gruffly, "Is that book any good?"  I replied, "Well, it's a page turner for sure," and for some reason, I added, "It's pretty hard on the Catholic Church."  So this guy says, "Well, somebody needs to be," and looked quite satisfied with himself.

I laughed out loud, and thought to myself he was probably a fellow atheist, but later I decided it was more likely that he was a pissed off fundamentalist who hated Catholics.  It seems that few people can agree on anything about religion when you get right down into various aspects of doctrine.  These differences played a role in causing me to begin questioning all religions many years ago.

[aileron]

Wow, that says a lot about your religious upbringing when a Catholic explains the real origins of the solar system to you.

I was raised in a Catholic family too, just mercifully went to public schools.  Even at the tender age of 5 or 6 I had already heard from other sources the scientific explanation of the origin of the solar system.  So it wasn't that I was surprised to hear this origin, but rather I was surprised to hear it coming from a nun.

What baffled me was why the Catholic nuns and priests would tell us out of one side of their mouths "Garden of Eden" and tell us out of the other side of their mouths "accretion disk."  

They're still doing it.  They scare the living shit out of kids with "eternal fire" to keep them in line, but when questioned how a loving God could create a scheme that casts people into such torture, they explain hell 2.0, the one where the "primary punishment is separation from God."  But does that mean, since hell 2.0's primary punishment is separation from God, that there's no fire in hell?  Yenosorta is the answer there too.

[SGOS]

What baffled me was why the Catholic nuns and priests would tell us out of one side of their mouths "Garden of Eden" and tell us out of the other side of their mouths "accretion disk."  

LOL  I think that's covered by the "God works in mysterious ways" apology.

[Deidre32]

I didn't lose my faith. I chose to abandon it based on reasoning and logic. I think that should a god exist, it will require nothing on my part to "believe" in him/it. He will exist, period. When I was a kid, I believed in Santa. It required me to believe in the fantasy for the fantasy to exist in the first place.

If a god exists, there wouldn't be 10000000 religions "describing" him, all contradicting one another. This tells me that he exists only in what our imaginations allow.

If a god exists, he will not require me to "have faith." He will exist regardless of what I think. Religion has a way of making faith sound mysterious and secretive. lol Guess it wouldn't attract people if it told the truth.