In fifth grade, my teacher stood at the front of the room and dictated the rules of salvation to the class. Only those who let Jesus into their hearts and were Catholic would be accepted into heaven. I raised my hand. “My mom is Protestant,” I said.
“Is she going to heaven? ”
“No,” the teacher told me. “Your mother is going to hell. ”
I can still remember that moment to this day.
It shattered everything I believed in. I went home crying, and my parents raised absolute hell at that school until the teacher was forced to apologize. But the damage was done. That single comment started me on the path of completely walking away from the church—and I never went back.
At six years old, I was raised in a Hindu family, and whenever I got into mischief, my nanny would warn me that God was always watching and would poke my eyes out if I caused trouble. Even at that age, the logic didn’t hold up for me. If God created me and made me get into trouble, why would he punish me for it? I don’t think I ever seriously believed.
When we went to temples, I would admire the sculptures and the jewels adorning the gods and goddesses, but that was as far as it went. A friend once told me that when she saw a deity in a temple, she felt a small shiver of thrill, of happiness, run through her. I remember thinking, why doesn’t that ever happen to me? I would stare at the idol intently, trying to force the feeling, but nothing ever came.
I felt nothing at all. My mom was religious. My dad and older brother weren’t. I think that played a role too.
I didn’t even know atheism was a thing until I read The God Delusion, and suddenly I realized, oh, that’s what I am. Though I’ll give Hinduism credit—the mythology is intricate and fascinating, some of the coolest stories out there. I became a Christian as a young adult, but I wasn’t raised in it. My parents never went to church.
I got interested in elementary school, got baptized, then drifted away and eventually accepted I was an atheist. Last year, though, I started getting this itch. I wanted to know more. My wife is religious, and she wanted to raise the kids in a church, so I went with her for a couple of years and frankly didn’t care either way.
Then I picked up the Bible and started realizing everything I thought I knew about Christianity was wrong. Christ clearly calls us to love other people. He doesn’t talk about getting into heaven—he says the kingdom of God is within us and will come to earth. He filled his life with misfits and taught us to love our enemies.
He told us not to judge each other but to help each other out. He saves us by grace, not by our actions. I read through the responses to that question online and saw so many people damaged, destroyed, and cast aside by their churches. To them I want to say I’m sorry.
We are not all like that. The dirty little secret many in the church like to forget is that we are all damaged, broken people, and that we should try to be better. But being a Christian doesn’t automatically make you a good person. It boggles my mind that people take a faith based on humility, self-sacrifice, and service and turn it into a way to make money.
But they do. I hope everyone hurt by a church or a Christian finds some peace. And I’m truly sorry that something meant to be a beacon of light in the darkness has been used to cause you pain. I was raised with religious parents in a religious school, and I stayed religious for my first twenty-three or twenty-four years.
I stopped because I realized I was wasting my time with a bunch of hypocrites. Granted, I understood that everyone is a sinner. But the middle-level leaders of the church I worked with directly would go out, date a bunch of people, sleep with them, divorce their wives, and live completely messed-up lives, and they never corrected that behavior. They also spoke in tongues and led Bible studies.
Their lives were more broken than mine, and the grace of God never seemed to change anything. That made me raise my eyebrows. So I started reading more, getting interested in science and philosophy. I did some internal debating, from Clive Staples Lewis on one side to Dawkins and Hitchens on the other.
Needless to say, I agreed more with Dawkins and Hitchens from an intellectual perspective. I quit going to church and learned I really enjoyed sleeping in and having three or four free hours before the football kickoff. Growing up, I always found other religions fascinating. I was raised Christian, but my parents weren’t super religious and we never went to church.
While learning about religions, though, I kept wondering why any of it made sense. I’m more of a math and science guy—I like things to be proven. If something isn’t a theory backed by trustworthy data, I question why anyone would believe it. You can’t prove God.
People can swear up and down that they feel his guiding hand, but nobody can offer concrete proof. That’s why you need faith. Then I took world history, and that opened my eyes even further. There are so many religions, some of them dead now, and they all share something in common.
Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion very close to Christianity, but it was created centuries earlier. It seems like everything stems from something else, and most God stories were created by storytellers to explain how the world worked. Religion was created to keep us from being afraid of the unknown. The hope it brings keeps people from worrying about death and disease because they believe they have a guardian protecting them if they remain holy.
I am not an atheist, but I’m not religious either. I will forever be a skeptic until the day I die and find out whether there’s life after death or if I just disappear into the void. Only time will tell. I grew up in a religious family and went to church every Sunday from birth until college.
My experiences in church, outside of the friendships, were just meh. I was constantly getting in trouble for asking questions the Sunday school teachers and youth group leaders couldn’t answer, and they would take it as me being a smart aleck. I couldn’t understand the hypocrisy of people claiming to be super Christians while doing bad things. And the teachings seemed to ignore common sense—a guy resurrecting from the dead after being crucified, pierced with a spear, probably cared for in the most unsanitary conditions, and then laid in a cave?
In my third year of undergrad, I took a class on Greek and Roman religions and learned about syncretism—incorporating other religious practices, beliefs, or doctrines into another. There are multiple stories of different deities resurrecting that are extremely similar to Christ’s. That class definitely opened my eyes. I realized maybe there isn’t one right or wrong religion.
If it helps you, so be it. I just couldn’t stand the narrow-mindedness of the people I went to church with who would claim someone was going to hell. Seriously, who the hell are you to say someone’s going to hell because they don’t believe what you believe? That’s why I’m not religious.
I find this question unnatural. The default state for believing in the existence of something should be believing it doesn’t exist. With evidence—like actually seeing it—disbelief could turn into belief. Atheists are always asked things like why don’t you believe, or how did you stop believing, or what happened to make you not believe.
Those questions show an underlying assumption that belief is the default state. If you are a believer, I strongly advise you to challenge that assumption. If the idea of God had never been introduced to you by your family, school, or church until you reached intellectual maturity, how would that idea sound to you? My disbelief in God comes from the same place as my disbelief in Santa, unicorns, the flying spaghetti monster, and many other things.
Imagine that no one had ever told you about God or any other deity. You have no exposure to that idea your entire life, but you still have science to help you understand the world. No one speaks about God, and you’ve never seen or heard of the Bible, the Quran, or any holy book. Would you believe in God?
I don’t think so. You might wonder what created everything and makes it work, but you wouldn’t come up with the exact idea of God because there’s simply no reason to. The problem I have with faith is that it’s more wishful thinking than anything else. Throughout history, there have always been things we don’t understand—the big glowing orange ball in the sky, where we come from, why natural disasters happen, why people die from mysterious diseases.
Everything humans didn’t understand tended to be explained by God. But over time, we filled in those blanks. We learned the Earth orbits the sun, that diseases come from microorganisms, not a godly force. The main blanks left to fill are where we came from, who created us, and what happens when we die.
Since no one can truly answer the second one, I think religion will be around for a long time. Personally, I’ve never seen evidence for God, and I’d rather wait until our understanding improves before jumping to conclusions based on a holy book. I wouldn’t exactly call myself an atheist. I was raised in church.
My older brother is a pastor. My family is devout. I’ve always enjoyed the churches we’ve attended, and I think the hymns are beautiful from a musical and lyrical standpoint. I believe the Bible contains things that are good in nature, even though it also has bad parts and contradictions.
I’ve struggled for years to deconstruct myself and my take on religion. I’ve always wanted to feel what my family feels, to understand what they mean when they talk about feeling God. But I just can’t. I don’t feel those things.
I don’t see the Bible as infallible. I don’t hear God speak to me. I just don’t have whatever it is inside them that makes them believe. I’m a very logical person, so the concept of faith is alien to me.
Don’t get me wrong—the whole afterlife thing does bother me somewhere deep inside. If I died and was wrong, I’d have lost my family, my wife, and my kids forever. That’s a bummer of a thought. But I’ve never had anything grab me and prove there’s something more out there.
I respect their beliefs. Like many others in the world, I keep mine to myself. It’s another conversation I fear having. I don’t want the possible excommunication from my family and friends, or the overzealous reactions and prayers that come with it.
So I guess I just don’t, and can’t, believe in it all. Maybe one day they’ll be sensible enough to accept me. Until then, I’ll continue quietly and enjoy my time here with the people I love. I was raised Southern Baptist.
My grandfather is a retired preacher, and I used to believe quite strongly. But my faith began to fade in my late teens. One of my problems with religion is that there are so many of them. Practically every culture throughout history had its own separate religion, and each one believed theirs was the only true one.
What made me think mine was right and that billions of other people throughout history were wrong and burning in hell? Was I just lucky enough to be born into a family that believed the correct religion? Clearly, religion is just an attempt to explain a frightening and complex world we don’t understand. On a personal level, I also had a bad experience.
I’d been an active member of my church’s youth group for years. Then I got my girlfriend pregnant in high school. You’d have thought I murdered someone. A lot of people treated me like crap because of it.
Not everyone, but enough that it hurt. Where was the undying love and compassion they preached about? I sure could have used it then. My parents were religious, and I went to religious schools through junior high.
I participated in rigorous Bible study programs and youth groups, doing various ministry activities, some voluntary, some forced depending on where I stood with my faith at the time. I took the studying seriously and always tried to maintain a personal understanding. I would question things with a healthy level of skepticism so I wouldn’t be blindly following. As I got older, the questions grew larger and the doubt deepened.
Eventually I fell out of the routine, my parents allowed me to make my own choice, and I stopped cold turkey. For me, religion and spirituality are deeply personal, and I could never tell someone their feelings are wrong. I still have a sense of spirituality I can’t explain, but I also find it difficult to accept. I consider myself agnostic because I think it’s truly impossible for us to understand the universe’s origin.
As we understand it, things can’t come from nowhere. But that’s completely illogical too—how did matter come to exist at all? There are certain things we can’t understand, and people will always try explaining them with science or religion. In the end, does it really matter?
Part of me wants to believe. The other part simply can’t. I’m not religious, but I’m also not an atheist. I was raised in a liberal, tolerant Methodist household.
Even so, as I reached my mid-teens, I found myself desperately wanting the depth of faith I saw in others. I went to message boards and chat rooms, spoke to believers from a myriad of systems, and every conversation ended the same way. My questions would reach a point where the response was always, well, you must have faith. For a time afterward, I called myself an atheist, believing that was the logical course.
But as I grew into an adult, I found that many self-declared atheists practiced the same bias and discrimination I’d seen from the Christians I grew up around. I’m twenty-three now. With the internet and a pile of books, I’ve examined both history and faith, and my conclusion is that it all comes down to being human. We’re intelligent animals, but our understanding of many topics is still limited.
Because of our intellect, we obsess over possibilities and nurture fears that wouldn’t exist if our only drive were finding enough food and shelter. I understand the logic of faith and the places where it provides security or peace of mind. Both are invaluable. Picture yourself in utter pitch darkness, unable to see your hand an inch from your face.
You stand before a forest, and your goal lies on the other side. You must pass through. As you do, you hear crackling leaves, predators and prey, snapping twigs. Your mind fills with nightmare images.
Is it easier to say, I must do this, and press on despite my fears? Or to give the fear up, to believe your actions are ordained and you’re defended by some force beyond your understanding? To clutch a talisman or invoke a name and believe it will see you safely through? I believe faith of one stripe or another will exist until mankind eradicates every gap in our knowledge.
As long as those gaps exist, fear will fill them, and people will plaster those fears with duct tape and faith. For me, simply existing as a human is enough. I do what I can to thrive in the moment and take joy in the simple mechanics of living, breathing, and feeling the sun on my back. I would love to have the certainty of a deep, abiding faith.
But it remains beyond me, and probably always will. I was never a fan of organized religion. I used to be that jerk atheist, but I’ve calmed down a lot since falling in love with astrophysics. The vastness of the universe inspires awe in me without needing a deity.
In a way, the universe is my deity. I don’t believe in an afterlife either. Most people are scared to death of the fact that once you’re dead, that’s it. No more you.
Period. I feel the opposite. The idea of simply unbeing gives me a great sense of inner peace as I struggle with mental health issues. I look forward to the day I no longer am, when I reside in nothingness and silence.
Science is my dogma, and its philosophical implications are my afterlife. Knowing the matter in my body will eventually become part of the earth is my version of reincarnation. It gives me enough comfort without religious authorities, prayer sites, or ancient texts. One of two things must be true.
Either there’s an all-knowing, all-powerful, loving God willing to let poverty, hunger, illness, and war kill millions throughout history, willing to let us knowingly destroy our planet into a sixth mass extinction, willing to reveal itself only through events similar to mild psychosis or misinterpreted natural occurrences, willing to send untold ancestors to damnation for lack of belief, and leaving absolutely no evidence of its existence anywhere. Or that God doesn’t exist. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of God outside of holy writings.
Without evidence, you have to reject the notion. Let’s talk about the foundation of Christianity. The Roman era is exceptionally well documented. If there had been a rabble-rouser in Judea during the period claimed as Christ’s life, or even a crucifixion relating to his activities, we’d have some record of it.
We don’t. The birth name of Christ, Yeshua, was one of the most common names among men in Judea at the time. Miriam and Yosef, his parents’ names, are equally generic for that era. Add in the Gnostic texts, the obvious bias in the Bible toward addressing issues of the first Council of Nicaea, and the parallels to Mithraism—which was rampant in the imperial armies the church needed to control—and there’s little chance he ever existed.
It’s like saying Zeus exists because the stories of Heracles’ labors exist. It’s a self-feeding delusion. I was raised Catholic, went to church every Sunday and classes every Monday. I still go on holidays to make my mother happy.
The reason I’m not into organized religion is hypocrisy. I’ve never believed humans are infallible or without weaknesses. But I won’t follow those who preach one thing and do another. Why would I trust what you say about God and how to treat one another when you don’t follow those teachings yourself?
I gave up once I realized religion was always a way to get rich, to teach that a group of people was wrong or going to hell, to take advantage of those who trust you—especially children and parents. While I don’t believe in creationism or the strict Bible stories, I like to think of them as metaphors for how to live your life. I was raised by religious parents in a religious community, in a country where religion still influences politics and where huge scandals have been exposed in recent years. I see the harm of organized religion.
I was always expected to behave a certain way, and anything else was considered disrespectful. Through my teenage years, certain things just didn’t fit together. I don’t like the idea of organized religion. I believe whether there is a god or not should be a personal thing.
People should simply respect each other’s views instead of trying to force everyone to obey what their religion believes.