Journey of Faith

[slh12280]

What made some of you either become a believer or become a non-believer? This covers all religions/beliefs.

For me personally, I have always believed in God. I can see how everything in the world works together and there are some things that are not easily explained to me without God being there. When I look at the world I also see how Christianity has truth, and I believed what Jesus preached. I just believe He is God.

So what caused you to believe/disbelieve?

[FundiesInMyFamily]

I grew up a pretty generic church going Lutheran. My Church was very old and my family was 'prominant' because my great-grandparents, grandparents, and my parents, aunts and uncles and cousins had all been born, baptised, and married in this church. Growing up we were never overly religious, I always knew that God was up there and occasionally I talked to him.

My departure from religion came in 2 phases, the first came from two words - mental illness. While growing up my family was very normal, at least from what I thought, but it turns out that mental illness runs rampant in our family. First was my grandma, she was never diagnosed with anything but the older she got, the crazier she got. About 15 years ago my mom's youngest brother decided he'd had a "revelation" and was a disciple of Jesus... he changed his name from Mark to "marcus John". This wouldn't have been all that bad except that he then became a kidnapper/rapist, and when he was done he would stand over his victims and ask them to pray for him. My mom is also crazy as a loon, we suspect she has borderline personality disorder and possibly mild schitzophrenia. She is horribly parinoid and always thinks people are following her, tapping her phones, ect.

All the people in my family mixed Jesus with their particular craziness and it freaked me out and turned me off to organized religion at the time. This was also about the time I was in college and started questioning things, and started learning all the horrible things that have been done in the name of God, and I decided that most organized religion was even and only created to keep the masses down.

The 2nd part of my journey to agnostic/athiesm is due to right wing politics/conservative christians/fundies and all the horrible things they do in the name of God. When all these people started taking portions of the bible literaly I started looking into the bible and learned how many times it's been translated, that some of the same stories of the bible exist in other cultures/places, ect. I have just come to the conclusion that its a wonderful and historic document that should be studied, and lots of great things can be gleaned from its teachings, but it was written by man and not by God.

[Patsy]

I'm interested to read others' stories, but I don't think I will share all of mine. There is nothing that interesting in it, really, and I'm not very good with typed communication often* so I'll leave it.

I will say that I honestly credit this board with some of my development in the last year, and, separate to that - it has actually given me an understanding of some religious things that I did not previously grasp. Through linking (the Wife of a Street Preacher's nope, "subject by design"'s explanation of Calvinism, say - yes, really!) and discussions here, I have a bit of an understanding of how someone could genuinely mean what we criticise fundies for saying hollowly. That doesn't actually affect what I BELIEVE, or my view of the world and the universe, but it does sort of enrich it, even though it comes from the opposite of what I think is true.

* Anyone who is familiar with me here (I am not a big poster) is probably thinking "Uh, yeah." Thanks for persevering :)

[booksnbeats]

I was raised Catholic, but pretty loosely--we only had to go to Sunday School, not church, unless we were in trouble. (You can see how my parents were setting me up for some healthy religious beliefs.) I think I lost faith as a result of my prayers not being answered as a child. Until I was 18 and my boyfriend had the balls to call the cops on them, I was abused by both my parents. I would pray for hours for God to protect me, to make them love me, etc. I remember I tried to confess about what was going on in church (probably badly, as I still thought it was "embarrassing" to ask for help) and was just told that I needed to be more respectful and honor my parents. I think it was the fact that nothing changed that made me see the world as a place that wasn't being guided by a sympathetic Creator. By the time I was in junior high I no longer believed in Hell, and soon after that I realized I had no belief in God, either.

[debrand]

I was a very strange child and always felt a closeness to something bigger than myself. My family was Christian, even if they were not religious. It made sense that I would frame my feelings about the deity in a Christian framework.

As I grew older, I began to read about different religions. For some reason, I couldn't accept that all religions led to the same place. My abusive background had laid a foundation of black/white thinking that I still struggle with to this day. There had to be, I thought, one religion that was correct.

In my thirties, the example of a very sweet woman led me to become a Christian. She never evangelized me but she really was the best example of Christianity that I had ever met. She was kind, compassionate and loving. I never heard her say a bad word about anyone. I wanted her calmness and certainty.

One day, I accepted Jesus into my life. I admitted, with tears and great emotion, that I was worthless and a bad person. That wasn't hard for me. My mother had spent years telling me how stupid, dumb and bad that I was.

At first, being a Christian meant following the gospels and I was very good at picking out the good parts, loving your neighbor, not being judge mental etc. If it wasn't for other Christians, I might have remained a person who thought my faith was only about being considerate to others. My friends wanted me to mature in my faith. SO they advised me to read Paul and different Christian writers.

That led me to fundamentalism. The problem was that I can't turn my brain off and I followed my friends' instruction and read the bible. In desperation to save my faith, I became Catholic. Catholicism seemed less extreme than the fundies did. But my faith was leaving. Christian theology goes in circles to me. I didn't understand why an all powerful being would need blood sacrifice and create a person to die. Plus, Jesus' sacrifice seemed pretty weak when you consider the fact that he knew he would rise from the dead to rule with his dad.

But the final straw came when my oldest son got his girlfriend pregnant and dropped out of college. I was very disappointed in him. The way god deals with disappointment is to send his children to eternal torture if they don't grovel for his forgiveness. I would never harm my child and the thought made me sick. It was the final straw. My faith left because it made no sense. It wasn't only illogical but Christianity suddenly struck me as cruel

I am an atheist who loves to read about other faiths, especially paganism. But I don't think that I could ever actually believe in a higher power again.