Youth group wanted to split out group into boys and girls, also by age, and start charging. I also actually read the damn book (I had 2 bibles ) found it dismal and hypocritical. That was the final nail in the coffin.

I read the bible. All of it.

When my pastor told me the earth was 2000 years old but he still uses gasoline made from prehistoric plants didn’t help much to keep me there and that dinosaurs aren’t real, along with science being the main enemy.

My family was secular so I didn’t have religion shoved down my throat as a kid. I got curious about church when I was around 8. I went for a year or so then had an epiphany about how nonsensical it was that a loving god would consign people to hell and stopped going.

I toyed around some with occultism in my teens but have been an atheist ever since. Nothing about religion makes sense and I live in the material, rational world.

Getting baptized. Before then, I felt no spiritual connection or “heard the voice of god” or anything. I understood that once I was baptized, I’d be one of god’s children and I assumed the holy stuff would kick in after that point. Funny thing though, nothing changed. No matter how hard I prayed or tried to believe, nothing was different.

I spent several years trying to find literally anything to show that any of it was real. But everything lead to the same dumbfounding dead end: you just have to have faith.

As I learned more about Christianity from a scholarly perspective, it became increasingly clear that it’s not real. The oldest book in the new testament wasn’t written until at least a hundred years after the events took place, meaning it was all disparate verbal stories for hundreds of years. The Council of Nicea later just decided to remove parts and add some new parts to the bible, justifying it by the council itself being divinely inspired to have arrived at the correct version of the bible.

It’s clear now that the rich and powerful have historically used religion as a tool to control and manipulate the masses. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s just an obvious scam that has no basis in reality. So for that reason, I’m out.

I was raised Methodist, but when I was maybe 7 or 8 I realized that I was only Methodist because I was raised Methodist and that if my parents were a different religion, I would have believed that instead.

It took me until my late teens to realize I was an athiest, but that was definitely the start.

I befriended a lawyer in a online game years ago. When he found out I took the bible literally, we had debates about it, and he’d break down some of the passages in Revelations and try to get me to justify stuff like dragons. It opened my eyes to how ridiculous some things were, and how there was a reason one of the first things we were taught (Baptist) was not to question anything.

How it seems every religion believes they’re the “One True” religion, and the whole rest of the world is wrong. How throughout history, it’s fueled wars, and been used as a method to control people more than a way to help people.

How some priests garb themselves in expensive robes and surround themselves with gold or drive luxury cars, or preach on TV from practically a stadium while passing around the donations plate through a crowd of poor people while promising a afterlife gated by pearls.

I’ll stop here but yeah. It was actually a pretty devastating realisation for me, as religion was a huge part of my life up to that point.

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I don’t think it ever sat right with me but I couldn’t say why at first. When I was pretty young the problem made itself more clear when we got a new pastor. I didn’t agree with what he was saying and perhaps more importantly what he was saying didn’t agree with what his predecessor was saying. I brought this up to my parents and they said that he wasn’t right about everything. Well that’s a problem then because it means all these beliefs are subjective. The more I thought about any one story parable text or anything, the more I thought that this is just another person who doesn’t really know anything. Even where it says “This is the word of god” Someone had to write it down. Someone had to translate it. The harder I looked for god the more I found men, and I do not have faith in men.

I realized I had to make an effort to continue believing, so I stopped.

Sect/cult stuff. Rules did not add up. Stuff contradicting each other. The people were all preachy hypocrites. They’d go out of their way to twist a law of physics to their narrative. For example, “spiritual vibrations” in sound and radiation. Religion was used to control me. Quackery, conspiricy theories and mlm schemes everywhere. Broke free over time.

I went to church as a young kid, but never really believed and by interacting with people from different denominations and religions it became clear that the church I went to claiming to be the right one out of thousands was pretty unlikely. Was able to talk my mom out of taking me around 12 years old, and spent a couple years as agnostic until deciding that science made a lot more sense and if we could prove there was a god, he would just be part of nature and therefore not really a god as taught in church.

So basically thinking critically about it undermined the teachings. I still kept the positive messaging, but also added in the positive messaging from other religions and honestly see them all as more cultural than mystical.

I was raised Mormon. Mormonism is somewhat unique in that it claims to have a modern prophet and leadership that are directly led by god, and it strongly encourages members to pray to god and ask god for confirmation that this is true. Mormons are also taught that god would not allow their prophet to lead them astray, and that your local leaders are also inspired by god in what they do in their official capacity.

I was a missionary when shit started to break. I had a nervous breakdown; I am on the autism spectrum (although that diagnosis wasn’t available at that time; it was almost 30 years ago, back in DSM-III), and being a missionary was a lot too much for me for many, many reasons. I became suicidal. My leaders–again, people who were supposed to be called by god and led through inspiration from god–insisted that I must be acting in some sinful way, and that it was sin that had led to me being suicidal. They encouraged me to read my scriptures and pray more–as if I wasn’t already doing that a lot as a missionary–and to repent of my sins (whatever they were, because I sure as fuck didn’t know). If I was not sinning in some way, then Satan never could have taken hold in my heart, and Satan was obviously what was causing me to be suicidal. Obviously these commandments did not help, because I wasn’t doing anything ‘wrong’ in the first place.

But that leads to a problem: I believed that these people were called by god, and acting under god’s instructions, because I had received a spiritual witness. However, it was clear that they were wrong; I was not acting in a sinful manner (certainly less so than other missionaries!), and I had nothing to repent of. So these things are clearly contradictory: if I have received a spiritual confirmation from god that these men are led by him, then what they are saying must be from god and therefore true. But I know my own actions, and I know that I haven’t done anything that is sinful under any remotely normal definition of sin. Therefore, the feelings that I believed were spiritual confirmation must not have been spiritual confirmation at all.

Once you realize that feelings can not be a reliable way of knowing if something is actually true or not (or True, for that matter), then all of it falls apart. You realize that ‘answers’ to prayers are just feelings, not communication from the divine. The bible is suddenly a book of myths. Miracles dissolve like fog in the sun. When you look at religion–not just Mormonism, but all religion, and you compare it against things that can be verified empirically, none of the claims stand up.

Even though the foundations of my faith cracked while I was a missionary, I was unable to accept the meaning for several years, because Mormonism is a cult, and it’s very hard to escape even when you know it’s garbage.

The contradictions were too glaring by the time I turned 12. God is love but hell is eternal and full of millions of objectively good people who just practiced the ‘wrong’ religion? Those things can’t both be true.

There were just too many contradictions and the more I learned about science, especially physics, astronomy, and psychology, and the way the world works, I discovered that there is always a rational explanation for things, even if sometimes the knowledge necessary to comprehend something is not something I possess personally at the moment. People who would preach in my church would confidently claim things I knew to be fallacies, misleading, or straight up incorrect, not out of malice but their own ignorance as well, and I stopped trusting the words of religious leaders as I discovered they were as human as myself- their faith didn’t protect them from error or make them better people, and eventually I just couldn’t fall back on faith or ideology to be the bedrock of my moral or philosophical compass because it just wasn’t trustworthy.

I never was personally. But one thing that constantly gets me is religious people knowing their church people are touching little boys and girls and they still believe in them and their higher power.