#anyway deconverting from christianity is the best thing i ever did

[winged-thinged]

Life gets so much lighter when you are just allowed to exist. When there's no god in your head listening in on everything you think. When the trees outside are not a sign of anybody's presence, but just beautiful. I think the world, fundamentally, belongs to itself. And we are a part of it. That's all.

[itsbenedict]

interesting! is that post implying you used to be religious? if so how much and what made you change?

oh, man, that's a whole long story

to make it short: my family is the most worst type of evangelical fundies, and when i was in college i was not an exception. but i also was really insistent on proving i was right, because like...

...i'm not sure if there's an analogous feeling i can point to if you've never been that deep in the paint with theology, but... there's a cognitive dissonance between believing in God qua the omnipotent omniscient universe-sustaining being that optimizes for his own glory, and like, living in the world we actually live in, which is nothing if not poorly optimized for any particular purpose at all. you believe in something which is just so clearly at odds with all observable evidence, you have to try extra extra hard to justify your belief in it, prove that it has to be true and explain away all the discrepancies.

if you don't have ironclad reasoning, all those little things like "the gay people i know clearly aren't evil", and "the bible is wrong about just about every scientific and archeological claim it makes about antiquity" and "god's vast ineffable plan somehow looks identical to not having a plan at all" sort of add up. so i wanted to make sure my reasoning was the most ironclad, and the best way to do that was to fight about it all the time.

i used to- they call it "struggling with doubt", a perfectly normal thing everyone does from time to time. y'know, i have never once "struggled with doubt" about atheism in the past... almost a decade, now, since i deconverted? not once have i thought "hm, this thing would make more sense if the god of the bible was real, so i'm going to need to figure out how to ignore and/or explain away some things in order to maintain my atheism". it doesn't happen!

(and hilariously, dad insists that all nonbelievers really know that christianity is true deep in their hearts, and their every waking moment is a constant struggle to lie to themselves and come up with excuses to ignore the truth- one of the most easily falsified points of doctrine, in retrospect. sounds a little like projection, actually)

so, i habitually argued with people on the internet trying to convince them that christianity was true, and kept somehow not succeeding, ever, which was annoying but was probably the fault of the nonbelievers being very good at lying to themselves. and so what if i didn't have good answers to all their counterarguments? so what if their reasoning seemed dead simple and obviously true? they had to be wrong, or else I was stupid!

anyway, then zero got me to read HPMOR, and then the Sequences, which i did voluntarily because i was convinced my faith would hold and i'd be able to come up with counterarguments against those ideas, and...

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

If the sky is blue I desire to believe "the sky is blue" If the sky is not blue I desire to believe "the sky is not blue". Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want.

and stuff like EY described in "Belief in Belief", just... completely had my number. describing exactly what was going through my head as if he was psychic, demolishing all the anti-epistemology i'd built up to defend the self-deception- it all fell apart.

and then i stewed in guilt and horror for about a month or so as my world crumbled around me, and then my dad finally caught wise and confronted me about it one on one. and... he couldn't fix it. my dad's a lot like me, except that he went to seminary and was an ordained pastor, and he couldn't repair anything in that conversation, no matter how much i wanted it repaired. no matter how much i wanted to be able to believe that heaven was waiting when i died, there was no grounds to believe it on.

he took me to a "worldview conference", which was a week-long church camp type thing specifically aimed at young people to teach them apologetics and prepare them for a hostile world, and that didn't take. we talked a lot- argued a lot- and my dad, this guy who went to school specifically to learn all the arguments and be the best at defending this faith, just... failed to give me anything to cling to. the last time we talked about it- i forget the specifics of the argument, but i remember the setting, it was this bench at the top of a hill overlooking a beautiful wilderness vista at sunset, the day before the conference ended- the argument ended with him conceding that you can't believe in god without believing that god is above the concept of A=A- that fundamental logic needs to be optional, to an omnipotent being.

and not being omnipotent, i couldn't hang my whole frame of reasoning about the world on something that resolved to believing A sometimes != A, and that was where it ended.

.

anyway, what ensued was a not-happy home situation, and i eventually got kicked out, and then after about a year of me taking out loans to live on my own and finish college, mom talked dad into softening his position and letting me come home. it's been pretty awkward living with them since then, but it's faded into the background of things-we-don't-talk-about, noticed primarily during birthday parties when i conspicuously don't sing the second "may the dear lord bless you" chorus.

(...well, that was a lie, huh?)

[anarchistcowboy]

My “problem” with Religion; why I am no longer a Protestant Christian, and why I don’t ever plan to reconvert

Disclaimer: I have no problem with religion itself, per say, my best friend is a Mormon (More accurately my best friend is a ex-mo who is still spiritual, but I meant her as a Mormon, and she came to deconverting her own free will, independent of my own beliefs), many other of my friends are religious, and I study religious texts out of interest. However, people insist I have a problem with religion because I deconverted, so I wanna talk about why I deconverted. You can be, and do, whatever the hell you want I don’t care. It’s you life, not mine, and so it aint my business. 

Bottom line, this is specifically about me and my opinion.

Got it?

M’kay lets do this shit.

So, for most of my life my uncle’s church and I grew side by side. It was a small church, actually still to this day it is. I only once meant someone who didn’t help start the church or was born into it, and I spent my sundays learning about the good word of the LORD up until I was 13. I actually really enjoy church, and I still go from time to time when I have a free sunday. It has a familial atmosphere, one I never really had at my home and so it was one I longed for for a long time, even after I left the church. That longing is partly because, or mostly because, of a narcissism developed by my mother during maternity, and this narcism warped my father into an internal extrovert displaying himself externally as an introvert which caused him to be very depressed and distant for as long as I can remember. Some people claim that this is why I left, you know the classic “ you left the church because you were angry, and you felt like God left you”, but that’s not the case. In fact the Bible and the church in general brought a lot of comfort to me. And I believed in it. Whilst I don’t believe in it now there are still parts that I agree with morallu and still incompance my outlook of life, just minus the God shit. Mark 12:31 and Proverbs 17:17 being some of the biggest influencers on me still to this day. But, there is a very distinct reason why I left the church, I remember the moment vividly. My parents were still together at the time and I was locked in my room like every other day being my angsty teenage self. Because, no matter how great your kids are there will always be a little bit of angst in your kid, even if it doesn’t look like it. I was doing my thing, and it was dark. I’m just laying on my bed just scrolling through the interwebs. Ironically, I had my Bible to the right of me, which is the same Bible I had in my backpack up until the end of eighth grade, before I decide to part ways with it and give it to someone who would actually use it. But, I’ll talk more about that on a later blog. Back to the story I was telling, I started thinking about all the other religions in the world and if they so desperately wanted to be right, have/know God, and we’re also given the chance to have the “right” God later on when Europe decided to try and achieve global domination why didn’t they take it? Wouldnt God want everyone to follow him and reveal himself to them too? And what about the people they never got a chance, what about the Native Americans who didn’t even know about Jesus or Adam or Eve. But, the more I thought about it the more I realize how cruel God is in the Bible anyways, so why would they? I was mature enough to read/hear/see parts of the Bible that were hidden (for lack of a better word) to the younger kids in Bible school, blowing up a city because the majority of the men in the city were gay, the miss treating women, and the fact that God allowed slavery, just not of the Jews. Thing like that all that, which I was far far against, and admitively were all cases of the old testament, but can also be seen in the new teastament, which didnt seem like something an all loving God would do. Then I started thinking about the new teastament in general and how it seemingly changed God over night. Why didnt he act this way the first time? Wouldnt an all knowing God have perfect morals, which the bible claims is the case, and wouldnt an all knowing god not change his morals, if they are indeed perfect? Also why does he change his mind at all! And why did he create foreskin if he just wanted it cut off? Thats pretty awful! Did he gamble with the Devil for the male reproductive system and lose? Also God is a cruel son of a bitch, Jesus even says to fear God (Mathew 10:28). Why would anyone fear an all loving creator? Simple, I wouldnt! My mind kept going down that rabbit hole, and by the end of the night I was convinced on the belief I didnt want to believe. God isnt real because there was so much, to much in the bible that didnt make sense, to me at least. Thats the story, it aint much but its mine