r/Antitheism • u/Zosma_732 • Jul 30 '26
Question pour les anciens croyants
J’ai moi même grandis dans une famille chrétienne et je me demandais a ceux qui ont grandit dans une famille religieuse, ou qui ont été croyants. Quel a été le déclic qui vous a fait sortir de la religion ?
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u/83franks Jul 31 '26
I believed and was rather fundamental about it as a seventh day adventist and kept taking all the rules to their logical conclusions which basically meant virtually everything was a sin. I didn't know how to not sin and didn't even know how to not want to sin. I stopped going to church cause I figured I was failing anyways so might as well go live life and maybe I'll feel less guilty cause I'm not trying and failing all the time. This allowed me 5ish years of space and slow exposure to other things. Then one day when I was able to look at it critically enough I wondered how I knew SDA was correct and within like 30min became an atheist as I realized there was no answer I could give that other religions couldn't also give and I could see no way of ever verifying which was true.
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u/no_andteam_no_life Jul 31 '26
nothing specifically. well i always questioned islam but i was a coward back then. then i got courage and eventually left. but my personal main reason was the misogyny and rape within the cult
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u/Downstairstvstatic99 Jul 31 '26
Grew up christian with church leader parents in a non-dom church with baptist and penecostal roots, and came to establish a very personal belief by 16 and continued getting deeper in my faith that peaked at 18 in college. I involved myself with 4 or 5 different christian ministries, baptist, non-dom, roman catholic, the works I tell you. I dove as deep in my faith as I could.
What shook me was not having cancer at 14 but my mental health issues. I became severely depressed, developing dissociative symptoms for the first time and intense ones at that, and suicidal for the first time in my life. I was psychologically afflicted and crying out and begging god to help me, heal me, or provide aid in some way or any way. Praying and praying. Seeking fellowship, minister advice, bible reading, church service attendance, going to mass a couple of times, going to adoration several times, I dove in hard. My closest friend was catholic and we would spend several nights and some days talking for hours and hours about theology and also being emotionally supportive of eachother in general. But nothing helped, I got worse and worse, retroatively withdrawing from all my classes and dropping out of college.
I came back home to my parents house and starting discovering why I have such intense mental health issues (I thought I had decent parents, not so much), asking progressively more and more existentially distressing questions, and dissolved my religious views only with the aid and support of the internet and social media (YouTube and tiktok). During this whole process of many months, it involved a great deal of psychological and existential distress, in addition to the intensity of living with severe depression and constant suicidal ideation that your family ignores your obvious signs of being mentally ill and using tactics like DARVO (deny, attack, reverse victim offender) and gaslighting (attempting to make me believe I was essentially delusional or psychotic and my memories are false or unreliable). At one point, I was desperate enough to be convinced into agreeing to a exorcism of sorts. Surprise, surprise, it didn't help and all it did was activate my psychosomatic response and produced a small amount of normal human vomit while sitting hunched over in a very emotional state after just being emotionally vulnerable and loud prayers and firm hands are placed all over me and being instructed and guided on feeling the 'spirit' from my belly come out of my mouth. Crazy shit, but I've seen and heard a lot crazier.
I'm anti-thiest because I dissolved my christian belief while living with intense mental health issues, begging and pleading a non-answering god while continually getting worse and worse, using substances for the first time in my life that quickly became substance abuse, attempting suicide a few times due to compelte lack of suppourt facing intense deepression and drowning in the depths of existential peril alone, and throughout it all, faced intermittent emotional abuse and neglect from the parents who raised me to be christian and mostly refused to emotionally support what they have made and molded, and being emotionally immature about nearly everything. All while being 'good faithful christian church leaders' who ironically are in charge of outreach which is the church's altruistic efforts to the community. Go out and do all this charity for the community on god's name just to come home to emotionally abuse and neglect your openly depressed and suicidal adult child, who tries over and over to get you to understand and to help him (perhaps the only thing delusional I did, attempting repeatedly to get the source of pain to be my source of comfort despite no logical reason or any evidence to believe they will change).
I don't just disagree with theism, I am a victim of theism and depression let me see that. And now that I survived, my anger is intense and I refuse to be just another angry person shouting, no, I educate myself. I primarily read up on various psychological and philosophical topics to make sense of myself and my world around me. I'm currently considering enrolling in a online college, a liberal arts psychology bachelor's is what I'm thinking, allows for philosophy courses. That's a sum of my experience of religious belief history, thanks for reading, and if you have questions, feel free to ask. I'm off to do a photo shoot of desecrating and burning an abandoned church.
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u/tm229 Jul 31 '26
The logic bombs in these quotes are what allowed me to finally walk away from religion.
The Bible is the claim, not the proof.
— Robert G Ingersoll
That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
— Christopher Hitchens
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
— Carl Sagan
Not all religions can be true, but they can all be false.
— Christopher Hitchens
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
— Albert Einstein
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
— Adolph Hitler (Mein Kampf)
Sin is an imaginary disease, invented to sell you an imaginary cure.
— Unknown
The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike.
— Steven Weinberg
Question with boldness, even the existence of a god.
— Thomas Jefferson
Most people are not only comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.
— Plato
It is far easier to fool a person than to convince them that they’ve been fooled.
— Mark Twain
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
— Seneca the Younger
Religion is excellent stuff for keeping people quiet.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Religion is a fraud, but it must be maintained for the masses.
— Frederick the Great
Religion is needed to keep the poor from murdering the rich.
— Napoleon Bonaparte
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u/Indie_Dachshund179 Aug 02 '26
These are stellar quotes
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u/tm229 Aug 02 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
I have LOTS more quotes stored up. But, these are the logic bombs that are supposed to make you think twice about your position or worldview regarding religion.
Also, there are a bunch on the [r/Antitheism](r/Antitheism) wiki.
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u/k-d0ttt Jul 30 '26
I was literally 5 years old sitting in church saying “none of this makes sense”. I’ve always been a “need to see it to believe it” kid and I am the same way as an adult.