(I grew up Catholic) All throughout my Sunday schooling the inconsistencies kept popping up; when I was young I would chalk them up to ‘I’ll understand later’ or ‘as I learn more I’ll figure it out’, but it never happened. By the time I was in my teens I was there just to keep the family happy; I became more aware of the underlying bigotry and hate, and my disagreements with the church as an organization piled up. I distinctly remember while on the way home after confirmation that I didn’t feel any different for having gone through it, and when I said it aloud, my father couldn’t provide any useful guidance, I sometimes think he doubts, but won’t or can’t bring himself to leave. As soon as I graduated I stopped going to mass regularly, sure that I didn’t want to be considered Catholic anymore, but still unsure of what I believed. In college I was a Classics major (these days I teach Latin), which is what finally killed any last vestige of faith I had. I spent a lot of time working with documents ranging in age from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the works of St. Augustine, and at every turn I saw just how deluded, how derivative, it all was. There was a sentiment throughout the classics department that went something like this: Studying these topics will either strengthen your faith and make it unbreakable, or destroy it utterly. Obviously, this applied most to Christian students, but seeing the way the religious sausage is made so-to-speak would have been enough, for me at least, to turn away from any faith. I never understood how anyone could learn all about this and still have faith, the cognitive dissonance just seemed so massive, yet I saw it happen with some of my fellow students. These days, except for weddings and funerals, I avoid going near churches.

Same reason I stopped believing in Santa Claus, the Easter bunny and the Tooth fairy. I grew up.

I paid attention to the stories.

The story of Job in particular drove me up a wall.

God took everything Job loved to win a bet he already knew the outcome of. A bet he made with Lucifer.

Basically Lucifer tricked god into torturing an innocent man and god fell for it like a fuckin chump.

He either knows all and willingly tortured Job to prove a point to someone he shouldn’t give a single thought toward or he got duped which shows he’s either not all knowing or just a dumbass.

I could never find an answer the question: Why is my religion the one that’s real and not all the others?

Raised Catholic. Around 12 years old I simply could not reconcile the idea of “God is Love” with the idea that “God sends unbelievers to eternal torture in Hell”. I had just learned about Gandhi, and was like, “that guy’s in Hell??”. Told my mom I didn’t believe in god anymore and I didn’t want to go to church anymore. She cried.

hate.

specifically, there was some small LGBTQ protests that put the hatred into perspective- there were the protestors (who maybe went out of their way to be annoying and provoke things;), assholes, and everyone quietly cheering for the assholes.

it made me look at my own behavior… and I didn’t want to be an asshole (or perhaps, more accurately said: didn’t want to be that kind of asshole. I’m not a perfect person.). This prompted a slow slide from non-practicing through agnosticism into straight up atheism.

It didn’t help that it took 2-3 years before anyone reached out to me about why I left, and then it was because my mom had asked a pastor to do just that… he didn’t get it when I quote CS Lewis Mere Christianity (“That a person ought be a better person as a christain.”…) I was a better person as an atheist; because I wasn’t obligated to be an asshole.

edit to add: it wasn’t just the LGBTQ hate. that was just the nature of the incident that brought me face to face with the ugly truth. It was easy to say, for example, that West Burroughs Baptist’s aren’t real christians. There’s a lot of out-groups that christians hate on. hell, sometimes those outgroups are even other christians (how many wars have been started between catholics and protestants?) more contemporary, look at the hatred for refugees and asylum seekers.

hatred is a pervasive feature of Christianity.

Well, my family is a weird split between Christian and Atheist. On my Dad’s side my Grandmother is Christian and Grandfather is Atheist. My Dad was put through Catholic private school and hated it… he’s never expressed any religious belief for as long as I’ve been alive. My mother’s side of the family are all Protestant Christian (My grandmother on Dad’s side is too she just has an extremely weird perspective on Christianity).

So, my Mother tried to raise my siblings and I as Protestant Christians. Unfortunately for her I’ve always loved learning about biology which brought me to knowing 'bout the theory of evolution… which contradicts Mom’s Creationism. At first I was just ignoring the evolution but as life went on I was presented with a mounting body of evidence of Mom being objectively wrong about various things and occasionally deliberately lying to me. This is also with the strain of Christianity Mom’s side of the family has holding that being Christian is to have a relationship with God, including that he would be responsive to prayer. I never felt it. No presence of some “higher power” or anything that I could take as being the answer to prayers to it, not even “No”, no response at all.

After enough of that I had to ask myself what I believe. Being presented with science verses dogma and being told they’re mutually exclusive (by the side of dogma) I chose science. Kept that decisions to myself for a few years out of fear of retaliation. In that time I learned about ethics, a little philosophy, a little physics… and the online Atheist community in-general. So by the time a family member asked me directly if I still believed in God I had pretty well made up my mind that #1: I don’t and #2: if I’m wrong I certainly don’t want anything to do with them. I left the second point out of my answer and told them the truth: I don’t believe in their god anymore.

It took me a month or two to stop worrying that some retaliation was coming… it never did but my relatives were curious about what I did believe since it wasn’t the same as what they did. I’ve pretty much settled on a materialist view of the Universe, I don’t believe in anything that is supernatural.

Hypocrisy, all the fricking hypocrisy.

My uncle runs a Christian Megachirch and he is the worst family member I’ve ever met, narcissistic, selfish and generally concerned mostly about money. I left for college, left all the religion behind and never looked back.

I was raised as a Catholic, went to private school K through 12, and even wanted to be a nun when I was around 12. I bought into it 100%.

First started questioning the sinfulness of same-sex love because I was having feelings for my best friend in high school.

I was taught that questioning was a sin, but even that didn’t make sense to me because my intellect is a gift from God, so why would it be sinful to use it?

So I started to allow myself to question things, but continued going to church and believing through my 20s. I just cherry-picked which teachings to keep and disregard.

Sometime in my 30s, thanks to the internet, I was exposed to people like Dan Barker and Sam Harris. I was living in Michigan at the time and also started listening to a local podcast called Reasonable Doubts (highly recommend).

All of that combined helped me realize atheism made the most sense, though it was several months before I learned to embrace the term.

So I was raised LDS, and the exmormon community says all Mormons have a “shelf”

Basically everytime you ask a question and the answer is along the lines of “we don’t have the answer to everything, all will be revealed in time” we put that weird thing on out shelf. Eventually, too many things are on the shelf, and it breaks.

Some people who want to stay in the LDS church because it makes them happy have a very strong shelf. Those who want to stay because of fear/social pressure avoid looking at anything that might need to be on their shelves.

Some common shelf items that were on mine:

Book of Mormon describes the natives having very European technology around 0 AD. They have metal swords, horses, chariots, to name a few. Yeah they just didn’t.

Even in a time when it was incredibly common to be anti slavery since the Civil War was around the corner, the idea that black people were inferior to white people and should serve them was heavily recorded in the early church. And black men couldn’t reach full status like a white man until 1978. They preach that God loves all his children equally… but apparently there were a few qualifiers about skin color.

How they treat women is trash.

Prophets supposedly are getting revelation from the same God, but keep contradicting each other. Most famous example is “Adam was God” theory. Most recent high profile example was a previous prophet ran a campaign called “meet the Mormons” trying to sell the idea that being a mormon was super normal. But current prophet says “mormon” is a derogatory term and a win for Satan?

The way they demand super poor people pay tithing, while holding upwards of a hundred billion in reserve for no apparent reason. They could easily end hunger in the US, and maybe even homelessness. And they would if they actually followed the teachings of the loving christ they claim to follow.

They claim that they have magical gifts, like being able to tell if people lie. Given the rapists and worse that have been high ranking members of the church, either they are liars or complicit. But given how often they defend rapists that were obviously guilty, probably just both.

I could go on for awhile… but those were my shelf items. One day it just broke and I was like… huh this is all just nonsense isn’t it.

So our (Lutheran) church would bring all of the kids in the congregation up to the front to discuss a theme or passage during each service. We initially had a pretty cool female pastor (who—I later found out—was bullied into leaving because she was a woman 🙃); she at one point told us that to get into heaven, we only needed to ask God to let us in. It made sense to my naive little brain.

When I was 15, some asshole temp pastor called us up and asked if we know how to get in, and I replied with what I was told; he very condescendingly said “uh, no, you need to believe in God”.

I was irritated by his tone, yes, but I also hadn’t heard that before, strangely. His response really disturbed me. I thought, what about people across the world who have other faiths? Or children who die before they even have a chance to believe?? You mean my amazingly kind, Buddhist Vietnamese friend is going to HELL?? What the fuck???

So I began to research alternate viewpoints online, and discovered the ways in which Christianity doesn’t make sense and how it’s often used as an excuse to spread hate and suffering. I just couldn’t justify believing anymore.