For Agnostics/Atheists Only - Share your journey

GuitarHero · Post by **GuitarHero** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 11:33 am

Well, let's see if this works now. I was roundly mocked for following the very suggestions Teresa now mandates the last time I tried this, so who knows how long this will last.

As the title says, post here if you are agnostic/atheist. Talk about your journey, share new ideas, resources you have found, and struggles you've had as an atheist/agnostic.

tarheel · Post by **tarheel** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 12:01 pm

I was a PK. I can remember as a teenager when asked to lead prayer how foolish I felt. Praying to what? Personality wise, I am very pragmatic. If it doesn't seem logical to me I can't buy it. As a young adult I was what I guess they would call a weak believer. Then about 35 years ago I was disfellowshipped for getting a non-scriptural divorce. When I offered to make it scriptural they failed to see the humor in it.

That event made it rather easy for me then to start serious study and not worry about leaving the church.

Over the years I read a lot of ancient history, early christian history and discovered Bart Ehrman. His easy to read and understand books filled in the gaps and made a lot of sense to me. I've read them all. I have "officially" been a non believer for 10 - 12 years now. I can go into the reasons later but I would presume they are much the same as for others. It is the most freeing feeling. I do vacillate between considering myself an athiest or an agnostic. Knowing what ii know now I simply have a hard time now understanding how anyone can take christianity seriously. And I must confess I get real weary of all of the "God talk" postings on social media.

My parents passed long ago without our having to discuss it. My brother is a retired minister and we are estranged. On his part because of my beliefs. He is unable to accept it. (He disowned his daughter because she married a black man). My sister worries for my soul. I have asked her not to worry because I don't. I have made it clear to all 4 of my children that what they believe is their own business. All I ask of them is to know why they believe what they believe. They know I am a non-believer. 3 are believers and 1 isn't. My wife is a semi-believer in that she has a whole different take on spirituality.

GuitarHero · Post by **GuitarHero** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 12:41 pm

I definitely find Bart Ehrman's work useful. Richard Dawkins actually put me off of atheism for a while just because I couldn't stand how f**king smarmy he is, just arrogant and just as preachy as the fundies were.

I honestly don't think I ever really learned how to pray. At least, I was never sure if I was doing it right. It all seemed rather silly, talking to oneself.

The breaking point for me boiled down to the following Bible verse: "You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit." I simply looked around me, and at my family in particular, and wondered why every time I took a bite of their fruit, it turned out to be rotten prunes. How come every preaching job treated me worse than any secular job ever did? How come my father could never stay in one place as a minister? Why did every congregation I was a part of split? Why are church people, in general, so constantly bitter and angry and unhappy?

Studying Church of Christ history was my first step out of the COC, and so it follows that studying church history and the canonization of the Bible would start me out of Christianity as a whole. Doing actual textual criticism, or reading those that had written them, would be the next step.

The funny thing is, I didn't even know I had become an atheist. My wife and I were having an off-handed conversation one day, and she asked me what I believed. I told her I didn't know. She just looked at me and said "you don't believe any of it, anymore, do you?" And I paused, thought for a second and said "no. No I do not." And admitting that told me who I was, finally.

Nearly all of my family has disowned me. My parents cut me off, as well as most of my siblings. Given that there is a huge amount of drama and abuse in my family, I barely miss them at all.

Turtle · Post by **Turtle** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 1:02 pm

I've officially considered myself a nonbeliever for about two years. I also worked my way into it through serious reading and bible study. Along the way, I rested for short times at progressive christianity and panentheism. I wish I could say I've physically left the c of c, but I haven't. My husband is a deacon, we all know what will happen when it comes out.

I told him about my non-belief about six months ago. He lives in denial. At first he threw every typical response to atheism at me,(including "look at the trees.") and I was ready. It became very clear very quickly that he cannot wrap his head around it and is not even willing to try to understand. I reached a point where I told him that for every argument, article, book, etc., he wanted me to look at he must look at one of mine. He hasn't brought anything up since. So, for now, I just let things be.

I am happy in the knowledge that I am mentally free, but uneasy in most of my personal relationships. I don't personally know any other nonreligious people at all. I live in the Bible Belt, where everyone assumes you are a Christian by default, and people post anti-atheist stuff on facebook. I live the way I've always lived. My morals haven't changed, but my political views have. I mostly keep those to myself as well. A few months ago, I started an anonymous blog about reading the bible as an atheist, and am doing commentary on a plain reading, Chapter by chapter. It is a kind of purging of religion for me. I knew I would learn a lot, but it has been extraordinarily eye opening, especially on topics like slavery. I was surprised that I got a couple of regular readers pretty quickly.

GuitarHero · Post by **GuitarHero** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 1:14 pm

I'd like to read it, if I may.

chrisso99 · Post by **chrisso99** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 1:16 pm

I think I've been an atheist as long as I can remember. At various times I tried not to be, but even as a very small child in Sunday school, I remember thinking these stories were just fairy tales. Going to church no less than 3 times a week was miserable growing up. Allowing myself to be coerced into going to Harding was a miserable decision. Being an 18 year old unbaptised elders kid was annoying. I got the full court press in every class. The church was desperate to dunk me. They thought maybe they should just pretend I was. They even went so far as to assign me parts of the service including announcements, scripture readings, plate passing, and the most dreaded of all: prayers.

It was a constant cause of consternation. I was the "good" kid. I was the brightest kid in Sunday school. I came from multiple generations of elders. They just couldn't figure out how to deal with it. I finally got baptized on my own away from my church and my family so I could end the nonsense without giving them the satisfaction of seeing it.

Turtle · Post by **Turtle** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 1:29 pm

GuitarHero wrote:I'd like to read it, if I may.

You've got a PM. I had to send it again. The first one disappeared.

Still Here · Post by **Still Here** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 5:01 pm

Have been a non believer for about 10 years, after being raised to adulthood in the coc. Left the church with a bit of a "bang" unfortunately, ( I think at the time I just didn't see any other way to get out). I just could not take the inauthenticity ( mine that is) anymore. I was not an atheist when I left coc, but I knew I did not believe THAT! I had always questioned, but there was no question I could ever ask that did not have an answer, and I respected and trusted those who had the answers. As I got older I did plenty of my own rationalizing to make it all make sense, and actually became fairly good at it, but it became more and more obvious that I was just kidding myself.

As I remember that time, the things that I could not reconcile were: women's submissive stance in relation to men, the definite of sin vs human nature, and our responsibility, the constant fighting over doctrinal issues (this was ongoing from my early childhood and destroyed friendships and family relationships), I just could not see that God could care so much about these petty things, I felt the problem had to be the way we were applying scripture.

Well, as someone else mentioned. Once I was out, I was free to explore and I found psychology, that actually does a fairly good job of explaining sin, I found Bart Ehrman, Daniel dennet, Michael shermer and many others. "Your inner fish" helped me to understand evolution, "why we believe strange things" and "demon haunted world" helped me understand how the brain works, I read a lot about ethics and the evolutionary roots of ethics, by Francis Weil (and lots of other books that I don't remember right now).

But I think the biggest thing was just "trying it out", I decided to live for a while as if there was no god, and I found that things just really fell into place, no more need to try to force square pegs into round holes, it was liberating. My relationship with my extended family ranges from non existent to just polite, and I do miss them, but for me it felt like closing sanity or insanity, really no choice.

NeverAgain · Post by **NeverAgain** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 5:56 pm

I have been an atheist for about 30 years. When I left the Church of Christ, like Still Here, I didn't necessarily acknowledge yet that I was an unbeliever. I just knew that what the CofC specifically and fundamentalists in general were teaching was so patently absurd that I would no longer even pay lip service to it. My grandfather had been an elder for many, many years, up until his death (although he had converted from Methodist as a young man, I suspect to please his wife; that may explain why he was always so kind and open-minded and nonjudgmental of people, unlike any other elder I ever knew). My father was already dead, and my mother had remarried and moved away (she had joined the CofC to please my father, but never really believed in it).

Like most here, there was consternation and turmoil over the decision. The visits, the wondering about the "reason" (since CofC being wrong wasn't an acceptable answer), the crying, the "worried about your soul" conversations. I had, after all, won the Bible award at the Christian elementary school I was forced to attend, my grandfather (deceased by this time) had been an elder, my grandmother was still a stalwart member whose parents had been baptized by David Lipscomb himself. "You know the Bible," they would say in puzzlement. Yes, I did and do; that's one reason I left the CofC and became an atheist.

I tried out the Catholic Church on the theory that if anyone could claim to be the "one true church, it was the Catholics. But by the time I got married, I had put it all aside as superstitious nonsense. To be honest, I came to believe, and I still believe, that people who really subscribe to religion: 1) are mostly being dishonest with themselves (there are far more atheists than we realize; they're just afraid to come out in the open); 2) afraid of death and unwilling to let go of wishful thinking about an afterlife, and/or 3) just not up to snuff intellectually (like that ignorant trash in Kentucky who won't give marriage licenses to gay couples). Sounds elitist, I know; that's the way I feel about it.

In any event, after I got married, I went to church with my wife, a Methodist. She went to church to sing in the choir, to know people, to go to the dinners and such. Methodists are pretty easy going and have a lot of out-of-church activities. But she eventually came to not believe in god either, or at least she is agnostic. So much injustice in the world belies the idea of a just god. Eventually, we quit going at all, and I have been inside a church for a regular service just once in this century.

I don't make an issue of my atheism, but I don't shy away from it either. If asked, I reply; but who really asks a question like that? I don't fear for a job or business, since I am more than financially secure for life. My older brother is now an elder himself, but he never brings it up, and we are not close anyway. I did acknowledge that I cannot ever run for political office here in Tennessee as I would like. Well, I guess I could, but I know full well that a liberal, pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-income tax atheist who wouldn't lie about any of those things has no chance. Instead, I give fairly generously to liberal Democrats.

I am happy and content in my atheism. I find it liberating and stress-free, especially compared to the primitive, hyper-judgmental, legalistic, mean-spirited denomination I (and all of us here) left behind. I like to find others who have had enough of the CofC and encourage them to leave it. I also encourage people to consider atheism, although whatever makes them happy is where they should go, of course. That's one reason I continue to post here, despite the obstacles thrown up by too-serious theologians.

[The last line of this post was edited, and not by me. I suppose you can figure out what it originally said.]

chrisso99 · Post by **chrisso99** » Tue Oct 20, 2015 6:52 pm

It's not elitist to think believers are not as smart and educated as atheists and agnostics. Lots of research has shown strong correlations between IQ (brain power) and less religious belief as well as education and less religious belief.

I did some work with a data set on education levels and religious denominations and it was painfully obvious. The more conservative/fundamentalist you were, the less education you had and vice versa. Unitarians were actually the highest scoring group. Just barely edging out atheists. Probably not statistically significant but that annoyed me a bit.

The CoC and other fundies are downright openly anti-intellectual, I don't see why these facts are always disputed by them. How many sermons did we hear about people going to college and falling prey to the devil? How many times were we told not to read books that contradicted the bible (i.e., pretty much every history and science book).

Fundies, generally, are not just dumb- they're dumb and proud of it. My dad, an elder, is actually a pretty smart guy but the dude has NEVER read a book other the bible or something written by a fundamentalist - not even for fun. He has a degree from a secular school but barely. He is proud of livin in the real world, not some academic ivory tower. He embraces the label of underedcated and he seems almost embarrassed to have a degree and a really successful secular career. My mother on the other hand is not very smart (sorry, mom). She too has a degree from a secular college but is not well read. She only reads the bible, church books, and oddly trashy grocery store romance novels. However the slightest hint she or fundamentalist Christians aren't smart or well educated drives her beserk.