Category Archives: Deconversion Stories

Dan’s Deconversion Story

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I’ve recently started following the blog Camels With Hammers.  I’m new to following this blog but it looks like a great one.

I’ve seen snippets of his story but here is a link to all of his posts concerning before, during, and after his deconversion (the ones he’s done so far).  It would be a lengthy read to cover all of them, but I’m sure it would be very helpful to someone in the middle of their doubts or their own deconversion (or just interesting for the rest of us):

Dan’s Deconversion

I’d love to hear back from anyone who reads through his entire story.

Memoirs of an ex-Christian

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Last week I stumbled across this blog and I was transported back in time.  I had forgotten about this blog but when I saw it I instantly remembered it as one that I visited often in the early days of my religious doubting.  He isn’t currently blogging but I emailed the author to thank him for sharing his story and I let him know how it had impacted me.  He replied and we exchanged a few encouraging emails.  It reminded me of why it’s important for those who have left the faith to tell their stories.  After we deconvert we move on with our lives, but there are others who will go through the same struggles and will benefit in some way from reading about our journey.  Enjoy reading Kevin’s story:

Memoirs of an ex-Christian

An Examination Of the Pearl

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I want to share with you a link to a free online book that may interest some of you.  It is a story about a loss of faith - but so much more.   It’s called An Examination of the Pearl and the scope of it is staggering to me.  Click on the Table of Contents and then click on items listed there and you’ll see how exhaustive this book really is!  He covers any biblical or doctrinal issue you can imagine.  If you’re in the doubting stage of your faith then this book is required reading!

I thought I’d give you the author’s words from the first page so that you can get an idea what the book is about:

The Gospel of Matthew records Jesus as comparing the Kingdom of God to a merchant who found a valuable pearl and sold all that he had in order to buy it. No merchant of fine pearls would ever buy one that he had not examined carefully. To take the supreme leap of selling all for the price of one particular pearl would require that merchant to have either found it flawless after detailed examination, or to enter blindly into what might well turn out to be a bad bargain out of impulse, emotion, or deceit.

This book is an honest and unflinching examination of the pearl that Conservative Laestadianism puts on offer as the Kingdom of God. It is a study not just of that obscure revival movement from 19th century Lapland, but also of Martin Luther, fundamentalist and sectarian Christianity, and the Bible itself.

About 18 centuries ago, Clement of Alexandria wrote, “If our faith is such that it is destroyed by force of argument, then let it be destroyed; for it will have been proved that we do not possess the truth.” Many dare not take the risk to their faith, or the faith of those under their influence, of reading or allowing the reading of anything critical about what they supposedly believe. But is that really faith in anything other than the others in the fold who are themselves just repeating the old slogans? They, too, are all too often ignoring the facts about their own unexamined faith that is itself supported only by the claims of others.

There are many such unexamined and fearful faiths competing in the marketplace of religion, some of them also claiming to be the truth outside of which no one will be saved. And without critical reflection like that found in this book, each one is a self-sustaining doctrinal bubble that quivers unsteadily in the air, vulnerable to being poked by the slightest intrusion of fact.

I’d love for you to check it out and to let me know what you think of it:  An Examination of the Pearl

Speed’s Deconversion Story

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A while ago I asked one of the commentators on my blog (Speed), if he would mind sharing his deconversion story.  Here it is !  I enjoyed reading it and I know if will be helpful to anyone in the midst of a similar journey.  Thanks for sharing Speed!

I was born into a Catholic home. We didn’t really discuss God or the Bible that much, but we went to church every Sunday unless we were sick. I attended Catechism as well, though I thought it was extremely boring and didn’t teach me anything useful. Plus at our church the priests didn’t seem that nice. Because of that, I started to think there was something wrong with Catholicism since the people who were supposed to represent God didn’t seem like the loving God they were teaching.

My life went fairly normal and I was fortunate to not have to face any tragedy. Because of that, questioning the big things in life didn’t really happen. It was easy to stay in my faith while things were going well.

Then in college, I got very sick with an infection that left me unable to eat. I suffered with this for almost a month and had to be hospitalized. At that point, the questions started coming. Being in a hospital for a while and being surrounded by so many people struggling with health issues, I started questioning why God allows us to go through these things. I had been told that it makes us stronger, but what if Idied? Surely that was possible, and this sickness would have done nothing but taken me out at a relatively young age.

Shortly after I got out of the hospital, I started to feel like I was living a double life. I noticed that about all Catholics I personally knew as well. It seemed in church, we had to act a certain way and be “holy” but when we got home, we were anything but. From the music we listened to, to the movies we watched, to the way we talked, I felt we were being hypocritical. I started listening to non-Catholic radio broadcasts that were very fundamental and realized that I needed to be Christian all the time and not just in church. Plus, these radio broadcasts seemed to be giving a totally different method of salvation which I never heard in the Catholic Church.

At that point, I decided to give my life to Jesus and become “born again.” I knew a pastor from another time in my life and went to him, said the salvation prayer, and then started attending his church services. I even started taking Bible college courses to better understand the Bible.

I remember at one of the church services, my pastor said that God was telling him someone there didn’t have the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I raised my hand. They got together and prayed with me. Nothing happened. Looking back, I realize it’s because I had no intention of acting in front of them and I told myself if something was going to happen, it was going to be from God and not me. After that day, I had doubts about what was going on and I wondered if most of this fundamentalist stuff was just a show.

My soon to be fiancé, whom I met in the Catholic church, was scared not only that I was going from Catholic to non-denominational, but she was scared that I was going to become a priest and end the relationship with her, though I had no intention of becoming a preacher. All of this caused quite a bit of strife in our relationship to the point where we almost broke up. Finally, she decided to follow me out of Catholicism, said the salvation prayer, and we were on the same page again.

My fiancé and I started attending church together. Things seemed to be going well, and we ended up getting married in that church. However, my wife started telling me that she questioned God a lot. She couldn’t understand why the world was like it was while an all-loving God sat back and watched. She didn’t get why salvation was sometimes preached as works and sometimes as just accepting Jesus into your heart, which she had trouble understanding what that really meant.

After we got married, we quit going to church regularly. We decided to take a break from church because we felt worn out from going every Sunday for our whole lives. We also didn’t enjoy the church we were going to as much, so after a little while we decided to try a few other churches. After attending a few, we both knew a lot of the extreme fundamentalists at the church were acting, and some of the people (including preachers) really rubbed us the wrong way. I felt like it was my fault for not enjoying any churches but I kept praying for God to lead us to a great church. Nothing happened. However, I still stayed Christian. I believed in God, but I didn’t believe these churches were being honest and I wasn’t going to force myself to attend church in a place I didn’t want to be.

Along with all of this, we started having problems in our life and we didn’t understand why they were happening. Because we were Christian, it naturally became a matter of asking God why this was happening to us and if it was some kind of punishment or trial.

Plus, I was having my own crisis with Christianity because I, in all honesty, knew I couldn’t share my faith with anyone. How could I ask someone to convert to my beliefs when God was nowhere to be found? We were supposed to have a personal relationship with Jesus, yet I was doing all the talking. What if I converted someone and they said they prayed and nothing happened? Would I just give them the typical “It wasn’t God’s will” response that I knew would give them no comfort? I then started to realize that God was failing me because as much as I prayed, God never seemed to respond.

Then the whole Hell issue started tearing away at me. What happened to my grandparents who had died? Were they being tortured in a place so bad that we couldn’t stand it for one second? I read Mary Baxter’s book about her revelation of Hell and I was shocked. From that point forward, I couldn’t turn on an oven or my BBQ pit without feeling anguish over people suffering in Hell. How could God do this? All I kept hearing was that even though God is love, he’s also just. But was this justice? We find torture barbaric and despicable yet God is doing this to over half of mankind and it will never end. All of a sudden life becomes a whirlwind of desperation and fear. How do you save the world? Nobody should have to suffer through Hell and how can I love God while knowing this is happening?

Then, we had a tragic time in our lives. We lost a close member of our family and I was getting extremely stressed at work. My health started to deteriorate. It got worse and worse but I prayed to God continuously to heal me. Nothing happened. I ended up being taken by ambulance to the hospital and was treated for multiple problems severe enough to where had I not been hospitalized, I definitely would have died. It was the scariest moment in my life, but I felt that at least if I did die, I would be in heaven.

However, in the hospital all of the “why” questions started coming back. Why did God allow all of this? Had I not gone to the ER, I would be dead. That bothered me for quite a while. Then I decided to keep my prayers simple. I just asked God to talk to me; to say anything. I would stay up at night asking for this, and I would clear my mind so I’d know it wasn’t my own thoughts talking to me. I heard nothing. This went on and on until I started to get very frustrated.

Then one evening about a year later, I got sick with bad stomach pains. The pain would come and go, but then it got worse on my right side. I had a hunch what it was but I prayed and prayed that it wasn’t and that God would heal me. I got nothing. At 3 AM one morning, I told my wife it was really bad and we needed to go to the ER. My fears were confirmed…it was appendicitis. I had to have surgery and long story short, my surgery and recovery didn’t go as well as anticipated and I ended up staying in the hospital for over a week.

Then at the same time this was going on, my grandfather had to have surgery as his health was deteriorating. Then all the Hell stuff started coming back and this time, it was even worse. If he died, was he going to be tortured forever since he was Catholic? What about everyone who helped me yet they weren’t “born again?” Did they deserve to suffer for not believing in a God who wouldn’t even speak to me when I prayed every single day?

I started researching Hell and was shocked to see how many people thought the Bible was mistranslated and the Hell I believed wasn’t really what the Bible taught. I was torn as to what this meant. In one way it made me feel better because I had a reason to believe that Hell didn’t exist, but then why did God allow his inerrant word to be sabotaged by translation issues? Then the story of Noah’s ark started to bother me. How could I justify this story? It’s so ridiculous that there was no way as a rational human being I could defend it. I started reading the Bible from the beginning and I was shocked at what I found. I found a God who endorsed ideas that I was taught were terrible. I saw thousands of people slain just for believing in another God. I read about children being killed, which turned my stomach. All of the animal sacrifice was so bizarre as well as the obsession with circumcision.

I started doing critical research of Christianity and every time I read an apologist page, I would role my eyes and every time I read an anti-Christian page, I would agree. It was then I started to realize I was turning. I remember at one time I thought to myself “If I take God out of the equation, everything makes sense.” I didn’t want it to be true, but it was hard for me to convince myself otherwise. I don’t remember what I searched for next, but it led me to a YouTube video for the Atheist Experience. As I watched a few videos, it was like layer after layer of Christian lies were peeled away. I saw how ridiculous Christians sounded as they made excuse after excuse for God. I realized how rational the atheists were and how non-rational my beliefs were. I started finding blogs about people who left Christianity, and I would relate to their stories. It made me realize that I was on the right track and I was justified in questioning things and following the evidence to an understanding that Christianity was in fact, a lie.

My wife was incredible as we talked about my new beliefs, and I think what I said resonated with her because Christianity didn’t sit right with her either. I knew she had hope that we would see all of our loved ones again one day, and I think that was the most depressing point of the conversation. However, I told her that even if we do want an afterlife, we wouldn’t want one based on Christianity where we weren’t sure who would make it and what the punishment would be for those who don’t. She agreed and she still hopes there is a better life after this one without believing Christianity.

Since I’ve left Christianity, I now find life more enjoyable. I don’t worry about people being tortured every day. I don’t have to worry about a God who finds me so terrible, that he had to kill his own son (or himself depending on how you look at it) so I could even be in his presence. I don’t have to try to decipher a boring, contradicting and confusing book to try to decide what is right and what is wrong. I can just live, and enjoy it. I always thought that it was the atheists who were missing out on a life with God, but I realize now it was me missing out on a life without stressing to reach for a God who was never there to begin with. Christianity really was a burden on my life, and I am so glad I’ve been relieved of it.

Am I An Atheist Fundamentalist?

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I received these two comments (from the same person) on my site this weekend.  I didn’t approve them but I do think he asks a legitimate question amid all the ranting and I’d like to address it:

From Christian to Deist is a natural progression.

From “Born-again” Christian to Atheist is a natural move too.

Its only natural that a crazy lunatic “born again” Christian fundanmentalist, upon figuring out how false Christianity is, would throw the baby out with the bathwater and become a bat-guano crazy Atheist.

Whereas a ‘normal’ Christian can toss aside faith in a lie and retain belief in God’s existence, I suppose it is impossible for a fundamentalist, especially a Calvinist, to do so.

and …

One of the reasons, I suppose, is that fundamentalists have no critical reasoning capacity.  Their psychology requires a perfect inerrant document of some sort to simply believe in without question.  A Deist has no such thing.  So they can’t move to Deism.  But Atheism has this in so-called ‘science’ (i.e. pop-science).  So the crazy Fundie moves from belief that the Bible is the perfect inerrant receptacle of truth to believing that Science is the perfect inerrant receptacle of truth to be dogmatically believed in with no questions and no critical thinking.  Whatever pop-science says is like the word of God (as it were) to these Fundie Atheists.  Paul was unquestionable as a Fundie Christian — but now having rejected the Bible, Dawkins is unquestionable, Steven Hawkings is unquestionable.  The pop-science on the Nightly News that pretends Global Warming is man-made — UNQUESTIONABLE!!!!! How dare you question the Lord God Al Gore!!!!  There is a psychosis in you people.  You just can’t stand not having some perfect Magesterial authority dictating to you what to believe — you are pawns who have to have your every belief dictated to you by someone else because you can’t think or are too afraid to.  Maybe its because your mother drunk too much while you were in the womb and it caused brain damage — maybe its because you drank too much yourself and caused brain damage.  I’d really like to figure our what it is that kills a person’s ability to think for themselves and makes them a mind full of mush that can give their full unquestioning consent either to the Bible or to pop-science.  Maybe you can help me understand it.  Are you a drunk?  Was your mom a drunk?  Because those are my two best leads on this subject.

“Bat-guano crazy Atheist” – he he!  I kinda like it! My mother would likely be insulted by the accusation that she’s a drunk though! lol

Did I jump from one type of fundamentalism to another?

I’ve spent some time thinking about it and there are a few key things I’d like to say:

1.  Here’s a post I published about my personality profile.  If you read that it won’t be surprising that I feel comfortable within the atheist community!  I like correct answers so it does make sense that I didn’t hang out long in any worldview that I probably perceived as wishy-washy.

2.  I started my blog after I’d completed the journey from Christian fundamentalist to atheist.  I realize now that my site doesn’t document that journey much at all.  There was a full two years where I struggled with a million issues, read innumerable books (my amazon bill was insane!) and thought, thought, and thought some more about pretty much every issue relating to religion.  So looking at my site I can see how someone would think I just made a quick leap from one end of the spectrum to the other.

3.  I did hang out in the grey zone for awhile.  I started out reading liberal Christian material.  Then I remember reading about deism and thinking maybe that’s where I belonged.  I called myself an agnostic for awhile.  Realizing that I no longer believed in any revelation from any god and that no human knew more about the big life questions than I did made me an agnostic.  The hiddenness of god and the problem of evil and suffering tipped me over into the atheist camp.  It wasn’t a quick jump and it certainly wasn’t one I made without any thought.

4.  Am I incapable of thinking for myself?  I certainly relied on books and the internet during my deconversion.  I read things from both ends of the spectrum and everything in between.  I was constantly reading and trying to digest it all and decide what made the most sense and what I could accept.  But in the end I had to make up my own mind about what everyone had to say.  I’m not sure what thinking for myself would look like for this commentator.  Would I have to lock myself in a room and ponder the mysteries of the universe without any outside input?  I don’t think there is anything wrong with hearing what others have to say and then coming to your own conclusions and that’s what I did.

5.  I read this wikipedia article on fundamentalism.  In there, Richard Dawkins says this about the accusation that he is a fundamentalist:

Richard Dawkins has rejected the charge of “fundamentalism,” arguing that critics mistake his “passion”—which he says may match that of evangelical Christians—for an inability to change his mind. Dawkins asserts that the atheists’ position is not a fundamentalism that is unable to change its mind, but is held based on the verifiable evidence; as he puts it: “The true scientist, however passionately he may “believe” in evolution for example, knows exactly what would change his mind: evidence! The fundamentalist knows that nothing will.”  Dawkins has stated that, unlike religious fundamentalists, he would willingly change his mind if new evidence challenged his current position.

I’ve taken part in some online discussions about what would change people’s minds about their current worldview.  I have to admit I was shocked.  As a Christian I believed that the evidence supported my view but I don’t think I ever held the belief that no evidence would change my mind.  But lately I’ve come across Christians who say that faith trumps evidence and therefore no evidence could change their mind.  On the other hand I’ve read atheists’ specific lists of what would change their minds.  Here’s another one.  I think most atheists could come up with a similar list.  But what I see many Christians saying is that it’s ok to doubt – as long as that doubt leads back to God.  And it doesn’t matter which issue you bring up with most Christians – they ultimately say that they just have faith that it is true and that the evidence they’ve been presented with won’t change their mind.  To me this is a huge difference between the two camps:  a willingness to change one’s view if there is sufficient reason to do so.

I’m certainly open to changing my mind.  If I was able to change my views while believing it could send me to a literal hell then I think that speaks pretty loudly to the fact that I am concerned with truth and not just accepting someone else’s views.

Deconversion Story at ‘Thoughts From a Sandwich’

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Sharing another deconversion story:

DagoodS – Deconversion Story

[Click on the next chapter at the end of each of his posts.]

I loved reading all of it but was particularly struck by his explanations of the issues that he could no longer ignore within Christianity.  If you are a doubter then you need to read his entire story.  I almost hate to pick out any of it because I want you to read the entire thing, but at the end he has this to say that I really related to:

What happens after a Christian becomes an atheist?  Well…life moves on regardless.  The sun rises, clients call, and newspapers continue to be delivered. While it was a shake-up, much of my life moved forward as before.  I met the following weeks, months and years with a mixture of emotions.

Believe it or not, there was a feeling of relief.  All those questions and attempts to determine what God was thinking, or what God was saying, or what God wanted were resolvable in the simple notion that everything I had learned about God was the human interpretation of what God was like.  It was a human project, with human results.  The unadorned answer to these complex questions?  God was human-made.

It resolves the Problem of Evil.  Resolves the conflicts (both historical and doctrinal) in theistic claims.  Resolves the answer as to why God was so non-responsive, so hard to find.  Resolves why humans provide 1000 different solutions to 10,000 different questions about God.  Resolves why Christian book stores bulge with Self-Help books.

The humanity of God explained why non-believers and believers alike shared the characteristics of good and evil.  Both were as likely to be a person of anger as a person of love.  There is nothing “divine” in being a Christian; nor in Christian “fruit.”  It is humanity looking for a justification to act a certain way.

There was also relief in having been through an ordeal.  It is tiring on the body to deprive it of sleep.  It was tiring on my spirit to be constantly aching for a God I believed in and hear nothing but silence.  It was tiring on my mind to be suppressing the obvious implications of what I read.

I became elated.  For the first time, I could openly read the Bible in any manner!  There was no preconceived dogma which required “scripture to interpret scripture” or that it was God-inspired, or inerrant.  Ephesians could be written by Paul, not written by Paul, or not even qualify to be in the Bible!  Isaiah could be a complete book, or a conglomeration of two or three books.  It could be written in 740 BCE or 450 BCE.  I was not pre-determining conclusions, and looking for evidence to support them; rather I was looking at the evidence, and coming to conclusions.

I want to let him speak for himself, so if you are a doubter, please take the time to read his story.  I’m really glad that I’ve been coming across these wonderfully written deconversion stories lately.  They speak to the human aspect of each deconversion and I love being allowed to follow along as I read about each stage of their journey.  And as always – I hope that sharing this might help someone out there who is struggling with their own doubts and needs to know that others have traveled the same road.

Deconversion Story at HeIsSailing

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Reading this deconversion story at HeIsSailing is well worth the time.   If you want more than just a quick snapshot of someone’s deconversion story then you’ll appreciate as he shares his insights and thoughts about each stage of his life and religious journey.  I felt like I was sitting down with a wonderfully written book as I read his story.  There are more installments to come and I can’t wait to read them!

HeIsSailing – It is time

[Just click on 'next chapter' at the end of each post to read the next installment of his story.  And of course - check out the rest of his blog as well!]

Luke’s Deconversion Story

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When I was going through my deconversion, the Common Sense Atheism site was a big help to me.  There is a ton of stuff on his site no matter where you are in your journey.  Today I want to link you to his personal deconversion story.  It seems that many believers think that somehow people who ‘lose their faith’ must have never really been a true Christian in the first place.  They must not have experienced God the way a true Christian knows that they do in their own life.  I don’t know that those of us who have deconverted can ever convince them, but when I read Luke’s story, I don’t see how he could have been any more sincere and sure about his faith.  And I related so much when he says,

I started to panic. I felt like my best friend – my source of purpose and happiness and comfort – was dying. And worse, I was killing him. If only I could have faith! If only I could unlearn all these things and just believe. I cried out with the words from Mark 9:24, “Lord, help my unbelief!”

So I hope if you are at any point in a deconversion journey that his story will help you know that you’re not alone.  If you’re a Christian maybe reading his story will give you some more insight into what it’s like to go from being a true believer to someone who just can’t believe anymore.  And if you’ve already been through your own deconversion I’m sure you’ll relate to his story.

Luke’s Deconversion Story

[Note:  Luke has moved onto other things so he no longer posts at that site, but all the previous material is there for our exploration.]

Imbrocata’s Deconversion Story

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I want to share with you a deconversion story that really touched me and caused me to think a great deal about my own deconversion.  So please go read Imbrocata’s story here:

Origins: My Personal Testimony

I’ve read some of his other posts and they are great – so I encourage you to follow his blog.

Now I’d like to share the thoughts that his story sparked in me.  Something about Imbrocata’s deconversion story really struck me as profound.  I think after mulling it over it’s because he really did lose faith in faith.  (That reminds me of Dan Barker’s book by that title, Losing Faith in Faith: From Preacher to Atheist.)  Many people seem to start doubting due to specific details such as an issue with something in the Bible.  Or maybe they struggle with the idea of a loving god sending people to hell.  But Imbrocata’s story impressed me because he looked around and saw a type of desperation in his own life and in the lives of his fellow Christians (my wording, not his).  This emphasis and obsession with just believing and needing to have greater and greater faith … something wasn’t right.  It was a red flag that would be the undoing of his life of faith.

I think Imbrocata’s story brings into focus something that has become more and more clear to me the longer I am out of Christianity:  There is something fundamentally wrong with it.  My focus has really been turning from being willing to debate every little detail to feeling passionate about getting Christians (at least those doubting) to look at the big picture.  Lately I’ve in essence been saying, ‘Let’s step back and take a look at the basic storyline of Christianity.  Let’s not start with any assumptions that anything had to be a certain way.  Let’s ask ‘why’ at each step and stage as we look at the Christian story.  Why did this have to be this way?  Why did that have to be that way?  Does it make sense that a god would set things up this way?  I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to get Christians to be willing to do this, but for someone who is already beginning to doubt their faith, it may be possible.

Imbrocata’s story encourages us to ask an even more basic and fundamental question:  ‘Why Faith?’  And even further, faith should not only not be held up as a virtue, it should be a red flag that something is fundamentally wrong.

His story stands so beautifully on its own, part of me hates to pick it apart.  But I actually printed it off, read it to my husband, and underlined the parts that really struck me and that made me think.  So for anyone interested, here are a few of the parts I underlined and the thoughts they sparked.

Still, despite my conversion being based on the acceptance of Love through fear, I sincerely wanted to please a God who sacrificed everything for me … ME! 

It’s very difficult to get Christians to admit to the role that fear plays in their religion.  To them it’s all about love, love, love.  Of course – they’ll tell you they believe that hell exists, but they try to say that it doesn’t really play a major role in why people convert to Christianity or in their own lives now.  In hindsight I see what a major role fear does play in a Christian’s initial conversion and in their life afterwards.  There are those who believe you can lose your salvation (fear!), but even for those who think that once you’re saved you’re always saved, there is always the fear that you’ll displease God.  Not only in some major way, but in little things each and every day (even your thoughts!).  When the whole goal is to please God – how could there not be fear of failure (especially when it’s pretty difficult to figure out exactly what this invisible being expects on every issue, big and small.)

Christopher Hitchens talks about his disgust with Christianity’s requirement of compulsory love.  The Christian God says, ‘You will love Me, or else.”  This is what popped in my mind when Imbrocata used the phrase, ‘Love through fear.’  It frustrates me that Christians can’t see how awful that is.  But then again, I didn’t see it for 20 years either.

Speaking at a Center For Inquiry event, Dan Barker summed up Christianity this way:

Imagine you are strolling down the sidewalk and a man excitedly calls you over to his front porch to share some “great news,” Protestant minister-turned atheist author Dan Barker asked his audience on Wednesday.

The man’s got a gruesome torture chamber in his basement, Barker said, but you don’t have to go down there. Instead, you can come over, hug the man’s son, say you love him and you can all move in together in the attic and tell them how great they are forever.

“Isn’t that great news?” a sarcastic Barker asked the crowd…

(via The Friendly Atheist)

I realized that I had underlined so much of Imbrocata’s testimony that I needed to really narrow it down.  So if you promise me you’ll read his full account, I’ll keep my quotes to a minimum :)

I continued to see the others throwing themselves after some elusive spiritual high just like I was. …

He gave me the impression that what he saw was nothing less than a cult. …

their fervent telling spoke to me of a deep desire to convince …

this and many other instances, felt as though we were being compelled to put on blinders. To rejoice in putting on those blinders.  To believe with no reason to believe … no reason but that disbelief was sin and punishable. 

 It is submission par excellence to something which has not convinced you and refuses to even try to convince you outside of intimidation, guilt, and fear.

It has all the hall-marks of a cult-ish, mind-controlling phenomena.  It demands adherence without any reason.  It allows no question.  It criticizes and attacks all dissent.

I try to be very diplomatic, but I’ll be honest here and say that I do see Christianity as being cult-like.  And these quotes above from Imbrocata’s story give a glimpse into why I see it that way.  I realized after I’d been out for awhile that the threat of hell took Christianity beyond just a fair exchange of ideas into another realm.

Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives’ tales as to what is to become of him afterward, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave.

Theodore Dreiser

My exit from Christianity was traumatic and after the dust had settled, I realized my experience seemed to mirror those of people who had left cults.  I had to deprogram my brain – from fearing hell, from fearing what the world would be like without this ever-present god in my mind, heart, and life.  I had to force myself not to fear facing the world without this god and my christian community always there telling me what was ok to think, feel, and do.  The experience was incredibly difficult and jarring to my mind, my body, and my life.  I’ve never voiced it before, I think mostly because I didn’t want doubting Christians to dismiss what I was saying because they would think it was an extreme and unfair accusation.  But the Christian story says that if you don’t love god (their god of course) then you’ll go to hell.  And don’t forget that this god can read every thought you have.  He can see every desire and motivation and he will judge you on them.  He (and the Bible and the Christians in authority over you) will tell you what is ok to think, say, and do.  If you doubt, it is your fault for not having enough faith.  How is this not a cult-like type of mind control?

There is a book I just pulled off my shelf that helped me at one point in my journey.  I remember giving it to my counselor so that he could read it and understand how jarring deconversion can be to someone and what a long and difficult road it can be.  It’s called Leaving the Fold and the author is Marlene Winell, Ph.D.  Just now I skimmed through the table of contents and one chapter jumped out at me (and it’s section titles):

Recognizing Manipulations

Fear manipulations * Guilt Mainipulations * Mystical Manipulations * Denigration of Self * Discrediting of the World * Group Pressure * The Power of Authority * Thought Control * Closed System of Logic

The rest of the chapters look interesting and helpful as well.  I remember it being one of the first books where I thought someone really understood what was really going on in my deconversion experience – how jarring it was and how it was requiring me to see everything about my life and the world in a whole new way.  She understood that my deconversion experience required taking back my own mind.  I am hesitant to say any of this because I don’t want to turn away anyone who might be helped by my blog.  Maybe it will turn away some, but maybe it will help others.

I feel like I’ve rambled and probably not very eloquently.  I also don’t want to take away from Imbrocata’s own testimony.  Let me finish off with one more quote from his story:

At some point it seems, most if not all belief systems require one to believe for its own sake.  To cite as evidence that which has no citation.  To simply accept as true something for which no reasoning exists.  This to me has been a red flag that what I might be involved with at any time is less than honest, needs and relies on mind-tricks to persist and is, therefore, false or at least, not sufficiently true to stand on its own.

This is why I can’t accept the Christian argument that we both look at evidence of equal value but just come to different conclusions.  I greatly admire and respect the ideas of many atheist speakers and authors, but they don’t threaten to read my thoughts, punish dissent, or send me to hell.  And they don’t tell me to dismiss questions but to chase them with excitement – following wherever the evidence leads.  And these facts alone give me some confidence that I’m on the right track.

Reposting ‘Why I Became an Atheist’

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I was looking back at some of my older posts and I came across Das American Atheist’s account of how he became an atheist.  This series of his videos, as well as many of his others, were one place I turned when I was doubting.  I hope if you’re a religious doubter you’ll check out his videos on youtube.  For those of us who have already left, you may find his journey interesting.

Why I Became an Atheist by Das American Atheist

[For those interested, he has a video playlist of his rebuttals to William Lane Craig's arguments.]