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Post by anatheist on Oct 25, 2009 13:44:27 GMT -5
Most of us are here having broken what we'd believed were god's rules for our lives- we divorced a toxic spouse or wrenched free from toxic parents. Many of us no longer attend church or practice religion, or our religious beliefs have changed.
However, for many of us, the change came from reaching a breaking point. We had to save ourselves or break down. At the time, we may have believed that the act of leaving our husbands was condemning us. So for many of us, only later did we have time to think about the full religious consequences of our act of "disobedience toward god".
My question is: How did you later resolve the beliefs that you held so closely with your decision to leave the lifestyle associated with those beliefs? Unless you believe that god will condemn you one day, your beliefs about the nature of god must have changed drastically. What, besides emotional turmoil, allowed you to find a new set of beliefs?
Sorry the answer choices don't cover everything, there was a limited amount of space provided- consider them generalities.
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Post by jemand on Oct 25, 2009 20:54:28 GMT -5
Most of the "breaking point" for me was actually *after* I had quietly, internally abandoned the belief, but my new beliefs were NOT tolerated in the community I was in at the time.
I would have been an atheist regardless... but the "breaking point" and all the things that people said to me and did to me-- they are what nudged me more towards being the kind of atheist who believes religion is usually actively harmful and dangerous, rather than the kind that just believes religion is illogical and an insufficient basis for building a life.
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Post by Vyckie D. Garrison on Oct 25, 2009 23:29:43 GMT -5
Thanks for setting up this poll, atheist ~ I, too, am interested to learn more about how everyone has dealt with this issue.
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Post by anatheist on Oct 26, 2009 0:41:08 GMT -5
Well, my resolution was a lot like Jemand's, but for a variety of reasons, I wasn't willing to break away from Christianity until I was going through a divorce, although I had inwardly stopped believing in its tenets.
I had a built up a lot of layers of belief and unbelief during my life. From the time I was in the church nursery, the existence of the Christian god was taught as the same sort of reality as gravity or heat. A lot of the things I learned from different sources were a bit contradictory, or I saw contradictions on my own, and those were compartmentalized. Even things like fear of hell or fear of disobedience had compartments, so that by the time I was an adult, I didn't have just one system of belief- I had a tenuous pile of "realities" that were held together by being lumped into Christianity- different things would rise to the top at different times. And the unbelief just kept being pressed down to the bottom.
When I got married, I had a veneer of social Christianity and the horrendous decision of always trying to live my life to please my parents over top of the knowledge that I didn't believe in Christianity. The disintegration of my marriage forced me to accept that I was living for other people. When all the fear and obligation fell away, I wasn't left with any reason to believe in any god.
I also became ok with the idea that if there was a god, then I would rather share the suffering of those who weren't saved than step over them on my way to heaven.
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Post by Sierra on Oct 26, 2009 15:54:16 GMT -5
I left fundamentalism through the "back away slowly" approach. I spent more and more time at college, going to church every week at first, then every two weeks (I had exams, a field trip, a term paper, a bad cold, couldn't make it, sorry), then down to months at a time and finally my mom stopped asking if I was coming.
The church had a policy of sending CDs of recorded sermons to everyone who missed a service, and they piled up in my college room year after year until finally the mailing list was redone and I deliberately didn't send in the renewal form, so they stopped coming. I had wadded them all into a big envelope and stuffed it into the bottom drawer of my desk - I just unloaded the whole mess at my mom's house once without her ever noticing. At the time I was afraid to throw them out lest they were still endowed with some kind of divine protection as "God's word." There was also the sense of oh-so-polite Sierra not destroying something that someone else has put in the effort to make for her. Now I almost kinda wish I still had them so I could make them go crunchy with a hammer. ;D
What was going on in my mind at the time, though? Well, it was what atheistBB said... I was not so callous that I could live a life of eternal joy knowing that the God who had saved me had condemned to death my best friends and teachers. More than once I bargained with God, "If I offer to go to hell for them, will you save my friends instead?" I figured Jesus had done it and got quite the bargain for his one soul!
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juju
Junior Member
Posts: 56
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Post by juju on Dec 3, 2009 18:21:52 GMT -5
From the time I was in the church nursery, the existence of the Christian god was taught as the same sort of reality as gravity or heat. That's pretty much what happened to me as well, but for me, it stuck. I always knew I believed in God, I just could never find a reasonable hook to hang it on. I investigated a lot of different things during my years away from 'regular' church (by 'regular' I mean protestant fundamentalist worship like the church where I was raised) -- goddess worship, Judaism, Buddhism...I was fascinated by some other Christian denominations, like the Mormons, but I was never tempted to join any of those. I was running from the Rapture, was what I was doing. LOL When I found the Catholic Church I knew I was comfortable at last, although I still have my ideological differences. I've just seen the hand of God in my life too many times to be able to say He doesn't exist. Although there are times I'm convinced He's not too fond of me.
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Post by journey on Dec 3, 2009 18:44:12 GMT -5
I have been fascinatedly reading Barbara Bradley Hagerty's new book, " Fingerprints of God: the Search for the Science of Spirituality," which goes into some interesting neuropsychology studies on the brain and experiences of the divine. For all of those dabbling on the edges of faith and not-faith, I highly recommend it. It's not that the book answers any specific questions (the fundamentalists out there will hate the book, actually), but more that it poses some current scientific information that seems to point to "Something" being there...or, at least, that the sense that "Something is there" is valid and not easily explained away, based on current neuropsychological findings. I think I have yet to find anything more succinct to explain why I still hold to a believe in a "One Who is Love," while at the same time thoroughly rejecting the horrid bonds of Christian fundamentalism that almost destroyed me and has destroyed (or is in the process of destroying) so many others...and rejecting more than just Christian fundamentalism, actually... There are many things in the more moderate evangelical world that I no longer believe, as well. I've been reading this book while doing sort of a "happy dance" inside of myself. I'm still in the sorting stage..."What does this all even mean, then?" But, well, that's okay. It was fundamentalism that told me I had to have everything all sorted out into firm black and white boxes, that I had to know the perfect answers to all the questions. I don't have to have anything sorted out now. It's nice.
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Hillary
Full Member
"Quivering Daughters ~ Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy" Now Available!
Posts: 129
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Post by Hillary on Dec 3, 2009 22:29:21 GMT -5
I am a Christian who never stopped loving God but I learned that I'd loved a different god ~ which brought turbulent emotional and horrific spiritual ramifications. To iterate personally how I resolved my past beliefs and contrast the difference, here is something I wrote in the past.
For me, I stopped. I rested. And became renewed.
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Post by krwordgazer on Dec 7, 2009 20:14:46 GMT -5
For me, it was more like going back to my earliest roots.
My parents were Christians (non-fundamentalist) until I was about six or seven years old. I remember my mother's faith as very sweet, gentle, and accepting. Then they both became atheist/agnostic, and joined a Unitarian Universalist church. We went to that church for years, and though it was fun for my sister and me in the children's groups, when we grew too old for those, we both felt in the services for adults, that something was lacking, somehow.
Searching for a deeper spirituality in our teens, my sis and I both ended up getting sucked into fundamentalist, cult-like groups. We also both emerged from these groups in our late 30s. And we found that the sense of the presence of God that we experienced from our earliest years, didn't leave us.
I feel as if I've returned to the gentle faith my mother had when I was little-- just something very basic, very deep in my heart. Now that I'm grown up, I have added an intellectual aspect to it, as I've considered the big questions of life-- but really, the soul and center of it has always been in the deep places of my heart.
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