De-conversion Testimonies

[Professor Frink]

I went to church with my family as a grew up, every week without fail. When I got to college, I ended up joining a very evangelistical church which did lots of things like going door-to-door inviting people to church and having bible studies two times a week, etc. I really believed it all, and believed I knew the answers.

Then one day I was talking to someone about it, and I realized that I had no idea why I believed what I believed, it was simply told to me over the years as I was growing up and I just took it for fact, like you remember the things that happen when you grow up, or you remember a particular birthday party or something. Things like "Jesus rose from the dead" are going to be accepted without question by an 8 year old, and they become a part of your thinking, like memorizing 2+2=4.

I started talking to a person who was in my college church who had left, and I realized that the whole organized religion thing was a crock - it was stomach-dropping. I realized from that point on that organized religion was a sham.

I still thought the bible must be okay, it's the people who are running the religions that are the problem. All I have to do is understand the bible and I'll be fine.

Then I realized that it is literally impossible to read the bible and come to any reasonable conclusion about what you're supposed to do to be saved. Every single sect of christianity believes something slightly different - how is that? How can a god's "book" which is presumably the "breathed word of God" be so ambiguous? No wonder people cling to a half-dozen verses like there's no tomorrow - you have to! 10 Commandments, John 3:16, a few others.

Then I came to the conclusion that even though all these sects claimed to be worshipping the same "God," they weren't. In fact, if you believe that salvation comes a different way from the way the church across the street believes it, then face it: YOU BELIEVE IN DIFFERENT GODS! You can't say it's the same one, because the one across the street demands an utterance for salvation, and yours requires baptism. No one God accepts both, does it?

Anyway, I have admitted in other places that because of my upbringing it is difficult for me to flatly say I don't believe in God, because while I don't 99% of the time, it does hit me occasionally.

Frink

 

[Jude]

I became an atheist when my Gameboy batteries ran dry.

Going to church was never about religion or faith for me. It was about socializing and trying to weasle out of having to sing the hymns. I had never actually given the lessons or anything any thought. I went to a Mormon church, and on the first Sunday of every month they used chapel time for testimony bearing (i.e. members get in front of the mic and say they love Jesus and how happy they are for their blessings). Normally I spent the chapel period doodling, chatting with friends in the foyer, or playing Gameboy. Anyway, it was during one of these testimony sessions that my Gameboy batteries ran dry. I was like, "Hey, I'm a mature 13-year-old now, I should be an adult and just listen to these testimonies." And so my de-conversion began. I was absolutely floored by the things that came out of their mouths. I had always figured religion was just some casual faith about being nice to each other, and that everybody felt the same way. One of the testimony bearers went as far as to say they had seen their daughter's spirit in their bedroom before she had even been born. My de-conversion was pretty swift, and it wasn't long before I viewed anything related to the supernatural with steep skepticism.

 

[Marquis de Carabas]

I began my de-conversion sometime around the age of 8, when I was praying consistently to God for something (I remember not now what it was) and it never worked. I briefly switched to praying to Satan, figuring he might be a bit more generous. When that didn't work, I began to suspect the whole thing was horse-hockey.

It took another several years before I actually described myself with the word 'atheist' but it all began there, at least.

 

[espritch]

I was quite religious as a child. I regularly attended the local Presbyterian Church, went to bible school, and actually read the entire bible (King James version - even the begats). I even cried myself to sleep one night thinking how awful it was that Jesus had to be nailed to a cross for me. As I got older, I began to notice some things that bothered me, like the time I overheard two grown men making a joke about coons in Church (this being a derogatory term for black people). I couldn’t understand how “good” Christians could practice blatant bigotry in God’s own house.

As I got older, my doubt grew. Of course I couldn’t bring myself to admit that the problem might be with my beliefs. I assumed that I just didn’t have enough faith and if I could only get filled with the Holy Spirit my doubts would vanish. It’s strange. I had already been baptized and publicly professed my belief, yet I was still trying to become saved. I wonder if that means I wasn’t really a Christian after all?

In my second year at Carolina I met a campus Christian group called Maranatha. These were hard core evangelicals. They went for full emersion baptism, speaking in tongues, and preaching in the pit (let he who attended Carolina understand). I figured if they couldn’t fill me with the Holy Spirit there was no hope for me. So I attended their meetings, got baptized again, got prayed over, etc. My doubts persisted.

One of the other members told me that he was a big fan of Edgar Cacye, the so called Sleeping Psychic. He told me how Cacye claimed people are reincarnated and spend their incarnations working on problem areas from their past lives. Being somewhat familiar with Christian theology, I was dumbfounded. I couldn’t imagine how a Christian could reconcile such nonsense with the teaching of the bible. I was quite rational enough even then to recognize that Cacye was total hokum, but I still wasn’t ready to apply that rationality to my own deeply held beliefs.

It all came to a head near the end of the school year when the service featured a guest preacher - a traveling faith healer no less. At one point in the service, he proclaimed that while we were praying, he had seen the spirit of God descending like a fog over us. I looked up to see the fog of the Holy Spirit and saw only the ceiling. Later he told us he was going to perform a genuine miracle. It seems someone had told him he was having back problems. But God told the preacher the man’s real problem was that one leg was shorter than the other and that God was going to heal him. I didn’t actually get to witness this “miracle” – there was such a thick knot of people gathered around to witness the event that I couldn’t get close enough to see anything. What I did witness was the look on the “healed” man’s face later on. For a guy who had just received a miracle from God, he didn’t seem particularly elated. In fact, he seemed rather troubled.

Well never mind. I was still determined to get filled with the Holy Spirit. So when the preacher started laying on hands and people were falling out, slain by the Spirit, I got in line. When my turn came, he prayed and put his hand on my head. I closed my eyes and prayed and prayed and prayed until I was suddenly overcome by a deep conviction. But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit - it was the realization of how utterly ridiculous the whole situation felt. I was griped with a strong desire to be somewhere else. So I fell back, slain not by the Holy Spirit but by the need to get out of what was becoming, for me, an increasingly awkward situation.

There are certain moments in life that you wish you could go back and do over. That was one of mine. I’ve never liked hypocrisy and I really don’t like it in myself. I wish I had been honest about it and just admitted it wasn’t working for me and walked away. I never went to another Maranatha meeting. Although I attended Church again a few times afterwards, my faith pretty much died that night.

It was about a year later that I first heard of James Randi. I read an article about a debunking he had done of evangelical faith healer Peter Popov. In the article, he specifically mentioned the so called “miracle” where the faith healer tells someone with back trouble that they have a “short” leg and God is going to make it grow. This is apparently a standard faith healer parlor trick. Reading that article convinced me that my gut instinct about that miracle had been correct. That was the final nail in the coffin for my faith.