De-conversion Testimonies

I de-converted to atheism at an early age. I didn't grow up in a very religious household. My parents never really considered themselves "religious" in the traditional sense of the word, though they often expressed a vague spirituality that was mostly the residue of their upbringings. I had always had an interest in science, especially biology and zoology of which I devoured books and TV programs on. Thanks to such sources I had a very early introduction to Darwinian Evolution.

By the time I was 9 years old I had started to develop a great disdain for religion. It was something that freaked out a lot of my friends at the time (I grew up in Maine where just about everyone is religious). Between that and the age of 15 I gradually went from holding to a sort of neo-deism to being a full blown atheist.
 
arcticpenguin said:
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(they are the Mormons of the Pagan world).
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I would just love to hear you elaborate on that.
Both Mormons and Wiccans are really super nice! :)
 
arcticpenguin said:

I would just love to hear you elaborate on that.
Mormons ride bycycles in pairs, Wiccans ride broomsticks in pairs! :D

"Can I interest you in the book of Wicca?"
 
arcticpenguin said:

That wasn't very interesting, make something up.
The reason is quite "unusual". Skip this post if you are offended by any of the following: Sex, drugs, violence, genocide, immorality, abuse, public defication, evil, or obscene graphic imagery.


I was sitting naked in the living one day, and I was praying to a cat statue. Well, as I was sliding the razor across my skin (its part of the cermony), I musta hit some vein or artery cuz I got real cold and passed out.

I lost a lot of blood, and before I know it, I'm flying in the sky. For several minutes, it was utter euphoria, then I see the hand of god, I fly toward the hand... a few minutes later the hand forms into the shape of a middle finger and my sorry self falls straight to Hell.

So I'm in Hell, right, and its hot as Hell (hard to imagine). I see thousands of damned souls working in a huge sweat shop, every movement completely autonomous and in unison, and I think to myself "This is pretty cool!".

Satan says "Welcome to Hell! Care for piña colada?". I LOVE piña coladas!

Well, I have to say, after a few drinks or so with Satan, I had got myself properly trashed. I dont know why, I just said it out of nowhere, I said "Satan, I been trying to ignore it but Jesus f**king Christ, calm yourself down, you've been sportin' wood all night and you're knocking ◊◊◊◊ off the table". Satan didnt take to kindly to that (apparently its really bad to say the "J" word in Hell).

So Satan tells me I have a drinking problem. No, I dont have a drinking problem, I do have a problem with a guy who cant control his own gurth and sexual prowess.

I sober up and Satan says he appreciates how dedicated I am feasting on the blood of Christians and how devoted to the Satanic revelution, he decides to resurrect me.

Few seconds later, my wife is standing over me and she's shocked, she thought I had died. I hadnt the time to tell her my death story because the child (whom we lured into the house with promise of gingerbread cookies) was making an obnoxious amount of noise. You wouldnt think kids could scream so loud in terror... go figure.

Later that night I told her all about the story. I dont remember ever getting one of them, but I suddenly remembered I had a souvenir "I died and went to Hell and all I got was this lousy mug" novelty coffee mug. My wife really appreciates a good mug. And this one is cool because cold beverages stay cold and hot beverages stay hot, I love technology!

Over the next few days, little surprises started appearing all over the place. Sometimes I'd put my keys on the table, then I'd find them on the couch, othertimes I'd open a closet I wouldnt see the normal closet instead I see a whirling spiraling vortex of mystical origins. I discovered I had a few powers of my own also. Heh heh, silly me, I also want to be a prankster, I started a little mini-Armageddon at the mall. I had mind control also, its pretty cool, I made a hobo stick a needle in his arm and inject himself with his own urine. I'm such a crazy Yahweh.

Some time later, my wife and I began chatting. And I remembered, I could make the best piña coladas this side of Spiritual horizon. Later that night, a couple stopped by the house asking about their missing boy. What, I dont care about their problems, go away you whiney babies. Next thing you know, the floor in my kitchen falls out, and through the hole a-comes that Satan. My wife was star struck, she's always wanted to meet the Dark Unholy Prince himself, Satan.

To make a long story short, that rapture isnt what you think, stupid people suck, polygraphs are inaccurate, and Mormons and Wiccans are one in the same. :)

(Vote Yahweh for Post of the Year!)
 
Bah! Bah, I say!

Contribute to their mythology and validate it for them.

Don'tcha know that to the religiously afflicted, when you make up stories set in their favorite fairy lands, they just get more convinced you believe in them, and share their little fantasies?

Of course, something like "I was clinically dead for a little while, and there was... NOTHING!" isn't as good a read, and is just as conclusive as any other "near death" story, which is to say, it demonstrates nothing at all except for what relative levels of hypoxia in a still living brain will do.

Judgments, heavens, hells, reincarnations, yadda, yadda, yadda. It's all rantings and ravings without any form of proof.

Of course, even if you managed to get a video camera past the "great beyond" and back, if its images didn't match the religious preconceptions of what "SHOULD" be there, it will simply be rejected as "not it". Even if anybody could repeat the experiment.

"I don't know and I don't care." works for me. It's as likely that anyone's wild and/or chemically imbalanced speculations are correct as any especially sacred versions.

Who knows, maybe it's just like it looks. You die, you're dead, that's it for you. What's it like after you're dead? What's it like before you're born? Probably the same. Here is all there is. Nobody made the world. Nobody will miss it when it's gone (unless there are people still living in space who remember it).

Why not?

And why bother? The fundies will probably have their holy wars to bring back their favorite saviors long before we colonise other worlds, and what do you know? Everyone will die and no savior will ever return, and the human race will simply be extinct. Yay god! Way to go!
 
I'll contribute to their mythology if I feel like contributing their mythology!

Apparently, all should expect to be smithen down if they add on to the word of the God... poor Mormons...
 
Once, a long, long, long time ago, I read a very brief explanation of deism in an encyclopedia article on the study of religion in history. I decided then that deism made the most sense to me, but a week later I'd completely forgotten about it (since I was only a kid). I was technically Christian all my life until sometime between 16 and 18. Even earlier than that, I'd been becoming more and more of a "liberal" Christian, so one day when I "rediscovered" the concept of deism and decided (for sure this time) that's what I was, the change wasn't very sudden or drastic, nor was it cause for introspection. Thus, my "deconversion" took a long time, had several subtle steps, and is really too long a story to hold anyone's interest.

Unlike seemingly almost everyone else in here, I can't claim to have possessed any grown-up reasoning skills when I was little. I believed in Santa (though the concept didn't mean enough to me that I cared when I worked out that it wasn't true), and I believed in Jesus, etc. I loved UFOs, aliens, ESP, psychokenesis, ghosts, and cryptozoology - they were not "obvious" hooey to me. It took me years to wade slowly through each one of them, on my own, without any Sagan or Randi or baloney detection kit or spontaneous critical thinking skills to make the job easy or help me out in the least. No epiphanies about the materialistic nature of the universe, or insight into how "stupid" religion is, or how ignorant adults were; no "common sense" (as KevinG calls it) apparently either. Just patience and the love of truth, I suppose.
 
Yahweh said:
I'll contribute to their mythology if I feel like contributing their mythology!

Apparently, all should expect to be smithen down if they add on to the word of the God... poor Mormons...

But don't you see, that's the POWER of selective holy-book belief. If you can toss out 'Old Testament' stuff, like what God TOLD people to do, why not disregard that silly Revelation 22 as well?

18I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: If anyone adds anything to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book. 19And if anyone takes words away from this book of prophecy, God will take away from him his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.
 
evildave said:
But don't you see, that's the POWER of selective holy-book belief. If you can toss out 'Old Testament' stuff, like what God TOLD people to do, why not disregard that silly Revelation 22 as well?
Toss out the Old Testament! Have you gone mad!

Its filled such a great story, and children just love them! Here's a little taste:

From Exodus:
2:11

And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out unto his brethren, and looked on their burdens: and he spied an Egyptian smiting an Hebrew, one of his brethren.

2:12

And he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian, and hid him in the sand.
Now that is a biblical gem if there ever was one. It speaks of Moses waiting till the coast was clear, then he slaughtered an Egyptian and dumped the body.

Oh, remember when I hardened Pharaoh's Heart by slaying all the first born:
4:21

And the LORD said unto Moses, When thou goest to return into Egypt, see that thou do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.

4:22

And thou shalt say unto Pharaoh, Thus saith the LORD, Israel is my son, even my firstborn:

4:23

And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn.

4:24

And it came to pass by the way in the inn, that the LORD met him, and sought to kill him.

4:25

Then Zipporah took a sharp stone, and cut off the foreskin of her son, and cast it at his feet, and said, Surely a bloody husband art thou to me.

In 4:24 I try to kill Moses because his son wasnt circumsized. But luckily, as it says in 4:25, Mose's wife, Zipporah, cut off her son's foreskin with a rock. A ROCK?! Ouch!

It is the word of Yahweh, ya know.
 
Grew up in a totally secular family(the first book i read was a astronomy text, at age 3) , didn't give a darn about god or santa until I got on the internet and found www.csicop.org, and go into skepticism, which led me to www.randi.org, and other more atheist sites, and became a full-on atheist.
 
You'd better share that one with Ruby in her 'contradictions' topic.

Moses the Murderer!

Don't like what someone's doing?

MURDER them!

To be fair, nobody could possible have ever told him murdering people was bad, yet. Why, until God said "Don't kill each other!", nobody would have ever had a single moral compunction or even hesitation about murdering someone. Didn't a state supreme court judge in Alabama make that point for us?

That he hid the body, well that wasn't guilt, just tidiness.

Boy, ol' Moses must've been embarassed when he read those rocks for the first time. I sure hope God had a notion of ex-post-facto laws. Oh wait, that's sort of Roman/Latin again, ain't it?

Otherwise, we have Moses wilfully violating the sacred and eternal law of God.
 
I was born into a mormon family and was a serious mormon until about the age of 14.

Through my interest in politics (I discussed politics with adults from the age of 6), I came into contact with general philosophy, and some specific reality-oriented philosophies, which had the effect of curing me of me theist illusions.
 
Tony said:
Does anyone have an interesting de-conversion story they'd like to share?

When I was in high school, an impressionable lad, I began to encounter more and more agnostics and skeptics, and I found myself reading a goodly amount of material questioning the historical reality of Jesus. In concert with other interests (paranormal, UFOs, science), Christianity just seemed either irrelevant or just not all that interesting.

I never made the conscious decision to de-convert. It never occurred to me in an epiphany that I no longer believed or should no longer believe. What happened, I think, was more of a de-personalization. What was meaningful became less and less meaningful. Eventually I stopped going to church, that lasted a couple years.

My re-conversion story, I suspect, is not applicable to this thread.

-Elliot
 
Re: Re: De-conversion Testimonies

elliotfc said:
I never made the conscious decision to de-convert.
That's because you never de-converted. You never gave up your addiction to the absurd. You just switched to different brands for a while.

Your story is like a two-pack-a-day smoker who spent the last year smoking cigars instead. It's still smoking, dude.
 
Re: Re: Re: De-conversion Testimonies

Yahzi said:

That's because you never de-converted. You never gave up your addiction to the absurd. You just switched to different brands for a while.

Your story is like a two-pack-a-day smoker who spent the last year smoking cigars instead. It's still smoking, dude.

Your dogmatism is tedious.

Way to go. Insult people who think differently than you. Why should I take a person of your temperment seriously?

-Elliot
 
My parents were nominally Christian, but we never went to church when I lived at home. I think I must have always been a questioning sort of kid. I can dimly remember an awkward conversation with my dad in a car one day - I was probably 8 or so. I had said "God!" in an exasperated way, and he was trying to tell me why this was a bad thing. I just couldn't understand his point.

Later, when I was about 12, my cat was struck and killed by a car in the summertime when I was home alone. A friend told me where he had spotted her several blocks away, and I walked over there and carried her lifeless body in my arms back to my yard. I was very distraught, and I can't remember ever having prayed for something so fervently as when I asked God to bring her back to life. After some time had passed, and it had had no effect, I suddenly realized that I just didn't believe any of it. It was less of a decision than just a realization of what I had unconsciously felt all along -- that God was make-believe.

Here's a bonus de-conversion: For a time thereafter, although I was an atheist, I was also kind of New-Age-y with beliefs in various aspects of the paranormal. That died away shortly after I went to college and did some serious research on the subject in the university library. It was actually Robert Anton Wilson's book The New Inquisition that did the trick. Its attack on the scientific establishment in general and CSICOP and Randi in particular incensed me: "How could those mean-spirited close-minded skeptics do such terrible things?"
But when I looked into the situations he mentions, I discovered that Wilson distorted the facts in virtually every case! As I continued my research, comparing and contrasting the works of the believers with the works of skeptics, I found the latter far more persuasive. CSICOP and Randi went from being villains in my mind (due to Wilson's book) to heroes. And that's how I was de-converted from paranormalism.
 
Re: Re: Re: Re: De-conversion Testimonies

elliotfc said:

Way to go. Insult people who think differently than you.
Eh... I wasn't actually trying to be insulting. This time, at least.

Seriously, though, your various new-age and paranormal beliefs are of a similar character to religious belief. As you said yourself, you never stopped believing, you just stopped caring. That's not quite the same thing, is it?
 
An unborn christian

Went to University, got converted to Born Again Christianity, went through an exorcism, walked away from it all, got threatened. Recently came across the Sceptics Annotated Bible and the Encyclopedia of Biblical Errors.

"And you will see the light, and the light will set you free".

Truly.

No-longer-in-Christ.
 

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