If you used to believe in God, but not anymore, why?

[HankHillsPropane]

I was brought up in quite a religious home. As this is the status quo in my home country i.e. everyone is extremely religious, I never knew anything different. I grew up believing in God/heaven/hell, church every Sunday, prayers every night, praying whenever I needed something..etc

I think I started to have my doubts around the age of 15, and properly gave up on the idea when I was around 17. I'm 30 now.

For me it's the absolutely shocking state of the world we live in that made me completely give up on the existence of God. I felt that even if there was a 'higher power' of some sort who had engineered all of this, they were very much the opposite of benevolent(sadistic even?), and probably did not deserve my worship.

Just the constant barrage of disasters, evil, chaos, inequalities, atrocities, the absolute randomness and luck that defines our existence...I mean look around. Would anyone really want to put their name to this?

Anyway, what was your turning point? When did you stop believing in God?

My dad was very religious. He considered joining the priesthood in his youth. He was once interviewed by BBC about Irish priest abuse. He very eloquently spoke of his relationship with God and how men/priests are flawed. But years later on his deathbed he got little comfort from his beliefs. He had long deep conversations with a very nice priest but he was not comforted. He was distraught. That saddened me because if religion gave you comfort on your deathbed I could understand the attraction and I would envy people who believed. But in my experience it didn't.

Just wondering for those who don't believe in God how do you think we were created? (I don't mean evolution, I mean the big bang and every atom in the universe, etc). All of this must come from somewhere and we obviously didn't create ourselves. The world and universe is so far beyond our understanding - we are clearly just a small part of something.

Not saying there is a God by the way but there must be something that created all of this & I wonder what that is.

I grew up going to church - my parents were c of E but we later went to a Baptist church. While I still have some v good friends from the church a lot were quite judgemental and IMO "religion" and being seen to be doing the right thing, attending church as often as possible etc seemed to supersede kindness, hospitality , love etc that was being preached.
Also as I grew older I couldnt agree with the church views on womens roles in the church (ie consigned to childcare and coffee rota/cleaning) and the views on homosexuality.

I know a family where both parents work for the church.

They're the most self important and hypocritical couple I know.

They whine about having no money but live in a massive house provided by the church with all maintenance paid for and send their kids to the local private school for next to nothing due to staff and clergy discount.

They're like a caricature of the fat clergy living it up on church expenses. And they are very, very unpleasant people.

They opened my eyes to what a racket organised religion can be.

Ohgosh yes Ive got quite a few friends who have become vicars who go in saying they wont get like that...

Then moan about their 4 bed house /money when they've more than theybwould have had and got so kuch subsidised!

I was brought up in an American Evangelical household (though my mother's side is Catholic at least for the last couple generations) with several family members as pastors or otherwise working in the church so it was a large part of my life growing up and I was raised to believe.

There was a time I believed someone had to have the answers of the divine. I can remember being 11 or 12, desperately wanting to feel better and following the advice to pray and it wasn't working so I started to read, thinking I must be doing something wrong (shockingly, child-onset CPTSD can't be cured by prayer, but I can still remember sobbing little me, curled up in bed praying thinking if I could just get it right, then it would all be better like they said).

I spent years in study within Christianity and after a few serious events where I came face to face with corruption in the church, I studied Judaism mostly, but also other faiths and philosophies.

The final straw actually involved an Orthodox Jewish man and discussing corruption within different Jewish groups, including ones he'd been in himself, and the importance of being diligent against corruption particularly with people using God as a reason for their actions. Something just clicked -- humans are limited, so are all of our organizations and ideas. They are all susceptible to corruption when the powers are not kept in check. There are benefits to some of the cultural religious systems that tie people together, but that doesn't mean any of them are the answer in the way child-me was looking for well into adulthood. It was very freeing to lean into humans just not being able to know anything definitive about divinity.

I dug more into philosophy at this point, particularly monistic philosophy, and I got to a point where I no longer believed in individual deity or deities that desire or deserve worship and that rituals we humans have created are for us, to connect us with each other and to meaning, not for any sort of powers.

I'm open to the possibility that we may one day have evidence of a force within the universe, like gravity, that from a human perspective is divine. I've read some interesting ideas on viewing all of the universe as divine in the awe-inspiring way of something of which much is beyond our current understanding or just the value in seeing ourselves as part of one divine whole with the good, bad, and neutral. I'm also open that we'll never have the capacity to know -- and that's okay. It's not only okay, it's part of being human not to know everything.

Just wondering for those who don't believe in God how do you think we were created?

While I have a lot of interest in philosophy, I honestly have no interest in how we were created. It doesn't matter to me.

I only exist because two particular people had sex and, as my mother told me growing up, she couldn't get an abortion because it wasn't accessible or acceptable. I have long said that there is nothing I can do with my life that can make up for a forced pregnancy, the risks of pregnancy and birth that she went through, or the pain and burden my life brought to my mother to allow me to exist just as there is nothing she can do to make up to me that pain she caused me and the burdens she and our community left on my young shoulders.

Does the fact I was born unwanted as a consequence of biology and raised purely out of duty enforced by the community which repeatedly failed by their own values mean anything for who I am and how I should live? I don't think so. I don't get my purpose from why I was created, it's something I have decide for myself regardless of how I was made. Same is true to me on a larger scale - I'm happy to read about the evidence of how we came to be as it comes up, there are a lot of philosophies I enjoy reading about the explore this, but it doesn't change anything for me.

One of the books I have my children read is In the Beginning: Creation Stories from Around the World by Virginia Hamilton. It has 25 creation stories, including the Biblical ones. We discuss what questions they answer and themes and tropes we see repeated. I think a good part of cultural education, but to me the interesting part isn't considering how we came to be, but seeing the how people have tried to make answer and meaning of our lives through stories. Coming from a celestial egg vs living on a giant dead deity wouldn't change the life and systems I live now.

It is strange that you’re supposed to worship the deity that created this world yet they know horrible things are going on and unpunished but do nothing (I get that punishment is supposed to come in the afterlife but still why the trauma?) yet if I knew there were rapes and murders happening but did nothing I’d be considered a monster.

My powers of logical deduction eventually matured enough for me to figure out:

There are a huge number of different religions in the world with many different "gods".

There's no reason my 'Anglican' god should be the true one any more than any other religion's version of god.

So many (most?) wars and violence in the world are caused by different religions fighting each other in the name of 'their' god.

If there was truly a 'good' god whatever form he, she or it took, they would not allow all this suffering to be caused ABOUT THEM.

Therefore it's not real.

Happy to discuss further.

It the sheer lack of logic for me. During the pandemic for example, ive seen religious people repeatedly praying for good outcomes for people with covid, for strength for health care professionals etc, and wondered how they rationalise the idea that if God can answer these prayers, he could surely remove covid entirely or not have allowed it in the first place. The answer always seems to be about having faith, and I really wish I could, it must be very comforting, but I just can't anymore.

To all who have lost their faith. Religions are man-made institutions, religions are not God.

Despite the squalor of religions there may still be underlying order in nature, and the possibility for us to do good.

Doing good had nothing to do with any Gods.

Why do you think it seems to bother people so much that others don't believe in their God?

"Just wondering for those who don't believe in God how do you think we were created?"

I've always been a fan of the "turtles all the way down" philosophy. That is - that prior to the big bang there was a big crunch. The universe is continually cycling through an expansion/ contraction phase. This is infinite. In the same way that knowledge is infinite, and splitting science and religion is probably ultimately pointless as these two philosophies are also infinite!

Big fan of the "total perspective vortex" too!

For all I know we are part of some elaborate computer simulation.

If we become capable of creating a simulated world, complex enough, within that world, they'd be able to create their own simulation. The denizens of that world would be able to simulate a world etc etc. This would continue essentially infinitely, worlds within worlds within worlds for infinity. If there are infinite worlds, the odds that we are in base reality (the highest up world, the only one that's not a simulation) are literally 1/∞. One divided by infinity is essentially zero. Meaning the chance we are in base reality (not a simulation) is "essentially zero".

That is as plausible as a Deity.

There being order to nature is not linked to the existence of any individual deity that have a will, any desire for me to act a certain way or to worship said deity or any divine force. Divinity is not equivalent to order. The divine can be and is sometimes represented as chaotic.

The possibility to do good does not require any deities to be acknowledged to do them. I agree that some religious institutions have enabled and incentivize certain good actions and can remove barriers to doing so where other systems can prevent them, but it's possible to do beneficial acts without any belief in divinity just as its possible to do horrific acts while believing in particular deities or deities.

And many divine forces are made by people. Ancestor worship obviously involves people who were made by other people. Most are happy to acknowledge that many of the writings of ancients gods comes from people and through that were changed over time as society. Our modern Western understanding of God as The One Omnipotent Divine is more developed from various Bible fanfics over the past millennia than what's in religious texts (studying the origins of certain religious texts was also involved in my turn towards the agnostic ideal that we should use the same level of evidence to other things we know). None of this prevents the idea that there is possibly order to the universe or people's ability to do beneficial things for others.

Brought up with Baptist church every Sunday. Tried my damndest to believe despite recognising even as a child it was all a bit implausible because I was terrified of being sent to hell but having wasted years praying into thin air and never hearing a thing back while watching hypocrites with a jaw on my knees I finally liberated myself from the nonsense.

The only regret I have is the wasted time.

I grew up in a C of E church that had an evangelical slant to it and I spent my teenage years attending youth groups, bible camps etc etc. I remember not really getting it all then, like everyone else around me seemed to, but of course, being young I thought there was something wrong with me or that I wasn't doing it right and I wasn't 'believing' enough.

I went away to university and drifted from the church, not really intentionally at the time, but just because I had no real pull towards it.

20-odd years on, I'm now an atheist, and have more recently reflected a bit further on how I actually got here. For me, there's three main strands, a lot of which other posters have already mentioned.

The logical/rationale. I just have never been able to do the mental gymnastics. I tried as a teen, tried to just 'have faith' and 'believe' or whatever it is they say, and felt a fraud.

The spiritual. I remember how important the relationship with God/Jesus was to many people in the church. It gave them deep meaning to their life, great joy, and huge comfort. While I saw it in others, I've personally never felt compelled to seek that out and have never felt lacking as a result. And my life's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination! I've had my fair share of shit.

The moral. I grew up with the morals of the church. But now, I can't abide the chastity nonsense, and general religious views on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, etc (I know not everyone in the church holds these views but they're common enough).

Then, in addition to all of that, there's just the general weirdness, the fear-mongering, the gaslighting, the 'give your life to God' crap... I honestly have found casting it all off so freeing. I'm very happy and content in my secular world view and it fits and feels right in all the ways religion never did for me. I don't see it as though I lost my religion, I see that I gained this instead. And that is, in some ways, a story of redemption too.....for me.

It used to be drummed into me by default because I went to a CoE school, my only local option. Once the normative reinforcement was lifted I was able to freely question things and came to my own conclusions.

Similar for my husband. He was brought up Catholic and once he left that environment he was free to explore how he truly felt about things. Ironically, his parents were pretty sad that he left religion but they now have left the Church themselves.

Nursing killed it for me . I wasn't particularly religious but had an underlying hope /wish that there was a Divine force that looked out for us at least ...which I now see as a primitive need for a mother or father figure to protect me ...but in nursing I saw such horrors that any idea of a compassionate god evaporated overnight .
I worked for a while in what was then called Mental Handicap nursing in an old, vast and neglected hospital ..this was the real backwaters of nursing at the time , with wards full of severely physically and mentally damaged people who had an abysmal.existence. I wont go into details but these people were not to blame for their condition , were pretty much abandoned and had no quality of life. So in a simplistic way that really closed down the idea of a god that cared .
Later in my nursing career I saw the efffects of childhood cancers , spina bifida and cystic fibrosis and the despearate unanswered prayers...and also how the meanest and most judgemental and cruel nurses often proclaimed their Christian beliefs .
So ..no god ..no salvation ..just us .

For me, it was when my brother (aged 5) died of cancer. And at the church everyone kept saying it was part of "gods plan" and him being dead was him in a "better place" ...

I was brought up atheist/agnostic but became religious as at about 14. “Converted” by a CofE connected happy clappy group that came to my school and then got in with a bunch of Christian youth groups in CofE and Methodist ministries. I see now that it was an escape from the somewhat neglected home life I had and it was incredibly beneficial in terms of keeping me in school, off drugs and not pregnant. I bought in to the teachings for a while but by the time I headed off to university I was having a hard time reconciling what I was being taught and the hypocrisy and self-serving nature of what I saw going on in the Church (especially as a know-it-all teen!). The more I started reading for myself, the more I disliked the God I saw in the bible. It took a few years but I lost the faith and eventually came to see it, as I wrote above, as something where the social support filled a need at the time but that I can find no good reason to actually believe in the god.

A parent having a catastrophic illness when I was a child, i prayed every night, it got worse.

Babies dying in pain is all the proof i need.

This is such an interesting question, but it does centre the Christian 'God'. I wonder if people from other religions with the concept of God(s) eg Hinduism, have had a similar crisis of faith.

I was brought up with the whole CofE shebang, Sunday school, confirmation and prayers at bedtime. Sent to a RC school religion, hellfire and brimstone, purgatory. The whole works were rammed down my throat for 7 years, the slightest degree of non-conformity and you were punished. The non-RCs were labelled as ‘non Catholics’ and clearly meant to be pitied and beyond redemption if we didn’t comply and convert.
The hypocrisy was gobsmacking, and sickening at times.
Then having a very religious MiL who didn’t have a good word to say of anyone complaining cinched my becoming atheist.
When you consider that virtually every war is as a result of religious differences then I am surprised anyone really believes or whether it’s a hedge your bets insurance against going to hell?

My faith was tested when I lay at deaths door aged 22 with my tiny baby struggling to survive inside me. He was born prematurely and lived but not without his difficulties including nearly losing him at 3 weeks old when he suffocated on his milk.
I lost all faith after 3 miscarriages in a row one of which caused massive hemorrhaging and mental torture.
I didn't pray to God when my last child lay in hospital at 3 weeks old clinging to life as his tiny body wasted away. I thank the incredibly skilled surgeon who saved his life and I thank the nicu team who saved my eldest too.
What kind of God would put someone through that, my husband has nearly lost me 4 times in the 5 years we've been together and all our children have either died or only survived thanks to the dedication of some fantastic drs and nurses.
My mental health is shot now and I cant love a god that would harm me - I believe that would be classed as an abusive relationship

@maddiemookins16mum

I was baptised Catholic, attended Catholic schools for most of my school life. Made my FHC at around 6 or 7 (I assume). This was approx 1972/3. My darling, lovely mum was a single parent. Had divorced my abusive father a year or so before. After the FHC service, there was a FHC breakfast in the church hall, bottles of pop, sandwiches, cake etc. All us kids went upstairs for the ‘party’, parents close by. EXCEPT my mum, she was shunned and told it was inappropriate as she was divorced. I’ll never forget the shame on her face. She had to wait outside on a park bench.

A friend of my son is, or rather was, Jehovah Witness. Her husband had an affair and divorced her and SHE was publicly kicked out and ostracised by the church community, losing a number of her life-long friends. Any, including her family, who continued to see her were threatened with the same. Very Christian I don’t think 😡