atheist who questions the presumption of evilAuthor has 6.1K answers and 6.7M answer views2y
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[Serious] Formerly religious people, what made you turn athiest?

Actually it was my getting more interested in my own religion that did it.

I had been raised to believe in a God and to read the Christian Bible, even though my family moved around so much and worked so much that there wasn’t much room in our lives for a regular church service.

As I became an adult and was trying to decide what to do with my life, I had strongly considered joining a church and becoming a pastor and helping people. While I had my beliefs, I wanted to know more about them.

One of the problems I faced was that since I was not a member of a regular church service, I had no idea what denomination of Christian I was. I was just a Christian without a church.

I wanted to learn more about Christianity and I had to learn about it on my own, I wanted to figure out what the difference was between all these various splits and schisms and divisions within the Christian religion, from Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant and so forth, to the countless versions of Protestant, all the way down. And what of the Christian-like religions with fancy names and their own extra Bibles like the Mormon church of latter-day saints or the Jehovah’s Witnesses and so forth?

Having been taught that the Bible was written or inspired by God and its creation was guided by God, someone I had been told was omniscient, omnipresent, all-kind and all-loving and all-forgiving and always benevolent and righteous, I began my search there.

I had read bits of the Bible but never cover to cover, just the stories that were read to me most often, some of the Old Testament, a bit of the New, and repeat.

Well, which Bible should I read? There had been so many versions. Some books left out, some added back in. What was canon and what was not changed depending on which version of Christian you were.

To me, if there’s an important message that is given to us by an inerrant God and then it gets placed in the hands of mortal men, my thought is that the reason why there are different versions is because bits of the story are added to or removed from.

As such, I wanted the truth, which I assumed would be the most ancient, most original, least fiddled-with version of the story. I got the oldest versions of the Bible I could find and still read, and I got a Jewish Torah in English so I could hear the original Jewish version of God as closely as I could manage, just in case the whole Christian addition to the story changed bits of the original.

In any case, in my studying of the Bible, checking my book versus these other versions, I came to find that the meaning had been changed, passages omitted, books added or removed, and in reading the actual stories, much of the information contained within contradicted other bits of information found elsewhere in the whole of the set of Biblical books.

Believing God to be inerrant and always truthful and correct, I came to conclude quite quickly that the Bible absolutely cannot be the inerrant word of God precisely because it contradicts itself directly and indirectly in so many instances. That was before more problematic accounts of God were even taken into account, for example God lying to Adam and Eve about the effects of the forbidden fruit, God telling one person to kill his son as a blood sacrifice to him before changing his mind, and God deliberately murdering and tormenting Job’s family and Job himself and destroying his livestock and inflicting boils upon him and killing his family, all to satisfy a wager with Satan.

Stuff like that, I just could not believe literally happened and that God was the one who did it, that didn’t match the definition of God I had been told, an inerrant source of wisdom, morality, and truth.

And then there were other meta-examples of the Christian Bible being wrong, because of the way God’s personality changes between books in the Old Testament, and then, radically differently in philosophy in the New Testament.

And then the whole idea of adding a New Testament, when an omniscient always moral God supposedly wrote the first one. Why wouldn’t God get all the rules of morality right the first time?

Why would God mass murder his own creations and then later decide it wasn’t a good idea and promise not to flood the Earth again, if he knew all and was always moral in the first place? Why would he then threaten to do it again in the book of Revelations? Why would he need to send himself as his own son to die as a way of paying for the crimes of humanity, instead of just forgiving those crimes outright? Just senseless and unnecessary steps to take.

If he was God, he wouldn’t need Noah to build an Ark or destroy his creation with a flood, he could fix whatever the problem was by imagining a solution and then speaking it into being, the way he created the universe.

If mankind were flawed, he could literally speak and fix us immediately, no need for torture, threats, eternal punishment, or mass murder. No need for hell, no need to sacrifice his own son, none of that.

It all began to unravel, all the stories about God in the Bible were clearly written by flawed, immoral, illogical, irrational mortal human beings who make illogical narratives and irrational sets of moral rules and can’t keep their stories straight.

The Bible condemned graven images but said nothing of slavery, torture, or rape in the Ten Commandments. In fact, marital rape, slavery itself, torture and execution are advocated for in the Bible, and these things are quite immoral.

Then other stuff that was said to be immoral, like wearing blended fabrics or eating pigs or shellfish or “unclean animals” also did not make sense. These were just arbitrary and meaningless superstitions. Being afraid of women’s menstruation was a sign that we were reading bronze age nonsense, if the stuff about slavery being okay wasn’t a big sign.

Jesus taught things that went against what the God of the Old Testament taught. They are supposed to be the same person.

The biographies of Jesus’ life contain contradictions in the various stories told by his supposed Apostles. These are the people that are supposed to be getting it right as eye witnesses.

Then I read about how various books of the Bible were voted in as canon and voted out as apocryphal by human beings. People decided by a vote what was the word of God and what was not.

And people debated whether Jesus was God or not, and Christians who believed he was a prophet inspired by God but not literally God were condemned as heretics and cast out.

The more I got interested in the history of the church and of the various Bibles and Holy Books that mankind had written, the more versions and the more Bibles and Holy Books I bought. I read about Mormonism and Jehovah’s Witnesses and their beliefs, I bought a Koran, I read about Hindu mythology, I bought a book on Buddhism, I learned about many religions. I even bought a Wiccan book.

The more I read, the more I saw which I did not believe was real. And it all started to look the same to me.

There was nothing that any one religion offered that looked like literal, factual, moral, supernatural, always-true Truth.

It all looked like Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

I no longer believed in any religion, but it took me a lot longer to let go of the idea of God.

To me, God was perfect, honest, moral, and all powerful. There would be no way he would create a Hell or a Devil and wouldn’t lie to us, or change his mind about what was moral, or make regrettable mistakes, or leave out bits about slavery and rape being immoral sins and focus on graven images and making sure people gave him respect instead as his main focus.

My idea of god made sense. A god that never revealed a religious faith, through prophets or story books, a God that simply represented morality and truth.

And over time, those principles stopped needing a deity in my mind, a being, they were just principles.

Instead of Thunder being caused by Zeus, thunder and lightning were just a result of electricity, a part of the natural forces of the universe.

Morality and truth are simply a result of cause and effect, and the reality of what happens when we behave in a harmful manner, and the difference between fact, opinion, and fiction.

There didn’t need to be a patron deity behind those principles. I just needed to respect truth wherever it may be and let morality be my guiding light, in place of the empty space left behind by a God belief.

But you see, the core of me never changed. When I believed in a God, I believed he was a God of morality, truth, kindness, and so forth.

Now, I just believe in morality, truth, and kindness, and believe that humans are capable of questioning, defining, and establishing these concepts. Basically, we are on a journey to discover what morality is, what facts and truth are, have our own opinions, and tell entertaining fictional stories, and reserve lying for only the rarest of circumstances where not telling a lie would result in terrible harm to people, as part of morality being equally or perhaps even more important than honesty, because morality is also a part of the truth of our existence, and merely being honest does not mean you are being moral or just.

For example, if the Gestapo knocks on our door and asks if we are hiding any Jews, the answer is always “no”, whether it is true or not. Because the horror that could be inflicted on that family is far worse than the consequences of dishonesty.

But aside from the rare use of a benevolent lie in defense of human life and morality, truth is sacred and must be upheld and defended.

And part of that truth and part of that moral honesty is telling people that no, I don’t believe the Bible is literally true, and there are thousands of examples I can give you as to why that is so.

I also truthfully do not think there is a god that intervenes in mankind’s affairs, and don’t believe currently in any of the god figures that mankind has conjured up and invented and told stories about, from ancient tribal myths to bronze age polytheism to iron age monotheism. I am an atheist, and I think it is important to be honest about that so long as it remains legal to be one.

The search for truth, honesty, reality, and separating that from fiction, the search for what is moral, and separating that from the truly ghastly things my former religion taught was moral, that is what led me to being not a member of any religion.

I wanted to become even more religious, and my search for the truth turned up the amazing discovery that everything I used to believe about the Bible, the church, and the mythology I had believed in, was based on nonsense and contradiction, immorality, and fiction.

And because I was still truthful and honest and moral, I was forced to choose to not be religious anymore. I could no longer believe it was true or moral, and I could not even bring myself to pretend that it was.

As such, the truth set me free. The truth was, the religion was wrong and not true. And an honest person has to admit that, even if it hurts their feelings.

It wasn’t what I wanted, it wasn’t the goal I had in mind at the start. But in the end, my morality is much clearer, much more honest and real and based on something reasoned, and I am much more confident that I am on the side of truth and justice now.

Those who are religious but consider truth and justice to be important and the harm we do with our actions and choices to be the basis of what constitutes immorality will find much in common with me, apart from believing that God is literally real, which i do not.

We still have so much in common.

But no, I cannot ever believe that God would lie or condone slavery or rape or ever change his mind as to what is moral. I don’t believe his toolbox for fixing his own creations would involve torture and execution and mass extinctions, when he could literally think a solution into being that doesn’t involve suffering.

I also don’t think God would invent bone cancer and inflict it on little babies and let them die a terrible, torturous death.

As such, all revealed religious faiths are wrong, to me. They reflect only what some people think God is because that is what they were told, but those are mortal, feeble human opinions that are misguided and wrong. People invented the rules of religious faiths and those rules can and should be examined. They are not sacred nor are they unquestionable, nor are they true just because a man in a robe said so.

Another guy writes,

But a world 1400 years later has evolved and due to the Quran not allowing for modifications in its rules, the rules did not evolve and now, the only possible way for a person to truly practice Islam as it was written, and not take a loose interpretation of it and follow it at one's convenience, is to become a recluse.
I am yet to see anyone in my life who actually follows all that is preached. Everyone picks rules they CAN follow and then just ignore the rest.
To me, it made no more sense as a 17 year old as it does now (i'm 22 now).

If you truly believe in Allah, and Muhammad, then you must believe the whole Quran to be the way to go, not only the parts you agree with. Either follow it completely or not at all.
And if not, then you are not really a Muslim, just a person with a morality based off of Islam, but essentially your morality, not Islam's.

This was the major factor, but then a reading of the Quran will reveal many rules that may have been acceptable then, but is repulsive to the mind now. Rules like a man being allowed to hit his wife if she refuses to come to bed with him thrice, or women not being allowed to divorce, or not being allowed to work in a co ed organization. Again, for its time, it must have still been a forward step to allow women any rights at all, but it remains revolutionary only for that time.

I am neither, I left religion, i now follow my own conscience, my own mind. I respect Islam, as I do all other religions, but i believe they are essentially all man made and man is fallible. I would trust my own conscience more than one written for me 1400 years ago.

धर्मो रक्षति रक्षात: (Righteousness and मोराले)