I wrote several of such, pointing out diverse aspects, and
incomplete. Here are a few version I happened to write in diverse
times, in bulk.
Posted in Former
Christians: How did you gain then lose your faith?
I converted to evangelical christianity by myself (from a rather
non-christian family and surroundings in France), then stayed
there for years, and then painfully deconverted quite late (in my
taste), based on my own thoughts and experience (missing the
chance of having checked existing arguments earlier).
I always believed in the existence of life after death, naturally
and as something obvious and intuitively just as undeniable as my
own existence, from the first time the question was raised:
namely, when I heard about Near Death Experiences during my
teenage. After this, as I was a science lover, I read some popular
science magazines, and found something disgusting there: articles
denying in principle the possibility of afterlife in the name of
science and reason. This pushed me to consider reason and the
scientific method as corrupt and misleading practices inducing
blindness of the mind, a sort of foolishness away from the deep
truths in metaphysical issues.
Something else that went wrong for me, was the school system. I
had the chance to develop my own understanding of maths and
physics (up General Relativity at the age of 16) during my free
time, but aside this, my experience with school (an ordinary one,
that did no way adapt to my skills, where, as for mathematics, I
had to "learn" things I already knew most of the time at the same
speed as others) was so painfully boring. I think the academic
system gives a quite terrible image of science.
In the way I perceived things at that time, one of the worst
absurdities taught by school was the history of the so-called
"social progress" consisting in the abolition of child labor. What
? They believed they did something good by "abolishing child
labor", seriously ?
Indeed I was feeling like a convict in a penal colony, as a pupil
in this school system. I even felt jealous of the working children
of the past, as while they may have not been free of what they
were materially doing, at least I imagined they could somehow be
free of their mind while working; but I wasn't, persecuted as I
was by both the bullying by my mates, and by the stupidity of the
courses. I was forced to sacrifice the life of my mind to serve
this Cult of Nonsense (the school system) that this world was
serving without tolerating any question. So, this world was
actually dominated by a reign of evil forces. And these evil
forces were set up as they were by... the secular human intellect.
How could I understand and find a voice, a way out or something,
with whom I could share my desperate pain and observations of how
corrupt this world is ?
When I met Christianity (ideas and humans), I found it innocent of
these evils. It offered me "sense" to the terrible suffering I
went through, and (implicitly through their theology) agreement on
the fact that this world and its dominant "intellectual" voices
were corrupt and evil. The environment of brotherhood and nice
songs I found there sharply contrasted with the bullying and other
absurd things I suffered until then in the secular world.
When I was Christian, I hardly ever seriously cared to know about
the atheist arguments. Why ? First because they are atheists, that
is, they think there is no God. How could this be ? The laws of
physics are so conceptually wonderful, they can only be the
expression of a wonderful divine mind. How could all parts of the
universe be connected together (coexist), unless there was a sort
of underlying unity of all existence ? How could I see a
motivation to stay alive despite all the bad things I was going
through and keep fighting for a better world in these desperately
painful circumstances, unless there is a sort of divine justice, a
sense of mission for my life, a hope to be rewarded and paid back
for all these sufferings and efforts after I die ?
But Christianity did not keep its promises in my life. My feelings
went from bad to worse. While I badly needed to find love in my
life, God did not keep the promise (as told by Christians) of
providing what I really needed to morally survive. It became
physically more and more impossible for me to worship God. On the
contrary I could not avoid cursing Him for what I suffered. But
cursing God is the way to hell, isn't it ? Moreover, fellow
Christians did not understand my troubles, and their preachings to
keep trusting God went flat.
My faith crumbled as the Christian teachings and ideas that formed
my view of life, turned out to seem more and more absurd, empty of
meaning. So I could not stand my life and my faith anymore, but
where could I go ? How can I dare to contradict God, if Christian
teachings are from Him ? I seemed to be smashed in a dead end as I
expected no understanding of life and no hope of a positive
afterlife outside the Christian faith that I was in but where I
could not stand anymore.
But at the moment when finally all my conceptual world collapsed,
just one thing remained in my life, the only possible open way out
of this nonsense: the presence of near death experiences, that I
could readily get informed about, to check the truth about
afterlife: is Christian faith and worship of God necessary for
salvation ?
This is how I found the answer: no, Christianity is not true, and
more refuted than supported by the information we have about
afterlife from near death experiences. The chances to reach heaven
are not affected by religious orientation or piety, and there are
strong hints for the existence of reincarnation, contrary to what
Christianity teaches.
Once I was out in this way, I could rebuild a worldview, finally
acknowledging and formalizing a big lot of evidences against
Christianity that had more or less silently formed in me before.
And then I was surprised to see, both that Christians refused to
understand but instead condemned me for my new understanding, and
that I turned out to have a lot of agreement with atheist views.
While I still believe in the existence of afterlife and the
supernatural, I finally agree with them on most of their arguments
against religions, and the value of science and reason.
My reply:
A cause of my deconversion was my endless depression, my resulting physical inability to worship God, and the unfair guilt it produced while trying to believe a doctrine telling it an absolute duty to worship God : trying to make me guilty (and maybe deserving hell) for not succeeding the impossible was not fair. I had not taken any decision that the solution out of depression should have been a matter of finding human love. Yet it was a fact I could progressively less and less deny. Related topic : God's promises.Theorem.
Nobody on Earth was ever guided by God in the last decade.
Proof: If God had the
opportunity to guide someone, He should have used this
opportunity for emailing me the address of my future wife
(and/or emailing mine to her).
But this didn't happen. Therefore no such a person existed. ◻
I guess what Christians would automatically reply to this proof:
they would argue that no, this request is not right, I did not
really need this, God had reasons to not do this, greater plans
than this, better purposes to fulfill.
To this my reply is that, well, they can imagine so, but this
requires assumptions about my life that are light years away
from what it clearly is to me - and I'm not making this up.
I cannot in a few words show enough of my life and experience to
prove to their satisfaction the moral necessity of this
expectation, but to me it is overwhelming.
Just a few details to figure out what I mean, though the
complete proofs would be much too long and hard and out of
subject to convincingly explain here (and, of course, too far
away from the Christian ideology to seem plausible to Christians
at first sight... which is one more evidence to me that
Christianity is evil as it hijacks the goodwill of people away
from the necessary understandings for truly efficient good
actions) :
I have read and heard many hundreds of Christian testimonies
praising God for different things. And I noticed that all these
reasons were either imaginary (with no evidence of the reality
of the claimed blessings, for example as in paragraph 39 of Faustina's diary) or much more
short-sighted than the deceived expectations that forced me to
conclude that God does not help.
Because I discovered very important things to do with my life
for the good of humanity, but destiny (which nearly anyone could
have helped but none did) made these stall until now.
Another option for God would have been by the same method to
give me contact with future partners to implement my software
project that would bring new uses of Internet that would be very
helpful to millions of people (and somewhat helpful to many
more), including tools to more easily find the truth, secure
online transactions of any kind, contribute to justice, freedom
and prosperity, and a new online dating system that would bring
love to millions of people.
But this did not happen either. Neither by direct contact with
partners, nor indirectly by anybody with the basic sense of
mission to care about finding some. Neither the direct divine
inspiration to anybody else, of a similarly useful plan for the
world.
Neither any similar type of divine guidance: despite the
numerous cases I heard of Christians (and other spiritual
people) testifying that God gave them their love, none of them
ever got it in a way similar to the one described above, while,
I think, this should logically have been one of the easiest and
most efficient available methods for an omniscient God to do as
soon as He can guide anyone. Why ?
Without these bad lucks, I may have stayed a devout Christian
until now, and also done great works to bring new ideas for the
teachings of mathematics and physics, that could have become
popular to a lot of students. But being abandoned this way
wasted my energy, forced me to curse God and then deconvert and
expose many arguments against Christianity. Can that be God's
will above giving me the chance to do the other very useful
things for mankind, seriously ??
(posted in a FB group)
I am deist and used to be Christian. So what I left is not the
abstract general concept of God's existence but the many
particular details of Christian doctrine, starting with the
presence of divine guidance and the meaningfulness of the
"relationship with God" which Christians claim to have and that is
supposedly available to anyone who decides to give Jesus their
life (as I found it failing to happen to me...). Nothing to do
with the fear of death, but much more with the fear of the
insanity of this world, and the fear of missing my mission on
Earth.
One thing that initially seduced me is all those "testimonies" of
people claiming to have God in their life, as they were speaking
in such a way that looked as if such a relationship with God was
readily available, real and meaningful. So I thought I needed to
follow their teachings until I would get such guidance myself and
would get from God some clearer mission (that time never came). I
must also say I suffered depression, especially by the mental
torture inflicted to me by the school system which heavily posed
as representing "reason" and the world's order (while I did much
better science in my free time), which made plausible the
Christian equation "world = reason = reign of Satan" (now I see a
big flaw with this motivation : Christianity is actually powerful
but never cared to criticize or try to resolve the troubles of the
education system). So I was psychologically in a situation of
weakness, in desperate need of something that looked friendly,
some end of the tunnel of a hostile world. Going from a school
environment where I was regularly bullied, to a Christian
environment that felt much more friendly, had a strong influence
on me. Also, Christianity offers a candidate "sense of life" (both
as understanding and purpose); the rest of the world did not seem
to care where life goes.
So yes I was initially deluded by the Christians claim of being in
relationship with God, until I understood that they are only in
relationship with their own faith and their own extremely
sophisticated system of excuses (practiced honestly, without any
intention of fraud just because they happen to have faith that
this is the spiritual and truthful way to think, as they are not
skilled enough in logic to understand things otherwise) to keep
pretending to "see" God in their life when no such thing really
happens. So I was trusting them, and I guess most of them are
similarly just trusting each other, feeding that rumor from
nowhere, failing to pay attention to what it should logically mean
to have their own "testimony" before calling it such... as for me,
probably thanks to my logical skills I was still aware that that
divine guidance in my life I was desperately expecting, still did
not effectively occur yet. So I was shutting up and religiously
listening to those who seemed to have found what I was searching
for... I regret to not have thought about it before : if the goal
was to open some communication channel with God to get some divine
instructions for my life, and if those Christians around actually
succeeded it for theirs, it would still not justify that long and
hard path of praying / bible studies etc, that visibly kept
failing for years without clear instructions, desperately trying
to "purify myself" enough to reach that point: a wise God speaking
to people would already have used others since long to report to
me any useful instruction he had. So logically, I finally
understand, if God had nothing really interesting to tell me
through the mouth of other Christians (well they somehow seemed to
have, you know, these big enthusiastic preaches of pastors to
their audience... but it turned out to be too "general", lacking
any effective results and adaptation to personal cases) when I was
not "spiritual" enough to hear Him myself, then there is no sense
to expect anything more once I would "reach the spiritual level"
of those same Christians.
My guide
to conversion and deconversion
Some
logical refutation of Christianity - Evidence
against theism.