Losing My Religion

31 Comments
By Jennifer ~

I just recently had a complete mind shift with regards to God and Religion and Heaven and Hell and eternal life... everything I guess. It was like something just 'snapped' inside my brain. Suddenly I just saw it all completely different.

5 stages of grief (Depression) #4Image by COCOMARIPOSA via Flickr
At first I was kind of blown away at such a massive revelation, I mean, talk about shaking someone at their very foundation of who they are (or who they thought they were).

I instantly had this hunger to find out if others were in this situation, and sure enough, there were.

But that only sustained me for about a week... now I have been stuck in this sort of stage where I can't stop thinking of how much this is going to change. I know there will be friends and family who will shun me if I tell them the truth. It truly is comparable (I assume) to a gay person coming out of the closet. You cannot predict the ramifications and the thought of that alone is driving me insane. I KNOW first hand how atheists are thought of and treated because I used to be one of those people! Talk about hypocrisy. My God loved everyone except atheists (seriously, this is how I was raised).

At this point, I have nearly completely isolated myself (at the expense of my husband and children) out of this irrational fear? Please tell me this will pass and that I will be able to come to full terms with it because I know my retreat can't be healthy. I know I am not the person I can be and want to be... but I just feel stuck right now.

I am hoping that losing my religion is comparable with the stages of grief and that eventually, in my own time, I can move forward.

I have never in my life experienced depression and honestly used to think most people used it as an excuse of sorts but now of course I am understanding what it's like to get into a mindset and not be able to just 'snap out of it'. That of course compounds feelings of guilt I have for not having the empathy certain people in my past needed and I could not give it to them because I didn't understand.

I have never felt so alone in my life and obviously the ones I would have normally turned to in the past for support and guidance are the very ones who molded my religious delusions in the first place.

I want to be true to myself. No more pretending. I'm just not sure how to take the first step.

Previous
Next

Recently popular posts:

Celebrating life beyond belief

Post a Comment
Image
From The Australian : THEY came from everywhere, the true unbelievers: from Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, New Zealand and beyond. There was a honeymooning couple from North Carolina who had met on an atheist internet site; and two friends from rural NSW, both extroverted women who had been raised Catholics and were now seriously annoyed with it.  Author Richard Dawkins had a few words to say about the sanctification of Mary MacKillop. An Iranian man who had seen unspeakable things done in the name of religion asked a speaker, philosopher A.C. Grayling, how it was that humans could be so kind and yet torture and kill each other. An Iraqi who migrated to Australia 40 years ago gave $4000 of his money to support this unusual gathering: the 2010 Global Atheists Convention, held in Melbourne at the weekend. The idea of atheists congregating seems counterintuitive. After all, they are defined only by an absence, a belief they don't have. But congreg...
Read more

Suffering For The Will Of god

Post a Comment
Image
By TheRedneckProfessor ~ I magine, if you will, a seedy hotel room in the dirty part of town.    In the corner there is a small table, the drawer of which contains a Gideon bible.    A garishly ornate lamp casts a pool of dingy yellow light upon the wall behind it, covered in peeling wallpaper, the fading floral pattern now more a study in browns after decades of dust and cigarette haze.    In this room we have a 10-year-old girl: a singular expression of innocence and unfettered hope.    Beside her, on the bed, is a 39-year-old pedophile rapist: the epitome of sociopathic sadism, a monster.    He is neither her father, nor her uncle.    He is, in fact, no one with whom this little girl should be alone.   We know what is going to happen in this room; there is no need to provide further detail.   This is the essence of meaningless, purposeless, gratuitous suffering inflicted upon innocence, examples of which can be s...
Read more

Does God have Free Will?

Post a Comment
Image
By Webmdave ~ A short discussion with a Christian believer Question: What do you mean when you say “free will.” Christian Believer Answer: Free will is the ability to make choices without external constraints. Q: Does God possess free will? CBA: God has the capacity to make choices, does not answer to any authority, is not limited by any external constraints, and cannot be coerced. God is unconstrained by all natural laws; He in fact established those laws and is sovereign over them. God most certainly possesses free will. Q: Then, In the same way, is God also unconstrained by moral laws? Since he established those laws, then he must hold sovereignty over them as well, right? CBA: There are certain things that God is incapable of doing because His perfect and holy nature disallows it. For instance, Titus 1:2 says that God “cannot lie.” God’s perfection prevents Him from lying and identifies an intrinsic property of God’s own character. God cannot be unfaithful to Himself; H...
Read more

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

Post a Comment
Image
By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our ...
Read more

  Books purchased here help support ExChristian.Net!