By Pam27 ~ I have been coming to this site for about a year now and I decided to try to write down my de-conversion story. Before I begin, I would like to express my gratitude to those of you who post stories and comments here regularly. I look forward to my ex-Christian.net fix almost every day. Our culture is saturated in the Christian mindset and sometimes I feel like I’m struggling to keep from being sucked under by quicksand. This site is a great support for me. I became a Christian as a teen-ager in the mid-70s during the height of the Jesus Movement , during a “Jesus Festival.” My life was wrapped up for years in attending Jesus festivals and Christian rock concerts, as well as church. I was not raised with any religion and had very little church experience. Because of that, it all seemed new and exciting to me. I married a fellow Christian within a few years of my conversion. We have two grown children. My husband is still a Christian and I’m not going to lie ...

Suggested by dealdoctor ~ And this: http://tinyurl.com/497etsl

By Valerie Tarico ~ L ast week I posted an article about relentless slurs, becking and other threats targeting the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and what it is like for them to be constantly in the crosshairs. This letter below, from a soldier, below, is why they keep fighting. Since my first contact with the MRFF, I have seen close to 100 letters like this, all carefully redacted. The situations the soldiers face are equally outrageous – but every one tells a different story in a different voice, with a different writing style. I really can’t add anything to their words. This soldier has given permission for his letter to be made public. (Note: the formatting came through garbled, and Justin at RockBeyondBelief added paragraphing.) Before I tell you, Mr. Weinstein and the MRFF of my total outrage at the U.S. Army for grading me as a “Spiritual Fitness failure”, I will tell you a few things about myself. My name is (name withheld) and I am an enlisted soldier with the ra...

By Carl S ~ M ost ignorance is willful. Some months ago, the Freethought Today newspaper published an interview with a former Onion periodical editor, in which he described true believers as being "incapable of learning." The sociologist/author Eric Hoffer wrote in his book, " The True Believer ," that, "One is astounded at how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible." My wife is a wonderful, caring person, and is totally indifferent to my statements of the harmful effects of religion. Her usual response involves the words, "Not in my church." This is even though her church includes all of them as of the same faith, in silent and tacit agreement with the most extreme of others of that faith. But she refuses to consider this. And there's a whole pattern of denials supporting the system, which amounts to ignorance is bliss, and the belief that this is harmless. But, is it really? Let's think about it. Are individuals or o...

By Anonymous ~ I 'm extremely encouraged to find this site, and I'm looking for advice--I'm like many on this site--raised in an evangelical Christian family. I attended one of the most conservative Christian colleges in the country for two years before transferring to a state school, and admitting to myself that I didn't believe a lot of this anymore. Image by mfajardo via Flickr I was (and am) determined to go about spirituality in my own way, and have done quite a bit of recovering since that time. In the past few years, I've gone through a terribly painful experience when, upon moving in with my now fiancé, my parents lashed out (to put it lightly). I have never suffered so much as then. Any advice on dealing with the guilt/combining my set of beliefs? I am still dealing from the aftermath of the previous brainwashing, and am looking to sort things out. I firmly believe that evangelical Christianity is amoral, and completely misses the more important tea...

By Nikki ~ I am a very reluctant atheist. Having been brought up in the church and primed for becoming a missionary and marrying a nice Christian boy, to now find myself as both an atheist and a lesbian has been disconcerting, to say the least. There were three main things that eventually led to my deconversion. The first was a love of truth; the second, a deep disgust with hypocrisy; and the third, my final acceptance of the fact that I am not, have never been, and never will be straight. My love of truth paved the way. Many times as I grew up, things would bother me about what I was being taught. I wondered about the stories of God ordering genocides in the Bible, or just outright murdering people himself. I puzzled over discrepancies between the Gospels of Matthew , Mark, Luke and John. I wondered why, in all my years of being a Christian, I had never seen even one verifiable miracle. But I simply chalked it up to my lack of understanding, and went on as before. Then my hat...

By Sergius ~ H ey people, I wanted to write a full testimony on here for two years, but I never brought myself to it as an Atheist , probably it was for a reason. Even now, I am not writing a testimony because things change and enlighten you all the time, so I choose to ask a quick question with some information about me in mind. In reality, I always been and thought of myself as neither Atheist nor Christian, I didn't believe in most of the Bible and found a lot of it boring, I never practiced or accepted most of the Christian belief either, but I was a strong believer since I can remember myself, and kept speaking my mind to God in order to find solutions, just refresh myself, or share something important or gather wisdom, to gain new perspectives or self control. Two years ago I decided to educate myself as much as I could on religions, atheism and everything surrounding it. That was when I figured, that I must be an atheist and I was strongly so for those two years straight...

By Kat ~ I am 23 years old and I am not able to be a Christian anymore after thoroughly investigating and questioning my understanding of it. I was heavily forced into non-traditional American Catholicism as a child by my parents (one a Third-Order Carmelite nun) I haven t been a Christian for years now and I thought I had worked through my feelings about it but I finished The God Delusion and some other materials on raising Christian children and I've realized how deeply ingrained it was in my childhood and how much my religious upbringing affects me in my day to day life. I get angry now when I hear old Bible stories that remind me of being ridiculed as a child for asking questions or when my family attempts to convince me that the origins of one thing or another are Christian (Greek, Roman, Gaelic and Egyptian mythology , obviously insane claims). I have a hard time being civil in discussions with them and I feel my reactions are becoming overblown and will ultimately u...

By Valerie Tarico ~ Note: This concludes the series, “God’s Emotions: Why the Biblical God is so Very Human.” Parts 1-8 are available at this website. Or to obtain the whole series as a Word document email vt at valerietaricodotcom. Man is, and always has been, a maker of gods. It has been the most serious and significant occupation of his sojourn in the world. -- John Burroughs A lmost two hundred years ago, a young European Christian, trained in theology, set off on a voyage around the world. When he left England, he did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible, and in fact during the trip he quoted the Word of God as a moral authority. But he returned with questions. He spent the next twenty years assembling the vast array of detailed observations that he had made as the ship’s naturalist into a scientific theory that rocked the world—and his own Anglican orthodoxy. In the end, Charles Darwin had many things to say, some with no small regret, this among them: I had no int...

By Charissa ~ I struggled for months with my relationship with god. If I look back at my prayer journal, it’s pretty depressing. I would cry out for him for hours on end. And even then, when something would happen and id be on a spiritual high for a few hours or minutes depending on the stimulation, I often wondered, is this just me making myself “feel” good again? When I was a new Christian I would have doubts. I once met an atheist online, and we discussed evolution vs. creation. And I thought I was doing a real service by trying to convince him. But most often he would give me too many doubts, questions I didn’t want to answer because I was taught it was all lies. My arguments were very convincing to me at the time (I have gone back and read what I actually wrote *face palm* what an idiot I was ha-ha) and eventually I just never replied to his last message, because of the way it made me feel, and the fact that we were just going in circles. I think I actually used the line “I ...

By Rachael ~ O ne of my earliest memories is me, my sister and my parents sitting around the dinner table, my Dad asking me to explain what the hypostatic union was. It was, of course, the theological term used to describe how Jesus is both God and man at once. My dad runs a very large and prolific Christian Apologetics site. I no longer live at home, but this organization is the sole income of the rest of my family. My father's been on TV, debated Dan Barker , and is pretty much the personification of rationality in Christianity. I was taught all the arguments of atheists and evolutionists and taught their flaws and how to rebuff them; I was taught how to think logically and critically, how to explain away every perceived problem in the Bible. By the time I was seventeen I'd memorized well over a thousand verses. I never 'felt' God, though. While I was pretty brainwashed into believing that he did, MUST exist, I never emotionally connected with him or felt hi...