Sent in by Amy Hi! I just came across this site and I wanted to share MY story. I was raised by two Catholic parents in Maryland. where I live, religion plays a major role in the daily lives of people. More than 90% of my friends are Christian, and the other 10% is predominantly Jewish . Growing up I was taught that it was bad to question my belief in God; that He would become angry with me if I ever thought too skeptically. I went to Sunday school during my entire childhood and church on Sundays as well. I also attended a Christian summer camp and was read the bible every night by my mother. Despite my indoctrination, I began to question God when I was 12. You see, by reading the bible and thinking critically, I was able to ascertain that much of "God's word" was impossible or illogical, misogynistic, cruel, and racist. I was shocked to find that God, my beloved father, sent people to Hell for small mistakes or flaws in belief. At the time I remember I simply thought ...

Sent in by Yoonhee Hello! I'm a Korean woman who's in my late 30's. I worked as an English teacher for a while, and now I work as a freelance translator. I visit the Korean anti-christianity site quite often, and I read about this site in there. Altough I'm a Korean, I wanted to share my horrible story with you. (Sorry for my poor English...) I attended to the Presbyterian church since I was 19. When I was a university student, I was a church-maniac. I went to church from Sunday to Monday. And, I used to pray until midnight. Maybe that's why I've got married a preacher. I've met this minister from a church seminar, and he proposed to me. And, I thought that must be GOD's order, so I've got married him in 2 months. But, after marriage, he turned into another person. Before marriage, he seemed like an angel, but after getting married, he became a devil. With no reason, he threw stuffs, lied, stole things, watched the pornographic videos all the time,...

Sent in by Elaine Image by Caucas' via Flickr The moment I stopped believing was like waking up from a dream. My heart beat fast, may head ached, I cried. It was like the my world was suddenly spinning out of control. I was sick to my stomach. I was angry. I had truly believed in God with all of my heart. He defined my life and my relationship with him was personal. And now.... In hindsight, I guess I should have known. After I became a mother, I began to wonder how any sane parent could hit their child for acting like, well, a child. My parents never spared the rod, but they were completely sane. They trusted that the God's word was just. No one questions the Will of God. When I became a mother five years ago, I began to doubt that God knew what was best for my child. The studies showed that hitting is not the best way to raise a child. Nevertheless, I was determined to raise good Christian children. When the first Sunday of my unbelief came, I did not go t...

Sent in by anonymous When I was a kid, I slept with all arms and legs tightly wrapped in a quilt and never hanging over the edge of the bed. My mother had always told us that if we didn't behave, the boogerman (devil) would pull us through a hole. When my sister and I got bunk beds , I claimed the top and wouldn't take turns. I figured the boogerman would have a hard time reaching me all the way up there. When we began to question the existence of Santa Claus , my mother told us, "It's not the presents that count. It's the spirit of Christmas." So NOW I had to worry about a ghost flying around my house on Christmas Eve. I no longer wanted presents and just wanted it to stay away. Boogerman under the floorboards, angels and ghosts in the air and god, well, everywhere watching me every moment--I was a very nervous kid. But, as soon as I no longer believed in ghosts and the Boogerman and fairies and unicorns, I began to also doubt god. Everybody else I kn...

By Neal Stone Image by Philerooski via Flickr All of us at this site either are at that point or past that point where we finally stopped doing the Xian thing. We feel that sense of loss, frustration and anger for what we have been through and given up or lost as a result. My time was 1998 when I had that breakdown and sense of frustration and anger over what I lost and gave up because of my life as an Xian. I went through a very dark period of my life as I gave into the anger and frustration of what I went through. So what is one to do at this point? After looking at my life then and now I feel I can point out some help and hopefully help someone avoid the same journey and dark place I went through. 1. Don't give in to the anger. The anger will eat you up inside. Xians love this as it makes them feel they were right all along about thinking you can only be happy with god. Do you really want to prove them right? Hell no! The anger will also take you down even farther and ...

Sent in by Brain User It was a long time coming. In Christian school I never really took religion seriously. All that prayer for things that never seemed to happen just didn't add up. God never talked to me and I never felt any sensations of his presence. But everybody else did, or so they said, so I went along with it. I felt emotions, for sure, but nothing that was obviously other-worldly. Like every youngster, I wanted to be accepted. Later in my early 20's I really wanted to believe and re-dedicated my life to Jesus, praying fervently for various things, including the gift of speaking in tongues , but it never happened. In my 30's I joined a church that believed in healing and miracles, and there seemed to be biblical reason for the belief, so I kept praying. I must not have had even the faith of a mustard seed because I never did speak in tongues. A lot of other prayers went unanswered, too, including fervent prayers from the very faithful. Prayers like "We ask f...

Sent in by Anonymous Image by Ann Althouse via Flickr As a relative newcomer to the life of parenthood, I debate many issues internally and with my wife. One of those things is the Santa Claus lie, or rather, "Should we tell our children they get presents from a mythological man who, lives forever, knows about everybody's deeds, and visits their homes one night out of the year to deliver gifts?" There are negative effects to perpetuating such a lie, but it's embedded in our culture. If you live in the US, it's unlikely you don't know about Santa Claus. So, what are the positive effects of the Santa Claus myth? I can't think of any. At some point, your kids will discover there isn't a Santa Claus and you've been lying to them. My parents never told me Santa brought me something, encouraged me to leave carrots for the flying reindeer, or took me to visit a fat man in a costume to tell him what I wanted for Christmas. This wasn't just beca...

Sent in by Maestra I know my story is not unique as I’ve been reading many others just like mine, but I know it will be cathartic for me to write my own. I am the granddaughter of an evangelist and I was raised in an evangelical church. I was a “ Missionette honor star .” I bet some of you on this site were too! I went to Evangel College (University now) and married the son of two pastors. My grandmother was into prophesy and prophesied when my sister and I were little that my sister would grow up to be a nurse and I would one day be an evangelist. My sister is a nurse…..dun dun duunnnnn. I LOVED my church growing up. My husband and I decided to “take a break” from church in January of 2009, and I miss it (the people). Growing up, I looked forward to every aspect of church; Sunday and Wednesday nights were definitely the highlights of my week. Our Sunday school teachers and youth pastors would always encourage us to bring our friends from school to church, but I never wanted to. Firs...

Sent in by Priscilla Image by Romy Schneider via Flickr “You know he may die during the surgery… the Bible says that the wages of sin is death.” My mother, hundreds of miles away, stung me with these words over the phone about a year ago. By then I had stopped going to church, although I wasn’t planning on leaving the faith. I was a backslider of sorts, a Christian without a church. In her comment she was referring to my then-fiancé -now husband- who had been experiencing health issues from a genetic disease and was about to have a very complicated and dangerous surgery. Our sin, according to my mother, was that we had purchased a house a few months earlier and ever since had been living together without being married. Apparently, this was punishable by death . Anything bad that happened to us was now because of this. At the time I thought that even though my mother did not agree with my living arrangements –as she had expressed very clearly in a previous uncomfortable convers...

Sent in by RandallScott Image by stevesheriw via Flickr My name is Randal and I'm currently in recovery. I'm a recovering Baptist. My sponsor told me to stay away from anyone who is condemning and judgmental, so I immediately quit going to church. I'm not really sure when my 'de-conversion' process reared its beautiful head. I would love to tell you a great story about an "A-ha!" moment, but I don't have it. I did, however, wake up one day and just kinda get it. But it wasn't, and isn't, an overnight process. For years, I've been tirelessly and religiously chipping away at my theological prison wall like Andy Dufresne . To be the person that I wanted to be, I had to dig as deep as I could possibly dig. Rest then repeat. Rest. Repeat. But if I had to pinpoint a time, in my life, I would say it was when I started reading. Reading "other" material. My dad was an intellectual student of theology and received his Master of Divinity a...

Sent in by Alexander Image by troismarteaux via Flickr I have just recently made a break with Christianity. Looking back on it, it seems to be the end of 4 7-year cycles. In my early twenties, I thought more and more about little things about Christianity that annoyed me. My entire primary school education, save grades 7 and 8 (thankfully) were spent in some sort of religious school. In the South , religion is as omnipresent as Crisco . Let me say now that Muslims aren't the only one with their own fundamentalist schools. Christians have them too, and they are just as bad. One thing that annoyed me was how in the Bible, there's a prohibition on eating pork which shows up in Islam and Judaism, but somehow Christians get around it. "That was the Old Testament" is what I was usually told. I took the "Islam method" to that and stopped eating pork in high school. Actually, it makes me sick today if I eat it. Heh, have a bout of pork poisoning on a flight down t...

by A Seeker Image by State Library and Archives of Florida via Flickr Lately, in pensive thinking of how to converse with my Mother about our past issues, many points of thought come to mind which I am not clear in. One of those is getting a clear picture of how my very religious family could have handled my leaving the "fold". I want to compare it to a normal family who has a teen/twenty-year-old, free-thinking child who wants to leave home and start out on her own. Here is the history of how my story went down and I'd like feedback on how it could have been handled "normally", so that when my Mother and I speak about it there is a clear picture of how they could have reacted differently. Growing up as the 3rd eldest of nine children in the home of a Primitive Baptist preacher, we grew up very sheltered, in a bubble so to speak. Our entire life consisted of church, people in the religion, school in the religion and then homeschooling. Our year was full of vari...

Sent in by Escaping Religion Image by cindy47452 via Flickr I was raised in a fundamental Baptist family. My parents divorced when I was 5 due to domestic violence . All the time I was growing up I went to church at least three times a week, was forced to participate in door to door evangelizing and running a bus route proselytizing children, to bring them to church on Sunday mornings. All my life I heard how great this god was how he gave his followers everything,yet I grew up in poverty. While my mother spent all morning laying in bed reading the bible, the kids were left to fend for themselves. We were not allowed to go to school, and in fact I reached age 18 without ever going to any school. I was a very precocious child though, and read extensively and taught myself as much as I could on my own. One night when I was seventeen we were driving home from a church function, my mom and step-dad got in a fight over something insignificant, and it escalated until my mother was crying ...

Sent in by Joshua Image via Wikipedia First off, I can't believe I'm actually submitting this and putting my past on display, but holy crap! I can be a jerk. I know this and anyone who knows me knows this. I'm stubborn, pig-headed and I think I know everything. I know quite a bit about a lot of stuff, but I like to pretend that because I have mad debating skills that I know more than most people. This simply isn't true and deep down I know that just because I might have a little more knowledge about a subject doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know about it. Ask my wife and she'll tell you. I don't like to be wrong and I'll try weird and exotic tactics to be right. The one thing I do have going for me though, is that if I know I'm right, I will not let it go. I know I can't convince you to change your opinion but if I can get you to at least look at it from my point of view and say, "Yeah, I can understand that" then, I’m p...