by Aaron Rossetti What would cause someone to abandon the very thing that saved their life? How could someone who would've given everything up for what they believed... give up what they believed in order to gain nothing? My name is Aaron and this is my conversion and de-conversion story. The Beginning Being raised as a Lutheran in suburban America was a great way to grow up. My mom and dad loved me and poured a ton of love and great things into my life. I'm thankful for the chapel services, memory verses, and message of grace that was taught to me growing up. My Christian upbringing would lend a helping hand to the drama to follow in my teen years. I was always an intense drama and threw myself into everything wholeheartedly... well... that I really felt like doing anyway. Before Christianity By age 15, I began the momentum of my flirtation with the drug world. 'Pot never killed anyone. OK. Inhale it through this Mountain Dew bottle, huh? Whatever.' I didn't get ...

Sent in by Angela If the pessimist sees the glass half empty and the optimist sees it half full they both go away thirsty. I’ve been thirsty for a very long time, yet afraid to take a drink. Most of my life I’ve had an all consuming fear of hell that has prevented me from being honest about my doubts. I was raised in a Charismatic Christian household where free thinking and doubting were discouraged. Doubt was an enemy to faith. It was to be either fought against, or politely ignored. Every question I had received a simple black or white answer that never satisfied. The older I got the harder the questions became, but the answers remained just as unsatisfying. When I was 17 a man came into our house and attempted to rape my mother. This was while in the middle of my parents trying to save their marriage because my mom had an affair with someone at church. At the time we attended a church that taught us if we had enough faith we would never get sick, we would be rich, and no...

David & Goliath via Wikipedia Sent in by Corey I was raised in a Catholic home from birth. I went to Holy Family Catholic school from kindergarten through eighth grade . I attended church every Sunday and kinda believed in it all. Now, my parents didn't really harp on God or the Bible. I don't think many Catholics actually read the Bible, but I went along with it all. However, I must admit that I never felt that my "faith" was strong enough. I've been thinking about it lately and I think that I remember my initial doubting. My mother was reading me stories from a children's Bible. If my memory serves me right, it was about David and Goliath . There was also something she read to me involving angels. It all sounded very much like made-up stories to me. I asked why we didn't see any giants or angels, and she said that "We just don't anymore." That is what I believe was my first serious doubting. Well, over the years of my life I tried to...

Image by SoStark via Flickr Sent in by by Kathlene Wow, I am so glad I found this site. I am now only on my second day of turning away from God and it is so liberating on one hand, but terrifying on the second. My journey has taken 3 years, so it wasn't an overnight decision although it feels like it. I feel like I have taken my own brain back and I am giving myself permission to have my own thoughts. I am 35yrs old and I became born-again when I was 22. I was so young and naive back then. My husband and I had just broken up and I was angry, lost and hurt. My best friend had become a born-again Christian . I went to visit her and gave my life literally up. I am still in the anger phase of how many years I have lost by not living. I spent the next years alone raising my son. I became very active in a charismatic church and got right into the gifts of the spirit and speaking in tongues , etc. I was on fire for God and nothing would stop me. During this time though, I...

Image via Wikipedia Sent in by Trans-man I didn’t grow up in a very religious environment. My father has been an atheist for as long as I know, making fun of religion and people who believe. However, he wasn’t a good father, and not a good role model. Had he been a better role model, maybe I would have had more conversations about religion and would have never gone into a church in the first place. Truth is, I was looking for a home of sorts, where I could experience some acceptance and friendship, and unfortunately, churches are good at filling some of those needs. My mom was raised catholic in a small town, and tried holding on to her faith. The rest of my extended family, grandparents, uncles and aunts, all faithfully attend the catholic church , pray before meals, and use Bible verses as needed to prove their point. When I started going to church for a short time at 17, my mom seemed to like it, and for the next 20 something years I always saw her sadness and regret that she couldn...

By Marshall I was not brought up in a religious home. My mother and stepfather never went to church or talked about it or God from my memory. I never remember thinking about religion when I was young other than when I was with my real father on weekends. He would drop me and my sister off at a church for Sunday School class every now and then. He would drop us off and then leave and come back and get us afterward. He never went to church. I really don't know why he took us to this day. In the summertime he would take us out of state for the two weeks we spent with him. We always went to one of his brothers house. He and his wife were very religious Baptist. I remember them speaking to us about Jesus and a place called HELL. They told us about Hell and if we did not believe in Jesus we would go to this horrible place when we died. I was very young and don't think I ever really took it very serious but it was always in the back of my mind as I got older. Many years later I meet...

Sent in by Elizabeth I accidentally stumbled across this website while I was Googling the Duggar family , and I have been browsing on here for the last four hours. I am intrigued because I had no idea that so many people shared the same frustrations as I do. I was raised in a strict Church of Christ home. For those of you not familiar with the COC, it is a small denomination of Christianity primarily concentrated in the South. Each congregation is independently owned and operated. The denomination has several colleges, including Lipscomb University in Nashville and Harding University in Arkansas . Funny story about that: When I was 17 a lady at church asked me if I would be attending one of the COC colleges. I replied, "No ma'am, I'm going to a REAL college". I was never given a choice as to whether I wanted to attend church or not, and was forced to do so three times a week (plus youth group activities) until I left for college. As a child, my mom's favorite ...

Sent in by Jessica I have never sat down and actually written this in its entirety. I can imagine it to be pretty therapeutic. Anyway...here is the shortish version :) I am 18 years old and currently in my first year of university. I have been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian environment where the family's core is the bible. Everything within my parents' lives is based on 'the word of god'. My dad was an elder in the church until they made the whole family up sticks and move away in order to start a house church . The thinking behind this was stripping church back to its old testament roots. A number of other families moved away to embark upon this venture with us. Needless to say this resulted in a closed, tight, little Christian community. All my parents friends were Christians, all of my extended family were also of the faith. This way of life was completely normal to me and I was actively involved in church life. I enjoyed the social aspect of it and havin...

Sent in by Danny I don't think I've ever really sat down and wrote out the story of my deconversion. You'll have to forgive me if it comes out a bit jumbled. Like many of the stories I've read, it wasn't something that happened suddenly for me. I was a slow and arduous process. I was born into a Presbyterian family. My mother and father were very active in the church. In fact, my mother worked in the office as a secretary and taught sunday school classes. I went to church every Sunday, attended almost every church function. During the summer, I would go to Vacation Bible School , and would be at the church almost every day. My parents weren't literalists. They didn't believe, for example, that the human race had started in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. They didn't tell me this when I was young, of course. I guess they didn't want to confuse me too early. My Sunday School teachers taught us all the nice Bible stories about Moses's heroic...

Freedom by Funky64 ( www.lucarossato.com ) Sent in by Jackee Gianfelice I was brought up in a devoutly Christian household. As a child in Sunday school, I learned biblical stories (carefully selected biblical stories, to be sure) and stories about Jesus. God and Jesus were presented as loving, caring, and compassionate, with all the unsanitary parts of the bible edited out in the readings and lessons we received in church and Sunday school. Even so, I was shocked when, at the age of about seven, I was sitting with my mother in church and the pastor began his sermon by stating, "Aside from a few cranks and revisionists, the vast majority of historians and archaeologists agree that Jesus did exist." I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think Jesus was real! I thought of the bible stories as superhero tales, with the character of Jesus just that--a character, there to point up the moral of the story. I quickly looked around and was doubly shocked that a...

Sent in by Lance Let me start off by saying that I was a liberal Christian . I had gone through fundamentalist phases earlier in my 30 years as a Christian, but I moved to a somewhat liberal belief system before I ended up pitching the whole thing. I rationalized hell by saying it was only a separation from God -- whatever that meant. But I did not think it was a literal lake of fire. I believed in evolution, and reconciled it with the bible by saying that just as Jesus spoke in parables, the god of the old testament used myth to convey truth. In the same way we humans can use fiction to convey truths about the human condition. I looked at the creation story in Genesis as if it was saying something like "The world, the stars, the physical universe in total, is just stuff that god made. We should worship god and not the stuff." That was enough for me. I did not try to make sense out of the 6-day creation, and thought it foolish to even try to twist an obvious myth int...