sent in by Carol Hi, Good People, I have enjoyed reading through much of this site and occasionally commenting for some time now and even though I really don't have much of a testimony, I thought I should post anyhow. I was born into the catholic church and baptised. My Dad was and is non religious, but had to become a catholic to marry Mom. He didn't really swallow it and only went to church once in a while, when Mom dragged him on holidays. I remember being really young, 7-8 or so but maybe younger, and sitting in church feeling very much like there was absolutely nothing "there." I felt bad and sad and really tried to feel something because I didn't want to go to hell. So I played along out of fear. Also due to a slight hope that there might be a god to take care of me and help out once in a while. As I got older I gradually grew further and further away from "belief" and as soon as I got old enough, I quit going to church. I have not been totally fre...

sent in by Tyler deren Nine months ago I began to see the huge holes in the bible. I was a devoted Christian, and I even preached for 2 years. It was this that lead to my discovery of small mistakes and contradictions in the bible. That in turn lead to my mind opening up to the possibility that the bible was full of myths and lies. Once I began to read and study peoples works like Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll the blinders came off and I have never looked back. I have the greatest feeling of peace. I have never been so happy with my life and myself. I no longer look at myself as a hopeless sinner destined for hell because I can't stop getting mad when someone cuts me off in traffic or stop saying shit. I was in such a huge depression that had lasted three years on and off, mostly off toward the end. Then my eyes were opened and now once again I like myself, life, other people, and have become ten times more environmentally conscious. I really love this web site. Keep on spreadi...

sent in by Chris I was born and raised in rural PA, USA. My upbringing was pretty nondescript spiritually; I went to Catholic school and Catholic church every Sunday and viewed god as sort of a Santa Claus in the sky. When I was about 11 or 12, my mom was "born again" and went off the deep end. Sermons were always blasting on the radio, and she developed an obsession with the End Times, devouring every Hal Lindsey book she could get her hands on. She was truly convinced that Jesus was coming back at any moment. She'd corner me every time some wingnut cult came out with a "calculation" that the world would end within the week, and tell me to pray and prepare. I lived most of my adolescence truly believing that it would all be over any minute, certainly long before I reached adulthood. Needless to say, this made me angry and depressed -- I had hopes and dreams for the future that I'd never realize because god was going to pluck me from my short life with...

sent in by Dulce It all started out when I met the man of my dreams. We dated only briefly before we were married. I knew he was raised Pentecostal, but having never been to church or raised religious, I really didn't understand the implications of it all. For those of you that don't know, Pentecostalism is an abusive, cult-like religion. Well, I didn't know. What I did know was that me going to this church made my fiance and his entire family so happy they practically cried with joy for the first year. But let me tell you something, after I said "I do", everything changed. Out went the pants, only dresses was I to wear now. I had to stop cutting my hair and absolutely no more make up. After all, that's how God wants it, I was told. So, I thought, O.K., I can do this. After all, I love my husband. Well, I tried and tried and no matter what I did, no matter how long I fasted or how long I prayed, I just didn't get their doctrine. I guess the hard...

sent in by anonymous I was born into the Seventh Day Baptist church, but spent most of my life as an Adventist. There were a few major points on the road to de-conversion. I'll list them, rather than give a whole narrative. 1) Sexually molested at the age of 8 in the church building by a boy and a girl 1b) Baptised into Adventist church at age of 11 2) Began to compare creation and evolution at the age of 13. I couldn't quite believe the story about God putting dinosar bones into the earth to test our faith. 3) Temporary spiritual revival at 14 as I assumed greater duties as an executive member of my church's youth group 4) At 15 I had a brief liaison with a married man, the teacher of my class in Sabbath school, and a friend of my mother's. It consisted of him insisting he was in love with me and would eventually divorce his then-pregnant wife, and me trying desperately to discourage him and keep the whole thing secret. 5) At 16 Married man's wife confronted me wi...

sent in by Momo I was raised a Christian, but even from an age when I didn't even have developed analytical thinking skills, there were so many things about Christianity that didn't add up. When I asked the adults, they couldn't explain anything to me without using circular logic or saying "the lord works in mysterious ways." When I was 12, I went through a major depressive period because I thought I was going to hell because I thought somehow I'd accidentally sold my soul to the devil. That's so embarassing to look back on now, but at the time I wanted to kill myself. Only problem was, if I killed myself, that would make my descent into hell that much faster. I came to the conclusion that there IS no Satan. Evil is not an external force that coaxes us into doing wicked deeds. The only Satan that exists is inside all of us. It occurred to me that the belief in Satan causes us to not take responsibility for our own evil actions. After that revelation,...

sent in by Andrew Hi all Hows it going? I am new to this group My spirtual story so far in life is as follows , I was brought up in an interdenomational (one with baptist , methodist , anglican etc) church and made a commitment to Christ at the age of 10 at an evangalistic rally. For the next 4 years or so I just went to church on sundays and that was about it. When I was about 14 years old one of the sunday school teachers told me there was church and they prayed for people and they were touched powerfully with the power of God , some people shook and some people fell over and some people laughed and cryed and she asked if I wanted to come So I went to this church with the sunday school teacher that evening They prayed for me and I was powerfully touched with the power of God and I fell on the floor shaking. Previous to this I had been listening to just non Christian music but from the next day on I started to listen to the Christian radio station and I begain to be really full on for...

sent in by GuitarHound Hello to all, Forgive my grammerand punctuation, I'm not eloquent in writing, but eloquent in speech. First off, I stumbled on this site doing a search on Dan Barker and found the link for his debate with Jason whatshis face. Anyway, I find some of the terstimonies posted here as hilarious...you guys rock!!! Well I guess I'll let ya'll know a little about myself. I became a Born-Again believer at age 21 and joined a Non- denominational Church basically in a quest for truth and the meaning of life. I went through the basic training all of us get...I remember before joining the church, I had a Humanities course in college and the Professor was doing a study on the Book of Job. He told us we all needed to bring a Bible to class at the next meeting so we could study the story. We studied the story and yes I knew that the Christian God had made a "Deal" with the Devil over Job's Life...amazingly, I rationalized it away as be...

sent in by Rocky I'll start by saying hello-been lurking on this site for several months and I'm impressed by most of the intelligence expressed here. Before I cover my background, I'll tell you why I'm here and why I'm so PISSED! I live in a city which has taken yet another ridiculous religious grandstand-a "creation" exhibit at the Tulsa Zoo. Funded by, you guessed it, TAXPAYER DOLLARS. Apparently the mastermind behind this decided that the elephant exhibit is representational of the Hindu faith and therefore this brainiac, who can't separate fact from myth, wants his faith represented too. It's clearly a cultural exhibit, but try telling that to anyone who thinks the earth is only a few thousand years old. What's worse, OUR MAYOR VOTED FOR IT, making us the laughingstock of the nation. If any of you live in Tulsa, please sign the petition to reverse this decision. I always liked the zoo-shame I'm going to have to boycott ...

sent in by The MadBuni I found your website a few months ago and subscribed to the posts, now I am addicted to getting my emails as soon as I get home from work to find out the latest topic of discussion. I knew all the sane people were hiding somewhere and I just found them! What a relief! I rarely have enough time to stay online long enough to post anything, because my husband breathes down my neck when I am typing messages, he thinks I’m having an internet affair if I spend any time on the computer, but he is computer illiterate. He is also what I fondly refer to as a PIMA (pain in my ass). I love him, hell we’ve been together since 1967, I just can’t stand to live with him most of the time. Our son says we should have divorced long ago. Why don’t I leave? I love to spend money, and two incomes are better than one. He pretty much feels the same way, besides, it’s way too much trouble and effort to get a divorce. Ok, I know that sounds really awful, but I have to get one thing ...

sent in by Jennifer To begin with, I started dating my boyfriend(who is now my husband) when I was 16. His family is very religious and they don't believe that it's a good idea for anyone of differing religious views to be together. My family for the most part let me and my brother choose what we want to believe in. I guess you could say I was open to Christianity and liked what I heard. So at the age of 16 I accecpted Christ. At no point after I accepted Christ did I feel different, or did I necessarily stop making wrong decisions. I never really expected to. While following Christ, I felt restricted. My morals did not get better or worse after becoming a Christian. So now at 24, I chose to become an atheist. Suprisingly, there wasn't a major event in my life that changed my viewpoint, I only went back to what my parents taught me. That is to be true to myself, find what it is that I believe in, and be open to all religious possiblities, whether I choose a reli...

sent in by Joe I was raised in an Assemblies of God church in upstate NY since I was born. My parents are devout born-again Christians and have forced…um...highly encouraged me to attend all services (negatively termed indoctrination sessions) and to live my life for Christ until I finally moved out of the house. I can remember when I was a young boy and had asked my father if he also had a stomach ache every time we went to church. It never felt comfortable for me there but all I knew was to obey my parents and do as I was told. I loved and trusted my parents and wanted to please them very much. I honestly believed in everything that was taught to me and was a self-proclaimed Christian by age 4. In 1989 (Age 9), I remember a member of the church coming down to teach our children’s church. Her goal was to have all of us young kids speak in unknown tongues and be “slain in the spirit” aka "baptized by the holy ghost". As a young boy, I was very confused by this and it didn’t s...

sent in by Chuck S. My name is Chuck S. and at the age of 23 I became a Christian out of a sense of hopelessness in life and a fear of death. Though I was young I had bouts of depression mainly because of drug and alcohol use that left me in morbid states of mind and I turned to Jesus as a means to eternal life and to reach peace of mind in this life. I started out with a small Baptist group in Baltimore Maryland where I graduated from college and from there joined another Baptist group in northern Virginia near Washington D.C. when I moved down to the D.C. area for a job as a stock broker. As any Christian, my faith in the begining was enthusiastic and exciting. I was introduced to some very nice people and I acquired some hope and a reason to live. However as the years went by I found my state of mind to become even far worse that it was before I became a Christian even though I had stopped drugs and alcohol. When I read the Bible I believed it to be literally true and I found myself...

sent in by Claywise My story is frankly a lot less fascinating than that of many posters here. But I have finally decided to lay it out. We went to Catholic Church when I was a kid. I went to CCD -- got in trouble once for swiping unconsecrated Communion hosts with a friend! -- but my father was more or less an agnostic who had himself thrown off his Catholic straightjacket and only went to church on holidays to please my mother. My mom was never a radical, or hard core, but she went to church because, well, that's what nice American families did. I hardly remember what I was taught in church as a young person, or in CCD (what we used to call "catechism"). But somewhere along the way, I developed some pretty messed up notions: Humans are, by design, flawed and pretty rotten; sex is repulsive and wrong; to even question the tenets of the Church is to condemn oneself to eternal punishment. In short, I came away from my early experience with a lot of fear and self-hatred. Wh...

sent in by Red De-conversion 1. My parents were “born again” when I was five years old. They quickly became zealots. They used our house for church gatherings and backyard bible study. People were constantly coming and going. My parents became extremely active in their zealotry, witnessing door to door and going to church three times a week This was the mid-seventies and I have nostalgic memories of the long-haired Jesus freaks coming over with their sandals and guitars. At this age I picked up and filtered the messages I was hearing at church: we are the best church, we are saved and others are not, we are good and they are bad. I was five when I formally accepted Jesus Christ into my heart. In elementary school, I was an active crusader, genuinely concerned about my schoolmates’ souls. When I was about seven, my dad and two other guys from our church broke off and founded their own church, which rented out a space at a private school. It was exciting to me. After intense w...

sent in by Chris I thought that I had posted this once before, but could never find it when I looked. So if this is a repeat, forgive me. I was, unfortunately, born into a family with a very typical southern attitude toward religion. What might that attitude be? Well, in my experience, that attitude is that Christianity offers the only answers to the mysteries of life; we as humans are simply unable to understand those mysteries and should therefore simply accept Christianity without question, bathing in the opulent light and love of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Well, as Penn and Teller so eloquently put it on their Showtime program, “Humbug!” Again unfortunately, I was forced into this mindset at a very young age. I suppose you could say that my programming began at birth. My mother and father were both born in the south, my mother in Florida, my father in Alabama. My mother’s family was also native to Alabama, and to top it off, came from one of the small towns in the “mountains...

sent in by Richard Moore My name is Richard Moore and I am thankfully an ex Christian. I was raised in the very fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. When I was too young to walk to Church, I was carried. There followed many years of Sunday School, worship service, vacation Bible schools, and summer youth camps. The pressure to believe is intense, and I was baptized at about the age of twelve. Christians must believe blindly and have faith without proof and doubts must be suppressed. Of course a single doubt or the wrong question can destroy the Christian programming. About the age of sixteen I started asking the hard questions. For example, Adam and Eve had two children, Cain and Abel. Cain killed Abel and was banished to another country where he took himself a wife. Since the Bible says that only Adam, Eve, and Cain were alive, how could there be another country from which he could take a wife? I found out that my church leaders didn’t like being asked the hard questi...

sent in by Tyson Wow! Where do I even start? I want to try to make this as short as possible if I can. Ok, I was born on St. Thomas United States Virgin Islands and raised 150 miles southeast on an island known as St. Kitts (Christopher). From the time I knew myself, I was going to church because I went to St. Kitts when I was 6 months old. My grandmother raised me Catholic and you guys have got to realize that 30 years ago, the Caribbean was a bastion of Christianity of all types of faith. Slavery's legacy of learning the religion of the slavemaster for 400 years was deeply entrenched. I don't even remember Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, Wiccans or Hindus in the community much less the island. You were either Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Moravian, Baptist or Pentecostal. In fact, considering this was back in the mid to late 60s, we had no television at the time and all my grandmother did was have her radio locked on a Christian station 24/7/365. The radio was NEVER off s...

sent in by John Blatt My name is John Blatt and I am an ex-christian. The process of leaving christianity took a good two years, but now I am finally free from that fear and guilt-based Cult. Fundamentalist Christianity is literally a destructive mind-control cult and the bible is primarily a series of psychological documents. It took many years to finally come to see this reality, because I didn't want it to be so. No one in the Cult can see with straight vision, thus, the more devoted and zealous one is for christianity the more blind they are to its psychological and spiritual destruction and control. I became a born-again christian at the age of twenty while I was in the U.S. Air Force in May of 1992. It was a powerful and moving experience and it did effect me deeply, changing me overnight. Before this, I had simply adopted my mothers metaphysical beliefs and so I had no true belief in anything that was really my own. Since the day that I had been "born-again" I...