'Ex Christians' who are now atheists, did you ever truly believe in God?

In retrospect, no, I never really believed.

To the best of my ability, yes I did. I was born into a Christian family and studied the Bible for until my early teens, and I thought it was the truth. I didn't see anything wrong with it, my parents and older sister considered it fact, and most of my friends were in church so they also considered it true. I prayed often and legitimately thought at times that there was something out there that was listening to me, and I assumed this was the God I believed in.

I started questioning my faith when I moved to a different state and had an entirely new set of friends in high school. After a while, I decided to become agnostic as I felt I didn't know what to believe and that I couldn't really find out. After that I eventually became atheist as I studied religion more and more and saw its effect on people. As for my imagination as a kid, I look back and wonder why I was so willing to credit an emotional feeling to God, when I can get the same feeling of comfort from another perceived source of love. The reason I will never accept religion again is simply because I know Christianity far too well, and the people I know who have matured in their faith willingly admit that all they have is faith, nothing more. Religion itself becomes very obviously man-made when it tries to become anything more than simple belief without evidence.

I did. But as time passed, it became harder and harder to do at the face of growing skepticism. I dropped Christianity mid-high school and became an atheist in college.

It suppose it is a bit of a jump, which is why for me it was a process that took a while. I spent a lot of time trying to believe when every gut in my body told me otherwise. I spent a lot of time attempting to separate what I actually thought and what the research I was doing said from what I had been told and was still being told. It took a while. Although, it's only one god less then the thousands of others I hadn't believe in before.

It had nothing to do with rebellion, wanting to live an "evil lifestyle", or hitting a rough spot. And I wouldn't call becoming an atheist "turning on god" seeing that atheists don't believe that god exists. Don't confuse atheism with maltheism.

Did you strongly believe in Santa as a child? How did you go from strongly believing in Santa to non belief? Some people figure it out on their own. I guess it's a similar process.

I absolutely believed in God. If I had not, I would not have considered myself Christian. I worked for the Southern Baptist conference center in Glorieta. I did missionary volunteering on a reservation and with impoverished children in my town. I even interned with my youth minister. When none of the other teens would volunteer to take the younger girls to church camp as a councilor, they could always call on me.

I did look at all sorts of religions when I realized the Christian religion was based on other older religions and that Jesus's story was not unique. I knew that version of god was barbaric and irrational, but I hoped another would be better. I was Pagan for a few years as I explored the idea of all gods being one god.

Then I realized that there was no evidence for any god at all and that the universe needed no gods.

As a child I was raised to believe there MUST be a god. That is called childhood indoctrination and it took many years of study and thought combined with time to mature and grow before I was able to shake it off and free my mind.

EDIT: If you were not indoctrinated by your parents or society, then what possible reason can you give for belieivng in the Bible God? You've admitted that the Bible contains errors and was written by men. So your faith cannot be based on the Bible. So why believe in this invisible man in the sky?

A lot of you seem to assume that most Christians are conditioned or forced, brainwashed, whatever into believing which simply isn't true. Personally, I wasn't.

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Well as far as I am concerned, I was not offered any alternatives to being Catholic. It never even occurred to me that I could question my faith until I flew from the coop. In that sense I did indeed truly believe.

I'm pretty sure that you are the exception to rule if you weren't brought up in a Christian environment and found god on your own. Typically, religion is inherited from your parents and very few people change faith as they grow older which leads to the conclusion that you are trained to believe what you believe. No coercion is needed if someone is trained to believe at an early age that religion is so sacred that it should not be questioned.

Coercion is quite rampant however. My son is 8 years old and several of his friends have already told him that hell is for the people who do not believe. This should give you an idea of the mindset of their parents, most of whom are not anywhere near what I would consider religious fundmentalists.

I have no proof to back that up, but I strongly believe that most kids raised in a secular environment will not feel the need to turn to any religion as they get older.

As far as the reason why I stopped believing, I will give you the answer you have probably heard a million times. We have not a single shred of evidence that there is a higher power or that one is needed for humans to behave like... well humans. We certainly have a lot of unanswered questions which in time I believe will be resolved, the way many century old questions have been resolved in recent history thanks in large part to science.

The bible as you said was written by men. It is a document written to help humans deal with two things:

* Insecurity. People fear that if no one is watching and that there is no retribution in the after-life for the sinners, chaos will ensue. We have no proof of that and for a good read on ethics from an atheist's point of view, I suggest you google "the ineffable carrot and the infinite stick".

* Coping with death. People cannot accept that the after life is a void. That we are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that we will quickly be forgotten by the generation that follows our grand-children. People also have an irrational need to be re-united with their loved ones after death. It is a laudable thought and certainly sounds good, but again we have no proof of it and there aren't any rational reasons to believe that it happens.

Once you accept the idea that there is no after-life, you also realize that you will not "need" to be re-united. You also realize that you should live your current life to the fullest and that you should tell/show everyone you care for that you love them.

I truly believed in God. I even went to a Bible college to study for the ministry.

In my case you're right. My "deconversion" happened over a period of years, and I tried to hold onto as much of it as I could. I went from conservative Christian to a mainstream and then a liberal Christian; I dabbled in some New-Age woo where Jesus was some sort of positive energy, and then spent several years calling myself an agnostic while saying nice things about Christianity. For me, the step to atheism was the next step in a journey, acknowledging that the question doesn't even really mean anything to me anymore.

It wasn't easy, and it wasn't quick. Yes, I believed in the Christian god for the vast majority of my life, in salvation through the grace of Christ (not through works), all that jazz.

Reading the Bible (all of it) was merely the first step on the long road that eventually led me to completely dismiss first Christianity, then later theism altogether.

Eventually, I came to realise that there was no difference between a god for which there is no evidence, who does nothing, and certainly had nothing to do with any of the so-called "holy" books, and one that simply didn't exist.

Well If I didn't truly believe it's not easy to see how any Christian can be sure they do.

You didn't get more serious than me. Professing, active, committed: any internal or external evidence you might cite applied to me too, twenty years ago.

" how does one believe strongly in God at one time, and then come to reject him and the possibilities of any other gods also so quickly? "

It wasn't quick. It took about five years of solid work to consider the alternatives,

And it started with a question of truth, and a verse of the bible.

"... for we who teach will be judged with greater strictness"

Out of the varied doctrines of the branches of Christianity, which should I be teaching?

It was going deeper into the bible, its history and that of the Christian church I discovered that what I had been led to believe, the Christian message that I had accepted believed and lived for many years, was not at core what it proclaimed itself to be.

I even did two courses on liberal theology, to see if there was something in that approach, non-instinctive though it was to me personally.

If you start on the "bible with errors" line lots of epistemological and subjective assessment difficulties arise, on top of the purely theological ones.

Other theistic positions did also come in for consideration, later on.

But for someone who was "real" enough in belief to have applied for a missionary post in Afghanistan in the 1980's (I wasn't rejected or accepted: the mission had to close) it was just a matter of following the truth where it appeared to lead.

Yep, I really believed.

Being convinced not to believe wasn't easy at all. It took years of reading the Bible and going to church twice a week before the last bits of belief were finally crushed out of me. Only constant exposure to all the absurd and contradictory things going on in front of my eyes (and written in the Bible) made it possible for me to make the leap to unbelief.

I'm living proof that the "No True Christian" argument is a fallacy. (It's the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, in fact.)

Who ever said that it was easy?

It was simply a process of comparing what religion said about how the world worked with the real thing. The hard part was accepting that what I wanted to be true wasn't. Research and learning followed not long after.

I don't know if you'd call me an atheist. I don't believe anything I've heard about the topic of God to be accurate, but I'll admit that whatever knowable knowledge about God there is, is unknown to me.

However, I used to be a devout Christian. I believed very strongly and I lived it and in a very large way I devoted myself to it. But one day I realized there was no wizard behind the curtain.

It's like when you watch a really good magician. I don't know how he did that, but I know better than to believe it's magic.

What I'm saying is, you don't have to know what it is to know what it's not.