Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I don't know if I ever believed... I can only remember so far back. I remember church and the whole god thing being a complete mystery to me. The whole 'let Jesus take you by the hand..' particularly was always a complete puzzle (but there's nobody there, and I thought he was dead). I used to wonder if anyone else believed it or was everyone hallucinating?
However I didn't consider myself atheist until recently when I gave up on trying to understand what everyone was going on about. To this day, I still don't get it.
This is the first time I'll sort of acknowledge in "public" the shame I feel for finally breaking free in my . . . late 30's . . .
I was indoctrinated from birth. In my late teens the logical conflicts of a world of what I was taught not only from family, but from classroom prayers and from society in general not adding up to the facts of the actual living world that surrounded us made me rebellious enough to stop attending church.
Oh, but I still feared damnation! LOL
I look back at its effect and frankly I can't imagine most people can understand the horror of religious indoctrination of children. It was not a matter of "believing" but a matter of "knowing" that all that B.S. was a true and right as the air I breathed and the sun above our heads. Societies surrounded in that environment, self enforcing the beliefs. It was a slavery of the mind. And oh so effective at self enforcing.
So much as looking at a "book of the devil" was a thing to fear. Reading a few pages of Nietzche's The Antichrist and seeing some sense in it would soon give rise to that self reproach "you see! It's the devil! he has a silver tongue! That's how he seduces you!" And so somewhere, somehow, while none of it made any sense, the fear of death while not in a state of "grace" remained.
Hah ... all those schools . .. those efforts by all churches to educate our children to be good citizens . . .the church of rome, evangelicals, islamic madrassas. What a very clever and insidious way to enslave the minds of the impressionable.
While religion made no sense I still feared god and damnation. How nice.
As late as my late 20's I could not understand how a person could live without believing in heaven and an afterlife . . . in the process missing the beauty of the life that IS.
It took much much later to understand the truth on my own. By the time The God Delusion came out I already knew inside - but would not dare acknowledge it out loud . . . but the clear way the book explained things allowed me to find peace, and understand that no longer believing any of that BS was OK.
Years later, while downloading free books here and there I ran into Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason." In 1793 this man was able to understand and clearly and vividly articulate the likelihood of innumerable stars, many of them with as many worlds and the mendacity of institutionalized religion in the face of the relatively basic knowledge of astronomy, history and mathematics available to him at the time. With those passages I felt free once and for all.
So much life wasted.
On a positive note, the remainder of a life in freedom is an achievement given my upbringing.
I have to say that, as a lifetimer who had it easy, relatively speaking in a country of census -Christians, I am full of amazed admiration for those in the US who were indoctrinated and brainwashed from infancy and still managed to think their way to reason on their own pretty much.
I have these thoughts too now and then, and it took me about the same number of years to pry myself loose as it took you.
But this is rather like a child bemoaning their parents or their situation in which they were raised, or some disability they have or any other challenge. Would they rather not have been born? Because the parents they had and the exact situation they were born into, made them who they are.
In retrospect, I'd rather not have been born into fundamentalism, but if I had been, and if I had managed to suffer less, and so forth ... guess what, I'd be an entirely different person. If I have any healthy love or respect for myself, I have to be grateful ultimately for what made me into what I am.
Your next victory will be to learn to live your life without any regrets. Disappointments, sure. Regrets, no.
Even I sometimes look back and wish i could do it all again say from age 15, knowing what I kow now and doing it better, much better.
But then I know this is futile and instead I am thankful for was I was able to do and am still doing, despite the disadvantages and wrong decisions.
Yes, this is a problem even if you weren't theist or otherwise disadvantaged because life is such that you make all sorts of portentous important decisions at the time you're the least experienced and the most hormone crazed and the most naive. That's a toxic combination and it's bound to result in poor outcomes if not outright setbacks. But when you realize it's the nature of the beast you can cut yourself some slack. Everyone else labors under the same disadvantages.
In a similar vein, during a period of temporary insanity I hung up my independent consulting spurs to go to work for an actual employer, almost 20 years ago now. One of the hardest things about working for most companies is that they do such self defeating, stupid things that I thought would make us look like buffoons to our customers and competitors. But then I realized that the competitors were even bigger fools than we were. Here again, everyone was laboring under the same disadvantage ... largely that we were all human and subject to human frailty, hubris, blind spots, ego attachments and all other manner of self-defeating behaviors.
This is the first time I'll sort of acknowledge in "public" the shame I feel for finally breaking free in my . . . late 30's . . .
I was indoctrinated from birth. In my late teens the logical conflicts of a world of what I was taught not only from family, but from classroom prayers and from society in general not adding up to the facts of the actual living world that surrounded us made me rebellious enough to stop attending church.
Oh, but I still feared damnation! LOL
I look back at its effect and frankly I can't imagine most people can understand the horror of religious indoctrination of children. It was not a matter of "believing" but a matter of "knowing" that all that B.S. was a true and right as the air I breathed and the sun above our heads. Societies surrounded in that environment, self enforcing the beliefs. It was a slavery of the mind. And oh so effective at self enforcing.
So much as looking at a "book of the devil" was a thing to fear. Reading a few pages of Nietzche's The Antichrist and seeing some sense in it would soon give rise to that self reproach "you see! It's the devil! he has a silver tongue! That's how he seduces you!" And so somewhere, somehow, while none of it made any sense, the fear of death while not in a state of "grace" remained.
Hah ... all those schools . .. those efforts by all churches to educate our children to be good citizens . . .the church of rome, evangelicals, islamic madrassas. What a very clever and insidious way to enslave the minds of the impressionable.
While religion made no sense I still feared god and damnation. How nice.
As late as my late 20's I could not understand how a person could live without believing in heaven and an afterlife . . . in the process missing the beauty of the life that IS.
It took much much later to understand the truth on my own. By the time The God Delusion came out I already knew inside - but would not dare acknowledge it out loud . . . but the clear way the book explained things allowed me to find peace, and understand that no longer believing any of that BS was OK.
Years later, while downloading free books here and there I ran into Thomas Paine's "The Age of Reason." In 1793 this man was able to understand and clearly and vividly articulate the likelihood of innumerable stars, many of them with as many worlds and the mendacity of institutionalized religion in the face of the relatively basic knowledge of astronomy, history and mathematics available to him at the time. With those passages I felt free once and for all.
So much life wasted.
On a positive note, the remainder of a life in freedom is an achievement given my upbringing.
how the heck could you be ashamed? You actually didn't believe, but you still thought there was a hell? really? what did your parents teach you? I blame them really. My parents were catholic. They indoctrinated me into using what you have to make the best possible choices. "free", not so sure we ever are "free" from ourselves.
I wasn't born into a religious family and the first I heard about it was from a friend in elementary school who tried to explain what a "soul" was. I didn't get it then and still don't, 50 years later. I did learn ALL ABOUT religion though and ended up being really good at faking/fitting in when I was a teen due to me being involved in a youth group and Christian school. No reason, it's just where I ended up due to flukes of nature.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
How old were you?
To this day, I still don't get it.
