Were you ever a believer? Do you know what it's like to believe? (Christ, choice)
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I don't know what it is like believing in a God. I was raised as a non religious Jew in a small prairie town where most of my friends went to church however they never displayed any difference from non believe on an everyday basics
So not only dI'd i hever beleven but reLigon was never a real factor in mY life, other tHan the Catholic prest coached baseball and hockey..
I did too but then tried to make it work for a few years until I was a teen. But the question isn't really about when did you stop believing bragging rights.
... OK, but can I ask what is the question? The OP contains four declarative statements, but I didn't see anything begging a response.
Assuming the questions were in the thread title, I suspect the answer for most of the non-believers will be some variation of "Yes, I believed for awhile, until I stopped" (and here's why, etc, etc). Or is the question, did we ever REALLY believe as adults, beyond what we were spoonfed as children?
Last edited by HeelaMonster; 06-03-2019 at 01:38 PM..
My transition from believer to non believer took place in my 15th year. I can recall aspects of being a believer, such as comparing how hard I struck my breast during the Sanctus Sanctus prayer to how hard others were doing it. I felt that I was somehow or other holier than those who were just going through the motions with light pats. I do not have a memory of of actual belief, rather of trust in what the adults had always told me.
That is why when I ceased believing, there was initially anger on my part that I had been deceived by all these people I trusted....or used to trust I should say. The experience made we wary of all adult authority, as in "If they lied to me about something this big, what else are they lying to me about?"
I recall the prime question in my mind at that point being "If I was able to figure out that this religious stuff is bogus, how is it that all these adults, more mature, more experienced than me, have apparently been unable to figure it out?"
I was never an adult believer, so my memory of belief is the same as my memory of anything in my childhood which I didn't understand yet. As soon as I developed the ability to scrutinize what I was being told, I started scrutinizing everything and everyone.
I was raised Catholic and as ayoung teen figured out God was not likely to be real. It was no big deal,no trauma, no problem of any kind. To this day I remain a cultural Catholic and even go to mass quite often. Whether God is real or not is a moot point for me. I tell my kids to be like Jordan Peterson: "Act as if God is real".
FWIW I was raised religious and as a child naturally believed what I'd been told. I know from the inside looking out what it is like to believe through most of childhood into teen years. I looked back and could tell I had psyched myself out into believing things that are not so. I know that religious people do that but suspect many can't or don't want to admit it to themselves.
There are degrees of belief, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "believer" and "believer" isn't really well-defined.
I was raised Romanian Orthodox, but there weren't any Romanians here, so no church. There was a Greek Orthodox Church and we went there, but it was a bit of a haul. That was before I-74 and I-275 were built, so we had to drive through back-roads to get there and it was about 35-40 minutes, even though we were in the same county.
There was a Romanian Orthodox Church in Indiana, and we'd go there on major holidays. Even though it was farther away, it didn't take all that long to get there, since we could go up SR 128 or I-75 to I-70 into Indiana then zip up a US route.
You have the neighbors and others, like PTA members, you know, the "We never see you in church" crowd and I think they were kind of horrified, because they didn't know what "Orthodox" was.
We went to Sunday school at a Methodist church for a while to keep up appearances, and then to a Catholic church.
There was God, and Jesus, and Christ and I wasn't exactly clear they were the same thing, and I thought for a long time Yahweh was actually another god and Jesus died for our sins, yada, yada, and that's pretty much the extent of my belief.
I was too busy in high school with band, football, swimming, tennis, track, plays, the variety show and such, and then I got a job at Wendy's and our band started playing out at clubs, so I just didn't have the time.
Actually, the next time I ever set foot in a church was the Marienkirche in East Berlin. A few years later, I was in Romania, so I went to church, because I'd never actually been in a "real" Romanian Orthodox Church before and it was in walking distance from the embassy compound and 'I had weekends off, so what the hell.
Later, after leaving the military, I got conned into going to a bible "study" group, which was nonsense, because they didn't study crap. So I did my own study, which was very methodical, and I realized that stuff wasn't worth the paper it was written on.
At that point, I was pretty much agnostic.
If there was a god, it most certainly wasn't the abomination in the Judeo-christian texts.
Then, I got into mythology and realized the Hebrew texts were just differently twisted versions of much, much older stories, and seeing how everyone everywhere had their own version of things, it was all made up to make people feel better.
That's when I became an atheist.
In the years since, nothing but mountains of evidence refuting any possibly of a god-thing.
Never. I was subjected to Cultural Christianity and religious indoctrination at the state level and through evangelism later on. Neither of them worked. The first was simply ineffective - like joining a club and getting bored with it.
The second of these was more effective (it's designed to be) but some validating checks showed that they were wrong in so many things. Their claims lost credibility.
So, I've never been a religious believer so I don't know what that's like, but I have "believed" (bought into) some things - like at one time the belief that the crucifixion was a fairly reliable account. I eventually had to give that up, though I still think that it happened. You can call that 'belief' but of course it isn't a religious one.
FWIW I was raised religious and as a child naturally believed what I'd been told. I know from the inside looking out what it is like to believe through most of childhood into teen years. I looked back and could tell I had psyched myself out into believing things that are not so. I know that religious people do that but suspect many can't or don't want to admit it to themselves.
Oh yes, definitely. Was a believer from just short of age 6 to about age 36 actually. Thirty years of experience believing, 26 years of experience letting go of beliefs and illusions and dealing in something more resembling actual reality.
I would be unsurprised to find that most of us here are former believers, the main variation being when (and how decisively) our BS detectors went off.
I don't really know. I've always been kind of angry and sceptical. Mother issues. I remember walking home with her when I was little (younger than five) and thinking, as soon as I'm 18, I'm leaving. She was always spouting religious nonsense and it got on my nerves. My poor mother.
Last edited by KaraZetterberg153; 06-04-2019 at 03:02 PM..
Worth a re- read. If i may quote from it without infringing copyright..
"Too many people’s thinking is along the lines of I don’t know, I can’t understand, therefore it must be...insert belief of choice. I blame this on our educations, that schools do not produce critical thinkers, just consensus memory. We never were taught how to distinguish knowledge from belief and what is the correct place for each."
Nails it.
Nobody can believe in a particular religion without simply ignoring other religions, believing on Faith (which is simply being accustomed to what they were taught as kids and confirmed by everyone around them) that their religion is true, or, more probably, never even thinking about the others.
It's true of course that the religions of the book have an advantage as they have a grounding in historical events that the others (apart from Buddhism, somewhat) don't have. It's why the debate about the Bible is ongoing and so important. The evidence we have now shifts the weight of credibility from 'well we might doubt the trumpets and walls collapsing (1), but the event must be true." to "It now looks like a total fiction."
It's as serious as that for anyone who is either not blinded by faith or simply doesn't care and lets religion get away with whatever it likes.
(1) even I could come up with an apologetic of Hebrew sappers undermining the walls and (on a signal from the shofars) the supports were fired causing a collapse and a breach.
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