Sent in by Trudy H I am beginning a journey to find truth. The problem with religion, all religions, including Christianity, is the belief theat they have all the answers. The truth is, no one can ever have all the answers. We are all on a journey to find truth. As soon as you become part of a religion you get a "package of beliefs," and you no longer need to search for truth or answers: You are right and everyone else is wrong. Anything that stops you from thinking, growing, searching is not beneficial. Truth should cause you to open up, not close up. People come to church for friendship, fellowship, comfort, etc. which are good things to find, but it is a high price to pay if you no longer are able to challenge beliefs or search for truth. Thank-you God for opening my mind. Help me to continue to search for truth. I wrote this yesterday while sitting in my church. I have just started on this journey. I was raised in a good Christian home. It is hard for me to th...

Sent in by Lance K So I'm done with Christianity, but I have a question that I need your help with. I could give you all my reasons, but as I read the other testimonies here, my own issues resonate well with them. And really, my reasons for leaving are not why I need help. A quick but not complete summary of my reasons would be that I find atheists can have more integrity, tolerance and love than Bible believing Christians, that the search for truth has shown me that Christianity does not have it, that the god of the Old Testament is quite an A-hole, the ugly history of the church - especially the support of slavery in the US, the Christian right-wing and their hatred of gays, and of course that listening to the creation/evolution debate made me realize these people are simply not honest with themselves. So now for my question. I am 45 years old and have a great wife and three kids who are not quite with me on this whole adventure. I'm in the middle of pulling the family...

Sent in by AJ Names changed for anonymity This moment of decision was triggered by my conversation with Ryan at Erica's wedding. He was trying to pull me back into the "fold." But, the more I look, think, read, and talk, the more I am pushed away from faith. I even finally admitted to my parents last night that I don't have a clue. Their answers weren't very satisfying. They've closed their minds to make themselves happy. Their opinions and rationalizations seem senseless and misguided. They are robots, controlled and blinded by their faith. Which is sad, because they will not open their minds and really listen to what I say, instead they reply with the pre-packaged Christianese answers I rejected many months ago. After Ryan's urging, I decided that it would be a good thing to go to Great Big Church with my roommates. Hurray! All the roommates go to the same church. How harmonious! The sermon was on the "peril of falling away." AKA, you cannot le...

The first part of my life was a blur with only a few memories that stood out. I do remember going to church with my grandmother and wondering why people were kneeling in front of the bench with their heads down and looking very grim. As I grew older, my mother and step-dad didn't go to church and neither did me and my brother. I don't think we (my brother and I) cared about going to church, except to make my grandmother happy. She would say, "Are you boys going to church with me today? I sure would be glad to have somebody come along. I think you boys need to go, wanna come with me?" Something like that. Anyway, it was like that for most of my life and I wondered why people believed in god. I could believe that Jesus was real because I knew that there were stories about people in history and how great they were, so, I thought it was pretty much the same thing. A history lesson. For the most part, I thought I was doing the right thing to believe in god and hi...

Sent in by Troy W. My backstory as a Christian is probably not too unique or interesting. Although when I was 'walking away' I felt very isolated and thought I was the only one who had ever gone through it. I later found out how wrong that was. I was from a non-religious family and 'got saved' in 1984 at 13 years old when a travelling group of musicians came through my school and kicked up some religious fervour. I was later recruited into an Australian Pentecostal cult known as the Revival Centres International. They are somewhat similar in belief to the United Pentecostal Church. At 17 I left that group, rather I was kicked out for a time for having premarital sex once (yes, once), but I took it as a chance to leave and so never went back. After a few years of avoiding religion and getting right into the thriving nightlife of my city, my religious guilt and fear of Hell and the devil caught up with me and I eventually joined the more mainstream Assemblies of God in Au...

Sent in by Daniel P We all define our gods through our own beliefs. Usually we are given our spiritual identity by our parents based upon there belief system or religion. This is how I received mine, and for a long time, I defined my god with these teachings. My view of life and the supernatural were shaped by an early indoctrination into my parent’s system of religion. As time passed and my experiences with the world grew, I began to question some of those teachings. The questions that arose surfaced in different forms, but the underlying basis for these questions rested on a conflict that stemmed from the increasing disparity between what was my experienced reality and those early religious teachings. Why do people believe in a god? What evidence is there that a god even exists? These questions and more have plagued my mind through most of my adult life. The lines of demarcation between two foes, Religion and Reality, were drawn years ago. A conflict slowly arose between my ...

Sent in by Larry M. My goodness - am I ever glad to have found this site! I cannot say how much the comfort in reading others feelings/stories has helped me in my journey .. but first - some context: I am from Canada - the Fraser Valley in B.C. to be exact. I was born in 1968 into a Christian family - Mennonite to be exact: If you aren't familiar with the Mennonite people, you might have a look at - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mennonite for a quick synopsis. The Mennonite people are pretty pacifistic, and refuse to go to war for that reason. I think this led to a lot of confusion when I saw my American Christian neighbors forming what they called "God's Army" as a teen. Violence really didn't make much sense in my neck of the woods. Anyways, my parents became disillusioned in the 70's and stopped attending church altogether. I noticed that they were reading many psychological texts of the time - incl Carl Jung - and this led them finding an old church friend...

Sent in by Keith P. I grew up in fundamentalist Christian circles in the 1970s and 1980s. Raised in Lynchburg, Virginia, my parents had been friends with the Rev. Jerry Falwell early in his career, when he was still just an ambitious local minister, but they eventually left the Independent Baptist denomination Falwell was associated with and converted to Orthodox Presbyterianism (Calvinism). As a kid, I attended the Calvinist church with my family every week, while attending private Christian schools run by the Baptists. Early on, I noticed the doctrinal discrepancies between the two on such matters as free will vs. predestination, eschatology and other things. Obviously, both points of view couldn't be right, yet both groups claimed to possess the absolute truth on everything. At least some of them were wrong some of the time. I began to wonder what else they might be wrong about. I first began have serious doubts about Christianity during my final two years at the Christian hi...

Sent in by Mandy First, let me say I hope there is no word limit to this. Secondly, that my testimony is a bit different from others I have read on this website. I don’t come from a fundamentalist or evangelical background and no life shattering tragedy tested my faith and found it wanting. I grew up in rural Australia- while church was a focus of much of the charity work and social life of my home town, it was never hard-line: we were taught evolution in my tiny school, and all the local men, even the most “pious”, drank too much at the pub on a Friday night. My family were members of the Anglican Church. My mother was head of the Young Women’s Association, my father was heavily involved with working with the “at risk” teenagers. I went to church and Sunday school, knelt when told to, sang the boring hymns that were easy for the elderly women to sing along to with their shrill voices. I said grace at dinner, prayed before going to bed that god would keep my soul. If I’m honest, I d...