Sent in by Bryce After a couple of weeks of browsing this site and after agonizing over this issue on and off for the last few years, with the most recent being the last couple of months, I've decided to accept the fact that I'm not a Christian. My story: I grew up in more or less a religious family overall. In my immediate family my mom was religious and my dad wasn't and this would sometimes cause an issue when mom wanted to take me to church and my dad didn't agree with her forcing me to go. Anyways, eventually my parents split, and I stayed with my mom. They got back together for a while, and my dad did started getting into church and all, but it didn't last and they finally split for good. Being that I lived with my mom and had minimal contact with dad, coupled with the fact that my mom was absolutely devastated by the break up, she became EXTREMELY devout with her faith and believed that the reason my dad left/cheated was b/c "God was removing the very th...

Sent in by Awlheart I was always a very religious person. I was born into a Sicilian-Catholic family. I went to Catholic school and was the kid that always had questions on religion because so much of it didn't make sense. But I was brainwashed very well and bought into it 100%. Then the teen years hit. I met this wonderful Southern Baptist boy at 15. He brought me to his church. I loved it, but now more questions came up. How come his church puts down what my church believes in? Why do we have different beliefs? So I begin bible study with a friend who is Evangelical Christian. She teaches me so much and shows me all the great things God does and all the things I need to do to go to heaven. All these years of being a Catholic I thought I was going to heaven if I was good, then I learn it has nothing to do with being good, it has to do with saying a prayer that I swear to believe in Jesus as my savior. So I head on down to my Catholic Church with bible in hand and full of knowledge...

Sent in by Brian My story of leaving Christianity is a little different than most I’ve heard or read. The focus of my story is how much I regret now, looking back on my life, that would have been different had I not been a Christian. Starting from the beginning: I wasn’t raised in a Christian home. My parents never really went to church, except occasionally on holidays my mom might take me to a church. The first time I ever attended a Catholic mass, I was with one of my mom’s friends. I turned to her about half-way through the mass and asked, “Who is getting married?” My parents had been brought up Christian, but they never really forced anything on me. I made friends with Christians at my elementary school. One of them invited me to attend some Bible camp. I think it was during the summer after first grade. I had no idea what it was, but I went. It was pretty fun, we got to do crafts and play games. I think it was three days long, but I only went on the last da...

Sent in by Tina I've struggled with faith my entire life, and now I truly believe that religions were established so power mongers could control and oppress people (especially women). My late mother walked away from her church as a teenager and never looked back. She was still very much a believer in the bible but did not believe in the trinity theory that so many Christian churches teach. She did encourage her children to go to different churches with friends and decide for ourselves what we wanted to believe. As a youngster I frequented Catholic, Baptist and Methodist churches and even visited a synagogue once. My mom spent years studying the Bible on her own and obeying all of the “rules." Virgin until she married, never cheated on my dad (and he probably cheated on her), gave birth to children she really did not want and tried to live by the rules spoon fed to us by our Christian based society. What did my mom get in the end? A miserable and slow death from cancer (dy...

Sent in by Michael I write this mostly as catharsis, not as a call to action or as a convincing case against Christianity. As I think more and more about it, I have come to realize that my life is far more valuable than I let it on to be, and that my deconversion a year and a half ago only opened me up to far more than I had ever experienced. I was raised Catholic, in a family where religion was far less about belief and far more about heritage. Talk of God or Jesus was rare in my household, though my family attended Sunday masses as frequently as possible and my father taught catechism, leading untold numbers of children into the "fold" which most did not seem to care about anyway. I remember Mass as something very boring and monotonous, so I attempted to make the best of it, letting my imagination run wild by thinking up little stories about all the different things I saw around me, trying to visualize the events occurring in the stained glass windows and the meaning...

Sent in by Tressa My dad was born to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. They raised him to have a marginal belief in a monotheistic, omnipotent God and the existence of an afterlife, but other than that, for the purpose of compromise, he was not brought up under any definite religious doctrine. To this day, my dad holds vaguely deist beliefs, but is fairly distrustful of organized religion. My mom was born to a devout Anglican mother and a Seventh-Day Adventist father; keep in mind that in these days, the Adventist church was not as well-integrated into mainstream society as it is today, and was still quite a bizarre Christian offshoot along the lines of the Jehovah's Witnesses. My mom was baptized Anglican but raised in the United Church of Canada, as it was the dominant religious institution in the small Ontario town her family eventually moved to. The United Church of Canada is a uniquely Canadian institution. Despite technically being founded as an evangelical Protestant ...

Sent in by Ian I wish to post my testimony for a few reasons. For one, I hope that just one person gets a bit of help from this. I've been so encouraged by this site and others like it that I felt moved to help in the only way I know how. Second, I want it known that I am a new person. I'm not the Christian that I once was. I'm not that judgmental, closed-minded conservative that worries about every action and is ruled entirely by guilt and false obligation. Anyway, it turns out that I even like myself. Who am I? I'm one that was raised in Christianity. I probably have a more extreme background in it than most Christians, I admit. I'm about 32 years old and couldn't understand that somebody on an atheist blog wouldn't know what "equally yoked" meant. I am an atheist/agnostic/oh, I don't know what I am--but I'm entirely comfortable with "I don't know" as my status. What I do know is that Christianity is not true. I r...

Sent in by James I've been visiting this site for a while now and it's been a real help during my deconversion. I thought it was about time I contributed and maybe help someone else who is looking for answers. Well, eight months ago I told a friend "I am a Christian who loves God and has no ulterior motives or desire to not be a Christian. Yet I am willing to leave Christianity if it is found that its claims of Truth can not hold up. Anyone who would not abandon even their most deeply cherished beliefs if it became clear it was false would be a self-deluding fool." I still think that no one should have a belief so cherished that it could not be given up if evidence shows it to be false. That is why I no longer believe in the Christian conception of god, or any personal god for that matter. I am now an atheist. Through reading people's deconversion stories I have discovered the terms weak atheism and strong atheism. A strong atheist would say there is no god, ...

Sent in by Virginia Christianity thrives on human suffering and yearn for community. It was precisely under these circumstances that I committed myself to Christ at 19 years old, when my family got into serious trouble -- father filed for bankruptcy, my parents separated. With all the yearning for care and love upon the utter shattering of my family, my high school pals who were Christians befriended me. I began fervently witnessing Christ, became a cell group leader on Bible study, witnessed to friends and relatives about Jesus and the salvation, using the tracts supplied from my church. I was active in church and in my college years, also leaded evangelizing activities witnessing Jesus. However, I sensed in the entire ethos of this set of belief, some incompleteness. It promised one being "new in Christ", with Christ Lordship, a person should be filled with blissful joy and contentment. It was not the case, the blissful atmosphere common in Christian community were mainly e...

Sent in by BiMamaFemAtheist I posted the short version ; here's the long version - SP. I was born at home in January of 1983. Six of my grandmothers eight grandchildren were born this way (the other two are adopted). My parents split up before I can remember, and my mother went back to school to get her degrees (ending up with a PhD). So my grandmother was my primary parent (although mom did live in the same home). My grandmother, who I have always known as Giggy, was both devout and insane. She made the rules and meted out the punishments. In the late 1970s she wrote a Xtian bestseller about the end times and promptly retired from nursing, a job she hated. After a few years of notoriety and fame in the Xtian fundy world (then known as charismatic) she became a "spiritual midwife", urging women to forgo traditional prenatal care and instead root out "defilements" in their lives that might cause a less-than-perfect birth experience. This is the world I gr...