Image by SoStark via Flickr Sent in by by Kathlene Wow, I am so glad I found this site. I am now only on my second day of turning away from God and it is so liberating on one hand, but terrifying on the second. My journey has taken 3 years, so it wasn't an overnight decision although it feels like it. I feel like I have taken my own brain back and I am giving myself permission to have my own thoughts. I am 35yrs old and I became born-again when I was 22. I was so young and naive back then. My husband and I had just broken up and I was angry, lost and hurt. My best friend had become a born-again Christian . I went to visit her and gave my life literally up. I am still in the anger phase of how many years I have lost by not living. I spent the next years alone raising my son. I became very active in a charismatic church and got right into the gifts of the spirit and speaking in tongues , etc. I was on fire for God and nothing would stop me. During this time though, I...

Image via Wikipedia Sent in by Trans-man I didn’t grow up in a very religious environment. My father has been an atheist for as long as I know, making fun of religion and people who believe. However, he wasn’t a good father, and not a good role model. Had he been a better role model, maybe I would have had more conversations about religion and would have never gone into a church in the first place. Truth is, I was looking for a home of sorts, where I could experience some acceptance and friendship, and unfortunately, churches are good at filling some of those needs. My mom was raised catholic in a small town, and tried holding on to her faith. The rest of my extended family, grandparents, uncles and aunts, all faithfully attend the catholic church , pray before meals, and use Bible verses as needed to prove their point. When I started going to church for a short time at 17, my mom seemed to like it, and for the next 20 something years I always saw her sadness and regret that she couldn...

By Marshall I was not brought up in a religious home. My mother and stepfather never went to church or talked about it or God from my memory. I never remember thinking about religion when I was young other than when I was with my real father on weekends. He would drop me and my sister off at a church for Sunday School class every now and then. He would drop us off and then leave and come back and get us afterward. He never went to church. I really don't know why he took us to this day. In the summertime he would take us out of state for the two weeks we spent with him. We always went to one of his brothers house. He and his wife were very religious Baptist. I remember them speaking to us about Jesus and a place called HELL. They told us about Hell and if we did not believe in Jesus we would go to this horrible place when we died. I was very young and don't think I ever really took it very serious but it was always in the back of my mind as I got older. Many years later I meet...

Sent in by Elizabeth I accidentally stumbled across this website while I was Googling the Duggar family , and I have been browsing on here for the last four hours. I am intrigued because I had no idea that so many people shared the same frustrations as I do. I was raised in a strict Church of Christ home. For those of you not familiar with the COC, it is a small denomination of Christianity primarily concentrated in the South. Each congregation is independently owned and operated. The denomination has several colleges, including Lipscomb University in Nashville and Harding University in Arkansas . Funny story about that: When I was 17 a lady at church asked me if I would be attending one of the COC colleges. I replied, "No ma'am, I'm going to a REAL college". I was never given a choice as to whether I wanted to attend church or not, and was forced to do so three times a week (plus youth group activities) until I left for college. As a child, my mom's favorite ...

Sent in by Jessica I have never sat down and actually written this in its entirety. I can imagine it to be pretty therapeutic. Anyway...here is the shortish version :) I am 18 years old and currently in my first year of university. I have been brought up in a fundamentalist Christian environment where the family's core is the bible. Everything within my parents' lives is based on 'the word of god'. My dad was an elder in the church until they made the whole family up sticks and move away in order to start a house church . The thinking behind this was stripping church back to its old testament roots. A number of other families moved away to embark upon this venture with us. Needless to say this resulted in a closed, tight, little Christian community. All my parents friends were Christians, all of my extended family were also of the faith. This way of life was completely normal to me and I was actively involved in church life. I enjoyed the social aspect of it and havin...

Sent in by Danny I don't think I've ever really sat down and wrote out the story of my deconversion. You'll have to forgive me if it comes out a bit jumbled. Like many of the stories I've read, it wasn't something that happened suddenly for me. I was a slow and arduous process. I was born into a Presbyterian family. My mother and father were very active in the church. In fact, my mother worked in the office as a secretary and taught sunday school classes. I went to church every Sunday, attended almost every church function. During the summer, I would go to Vacation Bible School , and would be at the church almost every day. My parents weren't literalists. They didn't believe, for example, that the human race had started in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. They didn't tell me this when I was young, of course. I guess they didn't want to confuse me too early. My Sunday School teachers taught us all the nice Bible stories about Moses's heroic...

Freedom by Funky64 ( www.lucarossato.com ) Sent in by Jackee Gianfelice I was brought up in a devoutly Christian household. As a child in Sunday school, I learned biblical stories (carefully selected biblical stories, to be sure) and stories about Jesus. God and Jesus were presented as loving, caring, and compassionate, with all the unsanitary parts of the bible edited out in the readings and lessons we received in church and Sunday school. Even so, I was shocked when, at the age of about seven, I was sitting with my mother in church and the pastor began his sermon by stating, "Aside from a few cranks and revisionists, the vast majority of historians and archaeologists agree that Jesus did exist." I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think Jesus was real! I thought of the bible stories as superhero tales, with the character of Jesus just that--a character, there to point up the moral of the story. I quickly looked around and was doubly shocked that a...

Sent in by Lance Let me start off by saying that I was a liberal Christian . I had gone through fundamentalist phases earlier in my 30 years as a Christian, but I moved to a somewhat liberal belief system before I ended up pitching the whole thing. I rationalized hell by saying it was only a separation from God -- whatever that meant. But I did not think it was a literal lake of fire. I believed in evolution, and reconciled it with the bible by saying that just as Jesus spoke in parables, the god of the old testament used myth to convey truth. In the same way we humans can use fiction to convey truths about the human condition. I looked at the creation story in Genesis as if it was saying something like "The world, the stars, the physical universe in total, is just stuff that god made. We should worship god and not the stuff." That was enough for me. I did not try to make sense out of the 6-day creation, and thought it foolish to even try to twist an obvious myth int...

Sent in by Eddie I really don't know where to begin telling my story of de-conversion because it involves too many events over a long period of years. I will try to give the basic highlights and avoid a drawn out boring tale. I was raised in a Church of Christ home attending services of the church three times a week up until I was 16. My dad had been an elder in the congregation and was basically the backbone of the congregation. He did not believe it necessary to coerce obedience to the Bible, and I was given liberty to not attend after my 16th birthday. I did however, attend on a not so regular basis. I eventually obeyed the Gospel, as they call it, and married shortly thereafter. I was very young, 19, and eager to please everyone in the family both spiritual and physical. For some 30+ years, for all intents and purposes, I was the model Christian. I developed the talent of Preaching and was called upon to do so at various times in my own congregation and at distant congregation...

Sent in by Brian I didn't leave Christianity based on past experiences, I had no bad experience. Many people think that I am angry with god, that my "ideas" come from my traumatic past experiences. And that is not right. I hate nobody, I have nothing against anybody. I grew up in a Catholic home with parents who were not very religious. You know, visiting church only on special occasions, that kind. When I was about 14, a friend of my dad brought the Jehova's Witness message to our home, and we started studying the bible with some guy and JW's (Watchtower) publications. Even though I was young, I always thought there was something wrong with Catholicism, JW's use the fact that people are not happy in their catholic faith to lure them into JW's. However, many things the JWs taught us I was very skeptic, deep inside me I wasn't buying it, but I was not mature enough to speak up. Stuff like, only 144,000 will go to heaven, and only white American JW...

Sent in by Stacey When I was nine I had it pretty figured out. I was smart, fast, creative, bold, adventurous and curious. Mom relocated us back to Michigan , first Hollywood and a then a brief stint in Oklahoma City . It wasn't just Michigan. We were in one of the most isolated pieces of land in the Western most Gogebic County --filled with a lot of elderly people, mostly very devout Catholics. It seemed a bit strange. I liked the smell of incense and I loved carrying the cross when it was my turn to do class Mass . I was pissed I couldn't at that time be an altar boy or possibly work my way up to priest. I was re-baptized at age nine. I didn't like that. And then it was First Communion . I'm the one in the photo snarling in my too itchy scratchy starchy dress. I didn't like that by becoming Catholic I would suddenly have to give up my right for freedom --no questions asked. Being a girl baptized Catholic is a commitment to original sin and shame and ver...