By Neal Stone Image by Philerooski via Flickr All of us at this site either are at that point or past that point where we finally stopped doing the Xian thing. We feel that sense of loss, frustration and anger for what we have been through and given up or lost as a result. My time was 1998 when I had that breakdown and sense of frustration and anger over what I lost and gave up because of my life as an Xian. I went through a very dark period of my life as I gave into the anger and frustration of what I went through. So what is one to do at this point? After looking at my life then and now I feel I can point out some help and hopefully help someone avoid the same journey and dark place I went through. 1. Don't give in to the anger. The anger will eat you up inside. Xians love this as it makes them feel they were right all along about thinking you can only be happy with god. Do you really want to prove them right? Hell no! The anger will also take you down even farther and

Sent in by Brain User It was a long time coming. In Christian school I never really took religion seriously. All that prayer for things that never seemed to happen just didn't add up. God never talked to me and I never felt any sensations of his presence. But everybody else did, or so they said, so I went along with it. I felt emotions, for sure, but nothing that was obviously other-worldly. Like every youngster, I wanted to be accepted. Later in my early 20's I really wanted to believe and re-dedicated my life to Jesus, praying fervently for various things, including the gift of speaking in tongues , but it never happened. In my 30's I joined a church that believed in healing and miracles, and there seemed to be biblical reason for the belief, so I kept praying. I must not have had even the faith of a mustard seed because I never did speak in tongues. A lot of other prayers went unanswered, too, including fervent prayers from the very faithful. Prayers like "We ask f

Sent in by Anonymous Image by Ann Althouse via Flickr As a relative newcomer to the life of parenthood, I debate many issues internally and with my wife. One of those things is the Santa Claus lie, or rather, "Should we tell our children they get presents from a mythological man who, lives forever, knows about everybody's deeds, and visits their homes one night out of the year to deliver gifts?" There are negative effects to perpetuating such a lie, but it's embedded in our culture. If you live in the US, it's unlikely you don't know about Santa Claus. So, what are the positive effects of the Santa Claus myth? I can't think of any. At some point, your kids will discover there isn't a Santa Claus and you've been lying to them. My parents never told me Santa brought me something, encouraged me to leave carrots for the flying reindeer, or took me to visit a fat man in a costume to tell him what I wanted for Christmas. This wasn't just beca

Sent in by Maestra I know my story is not unique as I’ve been reading many others just like mine, but I know it will be cathartic for me to write my own. I am the granddaughter of an evangelist and I was raised in an evangelical church. I was a “ Missionette honor star .” I bet some of you on this site were too! I went to Evangel College (University now) and married the son of two pastors. My grandmother was into prophesy and prophesied when my sister and I were little that my sister would grow up to be a nurse and I would one day be an evangelist. My sister is a nurse…..dun dun duunnnnn. I LOVED my church growing up. My husband and I decided to “take a break” from church in January of 2009, and I miss it (the people). Growing up, I looked forward to every aspect of church; Sunday and Wednesday nights were definitely the highlights of my week. Our Sunday school teachers and youth pastors would always encourage us to bring our friends from school to church, but I never wanted to. Firs

Sent in by Priscilla Image by Romy Schneider via Flickr “You know he may die during the surgery… the Bible says that the wages of sin is death.” My mother, hundreds of miles away, stung me with these words over the phone about a year ago. By then I had stopped going to church, although I wasn’t planning on leaving the faith. I was a backslider of sorts, a Christian without a church. In her comment she was referring to my then-fiancé -now husband- who had been experiencing health issues from a genetic disease and was about to have a very complicated and dangerous surgery. Our sin, according to my mother, was that we had purchased a house a few months earlier and ever since had been living together without being married. Apparently, this was punishable by death . Anything bad that happened to us was now because of this. At the time I thought that even though my mother did not agree with my living arrangements –as she had expressed very clearly in a previous uncomfortable convers

Sent in by RandallScott Image by stevesheriw via Flickr My name is Randal and I'm currently in recovery. I'm a recovering Baptist. My sponsor told me to stay away from anyone who is condemning and judgmental, so I immediately quit going to church. I'm not really sure when my 'de-conversion' process reared its beautiful head. I would love to tell you a great story about an "A-ha!" moment, but I don't have it. I did, however, wake up one day and just kinda get it. But it wasn't, and isn't, an overnight process. For years, I've been tirelessly and religiously chipping away at my theological prison wall like Andy Dufresne . To be the person that I wanted to be, I had to dig as deep as I could possibly dig. Rest then repeat. Rest. Repeat. But if I had to pinpoint a time, in my life, I would say it was when I started reading. Reading "other" material. My dad was an intellectual student of theology and received his Master of Divinity a

Sent in by Alexander Image by troismarteaux via Flickr I have just recently made a break with Christianity. Looking back on it, it seems to be the end of 4 7-year cycles. In my early twenties, I thought more and more about little things about Christianity that annoyed me. My entire primary school education, save grades 7 and 8 (thankfully) were spent in some sort of religious school. In the South , religion is as omnipresent as Crisco . Let me say now that Muslims aren't the only one with their own fundamentalist schools. Christians have them too, and they are just as bad. One thing that annoyed me was how in the Bible, there's a prohibition on eating pork which shows up in Islam and Judaism, but somehow Christians get around it. "That was the Old Testament" is what I was usually told. I took the "Islam method" to that and stopped eating pork in high school. Actually, it makes me sick today if I eat it. Heh, have a bout of pork poisoning on a flight down t

by A Seeker Image by State Library and Archives of Florida via Flickr Lately, in pensive thinking of how to converse with my Mother about our past issues, many points of thought come to mind which I am not clear in. One of those is getting a clear picture of how my very religious family could have handled my leaving the "fold". I want to compare it to a normal family who has a teen/twenty-year-old, free-thinking child who wants to leave home and start out on her own. Here is the history of how my story went down and I'd like feedback on how it could have been handled "normally", so that when my Mother and I speak about it there is a clear picture of how they could have reacted differently. Growing up as the 3rd eldest of nine children in the home of a Primitive Baptist preacher, we grew up very sheltered, in a bubble so to speak. Our entire life consisted of church, people in the religion, school in the religion and then homeschooling. Our year was full of vari

Sent in by Escaping Religion Image by cindy47452 via Flickr I was raised in a fundamental Baptist family. My parents divorced when I was 5 due to domestic violence . All the time I was growing up I went to church at least three times a week, was forced to participate in door to door evangelizing and running a bus route proselytizing children, to bring them to church on Sunday mornings. All my life I heard how great this god was how he gave his followers everything,yet I grew up in poverty. While my mother spent all morning laying in bed reading the bible, the kids were left to fend for themselves. We were not allowed to go to school, and in fact I reached age 18 without ever going to any school. I was a very precocious child though, and read extensively and taught myself as much as I could on my own. One night when I was seventeen we were driving home from a church function, my mom and step-dad got in a fight over something insignificant, and it escalated until my mother was crying

Sent in by Joshua Image via Wikipedia First off, I can't believe I'm actually submitting this and putting my past on display, but holy crap! I can be a jerk. I know this and anyone who knows me knows this. I'm stubborn, pig-headed and I think I know everything. I know quite a bit about a lot of stuff, but I like to pretend that because I have mad debating skills that I know more than most people. This simply isn't true and deep down I know that just because I might have a little more knowledge about a subject doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know about it. Ask my wife and she'll tell you. I don't like to be wrong and I'll try weird and exotic tactics to be right. The one thing I do have going for me though, is that if I know I'm right, I will not let it go. I know I can't convince you to change your opinion but if I can get you to at least look at it from my point of view and say, "Yeah, I can understand that" then, I’m p

by Angie The pansy, a symbol of Freethought — via Wikipedia My mother, gotta love her, but recently the 'christian' emails from her have been driving me insane. She has sent lots of stuff over the years but it seems to be heating up right now. She sent me the old Laminin email a couple days ago and I sent her back the Snopes.com articles on it. No return answer. She just sent me this... Subject: Take a look at this www.wallbuilders.com I wrote back: What are you expecting for me to get out of this website because I don't buy that 'all' the founding fathers were Christian. In fact I have studied this topic very well and know many of them were free thinkers and atheist. I know you mean well but you can keep all your Christian based emails and websites to yourself or send them to actual christians that will get a hoot out of them. They do nothing for me now days since I don't buy into the myths anymore. I have studied many hours on the bible, history of th

by Eric, an in-betweener Image by atconc via Flickr Hi, my name is Eric, I am currently on the fence between continuing a Christian concentration and just kinda letting it go. I'm just looking for comments or suggestions or insights. I was raised believing in God, but not very strictly or "raised in a bible" as I like to put it. In high school , some of my friends started taking me with them to the youth ministry at what is now my church. As it was the first time I had really delved into religion and Christianity, I was intrigued and was quickly pulled in. Well, as I've continued over the last three years, I have learned more and more. The more I learn, the more doubts I have about Christianity. First of all, and I read about this on another submission on this site, one of the primary things that attracted me is now what is driving me away the fastest. I am so tired of all the optimism and prayers. When having a problem or a dilemma, I want to be able to go to someo

by Micah Image by aknacer via Flickr Well, I don’t know if I can exactly pinpoint when I started to doubt. I know it all started out subtly then grew. I was raised in a non-denominational church all my life. We believed in “saved by grace, not of works” like a lot of other modern churches today. I have no idea how I started to wake up out of it. I guess my brain just got the better part of me. Growing up I was really into God and the whole Christian thing. I can honestly say that I didn’t try to force my beliefs on anyone else. That whole part of it just didn’t fell quite right. Though I do think there is a difference between stating one’s views versus pressing one’s views. I was very passionate about god. Both my parents were ordained ministers by the time is was 13. Our family was entrenched with belief. My mother of course was the most zealous of us all always bantering about something with God. It would annoy the shit out of me. I’m not claiming that people who

Sent in by A Few Months In This has been an interesting week. People from my old church are starting to notice that I haven't been there for the past few months, and when I see them they start to ask questions. I made the mistake of being honest and telling them where I was in life, but this is before I realised they didn't actually care what I thought or how I felt - they just wanted a lead-in so they could share their "journey with god" with me (as if I hadn't heard it before when I went to church with them). Here's a few extracts Online: One of the guys I went to church with decided to strike up a conversation with me (only because he was offended by my AIM nickname) and started asking innocuous questions about how I felt about the church. Each answer was greeted with a deep-set and mystical interpretation of not so much the bible, but his interpretation of what Jesus meant and how he felt about Jesus. He then decided we needed to meet up for lunch sometim