Category: The Faith I Left Behind

When very young, I was threatened with punishment by the devil. When I asked about him, he was described as being in a black outfit with a long tail, horns, and a pitchfork. He had endless ways to punish me, but his specialty was fire, which he was to apply into eternity. I was reminded …

Not paying attention during Mass was a sin, and I did my best to pay attention—even though most of the time, the service was painfully dull. But one Sunday in 1962 when I was twelve, the celebrating priest read a quote from Jesus that was not dull but quite shocking: “But I say to you, …

A long time ago as a graduate student, I found Arsenal for Skeptics (Richard W. Hinton, ed., 1934) on a college bookstore’s bargain table. I was trying to decide if the Christianity I’d been taught as a child was true or not. I had had problems from the first: the nun who’d said only Catholics …

I was born in the Bronx in 1936 into a Christian family. Mother was a “Sunday Christian” who thought it was important to carry on the Christian tradition of her family and her Fundamentalist mother who lived with us. Dad attended church occasionally at the insistence of my mother. I suspect he was an unbeliever …

My involvement with religion began and ended at a very young age. I am seventy years old now, and while my memory is hazy on some of the details, the essence and psychological impact of my early religious experience is still vividly with me. It took me many years, however, to come to a deeper …

My earliest memory of learning about God was when my parents took me to Child Evangelism classes taught by two neighbors. I remember that the “flannel board” was used extensively, and, since the time was during World War II and materials were in short supply, the class cut out words and letters from newspaper headlines …

I cannot be a part of worshipping a god with strong psychopathic traits.

Discovering that the universe is unauthored … and that life without a higher meaning is enough.

How an eclectic ecumenical minister’s theological quest ended in secular humanism.

I’ve forsaken religious certainty—but not without being wistful about it.

“Religion happened to me by accident of birth, like the birthmark on my shoulder.”

“… Thinking too deeply about the concept of God, much less coming out as an atheist at church, will forever change your relationship with those around you.”

What a journey—from Lutheran to fundamentalist to atheist . . . to atheist minister!

“I grew out of my childhood belief in Santa Claus and his North Pole toy factory—why not God and his heaven?”

Philosophy and science overcame the strictures of my small-town religion.

Sometimes life finds a forceful way to remind us that ultimately, we’re all roadkill.

Looking back on a life in which there’s never really been room for God . . . or need.

Growing up without fundamentalism equipped this Texan to resist its dubious appeals.

Surrounded by sexual abuse, this Primitive Baptist found her church as near to hell as she would ever get.

Society tried to bully me out of thinking for myself. Eventually it failed.

“Naturally, my mother saw to it that her religiosity was duly forced upon her unsuspecting children.”

Because I was born an atheist, I was spared the indoctrination (brainwashing, child abuse) that produces helpless followers of one’s parents’ religion.

A flash of insight—there is no God!—compels a years-long, but ultimately successful, search for answers.

This Witness’s break from the family faith occurred, believe it or not, because of Romper Room.

There were attractive—even seductive—features to the mysticism my parents inculcated in me.

Only after converting to a vivid Christianity could one thinker come to realize how unconvincing it all was.

Shedding the last vestige of religious belief—and embracing atheism—made me free.

“I quickly discovered that most ordinary Christians have little interest in what elite liberal seminaries are teaching their future ministers.”

“Surrounded by family members firmly devoted to their beliefs can make freethought a lonely journey.”

“The days were filled with prayer, work, meditation, reading, and then more prayer and more work.”

“By the time I was ten or eleven, I’d figured out that church was theater.”

“Unlike the Southern Baptists, the devotees of Krishna danced, sang, made noise, and it was a holy thing.”

“Finally, I asked, ‘Can an all-powerful God make a rock so big he can’t move it?’ Success at last; I was kicked out of Sunday school.”

“. . . It wasn’t as if God was down to his last apple and the angels were going hungry; Adam and Eve had been surely just ‘breaking a rule,’ not really causing any harm.”

“I have met many gays and lesbians who have cited Christianity’s general tendency to deprecate homosexuality as their reason for leaving the religion of their upbringing.”

In the pages that follow, we present three more statements of nonbelief—and an explanation of a stance against “membership” in any “group.” The first articles in this series were published in the February/March 2014 FREE INQUIRY. There’s more to come in the June/July and the August/September issues.—The Editors My transition into the folds of Southern fundamentalist …

Teaching an ever-changing population of young Muslim immigrant girls was sometimes an unsettling experience.

For one unbeliever, independence is more important than claiming the label of “atheist.”

I’m more than an ex-Catholic; I’m an ardent anti-Catholic. Holy Mother Church should be ashamed.

In the April/May 2013 issue, FREE INQUIRY invited readers to submit autobiographical essays describing the life-stance odysseys that had led them to their present positions of secular humanism or atheism.