When did you lose faith in your faith?

I grew up catholic, stopped going to catechism before finishing, because nobody could give me satisfying answers.

I started looking into other religions. Thought that maybe the problem was with the dogma, read the bible. Found it to be revolting, moved on to buddhism. Found it to be lacking and soul crushing. Then i realized i may have been looking for something that wasn’t even there, and started calling myself agnostic. As time went by i realized what i should have called myself from the start was “atheist”, rather than agnostic, simply because agnostic just doesn’t explain my position, and here i am now.

So in short, when i lost faith in my faith, i looked for a better faith. Turns out there isn’t one.

Still, if i had to choose a faith, i would totally go for the norse gods. At least they aren’t a bunch of dicks.

I question a few things, but overall, I really haven’t.

I became a doubter when I was 13. By the time I was 16 I really couldn’t sustain my belief any longer. One of the things that bothered me was how hard people seemed to struggle to protect their faith. How can a faith be your armor and shield when it has to be treated as so fragile and destructible that you don’t dare expose it to questions?

Here are two older but still pertinent threads that contain some interesting answers with respect to Christian faith:

http://www.fluther.com/27215/what-convinced-you-that-christianity-wasnt-the-answer/

http://www.fluther.com/37870/any-former-christians-out-there/

I was always a skeptic. At 24, I finally dismissed religion for my life when I realized that making my own decisions and not going by a sense that God was helping me decide, would have kept me along a path that was more sensible than the one I took. No real harm was done, but I would have married a man that would have been wrong for me. I was lucky that didn’t happen.

Always been an atheist.

Growing up Roman Catholic, I didn’t get far into the Christian life and dropped out of the ‘game’ back in ‘91 when I was 9. I stopped believing when “god” wouldn’t answer my question as to why my brother was taken from me. I’ve relied on my reasoning ever since.

I lost my faith when I failed to find the question mark keys in my Blackberry.

I have been through a world of shit, but I never lost my faith. I do remember Job, and his trials.
I would like to think I will never be tested to that point.

alternate answer:

The only time I ever lost faith was when Kirk (fucking Crippled) Gibson hit one out of the park off Dennis Eckersley. Here is the link, but I can’t even bear to watch it to verify it is the right one.

I lost faith in Catholicism long ago. I remember sitting in church one day listening to the parishioners recite a prayer. I kept thinking how rote and humdrum and cult like the whole situation was. That was my last straw. I had always questioned it and didn’t believe in a mystical man in the sky and one who rose from the dead, etc.

I was reared Presbyterian. I drifted away, then gave it a final try back in the early 90s. There was a mega-church near where I lived. I went and was predictably electrified by the fiery oratory of Bishop John Gimenez, the prototype (at least so he claimed) for The Cross and the Switchblade. But he was constantly pandering for money. One of his favorite refrains was to cook up some worthy cause, then ask for the congregation (several thousand strong) to stand if they would be willing to give $500. After he’d shamed everyone able into standing and tossing 5 C-notes into the offering plate, he’d hit those that could do, $100, $50, and on down. The guy lived in a mansion and rolled around in chauffeur-driven limousines. It was pretty darned clear where the money was actually going.

Before I saw through the thin veil of piety masking his true greed, I signed up for the church’s bible college. The BS there was so thick a moron should be able to detect it even if he had no sense of smell.

That’s when I started thinking it through. I began looking at all the absurd contradictions and inconsistencies the God of Abraham, supposedly Omnipotent and Omniscient, had “caused” humans to write in the Torah. Then I started delving into all the other religions and what they had donated to the religions of the God of the Desert.

The emerging picture was abundantly clear. Humankind has invented at least 3,000 supreme beings. Almost all are mutually exclusive, which means at the very least that 2,999 of those supreme beings are false gods invented by men to enrich the priestly set and maintain dominance over all others. Given the absurdities of every one of the 3,000 postulated gods, I reckoned that it was highly likely all 3,000 were false gods, not just 2,999.

For me I think God had or has brought me comfort at times. So its still a search I am on. I often wonder where athiests get that comfort. I mean psychological comfort not physical.

@Shippy I find comfort in the grandeur of nature, the Universe, quantum mechanics… I find it in intelligence and human compassion. Compassion to avoid a vengeful god’s wrath does little to warm my soul. Compassion born or shared humanity and caring does a great deal. I suppose I spend so much time reading and studying science, cosmology, the origins of human consciousness, etc. just to get the comfort it takes to get through each day. And when times get tough, I remember the truth of the old saw, “This too shall pass.” When times are spectacularly good, I try to block that truism from my thought process.

And while atheists can be good or evil, and thus do good or evil; I find that only through religion can a good man do evil. Think the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Salem Witch Trials, Sharia Law, suicide bombers…

I think atheists tend not to need spiritual comfort. I have never been religious, so I can’t speak from the standpoint of someone who once was. That said, I have never sought or found comfort from the thought that some god might be out there. Rather, I take comfort in knowing that I don’t have to live every day of my life to please some being in the sky and to make it to some supposed afterlife. I take comfort in the same things as everyone else- my family, my friends, myself, my hobbies/interests, certain objects, etc.- just not God. To me, God is just a burden.

@ETpro. I’d never presume an athiest to be evil. There Are evil christians too. I know you didn’t mean that. But the thought struck me that many may percieve athiests thst way. Evil is just there or not I think. Regardless of which belief or none belief one subscribes to.

@Fly. I did always focus on Gods love and promises. But like I said even those seem unreal to me right now. I’d have run away long time ago if I saw it as a rule book. Never particularly liked rules myself so hear you.

I grew up in a mostly Catholic family, and most of us went to Sunday school. I started becoming sceptical to many of the teachings that I was exposed to such as the great flood, the parting sea, 6000 year old earth, resurrection, concept of a savior, etc by the time I was only about 7. My religious resistance has caused me a great deal of grief with not only my family but many others around me as well.

Regardless of my scepticism of religion there were many odd events in my life which caused me to consider that maybe not all that has to do with mysticism was all myth or wishful thinking. I still do believe that there is a Creator Mind or God, that we all survive physical death, that consciousness is not a brain function and other aspects of the paranormal.

I’m not into theology or religion that much, but I’m more interested in quantum theories which show how an ‘ethereal’ dimension or body would not be visible to us or our instruments, such as Pearson and Wolf propose. I’m also interested in chaos theories, artificial nueral networks and filter theories of consciousness. I look at ‘mysticism’ in a much different light than most religionists or sceptics do. I still have some degree of faith (we all do), but my beliefs in a deity or the supernatural come from my own experiences and research, not blind faith. Question everything is my motto.

This is sort of embarrassing, but it took more than half of my lifetime so far to discover that I never had faith in Christianity. It wasn’t until friends and acquaintances spoke of their beliefs, be it religious or not, that I realized none of us truly has an answer.

@Shippy I did not say that all Christians are evil, nor do I think such. What I was trying to say is that you find both good and evil humans among both atheists and the religious, but it usually takes religion to convince a good person to do evil.

And further to finding comfort in the mysteries and grandeur of reality, see this. If an iPad is a non-starter for you, it’s available as an illustrated hard-cover book as well.

@ETpro. Yes I know that is what I said.

When I read the bible, front to back, in 6th grade. Since then, I’ve been agnostic, then believed again, then agnostic, then believed in a god (but no religion), agnostic again, and am now an agnostic atheist.

I have never had faith that God would answer a prayer. He might but there again He might not. I was raised as a Christian but I cannot believe most Christian doctrine. There are times that are difficult, times when one feels alone and without help and it is at these times that I realise the truth of the Irish saying: ‘God’s help is nearer than the door’.

@Shippy If you believe in God and consider yourself a Christian, here is one train of thought: If you feel that God hasn’t answered your prayer, then the answer is “No”.

@Pied_Pfeffer God is so powerful he can’t speak?