Reason Why You Left the Church

parted ways with the woman I'd been going to church every Sunday for +/- 5 years. really didn't feel like going to church for a while, and longstanding problems I'd had w/doctrine & teachings started coming to the surface. still go sometimes tho

should've put an "other" box in shouldn't I?

I can't remember why I stopped going - I was a teenager - but I can't really remember why I started going either. it was entirely of my own volition.

My proper answer wd be "non serviam"

I answered "the not committing sins" thing because I was under heavy pressure to get rid of all my awesome heavy metal cds that dishonored God and I just couldn't do it.

But in reality the reason I left the church stems a lot from the reason I joined it in the first place. I was a very depressed, displaced youth at age 15/16 and I'd been bullied and tormented immensely from age 11. I had little to no self-esteem, I had friends but only a few real close ones, and I felt disconnected from the world. Joining a youth group, my mother felt would be good for me, so I did.

I never was quite sure if I believed in God - I remembered questioning the whole charade as early as age 7 when I asked my mother how we knew there was a God, and her responding honestly - "We don't". I still didn't have my head wrapped around it at 15.

One day, they took me to one of those "Conventions", and man are those things dangerous. It's easy to mistake feelings for God when you're in a room full of happy, dancing, singing Christians who are paying you attention. So I went forward and decided I wanted to become a Christian.

So the minister tried to prepare me for it and as he did I began to wonder if I even believed some of the stuff they were saying. I also began to see hypocrisy within the youth group - the pettiness, the social "cliques", and even the insults (I caught one of the girls talking behind my back, and another brutally hurt my best friend's feelings). Their minds were closed, and I found myself on the opposite end of every debate not because I was being a contrarian but because I dared to ask "what if?"

By 19, I had decided that if there was a God, he wasn't for me, and by 24 or 25 I decided there was no God. Besides, after some of the things I've done in bed with women, I don't think God would want me.

Yr line on the other thread inspired this poll btw

left CofE infant school

@Noodle: I kind of figured. I like the thread idea - I'm always curious why other people "lose" their faith.

after some of the things I've done in bed with women, I don't think God would want me.

pretty sure that as long as it was consensual, God doesn't have any beef w/ ya

anyway the answer for me is "came home from sunday school, told mum she was going to hell because she didn't observe the Lord, was asked if I really believed the Earth was created in 7 days, said 'yeah totally', was asked to engage brain, was not sent back to sunday school"

but I spent loads of time in Westminster Abbey after that coz of school commitments - pretty rad place tbh

7 days = heretical

- was persuaded by the gentle and reasonable remonstrations of richard dawkins

@acoleuthic: out of curiosity, did you ever find yourself attempting to argue that the world was 6,000 years old? serious question. my church was fundamentalist to the core and I remember arguing it with some people, them responding quickly with facts that made my argument sound retarded, and having...no response. that was another turning point.

singing Compline at 9 pm every Monday in a little candle-lit side-chapel was a really relaxing activity

@Cattle Grind, I was 8 or 9 years old, so I didn't really get my teeth into the semantics of it...for me it was a cool club with singing and friends and a nice fella called jesus who did interesting stuff we got to reenact

i wd go back today for the songs and the buildings but I'd know in my heart I was faking it

i wd go back today for the songs and the buildings but I'd know in my heart I was faking it

"welcome to the church of england"

if only they'd known that The Cure - Pornography was my favourite album

also nrq otm haha

realized that if i kept sleeping, no one was going to make me go

voted "Only came in cos it was raining tbh" for my dad, tho

stopped going to catholic school, to be honest. I went through eighth grade and then went to a public high school and probably only went to church a couple of times after that. another reason was that once in high school, my parents moved back to california but never found a church locally they liked (well my mom, my dad never went to church) with people they felt comfortable with so that was that. I do think about going to the catholic church down the street a lot now. but now I'm kind of freaked by all the political stuff going on around churches, none of which ever happened when I was a kid.

I went to a Methodist church so arguably another reason wd be the clunking tunelessness of the Good News Bible

they tried that out in the catholic churches I went to as well, what lame read

Kinda like the line drawings, but yeah it's a horrible translation imo

I think half of my reason really was musical differences,.

I gotta say, when I occasionally go to Catholic church with Mrs V, I don't enjoy any of the hymns. I grew up on Charles Motherfuckin' Wesley tho so I'm kinda spoiled for modern shit

too much small talk was expected, hate the shaking hands with strangers I'm not gonna get to know part

if only they'd known that The Cure - Pornography was my favourite album

our youth group leader pressured a girl in the group to break her Marilyn Manson cd, then took the pieces and put it inside a baggie for what I suppose were "demonstrative purposes".

also nothing secular was allowed on the youth group radio so we had to listen to shit like Audio Adrenaline, DC Talk, and Third Day. my friend was a big Ministry fan and he started playing them and tried to convince the youth group leader that they were Christian because of the name. He got away with it for about 5 minutes but people suspected tehy weren't Christian because they "sounded unhappy"

Talk Talk's Spirit Of Eden was probably my second-favourite album when I was 9, and I'd imagine they'd have turned a blind eye to that one. Or maybe not. One of the tracks is called 'Desire' after all

i got away with playing Kansas due to "Dust in the Wind". although Kerry Livgren made it real clear at one of the conventions he spoke at that that song definitely was about an alternative religion.

None of the answers really fit for me, my main reason was just that I found mass extremely tedious. At the bare bones of it that transcends any beliefs I do or don't have, mass is immensely fucking dull, 40 minutes in an uncomfortable seat shifting around, in a room with horrible air, listening to an invariably dreadful public speaker. I don't see how the process is of any value to anyone.

Later and as I get older I have lots of other reasons to dislike the Catholic church, and when I go at Christmas I feel very negative about being told what to do or talked at by a priest.

I find it sad that people say things like "lord I am not worthy to receive you but say the word and I shall be healed." etc etc, and are forced to kneel every few minutes.

If there is a god I like to imagine he'd want people to feel good about themselves and not kneel before him.

Local Garda OTM

http://www.discogs.com/image/R-182740-001.jpg

I remember before my first communion in 2nd grade the nuns telling us about the transubstantiation and how we were now eating the literal body of Christ and it did not make logical sense at all as it was clearly still a bread wafer.

That was the beginning of the end, I never really believed fully after that and couldn't except "because Jesus made it so" as the only explanation for things that didn't make sense. I stopped going to mass when my parents no longer made me go, sometime during my senior year of high school, and haven't been to any church service probably 15 years now.

I remember before my first communion in 2nd grade the nuns telling us about the transubstantiation and how we were now eating the literal body of Christ

bonus points if you stood up and shouted "that makes us cannibals!" and stormed out....

i almost wish I had said musical differences now, because i remember being at a Rebecca St. James concert where she advised us to throw out any cd we had that dishonored god and I sat there thinking I couldn't bear to part with Pantera's Far Beyond Driven which I'd just gotten and featured the immortal lyric "I'm born again with snakes eyes/becoming God-sized".

xpost

If I remember correctly the nuns actually did have some "here's why this isn't cannibalism" bullet points for us.

Did they have another set of bullet points for "here's why it isn't necrophilia"?

ronan got 40 minute masses? lucky him. If we got out after 50 mins here we were lucky. I hate sermons. If they limited a sermon to 3 mins A) more people would take it in and not switch off (i dont think i ever heard a sermon after the 1st 10 seconds. B) more people might go.

I stopped going about 15 years ago.
Ronan also pretty much otm with what he said.

i only went because of my mum tbh.

Left Bicester, couldn't find another Elim church that wasn't racially awkward.

I don't really get the wafer hate - lots of other aspects of church are clearly some bollocks but its clearly more than a wafer.

I dunno, transubstantiation is a weird one to get yr head round. I think it's indicative of something that the Prods dropped the idea quick sharp.

It does make for a great bit in Tale of a Tub tho

this one dude I used to know disarmed someone who asked if he had the blood of Jesus Christ in him by asking if it was sexually transmitted

thought it was a bit fishy all along, tbh.

stopped being forced to go to mass at about 14.

asked my dad when i was about 6 why he didn't have to go to church. he told me he'd "finished" years ago, like it was school or something.

you are henry plainview and i claim my £5

Voted for sinning. I realized I didn't believe in God at about age 5. Got my big break at age 16, with a morning shift washing dishes at Friendly's.

Never really believed in God but was forced to attend church and go to an all girls Catholic High School where I realized that I pretty much disagreed with everything I was being taught and decided I was agnostic. Did the agnostic thing for a while because of the "what ifs" but consider myself an Atheist now. No question.

After someone told me the "Jesus had a big dick... he was well hung" joke and I laughed a bit too hard at it, I felt I could never set foot in a church again.

I was supposed to play the part of Jesus in a Sunday School communion play in second grade or so. In rehearsal, I got to the part about "this is my body, broken for you." Another kid told me that he was gonna eat my butt. I was so appalled that I quit acting.

never went in in the first place, so never really left i guess

so raining option best i suppose

I find it sad that people say things like "lord I am not worthy to receive you but say the word and I shall be healed." etc etc, and are forced to kneel every few minutes.

cannot relate to people who do not take pleasure in kneeling and saying "I am not worthy to receive you" tbh

that whole part of the Mass is win-win

Man, mass is so cool compared to Mormon church, which was 3 hours long and had no pictures/cool stuff to look at in the chapel, no standing or kneeling, no participatory bits, and water and Wonder bread instead of wine and eucharist.

so what goes on for three hours?

my parents' church used weird bread that was the texture of pound cake but flavorless, plus grape juice. i didn't really "leave" it so much because i had to be dragged there a few times until they stopped trying.

cannot relate to people who do not take pleasure in kneeling and saying "I am not worthy to receive you" tbh

that whole part of the Mass is win-win

― the most sacred couple in Christendom (J0hn D.), Sunday, March 14, 2010 7:23 PM (7 minutes ago)

tbh masochism is a big part of church's appeal

I wasn't joking at all tbqf

either am i tho

it's my problem with a lot of milder Protestant forms - God as yr buddy, who understands you, digs where you're comin' from, can grok why you don't live up to His standards -- what the hell worthless kinda God is that? the God you kneel to at mass HAD THE IDEA FOR SOUND AND THEN INVENTED IT. ditto LIGHT. ditto THE OCEAN. it's not that He "demands" submission, it's that the natural response to such a creature would be "I am going to lie down on my face in view of Your splendor"

which isn't to say that there isn't plenty of ego-investment in masochism though, it's its own kinda thing, vide legendary Catholic passive-agression, an art form like few others

George: Pretend I'm God and now dance around me and sing my praises.
(after a few seconds)
Stanley: I'm getting tired. Can we switch places?
George: That's exactly what I said.

too much small talk was expected, hate the shaking hands with strangers I'm not gonna get to know part

^ this is so true

god told me - or, at least, i worked out that i didn't believe in god and was pretty uncomfortable with the idea of a god who'd approve of pascal's wager. I had this feeling of 'i have too much respect for god to pretend that i believe in the existence thereof' which is pretty convoluted but seemed fairly important to me at the time (i was i guess mid-teens?). I'd been 'into' Christianity in a quasi-academic sort of way: all i can remember about confirmation classes is getting to borrow books from the apocrypha from the priest, and being really excited about it. And I really enjoyed the liturgy, to which I knew all the words, and I like the way C of E hymns work, where you can work out how the tune is going to go having never heard this particular iteration before. But not believing in god suddenly became a huge sticking point, and I thought-- well, i could probably still try to be a decent person without having to go to church and shake hands with strangers.

my godmother married the priest who confirmed me (lol high church anglicanism-- idk i just can't think of him as a 'vicar' or w/e), and they moved to a different parish, where a couple of my friends now live. I keep meaning to stop by and see them, because they were and no doubt still are lovely people, and she's written to me quite recently, but I feel like i'd have to justify having left the church and... I dunno, awkward.

top ten reasons for leaving the church (aka my life as a teenage youth grouper)

10) Nods to the republican party as the one implicitly preferred by god
9) Audio Adrenaline's greatest hits just wasn't doing it anymore
8) elevation of homosexuality to ultimate vice by people who clearly don't have their own shit together on the most obvious Sermon on the Mount "Do Unto Others" issues.
7) prayer groups actually just fronts for gossip entertainment
6) special awkward browbeating sermons about internet porn
5) relation of all pop culture events to the Bible. (ie "Do you kids watch Twilight? Ho ho! Yes, I'm down & jiggy with pop culture just like you guys! Well, you see, the Bible is like Twilight, because all of us are vampires drinking the blood of Christ, but the good news is he has forgiven our sins! Now who wants to convert?"
4) old hymns which were actually interesting & kinda poetic being replaced by new "hip" pop songs circa 1980's Michael W. Smith
3)youth group conventions designed to sell DVDs & t-shirts & recruit for xtian colleges
2)It was boring
1)I stopped believing in God

ya da da da dah dah

oh no you did not just talk shit about michael w smith

you wanna take this outside

never went in in the first place, so never really left i guess

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Sunday, March 14, 2010 1:11 PM (2 hours ago)

^^^

in high school the jesuits told us that you shouldn't even GO to mass if you were only going through the motions. they wanted us to find a reason to believe, to "get involved" but I was like "wheee! I'm done..."

Never been to a church service that wasn't a funeral or Friday chapel for my one disastrous year in a Christian school.

I was a teenage christian (a confession)

My church at home (UK) had this teen youth group I was part of which was basically just the local kids who had proper Christian parents and who'd been taken to church their whole lives. There were about 8 or so of us who were regulars, and they were all 100% fantastic people - into decent music, appropriately cynical in everyday life, great sense of humour. I'd consider a few of them among my best friends even though I don't really see them much. The flipside is I don't know how much some of them actually believed. One went on to do a degree in Theology and one went to proper Bible School in Canada and is really into it.

When I went to Uni I tried the Christian union there but they met up on a Saturday night! Ridiculous. They also were over-friendly and pressured me into going to all the meetings and social events. I'm the kind of person that has to know people quite well before I'm actually friends with them so it turned me off. We didn't have the shared experiences of my previous group of friends. So anyway, I couldn't find a church I could just go to in peace when I wanted, so I didn't bother. Also I was v lazy and mainly hungover on Sundays and having to actually make the decision about going made me realise how flimsy some of my beliefs were. That said, I've always considered "church" one of the worst bits of being a Christian.

jewish tbh.

totally born hebrew

voted for musical differences, although choral masses can be fucking GREAT

went to church weekly w/parents as a kid, found it dull; stopped believing in god - don't remember much soul-searching about this, think i'd just decided it wd be cool and rebellious, but i'd never liked the idea of a big sky-dude spying on what a bad person i was

got to skip part of church if i went to interdenominational christian youth group - was nearly won back by their more youthy strand of christianity and meeting new friends

but eventually the kids i'd liked got too old and i had a horrible time on overnight youth group trip when several new girls singled me out for some bitchiness which the leaders either didn't notice or ignored - spell was broken and i never went back to the group or to church, the end

Episcopalians sing so much better than Catholics. This is gospel in my family.

Still trying to get a read on the singing of the Jews.

Stopped going when I was 14, because that's when I was no longer forced to go.

No 1 reason for 'not going' once it was a choice was fuck a 9am Sunday morning mass tbh. But I haven't had any interest in Catholicism as a participative belief since I was maybe 11 or 12 I think.

Obviously still attend maybe 5-6 weddings/funerals/baptisms/whatever a year though.

One thing that also bothered me about the whole sect was how many of the more fundamentalist group were quick to decry many aspects of secular music, then simultaneously borrow the sound and morph it into something less authentic and watered down, and then advertise in Christian music stores that the group "sounds like (insert band name here)".

It was essentially saying "Listen to Dead Pharisees*, they sound like Slayer without the Satan and all the anger"....

*actual band name

The Catholic church I grew up in (0ur Lady of Perpetua1 He1p lol) had the fiercest organist.
She was so great. I don't think I'll ever find that again. I love the sensory things at Catholic churches but I think I like sleeping in on Sunday more.

3)youth group conventions designed to sell DVDs & t-shirts & recruit for xtian colleges

I went to youth group two or three times as a teen but couldn't stand it. Looking back, they're kind of fascinating and strange.

i grew up in a family where religion or lack-of was never discussed, but during my teen years the only way to see 'cool' live music was to go to those christian youth concerts. i was fairly ambivalent about god-stuff, but the moment that i ~really~ decided that wow this is totally not for me was:

we were at this xtian youth gig, and it was cool, they were singing pearl jam covers and then the singer stops between songs to talk about her best friend who had recently committed suicide... and how she was sad because he was now burning in hell. i just thought that was the most fucked up thing i had ever heard.

I grew up in an areligious household, but I went through an intense period of doubt and fear of fire-and-brimstone at the age of 11 after I was handed a little orange bible by a lady proselytizing in front of my public school

That whole Church vibe seemed designed to make Being A Good Person much more complex than it needed to be. The conflicting imperatives only disrupted my concentration.

all the perfume the old ladies wore at church made my eyes itch and water.

"the mass has ended, go i peace" = my favorite words in the english language

er, "go in"

never went to church; my family wasn't/isn't too religious; went to a religious preschool and had a religious grandmother so I grew up kind of believing in god & jesus but I knew intuitively from early on that the bible was largely false (esp the creation of the world stuff) and that prayer didn't/couldn't work. IIRC I stopped believing in God before I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

later experiences attending church services w/friends lead me to believe that I am 99% leaning towards voting "Musical differences" (talking about Christian rock, not traditional church vocal/organ music)

That's the other thing. We didn't have cool organ music in ours. When I went to a Methodist church, we definitely did, but once we hit the Fundamentalist one we had some old ladies who played the piano adequately, and a Praise Band that I was part of that couldn't play outside of 4/4 time and really bad singers.

Their music was not their means of reaching people, that's for sure.

I started to believe I was better than God because I treated my fish tank better than he treated us. Chose Hell.

As soon as I thought about it, it seemed like bunk. Stopped going. Do sorta miss "With Cheerful Voice" from CoE primary school assembly, though.

Because I hated getting up so early on Sunday morning when I'd been out all night playing punk rock music on Saturday night. I suppose that's down to musical differences. Also we left the beautiful classical music playing church for a folk-rock abomination of a church. Music didn't seem to matter to my mum, who chose our churches, but it very much mattered to me.

I suppose that's musical differences, basically.

Oh yeah, also 2000 years of oppression, basically. I continued to believe in god, I just stopped wanting anything to do with Religion.

"Go in peace, to love and serve the lord" = YOU ARE FREE. GO AND HAVE SOME DONUTS AND COFFEE!!!

I've only started to go into churches again in the last few years because of friends and family. I started to think about the anglican church in a fond and stupid way, as some sort of progressive christian bastion, where everyone was pretty liberal and soft on dogma/ideology, and having been told of the existence of ceratin bishops and vicars who didnt go in for all that resurrection/miracle nonesense, I imagined I could find myself in sympathy with it. This illusion was rudely burst one service two weeks after easter, where i was in a high anglican church mainly to hear my sister sing, and the vicar decided to emphasise how belief in christs' resurrection was absolutely crucial, and one couldnt be christian without it and without it nothing else could be achieved. I'm dumb for ever thinking otherwise, perhaps? I got quite angry, tbh. Later on in the sermon he was talking about a couples' charity to a very ill and widowed neighbour, and using that to illustrate the spirit of easter, and i was back on board. Then he swiftly veered back to the resurrection. I left in a huff and have tried my best not to hear any other sermons.

One I couldnt help hearing was at an ordination presided over by Richard Chartres bishop of london.
He expounded on this spectacularly wrongheaded notion of recent history, which essentially proved the rise of fascism and communism in the 20c to the decline of anglican attendences in england, and specifically the decline of church and chapel buildings in the square mile. If you've been in central london you'll know you cant walk far without bumping into another construction of Wren or Hawksmoor, or some methodist place. That's presumably why there were no more churches built, because there was little bloody space in which to do so, not some huge fall-off in piety - though of course he's right to say that attitudes to religion changed, but then to facilely connect that to the rise of extreme ideologies....simplistic and erroneous garbage.

you should go non-conformist imo

I remember before my first communion in 2nd grade the nuns telling us about the transubstantiation and how we were now eating the literal body of Christ and it did not make logical sense at all as it was clearly still a bread wafer.
I had the same issue. I went to confirmation classes and then declined to get confirmed b/c I didn't feel like I was ready to be viewed as an "adult" in the church b/c I still totally didn't get the transubstantiation. By the time I took a church history class the next year (went to Catholic High School) I was having more and more doubts (especially didn't like the idea of people who killed themselves or didn't believe in god or hadn't gone to confession since the last wank session going to hell), and when I found out about how most organized religions have only acted as oppressive murderous assholes throughout history I said "No thanks" and decided to figure out my spirituality without the aid of the dogma of a cold institution that I couldn't relate to at all.

Oh yeah the complete failure to become some kind of an aura-enclosed superbeing when the holy spirit descended upon me aty confirmation was a real jolt, tbh.

at the age of ten I developed beef with the idea of having to confess my non-existent sins in a one-on-one setting with the local paedophile

Having being forced to go to church through junior school and going to a catholic secondary school with nuns that hit you kinda nudged me in the right way.

Oh and the fact it’s not real as well.

I'm kinda interested in how the "it's not real" part here really plays out: whether it's the suckiness of other parts of church life that drive this belief, or vice-versa. I tend to think "it's not real" is secondary, in that it's a metaphysical claim we're not well-equipped to think about, but we are well-equipped to think about the stuffiness of church services or the moral failings of church leadership or the quality of the music, etc. E.g. Nietzsche's old jab that if church were "hip" then most people would be "believers".

'it's not real' is a primary and valid reason not to go and say that something is real every week for an hour.

not saying it isn't, just saying that I think it's usually secondary to the other things I mentioned

I support and love tons of things that are not real i.e. nationalized healthcare in America

Maybe that's true in terms of expressing out loud why you stop attending to someone- but i think it's probably an underlying motivator that, speaking personally as someone that's in a country where most of the adult population still hold more than nominal beliefs, is not so easy to express without it becoming a 'bratty teenager confronting adults' altercation.

xp that's supporting something you want to make real, bit of a difference dyao. you can't make angels happen by campaigning.

whaaaaaaa ?? I just donated half my paycheck to the Society For The Reification Of Heavenly Spirits

I tend to think that we're not very sure what the "it" in the "it's not real" is referring to, so that what's at stake is a vague sense of how things work, for both believers and non-believers. But what's clear to us are the practices engaged in "getting in touch" with this "it", and it's those that people fixate on.

'it' refers to anything that is a higher power conscious of human behaviour for me.

YMMV, obviously, but that covers everything from Genesis:Resurrection and all the Saints since. The philosophy etc is interesting, the history fascinating, but sitting there and professing a faith I don't have through platitudes I can still recite after 16 years in absentia jsut doens't do anything for me.

raised Atheist, went to an old-fashioned CofE primary school in a colliery town in the mid-eighties, started going to church aged about 8. It was where all my mates were on a Sunday. After a year decided it was hypocritical to go and not believe, stopped going. kinda miss the ceremony of it all, still have an automatic reverence reflex around when church services are happening.

voted Rain.

Raised Catholic. God the horror of Sundays:

mass is immensely fucking dull, 40 minutes in an uncomfortable seat shifting around, in a room with horrible air, listening to an invariably dreadful public speaker.

So otm. And not just Sundays - evening novenas and holy days of obligation and reflecting on the 5 glorious mysteries & going round the stations of the cross. God I was even an altar boy for a bit. I mean I sort of dig the baroque furniture that this has left cluttering my mind, but the experience was punishingly tedious. I didn't want to go, ever.

I stopped going with family after my Father's death when I was 14. I already knew I didn't believe before that, but it became a fully formed intellectual & argumentative thing for the rest of my youth. I had to go at school, still, but felt I was under duress. Argued with priests a lot.

I'll still go for family occasions. I don't wholesale hate the Church. Individual priests helped members of my family in hard times; the church's institutions and rituals gave many of them comfort and community.

I was never a churchgoer so my realising I didn't believe in God aged 10 or so was no big deal. But I did recently have a conversation with an old ex-Catholic priest who, back in the '50s or so, when he was still a priest, started reading about pre-Christian religion and it broke his brain and his faith and so he and the church went their separate ways. Which I think is a pretty neat story.

Re musical differences: The Covenant Hymnal is a fucking gem of heavy, old-fashioned chording and 4-part harmonies. I wouldn't set foot in my childhood church these days if I were paid to do it, but I only have to hear one of those melodies to fall apart completely.

Was watching TV special on an ice hotel built in Sweden, watched some cheesy couple got married in the ice chapel, was fine until they played an old Swedish hymn as the recessional at which point I got all choked up and proud and reminiscent.

Earth and all stars,
Loud rushing planets,
Sing to the Lord a new song!
O victory, loud shouting army,
Sing to the Lord a new song!
He has done marvelous things:
I, too, will praise Him with a new song!
Hail, wind and rain,
Loud blowing snow storms,
Sing to the Lord a new song!
Flowers and trees,
Loud rustling dry leaves,
Sing to the Lord a new song!
He has done marvelous things:
I, too, will praise Him with a new song!

A mystical incantation to the universe that calls all natural forces, things far beyond human understanding, to sing and celebrate their created (small c or large C) status together. Fucking A, man.

this is the crap that we had to sing in school assembly:

Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled
And the silk inside a chestnut shell
Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled
All these things I love so well

So I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
I mustn’t forget.

Clouds that look like familiar faces
And a winter’s moon with frosted rings
Smell of bacon as I fasten up my laces
And the song the milkman sings.

So I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
I mustn’t forget.

Whipped-up spray that is rainbow-scattered
And a swallow curving in the sky
Shoes so comfy though they’re worn out and they’re battered
And the taste of apple pie.

So I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
I mustn’t forget.

Scent of gardens when the rain’s been falling
And a minnow darting down a stream
Picked-up engine that’s been stuttering and stalling
And a win for my home team.

So I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
I mustn’t forget.

I graduated from high school.

I do have to say that the last couple of years I have mellowed. I can understand the need for religion and the belief in a God by others (though I still, at the end of the day, know there is no god. Certainly not like the Catholic Church would like us to believe there is.) But y'know fuck it whatever makes you happy, floats your boat.

xp That's horrid. It takes out every hint of the sublime, leaving only mundanity and a begrudging reminder that you owe someone (or something) a hurried, mumbled expression of gratitude.

that used to be dinner at our house tbh

Man oh man. We always did held hands around the table and said "We thank thee, God, for happy hearts..." or occasionally the Selkirk grace (as google tells me it's called), and if you were sitting next to my mom, she squeezed your hand at "Amen". It was all a little recital-ish but not unfeeling.

Someone mentioned The Cure's Pornography upthread. I got that album (cassette) in my church's youth group gift exchange. I was thrilled, but it was kind of awkward b/c it was a racy title and a very conservative church (Seventh-Day Adventist).

I left church b/c:

1. I wanted to work on Saturdays
2. I stopped believing in God years before, though I couldn't admit it to myself
3. I like to touch other men's weiners, a behavior of which the church was very critical
4. Ignorance and faith were conflated; members' going to college (even community college) was a matter of great concern for some of the elders

I used to sneak out of the house at on Friday night at around 10:30 in order to work the graveyard shift at a grocery store. I would rush home at 7:00 a.m. and pretend I was just waking up. Then I'd have to go to church - ugh.

4. Ignorance and faith were conflated; members' going to college (even community college) was a matter of great concern for some of the elders

This infuriates me as much as anything about the fundie xtian church my wife grew up in.

Ultimately I left the church b/c all the denominations I'd been exposed to had quite low expectations for women and quite high demands on their womanly behavior. I put up with the disconnect all through childhood thinking that someday when I was grown up, I would understand God's will for me and my submissive future, but when I got to about age 20, it obv just wasn't going to happen.

"Separate but equal except that some are more equal than others" just became intolerable and I threw the whole system out wholesale around the middle of undergrad (at a fairly conservative Christian college). Wasn't willing to stay in it for the spirituality or something, and let the oppressive stuff go, because it ALL seemed founded on the oppressive stuff.

Was never in the church

Earth and all stars,
Loud rushing planets...

There are other, awesomer, stanzas to this, including "Classrooms and labs! Loud Boiling Test Tubes!"

Actually kinda love this one in a way.

5. Good Christians were expected to put all their eggs in the basket of their life in Heaven, which meant pretty much ignoring this world. Not the best thing for a depressed, already-apathetic young person to be taught!

I have founded my own religion (as many thoughtful believers tend to)

OH FUCK, Ledge you've just given me a bona fide 15-year flashback :/

...and now that tune is dancing round my head, taunting in its saccharine splendour...

non-religious parents, never went to church. find the whole thing bewildering tbh.

i'm curious to know if you feel like you've missed out because of that? in a 'shared/communal experience' kind of way?

couldn't find another Elim church that wasn't racially awkward.

Greggles, you were going to an Evangelical Pentecostal church? In a way that seems perfectly you, but it's so basically un-English.

insufficient babes

xp
i've no idea how much of a shared/communal experience a church is, i bet it varies a lot. don't feel i've missed out on anything tho.

curiously none of my friends were very religious either. the most memorable religious experience I had growing up outside of being scared by an orange bible was attending my friend's bar mitzvah, and being jealous that he go to go to hebrew school after school.

non-religious parents, never went to church.

Same here (mostly, with a few unpleasant exceptions), but with a twist -- my parents have gotten religion in their old age, so I know not to try calling them on Sunday morning. Actually I think it's a social outlet for them as much as a soul salvation thing. They're very good about not pressuring us to get churchy.

come for the salvation, stay for the game of bridge

I looked up "orange bible"... wow . http://flagaday.wordpress.com/2008/06/02/the-orange-bible/

the first comment is great

"I have no problem at all with a flag in the bible. After all, we are a Christian nation, founded on Christian principles…like it or not. Ask foreigners and they will tell you the gospel comes from America. I really like the idea. Good call, Mr. Bible Printer!"

! ! ! that's the one ! ! !

I wish I had gotten this one instead :(

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Catholic_Bible

xpost when I'nm older, actually no, now, I'd like to find a nice, non-culty atheist/humanist church equivalent. I just want the basics- mustiness, ceremony, tombola and tea - without the inconvenience of all the wacko god stuff.

what is the etymology of the word "church"...? seems peculiarly Christian. every other religion (except for Islam, I guess) has temples.

from Gk. kyriake (oikia) "Lord's (house)," from kyrios "ruler, lord."

Interestingly, the word temple seems to come from Latin templum which has direct connotations to augery and the temple space itself being consecrated for (pagan) worship through particular ceremonies. Not surprising that early Christians would want to distance themselves. Plus early church meetings were in secret, in private homes...kind of works out.

my friend was a big Ministry fan and he started playing them and tried to convince the youth group leader that they were Christian because of the name. He got away with it for about 5 minutes but people suspected tehy weren't Christian because they "sounded unhappy"

wow, I did this, too. I put on A Mind is a Terrible Thing... one night, and they put up with it for a while, but made me turn it off.

oh no you did not just talk shit about michael w smith

you wanna take this outside

lol - I sort of still un-ironically love The Big Picture. he lost his soul when he shaved the beard, though, imo.

I find other people's why-I-left-the-church stories to be kind of boring for some reason. mine isn't any more complicated than that I grew up in a religious family, never believed in God, and turned my back on it as soon as I had the balls to stand up to my parents. On the poll, I chose the sin option.

My family left a small town Christian church because my mom wanted to be an Episcopalian (social climbing I guess) - I loved the ritual and glamour of it, all the vestments and the kneeling and the hugeness of the music. Mom caught me once singing the Lamb of God at the top of my lungs in the backyard. We quit going to church there when my parents divorced. In the summers, my sister and I'd get sent to the Baptist vacation bible school for a week or two (free bus came to get us, they served lunch, mom got a break) - inevitably we'd both get saved again at the end. I can't hear "Just a Closer Walk with Thee" without starting to amble forward still. Then in high school, when I was living with my godless dad and stepmom, I got extremely involved in an evangelical Christian church - the guy I was dating went there, as well as a huge bunch of the band crowd. I ended up there at least 4 nights a week and both Saturday and Sunday. Youth group, choir, bible study, voice lessons. Got saved and dunked, but got out a few years later after they put me on a Soul Winning Action Team (SWAT hahaha) and I got horrified by the incredibly manipulative way we were supposed to "witness" to people and convince them to come up and be saved.

Went off to college and eventually joined a frat where a lot of the guys were Catholic and started going to mass with them. It harkened me back so hard to my love for things Episcopalian. Then I was dating a Catholic guy and went through the year of lessons in order to convert - so many things I loved about the Catholic church: the rituals and music and sense of pagentry and purpose, the acknowledgement that people could and would make mistakes but there was a path for setting things right again, all the sordid history, but also the tenacity of people's belief. I'm also a sucker for orthopraxy - everyone doing the same thing together, chanting the same prayers. But I left when I realized what restrictions the church was forcing my daughter to buy into. It was fine for me to freely make the choice to attend and believe/disbelieve/compromise, but not for me to see her limited/restricted by a bunch of patriarchal crap.

That was an amazing post, Jaq!

It was fine for me to freely make the choice to attend and believe/disbelieve/compromise, but not for me to see her limited/restricted by a bunch of patriarchal crap.

As a daughter, I thank you. Mightily.

I'm confused as to Jaq's gender (they let girls join frats?)

there are co-ed fraternities

I was a little sister - the college I went to (GMI) had only just started letting women attend, there wasn't much sorority presence.

lol for a second there I was trying to figure out if you were a teenage closeted gay male evangelical or what

nope, just a geeky girl engineer with religious dilletante tendencies

my parents made us go to a Southern Baptist church from like age 8 - 17. i'm sure most people are pretty aware of this nasty denomination, but in case you're not - in the southeast U.S. it's just the absolute worst mix of fucktarded fundamentalism and social status bs you can imagine.

none of it really made any sense to me, and around age 15 i became increasingly infuriated by what i was being asked to accept as true. it was a mainline lutheran church and my parents were pretty cool so i didn't have any of that intense duty or loathing or anything. i just couldn't get with the stories. jonah was really swallowed by a whale, huh? in the mediterranean? are you shitting me? and if THAT'S true, well, why aren't, say, arjuna's famous and wonderful deeds etc.

as long as i doubted the minor mythy stuff like methuselah being 900 years old or whatever, the big-ticket stuff like virgin birth and resurrection wasn't that much better. some people have faith in them very deep but i always thought it was bullshit. it seemed like a weird appendage to real life, not some kind of central explanation of its core problems. (plus, the church's official position was against me getting laid at that age which was a dealbreaker at 15 and still is. lies are a bigger problem than sin, imo.)

i had one big shouting match about this with my parents and that was that. i said i can't go because i don't believe and it's a waste of my time and god's too, if he's there. lutherans are big on conscience, thank the lord. always made my pastor sad that i quit, he liked me a lot.

I only passively believed in God to begin with, considering that we went to a Presbyterian church in the Twin Cities solely because they had a semi-liberal black pastor. We stopped going shortly after he left, partially because the new pastor said some stuff my parents grossly disagreed with and partially because the hour trip each way became tiresome for them since they had to wrangle 3 kids; this was about when I was 7.

As I was growing up, I had several racial run-ins with my peers that soured me on the idea of the existence of God; basically, I refused to believe that a benevolent maker who had my best interests in heart would allow total idiots to call me a nigger. As I grew older, atheism became another way for me to assert my individualism and to subvert stereotypes people formed about me; a lot of kids expected that when they first met me, I'd be a stereotypical Baptist type who sang spirituals since I obviously wasn't a gangbanger, so I kind of went out of my way to cultivate the image of being a hardline anarchist atheist as part of an ongoing project to make people stop just assuming shit about everyone they met and actually getting them to get to know someone before making judgments about them. At the time, the stance was more a pose than a conviction; if quizzed, I would tell people I was agnostic because it was impossible to definitively say whether God existed or not.

Right at the beginning of high school, my oldest brother died. This was my sign that God either didn't exist, or if he did exist he actively hated me and my family. As far as I was concerned, everything about the concept of a divine being could fuck off and anyone who believed in one was a mindless fool, except of course for my friends.

When I got to college, I ended up auditioning for the church choir because the time commitment they required meant you got paid for being a member. I got in and was introduced to a spectrum of sacred music I'd never heard before since my family had stopped going to church regularly and I had become so openly hostile to the concept of Christianity. The power of that music, from arrangements of simple hymns to Bach's motets to full-on oratorio pieces like "Elijah" and the Montiverdi Vespers, spoke to me in a way I'd previously only experienced via angsty post-punk groups and loud, harsh industrial tracks. Even though I'd done a lot of singing in high school, a good portion of it was tacky, cheesy high school choral music, and most of that was secular. Encountering this stuff not only reattuned me to what the underlying philosophy under the Christian faith was, but how that faith could inspire some vital, deathless art that spoke more to me than anything else I'd encountered. I still don't really believe in God, but I do believe that people experience emotions that take them outside of themselves and inspire them to works both artistic and prosaic that are worth cherishing, and those moments justify our existence as a species. When inspiring that, I can't help but find religion fascinating and amazing.

I still don't really believe in God, but I do believe that people experience emotions that take them outside of themselves and inspire them to works both artistic and prosaic that are worth cherishing, and those moments justify our existence as a species. When inspiring that, I can't help but find religion fascinating and amazing.

This is a very beautiful and succinct way of expressing some part of human experience that I'm just beginning to step to.

Knew I had answered this on another thread somewhere.

What age did you stop believing in god?

I'm not sure that I ever really believed in God, in the sense of believing it with all my heart or anything. My family went to church every Sunday since I was about six, and I listened attentively and went along with things, but since we never really talked about church outside of church, it didn't seem all that important.

Still, it wasn't until I was about 14 that I really started to question what I actually believed in. There was a time, while I was working this all out, that I decided to only say the lines in the Nicene Creed ("We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth...") that I could actually get behind with absolute certainty, and I wound up being silent for most of it.

Then there was the Mass where the visiting bishop made some anti-homosexuality remarks, and I left the church angry and frustrated. Fortunately, all of this led to my parents abandoning the Catholic Church (which they later admitted they had taken my brother and me to just to provide us with some religious education -- for which I'm thankful) -- and for a couple of years late in high school, we went to a Unitarian Church instead, but not with as much regularity.

I've never considered myself an atheist, though in those initial years of wrestling with my beliefs, I was somewhat disdainful of organized religion. In college, though, I met some friends who identified as Christians but were liberal and intellectual and could defend their belief system way better than the kids I grew up with, and this made me a lot more sympathetic to religious belief in general. And for the last few years, I've been attracted to the notion of some kind of universal guiding principle, though I wouldn't call it "God" because of the connotations that term has. It's probably safe to say that I've always been agnostic.

― jaymc (jaymc), Monday, February 13, 2006 11:21 AM (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Waay too much drama and politics at a number of the churches I attended. I'd rather hear the sermon and read the Bible. I prefer a church that stays out of my business and focuses on community service.

(ha it just sunk in that I have been regularly attending church services for 17 of the past 19 years, yet I still consider myself agnostic)

I live in a small town in the west of ireland, I went to a catholic primary AND secondary school (kindof your only option outside the cities in this country) and a both of my parents are religious in that weird way that all irish people seem to be to me, that is they go to mass every week and allow their lives to be structured by the church quite a lot, but they never talk about it, or at least never have to me. Growing up I was forced to go to mass every week and my dad is crazy gung ho about this in particular (he once refused to speak to my sister for like two months including xmas dinner over her refusal to go). By the time i was like 15 i was pretty resigned to the fact that home was just somewhere that was to be put up with until I could gtf out of it, somewhere that was stifling both sexually and creatively but that made it impossible for me to want to speak up about it, more that I should just collect myself and be packed when the time came to go.

It was only when I actually got to college that I realised I craved something to fill the void, although it has become harder and harder for me to understand whether thats just stockholm syndrome from catholic guilt or that I had spent so long defining myself against the values and beliefs that were pressed onto me that when that pressure was gone I had nothing to define myself as This kinda flared up as a general interest in anything kinda newagey and mystic, increasing asceticism etc. Obviously this is like the cosmic force that we are all staring into i guess. I mean I spent a long period of my last year of college visiting a local monastery and going to the plainsong mass, considering joining the monastery afterwards. I wrote my thesis about the meanings of the catholic eucharist, I was pretty hung up on Kierkegaard, especially the angsty search for meaning parts, the poetry of belief, but largely I think out of a weird nostalgia.

it's v true that Irish people have that sort of blind unspoken faith. my mum would often talk about religion in the sense that she says she's praying for you if you have a job interview or an operation or something, but my dad, despite going to mass every week and making a genuine effort to go no matter how awkward the given weekend, well he never talks about it ever. i find it hard to see how he really believes in it, he's v cynical and the most matter of fact person, he only really believes in hard work/family/living a decent life.

I was sort of forced to go to mass as well but sometime around 13 or 14 I was allowed to walk there on my own and I began just buying a paper and a bag of chips and sitting by the sea or in the park for 40 mins listening to music.

Then in winter it'd be cold and I'd come home after about 20 mins. It gradually became clear I wasn't going so I just stopped.

I dislike the Christmas trip to mass quite a lot but I think my mum would be v upset if I didn't go. I mean I dislike the mass, I sort of like the standing around outside afterwards and meeting people.

Argh I have had that Autumn Days song in my head all morning now, thanks.
p sure some suck-up kid at my primary school wrote a "Summer Days" which was basically the same song but with more stuff about the seaside.

fascinating thread - particularly like that it is about the church rather than belief.

it's really interesting to hear the experiences of people from backgrounds which aren't totally dominated by one mainstream church. I was raised Catholic in Ireland and it strikes me that one positive aspect that a few have mentioned - the sense of belonging to a community - was not in evidence at all in my suburban parish.

my own experience is fairly similar to what Local Garda expressed so well upthread. as far back as I can remember I had plenty of problems with the church (oppression of women, demonisation of gay people, obsession with power/status) but somehow I was able to partition these from my own experience, probably in major part due to the local parish priest being a smart and articulate biblical scholar with a lefty bent. shortly after he died, I walked out in the middle of a sermon (at another church in the neighbourhood) bashing gay people as evil "fornicators".

these days my churchgoing is confined to funerals and weddings. my own wedding ended up being in a church after my folks threatened not to attend otherwise (a threat which I took reasonably seriously - or at least I wasn't prepared to call their bluff).

lol xposts - not that I amn't also interested in hearing about other Irish experiences too!

sorry to harp on for another second, but just thinking on it some more, it's actually totally normal that my dad is religious but not in any way spiritual. religion in ireland seems totally separate to any kind of spiritual or mystical elements despite being completely based on that. eg i can't imagine my dad, my granny, my mum, any irish religious person i know ever actually discussing theological questions.

My wedding was in a church, partially because my wife insisted upon it (she is a practicing Christian of the Episcopal flavor), but mostly because we held it on campus and the church was an integral part of both of our college experiences; I sang there for four years and went on two European tours with them and she did child care there for 3 years and sang for 1 year, including a trip to Princeton to sing with Dave Brubeck. There was kind of no other option for us, especially since the church where we were singing at the time got snotty with us because even though we were volunteer members of the choir, we weren't tithing members.

religion in ireland seems totally separate to any kind of spiritual or mystical elements despite being completely based on that.

IR not a Catholic iirc but I think this is true of Catholicism in the US too.

My Mum was Church of England, but pretty much only Easter/Christmas/emergency kind of attendance. Mum never liked the pomp and ceremony of the old-fashioned CoE church in town, so she started taking us to this other one closer to our house, it looked like a classroom and the bishop looked like Jerry Garcia...still the same message without so many bells and whistles. But as a kid I really loved the huge old church with the stained glass windows, and the organ player and the bishop in his big white hat and fancy white dress...so since I stayed with my grandmother a lot on weekends, I would happily trot along to the cool old church with her on Sundays. She tried to get me to do Sunday School but that only lasted a few weeks, I really preferred the grownup church. In the summer I would happily trot along to the kids mission group they had in the town we vacationed...sandcastle competitions, a few jesus songs, it was pretty fun.

As a teenager that faded til I really didn't attend church at all except at Christmas (Gran got sick and had died by the time I was 16). But the summer missions started up a 'teen' group, and I hung out with them every year...the people were cool, and I started to learn a lot more about the Bible. Eventually I thought that I wanted to be confirmed, and that I would try to actual join the church for real.
At the same time as this was going on, I had been carrying around an idea of heaven that I hadn't actually expressed out loud. I liked the idea of it being like a big wheel, and that each religion still ended up in the same place, but that their part of heaven looked the way they believed it to be. It was all one place. Well...I asked one of the mission leaders if a Buddhist dies, they go to the same place we do, right?...it just has a different name, yeah? Nope. They don't go to heaven. And I said, Well..I mean, I know they don't go to 'our' heaven. But they still go to whatever it's called. Right? Nope. They go to Hell.

And it was like a switch was flipped in my brain. I think my position now, more than 15 years later is that I'm happy with my own interpretation of the Bible, mixed with what I know of people, and that I'm okay with not joining a group to affirm my beliefs. They're not strong enough for that, and I'm not enough of a joiner to engage in that kind of groupthink. I didn't swear off believing altogether, and I didn't thumb my nose entirely at the church as a place of comfort.

I still take a lot of comfort in the rituals of the church, and I will never pass up an opportunity to go at Christmas. Especially now that I'm away from my family, and with my Grandmother long gone, I find now that at least going at Christmas is an odd form of long-distance communication...I feel like everyone I love is there with me, at least for an hour, at the time of year when I really do want to be with them. The church is good for that to me, at least.

gah I don't know why I kept saying bishop when I meant priest. Dur.

Once I went to a Protestant wedding as the guest of a Catholic family. The officiating pastor stopped by our table at the reception, and Catholic Daughter kept calling him "Father". After he walked away, Catholic Dad said, "Don't call him that, he's a Protestant. They're more secular."

In seventh grade we were required to take a class in "global geography." It was at this point that I learned about the immense size & population of various eastern nations, and that most of those people were Hindus, Buddhists, etc. I distinctly recall raising my hand in Sunday school (I was raised going to a very straight-laced evangelical Baptist church) & asking the youth pastor if all of those people were going to end up in hell simply for adhering to the tenets upheld by their culture. He said "yes" & at that point I stopped believing in God as decisively as I dropped the idea of Santa Claus in second grade.

I'm more agnostic than atheist btw, & I've come to deeply respect and appreciate many aspects of Christianity, biblical teachings etc. but as a teenager, yeah I pretty much thought that my parents' church (which I continued being dragged to until age 16 or so) was the most corrupt institution EVER lol.

VG, I just read yr post & it sounds like we had a very similar experience.

Reconciling spirituality and religion is just impossible.
I consider myself spiritual but don't really have any interest in religion outside of cultural/social/anthropological fascination. And sometimes I like the smell of incense. Oh and I used to eat (un-consecrated) hosts by the hand-full as an altar boy.

just got off phone with my grandmother (irish-born, catholic) and she wonders if i could go to a church and get baptized and pray to some saint for a job. she's never done that before! it was awkward. i tried to explain to her it wasn't my religion so if i got baptized it wouldn't mean anything to me and she was like "as long as you believe in jesus christ it doesn't matter." *sigh*

Reconciling spirituality and religion is just impossible.

Possibly so, but I don't trust anyone who's never tried.

this is the crap that we had to sing in school assembly:

Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled
And the silk inside a chestnut shell
Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled
All these things I love so well

In primary school ours was even worse/more embarrasing. We sang shit like

If I was an elephant
I'd thank you lord, by raising my trunk
And if I were a fuzzy wuzzy bear
I'd thank you lord for my fuzzy wuzzy hair
But I just thank you father for making me, me.

*puke puke*

Twee, embarrasing shite. Even at age 10 everyone was *furiously* embarrased and awkward in "scripture" as they called it - why the fuck we had a bi-monthly christian folksong singalong in a secular state primary school I remain utterly baffled by. Half the kids must have been muslim or greek orthodox - but no one cared in the 70s. Ugh.

My dad was from a rural Catholic family and my mom, while not raised in any religion (Grandad's an atheist, Grandma a Deist, though neither of them think much about it afaik) went to an ELCA, that is, liberal Lutheran church with her best friend as a kid. I was baptized Catholic, got some childhood guilt shit, Catholic grandma probably still thinks I'm going to hell because of my queerness (I'm straight, but liked Spice Girls, Elton John, and, I mean, my mom was Lutheran, right?) When my parents split around age 9, we moved back to mom's hometown and after she got remarried she wanted me to go to the Lutheran school, since they were so nice and cool and accepting. However, what she didn't know was that Missouri Synod Lutheran is very, very different from ELCA Lutheran.

Despite all the masses and conservative Lutheran schooling, most of my beliefs came from mom and my grandparents, so I was into evolution, was pro-choice, refused to accept that my gay uncles were going to hell, etc. I got in trouble for repping for Darwin more than a few times in science class and got beaten up for being a liberal gay weirdo. After three years of Lutheran school, after 7th grade, I finally straight up asked mom to take me out of that shit.

That's when we started to go to the ELCA church. I liked it for awhile, but it turns out that the parts that I did like about church, all of the ceremony, the organ, the weird Old Testament stories about this jealous, trick-able God, ELCA doesn't focus on very much. Then, at some point, I think 8th grade, I was going through some lonely puberty stuff, and I was praying. I prayed for, among other things, a girlfriend. It was such a direct plea, and a desperate one. In response, I just felt this INTENSE nothingness. I wasn't talking to anyone. Absolute silence.

It took a little while to extricate myself, talking to my mom in a roundabout way, withdrawing from church activities, but that's where I knew I had to get out.

Still love certain parts from afar, but on the few odd occasions I've been in a church since then, I've been extremely uncomfortable.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I was sort of forced to go to mass as well but sometime around 13 or 14 I was allowed to walk there on my own and I began just buying a paper and a bag of chips and sitting by the sea or in the park for 40 mins listening to music.

Very similar to my experience. At 12 or 13 I'd make excuses about feeling claustrophobic or faint in order to bail out after 30min or so (occasionally the reserve priest would pop into the graveyard at St Alban's to have a little chat with me - usually along the lines of "I never really liked Mass at your age either"). By 14 I was supposedly going by myself to the Sunday evening service at St Joseph's but was actually walking along Egremont Prom, kicking rocks into the river. I think the final straw was just something trivial like missing the final set of the Queen's Club final on BBC2 (Shiras-McEnroe - 1984, I guess) cos I had to go to stupid, bloody, pointless church. Dad didn't care, Mum was very upset.

The faith side of it I'm not sure persisted with me much beyond 9 or 10.

if I've set foot in church, it's because someone was getting married or buried, one of the two.

haha it just occurred to me that "married" and "burried" probably don't rhyme in accents other than my own. oh well.

maryed and baried?

murried and burried

merried and berried

mauried and bore-ied

engroomed and entombed

o snap.

http://media1.break.com/dnet/media/2008/10/30%20Zombie%20Wedding.jpg

lol darraghmac/velko

MAYR-eed and BAYR-eed

By 14 I was supposedly going by myself to the Sunday evening service at St Joseph's but was actually walking along Egremont Prom, kicking rocks into the river.

Yeah I'd always hold out for the Sunday one too, there was always the chance my parents would forget I hadn't been until it was too late, plus it was a good time to doss or friends might be around. If I had a bit more cash I'd go to this really horrible video arcade at the back of the chip shop.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

This comment page has a lot of good reasons I left, mostly because I knew too many people like these - a serious example of a thread where responding would do less damage to the reputation of the posters involved than just letting it sit as is:

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/passion_of_the_christ/comments.php?reviewid=1713595

lately I really feel like I made the right decision years ago. note this isn't meant to attack anybody's beliefs, which I'll always respect, but just an explanation of mine.

as I mentioned in another thread, a casual friend of mine from theatre lost his daughter, who was only 5 months old, to complications regarding a rare form of pneumonia, which she caught due to having SCID, which was not previously known. They had thought a bone marrow transplant could save her, but she was too weak, and they had her on life support and dialysis, and induced a coma to try to control the pneumonia.

This friend, and his wife, are extremely religious, and so were several of their friends, and their efforts for prayer went on at unbelievable levels. People all over teh nation, even those that didn't know him, were praying for the child. The child had a lot of notoriety as a result.

And the reward, for the servitude, devotion, and unwavering faith in a time of crisis was that the child died, never coming out of an induced coma. Through all of it, my friend remained positive and unwavering.

And I'm glad he has that faith and that he believes so strongly in something. But for me, it serves to prove to me that there is no God. That everything is purely just random, that everything doesn't happen for a reason.

My friend isn't "wrong" and I would never ever try to steer him away from what works for him. But it just ate at me how unfair it was for him to lose his child. He was a great guy, a great father, didn't deserve it.

A lot of his friends talked about how God made her pure, well why did he allow her to be born with a fatal disease in the first place, and what was the point of her existing on Earth if it was going to be for a mere 5 months? To teach a lesson?

Ugh....I know this isn't exactly a rare occurrence, but I don't have many IRL experiences with infants dying from something like this...it's just still bothering me.

A lot of his friends talked about how God made her pure, well why did he allow her to be born with a fatal disease in the first place, and what was the point of her existing on Earth if it was going to be for a mere 5 months? To teach a lesson?

I believe that the stock answer to this is probably that it's God's plan. For example, maybe because that baby died other parents will treasure the preciousness of their own children's lives just a little bit more. And for you, maybe the baby died so that you could have a crisis of faith, and when you eventually come back to the church you will have a great story to tell about the crisis you overcame. Or maybe someone had to attend the funeral so that they could accidentally run into someone on the street afterward and change the course of history.

The direct cause for my break with the church was that I had to watch my mom fake a miracle and then speak in tongues, then watched the pastor "interpret" (translate into rural-Missouri English) what she said for the rest of the congregation. Later I developed a laundry list of more universal reasons, but that was the initial dealbreaker.

among other things, musical difference was actually a huge part of the reason i left [the synagogue]. it seemed that you really couldn't be an orthodox rabbi if you listened to women singing and my fave artist of all time is joni mitchell so at some point i decided i wasn't willing to give her up for the rest of my life. some people don't really have a problem being a rabbi that breaks some of the rules, but i didn't really see the point if i wasn't going to do the whole thing.

i left because i just stopped believing. it took me many years to finally break it off, though. i had a genuine terror of hell through all of my youth and that kept me in line. i had a period where i would repeatedly repent and "ask Jesus into my heart" because i wasn't sure if i was actually saved. it was taxing.

also, the people in charge at the church were genuinely intolerant, hypocritical, ignorant, narrow-minded jerks. kinda soured me on their point of view. the church (it was a big place) also had a school that i attended along with my brothers and i felt we were consistently mistreated. not to get all back-patting, but we were a little too free-spirited and independent minded. my older brother won class president and the principal brought him into his office and straight up told him he didn't deserve the role and he disapproved of his character. my younger brother also won class president, but they awarded it to someone else. after some sleuthing, he found out he did in fact get the most votes and the principal and civics teacher (the irony) who oversaw the process basically had to admit they fixed the election. they felt he didn't have the correct christian character for the position. so yeah, years of them teaching us the glories of democracy and the American political process and they fix an election. fuck those people.

To be fair, most people are genuinely intolerant, hypocritical, ignorant, narrow-minded jerks.

you're just biased against people

haha true. i guess it irks more when these people are all righteous at a podium about it.

xp

also partly explains why i get almost murderous when i see Beck, Hannity, and O'Reilly type folks. totally cut from the same awful cloth. i mean, pretty sure i would hate them regardless, but my background kind of amplifies the disgust.

Circa1916, you obv needed to break free from being enmeshed in that church, and those people obv fucked up, and you'll know you're making shitloads of progress when you find a way to genuinely forgive them for their trespasses against you. Not an easy thing. After all, you were just a kid when they fucked you over like that and they were adults, for crying out loud.

As for Beck, Hannity and O'Reilly - forgiving those fucks would be a miracle of compassion. Still, it helps to try.

Only been to Sunday School once, and i got in trouble for drawing Satan. I was really into drawing monsters at the time! Dad was really into Joseph Campbell when he raised me, so I had a respect for the stories and myths of religious traditions and even grew up believing in Jesus and his teachings. Still, my parents pretty much raised me to see the Bible Belt version as a Christian "Death Cult", which I always think of when I see things like this:

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5175/5410425799_80a6f44290_z.jpg

That's supposed to be blood fyi

when I went to fundie church they were concerned with my 'musical' tastes. granted this is 16-17 year old me, no death metal, no gangsta rap, really my musical collection was pretty much dictated by Matt Pinfield.

so I brought my Offspring "Ixnay on the Hombre" cd with me to youth group one night...not sure why, cuz only Christian music was allowed on the stereo, but I guess I just wanted to look at it. I left it lying around at one point, and then couldn't find it. Then the youth group leader, who was also the minister's wife, comes back in with the case, as well as lots of photocopied pages, and explains to me that since I brought in the cd, she decided to photocopy the lyrics to look at them.

She pulled me aside at the end of the night and talked about how our brains are little computers and the negative message on the cd might negatively influence me. She was talking mostly about "Cool to Hate", which even being a pretty moronic 16 year old, even I could tell was just low-level sarcasm/parody of "I hate you" punk rock lyrics, but she was convinced it was an anthem designed to encite the masses to hate each other.

She also asked us frequently to "honor God with our driving" when we went out to eat at Arby's after youth group meetings, and when I brought my guitar for a New Year's lock-in, she stated that she wanted me to only play 'christian' music (not sure how G-chords and C-chords are inherently 'Christian' but o-k).

Lady had me so freaked out about going to Hell that I rewrote a guitar riff for a Christian 'song' I wrote with my brother because it had a tritone in it and I was afraid it was evil.

Man I don't miss those days.

I was also made lead guitarist of the "Praise Band", but unlike many churches that have quality music programs, Fundamentalists apparently think things like 'learning how to play instruments' takes away from hearing the voice of God, so they actually made Crass sound like Liquid Tension Experiment in terms of musicianship.

They had this drummer named P@ul who was really annoying, and actually looked like one of the Goombahs from the awful Super Mario Brothers movie. They/he talked about his 'talent', and then we went to the first rehearsal with him, and his idea of drumming was kicking the bass drum and hitting the snare on every down beat, the cymbals were just window dressing.

likewise, we had a guitar player who couldn't play proper chords, because he sucked, but he always made excuses. For one show I asked him to play chords, and he couldn't, so I said "fine, play power chords", and he couldn't, complaining that his "fingers were too fat", so I told him to play the song on one string and he played about five notes and then gave up and sat on stage holding the guitar like an idiot the rest of the song.

mum stopped making me go.

I DO WHAT AH WANT!

My brother, the one two years younger than me, is still very much a strong practicing Mormon & he asked me the other day why I left the church. He was v respectful about it & said I didn't have to tell him. But I did tell him. I had seven main points and I spelled each of them out in detail (I just remember it was seven because I was numbering them as a way to organize my thoughts as I spoke). He listened without arguing, interrupting, or rebutting. I'd never really told anyone in my family the reasons except the sister of mine who also left the church. By the end of it we were both crying v hard. V v hard. Just a couple minutes with tears and no words. I wished I was there in person so I could have given him a hug. I think he understood & he said that he could tell I made the right decision for myself. It made me feel really good to hear that. I don't really know how to explain all the complicated emotions of this moment.

I think other brother, ten years younger, is trying to leave the church himself. I think he has deliberately been taking extra shitty care of his diabetes to get out of going on a mission. He also made a suicide attempt the other day over it after my parents threatened to kick him out before he graduated if he didn't agree to go on a mission. A p believable threat bcz they kicked my sister out of the house at 16 when she said she didn't believe in it anymore. I think it scared my parents enough to get them to say he doesn't have to go on a mission.

i was lucky i guess - i knew pretty much from the time i was in middle school that i didn't believe in god and mass and most of that catholic stuff was kind of silly. eventually my mom got the picture and stopped making me go to church, it's not like i was a bad kid or anything. i've never told her i don't believe in god or anything but i assume she gets it. she still guilts me into going to midnight mass each christmas with her, though.

my Mom still doesn't know I'm atheist. I don't think I'll ever tell her, cuz it would probably break her heart. she's not crazy religious but she always has followed the faith, so as of now she likely thinks I'm Agnostic, or just 'not practicing'.

she does know I don't go to church though, so it's probably one of those "know but don't know" things.

the last paragraph of abbbottt's hits home for me because one of my best friends (from a mormon family) killed himself during our senior year in high school, a few months before we graduated. he wasn't into the mormon thing at all, and i always wondered what role the mandatory mission played in his decision.

10 year anniversary of that is on Tuesday, actually. god

Oh Z S, that is so heartbreaking.

He listened without arguing, interrupting, or rebutting.

Dude may deserve Brother of the Decade Award just for that.

you are OTM!

i went to a jewish preschool because it was a block away. then i went to a catholic elementary school because it was reputed to be "good." i went to mass on wednesday during school---otherwise we were strictly C&E catholics. stopped going to mass on xmas eve about ten years ago maybe, and we only ever went for the pageantry or whatever. pretty sure both my parents are atheist/agnostic, and only felt compelled to go on the big two holidays because my mom is 'ethnically catholic'. liiiiiiiiike catholicism (esp irish-catholicism) for a lot of ppl is like being a secular jew these days, imo.

anyway i'm still always surprised to hear ppl's experiences with losing (or finding) faith just because the concept has always been alien to me---i was an agnostic from the moment i knew what the word meant, and my dad's favorite little aphorism was something like "to know the how and why of god is presumptuous, to know the if of god is a gift".

anyway i'm still always surprised to hear ppl's experiences with losing (or finding) faith just because the concept has always been alien to me---i was an agnostic from the moment i knew what the word meant

This is otm for me too. I was raised Catholic and for most of my childhood we went to church most Sundays. I was also in religious ed each year and made my communion and confirmation but I can't ever actually remember believing any of it. I went to a Catholic HS but stopped taking Communion in junior year and would just sit out while everybody else did. I don't think I ever had a moment where I lost my faith. It's more like it was never there to begin with and one day I realized that I didn't have to do certain things anymore just because everyone else was.

Also, became an atheist pretty soon thereafter and so far it's just been something I've never really questioned and have been really comfortable with. What I mean is, I don't struggle with it. At all.

my exp mirrors yrs e

Sometimes I do wonder why this wasn't that hard for me or why I never believed despite being pretty immersed in church culture but I guess it wasn't really talked about that much at home and I sort of always saw it as just something we did. Also, my dad isn't Catholic so he was never a part of any of this. Maybe seeing him abstain and not really get into any of it helped me realize that I didn't have too. *shrug*

err to

Never belonged to a church, so never had to leave one, thank god. I don't guess my wife will ever get over her ultra-fundie-upbringing trauma.

my dad used to handle the money stuff for this (methodist) church "out in the country" that he went to as a kid. then he only went when it was raining, then he stopped going altogether.

my mom was periodically involved with the presbyterian church on our block. i went there for sunday school and summer bible camp when i was a kid. the old testament has some pretty good stories in it, so that was cool.

neither of my parents have been to church in probably 20 years and have in fact grown rather intolerant of organized religion, largely because of its outsized role in current american politics.

Although I was baptized at five because of cancer and superstitious parents, we did not join the Episcopal church (or any other) because of tithing - my mom shuns any intersection of religion and money, and my dad was just cheap. My mom spent 10 years of her childhood pretending to be a Jehovah's Witness (long story told elsewhere on ILX) and let us free-range as far as going to church or temple with friends to 'see what it was all about' but when we came back from a friend's Evangelical Free Church group with instructions not to watch The Exorcist on TV for all the usual SATAN reasons, she gleefully switched it on the night of the broadcast and there was a tacit understanding ("next, we'll do 'I Married A Witch' and 'Bell, Book and Candle'") that we weren't going back there. My posh grandmother's family had gone Christian Scientist when she was little, so I investigated that via Sunday school for a year or so until I fundamentally disagreed with the whole attitude to medicine (an 11 year old pro-doctors cancer survivor is v. cat amongst pigeons in that setting).

Ludicrously, my mom accused me of setting religion up to fail with all this visiting of various doctrines only to come up against known deal-breakers. Me: "I think it sets itself up to fail with, y'know, MUMBO-JUMBO." The only church I actually liked was my primary-school best friend's Presbyterian because they did a very minimalist and abstract Maundy Thursday service.

http://blog.ascentis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/The_More_You_Know.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maundy_Thursday#Derivation_of_the_name_.22Maundy.22

It's more like it was never there to begin with and one day I realized that I didn't have to do certain things anymore just because everyone else was.

my family never talked about religion or practiced it except going to church and the requisite things connected to it (sunday school, some youth group stuff, fund-raising type events), and i really hated going to church from a young age and always looked for ways to avoid it (sleeping in late on sunday, lingering in the church bathroom so that i could hide out and miss the service, doing anything to 'help out' that involved my not being in the sanctuary during the service). i don't know when, but once it occurred to me to reflect on the meaning of what we were doing, i realized that i didn't believe in any of it and moreover was not all that willing to go through the motions just because i was supposed to.

but that wasn't enough to get me out of being confirmed, and i still had to go to church up through my teens until my parents switched churches (without ever really discussing it with me) and gradually acquiesced to my not going as various excuses made it more and more possible to skip (going to my own church, no transportation, got a job working on sundays, etc.). with a bit of conflict, but not really because that would have required talking about it.

And the reward, for the servitude, devotion, and unwavering faith in a time of crisis was that the child died, never coming out of an induced coma. Through all of it, my friend remained positive and unwavering.

A couple of random-ish things I've read over the past couple years have led me to feel that faith is clearly beyond the realm of rationalism -- it's something you feel at deeply emotional/instinctual/etc. level that is alogical (i.e. neither logical or illogical). Some people feel grace, and others don't, and to each their own... and if the observant can find solace and comfort in something as tragic as a dying child, then it's a boon, and deserves its own respect.

that's what I said, no?

I mean I was saying this was my feeling about it and that I didn't want to steer my friend away from faith if it worked for him.

Yeah, you did, I just wanted to be able to contribute as someone who grew up completely outside of any religious institutions.

gotcha.

I moved to an area that has an old-fashioned church so I started going again. I mean, REAL hymns, decent pastors, the sermon is worth listening to. The church is old and has statues and people with doilies on their heads saying the rosary and all of that.

I was turned off by religion because of places like my brother's church where they have jumbotrons and the hymns are really bad pop music. It's like they don't really care about religion, how can they when their music sucks so much.

catholics don't really say "hymns" or "pastors" and priests are notoriously bad at sermons compared to protestant clergy

we say hymns!

pernicious church of ireland influence

both of those guys really set the agenda for y'all

which guys?

lol why is this?

Co. Wicklow is the county with the highest proportion of Church of Ireland members (6.88%); Greystones Co. Wicklow has the highest proportion of any town (9.77%).

xp joke about relative decline of church of ireland but i just read it has made a small comeback

wicklow is enclave of west brit privilege iirc

Where is option like "whole scenario sounded like bullshit" ?

i can't remember how it goes down in Ireland but speaking as a kid who grew up on the Wesley Bros. virtually every song I hear in the Catholic church over here is weak fucken sauce

the songs are ok, i think, but the execution is appalling

A thomas-a-becket said ho ho ho

i've always quite enjoyed reedy, quavery out of control church sopranos, especially if the accompanying organist has bad timing and a timid touch and they've picked a key that's far too high for the rest of the congregation. i've heard things that could bring a tear to a glass eye.

or a crack

u might wanna specify a bit more there, man

to a glass eye you buffoon

hey i knew what you meant i was just protecting you from posterity

I was going to make some horribly custos bladerunner joke about scones off the padded shoulder of Olivia from Wangaratta so thank you for saving me with xposts.

posteriority

this is maybe not the thread for this but I was shooting for somewhere people who were knowledgeable would hang out. I was reading the thing about Revelations, in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, & got to thinking about strict interpretations of & adherence to texts. afaik there are religious groups for which this is pretty standard, the kind of thing that some everyday-rituals of being an orthodox Sikh, say, are based on, like carrying the articles of faith around, &c. but I don't know enough to know whether or not this is true of any Christian groups; like when I think of ultra-observant Christians I am thinking of Creationists, & it doesn't sound unfamiliar to think of people referring to every word of the Bible being true. but are there groups that have that stance & defer to the text in all instances?, like even wrt the kinda ~weird~ stuff that's usually invoked to impugn the idea of taking the Bible literally - so, you know, shellfish, the growing crops side by side, mixed fabric garments, &c&c&c? & if not, how is this circumvented? do all readings eventually get to a stage of selectively saying "well obviously this isn't applicable anymore", or (per the revelations reinterpretation), "this wasn't actually referring to shellfish"?

i am not super well versed in this but would be curious if anyone had any info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_inerrancy would be a starting point I suppose - some fascinating stuff there

thanks!, gonna save & read later. i don't even really have the vocab to pursue this stuff so appreciate the directions.

ugh. lately I'm tormented by (and I suspect it's the OCD side of my anxiety doing it) an irrational fear of being 'wrong' about my atheism. silly of course because it's not a binary choice, but it's a thought I can't get out of my head. including the whole concept of Hell. it is absurd, because it is a thought that as little as one year ago made me laugh my ass off.

and yet, every fucking moment I spent in the church, both in my younger days, and my teens, were MISERABLE. I didn't agree with anything taught there at all. my guess is I never quite rid myself fully of the brainwashing, I just kind of...ignored it for years?

Neanderthal, let me assure you that hell, in the sense of a place of eternal torment after death for the sin of failing to believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ to sit at the right hand of his father, does not exist. I say this with the full weight of decades of my thinking about this in rather tedious depth. It is one of the few metaphysical truths I am qualified to state categorically.

Yes, you could be wrong about your atheism, but the result will not be an eternity in a pit of fire, or anything resembling it. That should not be a worry.

it's not even so much a serious concern other than my OCD-esque brain enjoys trolling itself all the time, on everything I believe, whether it be political, or re: entertainment or whatnot. and has since I was a kid.

thanks for pipin up though. enjoyed your posts in the other religious debate threads too.

Sounds like you are getting your eternal torments front-loaded, just like the rest of us.

weirdly this week, a FB msg thread pops up involving 20+ ex-members of the non-denominational (read: CRAZY FUNDAMENTALIST) church I went to in high school, reminiscing wistfully on those old days of youth group and retreats and how they miss them so.

Naturally, I abstained because the only response I could think of if I was being honest was "thank you for the indelible damage you did to my brain many years ago", but I also don't have it in me to be mean to them as they aren't bad people (they weren't the *gun toting, don't tread on me* right wing crowd, albeit their message and means of conveyance is probably equally dangerous to the nation in terms of brainwashing and anti-intellectualism).

It kind of got me thinking back to those days and wondering how I would have turned out if I hadn't spent four years there. Eventually I got wise to their nonsense by about junior year, but when I was young and inexperienced enough to fall for their bait, it definitely stifled my intellectual curiosity but moreso, made me more emotionally unstable than I already was. Their extremely literal translation struck a lot of fear into me and made me feel worse about myself as an individual (which is kind of the *point*, obviously, you're 'not good enough but through His mercy he redeems you anyway', etc, etc), but in a way I'm also kind of grateful because it did unintentionally shape who I am now.

I mean nothing summed up their silliness more than the night I went to a church lock-in and brought my guitar to jam and was asked by the youth group director to only play riffs that pleased the Lord. The fuck does that mean....no tritones?