What Made You Hate Your RELIGION?
Вставка
- Опубліковано 12 кві 2024
- Welcome to Rufus Read It. We work extremely hard to make the best quality content for you. Each video takes a ton of effort time and energy to complete. It's a true labour of love but you all make it worth it. All the content in these videos are owned by us!
Our Work Process:
1. Ideation + Scripting: We research and come up with the best ideas to turn into videos, we write the scripts and refine our commentary.
2. Voice Recording: All our videos are recorded by a real human. No Ai Voice recording.
3. Gameplay: Every minute of captivating gameplay you see on the channel 100% recorded by us.
4. Audio Editing: Each video is audio engineered. We edit the pacing, flow and add audio effects to elevate viewer the experience.
5. Editing: We bring everything together here. We generate captions, sound effects and color correct to make each video unique.
6. Quality Control: Each video is meticulously fine tuned so that it holds up to our highest quality standards. If the video is not up to par we go back to the drawing board and make sure it is.
Thanks for watching :)
- Rufus
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favour of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. ALL RIGHTS BELONG TO THEIR RESPECTIVE OWNERS
That's me in the corner,
thats me in the spot light, losing my religion.
ah snap
I was waiting for someone to make the reference
I lost my faith when I was suicidal and asked the nun 4 help and she did not.
hope your life is better
Because a nun does not save you, ask Jesus not a nun, not sure what religion you fell under if it's catholic they are far from God, and do not follow his teachings, don't follow the religion follow Jesus
@@jordanbass9167give it a rest
As long as I can remember, I felt a pull towards beliefs in Nature and spirits. I wasn't even able to explore it, in any capacity. It was a sin. Strike 1.
At the ripe age of 12, a youth pastor claimed my brother's Autistic meltdown was a case of "being possessed by the devil".
No, mental health is a real thing and not something to be ashamed of. Strike 2.
Then, growing up, many people hid the reason for their hate behind Christianity. People don't seem to grasp that it's a religion based on love, acceptance, and so on. Strike 3.
So much more that I've probably buried in the recesses of my mind somewhere. The list goes on.
Christian turned Hellenistic Pagan, what happened to me I think is nicely summed up by Lex Luther from BvS “See, what we call God depends upon our tribe, Clark Jo, 'cause God is tribal. God takes sides. No man in the sky intervened when I was a boy to deliver me from Daddy's fist and abominations. I figured out way back if God is all-powerful, He cannot be all good. And if He is all good, then He cannot be all-powerful.” God was never there for me when I had to deal with my abusive stepfather and whatever bits of my faith was left after him was destroyed by my pastors hate the sin love the sinner sermon after the Pulse massacre, it’s easier for me to believe that the world is imperfect because the gods are imperfect then that god is good and perfect and all powerful but doesn’t end all the suffering in the world for some reason
Exchristian now Pagan. I never really saw the "love Thy Neighbor as thyself" happening in the reglion itself. Hell, I'd be considered one of the worse because of being a witch. All I do is mix flowers into water bottles, baseically.
Is your weight equal to that of a duck?
Look into the backstory on the god Horus (written 3,000 years before Christ) compared to Jesus’s story. They are nearly identical. Almost as though Christianity “borrowed” the exact same plot line and used it for a different guy. Easter? So much of the traditions and history comes from the Celtic goddess Brigid. Pretty much a ton of Christianity is heavily referenced from far older religions. They just changed some details around and called it theirs and the only true religion…which incidentally most of the other religions do that too. Names and a few details changed to suit the culture, and bam! “New religion”. People take this stuff and run with it, only too happy to have someone tell them rules to live by and how to think and act. Pack mentality at its finest. Thank goodness that I finally freed my mind and realized that not all established “wisdom” is even wisdom at all. Sometimes it’s based on tall tales from a very very long time ago.
I’m an eclectic pagan. An’ it harm none do what ye will.
Macy has sent me down a rabbit hole.
I am a Christian And I am sorry for the people that had to go through that… No one should experience those things in a place meant to love all people and answer all questions.
This, makes a lot of sense and I agree. Just like segregation and slavery. Not everyone is bad, but it can get very hard to have faith in people or religion, when your only exposed to the bad parts of it.
Thank you for your kind words
for me the event that shook my faith was the death of my grandmother, this was a few years ago so I was an adult when it happened but in the twilight years of her life my grandmother had developed ALS which for people who don't know is a very severe disease where you lose control of your body, she was a very devout woman and the main reason I went to church because she wanted me and my family to when we went to visit her, however as I said a few years ago she developed ALS and died the next year, my mind went "if she was such a devout woman how could God let her die of such a horrifying condition after all these years?"
Or worse, how about the idea that she might've went to hell because God told her, "Surprise! You followed a false religion this whole time! [so-and-so] is the one true faith!"?
@@JohnSmith-zw8vp that.. no.. just no
@@waywardwriterryu7185 That is generally what you're expected to believe to be a good Christian.
@@JohnSmith-zw8vp if you exist on reddit or are subject to americanized catholicism yes, but you also do realize the tact of someone pouring their heart out on this subject and then going "BuT wHAT iF sHe'S iN hElL???" right?
@@waywardwriterryu7185 I'm sorry if something got lost in the translation but the subject of the video is what made you leave your religion and that's one of the main reasons I did (this idea that good innocent people should burn for eternity just for not believing the right things or not saying the right magic words). And TBH I'm not so sure I'd be comfortable in any sort of hive mind kind of situation where you're expected to just blindly agree with at least the basic tenants of the group. I have to feel free to make up my own mind on things.
And I thought this part was self evident but I'm very sorry to hear about the loss of your grandma to such a terrible disease...I lost my own wife almost three years ago :,(
I guess it was my speculation that a lot of modern Christian beliefs are not accurate portrayals of God. There are so many teachings such as the concept of Biblical interpretation, the phrase “God understands”, or how God forgives every sin and loves everyone unconditionally that seem to be nothing more than fabricated aspects rather than elements originating from scripture. Even our worship songs lack worship. Instead, they consist of mere babbles boasting about ourselves because God suppository said so. Overtime; the Church’s inability to uphold their own beliefs and their pretentious nature in attempting to explain away or justify religious text in relation to their personal narratives and flaws brings a plethora of questions about their ideology and genuinity.
In the end, it seems that the Bible has been altered many times and in various ways for the sake of different individual characters and diverse relevancies. The majority of people choose to call themselves Christians so that they can feel like a good person - which brings about their constant attempts at justifying who they are and what they do with words of their own creation disguised as God’s because they fail to accept the reality that every man has failed in some way. And although I do not deny the possibility of the existence of the Abrahamic God: who he is and what he wants cannot be understood through the teachings of the earthly Churches.
I was raised Agnostic, though did occasionally attend church with family. I am still Agnostic, though I do have a curiosity for other religions. I enjoy learning about and/or experiencing religions of all kinds.
I have certainly found strength in my morals in doing this
These are really deep questions and answers im reading. Ill be honest, im a Christian and I believe im going to hold on to the end. I dont understand how people have come to their decisions but when my dad passed away, this was how God came into my life. 13 years later and through alot of backsliding im still a believer today. Sometimes it feels like blind faith and other times i see the evidence of my faith through His word. I guess alot of these questions would be extra additions to the Psalms if Psalms was a modern day book. I may never understand why these stories of loss faith happened or why things caused the hearts and minds to think this way but im ok with that, because this is what you decided. Maybe we have yet to see the reality of God's love or perhaps we have forgotten as times change. Perhaps society and even Christian society has let you down. Maybe God might have something else way later down the road that you would of never imagined thinking or doing. I dont know. I think there is a big difference in serving God out of fear vs serving God out of loving him and his word through thick and thin and asking for help from Holy Spirit daily. Maybe it really is black and white but Jesus came to relate to our gray lives to reveal why its black and white and how we can gradually move to the white daily.
I was forced into a Catholic boys home you can imagine how that went.
Are you ok? That must have been awful. Hugs :(
What's the LEGO-looking demolition game being played in the BG?
That looks like Teardown
@@bluedude101 It's absolutely Teardown, I've watch enough videos on that game to tell.
I strongly agree with story 2! 😁👍🏾
Protected kid diddlers
And blamed the victims
When Pastor david made me another statistic when i was 6.
I’m so sorry for you, I hope you’re ok now. Hugs :(
That's horrible, I'm so sorry you had to endure that. You deserved better.
I was raised in a very strict Christian religion. Alot of double standards, but the breaking point was when i looked online which never tell you to do. Multiple confirmed cases of CSA. I asked a man who was high in the relgious community and he just said "we're not the police." WTF?! Isn't that when the police get involved?
I've never been particularly religious, never went to church, but what little faith I had was unintentionally removed by my religious mother.
She's more religious than me but still doesn't go to church, but she's the kind of person who believes the bible is true.
It happened over time, basically with my mother pushing it on me telling e that one day i'll have to find god, well after a while it wore me down, the tipping point was when she essentially told me god's morality is black and white, either you are with him or you're against him.
That didn't make sense for me because people in general aren't black and white, I tried explaining this to her but she kept insisting god was black and white, this didn't have the effect she wanted, because instead of making me have more faith or believing as she did it instead made me think "If people aren't black and white, but god is suppose to be black and white and thats is the only way god exists, and we were created in god's image, then god doesn't exist because if we are suppose to be reflections of god in some way but god is nothing like us then it isn't true."
Those words "You're either with me or against me" sound a bit tyrannical don't they? it's extremely rare for anyone good to ever use them.
The final thing was a discussion I heard about hell that made me think.
It essentially went:
Hell doesn't exist, because hell is suppose to be infinite torture, but humans are finite entities, everything we do is finite, so what possible thing could a human do to earn infinite and unending torture?
If I had infinite time and I took my finger and poked a wall, through doing nothing but poking it I would eventually break down that wall, and thats by doing something as minor as poking it, people don't understand just how long infinity really is, so what could a person ever due to earn infinite pain?
Not really sure if i would ever consider myself religious, but my family went to church every sunday and when i got older i did attended youth group every wednesday and my parents helped run it. My mother has always been an extremely christian woman my entire life, anytime anyone at our church had anything happening my mother would check on them, go spend time with them to keep them company, make meals for their family if they couldnt, etc. Then my mother got in a horrible car accident, couldnt walk or do anything by herself for months, we lived less than a mile from the church an nobody even came by to see how she was, shes still a religious woman, but i dont think ive seen her step foot in a church ever since
The same thing happened to my husband’s grandmother. She worked tirelessly for the church, even cleaning it weekly to help out. Then she got deathly ill and suddenly no one had time for her. The priest was too busy and important to come give her last rites. She died and no one even cared. She routinely baked for the church bake sales and helped out with the Sunday school kids. She helped sick people etc. Cooked meals for them. No one came in her last days but her family. My husband’s father wrote them all off after that as users and liars.
I was raised Christian. The system always seemed very hypocritical to me, but as a kid I wasn't allowed to argue and practically forced to go every Sunday to church. I was so confused by what I was taught. That you shouldn't judge, to love everyone equally, and that God lets things happen for a reason. Apparently the love and nonjudgement doesn't extend to the LGBT community, other religions, and disabled individuals on occasion. "Things happen for a reason" resonated too closely with "because I said so" and other dismissive words. I could not, would not, believe that my uncle was burning in hell because he wasn't interested in females. He died too young to unforeseen circumstances and was the man who helped raise me alongside my father and mother. I didn't want to talk about his passing to anyone after the family found his stash and the rumors spread like fire on dry brush. Especially any church. This was why I lost faith as well as prayers feeling useless about 95% of the time. Also when people try to force their religions into my throat so much that I want to vomit and blaspheme as hard as I possibly can. I've struggled with not judging people of religion too harshly, especially since I've met such lovely people who do not oversell their churches/beliefs. But I've also met complete nut jobs about 3 out of 5. Extremists can be in any belief and so can be cults. This I have found over years of research in my adult life. I continue to explore religion, but more learning about history, myths, and legends. Currently I am very Atheist.
I grew up with 2 southern Baptist sets of grandparents. All of my questions were answered with, ‘just have faith.’ I think that I continued to go to church in my early adulthood out of habit & for community. My nex MiL was Pentecostal so I wasn’t the right kind of Christian in her eyes. I have multiple chronic illnesses/conditions. One day she said something like, ‘you know, you wouldn’t be so sick all the time if you just prayed more.’ That did it for me. I’m sure she’d be so happy to know that she triggered my complete rejection of Christianity. Now I’m more spiritual and believe in the earth and nature. There’s proof they’re real.
Got my rapist out consequences for her actions. because she was a good Christian girl and could not do the things i accused her of
I was the one punished for what she did to me.
I’m so sorry for you, I hope you’re ok now. Hugs :(
Was raised Catholic, am non-religious now (if i had to choose, though, I'd gravitate toward Shintoism). As I got older and found inconsistencies in what was preached with what was practiced, I felt less okay with it. Now, I find the way that religions develop to be a fascinating topic of research, though I could do without the violence in a lot of that history.
I was once devout Christian, tattoos and all, was even on the “worship team”. I’ve LEAD WORSHIP in church!
I lost my faith when I couldn’t NOT ask questions or apply logic to my faith. After a lot of soul searching I came to the realization that I ONLY believed out of fear. Fear of losing my afterlife. I didn’t love god, I feared god’s judgement. After that, I questioned why, if god calls us his children, does he send us to hell? He is silent, but the Bible says he wants a relationship with us? Is god unable to speak, or does he NEED vague mystery to feel better about the love he demands? I’m agnostic at best now. I’d like to believe the universe has something in it special, beyond what we can explain, but I have yet to see anything
So glad videos like this exist
I found myself questioning if there was a god after my abusive adoptive dad started beating me. I waited until I was finally free from him to say that I was an atheist. I had been for 8 years, and when I left at 19, the last thing I said to him was "I'm an atheist because if god is so good, why didnt he appear in the past 2000 years? And if he is so good, why did he kill so many people in the bible?".
A lot of time hypocrites of any religion drive people away. I’m a Christian and hold myself to a standard that maybe other people don’t. There are people who involve themselves in the church who just do so for power or to try to take advantage of other people. Those people aren’t real believers, can’t answer anyone’s questions because they don’t really know the answers. I love Jesus with all my heart and am not perfect but strive to do the best I can. To those of you who were mistreated by people who claimed to be religious or didn’t try to help you all in your faith study I’m sorry that happened to you all.
I haven’t lost my faith in Christianity completely but I’m on my own journey now and Hoping to get into Buddhism, I realized a while ago I needed inner peace more than salvation. I don’t like seeing people who claim to be Christian using their religion to justify hate for people and things they’ve probably never been in the same location as, it’s not something I want to be associated with!
So basically all the stuff controlling religious parents try to ban their kids from doing. Internet, friends from outside the faith, asking questions, etc
9:17 the problem with this theory is that some people say it only makes sense that we are in a simulation how else could the universe have started, so what about the creator outside of the simulation, something can’t exist without a space, so who would be running it
What I’m saying is that it would be the same probability if we were a simulation that the creators who made us are in a simulation of their own
I am Christian and i always always follow this from Jesus love the sinner not the sin im Bi no shame in it i know either way im saved regardless of my choices in life or my beliefs
I learned about revelations and immediately questioned everything and thus I am a atheist and to be honest this was kinda inevitable for me once never felt connected to Christianity and the only reason I probably still believed in it was because I never actually read the Bible and never new about the crazy crap that’s in it and a fear of hell like most peoples that follow christianity
I don't think I've ever really deconverted, but I've seriously deconstructed. At this point I'm too heretical for the Christians and too Christian for the atheists lol.
Too many incidents to point to but the biggest thing was just simply being willing to read outside my bubble and look at other perspectives. In particular, learning more about the biblical texts, what they were originally referring to in context and how their interpretation has changed over time has been an absolute roller coaster. If some of the youth group kids I grew up with knew the things that biblical scholars _know for a fact_ about the bible, but that pastors refuse to tell you, they'd start chewing the walls.
was never really religious. church was just a thing my mother would pick up or drop depending on her relationship with my extended family. it was just a thing I treated it like a mythos like any other. like Greek Zeus, or North Odin. but what turned me off was the people insisting I had to believe cause it wasn't a matter of faith but truth and its plain fact. they would try and get me to jump through hoops to defend myself but when asked for their justification for believing I would get copped-out answers. pushed for the "science" that proved them right and got nothing solid, and that it was not fact but all about faith despite them telling me the opposite a moment ago. so any faith or belief was dropped with all the other for of myth, legends, and fairy tails.
Not religious myself, but one of the things i like about Judaism that I've heard from people. Is that they encourage you to question your faith. In the sense of actually asking questions about passages in the Tora and discussing them at length. Rather than just being told "Don't question it."
All of their holier-than-thou BS. Nothing kills belief faster than people who think they can shame you into believing the same thing they do.
The behavior of the ppl not lining up with the teachings of the church, a lot of logical inconsistencies as well as anti scientific claims., and apologetics that really had nothing to do with explaining any of the things they claimed to.
Finding out about the politics of the early church and how pseudepigrapha writings came in that influenced the church to today. For example, only 7 of the 13 Epistles attributed to Paul are considered actually written by him. The Pastoral Epistles, Luke and Acts were written in the mid second century by a single group. Christianity is more the doctrine of Paul and not Jesus.
Today, some of the best Biblical scholars were originally Fundamentalists but are now Atheists and Agnostics ( I.e. Bart Ehrman).
Scribes and others altered texts to fit their views. For example, none of the found copies of the Gospel of Mark are exactly the same. They extended the ending of Mark with the “talking in tongues and handling of snakes) in later copies. The “Adulterous Woman” in John is also an addition, it appears in different parts of John while absent in the earlier copies and has also been found in Luke. In the 1700’s John Mills wanted to create a better New Testament from older scrolls, but he found over 100,000 textual errors and published that fact as why he couldn’t complete his work.
There are translation errors in the Old Testament from the Septuagint (Greek translation of the Hebrew). Such as a “virgin will bear a child” the Hebrew had a “young woman” and if you read that chapter of Isiah it is about something occurring in Isiah’s time not a prediction.
That's me in the corner...
If we are living in a simulation why do we have irrational numbers, like pi?
Other Christians made me lose my faith. They say "Put the Christ back in Christmas" but I think they should put the Christ back in Christians first.
I'm a former Catholic, I'm now a non-religious. I serve the church for 10+ years and I've seen many things in there, many hypocretes which really makes my blood boil. And they are worshipping Jesus Christ as God, which he is not. They actually forgotten who the real God is in that religion.
For me it was every time I would question something. I would get a backhand to the face and say you don't question this. It is what it is and I started rebelling by saying I might leave this church and pissing all the old ladies off and eventually I just did f that noise. I also hated all the rules like what we could or couldn't eat prayer is false hope to not take action in life
Religion is man made but at the center of it all is be a good person 🤷🏽♂️
I guess my grandad told me that when he was taught by nuns, one day, he was sent to the corner of the room. Then, the priest came into the room. He said he saw the priest put his hand on her bum. He shouted i saw you touch her. You're sick, swearword. He ran out and never went back.
Islam, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, I don't care, I'm agnostic, and will never change that
Proof that not everyone is open minded
@@mpalmer22proof that not everyone is easily led and gullible enough to fool.
@@macylouwho1187 There is a point to where extreme skepticism leads which pretty much inoculates you from any evidence of truth. Even if you saw a miracle with your own eyes, you would say miracles don't happen, because they can't happen.
@@mpalmer22 unfortunately you are preaching to the choir. I’ve been deeply religious prior to this. I spent my teens reading the Bible. Only to grow up and realize that so so much of it is heavily borrowed from far older religions with a few details changed. And that the Bible has been altered all throughout history by regular men who wanted to control the narrative. Look it up, it happened. The King James Version of the New Testament was completely in 1611 by 8 members of the Church of England. There were and still are NO original texts to translate. The oldest manuscripts that we have were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died. There are over 8000 of these old manuscripts, with no two alike. The King James translators used none of these anyway. Instead, they edited previous translations to create a version that their king and parliament would approve of. so 21st century Christians believe the “word of God” a book edited in the 17th century, from 16th century translations of 8000 contradictory copies of 4th century scrolls that claim to be copies of of lost letters written in the first century. That is not faith, that is insanity.
I didn't give up my belief of God, but I am agnostic.
The basic fact that it is all a lie 🤥
Because out of the trillions and trillions and trillions of tests conducted by the human species, not once, ever, has the supernatural ever been demonstrated, ever.
Also, I can hold up Harry Potter and put forth just as much evidence for the validity of Harry Potter as you can for your particular holy book.
I turned 7.
fr
Creationism and the many, MANY scientifically impossible things that happen in the bible that would absolutely never happen or work in real life. Whenever I hold a bible, I treat it less like a book I should follow and more like a legend of some healer sent down by god as a personification of what their supposed higher power can do. It all just really reads like something out of a DnD rp. No offense, DnD players.
I really liked what Bill Nye said in that debate...if you can prove using the standard rules of science that those Bible things really happened, that the Earth really is only 6000ish years old...go ahead and try! If you can you'd change the world forever.
As a DnD player, no offense taken. God summoning bears to kill some little children that made fun of a bald man (Yes, that's true. 2 Kings 2:24) Is absolutely something that'd happen in a DnD session.
Egyptian papyri mentions kings of Jerusalem that are not recorded in the Bible as well that were times Egypt controlled that area.
I don't really believe in any religion myself, however I do have a somewhat interesting take on the more fantastical stuff, tl:dr at the bottom.
Honestly the bigger events I do believe happened, however not exactly as they are told in the Bible or other religions/mythologies. Take the Great Flood and Noah's Ark for example. I don't believe that it happened the way that it did, but rather some major flooding occurred that, to those observing it at the time, it would seem like God flooded the world to them, hell some people probably even made boats to survive and possibly protect some of their livestock (where the ark comes from).
To my knowledge there are are several religions/mythologies with great flood stories, so a VERY (and I mean very) long time ago some big flood probably occurred in the area, and as a result you got stories like the one of Noah and his ark. Using supernatural and religious ideas/beliefs to explain what are explainable events today, but at the time something that they couldn't rationally explain. I mean "God flooding the world to wash away the sins of man" wouldn't sound unreasonable back then without modern-day knowledge.
I'm sure if human's existed in a somewhat civilized when the meteor that ended up wiping out the dinosaurs and survived somehow, it likely would have been described as "god's wrath cleansing the planet of sin" or something like that in a religious text. At first it would absolutely sound completely nonsensical and made up, but there is evidence to prove that did happen, but that wasn't divine punishment, just a gigantic space rock hitting the planet because we were in the way.
Yes I know that we as a species didn't exist yet, but I'm just using that as an example of something that would sound like it would be from the Bible/other religious texts/mythologies and sound like nonsense, but we know for a fact that it actually happened and have actual proof of it happening.
tl;dr, I believe that most of the "natural disaster" type stories from the Bible and other religions/mythologies have some basis on something that actually happened in the past. It's their interpterion of what happened that makes the stories into more than what actually happened, as a means to explain what they couldn't explain at the time.
I don´t hate relegion.
But I hate the institution behind it.
The hate towards anything different
Come, brothers. Let us mourn for the rocky places and the places of thorns, for the seeds did not sprout.
As a dumb hindu I believed God was someone who would fulfill my wishes😂 but God din't fulfill all my wished so I just stopped believing atmost
If god is an ever loving Father, why would he tell you to believe in him or go to eternal suffering? That's not everlasting love, that's conditional love. "You have freedom of belief so long as you believe in me" is no rule to live behind, and these concepts are what have kept me away. So much contradictory statements, do as I say not as I do people. The bible and many other religious documents are molded as much by political influence as they are fanatical belief. Translations and interpretations are on top of that and aren't immune from it either, it's all a mess that the church laughably tells you is the word of "God".
I'll never understand the huge boner some people have for religion. It's weird sitting on the outside looking in at USA going crazy on social medias and screaming about their magic sky daddy. Up here in Scandinavia, no one gives a cr*p about religion. We're only christian on paper but most people don't believe. I've been alive for almost 43 years and never met anyone who was brought up in faith. Churches are used for things like weddings and funerals because it's tradition, not because people actually believe in the things being told in there. Even priests are cool with it. We also have homosexual priests up here. It's all good.
Two things, the first being somewhat mundane and the other being a real pulling of the rug from under.
I was raised Catholic and sent to nothing but Catholic schools. During church, I felt that childish desire to stand out, and that equated to be an altar boy, but I never was one because I was just too shy to do it. Perhaps that spared me from being caught up by the massive - and as I need to remind some people, still ongoing - CSA scandal of the Catholic Church, but that did not really become a factor until high school, and even then, it was not by much.
Nah, what made me... well, not so much angry at religion but rather tired of it, was two things, both of which were pretty inane: me having to do volunteer service as part of my high school's curriculum (again, Catholic schools), and my mom being in the church choir. Yes, other stuff played a role, some of which were mentioned by some of the video's stories, but these two were the biggest.
The volunteer service was my first understanding about "working a job that you have to and not because you want to," and let's just say that it taught me to seek out a job I wanted and to try to not fantasize about it (not easy, but I had gotten the job I wanted for a while, at least until the "religious" state government axed the budget for the department I worked in and thus cut my job). As for my mom, her being in the choir meant having to get up much earlier for church and staying much longer after it. It was especially frustrating to me and my brother (our dad too, at least until me and my brother went to college). At least our mother didn't complain when my brother and I started taking our own car to church so that we could leave immediately after Mass was over and not have to wait for her.
Sure, the two of us kept going to church on our own for a while, particularly after we discovered Saturday evening Mass, but eventually, we concluded that we could do better things with our Saturday evenings than going to church. No, we did not go clubbing or anything like that, but we kept going out to fool our parents into thinking that we were still going to church.
So yeah, speaking for myself (even though I know it was the same for my brother), my religiosity was about as weak as it could get. My Catholic high school did not help, but that was not because it was a bad place - if anything, the teachers there encouraged me to consider others, and my favorite teacher (who was an ordained minister and served as my guidance counselor for my senior year) even said I should consider atheism as a legitimate option. That was quite the surprise, but it was welcomed. Even so, it was not the moment that the rug was pulled out from under my faith; no, the rug pull was when my classmate, who will only be referred to as "Daniel," was diagnosed with stomach cancer.
I am not going to go heavily into detail, but watching Daniel, one of the best kids I ever knew, gradually go from that golden boy status - i.e. smart (in the advanced classes), athletic (varsity baseball), and very friendly and sociable - over the course of the school year was devastating. It is one thing to hear that argument of "God also made that parasitic worm that bores into kids' eyeballs" (a solid argument, don't get me wrong), but it is entirely different to actually watch something akin to that happen right in front of you. That was a real game-changer for me, and bear in mind, I was a quintessential nerd with social and anxiety issues, only without any dental or hygiene issues. Daniel and I did not have that many similarities outside of being in the advanced classes, and it is fair to say that I was jealous of his qualities.
On the one hand, that experience dragged me out of the shell I was in back then. I got more sociable (or at least approachable), I started reaching out more, and I simply started doing more, with one such thing being getting Daniel on the academic team in order to scratch his competitive itch (he loved the challenge itself more than winning). On the other hand, well, it only took having his life slowly taken away - and I do mean "his life," as he would pass away exactly one week after we graduated. Memorial Day 2006 will always be a dark day for me.
The straw that broke my faith's back was at Daniel's funeral. The funeral went well, and I had even managed to convince some of the other now-former classmates of ours to join in the gesture I wanted to make (it was the academic team who joined in). Still, the whole time, I was operating on autopilot. I barely remember any of what I heard or said. However, one moment stands out, and it was when his casket was lowered into the ground. I heard someone (I cannot remember who exactly, and I attribute that to my state of mind then) give the whole "God has a plan" spiel.
The instant those words registered in my brain, I felt every mental restraint simply release. I was known for being expressionless - some had even described me as "stoic" - but I felt every negative emotion you could think of. I utterly lost it. That said, I did not break down into a crying fit. Instead, I turned on who said that spiel and launched into the biggest anti-God tirade anyone there must have heard. I was absolutely furious. I had never felt so enraged over such a statement, one that I used to draw some measure of comfort from. I could not stop myself, and my mental state did not register any desire to stop. I do not remember what exactly I said (all I can vaguely recall is something along the lines of calling God the absolute evil monster), but by the time I was done, the look on everyone's else faces suggested that even George Carlin would have told me to tone it down.
Regardless, that was the end of my faith. It took a while before I got my rage against any religion under control, only for it to be just in time for my parents to essentially go Pentecostal (if you think Southern Baptists are the worst, Christian or not - and they are terrible - you have not interacted with Pentecostals).
The first one droned on and on. Get to the point bro
i lost faith after holding the bible up to scrutiny
Couldn't ask the question of all religions, had to do of the only one it's legal to hate these days.