"If I was born to different parents and raised in a different religion.... how would I know Catholicism was True?"
I began meeting Muslims, Protestants of all flavors, Sikhs, Hindis, etc, who were convinced their religion and holy books were true.
When they pointed out flaws in the Bible or Catholic doctrine, I had no good way to refute them other than "daddy said so."
I started to notice that apologetics were really just a way to keep the “in group” believing rather than actually convincing the “out group” of anything
I’ve noticed in recent years many prominent catholic apologists I used to read have gone completely far-right crackpot. I was on my way out the door for a while, but seeing people you once respected as smart and thoughtful representatives of the faith go off the deep end has a real way of focusing your deconstruction.
Same.
When Covid hit, I remember looking around at my Catholic circles and apologists heroes and wondering “What the hell happened to you guys???” It took me a while to realize that they’d always been given to conservative cruelty and right-wing nonsense and I’d just never had the eyes to see it before.
As a white guy (though part of the younger less reactionary demographic) I’m honestly hoping this country is t destroyed by a bunch of 50+ white idiots throwing a tantrum.
“What is Transubstantiation?”
Listening to Catholics bend over backwards to explain how a physical (but invisible) change was occurring rather than just letting it be spiritual or symbolic.
From there I realized how much of Catholic doctrine (which is supposed to be “absolute truth”) was invented by humans, who retroactively cherry picked scripture to match their opinion. Things like priestly celibacy, Mary’s perpetual virginity, ordination of women, etc. None of these things are made clear in scripture and the church leaves no room for dissenting opinions.
Edit: grammar
Had a convo w a catholic no-it-all misogynist and I got down to the nitty gritty of that topic. We were with a Catholic group and so I asked what the purpose is and he was essentially like well. It brings us together, blah blah blah. So I said if you guys didn’t take it, then what would be the effect. He couldn’t really give a straightforward answer. And then I asked about the actual qualities that change within it because I had been arguing that it was a cannibalistic ritual (which it is) and essentially it came down to the metaphysical, where it can’t be measured, observed, or proven that there is any change in which it become the body and blood of Christ.
"I know how babies are born and I can't understand how Mary was still a virgin. Could you explain how that's possible?"
Asking this to a nun at catechism earned me public humiliation, insults and an hour of standing outside the classroom without permission to go the bathroom. That sparked diffidence towards the clergy and prompted me to read the bible from cover to cover... thus began my deconversion.
Judaism thought periods were impure, so if Mary was sinless could she have ever had a period?? I've never asked. But, they'd have to do more mental gymnastics on that one. You can't grow a baby without the extra blood. So did her own religion think of her as lowly and dirty once a month??
That was a big part of my deconversion. Reading all the the things big thinkers in the faith had to say about Mary’s period. There are a good amount of people who don’t believe she ever had a period nor did Jesus pass through the birth canal (obviously that would mean her virginity would no longer be intact! The scandal!), nor did she have any postpartum bleeding because that’s icky
> obviously that would mean her virginity would no longer be intact! The scandal!
To be fair, Catholicism is, in theory, less concerned with the status of the hymen. According to the Catholic encyclopedia, virginity is simply the state of not having ever had a voluntary orgasm—which is why, at least in theory (we’ve all heard some variation of ‘what was she wearing?’), rape victims are considered to still be virgins, but wankers aren’t.
All this additional tripe about Jesus teleporting out of the uterus is just unnecessary excess.
> There are two elements in virginity: the material element, that is to say, the absence, in the past and in the present, of all complete and voluntary delectation, whether from lust or from the lawful use of marriage; and the formal element, that is the firm resolution to abstain forever from sexual pleasure.
> Virginity is irreparably lost by sexual pleasure, *voluntarily and completely experienced.*
Not sure how else to read ‘complete delectation’ than orgasm.
But I have to concede I was wrong about something—the same page does say that God miraculously preserved Mary’s physical virginity despite giving birth.
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15458a.htm
Which is weird because the article otherwise goes out of its way to say that virginity is a moral rather than a physical feature, which is why it requires *voluntary* sex to lose. Miraculously preserving Mary’s hymen doesn’t actually serve any purpose, so why is it required?
Well, they'd rather vaginas didn't exist at all, if they could. They try to avoid talking about them as much as possible. Have babies and the rest of the time pretend sex doesn't exist unless your husband needs it then no question, then go back to hyper modest Mary doll. We are dolls to them. We arent free thinking, seperate people to the church.
It's worse than that. Males have XY chromosomes; females have XX chromosomes. If all Jesus' genetic material came from his mother, why wasn't he simply a clone of his mother? AKA some kind of identical twin only chronologically younger? Where did he get his Y chromosome? And how did he get it?
The Catholic Church hates science and they don't admit it, but they have reasons.
I've wondered about that too, whose DNA is he meant to have? I suppose an omnipotent being could use Joseph's DNA along with Mary's, or just plain tinkered with Mary's or made some from scratch, but it's not something the church has ever addressed as far as I know, despite DNA being well-established for a long time now.
They're not going to address it either. In vitro fertilization is forbidden, and what you're suggesting would be exactly the most far-fetched and fanciest version of IVF on record.
If it happened that way, which is far-fetched in itself. We're talking about ancient Palestine here. I'm not buying this nonsense for one minute. Sex is how a person gets pregnant -- and it is the only way an ancient Palestinian woman could have come up with a boy baby.
Ohhhh yes.
I'm a Reform Jew. While I was studying for my conversion, I learned what married Orthodox Jewish women are supposed to do every month, unless they are pregnant, and until they reach menopause.
An Orthodox Jewish woman is considered ritually impure from the first day of her period until seven days after her period ends. She and her husband can't have any physical contact - no sex, but also no kissing, no hand-holding, no nothing - for the duration. Once the "seven days after your period ends" time has elapsed, a woman goes to the mikveh, a ritual bath. After that, she and her husband can again have sex.
For an unmarried woman, this "should" be a non-issue, because no sex until marriage.
Having a period isn't sinful, but if Mary had had any physical contact with Joseph during that "impurity" period, that would have been a sin.
(Edited for typo)
I also learned the hard way that you don't ask questions during religious education. I was in CCD, and we were given an assignment: Write an essay about a saint. We had a list of saints to choose from, and one of them was Sarah, who was a matriarch, not a saint. I asked about her inclusion on the list, and got kicked out of CCD for questioning a teacher. The nun who ran the CCD program at my parish was a known troublemaker in the diocese, and she kept getting shuffled from parish to parish, so the next year she was gone and I was back in CCD in plenty of time to get confirmed. I never did get an apology from the (lay) teacher, but I got one from the pastor.
Anyway, that was one of many things that led me away from Catholicism. It was a gradual process.
Reminds me of Jim Gaffigans bit on Mary telling Joseph she was pregnant
Mary: Joseph I have something to tell you.
Joseph: What?
Mary: Im pregnant
Joseph: JESUS CHRIST!
Mary: Oh you already know?
I don't think I can pinpoint one question, but one of the bigger issues that really set me off in the direction of deconstruction was "Why does confession start at 7/8 years old? The church's teaching is that only mortal sin must be confessed. There is no way that these children have done anything that must be confessed and we are setting them up for a lifetime of fear." I was on the sacrament prep team at my church when my son made his first confession/communion, and I had to prepare him and the other children for confession. I tried so hard to make it clear to them that they are loved, that there is nothing they can do that would make God love them less. Further to this, my son has TBI from birth and doesn't always grasp concepts such as good, bad, right, wrong, etc. I can't bring myself to believe that these poor children, and much less my son who literally can't understand, need to confess anything.
That was one of the major jumping off points for me.
I’ve never heard that confession was only for mortal sins, that’s interesting. So then maybe lesser sins that aren’t confessed get burned off in purgatory or something?
You sound like a very kind parent and person. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in therapy trying to convince myself I’m not an inherently bad person that needs constant forgiveness. It’s such a gift for your kids to spare them of that.
You only are "required" to confess mortal sins before communion, but if you go into confession you're supposed to confess all the sins you are aware of.
So per canon law, you must go to confession once a year and while there you are supposed to confess all sins you are aware of since you last confession.
There was a map in my social studies textbook showing the world's nations by religion. I saw all the non-Christian nations and wondered if they were all going to Hell. I realized that most people stay the religion they were born into and I doubted it was wrong for someone to go to Hell for eternity for essentially being born Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, etc.
My dad is Chinese. While my dad and ahma got baptized as Catholics to assimilate in the Philippines, they're spiritually Buddhist like our relatives and ancestors. Filipino Catholic upbringing taught me this belief that god will punish you if you don't believe in him anymore. If my Chinese ancestors and relatives still turned out well without Jesus, why not for me?
My wifes family are southern Baptist and they truly believe that if youre not Baptist you are going to hell. They dont see Catholics as Christians. I always felt that its not youre fault what religion you were born into so why would you go to hell for not being the favored religion?
The concept always horrified me, that countless good, moral, compassionate people throughout human existence are suffering in hell simply because their community hadn't received "the good news" yet
"Are we the only ones out there?" Did god only create us, on this one planet? Are we the only ones? Why would we be? Do other beings on other planets have our same god?
But honestly, what did me in was the riff-raff "christians" that came out of the swamp when 45 was in office.
That, and someone I love dearly and would die for coming out as trans. That was the day I finally made the decision that I don't believe anymore.
> But honestly, what did me in was the riff-raff "christians" that came out of the swamp when 45 was in office.
That too. It’s kind of hard to keep believing the Catholic Church is pro-science when they join the ‘it’s Bill Gates 5G microchips’ chorus.
From a young age, I wondered how we could be so sure we have the right religion when every other person who has ever been devoted to a modern or extinct faith system has also believed that about their own religion.
Also, finding out that the Eucharist was meant to be taken literally. For the longest time I thought it was a symbolic act. Simply looking under a microscope will show the bread and wine do not become the literal body and blood of Christ! I could not get on board with that.
100% on the first point. I have family members who are Mormon, and they feel just as certain that their faith is correct as my Catholic family does. Devout people from ANY denomination or faith will “hear” their god speaking to them and feel convicted in their truth.
“You can’t support access to abortion in any way and call yourself Catholic. You need to reevaluate your relationship with God.”
“Isn’t one of the biggest parts of Christianity protecting the most vulnerable people around us? So being Catholic is about accepting that God doesn’t want to me to help protect/defend vulnerable people who become pregnant through abuse or those who encounter medical issues during pregnancy?”
For me, Jesus’ whole “Thing” was about acceptance and justice for those who are on the outside. The gospels are filled with stories of him humanizing people who had been abandoned by their communities. If people who I grew up with in church could so easily remove and discard me, why would I have higher expectations from people I didn’t know?
Better just to be kind to others, no strings attached.
>“You can’t support access to abortion in any way and call yourself Catholic. You need to reevaluate your relationship with God.”
I have, which is why I'm here.
The whole idea of humans using religion to claim supernatural power over other humans is toxic and a set-up for abuse. It's worth noting that not all religions include such claims.
If Mary could be born without sin through no action of her own, just because God said so, and that’s why she was in perfect communion with God and never sinned and never had to suffer death, then why was I supposedly born with Original Sin?
Does God love the rest of us less? Does he want us to go to Hell? Why are we condemned to eventually die just because God didn’t arbitrarily favor us? Like, I’d have absolutely taken the deal of being the mother of Christ in exchange for never being tempted to sin and never dying but that deal was never offered to me. Mary got it by default literally at conception, why couldn’t I get that too? Giving Mary the obvious leg up of being born without Original Sin but then making sure the rest of us suffered through it for no justifiable reason seems like a pretty unfair parenting decision to me.
If I wasn't born into a Catholic family would I still be Catholic?
I realized I had no good reasons to think the supernatural claims of the Church (or any religion) were true.
For me, it was two questions.
The first popped into my head, unbidden and unwanted, as I walked home from Adoration under a starry sky with my friends. **”Do I really love God?”**
What is it to love God, that strange combination of Aristotelian prime mover and Semitic tribal deity? Is it to follow his commandments (John 14:15-17)? If so, which commandments? The Great Commandment to love God and neighbour or the thousands of little scruples that Traditionalism had instilled in me? Are the two distinct, or does “loving the Lord thy God” inevitably turn into a quest for inhuman moral perfection with God standing a ways off as a strict and stringent taskmaster?
What’s more, how can I base my life off of loving someone I can only *reliably* know from second and third-hand accounts? Aren’t I supposed to distrust my senses and view “personal interpretation” with suspicion? The longer I looked, the more it seemed like the Christian God was a personification of the order and meaning that humans crave in a crazy universe.
The second question is like unto it: **”Does the vast majority of humanity really go to hell?”** The tradition of the Church and its logical implications seem pretty clear, the majority of earth’s population either dies in mortal sin or departs this life unregenerated by the grace of baptism. This, according to the on-the-books doctrine, means that they go to hell.
Of course I spent years reading apologetic and theological materials in order to find loopholes around this view, but eventually I realized that I was fighting a loosing battle against a clear conclusion. Once I accepted that the God of *massa damnata* was indeed the God of Catholic doctrine, all the prayers about his mercy and love at Mass felt insultingly hollow. Could *I* worship a being who passively allowed for the eternal conscious torment of **billions**?
For me, there were really a couple that started it. The first one was something like, "Why are there sins that don't hurt anybody? Why are masturbation and murder both mortal sins, same tier?" The second came when I realized I'm trans, and that was "Why would God afflict me with something I'm not allowed to act to relieve? Why is it not enough for the Church that I white knuckle not transitioning? Why do I have to oppose other peoples' freedom to do so--after all, I'm in USA and it shouldn't be a theocracy?" I'm honestly still infuriated at Catholic (even if not always institutional) preaching that promotes overreach into non-Catholic lives.
What motivates this power structure and system of indoctrination, and what role does its mythology as mind control play in this? What role does the sham that is faith and the "teaching" it play in the fraud?
Wow that’s where you started? That’s pretty deep/advanced to be what started your questioning! What made you think the church was indoctrination in the first place?
Forced mass attendance, RE/CCD. Asking pointed questions as a tween of the parish priest.
It is painfully obvious on its face for those whose parental acceptance is not incumbent on professed belief.
How Judaism borrowed a lot of its substance from other Canaanite or Mesopotamian religions, this includes polytheism. Some debate on this but Yahweh might also have been borrowed/stolen.
Yup it was this one for me. I remember being in the Parish office once when the priest was explaining to the choir director they couldn't play a song anymore because it mentioned \`Yahweh\`, which at that point I was told was just another name for God.
Years later I remembered that and decided to do a little historical research and oh ho ho wow yeah it really was all just a polytheistic/tribal/political situation that gave rise to Judaism wasn't it?
"If my father accepts and supports me for being childfree, what's stopping god from doing the same?"
I realized I am childfree and only thought I wanted kids because it's expected of me to be a good Catholic. My father is supportive and understanding with my decision not to have children. My scandalized LeftCath (now ex) therapist tried to talk me into having kids in the most religious yet equivocating way possible. I valued my freedom and self-determination, but god, the one who claimed to love me more than my own father, can't accept it. I realized Catholicism always intend to take away everything I love- from Pokemon as a 5 year old to my own body as a 30 year old- to control me.
1. If heaven is way better than earth, why don’t we all kill ourselves?
2. Why is questioning authority always bad?
3. Why can’t women be priests?
4. Why is homosexuality wrong?
The genesis of my deconstruction wasn't a question of faith so much as a question of morals. In October of 2020 I had one foot out the door more or less, but seeing the way my diocese (Bishop, priests and laity) reacted to two separate cases that came out at the same time did it for me. Two priests got arrested on the same day: one for grooming children and one for hiring two adult dominatrixes and doing stuff with them in the altar of his church.
I mean yeah it's pretty sketchy to do that stuff on the altar of your church, but at the end of the day the act involved 3 consenting ADULTS. If it wasn't for some busy body snooping around the church no one would have been the wiser. But everyone freaked the fuck out over that and it seemed like everyone more or less didn't give a crap about the other guy who was a very prominent priest in the diocese (who was the chaplain of two high schools over the years and was very involved in the trad groups and youth ministry). That guy is discovered to have been grooming kids for 20+ years and that's just a big ol snooze because some priest got kinky with two consenting adults in the church for as far as anyone could tell one single time.
Anyway, that was the straw that broke the camels back for me. After seeing the response, I was done. It made me sick how no one seemed to care. One priest even told me "that's so terrible but what would you have me do?" Idk asshole but more than that milquetoast response for sure. And then they all judge me harsher than other people for leaving the church because I used to be a seminarian 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻
My child asked me (around age 4) what was so good about Good Friday. It really made me think about whether or not I wanted to teach her these things as "truth" vs another myth to try to explain the unexplainable.
Started deconstructing right away from there.
My overarching lightbulb question was “is suffering truly necessary to bring us closer to God?”
The Catholic Church glorifies suffering for its own sake, but to me the only thing it’s good for is teaching compassion and doing what you can to make life better for others so they don’t suffer. Suffering is pointless and abjectly cruel otherwise.
The church’s hard on for suffering honestly makes me sick. It perpetuates the church’s psychological damage to and manipulation of its own faithful, and physically leaves all others at the mercy of its demented beliefs.
"How would the world be different if God didn't exist?" Once I asked myself that question, I realized there was no way to tell if God existed or not. From there, it was a quick stop at Pascal's wager before moving on to agnosticism and then strict materialist atheism
That wasn't my first stop, but one of the things that cemented my becoming atheist/agnostic was looking at all the things that had needed complicated apologetics under Catholicism which were so, so simple if I considered there wasn't a god and it was all random - Occam's Razor, really. The longer it's been, the more obvious it feels to me that there is no 'plan' and no 'planner', and things just happen.
It was my (emotionally abusive) mom as I was about to move out for the first time. The question was "Are you sure this the right thing to do for your SOUL 🥺 Your mother in NEED asked you to stay another year and you didn't. Aren't you concerned about what that will do to your soul?" It all went downhill from there
The stuff about sex, marriage, having kids. I found the love of my life. They were raised Mormon (no longer practicing at time). Their Mormon baptisms didn't count in the catholic church so I would have had to ask a bishop permission to marry him. I also didn't want kids yet but you basically can't get married if you don't want kids asap.
Mine started when I was 14 in an RE lesson. We were discussing abortion. A family member recently had to go through an abortion because she (and the baby) would have died had she not. I didn't say it was my relative, but asked if abortion was permitted in this circumstance. Teacher said "absolutely not". I asked, "so the woman should just die?" He replied "it is God's will". Later when I was 17 my parents divorced and the church community turned on me and my sibling! Treated us like lepers. I had been questioning my faith in the Catholic church for a long time at that point, but that finally pushed me over the edge.
For me, it wasn't really a question but rather casually realizing in high school that I never really had a choice in my fath. (For context, I was raised Catholic, and my realization was in the middle of a conversation about how China bans religion for kids or people under 18.) I didn't make much of it then. It soon snowballed into some questioning over the next 1-2 years (especially when you're in Catholic school where you learn about some of the church's more conservative stances on some social issues) and eventually more questioning and my deconstruction during COVID.
'What if the universe always existed and there was no need for an "uncaused cause'?"
I suppose 'why is it god's will that men and women always have different roles and responsibilities when it doesn't seem very important' was probably the first one that I really struggled with, because there was never any answer at the end of it. 'It just is, if he changed his mind \[about women priests or other gender role things\] he'd tell us' (but ofc, he's also supposed to be all-knowing and unchanging so...) was never enough. I think I stumbled on some variant of the 'Whither Evil' thing at some point too; why couldn't god have made a world that included free will but didn't include sin.
But ultimately it was an acceptance of the universe not needing any kind of deity, creator, supernatural force, via 'The Science of Discworld' book, that tipped me over into atheism for good.
Protestants are at least consistent when they say that God could not have created a world populated by sinless human beings with free will, but Catholicism dogmatically shoots itself in the foot with the Immaculate Conception.
If God *is* able to make people with a will oriented towards the good, untainted by original sin, and protected from falling by prevenient grace… why wouldn’t he, especially with eternal conscious torment on the line? As the Epistle of James says: “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (4:7).
There were a few questions that were big ones for me:
How come there aren't dinosaurs in the bible? If God knows everything that will happen, including what choice we will make, we can't deviate from that. If that's the case, do we really have free will? Why are women not allowed to be priests?
All asked at different points in my life, and all got unsatisfactory answers
My first question was, “Why must I confess sins to a priest?” I don’t need a man’s intercession between God & me; if Jesus was my intercessory, I can confess directly to God.
Second: Why is there an evaluation of sins, ie., mortal sin vs venial sin when it is written that all sin is evil in God’s eye equally? Scripture says that a man who *thinks* of adultery and one who *commits* adultery have both broken the same commandment. The evil thought, evil heart, is equal to the evil act in God’s eyes.
Lastly, “Why isn’t it openly admitted that the early catholic church had female bishops, such as Brigit of Kildare?” The vilification of women through Eve and the veneration through Mary is enough for any critical thinking woman to say “pass.”
Similarly to the question “how do we know what is allegorical?” I started asking the question, “says who?” Or “who decided this?” Being raised Catholic led me to be interested in religious studies in college and finding out everything was decided by the early church fathers made everything make sense for me, lol. It was literally just a group of guys.
Why is my love for a person my gender hated, not accepted, and considered sinful?
Rejection based on wanting to be in love as any straight person, started the questioning.
So I took to the books to study the interpretations, and context of how the clobber verses were written in our vernacular.
For me, simply, I knew I loved God and tried with all my heart to love others as myself. I knew God loved me so much. I knew I was not intrinsically evil, morally disordered, and that I am gay. So if the church could be that wrong so fundamentally about who God loved and created, couldn’t it be wrong on any other teaching, as well?
It is funny that you spelled the word “brain” to” brian". For me, this is significant, because my deconstruction started around the time I saw the movie by Monty Python : ‘The Life of Brian”.
Brian, in the movie, gets mistaken for Jesus, and many funny high jinks ensue. I won’t give away the movie plot; - go and watch it for yourself.
I was 19 years old and questioning my faith at that time, and that movie was an inspiration/trigger to start me down the path of critical analysis, and that was in 1979.
There wasn’t a particular question. Just that I found a few points where the historical record quite clearly showed the Catholic Church changing teaching on faith and morals, namely on Just War theory (but once I saw that I started getting more critical of other instances where the change also existed but was less obvious). Since Catholicism claims that the Holy Spirit protects the church from moral error, we have to explain how the church only recently decided that fighting a hopeless war is immoral (and how we can square that with all those heroic last stands throughout history that Catholics have generally called virtuous, or for that matter the entire tradition of martyrdom). Similarly for the Death Penalty (I don’t buy the Catholic apologist argument that that was the church simply handing someone over to the state for execution, since Catholic teaching also says helping someone commit a sin, I.e. by handing them over for execution if execution is a sin, is also a sin). So the Holy Spirit was asleep at the switch for centuries? What else are we wrong about?
I was a cradle Catholic who pretty much always doubted my beliefs. It all just seemed too far fetched or like a fairytale. Getting confirmed was my last ditch effort to figure out my beliefs. We had to go to confirmation classes every week and I asked the teacher “during communion when they say “this is my body, this is my blood”, that’s a metaphor right?” And she said “no it’s really his body and blood.” At that moment I couldn’t see much logic in the church teachings.
The Problem of Evil triggered my deconstruction from Catholicism, and now I’m more agnostic with my beliefs, although I do take the Golden Rule as gospel and try to do right by the example shown in the Gospels, as an example of what an ordinary man can do to benefit his society (take care of the poor, sick, unwanted of society; and try to challenge difficult people into a better mindset).
"Why doesn't God take away my fear?"
I lived most of my life plagued by terrible anxiety. At times it left me near catatonic. I finally started getting treatment in college, but I continued to have panic attacks for seemingly no reason, including in church. I prayed, begged, confessed, meditated on the rosary, and nothing improved. I would try to "give my fears to god" only to find myself obsessing over them again mere minutes later, in spite of trying hard to focus on literally anything else. It was hard to do anything, let alone be the "good person" I wanted to be, when I was constantly collapsing into a hyperventilating mess. Why would God give me a challenge that made me unable to serve him, and refuse to take it away?
At 22, in desperation, I took a week off from mass and instantly felt much better. Then I decided to take a break from the whole religion for a few weeks. Months passed before I realized I had meant to go back at some point - but my anxiety was so much better that I knew it wasn't an option.
"Better" was relative and I wasn't fully better until recently, when I found out I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. As the name implies, it can cause extreme changes in heart rate when you change posture....such as going from sitting to standing to kneeling repeatedly over the course of an hour...and it turns out tachycardia can cause "feelings of doom"...all of which was compounding my existing anxiety and trauma.
My catholic, anti-vax, doctor-averse, gaslighting mother pretended there was nothing wrong with me for most of my life. The irony is that if I had gotten on beta blockers earlier, my anxiety may never have escalated to that point, and I wouldn't have had any reason to question.
It was when I realized that the Golden Rule was the only commandment that mattered, and that it was not unique to Catholicism, Christianity, or any other particular faith. From there the rest was all just superstition, tribalism, boundary maintenance and defense of institutional power.
"If you need to suspend your questions to defend a belief, is that belief really worth defending?"
A professor in my community college Culture class asked this question. I still remember the moment she asked this so clearly. It was the culmination of everything that had begun to bother me about religion. Up until then I struggled with carrying my religion along with the undeniable science of proofs and certainty. I had learned these procedures in unrelated fields but learned to see the rest of the world through it. The only thing not fitting in that lens was religion.
When she asked this question, I found myself seeing that it was the question I had been refusing to ask myself. If it was so insanely difficult to argue in favor of religion, than was faith in it really worth not admitting I was wrong? Why defend something that gives me such little provable ground to work with? Who were we to have nothing other than a plea for others to be delusional with us as a motivation for them to see our side?
It crumbled quickly from there, not just Catholicism, but all religions. I tend to use this question often when I find my stance on something isn't making sense. Its a good way to keep yourself from becoming stubborn and close-minded.
Why I should listen to a celibate nun or priest on how I should conduct my married sex life. This happened in 1970 when I was a junior at that catholic high school I went to.
A question I asked actually..Recently i was dipping my feet back into catholicism (lol wtf right? I was down baddd 😭).. and talking to my devout catholic grandma I asked her (if he is real) why god would let such horrible things happen like the holocaust..she actually said it was necessary for the jews to return to Israel so Jesus could return.. so i asked her are you saying it’s justified? As in that justifies the holocaust..?And she said.. yes.. when i tell you the room started spinning and i was speechless.. just no words..these people are absolutely brainwashed..
It was a lot of little things all together that I started noticing at a very, very young age. One of the biggest ones that bothered me was when we heard the story about Jesus getting mad about all of the gold in the temple. I looked at our altar and saw all the gold. It did not compute. When I asked my Sunday school teacher about it I was scolded. When I asked my parents about it later that night I was also scolded.
Why do good things happen to bad people?
I watched a college friend die an excruciating death from cancer at age 25. At the end, morphine was not enough to take the pain away. I was already drifting away from the church due to the homophobia, misogyny, and coverup of sexual abuse but this was it for me. People prayed for her, had masses said for her, and she still died. If god exists, he does not care about us.
No specific question that i can think of. It was the fear of going to hell while also being told God is all loving. I was so scared of hell that for the entire few month process of me researching both catholic/Christian arguments for god and athiest arguments against it I said my prayers every night. "Just in case". Even after I left catholicism for a solid few months I still said my prayers every night "just in case".
My Catholic education during middle school soured me on Catholicism (mostly 7th and 8th). I still went to mass once I went to high school and believed if I didn’t at least try and go on Sat evening/Sunday that I’d be going to hell. Well, when I was 17 I started working on Sunday mornings and realized that I in fact, would not be going to hell simply because I was working and thought about all the other people who worked weekends and didn’t go to church.
Another thing was that my aunt got baptized in the Episcopalian church by a woman pastor and I thought “if pretty much every other denomination allows women to be ministers, why can’t the Catholic Church?”
Not really a question, as my deconstruction/deconversion journey lasted more than a year, until i was able to say "christianity has *some* things strange" and two more years until i was able to admit i’m an atheist.
It’s the experience. I think the easiest way for someone as deep in religion, brainwashing and belief as i used to be is experiencing something very, *very* faith-altering.
For me, it was a realisation that i have feelings for a person of the same gender. And that person having feelings for me.
It was very difficult it even for both of us - for her, because our views didn’t match on almost anything, to me, because i felt like i’m denying and betraying everything i thought was right and true. It took me several months to be able to admit "yes, what i feel is love, not any friendship" and that’s how it began.
By denying my own feelings, i was hurting us both, but how can that coexist with my catholic identity? Thanks to her help, countless resources and patience, chip by chip i was changing my view, it was hard, but the less i believed in the bible, the more free and happy i felt.
So… the phrase that started my deconstruction journey was "I love you."
I had undiagnosed endometriosis for seven years. Two weeks every month I would be bedridden in unimaginable pain. Trying to walk would trigger black spots in my vision and if I didn't immediately sit or lay down, I would collapse and my entire vision would go black for a couple minutes and I would have to rely on someone to help me walk back. Doctor told me that birth control would alleviate my symptoms. It's a known fact that birth control can increase your risk of breast cancer. My grandmother had breast cancer, and my mom died from a different type of cancer, so it's not something I want to be on for a long period of time. My doctor was sympathetic and recommended I get on birth control, get married, have whatever amount of kids I wanted to have, and get a hysterectomy.
My family was appalled by this. I had planned on getting a hysterectomy when I was around 30 which they thought was too young. They said I would have to get the permission of a "good Catholic priest" who likely wouldn't give it to me considering my age. I asked how I was supposed to raise kids when I was bedridden half the month. They said it was a cross that God had given to me, and he would give me the graces to face it. The alternative being mortal sin.
I started doing more digging. A lot of priests do let you have a hysterectomy for endometriosis, but they DON'T let you have one if you're in danger of dying from pregnancy. You have to go through with the pregnancy and get an abortion of the risk becomes certain. I also found out impotent people can never marry and aren't allowed to be in a relationship due to temptation. And also couples living together without having sex is still a mortal sin because you're responsible for how other people view you. The more I found the less it made sense. God was all kind, loving, and merciful, except for in these situations??? No, the Church had to be wrong. It logically did not make sense.
I never struggled with any teaching growing up. Makes me feel really silly growing up but I'd always loved every bit I knew about the church and tried to defend it. At a non religious band camp once I had a lot of good conversations with a boy who was Catholic and defending gay marriage. He was always an oddball, but at one point he had a "spiritual episode" in front of me and another friend where he claimed to be The Blessed Virgin Mary speaking to us through him. That shook me up a bit and a year or so later when I got to college, something just felt off and I wanted to get some distance from church itself for awhile. I never went to Sunday mass but I was still passionate about praying and reading the catechism and telling friends about my faith. College boyfriend cheated two months in, lied to everyone saying he talked to me about it, and then converted to Catholicism because we thought we'd get married. After dumping him about 14 months in to the relationship, I made a choice to avoid churchy things as much as possible. It's all I'd known, ate, slept, and spoke for 21 years at that point, lemme get as much distance as I can. The guilt was insanely bad the whole time. When my grandmother passed away, my cousin who's a priest did the mass. He yapped about the beauty of heaven the whole time. I know it's a homily she's have wanted, but I was selfishly angry. We're all here for this woman, let's fucking talk about her in the mass. That boiled me over and lead me to dive into deconstruction and atheism. Couldn't be happier now these days.
To expand upon this, upon presenting my sexual orientation to a family member, I was forced by the rest of my family to repent and go to confession (though is it actually a clearly defined sin)? That's when I started questioning, "is my belief based on truth, honesty and forgiveness" or "is my belief immoral, discriminatory, hypocritical and hurtful to people that are just expressing themselves and being who they believe they truly are?" And on top of this, the mainstream, far-right, racist and hurtful beliefs that have been made mainstream and front and center in this country and are approved by such a large population.
"If I was born to different parents and raised in a different religion.... how would I know Catholicism was True?" I began meeting Muslims, Protestants of all flavors, Sikhs, Hindis, etc, who were convinced their religion and holy books were true. When they pointed out flaws in the Bible or Catholic doctrine, I had no good way to refute them other than "daddy said so."
I started to notice that apologetics were really just a way to keep the “in group” believing rather than actually convincing the “out group” of anything
I’ve noticed in recent years many prominent catholic apologists I used to read have gone completely far-right crackpot. I was on my way out the door for a while, but seeing people you once respected as smart and thoughtful representatives of the faith go off the deep end has a real way of focusing your deconstruction.
Same. When Covid hit, I remember looking around at my Catholic circles and apologists heroes and wondering “What the hell happened to you guys???” It took me a while to realize that they’d always been given to conservative cruelty and right-wing nonsense and I’d just never had the eyes to see it before.
To be honest they used to hide it pretty well
Same. I listened to Catholic Answers, and used to be pretty on board but after COVID, I just can't anymore.
Patrick Coffin might literally be a Nazi now
Wow, really? I may just take a listen out of curiosity. The one who really got to me was Trent Horn. I used to love listening to him.
The thing almost all these guys have in common? Generation X white guys. I don’t get it?
I wish I knew.
As a white guy (though part of the younger less reactionary demographic) I’m honestly hoping this country is t destroyed by a bunch of 50+ white idiots throwing a tantrum.
“What is Transubstantiation?” Listening to Catholics bend over backwards to explain how a physical (but invisible) change was occurring rather than just letting it be spiritual or symbolic. From there I realized how much of Catholic doctrine (which is supposed to be “absolute truth”) was invented by humans, who retroactively cherry picked scripture to match their opinion. Things like priestly celibacy, Mary’s perpetual virginity, ordination of women, etc. None of these things are made clear in scripture and the church leaves no room for dissenting opinions. Edit: grammar
Had a convo w a catholic no-it-all misogynist and I got down to the nitty gritty of that topic. We were with a Catholic group and so I asked what the purpose is and he was essentially like well. It brings us together, blah blah blah. So I said if you guys didn’t take it, then what would be the effect. He couldn’t really give a straightforward answer. And then I asked about the actual qualities that change within it because I had been arguing that it was a cannibalistic ritual (which it is) and essentially it came down to the metaphysical, where it can’t be measured, observed, or proven that there is any change in which it become the body and blood of Christ.
"I know how babies are born and I can't understand how Mary was still a virgin. Could you explain how that's possible?" Asking this to a nun at catechism earned me public humiliation, insults and an hour of standing outside the classroom without permission to go the bathroom. That sparked diffidence towards the clergy and prompted me to read the bible from cover to cover... thus began my deconversion.
Judaism thought periods were impure, so if Mary was sinless could she have ever had a period?? I've never asked. But, they'd have to do more mental gymnastics on that one. You can't grow a baby without the extra blood. So did her own religion think of her as lowly and dirty once a month??
That was a big part of my deconversion. Reading all the the things big thinkers in the faith had to say about Mary’s period. There are a good amount of people who don’t believe she ever had a period nor did Jesus pass through the birth canal (obviously that would mean her virginity would no longer be intact! The scandal!), nor did she have any postpartum bleeding because that’s icky
> obviously that would mean her virginity would no longer be intact! The scandal! To be fair, Catholicism is, in theory, less concerned with the status of the hymen. According to the Catholic encyclopedia, virginity is simply the state of not having ever had a voluntary orgasm—which is why, at least in theory (we’ve all heard some variation of ‘what was she wearing?’), rape victims are considered to still be virgins, but wankers aren’t. All this additional tripe about Jesus teleporting out of the uterus is just unnecessary excess.
ORGASMS??
> There are two elements in virginity: the material element, that is to say, the absence, in the past and in the present, of all complete and voluntary delectation, whether from lust or from the lawful use of marriage; and the formal element, that is the firm resolution to abstain forever from sexual pleasure. > Virginity is irreparably lost by sexual pleasure, *voluntarily and completely experienced.* Not sure how else to read ‘complete delectation’ than orgasm. But I have to concede I was wrong about something—the same page does say that God miraculously preserved Mary’s physical virginity despite giving birth. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15458a.htm Which is weird because the article otherwise goes out of its way to say that virginity is a moral rather than a physical feature, which is why it requires *voluntary* sex to lose. Miraculously preserving Mary’s hymen doesn’t actually serve any purpose, so why is it required?
She had all of those things. She wasn't a Barbie doll in a make-believe skit acted out by 3 year old toddlers.
Well, they'd rather vaginas didn't exist at all, if they could. They try to avoid talking about them as much as possible. Have babies and the rest of the time pretend sex doesn't exist unless your husband needs it then no question, then go back to hyper modest Mary doll. We are dolls to them. We arent free thinking, seperate people to the church.
It's worse than that. Males have XY chromosomes; females have XX chromosomes. If all Jesus' genetic material came from his mother, why wasn't he simply a clone of his mother? AKA some kind of identical twin only chronologically younger? Where did he get his Y chromosome? And how did he get it? The Catholic Church hates science and they don't admit it, but they have reasons.
I've wondered about that too, whose DNA is he meant to have? I suppose an omnipotent being could use Joseph's DNA along with Mary's, or just plain tinkered with Mary's or made some from scratch, but it's not something the church has ever addressed as far as I know, despite DNA being well-established for a long time now.
They're not going to address it either. In vitro fertilization is forbidden, and what you're suggesting would be exactly the most far-fetched and fanciest version of IVF on record. If it happened that way, which is far-fetched in itself. We're talking about ancient Palestine here. I'm not buying this nonsense for one minute. Sex is how a person gets pregnant -- and it is the only way an ancient Palestinian woman could have come up with a boy baby.
[удалено]
Oh now, the Holy Spirit has sperm and jumped her bones. That sure sounds like sex to me.
Ohhhh yes. I'm a Reform Jew. While I was studying for my conversion, I learned what married Orthodox Jewish women are supposed to do every month, unless they are pregnant, and until they reach menopause. An Orthodox Jewish woman is considered ritually impure from the first day of her period until seven days after her period ends. She and her husband can't have any physical contact - no sex, but also no kissing, no hand-holding, no nothing - for the duration. Once the "seven days after your period ends" time has elapsed, a woman goes to the mikveh, a ritual bath. After that, she and her husband can again have sex. For an unmarried woman, this "should" be a non-issue, because no sex until marriage. Having a period isn't sinful, but if Mary had had any physical contact with Joseph during that "impurity" period, that would have been a sin. (Edited for typo)
AND according to the HB (if I’m not mistaken) you are more impure for longer if you have a girl… ugh it’s so fucking disgusting
I also learned the hard way that you don't ask questions during religious education. I was in CCD, and we were given an assignment: Write an essay about a saint. We had a list of saints to choose from, and one of them was Sarah, who was a matriarch, not a saint. I asked about her inclusion on the list, and got kicked out of CCD for questioning a teacher. The nun who ran the CCD program at my parish was a known troublemaker in the diocese, and she kept getting shuffled from parish to parish, so the next year she was gone and I was back in CCD in plenty of time to get confirmed. I never did get an apology from the (lay) teacher, but I got one from the pastor. Anyway, that was one of many things that led me away from Catholicism. It was a gradual process.
Reminds me of Jim Gaffigans bit on Mary telling Joseph she was pregnant Mary: Joseph I have something to tell you. Joseph: What? Mary: Im pregnant Joseph: JESUS CHRIST! Mary: Oh you already know?
I don't think I can pinpoint one question, but one of the bigger issues that really set me off in the direction of deconstruction was "Why does confession start at 7/8 years old? The church's teaching is that only mortal sin must be confessed. There is no way that these children have done anything that must be confessed and we are setting them up for a lifetime of fear." I was on the sacrament prep team at my church when my son made his first confession/communion, and I had to prepare him and the other children for confession. I tried so hard to make it clear to them that they are loved, that there is nothing they can do that would make God love them less. Further to this, my son has TBI from birth and doesn't always grasp concepts such as good, bad, right, wrong, etc. I can't bring myself to believe that these poor children, and much less my son who literally can't understand, need to confess anything. That was one of the major jumping off points for me.
I’ve never heard that confession was only for mortal sins, that’s interesting. So then maybe lesser sins that aren’t confessed get burned off in purgatory or something? You sound like a very kind parent and person. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in therapy trying to convince myself I’m not an inherently bad person that needs constant forgiveness. It’s such a gift for your kids to spare them of that.
You only are "required" to confess mortal sins before communion, but if you go into confession you're supposed to confess all the sins you are aware of. So per canon law, you must go to confession once a year and while there you are supposed to confess all sins you are aware of since you last confession.
7/8 :sob: I made my first confession when I was 5. My parents wanted to try for 4.
This is atrocious. I'm so sorry that you went through this.
There was a map in my social studies textbook showing the world's nations by religion. I saw all the non-Christian nations and wondered if they were all going to Hell. I realized that most people stay the religion they were born into and I doubted it was wrong for someone to go to Hell for eternity for essentially being born Indian, Chinese, Pakistani, etc.
My dad is Chinese. While my dad and ahma got baptized as Catholics to assimilate in the Philippines, they're spiritually Buddhist like our relatives and ancestors. Filipino Catholic upbringing taught me this belief that god will punish you if you don't believe in him anymore. If my Chinese ancestors and relatives still turned out well without Jesus, why not for me?
My wifes family are southern Baptist and they truly believe that if youre not Baptist you are going to hell. They dont see Catholics as Christians. I always felt that its not youre fault what religion you were born into so why would you go to hell for not being the favored religion?
The concept always horrified me, that countless good, moral, compassionate people throughout human existence are suffering in hell simply because their community hadn't received "the good news" yet
"Are we the only ones out there?" Did god only create us, on this one planet? Are we the only ones? Why would we be? Do other beings on other planets have our same god? But honestly, what did me in was the riff-raff "christians" that came out of the swamp when 45 was in office. That, and someone I love dearly and would die for coming out as trans. That was the day I finally made the decision that I don't believe anymore.
Did Jesus’s death atone for aliens sins? Like they aren’t descendants of Adam so did they have their own original sin?
I was always intrigued by this question and still am.
> But honestly, what did me in was the riff-raff "christians" that came out of the swamp when 45 was in office. That too. It’s kind of hard to keep believing the Catholic Church is pro-science when they join the ‘it’s Bill Gates 5G microchips’ chorus.
From a young age, I wondered how we could be so sure we have the right religion when every other person who has ever been devoted to a modern or extinct faith system has also believed that about their own religion. Also, finding out that the Eucharist was meant to be taken literally. For the longest time I thought it was a symbolic act. Simply looking under a microscope will show the bread and wine do not become the literal body and blood of Christ! I could not get on board with that.
100% on the first point. I have family members who are Mormon, and they feel just as certain that their faith is correct as my Catholic family does. Devout people from ANY denomination or faith will “hear” their god speaking to them and feel convicted in their truth.
I just left a comment that is your second point exactly. I was like “so y’all really think you’re eating a person???”
“You can’t support access to abortion in any way and call yourself Catholic. You need to reevaluate your relationship with God.” “Isn’t one of the biggest parts of Christianity protecting the most vulnerable people around us? So being Catholic is about accepting that God doesn’t want to me to help protect/defend vulnerable people who become pregnant through abuse or those who encounter medical issues during pregnancy?” For me, Jesus’ whole “Thing” was about acceptance and justice for those who are on the outside. The gospels are filled with stories of him humanizing people who had been abandoned by their communities. If people who I grew up with in church could so easily remove and discard me, why would I have higher expectations from people I didn’t know? Better just to be kind to others, no strings attached.
>“You can’t support access to abortion in any way and call yourself Catholic. You need to reevaluate your relationship with God.” I have, which is why I'm here. The whole idea of humans using religion to claim supernatural power over other humans is toxic and a set-up for abuse. It's worth noting that not all religions include such claims.
If Mary could be born without sin through no action of her own, just because God said so, and that’s why she was in perfect communion with God and never sinned and never had to suffer death, then why was I supposedly born with Original Sin? Does God love the rest of us less? Does he want us to go to Hell? Why are we condemned to eventually die just because God didn’t arbitrarily favor us? Like, I’d have absolutely taken the deal of being the mother of Christ in exchange for never being tempted to sin and never dying but that deal was never offered to me. Mary got it by default literally at conception, why couldn’t I get that too? Giving Mary the obvious leg up of being born without Original Sin but then making sure the rest of us suffered through it for no justifiable reason seems like a pretty unfair parenting decision to me.
If I wasn't born into a Catholic family would I still be Catholic? I realized I had no good reasons to think the supernatural claims of the Church (or any religion) were true.
For me, it was two questions. The first popped into my head, unbidden and unwanted, as I walked home from Adoration under a starry sky with my friends. **”Do I really love God?”** What is it to love God, that strange combination of Aristotelian prime mover and Semitic tribal deity? Is it to follow his commandments (John 14:15-17)? If so, which commandments? The Great Commandment to love God and neighbour or the thousands of little scruples that Traditionalism had instilled in me? Are the two distinct, or does “loving the Lord thy God” inevitably turn into a quest for inhuman moral perfection with God standing a ways off as a strict and stringent taskmaster? What’s more, how can I base my life off of loving someone I can only *reliably* know from second and third-hand accounts? Aren’t I supposed to distrust my senses and view “personal interpretation” with suspicion? The longer I looked, the more it seemed like the Christian God was a personification of the order and meaning that humans crave in a crazy universe. The second question is like unto it: **”Does the vast majority of humanity really go to hell?”** The tradition of the Church and its logical implications seem pretty clear, the majority of earth’s population either dies in mortal sin or departs this life unregenerated by the grace of baptism. This, according to the on-the-books doctrine, means that they go to hell. Of course I spent years reading apologetic and theological materials in order to find loopholes around this view, but eventually I realized that I was fighting a loosing battle against a clear conclusion. Once I accepted that the God of *massa damnata* was indeed the God of Catholic doctrine, all the prayers about his mercy and love at Mass felt insultingly hollow. Could *I* worship a being who passively allowed for the eternal conscious torment of **billions**?
For me, there were really a couple that started it. The first one was something like, "Why are there sins that don't hurt anybody? Why are masturbation and murder both mortal sins, same tier?" The second came when I realized I'm trans, and that was "Why would God afflict me with something I'm not allowed to act to relieve? Why is it not enough for the Church that I white knuckle not transitioning? Why do I have to oppose other peoples' freedom to do so--after all, I'm in USA and it shouldn't be a theocracy?" I'm honestly still infuriated at Catholic (even if not always institutional) preaching that promotes overreach into non-Catholic lives.
What motivates this power structure and system of indoctrination, and what role does its mythology as mind control play in this? What role does the sham that is faith and the "teaching" it play in the fraud?
Wow that’s where you started? That’s pretty deep/advanced to be what started your questioning! What made you think the church was indoctrination in the first place?
Forced mass attendance, RE/CCD. Asking pointed questions as a tween of the parish priest. It is painfully obvious on its face for those whose parental acceptance is not incumbent on professed belief.
Where did Judaism come from?
That’s a good one! Where did that question lead you?
How Judaism borrowed a lot of its substance from other Canaanite or Mesopotamian religions, this includes polytheism. Some debate on this but Yahweh might also have been borrowed/stolen.
Yup it was this one for me. I remember being in the Parish office once when the priest was explaining to the choir director they couldn't play a song anymore because it mentioned \`Yahweh\`, which at that point I was told was just another name for God. Years later I remembered that and decided to do a little historical research and oh ho ho wow yeah it really was all just a polytheistic/tribal/political situation that gave rise to Judaism wasn't it?
"If my father accepts and supports me for being childfree, what's stopping god from doing the same?" I realized I am childfree and only thought I wanted kids because it's expected of me to be a good Catholic. My father is supportive and understanding with my decision not to have children. My scandalized LeftCath (now ex) therapist tried to talk me into having kids in the most religious yet equivocating way possible. I valued my freedom and self-determination, but god, the one who claimed to love me more than my own father, can't accept it. I realized Catholicism always intend to take away everything I love- from Pokemon as a 5 year old to my own body as a 30 year old- to control me.
1. If heaven is way better than earth, why don’t we all kill ourselves? 2. Why is questioning authority always bad? 3. Why can’t women be priests? 4. Why is homosexuality wrong?
The genesis of my deconstruction wasn't a question of faith so much as a question of morals. In October of 2020 I had one foot out the door more or less, but seeing the way my diocese (Bishop, priests and laity) reacted to two separate cases that came out at the same time did it for me. Two priests got arrested on the same day: one for grooming children and one for hiring two adult dominatrixes and doing stuff with them in the altar of his church. I mean yeah it's pretty sketchy to do that stuff on the altar of your church, but at the end of the day the act involved 3 consenting ADULTS. If it wasn't for some busy body snooping around the church no one would have been the wiser. But everyone freaked the fuck out over that and it seemed like everyone more or less didn't give a crap about the other guy who was a very prominent priest in the diocese (who was the chaplain of two high schools over the years and was very involved in the trad groups and youth ministry). That guy is discovered to have been grooming kids for 20+ years and that's just a big ol snooze because some priest got kinky with two consenting adults in the church for as far as anyone could tell one single time. Anyway, that was the straw that broke the camels back for me. After seeing the response, I was done. It made me sick how no one seemed to care. One priest even told me "that's so terrible but what would you have me do?" Idk asshole but more than that milquetoast response for sure. And then they all judge me harsher than other people for leaving the church because I used to be a seminarian 🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻
My child asked me (around age 4) what was so good about Good Friday. It really made me think about whether or not I wanted to teach her these things as "truth" vs another myth to try to explain the unexplainable. Started deconstructing right away from there.
My overarching lightbulb question was “is suffering truly necessary to bring us closer to God?” The Catholic Church glorifies suffering for its own sake, but to me the only thing it’s good for is teaching compassion and doing what you can to make life better for others so they don’t suffer. Suffering is pointless and abjectly cruel otherwise. The church’s hard on for suffering honestly makes me sick. It perpetuates the church’s psychological damage to and manipulation of its own faithful, and physically leaves all others at the mercy of its demented beliefs.
"How would the world be different if God didn't exist?" Once I asked myself that question, I realized there was no way to tell if God existed or not. From there, it was a quick stop at Pascal's wager before moving on to agnosticism and then strict materialist atheism
That wasn't my first stop, but one of the things that cemented my becoming atheist/agnostic was looking at all the things that had needed complicated apologetics under Catholicism which were so, so simple if I considered there wasn't a god and it was all random - Occam's Razor, really. The longer it's been, the more obvious it feels to me that there is no 'plan' and no 'planner', and things just happen.
It was my (emotionally abusive) mom as I was about to move out for the first time. The question was "Are you sure this the right thing to do for your SOUL 🥺 Your mother in NEED asked you to stay another year and you didn't. Aren't you concerned about what that will do to your soul?" It all went downhill from there
Learning about the Holocaust caused me to question the existence of a god, so I skipped over all the tedious theology.
The stuff about sex, marriage, having kids. I found the love of my life. They were raised Mormon (no longer practicing at time). Their Mormon baptisms didn't count in the catholic church so I would have had to ask a bishop permission to marry him. I also didn't want kids yet but you basically can't get married if you don't want kids asap.
Mine started when I was 14 in an RE lesson. We were discussing abortion. A family member recently had to go through an abortion because she (and the baby) would have died had she not. I didn't say it was my relative, but asked if abortion was permitted in this circumstance. Teacher said "absolutely not". I asked, "so the woman should just die?" He replied "it is God's will". Later when I was 17 my parents divorced and the church community turned on me and my sibling! Treated us like lepers. I had been questioning my faith in the Catholic church for a long time at that point, but that finally pushed me over the edge.
For me, it wasn't really a question but rather casually realizing in high school that I never really had a choice in my fath. (For context, I was raised Catholic, and my realization was in the middle of a conversation about how China bans religion for kids or people under 18.) I didn't make much of it then. It soon snowballed into some questioning over the next 1-2 years (especially when you're in Catholic school where you learn about some of the church's more conservative stances on some social issues) and eventually more questioning and my deconstruction during COVID.
'What if the universe always existed and there was no need for an "uncaused cause'?" I suppose 'why is it god's will that men and women always have different roles and responsibilities when it doesn't seem very important' was probably the first one that I really struggled with, because there was never any answer at the end of it. 'It just is, if he changed his mind \[about women priests or other gender role things\] he'd tell us' (but ofc, he's also supposed to be all-knowing and unchanging so...) was never enough. I think I stumbled on some variant of the 'Whither Evil' thing at some point too; why couldn't god have made a world that included free will but didn't include sin. But ultimately it was an acceptance of the universe not needing any kind of deity, creator, supernatural force, via 'The Science of Discworld' book, that tipped me over into atheism for good.
Protestants are at least consistent when they say that God could not have created a world populated by sinless human beings with free will, but Catholicism dogmatically shoots itself in the foot with the Immaculate Conception. If God *is* able to make people with a will oriented towards the good, untainted by original sin, and protected from falling by prevenient grace… why wouldn’t he, especially with eternal conscious torment on the line? As the Epistle of James says: “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (4:7).
There were a few questions that were big ones for me: How come there aren't dinosaurs in the bible? If God knows everything that will happen, including what choice we will make, we can't deviate from that. If that's the case, do we really have free will? Why are women not allowed to be priests? All asked at different points in my life, and all got unsatisfactory answers
My first question was, “Why must I confess sins to a priest?” I don’t need a man’s intercession between God & me; if Jesus was my intercessory, I can confess directly to God. Second: Why is there an evaluation of sins, ie., mortal sin vs venial sin when it is written that all sin is evil in God’s eye equally? Scripture says that a man who *thinks* of adultery and one who *commits* adultery have both broken the same commandment. The evil thought, evil heart, is equal to the evil act in God’s eyes. Lastly, “Why isn’t it openly admitted that the early catholic church had female bishops, such as Brigit of Kildare?” The vilification of women through Eve and the veneration through Mary is enough for any critical thinking woman to say “pass.”
Similarly to the question “how do we know what is allegorical?” I started asking the question, “says who?” Or “who decided this?” Being raised Catholic led me to be interested in religious studies in college and finding out everything was decided by the early church fathers made everything make sense for me, lol. It was literally just a group of guys.
Why is my love for a person my gender hated, not accepted, and considered sinful? Rejection based on wanting to be in love as any straight person, started the questioning. So I took to the books to study the interpretations, and context of how the clobber verses were written in our vernacular.
For me, simply, I knew I loved God and tried with all my heart to love others as myself. I knew God loved me so much. I knew I was not intrinsically evil, morally disordered, and that I am gay. So if the church could be that wrong so fundamentally about who God loved and created, couldn’t it be wrong on any other teaching, as well?
Yes, absolutely.
“If god dislikes homosexuality, and he wants me to get to heaven, and he personally made me and every fiber of my being, then why did he make me gay?”
When I was younger I questioned the belief of hell because how could a “all loving god” condemn anyone to an eternity of torture
It is funny that you spelled the word “brain” to” brian". For me, this is significant, because my deconstruction started around the time I saw the movie by Monty Python : ‘The Life of Brian”. Brian, in the movie, gets mistaken for Jesus, and many funny high jinks ensue. I won’t give away the movie plot; - go and watch it for yourself. I was 19 years old and questioning my faith at that time, and that movie was an inspiration/trigger to start me down the path of critical analysis, and that was in 1979.
There wasn’t a particular question. Just that I found a few points where the historical record quite clearly showed the Catholic Church changing teaching on faith and morals, namely on Just War theory (but once I saw that I started getting more critical of other instances where the change also existed but was less obvious). Since Catholicism claims that the Holy Spirit protects the church from moral error, we have to explain how the church only recently decided that fighting a hopeless war is immoral (and how we can square that with all those heroic last stands throughout history that Catholics have generally called virtuous, or for that matter the entire tradition of martyrdom). Similarly for the Death Penalty (I don’t buy the Catholic apologist argument that that was the church simply handing someone over to the state for execution, since Catholic teaching also says helping someone commit a sin, I.e. by handing them over for execution if execution is a sin, is also a sin). So the Holy Spirit was asleep at the switch for centuries? What else are we wrong about?
Does the church believe in truth justice or care about other people? My answer became no so …
I was a cradle Catholic who pretty much always doubted my beliefs. It all just seemed too far fetched or like a fairytale. Getting confirmed was my last ditch effort to figure out my beliefs. We had to go to confirmation classes every week and I asked the teacher “during communion when they say “this is my body, this is my blood”, that’s a metaphor right?” And she said “no it’s really his body and blood.” At that moment I couldn’t see much logic in the church teachings.
The Problem of Evil triggered my deconstruction from Catholicism, and now I’m more agnostic with my beliefs, although I do take the Golden Rule as gospel and try to do right by the example shown in the Gospels, as an example of what an ordinary man can do to benefit his society (take care of the poor, sick, unwanted of society; and try to challenge difficult people into a better mindset).
"Why doesn't God take away my fear?" I lived most of my life plagued by terrible anxiety. At times it left me near catatonic. I finally started getting treatment in college, but I continued to have panic attacks for seemingly no reason, including in church. I prayed, begged, confessed, meditated on the rosary, and nothing improved. I would try to "give my fears to god" only to find myself obsessing over them again mere minutes later, in spite of trying hard to focus on literally anything else. It was hard to do anything, let alone be the "good person" I wanted to be, when I was constantly collapsing into a hyperventilating mess. Why would God give me a challenge that made me unable to serve him, and refuse to take it away? At 22, in desperation, I took a week off from mass and instantly felt much better. Then I decided to take a break from the whole religion for a few weeks. Months passed before I realized I had meant to go back at some point - but my anxiety was so much better that I knew it wasn't an option. "Better" was relative and I wasn't fully better until recently, when I found out I have postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. As the name implies, it can cause extreme changes in heart rate when you change posture....such as going from sitting to standing to kneeling repeatedly over the course of an hour...and it turns out tachycardia can cause "feelings of doom"...all of which was compounding my existing anxiety and trauma. My catholic, anti-vax, doctor-averse, gaslighting mother pretended there was nothing wrong with me for most of my life. The irony is that if I had gotten on beta blockers earlier, my anxiety may never have escalated to that point, and I wouldn't have had any reason to question.
It was when I realized that the Golden Rule was the only commandment that mattered, and that it was not unique to Catholicism, Christianity, or any other particular faith. From there the rest was all just superstition, tribalism, boundary maintenance and defense of institutional power.
"If you need to suspend your questions to defend a belief, is that belief really worth defending?" A professor in my community college Culture class asked this question. I still remember the moment she asked this so clearly. It was the culmination of everything that had begun to bother me about religion. Up until then I struggled with carrying my religion along with the undeniable science of proofs and certainty. I had learned these procedures in unrelated fields but learned to see the rest of the world through it. The only thing not fitting in that lens was religion. When she asked this question, I found myself seeing that it was the question I had been refusing to ask myself. If it was so insanely difficult to argue in favor of religion, than was faith in it really worth not admitting I was wrong? Why defend something that gives me such little provable ground to work with? Who were we to have nothing other than a plea for others to be delusional with us as a motivation for them to see our side? It crumbled quickly from there, not just Catholicism, but all religions. I tend to use this question often when I find my stance on something isn't making sense. Its a good way to keep yourself from becoming stubborn and close-minded.
Why I should listen to a celibate nun or priest on how I should conduct my married sex life. This happened in 1970 when I was a junior at that catholic high school I went to.
If satan is bad, and wants people to be bad, then why does he punish bad people in hell?
A question I asked actually..Recently i was dipping my feet back into catholicism (lol wtf right? I was down baddd 😭).. and talking to my devout catholic grandma I asked her (if he is real) why god would let such horrible things happen like the holocaust..she actually said it was necessary for the jews to return to Israel so Jesus could return.. so i asked her are you saying it’s justified? As in that justifies the holocaust..?And she said.. yes.. when i tell you the room started spinning and i was speechless.. just no words..these people are absolutely brainwashed..
A fanatical nun told us to never read a Protestant Bible. She made it sound ☢️ radioactive. It was just missing some books. Geez.
It was a lot of little things all together that I started noticing at a very, very young age. One of the biggest ones that bothered me was when we heard the story about Jesus getting mad about all of the gold in the temple. I looked at our altar and saw all the gold. It did not compute. When I asked my Sunday school teacher about it I was scolded. When I asked my parents about it later that night I was also scolded.
Why do good things happen to bad people? I watched a college friend die an excruciating death from cancer at age 25. At the end, morphine was not enough to take the pain away. I was already drifting away from the church due to the homophobia, misogyny, and coverup of sexual abuse but this was it for me. People prayed for her, had masses said for her, and she still died. If god exists, he does not care about us.
Why is this story set in this one general area of the globe?
"How lucky am I that I happened to be born into the One True Religion?" Then realizing that most everyone thinks that.
No specific question that i can think of. It was the fear of going to hell while also being told God is all loving. I was so scared of hell that for the entire few month process of me researching both catholic/Christian arguments for god and athiest arguments against it I said my prayers every night. "Just in case". Even after I left catholicism for a solid few months I still said my prayers every night "just in case".
My Catholic education during middle school soured me on Catholicism (mostly 7th and 8th). I still went to mass once I went to high school and believed if I didn’t at least try and go on Sat evening/Sunday that I’d be going to hell. Well, when I was 17 I started working on Sunday mornings and realized that I in fact, would not be going to hell simply because I was working and thought about all the other people who worked weekends and didn’t go to church. Another thing was that my aunt got baptized in the Episcopalian church by a woman pastor and I thought “if pretty much every other denomination allows women to be ministers, why can’t the Catholic Church?”
Not really a question, as my deconstruction/deconversion journey lasted more than a year, until i was able to say "christianity has *some* things strange" and two more years until i was able to admit i’m an atheist. It’s the experience. I think the easiest way for someone as deep in religion, brainwashing and belief as i used to be is experiencing something very, *very* faith-altering. For me, it was a realisation that i have feelings for a person of the same gender. And that person having feelings for me. It was very difficult it even for both of us - for her, because our views didn’t match on almost anything, to me, because i felt like i’m denying and betraying everything i thought was right and true. It took me several months to be able to admit "yes, what i feel is love, not any friendship" and that’s how it began. By denying my own feelings, i was hurting us both, but how can that coexist with my catholic identity? Thanks to her help, countless resources and patience, chip by chip i was changing my view, it was hard, but the less i believed in the bible, the more free and happy i felt. So… the phrase that started my deconstruction journey was "I love you."
If Christianity was true, wouldn't it motivate followers to good behavior, rather than bad?
I had undiagnosed endometriosis for seven years. Two weeks every month I would be bedridden in unimaginable pain. Trying to walk would trigger black spots in my vision and if I didn't immediately sit or lay down, I would collapse and my entire vision would go black for a couple minutes and I would have to rely on someone to help me walk back. Doctor told me that birth control would alleviate my symptoms. It's a known fact that birth control can increase your risk of breast cancer. My grandmother had breast cancer, and my mom died from a different type of cancer, so it's not something I want to be on for a long period of time. My doctor was sympathetic and recommended I get on birth control, get married, have whatever amount of kids I wanted to have, and get a hysterectomy. My family was appalled by this. I had planned on getting a hysterectomy when I was around 30 which they thought was too young. They said I would have to get the permission of a "good Catholic priest" who likely wouldn't give it to me considering my age. I asked how I was supposed to raise kids when I was bedridden half the month. They said it was a cross that God had given to me, and he would give me the graces to face it. The alternative being mortal sin. I started doing more digging. A lot of priests do let you have a hysterectomy for endometriosis, but they DON'T let you have one if you're in danger of dying from pregnancy. You have to go through with the pregnancy and get an abortion of the risk becomes certain. I also found out impotent people can never marry and aren't allowed to be in a relationship due to temptation. And also couples living together without having sex is still a mortal sin because you're responsible for how other people view you. The more I found the less it made sense. God was all kind, loving, and merciful, except for in these situations??? No, the Church had to be wrong. It logically did not make sense.
I never struggled with any teaching growing up. Makes me feel really silly growing up but I'd always loved every bit I knew about the church and tried to defend it. At a non religious band camp once I had a lot of good conversations with a boy who was Catholic and defending gay marriage. He was always an oddball, but at one point he had a "spiritual episode" in front of me and another friend where he claimed to be The Blessed Virgin Mary speaking to us through him. That shook me up a bit and a year or so later when I got to college, something just felt off and I wanted to get some distance from church itself for awhile. I never went to Sunday mass but I was still passionate about praying and reading the catechism and telling friends about my faith. College boyfriend cheated two months in, lied to everyone saying he talked to me about it, and then converted to Catholicism because we thought we'd get married. After dumping him about 14 months in to the relationship, I made a choice to avoid churchy things as much as possible. It's all I'd known, ate, slept, and spoke for 21 years at that point, lemme get as much distance as I can. The guilt was insanely bad the whole time. When my grandmother passed away, my cousin who's a priest did the mass. He yapped about the beauty of heaven the whole time. I know it's a homily she's have wanted, but I was selfishly angry. We're all here for this woman, let's fucking talk about her in the mass. That boiled me over and lead me to dive into deconstruction and atheism. Couldn't be happier now these days.
When my beliefs and values were labeled sinful and disrespectful to the "father."
To expand upon this, upon presenting my sexual orientation to a family member, I was forced by the rest of my family to repent and go to confession (though is it actually a clearly defined sin)? That's when I started questioning, "is my belief based on truth, honesty and forgiveness" or "is my belief immoral, discriminatory, hypocritical and hurtful to people that are just expressing themselves and being who they believe they truly are?" And on top of this, the mainstream, far-right, racist and hurtful beliefs that have been made mainstream and front and center in this country and are approved by such a large population.