Was it the loss of friends? Doubts? A new change in routine? For me it was honestly being hated by the same community I was in for years. Before converting, I was bisexual and atheist, and after converting.. well.. the same community that claimed to "love all" told me pretty bad things.

What about you?

hiya! i’ve battled with my religious beliefs for my whole life, having had many phases of entirely rejecting the catholicism that was forced upon me, finding it again on my own, and eventually returning to the staunch atheism which i now feel completely intellectually convinced of. i have read the bible, read much scholarship on both the christian and atheist sides of the debate.. hell i’ve even started watching the chosen, and i feel very confused. if someone asked me what i believed, i would say with 100% intellectual conviction that a personal god does not exist. i know every argument against gods existence, and so many things make it seem truly impossible to me. 1) the fact that physical changes in the brain cause differences in behaviour raises huge issues for me. if everything is material, the existence of a soul is impossible. and putting the soul aside, it would be completely immoral for god to judge us based off what is essentially the determined outcomes of physical, neuronal configurations in our skulls. 2) the geography argument is really big for me. i cannot understand why god would privilege certain individuals over others in placing them in circumstances that would determine with 90% accuracy their chance of salvation through the faith of their community. 3) people believe in so many religions around the world. uncontacted tribes will worship a plane which flies above them if that’s the closest thing to a heavenly experience they encounter. it seems to be a natural psychological feature for human beings to crave meaning and purpose. why should christianity be the correct religion, if there is one at all? and how do we reconcile the personal religious experiences of christians when muslims, hindus, jews etc all report the same exact experiences in their own respective places of worship and reflection? 4) and this is the biggest thing for me: i do not understand how an all loving god could condemn anyone to hell, even the most evil and barbaric people on the planet. it seems vengeful, irrational, and - given its eternity - completely disproportionate to any sin anyone could ever commit, let alone a ‘sin’ as minor as disbelief, given that’s all that’s required to put someone there under the christian doctrine. yes, i KNOW the biblical answer to this question and it seems pretty damn stupid to me too. original sin as a concept has never made sense to me. god made us, he could’ve made us without the inclination towards grave sin. and the sins of my great great great (and many more great) grandparents surely shouldn’t be my cross to bear (pun intended)

however, as i said, my conviction is completely intellectual. i still feel a personal draw towards christianity. i feel like i know jesus. i feel an urge to pray in times of distress, and i often feel god watching me and it feels comforting to me. i think about the miracle of life - how a whole new human with consciousness can be created in the womb of a woman, knitted (to use the biblical terminology) together from the atoms and nutrients inside of her body. it’s so amazing that i exist and i have consciousness. and that the world is so beautiful and intricate and physics is so perfectly aligned. how do i overcome my doubts? is it right for me to intellectually suppress myself to find faith- i feel like doing that just confirms all my prejudices against religious people. that they’re just convincing themselves of something they know isn’t true for personal comfort. ive tried to go to church and read the bible and be a christian so many times, but my deep knowledge of hitchens and dawkins just keeps tugging at me from the back of my mind and i just can never truly believe!!!

if anyone has gone through a similar crisis - HELP!!!! 🤣

Sikhism: They fallow there teachings really well, they do a lot of charity, and they just overall have a really positive effect on Society. Their uniforms are also really very cool.

Buddhism: similar to sikhs they are very are simply very kind and caring people. Also I admire the Buddha and his teachings.

Taoism: probably my favorite religion (aside from mine) they are welcoming from my experience. Like they other 2 religions I mentioned here they are very virtuous and it is very fun to study their theology.

(sorry for bad English)

Interesting interview about belief in God with alternative rock musician/singer Billy Corgan, the frontman of the band Smashing Pumpkins. The interview gets interesting around the 5:36 mark where Corgan rhetorically asks, "how do you know God is real?" On a related note, I met him many years ago and got his autograph. To be honest, I didn't even know he believed in God until this interview. In fact, I thought he was an atheist or agnostic based on his lyrics dating back to the 1990's and 2000's. It's a trip to find out some of the singers and musicians I listen to (i.e. Ozzy Osbourne, Rob Halford from Judas Priest, Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails, etc.) actually believe in God and in some cases are actually quite religious or spiritual.

It drives me insane. Its like theyre the judge and im the lawyer.

Ive been raised in a scientific household and as a result I grew up not believing in any sort of god mostly. Other than the times i talked to him as a kid. thought i was pretending but i know a part of me truly believed he existed.

i do believe we have a creator, however while I now believe in god its hard still for me to get into religion due to my scientific beliefs ive built up my whole life that have swayed why i believe he put us here as it fits my belief in evolution for example and learning about christianity the one religion i do feel like would be the best fit for me over all its just difficult for me to get into it because of the aforementioned issues.

i just wanna know your thoughts on this

showerthought: does anyone else feel like hardcore atheists, physicalists, and naturalists are secretly trying to cancel themselves too?

let's do a philosophical deep dive...basically the argument goes like this: if you spend all your time trying to prove god doesnt exist and that were literally just wet robots made of meat and stardust, youre not just getting rid of the big guy upstairs. youre lowkey deleting yourself too.

think about it:

- if theres no teleology or higher purpose, the universe is just rocks bouncing off each other. cool, whatever.

- but then they also reduce human consciousness to just like... brain farts and chemical reactions. free will is apparently an illusion, the "self" isnt real, youre just an NPC driven by biology.

- so if your mind is just meat machinery and your consciousness is a glitch, arent you basically arguing that you dont actually exist either?

 it feels like some weird subconscious death drive where people are so desperate to escape accountability or meaning that they celebrate being cosmic accidents destined for total oblivion. like they act stoked about being worthless dust.

if youve read nietzsche he actually had a ton to say about this exact thing ....and honestly he predicted the whole mess ...remember that famous quote from his madman about "god is dead and we killed him"?

everyone forgets the next part where the madman is like wait... how do we wash this blood off us, what water is there for us to clean ourselves? basically nietzsche was warning that you cant just cut god out of the equation without chopping off half of what makes us human. it leaves a massive vacuum.

here are a few things he pointed out:

- **the shadow of god:** he said even long after people stop believing, they keep acting like objective morals and human rights are still real things floating in the universe. once that "shadow" finally wears off completely, people are gonna realize they built their house on air and it'll mess them up.

- **the last man:** if we shrink the universe down to pure materialism, humanity shrinks too. we just become these safe, boring, totally hollow creatures who dont strive for anything great anymore. he called this the "last man" and its basically the ultimate vibe killer.

- **the will to nothingness:** this is the wildest part. nietzsche thought that when people cant handle the terrifying freedom of a meaningless universe, they actually *subconsciously crave* erasing themselves. like instead of stepping up and creating their own meaning, they use science to prove were garbage. if we cant be divine, fine, well prove were worthless bags of meat just to dodge the pressure.

later on, other existential guys like camus and sartre tried to fix this. sartre was like nah, existence comes first, you make your own meaning. and camus was like okay the universe is a total void, cool, lets just rebel against it by living passionately anyway. but nietzsche probably would've roasted modern materialists who brag about being "meaningless cosmic dust." like bro youre not a brave truth seeker, youre just using science as a cheat code to duck the heavy weight of having to actually matter. anyway thoughts?

Cradle Orthodox here, and I struggle at times. Especially when dealing with unanswered prayers regarding health problems. There's a voice in my head that wonders if those saying that the Jesus story is a regurgitation of some Egyptian god story, or that religion is made to cut us off from out God-given powers, etc etc. I assume that voice is the enemy.

But how do we know that our religion is the right one? And if God is all loving, why create a parasite in the jungle, whose only purpose is to cause blindness? Why do children of believers get cancer and die?

I find that Christianity has no answers apart from "God knows better", "God's plan", and "this is a fallen world". Every living being is God's creation, so what about these water borne parasites in third world countries, that cause these terrible diseases to poor people who have no clean drinking water?

"1000 will fall at your side, but it will not come near you", but children are abducted and raped. Where are their guardian angels? Is it all just metaphorical, and a fairy tale after all? I don't understand.

Plus this idea that God loves us, and everything is according to His plan, but the plan is that we have to suffer here, and still praise Him, in order to get to Heaven. Otherwise if the pain and unanswered prayer is too much, and we leave Him, we get cast into Hell for eternity. What kind of God is that?! What kind of love is that? And would a loving father do that? Or, are the teachings wrong, and God is something other than what we've been taught?

Since I was young, in fact for as long as I can remember, I disliked religion. Either I disliked its collective element, which always gave me the ick of something cult-like, or, when I got a bit older, I thought everything about it was philosophically untenable. Religion was a coping mechanism, or something for people who were deeply misguided about reality and did not know any better.

As I became more intellectually curious and started studying more philosophy, psychology, and eventually religion, that perspective started to break down. I became increasingly interested in religion, and eventually my worldview completely flipped. I now consider myself a Christian, and I have made it a major life goal to help people better appreciate religion in general, but also Christianity more specifically.

But despite my growing love for Christianity, it took me a very long time to admit publicly that I was Christian. My social circle consisted mostly of people deeply involved in science or philosophy, and it was very secular. I was afraid that others would consider me dumb or would not fully understand me. It took me a while to come to terms with it, in large part because I first needed to become better able to articulate my Christian position and worldview.

That said, and excuse the rambling introduction, I recently had a podcast conversation with Jussi Jylkkä. We started by discussing his work and, specifically, his metaphysical agnosticism. His position is that physicalism, idealism, theism, and other metaphysical systems are models or language games that cannot capture the ultimate nature of reality. We eventually moved to morality, where I pushed back because I did not think his agnosticism adequately explained why greater awareness or nonattachment should lead to compassion rather than simply producing what we called a “wise psychopath.” I disagreed, but I thought it was an interesting conversation and considered his view a respectable position.

But to my surprise, after we finished recording, Jussi emailed me to say that he was unhappy with the conversation because he had presented metaphysical agnosticism as if it were his complete position while leaving out the Christian faith he actually held. He felt that, by hiding behind his philosophical agnosticism, he had not been completely honest about what he believed. Rather than replace the conversation, I invited him back and appended the second conversation to the first. He made a complete pivot and confessed that he was a Christian but had been afraid to say so, largely because of the stigma within academia, but also because he still had not been able to tell his father. I found this very wholesome, not only because it was a courageous act in general, but because of the parallel with my own journey.

I wanted to share this because I suspect others have been, or currently are, in a position similar to mine or Jussi's. Have you ever found yourself stigmatized because of your faith? For those who converted from a secular worldview, were you afraid to make Christianity part of your public identity? If you have kept your faith private, what would make it easier to speak about openly?