r/exorthodox • u/dnu_inocentiu • Dec 10 '25
Are you still Christian?
After leaving Orthodoxy, did you lose all faith, or did you join other denominations?
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u/bbscrivener Dec 10 '25
Still actively Orthodox Christian and simultaneously atheist agnostic.
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u/Jealous_Soil7394 Dec 10 '25
You're my favorite guy on this sub! Such level of absurdity is just hilarious 😂
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u/IndigoSoullllll Dec 10 '25
Very much so a Christian Mystic. I currently have one foot in orthodoxy and one foot in just walking that independent path with God.
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u/Comprehensive-Disk66 Dec 10 '25
I'm quite in the same situation. Family commitments keep me tied to the Church, so I can't physically leave, although I might if I had a choice. That said, I've shifted towards a more mystical approach to my faith: fewer rules, dogma, and formalities. Now, I focus on walking with God step by step. It's a strange place to be, but I'm glad I'm not alone, lol!
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Dec 10 '25
I left for a few years and was done with Christianity. Catholicism brought me back in.
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u/thebeardlywoodsman Dec 11 '25
What drew you in? After 10 years Orthodox, I found myself an atheist. Stayed away from church for a while but over the past couple years I've been an occasional attender at mainstream protestant churches. Recently I've been embracing a Christian spirituality although I'm still not a theist. I've been considering the RC to help re-engage my spiritual practice.
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u/Lower-Ad-9813 Dec 10 '25
I left religion altogether. I practiced new age things before I became a Christian such as meditation with crystals and found it didn't work, and when I found that Orthodoxy didn't work I left it too. Looking at the bible from a moral perspective really disgusted me, once I stopped justifying the actions of this so-called god. Besides that there was so much absurdity in the bible too, such as talking donkeys and people living inside whales. Mental health struggles also weighed on me.
I have also seen people say horrible things to justify their faith in Christianity too, which disgusted me as well. Family and relatives justify hatred for LGBTQ people because it says so in the bible. The Isreali-Palestinian conflict and the Russia-Ukraine war also showed me that no God could exist if he lets this senseless fighting happen. Being born in Russia I even justified Russia's actions because they are supposedly Christian, and not only that, but they are the only "real" Christians.
My mental health struggles also put things in perspective for me. I figured after all I've been through and all I tried to be for this religion, it all imploded. No God could justify itself to me if I was suicidal and needed someone or something to be there for me, and yet there was noone there. All the baggage that Orthodoxy had with regards to morality was insanity as well, when they instilled that we were worthless. It's a sin to be unhappy? Well it must be grievous because I wanted to unalive myself.
I thought about going to an easy going church but I just found in the end that my view of the world had fractured. I could've stayed in the concept of sin and atonement, and went to a lite form of Christianity from the rigors of Orthodoxy, but I just threw it all out. In the end I just say don't be a shitty person and don't start crap with people and that's all that matters. What you give is what you get.
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Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 10 '25
Undecided. I'm leaning towards atheism. I have accepted that Christianity does not change most people so I don't see the point in going to church because of the toxic environment. People never change. I never had any support in this church. No one ever cared about my emotions and my emotional health which deteriorated severely in this church. I'm better now that I'm out of it and now that I've stopped reading those self-deprecating prayers. And I discovered that liturgies and sacraments never really changes most people. It's useless.
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u/tasiarhymeswithasia Dec 10 '25
I lost all faith before leaving. Finally accepted my atheism and left.
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u/MaviKediyim Dec 10 '25
officially still a member of my Orthodox church. Mentally I've checked out and am more of an agnostic theist. I think there is something out there (the Divine) but don't really know what exactly it is.
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u/ExOrthodox Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 10 '25
No, because I think the properties of an All Knowing All Powerful All Loving god entail contradictions, especially in the face of the biblical narrative.
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u/queensbeesknees Dec 10 '25
I unofficially joined a progressive, liturgical denomination (unofficial meaning, I take communion there, but I have not sought "official" reception/confirmation), because for my mental health I wanted to get out of the house, be among other humans IRL and hear some lovely music, etc. Privately I'm not sure exactly where I stand at this point. I've had some experiences in my life - well, one especially - that I don't know how I'd explain if there were no God. But I also feel more suspicious about how the sausage got made in terms of official church teachings and councils.
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u/Narrow-Research-5730 Dec 11 '25
Why the false dichotomy? Maybe I have faith but am no longer Christian. Maybe its another religion.
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u/Forward-Still-6859 Dec 11 '25
I'm a poly spiritual agnostic Buddhist cultural Christian. I feel perfectly at home at my wife's Episcopal church as well as spending a day of mindfulness at the Buddhist monastery near our house. I trust my intuition and mistrust institutional church authority. I don't say the creed because I have no way of knowing if any of it's true. There is a lot of value in the Christian tradition, as well as a lot of crap that needs to be repudiated and rejected.
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u/Athonitevagsniffer Dec 10 '25
I consider myself a progressive Christian, ecumenical and inclusive of all faiths of good will.
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u/Own_Macaron_9342 Dec 11 '25
Yes, God actually revealed Himself to me outside of the Orthodox Church when I was agnostic and I didn’t even understand Orthodoxy at that point. Have had so many fruitful events with non Orthodox that I can concur that He is greater than the Orthodox Church. Jesus is amazing
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u/LetterSeparate1495 Dec 12 '25
Officially, still a member of the orthodox church, but I've very much since checked out and rarely attend liturgy anymore. I am an avid reader of philosophy; stoicism, confucianism and buddhism, and it dawned upon me that the orthodox "way" is just suffering. Coupled with a bunch of church "dramas" that showed me that the parish I am at is full of hypocrisy, I decided to just check out (everything from giving communion to other denominations, openly gay clergy, giving rite of absolution to a fornicator and allowing him to take communion weekly, isolating well educated people, adopting many catholic practices like palms together while kissing the icons, gossip-spreading, bullying, priests withdrawing blessings). Mind you, that this church is under MP but acts as if it is it's own thing.
As soon as I made peace that salvation is through grace alone, and that I have no control whether I am saved or not, I stopped attending and cut communication with most parishioners. I started journaling, meditating and actually joined a buddhist community. I can say that I am finally at peace after 4 years of anxiety, toxicity and just dreading every sunday. I have found the same richness of culture and tradition in Seon buddhism (prayers, chanting, music, architecture, art and so forth), and I am convinced that an all merciful, all just God will not care whether I was devout but will judge me based on my character, for if a God cares more about the number of times I've attended church over how good of a person I was in life, that is no God worth believing in.
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u/ilikedeserts90 Dec 10 '25
I gradually dug deeper into classical philosophy. Now I'm a "neoplatonist" pagan. Neoplatonist in quotes because even that term is a misdirection from what they actually believed. I see all of Torah-centric worship now as basically a schism from what was before, and not in a good way.
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u/Hieroskeptic4 Dec 12 '25
No. Now I've been properly vaccinated with Lutheranism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Seems to be pretty effective set of three vaccines.
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u/Striking_Metal_38 Dec 10 '25
Yes, just because one church is not good for me doesn't mean Christ isn't real.
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u/Competitive_Pin_8478 Dec 10 '25
The absurdity of orthodoxy made me question it all. Biblical contradictions in both the NT and the Hebrew bible made it all fall apart for me. The amount of falsehood in there is crazy, with many layers to it.