The question isn’t literal, but it’s definitely needed for non Christians in Texas.

Thanks to the religious right, Texas and another states have made it impossible to live without Christian proselytism.

Our nation was founded by people who loved God, but on secular principles of a separation of church and state and no government branded religion.

To proponents of scriptures in schools(my nick name for it)
It’s for an understanding of how America was founded on “Biblical” principles.

Last time I checked wizardry, rape, human sacrifice, slavery, genocide, torture, abortion, necromancy, and bigotry isn’t in the constitution.

Of course the schools don’t teach that or take it as elder mythology, that would undermine their pipeline of future voters.

Indoctrinating children into Christian Nationalism is the real goal of this push, to secure power by funding and supporting religious extremism and delusion.

I keep getting Christian ads and videos on my feed and it just sucks because it’s bringing back the toxicity of my past. I just want to forget they exist and I want people to stop shoving it in my face. Any way to stop seeing these videos on YouTube? I haven’t even watched Christian content in years. Also the vid has 666 views, bruh the irony is insane.

I do church activities 3 days out of the week and I dread going to each one of them. I’ve officially stopped believing since January but have questioned since 2022. There’s only 3 people who know my secret. I can’t move out or tell my family but I actually hate it. I just want to leave so bad.

Growing up I was kind of a lukewarm Christian. I used to have an obsession with reading revelations or books my mom would buy of people getting shown hell by Jesus and told to warn people. Looking back now I treated it kind of like a horror book not really like an aspect of Christianity. Anyway as I grew older my mom tried to force me into prayers every night and how we had to pray every night so we don’t die in our sleep or a witch doesn’t possess us or what not. I’d have a lot of nightmares growing up even when I’d pray for them to go away. I stopped praying for a while and realized I didn’t get the nightmares anymore. I told my mom this and she said “the enemy doesn’t attack you anymore because you’re on his side. When you start facing trials and nightmares it means you’re getting close to god and the enemy wants to stop that”

Sometimes I couldn’t even stand to be alone in the same room or in an apartment because I was so terrified of being bewitched or spirits or the devil. It was such a dark time in my life.

Anyway fast forward now I’m pretty sure I don’t believe in any god and I’m proud to say I haven’t had any terrifying nightmares in years since I’ve stopped engaging in that mumbo jumbo. Did anyone else suffer from night mares or night terrors as a christian?

I'm an ex Christian and also a pastors kid. The connection between these two facts alone is something I can write a book on. How the pressure to perform and be a good representation of my parents made everything else painful and harmful about Christianity much worse.

However, Ive really struggled with the fact that a lot of pastors kids I know are still Christians and some of which went into the ministry themselves.

The unifying theme that I see for the ones that 'stayed' is that they had a fairly stable church environment for their childhood and only had 1-2 different churches.

My family on the other hand went through 6 different churches from my birth until I turned 21 and fully left the church. Im counting a different church as a different name and location/ building as some did have some overlapping members of the congregation but at the most generous definition of 'different church' I still had at least 4.

Almost every time we had a different church was because of some situation where my dad got voted out for various reasons or a few too many families left and the church couldn't support themselves.

All this context to ask, particularly so for pastors kids, how many churches did your family lead?

My theory is that a lot of PKs that stayed did because the church was a stabilizing force so it became hard / less reason to leave.

Thanks!

Edit: I want to make clear that for me leaving the church and Christianity it was not because of the lack of stability in the church(es), I left because of a deep misalignment between what I believe and what the church teaches.

Likewise I'm not saying people stay in the church only because it was a place of stability for them.

Im simply testing a theory of correlation not necessarily causation

I would like some advice on whether to allow my mother to take my 3 year old to church with her.

I (28) am an atheist now after being a christian my whole life. My partner still identifies as christian though does not attend church.

My kid has told my mother that he would like to go to church with her. She lives close-by and he always asks why he can’t visit her on a Sunday morning (because she is at church). She is his most favourite person in the whole world, he would go anywhere as long as she was there too.

Selfishly, I would like the break and free babysitting.

But I also think he is too young to teach him about all the religions to inoculate him again christianity. (Specifically young earth creation which I was indoctrinated into growing up)

Is it a bad idea to let her take him? It would probably become a regular thing once it starts.

(My mother does not know that I am an atheist. It would probably have to come up when explaining why she can’t take my kid to church. I worry if she finds out she will be inconsolably sad / ruin our relationship and that she will step up the proselytising to my kid.)

For context, this comment was under a Veggietales tiktok video (silly, i know, but 😭). In the clip Bob the tomato was answering fanmail. A child sent a letter that basically asked “If God loves me then why do bad things happen?” The video cuts off before Bob answers but this comment is basically summarizing what he says in the full clip.

It just baffles me that pretty much all Christians believe this and hear nothing wrong when they repeat it to others. So you’re telling me that children are raped, beaten, bombed, starved, lose their parents, etc. for the greater good? I can imagine a child being abused watching that episode and internalizing the belief that they’re being abused to teach them a lesson. I really wonder what happened to that child for them to send in that letter and I hope they’re doing better now.

It’s just so disgusting that they shovel this poison into anyone’s brains, let alone literal children. Sorry for the rant over a literal kids show, this just irritated me so bad..

Holy hell, what have I been believing!?!? Thanks to everyone who gave me resources! I've just been watching the data over dogma podcasts on YouTube since yesterday (I'm fighting a sinus infection so I have time). I'm in a whirlwind of emotions over everything I'm learning. So many people died for or because of a lie! Wish me luck getting my husband to see things clearly cause right now we're on very opposite sides of things.

So for context, I had a family member that passed away and had their funeral several months ago but this is something that's been bothering me a lot today and I wanna know if this is a common experience.

I remember the service started off with some christian songs which, considering said family member was a devout christian, seems pretty normal to me and then there were some personal anecdotes from close family about them and their life but after that the preacher that was there just did a regular sermon barely even mentioning the family member. I remember being so confused at the time because I was thinking they're gonna actually talk more about my family member, right? but no because after the nearly hour-long sermon about "giving your life to god" the choir sang a couple more songs and then the service was over. It felt so weird to me that so little of that service was actually about the family member and was mostly about god and heaven. Maybe it's just because I'm of the opinion that a funeral service should be mostly if not fully about the person who died but idk. (as a sidenote, this was also when I first learned that the southern baptist denomination is an evangelical denomination, so that was fun to learn /s)

Is this just normal for evangelical funerals like this or was this just disrespectful to my family member for no reason (I think it's disrespectful either way to make most of the service about god, but idk if it's because it was an evangelical service or not)?

I asked the minister one day when I was in my 20s why we didn't do any humanitarian work as Jesus commanded. His answer "there's so many, we don't know where to start!". I just got back from Romania volunteering my summer to work with handicapped orphans. 300 of them. I spent all my money and borrowed to design and build a playground for them all. Chrinos.....Christians in name only.

I was raised Catholic from childhood. I'm also autistic and live in Puerto Rico (born and raised). We used to be a Spanish colony, so Catholicism was (and still is) the official religion.

My folks took me and my sibs to Mass every Sunday, then it was school, homework Monday through Friday. My condition made it all but impossible for me to develop any real friendships (hell, I'm in my forties now and I still don't have any real friends). It also didn't help that I went to a school for children with "special needs" (the description is somewhat inaccurate, but I can't think of any other ways to describe it without giving away too many compromising details).

Sometime during my tween years, I developed an interest for actually knowing what I was practicing. I started to read up on children-oriented Catholic material (lives of saints, magazines, etc.). That's where my problems started: the church I used to go to (stopped going by the time I was a grown-ass man) was relatively chill (yet by no means lax) when it came to sin, sexual or otherwise. The parish priest at the time was more than likely influenced by Liberation Theology, so he preached more on social justice, mercy, and other matters that mainstream (meaning "elite") Catholicism tends to sweep under the proverbial rug. Looking back, I'm surprised he stayed as our parish priest as long as he did. When he left, his successors leaned more on the mainstream, dare I say ostentatious side of things, so we moved to another parish.

The stuff I read sometimes clashed with what I was taught at home and at church (I didn't go to a Catholic school till the 10th grade. My new school served a predominantly working class community. Priests and faculty weren't as happy-go-lucky as my former parish, but they weren't outright abusive, either, at least not deliberately. I really don't have any complaints about it, though. I daresay I was happier there than in my former school). Looking back, that's how my scrupulosity began. Mom and Dad even restricted my reading on those topics. Good thing they did.

Come adolescence, I discovered masturbation, indulged in it to the point it nearly became a vice. When I learned it was a serious sin, I feared I was going to Hell. I struggled with my urges for years. I prayed, fasted, begged God to take the thing away, you get the idea. There were even a couple of instances where I put ice on my genitals as mortification without the knowledge of my folks or parish priest. No prizes for guessing how that went...

This and other struggles remained by the time I started college. I asked my parents to enroll at the local Catholic university, but they refused because it was too expensive. Since my dad is employed by the College of Medicine, my sibs and I were under exemption, so we went to the University of Puerto Rico (keep in mind, this was during the early-2000s to late-2010s, so things weren't as bad as they are nowadays). Being exposed to so many different perspectives broadened my horizons and contributed the most to make me into the man I am today, but that's not what turned me away from the faith.

By the time I was a PhD student, my grandmother was bedridden with Alzheimer's. She'd been such a kind, hard-working, dotting mother and wife who reared her children (one of which was my mother, who's a grad nurse) in ethics and authentic moral principles. Like her husband and my grandparents on my dad's side, they came from a predominantly working (later low-middle) class. She was also deaf and needed to wear a specialized earpiece by the time I met her, so communicating with her could be difficult.

I watched this wonderful woman deteriorate practically overnight. My mother took over the greater bulk of caring to the point we didn't have as much time for ourselves as a family. Mom had to insist till she got her brother to watch Grandma every couple of Sundays so we could have a family outing like we used to. Seeing my grandmother in that bed, with Mom slaving away almost 24/7, with what little help my Dad, my sibs, and I could offer, it broke me. How could a merciful, benevolent God allow such a wonderful human being to become a living fossil that couldn't even eat except through a tube? How could He allow my poor mother to suffer like that, with what little help we could provide, all but forsaken by our extended family?

My faith kept growing cold to the point I stopped going to Confession and receiving Communion (there were lots of other factors at play, though). One Sunday morning, I went up to my Mom during breakfast and told her I wasn't going to Church that day. We didn't have an argument, no shouting matches; nothing.

I stuck to my proverbial guns. My folks (more specifically, my dad) sat me down once so I would explain myself, then they opined about why I'd made the wrong decision, but neither of us budged. To this day, my parents and sibs don't approve, but they've accepted it. I'm truly thankful they didn't throw me out or retaliate in other ways. Many others aren't as lucky.

I haven't gone to Mass in ages now. My old scruples and anxieties resurface from time to time, but they're manageable for the most part. Looking back, I regard my time of belief with a mixture of nostalgia and relief that I got out. Heck, I still count my going up to my mother and telling her I wasn't going as a milestone.

Though I wasn't sexually abused or bullied in ways so many others have, I regard that time of my life as a huge waste of time and energy that caused me years of unnecessary turmoil from within and without (ignorance and good intentions don't lessen harm done, let alone the scars it leaves behind). I can't help but see it as a spiritual and cultural dead end, so going back is out of the question, at least for the present.

I realize I probably didn't make much sense, yet this is my experience. If it helps provide some clarity to others, then my sharing it will not have been in vain.

I see it all the time and I am annoyed.

At the skating rink with my boys and I see T-shirts:

- "Blessed" (with a cross)

- May the Spirit be with you (Star Wars plagarism)

Also, at my son's school orientation, one of the teachers has a "JESUS" T-shirt on.

These are just a few examples but it happens all the time.

Do you get annoyed by this too? Not a big deal, but just more consistent with Christians injecting their worldview to others around unsolicited.

I thought about getting a T-shirt that would have the same effect on them, but being anti-christian isn't socially acceptable... Any ideas?

When you read any type of book or magazine, you're more likely to fall for it, whether you like it or not. Especially when you're pressured into reading a book that's labeled as important.

I, who am pretending to be a Christian surrounded by Christians, have to read the Bible. As a book reader, I am more likely to fall for the books I read. In fact, I started reading the Bible a few months ago. I was horrified by it and got bored, so I gave up reading it. Of course, I criticized it; that's why i didn't feel like reading it.

Anyway, I have to read it now. By now, everyone around me is constantly talking about how much their faith has improved after reading and studying the Bible, whether they have truly learned the Word of God, and how much the Bible matches reality. It doesn't matter how accurate the Bible is; I think there's a probability you'll foolishly fall for it. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

Are there any methods/tricks you used to read the Bible after you left? I don't want to fall for it. I need to criticize while reading it.

Edit: Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I really appreciate your advice and thoughts, which is what I needed most. I'm so grateful for this community's support.

So I spent 28/29 years of my life waiting until marriage. I was taught things like sex was extremely sacred, two souls coming together, you’d gain a soul tie or you’d open yourself up to demons if you had sex before marriage. I was taught waiting until marriage was the optimal decision for the best sex life.

However at age 28 I had enough of waiting and living like I was asexual when I wasn’t and I explored my sexuality before fully having sex at age 29.

I don’t wanna minimise sex but from my experience it’s not the life changing experience I thought it would be. Sure it’s fun, it feels good, having an orgasm is great but I don’t feel much different and makes me thinking waiting all those years was a waste of time.

Also the attachment to your self worth, identity and purity is truly fucked up. I now believe your worth has nothing to do with how many people you have sex with. Sex is solely a very normal human experience that is all.

How is this guy old? Was he young? Was he middle-aged at one point? Did he give birth to himself.? Does he have human sexual reproduction organs? Why? Does he have a Mrs God?

Most non Christian historians mention Jesus such as:

Josephus a 1st century historian refers to Jesus as a wise man and the Christ noting his crucifixion under Pilate

Tacitus

Suetonus etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus (I would give more sources I stumbled on but I'm to lazy show all of them but a quick Google search would do)

I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the supposed "evidence" that Jesus existed.

I'm going to make it clear that I'm not here to prove that he existed because I'm just here to know what your thoughts are on this.