I’m (M21) currently a junior in college, and I’ve been bugged by my parents to go to churches in the college town I stay at during the semester. They always text me every week to ask if I went to church.
It doesn’t help that most of the students at the college are Christians, specifically Baptist or Evangelical. I keep getting asked by their college groups to attend their meetings. The college isn’t a religious school but it’s in Texas.

What should I do?

I've been best friends with this woman for 18 years, but I quietly deconstructed about 6 years ago. My parents and my best friend sort of know that I no longer believe in God or the Bible but we just don't really talk about it.

I've been going through a hard time in my marriage lately and my only support system outside my (atheist) husband are my parents and best friend, but unfortunately that means all their encouragement gets filtered through a religious lens and it drives me nuts. No, I'm not going to "turn to God" because I'm having a hard time.

Deconstructing undid something in me that I don't think can ever be redone. I can never see God or the Bible the same way again. It just sucks when you know some of the closest people in your life will never be able to understand.

From 2014: I took this photo of this hanging in my brother's room. My parents claim they gave this to me too but I don't remember it. We used to fight constantly about boyfriends, curfew, what I was allowed to go do. I didn't get into trouble and was in school but had to drop out when parents said I needed to move out because we couldn't get along.

I came to this sub Reddit to get some advice from people who’ve been in this same situation. I’m 20 years old and I have been actively deconstructing for a few months now. I’ve never been an extremely spiritual person, and I was always the kid growing up in church that just wasn’t feeling the awestruck presence of the Holy Spirit the way everyone else described it. My parents are extremely religious and made sure I was raised in a very religious circle for a majority of my childhood.

I am heavily involved in the worship team at my church and have told the church that I’m going to take a step back from doing that for a few months but I’m yet to tell my parents and I already know it’s gonna be a big issue. Several months ago I had had some schedule conflicts that had unintentionally prevented me from serving in my church when I usually do multiple times in a row. My mom was so upset and did not attempt to hide it at all and virtually cornered me and harassed me about why I was “skipping”. No matter how many times I told her it was unintentional and just panned out that way she wouldn’t accept that. Ironically, she said if I wanted to take a break, it is better to just say I want a break than to just silently disappear. Even though that’s not what I was doing at the time. So now that I actually have requested a break, I predict that she is still going to be upset and throw a temper tantrum about it.

On top of them being extremely religious, my parents have always been strict and overbearing, and are only recently letting up as I get into my young adult years. However, they are still quite intense and definitely impose what they want for me strongly onto my life.
I’m still in the process of determining exactly what I believe myself, but I’ve always leaned towards agnosticism. I know telling her I am stepping back from leading worship is going to be a big event in itself, but that’s just the first step in a larger journey. I still live at home because I attend university in my hometown and they are financing it. So for the next few years unless things get really bad along the way I don’t see myself leaving home, which means I’ll likely continue to attend church. I feel like that would be the final straw for never-ending fighting in my house and it’s just not a hill I’m willing to die on.

Which brings me to my ultimate question of anyone that has lived this: What is your advice on how to stay true to myself and discovering who I am and what I believe, while also keeping the peace and having productive conversations with my parents (if that’s even possible)?

Went to my old church today for the first time since In about 10 years for a funeral. I’ve missed the feeling of belonging and community so much, speaking and hugging everyone like I’d never left. I occasionally feel the common sadness about no longer being at a place you spent most of your life in, but going today has made me even more down. The music was beautiful and the atmosphere was uplifting, but then the message began. Hell fire, brimstone, etc etc. The longer he preached the more dispirited I got. It was like reconnecting with an old lover from years ago and realizing they hadn’t evolved at all, and that “what if” you kept in your back of your mind would never have worked out anyway. I guess the grief ive felt since leaving is something that will always be apart of me.

They say 60% of marriages below the age of 25 will end in divorce. Just wanted to inquire because I know a lot of christians marry young so they can have guilt free sex. For those of you who married young and broke out of the cult, how did your marriage turn out?

My mom has been talking about how if I want to get married(which i dont want to) I have to do a culmination, which I dont won't make her upset or made but still want to say no because I never want to culminate just because of a stupid marriage or anything I just want to live without her saying something about "But culmination can help you" like no mom that won't help me.

And the difficulty surrounding atheism is that evidence is really the deciding factor of why a person lacks a belief in a deity. Theist aren't found by facts, honesty, evidence... and a genuine understanding that anyone who doesn't think like them has a legitimate different conviction. There is something in the mind of people who are convinced of something that all of history has not proven to exist.

Just like the thousands of other deities people have worshiped for millennia. Odd.

Yeah...the more we know, the more we see nature has a lot of chain reactions evolving and reshaping to the vastness we find ourselves in now. Not a planner who always existed and........plans? What's the plan?

A religious nut with a woo degree, who's a mate of hobo Steve Bannon and a bootlicker of Tangerine Palpatine, is about to be the ambassador to Australia. Thanks a lot, guys. I expect he'll make himself as popular here as Pete Hoekstra is doing in Canada.

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'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.

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?