Ex-religious users, what made you not believe anymore?

    I grew up in a religious community, but I never felt the connection to go everyone else said they had. It made more sense for me for there not to be a god than to believe there is one, who I guess is just hanging around doing nothing, so even if they do exist, they're so hands off they might as well not.


    My religious community was specifically Christian, so I also don't have a sense of what it would even feel like to be one of the other religions. I read an interesting thing years ago that "atheism" is itself colored by the dominant religions that the atheist doesn't feel a connection with. It's hard to feel a connection with a religion you've never experienced or even witnessed.


    And like bunnyviolet, seeing the religion get wielded like a weapon against society's most vulnerable groups hasn't exactly endeared me to revisit it.

    My religious teacher told us even questioning God's intent and his texts will land us in hell.

    I was 9 and I couldnt stop questioning things. So I figured Im landing in hell anyway, so what's the point of making my life harder?


    Later as I grew up, I felt frankly disgusted by the severe amount of sexism promoted in the religion. Hell or no hell, I will never accept Im half as good as a man.

    The cherry picking my family engaged in made it pretty obvious that something wasn't adding up.

    And when whole chapters of what is supposedly the word of God go completely ignored by everyone but extremists, you start asking questions.

    And once I'd asked them, I realised that there's no evidence that any of it is even true in the first place. And since I'd prefer to believe in as few falsehoods as possible, I left the church the moment I was old enough to do so.

    For me it was a geography lesson and realization that all of us are basically assigned religion at birth.


    Islam teaches that everyone who doesn't live according to Islamic rules will not go to paradise. But how can a person who was born in an Islamic country and someone from North Korea, who probably never even heard of Islam, can be judged the same? Like every time I imagine the conversation between the God and some North Korean or Amazon indigenous I start laughing:


    -Why didn't you follow my rules from Quran

    -What rules? What is Quran?


    Maybe you had other doubts as well, but regarding that specific question: Many scholars already addressed that topic and said that you can’t go to hell if you didn’t know about Islam.

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