It's common hear about atheists "losing" their faith. The language of "loss" is used by both atheists and theists, but is it perhaps language we should avoid? Well, some people definitely feel a loss when they stop having religious faith, but others don't. Quite the opposite, in fact: they feel more like they've gained something.
Someone above used the familiar expression "I lost faith," or something akin. We all know what is meant, of course, just as we do when someone mentions losing virginity. I have to ask, who'd want to keep it?
I think I began to question my faith when I was assigned to read an essay about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac when I was a college freshman a half century ago. About fifteen years later I was still trying to be a fundamentalist Christian when our pastor, a wonderful caring man who is now a pastor of an A of G "megachurch" in Texas, taught a series of lessons on the mind, soul, and spirit.
I can't remember any of his points any more, but I began to question the existence of a soul. I had friends who returned from Viet Nam with injuries that had changed them into people I didn't know. Why would their souls leave them?
It still took me a couple of years to detach myself from faith, but once I did, nothing was lost. A great deal was gained.
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When some people stop having religious faith, they do feel like maybe they've lost something -- comfort, assurance, that sort of thing. I don't want to tell them that they shouldn't feel that way, but perhaps this is a case where such feelings should be re-examined and re-considered.
How did you feel when you stopped having religious faith? Did you feel more like you lost something or more like you gained something? And what about now -- do you still have the same feelings, or have they shifted over time?
I’m trying to remember if I’ve ever used the phrase: “I’ve lost my faith.” In my own process to becoming an atheist, I can’t remember saying or thinking this. It seems that during the process, I felt like I was “questioning” my faith. At some point, this thing we call “faith” just didn’t make sense to me any more.
I find that not having to worry about this thing called faith was a big relief. I no longer felt like I had to reconcile atrocities, horrific accidents and illnesses and all the other suffering beings experience with some benevolent deity who made everything happen for a reason. Sometimes, I feel I traded one anxiety for another since I now have to accept that things don’t happen for a reason (i.e. fate/providence). This means not only I’m not in control, but nothing is. It is all humans making choices that may affect me, physical forces in motion, etc. Happily, I don’t think of such things all the time.
It is an amazing feeling to realize the freedom one commands when one is no longer controlled by the dogma of religious thought. That is the biggest thing I have gained since identifying as an atheist. It has made such a positive difference in my life.
The proper way to think of faith is a dependency. People with faith have a weak and/or compromised mental immune system and have fallen into a state of mental illness.
The reactive response to this condition is to fight the symptoms which primarily manifest as fear, paranoia. That is, faith is a false state of certainty that their paranoid fears are being held at bay.
In order to achieve real mental health, one needs to recognize that such fears are irrational, that is, one must be rational.
It is so often plainly stated that people recover from mental illness when they understand their condition and are able to manage it on their own (behaviour modification). Crazy people do not know they are crazy. Of course this does not apply to physical/neurological mental illness, but that is not the subject.
“Loss of Faith?”
You can’t lose “nothing.”
Grandpa
PS Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror. A benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries. Phillip Adams (borrowed from positiveatheism.org)
At about the age of nine I began to question What I was being taught in elementary school and Sunday school.Too many things simply could not be reconciled.That was when choose I natural over supernatural.From that point forward the material world was all there is. I never dwelled on theism agnostcisn or atheism. I was aware that most people around me had a different world view I was the nail that was sticking up, and as the saying goes,”The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”. But, there was always that nagging doubt in my mind. Never completely settled. The question in my mind was always this. If practically everyone I know has this belief, then how can I rule it out? Then at the age of about forty eight my second wife was diagnosed with a terminal malignancy.She had been raised up in a fundamentalist family. She could not make peace with her God and watching her go through the dying process was probably as tough for me as it was for her. I found myself searching for verses in the bible that I could take to her to help her make peace. there was nothing I could do. Her indoctrination was just too strong. She passed away with a terrible fear of the fires hell. Some weeks after her passing I began to review the last year of her life. Faith did nothing for her. Instead it made facing the end an order of magnitude worse for her. She would have been so much better off if she had never heard of Christianity. Then I took it upon myself to read the bible from cover to cover. It took about Six weeks of my evenings. I will always remember when I read the last verse. I closed the book. Now it is decision time. From that moment forward I was an atheist. I also was filled with a white hot anger over what that indoctrination did to her. I guess I was always an atheist beginning at about the age of nine but it was then that I made a conscious decision and put a name to what I am. For me that was freedom. freedom from doubt. I felt liberated.
I didn’t lose faith so much as embrace rationality. It was like waking up to sunshine and freedom. I felt uncomfortable about church and religion most of my childhood and only joined because my father would have been furious, and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of his anger. So Christian of him, I know. Ironically, the final blow to a tenuous faith came while taking a mandatory course in Divinity at Bishop’s University, Qc. The silliness of the whole theology was laid bare, not intentionally I’m sure, and I was, at last. the mistress of my own life and my own ethical decisions.
Hear! Hear! Thanx, Austin Cline. As I have written at my own blog:
~quoted from ‘Modernity And The Contemporary Apostate’~
“Personally, however it’s defined, I feel quite peaceful, even liberated, since I took the plunge [ed; into non-belief] some time ago. It wasn’t easy because I had been raised a believer and had actually become more devout than my parents. Finally, I renounced all professions of faith after undergoing a rebirth of trust in evidence, and after an overdue discovery of personal courage, took the joyous leap of reason…”
Many people need to compensate from the anxiety that accompanies such a dramatic ‘game change’ by morphing into outspoken anti-religionists. I suspect that a good proportion of these are “newbies’ to the rosters of atheism/agnosticism. IMHO, I think that dubious raison d’être recedes in time because we all have to affirm life in new ways to live with purpose ad joy. It’s never enough to self-define just through the adversarial posture of saying “No” to everything. Witness the current Republican congress.
When asked, I say that I “shed my faith.” This conveys that such irrational thought is at best unnecessary, at worst a hindrance, and so I divested myself of it.
I rejected religion and faith as a child. Going to church was something forced upon me, and every time I heard anything to do with religion it seemed like people were trying to scare me with it. So, I played along, but I never believed. Luckily, through my dad’s job, we were transferred out of the South. The nuns at my new school were extremely intelligent and were not just dogma enforcers. They opened my mind to the possibility that the bible was all bullshit, by stating that the story of Noah’s Ark was just that—a story. As the years went by, I became more and more educated about just how ridiculous religion is. Once, while visiting a black family’s home, I noticed a picture of Jesus on the wall. This Jesus was black, though. That’s when I realized that most people’s religious beliefs are culture-centric. Just like every culture’s version of heaven relates to their way of life. Now I was beginning to see the bigger picture. I watched as all of my friends and family went through their lives without even so much as a doubt about their faith. Even now, it saddens me to watch them voluntarily sell themselves into the slavery of Christianity. I, however am a free man! Free to follow reason, free to live my life to it’s fullest, free to develop my creativity to it’s fullest capacity and free in the knowledge that this life on Earth is the only one we are going to experience.
The concept of “losing faith” is interesting.
As I have mentioned in previous comments I listed to the Christian broadcasting network “Vision” at times for fun and the topic of losing faith is addressed often.
In their typical convoluted reasoning technique Christians tell us that all we have to do is seek Jesus and he will reveal himself and all is then OK. It happens that some doubt creeps into the hearts of some of the faithful however in spite of the initial Jesus revelation. This seems somewhat contradictory to me but not to the preachers on Vision.
It is always the fault of the hapless backslider, of course, if he allows doubt to creep in and sully his unblemished faith, but the good people on Vision have techniques that can be used to shore up, and restore the faith to the level it should be. Praise the Lord!
I never had faith to lose, as far back as I can remember I realized that Santa Claus was impossible, as was Jesus coming back from the dead or anything having to do with Spirits, Souls, etc. It was absurd to me even as a child.
Although I lost my faith, I gained something more valuable: the belief in my own reasoning abilities. It was liberating in ways I didn’t foresee. The down side is dealing with the irrational anger of family members who still believe and want me to return to my former status. I can understand why some keep their atheism or agnosticism from family and friends. The urge to pass judgment on apostates is so strong. Still, integrity compels me to be honest about who I really am.
Well done Irene. I commend you for being honest with your religious family although it has been hard.
Your observation that your family members are angry with you is interesting, but not unusual it seems. One would think that the reaction of your relatives should be one of concern and pity, because you are now destined to go to that less than ideal place, where all that wailing and gnashing of teeth is going on. So why are they angry rather than sympathetic?
The answer is to me rather obvious,( and if you have worked this out yourself then I am sorry to point out the obvious), but the theist needs to be surrounded by as many others as possible that believe the same stuff they do, to reinforce their conviction. When someone like you breaks away it erodes their faith and hence the anger.
An apt expression in Australia (perhaps in the US too) :
“Eat shit. A billion flies can’t be wrong.”
I always wondered if the bible religion was true or not so I just kinda went along but did not attend church or anything I guest I finally realized that it just was not true so I started to research and come to the realize God did not exists.That when I realized that I was an atheist but have come out and told alot people.