Corgan Sow

been a fundy for five years...until last August.

- the passage about Elisha and children teasing his bald head. That bloody verse was the turning point of my faith.

- ask questions from fellow Christian Fellowship members. All told me to stop visiting "satanic websites" like...this.

- ad hoc, ad nauseum arguments used repeatedly. Worst, Christians who don't feel a single tinge of idea of hell for unbelievers.

- ignorance! I live in a goddamned asian country and one CF member thought Buddhism is all about pagan gods tweaking your eyeballs should you not heed Guatama's Path to Enlightenment!

justashooter

being raised pentacostal is not fun. child abuse is rampant in that community, and physical illness of a family member is looked on as a sign that sin is at work in the family. the youngest child is usually scapegoated for the sin, and flayed alive for the "sins familia". twenty years later, those who have committed the physical abuse are in the ground, but the scapegoat/victim continues to carry the scars (physical and emotional).

this is a familiar pattern in that community, and a not so peculiar story. i'm not special. just another guy.

...

As a former Jehovah's Witness, I suppose it was all the garbage that they fed me throughout my childhood.

Now I'm an adult, and doing everything I couldn't do back then. Right now, I'm listening to Madonna while drinking a Bloody Mary, and thinking "fuck the Watchtower, I'm feeling GOOOOOO-OOOD!"

beoba

Sticky this thread.

Ouch, that must have sucked.

As for me, I've never had much of a family connection to fundamentalism, except for an aunt who homeschooled her kids and a grandmother who suddenly decided she really liked Baptists for a couple years.

My parents were (and still are) only slightly religious because their parents were, and so on. I had attended church as a child, and at the particular one I was at, it seemed more of a social event, which honestly I had no problem with, but it certainly didn't help me believe in anything. While I always cringed at "under God", I never really explored the possibility of lack of belief until around August 2001.

Pensee

I was regularly attending a Church of God in a nearby town. I loved it, was excited about it, and couldn't get enough of it. I went every time the doors were open. You could count on me being there, rain or shine. I honestly couldn't understand why people didn't go to church. However, I gradually started noticing a pattern in the services that didn't "sit right" with me. Some services, considering the nature of the church, were obviously all-out crying services, repenting and pouring our hearts out to God at the altar. These services are to be expected, but they became more and more common. Pretty soon, it was every service. We had a pretty small congregation. The preacher would give us his best fire and brimstone, then call on us to come back to the altar to repent. Well, sometimes I honestly felt like I had done nothing in between services for which I needed to repent. (Especially on Sundays, when you don't get out of church until 1:00 and come back for 6:00!) When I stopped going up to the altar every service to repent for sins I didn't commit despite being implored to do so by the preacher, people started treating me differently. It was like, "What's wrong with you?!" It made me really uncomfortable. The preacher even treated me differently. Pretty soon, I began to get the idea that he (the preacher) was playing with people's emotions to get them to the altar. It was just a sinking feeling I had and couldn't shake, so I quit going.

Less than a year later, I was a full-fledged atheist.