Losing My Religion and Going Public on Facebook

[cleanhippie]

Lots of people lose their religious faith and just keep quiet about it. They have great reasons for doing so. Entire communities and family relationships are built on agreement that God is real. Publicly express doubt and you risk becoming an outcast in both social and family circles. Thus, many people go through the motions. What’s the harm in believing a beautiful lie?

The problem for me was that the lie’s not harmless. Scratch the surface and you quickly expose a dark underbelly of rules designed to keep people in bondage: Women are to be submissive to men. Gay relationships are abominations. Natural sexual urges are sinful. This life is relatively meaningless compared to the afterlife. Suffering is purposeful and justified. And so on. This system of beliefs is not only harmful but, pushed to extremes, can result in devastation on a societal scale. Truth matters after all.

When I walked away from my faith and decided to go public, doing it through social media was a natural way for me to do it. For me, Facebook is a kind of “truth serum”—a place where people air all kinds of things, from trivial (what they just prepared for lunch) to intense (political and religious debates). I had used it a great deal over the years to air my challenges to skeptics in a public forum, so I thought it was only fair to use it as the platform for my admission that I was now convinced I’d been wrong.

I began by publicly announcing I was separating myself from religion and letting people know that in the days that followed, I would be outlining the high points as to why I no longer believed in the supernatural. I tried to be painfully honest about my fears in going public.

http://thehumanist.com/commentary/losing-my-religion-and-going-public-on-facebook

[trotsky]

1. A very good piece about someone's personal experiences.

It also contains valuable insight into how Christianity is actually practiced and believed by real people across the US, and not just the small groups of liberal Christians that some think are representative of the faith.