What caused you to lose faith? When was the point that you made the step from being a theist to becoming atheist? What was the rationale?
As a man of faith, I find the idea of one day disregarding my faith to be a bizarre concept. I know everyone believes differently, but faith is a strong emotion, right? How did you overcome your faith to embrace atheism? If you’re able to drop the faith, do you feel it was still true faith in the first place?
My parents were Christians, and I did go to church regularly as a kid. I think I believed in the sense that I didn’t know not believing was an option: I never really thought about God except when something was wrong, whatever petty things a little girl worries about. So I don’t count that so much.
Then my mom died and I went all-in on Christianity in grief: mainly, I think, because I wanted to see her again. I was straight edge, listening to Christian music, got my chestpiece tattoo (which is the Sacred Heart), went to church, all of it.
It wasn’t until over time, maybe as grief subsided, that I started to realize I never had intellectual reasons for believing; I only had emotional reasons. So I would think of questions and doubts that I was totally ill equipped to answer (and so were people I asked: I’d get totally unacceptable answers).
Also, major factor, I’m gay and I always have been. In high school I knew what my classmates thought of lesbians, so I pretended (and tried earnestly) to be straight. Same thing when I was “born again.” But it was lying to myself, and I really struggled with why God would make me a lesbian if He didn’t like homosexuals. I struggled with that so much, I cried a lot, I was in a really dark and self-abusive place because of it. So that was definitely a factor.
So, I left the faith slowly, piece by piece, first by allowing myself to stop trying to date men, by dropping the more hardcore aspects like young earth creationism. Then I finally allowed myself to date women, and as I had more and more intellectual questions about the faith, I kept dropping more and more.
At some point I realized that I had just stopped believing and was only going through motions. So I dropped the pretense. The guilt and the shame that was always there for being a lesbian was gone, I was finally happy.
