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I’m a member of the community site ThinkAtheist, and one active forum discussion [NOTE: this discussion is not available any longer 
] was sparked by question to atheists who “used to be deeply religious or who used to really have faith, especially those of view who have de-converted recently.” I will post my response below, but I’d like to hear your reactions as well.
Question: [W]hat chance do you give to the possibility of reconverting or going back to the religion you left? My [non-believing] friend maintained that many people for whom religion was a fundamental part of their life will eventually go back to their old faith, and possibly in a big way.
I think that of course, it will depend on the person, and how convinced they were when they became atheists in the first place; also, I think people who have had very bad experiences with their religion, and have finally escaped, will never go back to it.
Would I go back?
Since I left faith because of an intellectual search instead of an emotional reaction or difficult experience (such as Christians being mean to me, being angry at god because of a death in the family, etc.), I don’t think it’s likely that I will ever return to being a Christian like I was before. I was sincerely passionate in my belief and I studied a lot, read much, and loved being a Jesus-follower.
But since I don’t see any evidence for a deity, do not believe there is a higher power, and above all I absolutely reject the deity portrayed in the Christian bible, I don’t see why I’d return to being religious. I don’t think any man-made religion would satisfy me or make sense.
Plus, atheism is freeing! There’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing is lacking. Why would I switch back to something so ridiculous and make-believe?
Would you go back? Let us know in the comments.
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I’m sure my parent’s hope like hell that I’ll return. They’ve left more than a few hints that they view my current perspective as that of being wayward. However, like you, I left the faith because I found it deeply unsatisfying – in an intellectual way.
It probably helps that the brand of faith I experienced is the American Evangelical Fundamentalist variety. Among my friends reared in far more “calm” Christian faiths, they retain either ambivalence or communitarian interests in church. In the end, their interest in faith is due to the benefits of social cohesion and community building.
Heck, there’s a downtown Seattle church that has a surprising number of atheists. A minister in our family has noted that belief in god is *optional*. My wife and I are considering attending if only to see if there’s any benefit to be had. But that’s a far cry from embracing Christianity in anything more than the aforementioned communitarian spirit.
We shall see. All I know is that pining for a theistic, narcissistic version of Santa Claus is not in the cards. Intellectual nourishment is more important than anything else to me and my wife.
Thanks for passing along the thoughtful question.
I know a few atheists and agnostics who attend Universalist congregations in order to raise their children or experience a community like what you often find in a religious context.
I’m torn between two thoughts on that topic. I’ve mentioned numerous time on this blog how I wish atheists would form communities that are similar to–or better than–the religious communities in their areas. I see this as acutely lacking. So I do see why people would seek out “imitations” of religious community or join the most liberal kinds of groups to fill that particular void.
Still, I have a strong distaste for imitations and don’t want to settle for some filler group where I may be tolerated even though I don’t believe. That’s cute and all, but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I wonder why…
My wife and I have recently discussed that very topic. I would bet that bad-taste is (like my own) due to the negative emotions that we have and *not* strictly a result of our atheism. My guess is that my own resistance is due to the particulars of my experience.
It’s worth noting that atheists are not monolithic in their approach. I have encountered more than a few atheists that nauseate me because they may not be Christian, but they will adopt the dismissive nature of the very people that they claim to loathe. This is why imitation (as you put it) doesn’t strike me as so much of a problem.
I make compromises every day of my life; it’s required in a nation of around 300 million people. Even closer to home, we make compromises in our communities in order to harmonize better. Perhaps a liberal church is simply another way of making a compromise. If we gain a strong sense of community and brotherhood as a result, it’d be a compromise worth making.
As always, it’s great sharing in your reflections, GG.
I verymuch appreciate your thoughts on this topic, especially since I still have a lot of thinking to do on it!
I’m in Seattle, which church accepts atheists? : )
I googled “seattle unitarian universalist” and came up with plenty.
I recommend All Pilgrims on Capitol Hill.
I’ve been an atheist all my life, but I only realized it when I was 16. Up to that point, I had been told I was a christian without fully comprehending what that meant. When I began to search for meaning within my so-called faith, I ended up completely rejecting it, and the god belief.
For a short time after becoming an atheist, during the time I kept it secret from my family, I often wondered if I could go back. It certainly would have made the time much easier. However, knowing what I know now about my personal beliefs, what I know about religion, there’s no way I could ever go back to that mentality. I think it would require lying to myself and I don’t believe in doing that.
It would take evidence of god-like proportions to convince me that my belief is wrong or inaccurate to convert me back to religion, and I have yet to see any evidence strong enough to do just that.
No. If I tried to go back, I seriously hope someone who gave a damn about me would put me in a mental hospital until I recovered.
I’d have trouble going back even if I were to become convinced it’s all true. God would have some serious ‘splainin’ to do first.
I’ve been thinking about this the last couple of days since I am staying with my religious parents. And I don’t think I will. There are aspects of religion that are appealing, but far many more that are appalling. I can see myself going back in one sense, but then if I really think about it, it’s also my worst nightmare to get caught up in it all again. It didn’t work for me the first time, I don’t know what would have to happen to make me even seriously WANT to go back at all. At least for longer than 5 seconds. I am much happier to be free.
In “The Misanthrope” by Moliere the main character (who is an Atheist) is asked if he will revert to religion when he gets old.
His response?
“I am not responsible at the point my mind goes soft.”
That’s the only time I see myself ever becoming religious – in the case of a stroke/head injury/dementia.
I’m sure my mother hopes that I will one day. After all, this whole atheism thing is “just a phase”.
I *was* hurt by religion, but that isn’t what made me realize that I was an atheist. It just clicked in my head one day, I suppose. It’s funny because it actually “clicked” during the point in my life where I was feeling a lot less pain.
So no, I wouldn’t go back to faith. For one thing, it’s simply ridiculous. For another, I feel so much more peace since I realized that I didn’t really believe in a god and that there is nothing wrong with that.
If God revealed his glory to you, you would believe. (You would also die, according to God. It’s like an eye being exposed to the sun directly and close up).
If God stopped punishing sin, you would call him just. (Until you got to heaven and the guy next to you was a serial killer who never admited he was even doing anything wrong)
If God only punished the big sins you would call him fair. ( Until you figured out in heaven that you hadn’t only lied to people 899 times in your life but you had been hoping in your heart that God wasn’t real and didn’t notice all 899 times as you really lied to his face not just the person’s.)
If people didn’t have to suffer, you would believe in God. (Okay, we’ll let God kill the guy in Somalia who steals the food that’s shipped in every day, and the italian guy who blew off your grandpa’s arm in WWII fighting for his ideals, and oh yeah, you for spending your time playing Halo and complaining about God instead of feeding the poor at the soup kitchen every day possible).
If Christians weren’t such hypocrites, I might believe God changed people. (I’ll let the local church know that people can only call themselves Christians if they pass a rigorous test and earn the right so that there are no half-hearted Christian fakes ever).
I know these maybe sound argumentative, but I’m just proposing a different perspective. I hear many arguments against God, but as a Christian missionary serving impoverished Asia, I can tell you God changes people(though there are a lot of fakes in the world), God love people and wants to end suffering(that’s why He send people to Asia, hospitals, and into communities), and that He does answer prayers(most people just can’t accept a “no” and are often asking questions that are not for them to know the answers to). P.S. God is not a magic genie who answers wishes. I’ve found the difference between a genuine Christian and a nametag “Christian”(those are the kind most of you know) is that the genuine ones are out serving God and are too busy to bomb abortion clinics or to wonder why God let them lose their job. The nametag Christians seem to be the ones who unfortunately who mistreat people, and who leave their “faith” because it was based on the false notion that God is supposed to worship them and give them everything he has always and not the other way around. Again, I mean this only to provoke thought, not to be arrogant. I apologise if I came off as…passionate. haha. I’ve had to learn all this over 25 years of life, hardship, and growing up. Writing from the poor areas in Asia, -Jake
How about an argument against god that you have not addressed: there is no evidence a deity exists. And, may I add, personal experience, conversion stories, and what the bible says about god don’t count as evidence.
Another thought… you assume the deity that exists deals with humans personally, has a set of standards and rules, and has a name, and is *just like humans* only much more powerful and impressive. But what if there are deities for each species of living thing on earth and in the universe? What if the deity doesn’t have a rule book, but instead just really likes the taste of nebulas for breakfast? What if the deity is a terrible, murderous, loathesome being who uses destruction and death as entertainment, and to be “good” and “loving” as we know it is actually “sin” according to this god? what if by loving another person, you’re damning yourself to an eternal punishment? What if there is no god?
I hope you give a higher wuality of life to those you commune with in Asia. Happy returns.
Jacob,
What are you as an Asian missionary trolling on an atheist web site?
Wouldn’t your time be better spent praying or converting the destitute Asians?
Hitler, gained political power offering the out of work Germans, by handing out free bread. There was a catch. 50 million dead.
I bet those Jews were praying in those camps.
Do you offer them food for free or do they have to come to your church to get it?
The Pope has a car with bullet proof glass, he and all his followers cannot even get god to protect god’s representative on earth.
Even the Pope believes in science more than prayer.
I know, I bet Catholics are not true Christians?
If you do a little research, you will find they are the ones that decided what most of the books in the Bible are, that you believe.
Then they did their best to destroy the others.
I never had “faith”… or at least I don’t think I did. I bought into the Jewish community for a long time, but in the circles in which I grew up (American Conservative and Reform Judaism) nobody really cares all that much what you believe as long as you call yourself a Jew and go through with the rituals and such (incidentally, I no longer do that either… causing many arguments with my family). Because I grew up surrounded by atheists who wouldn’t (and still won’t) admit it, I honestly can’t remember whether or not I ever actually believed.
My experience was more one of discovering “oh, there’s a word atheist that means what I am? Awesome” rather than “wow, everything I believe is wrong”… although sometimes I wish I’d had the latter experience because I think it’d have been good for me to go through. As such, I can’t really answer your question, because there’s really nothing to which I could go back. Would I go back to calling myself a Jew and attending synagogue regularly? Absolutely not… but it wouldn’t be a matter of changing my beliefs, but merely of changing my level of tolerance for others’ beliefs (although that might be more difficult).
I’ve said before, and I will say again, that given my understanding of ethics (derived largely from Kant) I could not have “faith” in a god such as the Judeo-Islamo-Christian-etc one, because even if there were evidence such a creature existed I would be bound by moral duty to oppose it in whatever way I could even if such opposition would cost me whatever it considers the ultimate price. Such a god would be immoral, and frankly evil, and if it DID exist it wouldn’t deserve any of the praise its followers heap upon it. That’s not quite what you asked, but it’s the only way I can think of to articulate my position.
That bears repeating. I absolutely agree.
That is exactly how I feel about gods. And because of that, I could never, ever go back to worshiping such a thing. Even if there were proof that such a thing as a deity existed, and I had to admit it was real, I wouldn’t be able to worship it.
The first athiest I met was in college. I did not understand how she could think this way. Her father was a prominent physicist at a world rebound university. Neither one of them ever tried to convince me that my beliefs were wrong.
However, after gaining my own education, I started to question my own faith. I married someone of a different faith, and began to question religion even more.
Today, my wife is still a believer, but there is no turning back for me. It just seems outright silly to believe in imaginary things. Most certainly the religous leaders of many different faiths do not practice or preach a loving philosophy.
No turning back.
I wonder how our statements of “no turning back” and the like vary, if at all, from the statements of conviction by believers. Thoughts, anyone?
I agree with you. If a person doesn’t *think through* all the reasons and evidence, how is their decision to be godless based on any more reliable weight than that of someone who converts to a religion for confort or out of peer pressure?
And I also became an atheist by watching videos and reading various materials. I could not be more grateful for the internet!
I might at some point experience severe brain injury. That would mean all manner of bad decisions.
I’m not being flippant, but outside of finding direct evidence that points to the existence of god, or some trauma that turns me into such an idiot that I don’t think to trust my former self, I don’t see it happening.
So, either I get kicked in the head, or I encounter magic. Only one of those might happen.
I’m in belief limbo, if you will. I was brought up quite Southern Baptist, but quickly rejected most teachings once I went to college and was free to think on my own. Recently, my intense love of science has come between myself and my old “faith.”
As I was explaining to my atheist boyfriend a few days ago, it would be nice if I could go back to a time where I was convinced that everything was for a good reason, but I can’t help it if every time I open the Bible my faith seeps out of me. It’s just too ridiculous to take seriously anymore.
People who left religion because they actually were “mad at god” might go back. But skeptical atheists won't go back because they left for a good reason.
What chance that I would go back? 0%
“…many who had a bad experience do end up going back because they never learned about atheism”
FFRF is helping. The Chicago Tribune ran this story on the front page.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/religion/ct-…
It’s been a long journey for me that has finally ended with me arriving at the conclusion that I question the identity of god — still haven’t been able to take the leap that god doesn’t exist, but I think it has more to do with my cultural upbringing than anything else. I’ve written about having a religion of humanity, if any at all, and just this afternoon penned the process of discovering my self; I shun organized religion, but it wasn’t that I was born agnostic. I had the freedom to choose that path. http://bit.ly/aYAq4m.
Also, I find it very interesting that we apply the term “less” to anything that defies the norm — godless and childless being the most common amongst them — somehow signifying that there is indeed a sense of being incomplete without those elements in our lives.
I love reading your story. You have a wonderful way of expressing yourself, and I envy your style. Thanks for sharing it!
“still haven’t been able to take the leap that god doesn’t exist”
So you agree, it takes just as much faith to be an atheist as it does to believe in God.
It takes faith in oneself to believe in the non-existence of God, Valdi.
Valdi, it does not take as much faith to be an atheist as a believer.
It takes no faith.
It takes evidence to be a non believer, and this takes lots of research, which takes time.
You also have to reject your parents beliefs.
You have to become one of the most disrespected minority members of our society. This is no small task.
Most Atheist’s know about religion than the average believer.
http://pewforum.org/Other-Beliefs-and-Practices/U-S-Religious-Knowledge-Survey.aspx
It does not take faith to be an atheist. Belief is a powerful, powerful thing–so powerful that it often outweighs what we feel is rational. Think of it not as someone taking a “leap of faith” not to believe in God; think of it more as someone who is recovering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. Yes, the door is going to stay locked even if you don’t check it five times to be sure–but convincing yourself of that, even though it’s perfectly reasonable that you should only have to do it once, can be the most difficult part. You will still want to check the door for a long time, even though you know intellectually that it is locked. And you will still feel for some time that you should believe in God, even if you have come to the decision that God does not exist, because belief can be just as strong as rationality.
I really dig how you expressed this point.
I don’t think it takes faith to be an atheist, because it is simply the default position one must take without sufficient evidence for the religious claims. Just like it doesn’t take faith to not believe in Santa Claus or Zeus.
I was baptised in the Church of England. This, a strictly a strategic move on the part of my agnostic mother; she didn’t feel it was fair to potentially damn me because of her choices. I never ever heard my father ever refer to religion, so far as I can recall, in his life. I attended Sunday school until the age of seven. I then asked, what I thought was a reasonable quest and receive an utterly asinine answer in return
Q. if we know other Gods are mythical how do we know ours is real…A. because God says so in the Bible
I’d never had strong feelings about God and “baby” Jesus to begin with and I’d say this was the moment I officially became an agnostic. As the absence of evidence, for the existence of God, grew and as intolerant religious fundamentalism spread, my agnosticism evolved (I’m surely damned for using that word) into atheism. I’d have been happy to remain agnostic and unconcerned about religion but these madmen scare me and make me fear for my children’s futures. So in answer to the original question I’ve no faith to return to…Thank God!
This sparked a memory of my own parents: Because of my mother’s strict Catholic beliefs about original sin and the like, my Presbyterian father decided to be better safe than sorry and let me be baptized as an infant in the Catholic church.
I somewhat envy those who were raised in a secular upbringing. I gained much from my own experiences, but I also would have appreciated having no religious assumptions, beliefs, or guilt to climb out of.
I think I was lucky in that respect–even though I was raised sort-of Southern Baptist (not when I was younger, but I joined the church when I was an older teen), it never really “took” with me. I would pray and I didn’t *feel* anything–no response, no sense of communication, just dead air. And it always just kind of seemed false in the back of my mind. I was never really able to give it my full belief.
I think it would’ve been much easier for me to analyze my faith and leave religion behind if I hadn’t had the deep-seated emotional connection and powerful experiences that I had. I took those feelings as proof that I was involved in something real.
I’ve been an atheist for a year and my story is long and complicated which is why Im doing a series on it on my youtube channel soon.
To give you the short jist, I am 17. I was a christian until I turned 16. So it’s been a year. I emotionally miss it. I miss the people, the “trying to fit in” , I miss the warm, belief in a god who watches over me. BUT I can not intellectually go back to it. My mind will not let me. No matter how badly my emotions want me to, my logic says “this is stupid”. I just can’t.
That’s about the age that I was when I started turning away from the idea of God. You may still miss it later from time to time–especially around the holidays, I miss the rituals of church and the feeling of sacredness, even though I recognize that it’s due to the warmth of people rather than a deity. But over time, you develop your own rituals and sacredness to replace that fuzzy, communal feeling.
I’ve actually been going back and forth for two years now. Two years ago, I really made the connection that there is no god. I never had a negative experience with religion and so leaving it was hard. I’ve gone back and forth and really struggled with depression over the whole thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that my best friends go to church…it’s who they are. My life is better because they are in it. I’m willing to go to church (which the church we go to isn’t like other churches) to have these people in my life. The religious part isn’t that important to me, but my relationships with these people are. I’ve actually just started a blog about the whole situation (though I haven’t posted yet, I just registered the name tonight).
I’m not sure that I would consider it going back to faith, though in the last two years, I have gone back to faith off and on. Now, I’m just the atheist who goes to church. It’s a weird situation, but it seems to work for me.
As I have never had a religion, I’m not the right person to ask, but I do find it hard to imagine how such a large and demanding meme can fit into a person’s life. I suppose this is the flip side of the perception of a very large hole people have when leaving demanding churches.
I can understand collecting barbie dolls into adulthood, or a fanatic devotion to fishing, or boating, or motorcycles. Some people love music. Soap operas are a bit harder to grasp, but I’ve encountered enough of them. Sports… I’ve never understood sports fanatics. I try not to hang out with them.
But religious fanatics? Not only don’t I understand, I’m not sure I could ever understand.
If I may ask, what evidence has so convinced you that there is no God?
That’s the great thing about the null hypothesis. It’s the correct default position in the absence of evidence.
What evidence has so convinced you that you are not married to Angelina Jolie?
She calls the cops when I follow her.
For a billion dollars! ;D
Interestingly enough I thought I was a Christian up until I was 17. I did all the things that most people say a Christian would do: pray, read periodically, and listen to the sermons. It wasn’t until I realized that I never knew who Jesus really was/is and I needed to find out what was true. I actual looked at all the religious and I gave my life to Christ. I have found more freedom and have learned more about science, history, astronomy, math, logic, and various other subjects and how Christianity corresponds to everything we see around us. I know we’re all different, but I wonder how many people really never did know Jesus and just thought they were a Christian like I did. Regardless, I think this is an interesting site and I would appreciate if you could forward me to a link that talks more about your journey to where you are now. Thanks. Hope you’re having a great week!
Ditto. Except, sometimes I painfully miss camp and have dreams where I have to fake being religious again to go back.
I’ve only been able to admit to myself my disbelief for just under a year now, but I doubt that I could ever go back to Christianity. I have seen enough proof that the Christian religion is false, and that the god of that religion does not exist, that I couldn’t go back there. Even were there to be something that proved that god’s existence, as impossible as that would be, I don’t think I could worship him.