Maybe you could touch on how an inability to let go or refusal to accept that it might be false may lead to some really nasty extremist behaviors? That's just my logic. Great video regardless.
My push was similar. I was playing piano to accompany the kids singing in church, and as I listened to the words, I heard Christopher Hitchens in my mind saying “It is wrong to lie to children.” Hit me like a Mack truck.
Right? When he says "I digress" or "I've been going on too long" it's very cute for its politeness and discipline, but I'm always surprised like; "really? I hadn't noticed coz I was very interested in the thoughts expressed!"
@@Muhlurito be honest, parasocial relationships with atheist content creators (Brandon, the ACA, GeneticallyModified/Cosmic Skeptic) does create a sense of community that we often lose when we leave the church
My deconstruction was like a whirlwind. All of the unanswered questions, contradictory doctrines, and hypocrisy finally clicked into place. I hadn’t really believed for a while I just needed to become self aware of it. Unfortunately I still have to go through the motions if I don’t wanna be homeless
@@MindShift-Brandon Lack of belief + extra. My entire family is Baptist and I don’t think I have to do any more implying to what they would absolutely blow a gasket about more than atheism
@@SiFireHasSpeedMy family is also baptist, and it's difficult. At least I don't rely on them financially, as Im old and don't live under their roof lol. I've told my wife (hardest thing I've ever done) and her family also now knows, and they have accepted it completely. I have not told my side of the family, though, and I don't know how to. I'm sorry you're in such a spot, and I hope you can get to a place you can be yourself, however that plays out.
@@andrewt3768 thank you I appreciate it. It sucks being a college kid in a time where unpaid internships are seen as “Normal” for a field as lucrative as Computer engineering. I’d even take half the pay of the people I work with and I’d be fine with some stretching 😂
Sorry this dark age logic is still chaining you down my friend. My parents are devout Christians and they still don't understand why I get upset when they're talking shit about natural disasters heralding the return of Jesus just to name one of the things that still deeply desturb me about the religion I have left for the final time. Do not let them fool you it does get easier. Trust me I know.
@@aheartonfire7191 Have you read the story of Job? Righteous man. Satan tells God "of course he's righteous. He's got the perfect life. Take that away and he'll curse you." Now IF God is actually omniscient, Satan would know that and God could just say, "no, he won't. He'll stay faithful." But NOOOO....God proceeds to UTTERLY DESTROY Job's life to win the bet. Now everyone points to how Job was "blessed" at the end of the story. But do you REALLY think that REMOTELY made up for the anguish of losing ALL his children, etc.? Seriously? I would bet Job was screwed up the rest of his life. PTSD...grief, etc. Utterly preventable IF god was actually omniscient. Which over and over the bible seems to show he isn't.
Losing my faith provided me the most amazing gift: the gift to be able to say, “I don’t know.“. It also provided me with the very serious discomfort and horror of saying, “I don’t know.“.
I hope you won't always find "I don't know" so awful. I've been saying it all my life and it doesn't both me, I'm ok not knowing. Some people answer it with, "I wonder why?" and that's how the human race has made progress.
@@katherineg9396 thank you. I hope so too. Fundamentalist Christianity trains you to pretend to have certainty. So having illusions shattered is good and also a bit uncomfortable. Recovering Calvinist here.
I completely agree with your analysis of “tipping point” vs “trigger”. It reminds me of hearing something clanking in the dryer. First you sort of ignore it (you rationalize “probably a loose buckle NBD), but as it goes on you reach the point where you have to yank the door open and see what’s in there.
What I’ve really gotten out of your videos is this concept. If every single issue in the bible could somehow be addressed 100% to my satisfaction that still wouldn’t answer the question, why is this necessary? This book is supposed to be the best effort of the supreme being at communicating with us. It shouldn’t require a hoard of apologists and theologians to write 1000 books trying to fix everything that seems wrong with it. It’s ridiculous. On a separate note, Brandon, I am really coming to appreciate that all of this is flowing out of your desire to be a moral person. You seem like a really kind and honest person. Thanks for putting yourself out there.
That last bit of intellectual humility is also known as: How much are you willing to overlook, to bargain, to accept against your own values and authenticity to hang onto your faith for unexamined emotional reasons?
I so appreciate how your own story places you in a position to understand how HARD leaving the faith is for those of us who were once UTTERLY convinced of the truth of it all, just as you were. It is NOT an enjoyable process, and you have referenced that yourself many times. Believers seem to think that coming to the realization that something that was core to who you are as a person is not true, not believable, not trustable, etc. is fun. It isn't. It is a GREAT loss in many areas. I believe that I went through a period of mourning for several years when I deconverted. Believers seem to think we just cavalierly tossed it all away. NO clue as to the immense struggles that make up the process.
Mourning is a great word as there is indeed so much loss. Loss of the familiar, the comfortable, friendships, relationship dynamics and on and on. Thank you!
I hope his comment makes it to the top. It hurts. You're not just losing your dad. You're losing someone who convinced you he created you out of pure love for the unique you, who will shelter and shepherd you forever.. be there for you when no one is. Except he isn't. The arguments to defend it are illegitimate and ignorant. From Aquinus to the common scrub.
@@daddyg9401 Here is a suggestion meant with good will...Fall on your face before The Lord Jesus Christ and weep before Him in repentance. No matter how long you are there, stay there until you know that the presence of The Lord is forgiving, cleansing, and lifting you into the throne room of God. I know, from personal experience. It happened to me.
I come across this ALL THE TIME! Tried explaining to certain family, and heres the response. "You should pray and really really try and believe" "Maybe you went to the wrong church" "You never really believed, did you?" "You need to read your bible" "What happened to you?" "You cant have morals or be a good person without god" "Did your cancer come back?" Ive been called miserable, had my father breakdown because he's scared I'll go to hell. I started losing my faith around 2002 or earlier, it was a slow process. I had been "convicted" or saved, "felt" the holy spirit and been baptized. Im no longer try and justify my decision, "you have a brain and are capable of critical thinking, you should use it" annnnd then its the devil that makes me angry. You cant reason with people that have this mindset, its just something they have to figure out on their own.
Yep. If you really really try to believe in ghosts, you'll see them. Does that mean ghosts are real? It's possible but unless you can prove it in some way, it could just as easily be your mind giving you what you want. Your brain can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. If it can't be shown by the scientific method then how do we know it's not just someone's schizophrenia or delusion? I'd also beg the question if your dad is so scared you'll go to hell for such a petty reason, would that god even be worth worshipping? Because it sounds like he wants you to worship out of fear - which would make Yahweh Darth Vader.
This is why I just ghosted. My family does not allow for nuance or non-conformity of any kind. I won’t tell them any of my genuine thoughts or ideas, because I’m not heard anyway. They’re going to slap their own narrative on it regardless, so they can just do it without my help while I live my best life over here. Going on 4 years no contact with no regrets (in fact, another family member is about to be added to the list). I hope you are thriving!
I didn't "lose it," per se. As I got older and more educated, I started to align my perception and thoughts with reality. I never thought the flood literally happened, but I did think the Exodus happened. Of course now, I know how silly it all is. If over a million Jewish people got up and left Egypt, there would be a signifigant record in Egyptian history, yet they have no mention of it. Reminds me of Mormons, claiming that Jesus came to the American Natives, yet no American natives have any knowledge or history of this.
Never having grown up reading the bible, I just assumed Exodus was plausible (esp. when I heard about the Hyksos dynasty). The first tip off was that, to my surprise, the book never names the Pharaoh involved...Which really would have helped confirm it. Then when you look at the archeology and the actual text, it becomes clear it is a legend. What is fascinating to me is that this legend was being written around the same time that Homer* was writing the Illiad and both stories are referring to events that 'happened' around the same time (5 centuries or so before, I think)
I grew up Mormon and whenever you have doubts, you're told to take that doubt, put it on a shelf, and ignore it. Most ex-Mormons will talk about their shelf breaking, that moment when there's just too much to keep believing. For me it was the weird instances in the scriptures that either didn't match up or didn't make sense. There's a story in the Book of Mormon where a man is commanded by God to murder an unconscious man so he can steal some records of his family from the guy. Stories like that just clashed with what I was being told I'm supposed to do. Since I left, I've learned more and more that has reaffirmed my decision to leave.
Hello @gamergirl24! I’m so glad that you shared. I was raised in Christian Science but converted to Mormonism in my early twenties, following my older sisters into the faith. One of my sisters has left Mormonism and my other sister and her family, kids and grandkids, are still heavily involved. My reasons for leaving the church have more to do with recognizing that Joseph Smith was a con artist, than anything having to do with LDS church doctrine. To this day, I reject all Christianity out of the recognition that con artists have been around for just about as long as conscious human humanity. Who exactly, was Jesus? And why would humble fishermen with seemingly successful fishing businesses, up and leave it to follow a self-proclaimed messiah around? Who was Paul? Here’s somebody who beat Joseph Smith to the art of running a scam, by two thousand years. I’m not only not a Christian, I’m an atheist. I proudly proclaim it. I don’t believe in ghosts, holy or otherwise. I have no reason to believe that there is a god and I have not been shown any actual evidence that would prove otherwise. I do not proclaim that there is no god. I reject being called “agnostic.” It’s incumbent on the believers to make their case. Again, thanks for sharing.
@gamergirl24 Exmo here, too. I had lots of shelf items: modern prophets contradicting each other and scriptures, the church hoarding wealth in complete opposition to what Jesus taught, the succession crisis and Brigham Young’s not-subtle-at-all seizure of power, etc. Eventually found myself attending as an atheist just for the community, but quit going completely after last conference and Mr. Nelson’s banger of a talk about ignoring everything nonbelievers say. What a joke the church is.
At least now days labeling you as an apostate is no longer a death sentence, in fact all of their death sentences have been reduced to, " you're gonna burn in hell" which is about the equivalent of telling a teenager that Santa is gonna leave them a lump of coal in their stocking.
That might change soon because the trump Christian’s are taking over the country within a year. Just saying, you might need to pretend to be a Christian here if you want to live. But at least when that will be the final proof that it’s all wrong
If you havent heard or read the Project 2025, you need to. Im adding to the comment about trump, it pretty much says in there that America will be a christian nation again with ALL its wonderful values.
@@Grayraven777 yeehaw!! Surprised you made it this far in the comments. Doesn't this kind of talk scare you? Lol go back to your echo chamber, intellectually challenged clown 🤣
I lost my faith after I became scams victim, got treated very badly by the police, and a few other bad events, including being harassed by a coworker, the company covered it up by firing me and paid me a few months additional salary after I brought the issue to the labour office. I maybe could get much more if I sued them at the industrial court, but at the point, it's too much and I just wanted to escape from the bad situation. The harasser and the protectors used religion quote in their status and pretended to be nice people. My ex-pastor kept saying that God had more beautiful plan for me, but after being bombarded by series of unfortunate events and no one helped me, I decided to throw away my faith, found some atheist videos and got a scholarship! All happened after I left my faith...this God feels like demon in hiding...just like the harasser, police, and all the 'good people' involved...it took me almost 4 years to throw away my faith after all my prayers did not get any positive response and the pastor kept saying some bullshit...I do not deserve any bad things that happened for me..healing now..without that invisible bystander in the sky
I'm certainly not saying God is real, but....., Based on what I've been studying for over a year now, the current Christian god is most likely a Satan creature. I see far more evil coming from the "nice" people than those who're more atheistic, agnostic, or secular people. If God and Satan are real, then the minds of the believers has been captured by the deceiver long ago. Or, most likely, a morally inferior creature created the idea of God and Satan and set up rules for people to follow that would "lift" them up out of the dirt and peacefully enslave them into becoming voluntary tax cattle.
I sensed that something was wrong even at an early age. I never really suffered like this but I was smart enough to leave for good when I reached a certain age.
I cannot say that I went through the same string of events that you did. I can say that I did go though workplace harassment at my first full-time job, and it was not just from one coworker, but several, including some of my bosses. It felt like even more of a betrayal because I first got the job through a connection my father had in the religious group he was a part of - and this same connection would be involved in the harassment. Sure, my faith was already shattered from the death of a high school classmate from stomach cancer (and this classmate was a real golden child: smart, athletic, sociable, friendly, and an all-around good person), but during my first two years at that job, me and the man who hired me (he was the company's president) got along - maybe not enough to be friends, but still at least cordial. By the fifth year, I hated his guts, and yes, he and the other harassers were quoting the Bible as justification for their behavior. Unlike you, though, I did not try to sue them for what they did. Part of it was because I was not good at social navigation at the time (lifelong nerd and loner by that point), but because legally, there was nothing I could realistically do. Judging from you stating "labour office," I am assuming that you are not in the US whereas I was (Texas specifically before I moved to New Zealand over 10 years later). Well, Texas is a part of the US that has this thing called "right-to-work laws," which should already be sounding alarms as to what they actually entail - i.e. stripping employees of pretty much any standard legal recourse. My final days at the place did not go well for me at all, and looking back, I would not be surprised if it ever turns out that they thought they could get me "dealt with permanently" by the police by pushing false allegations against me. Sure, the harassers would later be taken down in a pretty big lawsuit from another worker, but it was in one of the few matters in a right-to-work part of the US that an employee could pursue legal action over. Still, at least this other employee effectively sued the pants off of them, so I got to enjoy the outcome vicariously through him. Regardless, if you really wanted a setup for someone to deconvert, this probably would do it. Granted, it is just a part of my story (the move to New Zealand was for completely different reasons, though watching my parents go down the same path as those harassers has been strong motivation towards not going back to the US), but it is both amazing and mundane that so many deconversion stories are just so similar. Hang in there. Neither you nor I or many others will allow BS - especially religiously motivated BS - beat us.
Yeah that section from 37:18 - 38:40 was fascinating. He recognized that evaluating these beliefs by first assuming they must be true is a poor methodology...and then proceeded to do it anyway. He was so close! I literally cheered and then dropped into a sad "awwww" like Peter Griffin.
He cites a story about Jesus asking his disciples to leave after his bizarre blood magic ritual explanation like it was proof of something.All I was thinking was that is exactly what every cult leader does when the leader goes off the rails. That's a red flag, not an answer to honest doubt.
One or 2 more triggers will probably break his floodgate and complete the deconstruction. The dam that he’s built to hold back those doubts is so flimsy.
“Then he quoted the Bible.” Yes, because there is nothing else. That’s the problem with starting deconstruction with looking for reasons to keep believing. You may still get there, but it takes longer since we try to make things fit beliefs we are reluctant to let go of. It is very difficult for many people to objectively start with an empty table and say “what is true?” gather as much information as possible, look for unbiased sources, analyze objectively, and on and on. This was very intense, Brandon, so well done!
I majored in Biology in college. Some people think that the complexities of life point to the biblical god. I didn't come to that conclusion. I looked at the contents of the bible where it describes a god that commanded animal sacrifices and loved the smell of burning flesh and I thought "would this god have had the ability to create the DNA molecule?" How could this god create the intricacies of genetics if this god also thinks that putting rows of sticks in front of breeding goats will make the offspring striped?
@@MindShift-Brandon An undefinable god is no different, practically, than a non existent god. If it ever "exists" outside of space or time, it becomes by definition, outside of reality: aka "make-your-self-believe" fiction. The problem believers find with defining god is that if placed within reality, it becomes testable and therefore falsifiable. The dishonest just move goal posts, semantics, and bait and switch tactics.
I really appreciated your fairness in this one and recognizing how kind this individual is coming across while also showcasing the issues. The world needs a lot more kindness, love, and understanding. Not ingroup vs outgroup.
Hey, Nightwolf. I'm a struggling Christian who is finding precious little comfort in my faith right now. It's pushing my OCD, my inability it be perfect, and self-judgement. I'm feeling like a unworthy, weak failure, and there are so many troubling parts of the Bible I'm trying to accept that my skeptical, rational brain is rejecting. Can you share more about the ways Christianity (I assume) is negatively impacting your mental health? Thanks.
@@RichRocketManFor starters it makes you weak and passive. God isn’t going to protect your children, heal your friends cancer, or make you money. It’s up to us, as humanity.
@@RichRocketMan first it was really stressful at the time I was trans before I knew it. So when preachers about how sinful was to be that and that made ashamed about myself. Second depression from anxiety that I gave up hope to live thinking life in heaven would be better than living. The whole belief killed my inspiration for living so when I left I find it more comfortably to find reasons to live even with no afterlife
@@nightwolf9430 Thanks! Interesting. Living for the afterlife in heaven instead of trying to find joy/happiness on Earth was "bringing you down" or causing depression? If yes, I can understand that. It seems as though God would want us to find joy/happiness in BOTH places, but it is hard to view it that way. Did your trans condition/feelings make you feel like God won't accept you? Like God and Christians believe you are sinning all the time by being trans? I might be pring too much, but I'm trying to learn and help myself with my own struggles with Christianity. Only answer what you feel comfortable answering. Did being a Christian and trans make you feel guilty all the time? Shame? Self-loathing? Thanks so much.
My indoctrination literally began in the womb. (my mom quoted scripture to her stomach) I have decades of false information to combat. Please never apologize for 'going on' about this or that too long. I NEED TO HEAR THE ANTIDOTE. And it's gonna take a long time to sink in deep enough to get through all those years of programming. Your longer videos are my favorite for this reason. Thank you for your help.
My deconstruction came suddenly, like a fever breaking. It happened when i was a teenager. I told my religious studies teacher that I didn't believe in God, and realised that I meant it. She went nuts, but I stood my ground. I was almost expelled because the headmaster didn't believe me, and thought that I was trying to cause trouble, but I told him that I genuinley didn't believe anymore, and wasn't sure if I ever did. He was a good man and respected my honesty, but I was taken out of the R.E class for the rest of my time at school. I had plans to join the army, so I studied German instead.
I'm pretty sure I was more convinced in the existence of Santa Claus than I ever was of Yahweh. At least with Santa Claus as kids, we're given what we think is proof of his existence through receiving presents and leaving out milk and cookies. The milk and cookies OBVIOUSLY could have only been consumed by Santa and no one else. lol. But you get no such evidence with Yahweh and church is a boring AF obligation where you get talked at by a bunch of old people who don't want you to ask questions. I decided I wasn't going to identify as Christian in the 5th grade when I couldn't shake the feeling Christianity hates girls.
If there is just one channel on TH-cam,among the many other similar channels I would direct people seeking logical and critical thinking about their religion, to view your outstanding content. Keep up your outstanding work. Truth does not fear scrutiny.
I have an issue with the "trigger" step in my own deconstruction. I didn't have any big "trigger," all of my experiences at church were really positive. My trigger was simply thinking about and exploring me beliefs and I found them, literal or metaphorical, to not comport with reality. As I've begin to learn more about the beliefs, origins, etc... I've found more and more reasons they don't match reality.
Yeah, people can be "triggered" simply by realizing they might be wrong and they have an issue with being wrong. The only reason I can see for this idea of a big "trigger" being so popular (besides its utility in allowing believers to dismiss ex-believers)...is that it's true for many ex-believers simply because their religion had put so much work into suppressing smaller triggers...for example, simply realizing a contradiction in the Bible, or having a question that no one has a good answer for, or a total lack of evidence for their religion. A neutral seeking of the truth can technically be a trigger, in which case I'm triggered every day lol.
Same, I actually wanted to stay a believer, and did so for years. But I found out I couldn't keep lying to me and everyone else. I was a closet atheist for 3 years, still going to service and all. People often gave me visions and words from God where they praised my devotion and faith and I just chuckled because I did not believe at all. Leaving was one of the hardest decisions in my life, everything and everyone I knew was Christian, I felt so isolated. But at the same time, it was liberating. I had to build a life and find friends outside of the religion, and it was hard but worth it in the end. Not because I do not miss my friends or life, but because it is best to be honest.
The kids part hit home. I’m new to marriage and parenthood and I’ve been diving deep into the word to learn how to be a better husband and father and wanted to rightly teach my kids. I made up my mind to be as honest and objective as possible. I traded and shed so many doctrines. And it has finally led me to deconstructing. It’s scary. But I can’t ignore it anymore. Thank you for your work man.
Having raised 3 kids, this was my process: “people believe different things. Some this, some that. You are free to make up your own mind. You don’t have to decide now and can always change your mind. I myself do not believe their is a god”
I’m in the de-conversion process (raised in a non-denominational Christian household). I realized that “my” faith was actually my parents’ faith, not my own. I faced trauma around the time of my baptism and it wasn’t a genuine act of faith. I am re-discovering who I really am while in my 30s. I now see worship service and Bible passages very differently than I used to. I finally got tired of living a lie, and I’ve started to question everything I grew up learning. I constantly ask questions and try to search for answers which I never seem to find. I will say, your videos have helped me make sense of what I really want to say and what I really believe but couldn’t really express. Thank you!
You're exactly right. All their premises for remaining a convert come back to their conclusion; the Bible has to be true because it's true. I saw that moment at the end as it was happening, and was so glad you caught it too. How could he not have caught it?! They always fall victim to circular reasoning. They always include their conclusion in their premise. It does help to see things like this because when people I looked to all my life for spiritual guidance are suddenly calling me a fool, even though I know I'm not one, it still hurts.
@jmparker78 I'm so sorry to hear that you've been called a fool by people you love and perhaps once looked up to. Keep it moving friend. I know that you will as we have no choice. ❤
@@henriettegraham9230 I referred to Bart Ehrman and the scholarly consensus that no one really knows for sure when the books of the Bible were written, except that they definitely weren’t contemporary accounts, and that we don’t have the originals, and twas told that what I was saying was so foolish that if we continued the conversation I would just embarrass myself so let’s end it now. I know these are the words of a threatened person, but when they come from your father, who is also the one you spent your life thinking of as wise, it really cuts deep.
This is a great video Brandon. According to Rabbi M. Kaplan (1881-1983) all theists follow a religion based on 'the three B's'; Belief, Behavior, Belonging. If we map the 5 points of consideration for deconstruction mentioned in this video it would look like this: BELIEF: (4) Spiritualism BEHAVIOR: (1) Performance Control, (2) Textualism, (5) Compulsive Certainty BELONGING: (3) Isolationism I find it quite fascinating that behavior modifications are by far the number one issue related to deconstruction according to this map. This actually does make sense when we consider that positive and negative feedback is a primary factor in the relationship to our behavior. If something provides a positive feedback it reinforces that behavior and visa versa when something provides a negative feedback.
Well said when you're close minded enough to leave no room, for even the possibility of God existing in reality. That reaction is understandable because sadly a lot of Christians are close-minded about their faith. However, I think It's important that everyone deeply considers that they can be wrong. Which includes not making bold proclamations such as "some choose to embrace faith and live in denial while others choose to leave faith and live in reality." With that revelation I think that we would find plenty of Christians, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Muslims and more who honestly think that their beliefs and reasons are a true depiction of reality. I'd like to say that I am one of those Christians who has constructively criticized his Faith, and still has Faith and sound reasons to affirm that belief.
@@theintelligentmilkjug944 When I was a Christian I was very devout and sincere, and when I had doubts about my faith I decided to study the Bible in college hoping to strengthen it and get answers to my questions. The more I learned the more difficult it was to believe, and I spent many nights at my study desk in tears praying to God not to let me lose my faith. In my Comparative Religion class the professor asked: _What objective criteria can you apply equally and universally to all religions and their gods, past and present, that can conclusively prove that one religion is true and all others are false?_ That was the nail in the coffin of my faith because I had no answer to that question, and still don't. Belief or disbelief isn't a matter of choice or will, it's something that happens to you. We can only believe what makes sense to us. Belief makes no sense to me, but it does to others. Atheists and Christians both accuse each other of being unreasonable, but what bothers me most is that it is Christians who often accuse atheists of having "made the wrong choice", as if they know some objective truth that atheists don't. Yet Christians can't even answer the basic criteria for truth from the question above, and since all religious claim lack any factual evidence and all rely equally on hearsay and testimony, rationally there is no more justification for believing in one god than there is for not believing in any of the other. Maybe you have reasons why you believe in your god, but there is no logical reason for believing in any god at all.
Satan and I had dinner last evening. He said, "My, you look lovely tonight." I thanked him, and after we finished eating, he invited me to church... "Church?" I asked. "Why the hell do you want to go there?" (Pick your denomination) Satan chuckled mischievously, then simply said, "Dear lady, church is where I do my best work!" While the above story is fictional, from what I've seen in the various churches I had visited in my youth, my fiction could be a docucomedy, lol. Truth be told, the "loss" of my "church community" was the loss of a boulder on my shoulder.
You must have been looking and viewing all the wrong things. Did you not love The Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength? What happened to you?
@@blueStarKitt7924 Of course everyone has their own story as to why they left The Lord Jesus Christ. Yet in all my experiences on these channels show me that almost all left because DOUBT entered their thinking. This is exactly what happened with Eve in the Garden of Eden. What were the first words that the serpent (Satan) said to her? "HAS GOD REALLY SAID?" And he was able to place doubt into Eve's thinking, even though she already knew what The Lord God had said to her and Adam. She let herself be deceived.
@@christophergibson7155 In all seriousness, I will reply with this. I am an investigator. I work with evidence, and facts. I looked at the evidence of a fragmented, divided, and hateful religion filled with contradictions, and blind willingness to defend those contradictions, and almost government-like protections of a deity's darkest deeds, whether by direct action, or by agents robbed of free will. The evidence moreover shows that "believers" believe what conveniently suits them to believe. There is so much more, and my personal experiences with Christianity, and its adherents, were simply the *resting of my case in the court of real life.*
My journey out of religion was slow, taking over a decade. I was raised as a Christian, albeit a weak one. I never memorized the 10 Commandments, and I didn't even know God's supposed name until well after leaving the faith. My family emphasized the importance of deeds over faith, and from an early age I was taught and shown that good deeds are their own reward. Heaven was just a much appreciated bonus. So I never feared for my place in heaven. Why should I? I lived then and continue to live now by my family's selfless example. I never thought much about the stories in the Bible, except for the life of Jesus. I would work myself up thinking about Jesus to the point of being near tears while saying grace each evening at dinner. I guess I thought of the other Bible stories the same way I did the parables of any other culture or religion. Culturally significant, but it didn't really matter if they were true or not. If I'd realized those stories are the foundation of Christianity, then my faith probably would have died a lot sooner. The first thing that started to unravel for me were the moral depictions of the Sunday school stories, Adam and Eve, Jobe, Noah's flood, etc. I still saw them as fables, so the scientific issues didn't concern me yet, but the moral character they portrayed of God did. The hate and tribalism displayed by Yahweh were incompatible with the loving and just figure I'd been raised to believe in. If God loved all living things, as I had been told, then he could not sacrifice the well-being of one person/animal to act as a lesson for another. Yet this is exactly what happens in the Bible, over and over again. It's as if only the main characters of any particular story have any value or agency. A moral God CANNOT behave this way. At some point, I started to understand that these weren't just supposed to be fables, and from there the historic impossibilities started to creep into my thinking. Then, the scientific impossibilities. Miracles could explain the events described but not why they had stopped as soon as we could investigate them, why they were never corroborated by outside sources, or why even the biggest ones left no evidence. At this point, I had just entered college and was calling myself agnostic (still leaning in favor of faith). I couldn't trust the word of the church anymore, but I wasn't willing to give up on theism yet. I started taking psychology courses and became enraptured by the science of the human mind and by proper modes of research and bias control. I decided, on my own, to start living my life by these methods, and began the long and difficult task of analyzing all of my beliefs. To my horror, I found that none of my political (story for another time) or religious beliefs held up. Even my rationalizations for nebulous faith started to crumble as I learned the mechanics of how the mind tricks itself. I'm sure my professors didn't intend for me to use their lessons in this way, but I did nonetheless. It was like finding a magician's instruction book. Once you understand how the trick's done, the magic is gone and can't ever be reclaimed. It was disheartening, sobering, anger inducing, but also freeing. Not in the sense that I could "do whatever I want" or "am my own God." I'd never felt in danger of judgment in the first place, and I have always been happiest when I'm of use to others, so neither of those applied in the slightest. I was free of the cognitive dissonance. Things fell into place and all the pieces finally connected. Bare reality was a good deal uglier than I'd hoped, but still had its charms and was more than worth living. Eventually, I lost faith in the notion that any God has ever contacted humanity. The methods by which all religions have started and spread fall too far beneath what should be expected of such a being. In fact, they all seem to have started in the exact same way. Word of mouth and sometimes scripture spreading from a single location in a single language that is then translated and spread entirely by humans with no conclusive evidence of any external being (let alone a god) being involved at any point. Every part of the proliferation is done by humans, just like it would be if it was all false. Even hypothetical advanced aliens could have done a more convincing job than any of these proposed gods just by air dropping pretranslated copies of a book at different, unrelated locations across the globe. I expect better of any interventionist God that cares about its message, tri-omni or not. I know more about the Bible and history of Christianity now than I ever did as a Christian. And to this day, the more I learn, the worse my perception of it gets. In the beginning, I still thought that it was good for people even though I no longer believed. Now I know how much it's been influenced by secular ideas. Basically, everything healthy about religion has been appropriated from secularism. Community, compassion, the golden rule, all of it predates Christianity by millennia. All Christianity did was wrap it up with a whole lot of toxic baggage and mechanisms of control. I can't respect that anymore now that I see it for what it is. About the only good thing it does is inoculate people against the influence of other, sometimes more harmful, religions. Even then, it's useless unless the competing ideology includes a competing God belief. Christians fall for all kinds of harmful ideologies all the time. Bad as it is, though, some other religions are far worse, so I am glad Christianity acts as a buffer against those. But the last thing I'd ever want to do is give Christianity back its teeth. It's only somewhat acceptable now because it's been declawed by the return of secular ideals (for which it now tries to steal credit) and the separation of church and state (which it's constantly trying to undermine). When it had power, it committed some of the most heinous atrocities in human history. Many of the church's devices would put even the Bible's depictions of hell to shame, were it not for death delivering them from the church's hands. I did hold on to hope of an afterlife for a while, mostly out of longing to see my loved ones again, but that too eventually faded. Now I've resolved to spend as much time as possible with the people I still have, to talk to them about their pasts and help them with their futures, so that I have as few regrets as possible when we are inevitably separated. I know I will someday die, and eventually, I will be forgotten. The memory and even the effect of my deeds will fade to nothing. And that's ok. For now, in this place, my life has meaning for those around me. For a time, my memory will have meaning for those I'll leave behind. Eventually, that memory will be set aside, so that future generations can forge their own purpose, unburdend by the memory of someone they never knew. Hopefully, they will get to start their own journey on slightly firmer ground because of the work I did. My legacy will be a shining brick, then an unseen foundation, then a piece of the nameless soil upon which a new foundation rests. That is all I could ever ask for. That is enough.
Honestly, I like to break things down until they're simple. Till they're at the point that if I was asked something such as how people keep their faith after doubting. I honestly would just flat say "Lie to themselves. Keep lying until they believe it" which seems dismissive of people's feelings. Probably because it is? Dunno, but there's no part of any of that stuff that came across as real to me since I questioned it as a child. Now as an adult, I look at it all and I genuinely do not understand it. I hate being lied to the most for several personal reasons and lying to myself isn't in my nature it would disgust me. I couldn't keep holding onto a pretty lie to forsake an obvious truth. Painful or loving, the truth is all I could ever want.
If it seems dismissive of their feelings it's probably because the lies they tell themselves are playing on their emotions more than anything else. Intellectually, I think most of them can figure it our pretty easily, but it makes them feel yucky because they've built up their illusions into something they imagine would be devastating to lose.
You articulated so well my frustrations with the progressive “deconstructed but not deconverted” community. On my way out of Christianity, I just kept asking everyone’s they were giving me their version of the faith or how they look at Jesus, “How do you know that’s true?” And everyone just kept telling me, “Well, that’s what I believe.” And when I wanted answers and certainty on at least SOMETHING, I was told that I was expecting too much because “it’s supposed to be mysterious and require faith.” I’d just had enough. Ok, I went in a tangent maybe away from what you were mainly talking about, but I think it’s connected.
I distinctly remember having a lot of real questions about my faith and worldview in general, but telling myself, "one of these days, I'm gonna sit down and figure out all my questions and get things settled so I don't have to live with confusion". Well, I finally did that at age 22, and I became an atheist within a couple of weeks.
@@MindShift-Brandon ngl there's still a lot of confusion that I'm working through (i.e. do I have free will, how will my political views change, what do I do now that I don't have a God-ordained mission for my life?). But I can learn and wrestle with these ideas without the constant fear that I might take one step too far from the "official" opinion of my faith and lose who I am.
@@riskybiscuits688 for political views, I recommend using the same method of truth seeking but with a healthy dose of world history and economic analysis, along with a critical examination of the motivating factors behind advocating one historical narrative or economic system over another. For what to do, hopefully your journey through political theory will eventually lead you to the principal that material conditions are after all the primary driver of historical events & you'll act accordingly.
I haven't watched the video yet, but I think there are 3 things that need to happen before they deconvert: 1. They have to have gotten to a point where their rational brain has wrestled with enough things to such a degree that the dissonance between their primal brain and rational brain causes a break. 2. They have to be honest enough with themselves that they are willing to admit that that is what has happened and that they rationally understand that they were wrong. 3. They're willing to give up all of the benefits that arise from being in their religion. For many people this includes loss of income, loss of respect and reputation, loss of close friends, loss of connection with immediate family, and more.
I would love to ask the author of the paper "What is the difference between intellectual humility (see 26:00) and deciding that you just don't care if the religion doesn't make sense?"
I hate that guy. I've seen him know and feel his arguments' weakness before, and yet grind through it, for the audience and the camera. Painfully. To confused and unsure claps after.
@@thegametroll6264 The Bible is where one must "do their research" to find the truth. That is....if they really desire to find it. Making excuses will never fly on the Day of Judgment before The Lord Jesus Christ.
@@christophergibson7155 So, you deny the fact that people deconvert while and after studying the Bible? I was studying to be a minister. BA degree in Bible, minor in NT Greek, learned Hebrew. It was Bible study that turned me into an unbeliever. What it really comes down to is ones mindset or approach while studying the Bible. Are you studying to try to support or defend what you already believe ? or are you studying to learn the truth wherever it takes you by applying intellectual honesty and sound reasoning?
@@billguthrie2218 All that endeavour led you away from the cross of The Lord Jesus Christ. Did you know and love Jesus with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Were you born again by the Spirit of God? Were you baptized in the Holy Spirit? The downward spiral of the de-converted all begins with DOUBT. Just like Eve in the Garden of Eden? What were the first words that the serpent (Satan) said to Eve? "HAS GOD REALLY SAID?" And he has been whispering that into the minds of people since the dawn of mankind. Next in the downward descent is DISBELIEF....then DISOBEDIENCE....and finally DECEPTION. Have you hit bottom yet? If so, then it will be so difficult to repent and return to the Savior to find salvation. Deception is when a person believes something to be true, when indeed it is a lie.
I have... no idea how to describe the situation. All I can paint my deconversion is just falling from the cliff, but instead of an abrupt end, I just keep falling. The only time the falling stops is once I realize how everything going on is just a farce. Sometimes I'm numb, sometimes I vent, sometimes I shrug and laugh, sometimes I'm just... nothing. And the other part is just me going nihilistic, whether it's a response to what my indoctrination was like or not. Trauma response? Not physically, but emotionally. My only answer? "I don't know." 23:25 - I would personally called it the "build-up". It just keeps building up until the mask eventually breaks, until you lose it, until you have no choice but to just admit that you're not a believer anymore... Personally, it's because of familial pressure, even if when you're an adult, YOU have the right to believe what YOU want to believe. But there are a lot of reasons why people struggle to come to terms with their doubt, until the bottling process is... broken. Intellectual humility is hard to process. I just don't get it. Nothing adds up for me. Anyway, just another Atheism discussion makes me flex my critical thinking cells again, and learn new perspectives in another pair of lenses.
I’d been questioning my faith for a while but the trump era really blew the doors off and made me take a hard, critical, second look When I say the average Christians idolizing a guy like trump while the average atheist was concerned about the well being of others it exposed that there wasn’t something special within Christian’s on average. By that point, the Bible did the rest of the work. There were so many things it said that I’d never noticed before, but if I had, I probably would have rejected it a lot sooner. The biggest expose about Christianity is how devoid of love they are. Now, I’m not talking about the ones who are simply telling you about your “sin”, I’m talking about the ones who hate refugees and don’t see a problem with the genocide of Palestine If Jesus said love your enemies, and he’s real, but god isn’t outraged at the genocide in Palestine, then you should t follow that god even if he were real
Me too! Exactly! My deconstruction started in 2016 when I noticed more Christian friends, pastors, leaders and politicians absolutely devoid of the fruits of the spirit and loving your neighbor while calling themselves a faithful follower of Christ. I started questioning my evangelical denomination, then questioning the Christian faith and the Bible. Then finally why I would continue to prioritize my life around religion having just faith, without good reason, evidence or proof. 😕
Same for me. The Trump era was my tipping point. Kinda solidified my questioning. I was trying to be okay with living a “good moral” life. If it wasn’t real, at least I was “good.” Funny thing is, I feel as though I’m a better person on the other side of it.
Excellent post. Donald Trump exposed Christianity for what it is. Even now, his biggest supporters are Christians. Look at the Speaker. Trump drop the border bill, he drops it. It’s crazy. I noticed when I was a Christian there was a tension between the ethic of Jesus and the ethic of Paul. I noticed most Christians gravitated towards the hatred and exclusion of Paul.
Hey Brandon! Just wanted to say I also have a business degree from a Christian college, and I also am a deconvert, and I also love your channel. That's all!
I cannot express how meaningful your videos have been to me. Thank you for all the time,quality, and care you put into your content. This is definitely one of my favorite videos of yours.
My tipping point was seeing deprivation of others, while living a charmed life. Didn’t seem fair to me. If god was good to a wretch like me, why couldn’t he do that for everyone? You know? All powerful etc?
I'll put this simple. I left the faith a long time ago. I was borned into a christain family and I left the faith but I am grateful that God never gave up on me. Reconstruction of my Christian life was completed and I stay by what I believe about christainity. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
I didn’t even want to deconvert. I prayed so hard for god to show up. I was done hearing convoluted answers from people. I just wanted to hear answers from god, I believed he could show up. I self harmed and did as the Old Testament Israelites did, cry roll around and pray. When that didn’t work and my mental health was at its lowest, I was done.
The Bible also says don’t test God. Mathew 4:1-11 (satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness) Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written: “‘He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
I love the longer videos honestly we are here to heal together, healing takes time, and patience! These videos really show how much you care, your research is flawless, thank you for caring so much
My experience of going to Church, and I went to several different ones, bares almost no similarity to the issues listed at the start. I never felt a need to perform, and while we considered the Bible important it was rarely put forward as the be all and end all for everything. I had lots of non-Christian friends and we were encouraged to get out there and talk to non-believers. Though I knew some people I would consider "too spiritual" I generally stayed away from all the talking in tongues, slain in the spirit stuff. And as for compulsive certainty, we were encourage to discuss our doubts with others and never (at least until I started losing my faith) looked upon badly for having them. None of these things are why I stopped believing. For me it was pretty much all down to reading the Bible and realising just how awful much of it was, and how clearly it could not have come from the God I believed in. That, and also the eye opening realisation that when two people on different sides of an argument claimed to have prayed and heard from God about it, they both couldn't be right, but they could both be wrong. Those were the things that started me down the path to losing my faith completely, though it was a journey of many years to get that far.
Excellent breakdown. Another essential classic. Length is great. 38:40 Also, the “sleight of hand” used when using the Bible to justify continued belief for the Christian God is a sneaky one - I am glad you were aware of it. Much appreciated!
Very much appreciate the callout of the difference between a trigger and a tipping point. At some point one straw breaks the camel’s back, but it wasn’t just that one straw.
That right there, at 36:30 describes my path towards deconversion I started to really think about the fundamental truths of Christianity and I came away with very little eventuality realizing I didn’t believe it anymore. I had to be honest with myself and my family.
I asked, "What does it mean to live by Faith?" I was in Church Culture for over 40 years at the time. Something didn't seem right. What I was hearing/reading and what I was seeing in church life didn't match up. I went from Evangelical to Progressive, to Zen Christian. Religion failed me. I became spectacle. I started reasoning. The final Jenga block was seeing the Gennesis stories as myth. The Garden story, Jesus' death because "we are sinful" were foundational to my faith. The Belief Tower fell, turned to smoke blew away. My faith went with it.
Yep. That's what happens to all the professing atheists, the de-converted, and the false converts....DOUBT comes in- -to their thinking. It is too sad that so many don't take to heart the lesson that Eve went though in the Garden of Eden. She entertained the serpent (Satan) when he said to her...."HAS GOD REALLY SAID?"... She fell big time for his deception. And he has been whispering that into the minds of people since the dawn of mankind.
@@mender722It certainly wasn't for Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. A knowledge independent of the Spirit of God. A knowledge that is self centered and not God centered. As it has appeared to have happened with you also. Repent, turn around and have a change of mind and heart toward sin and self. Then TOTALLY TRUST JESUS to save and rescue you from all your sin. For S.I..N is that "selfish"--"independent"--"nature".
@@christophergibson7155 I was a born-again Christian for 35+ years. I do not believe Adam and Eve were real. This scenario violates the science of genetics, for one thing. Other sciences show that there were already established cultures around the world "6000 years" ago. Talking snakes, Magic trees. I don't think so. Church Culture has nothing for me. I have nothing to repent of. I cannot force myself to believe that which I no longer believe. I am an Apistevist.
I was like your mom. I am not a Christian anymore. Watching this has been painful for me, but has shown me what I did to my kids. I need to ask their forgiveness. Thank you for showing me what it was like for them.
As someone actively doing an empirical study on the deconstruction process in psychology, and having gone through it myself, deconstruction isn’t a universal experience. The only way to put forth a true model of deconstruction would be to make it incredibly abstract and broad to be truly generalizable. From the results of my study (hopefully publishing soon!), this model is consistent with the model I’ve developed as well. Great to see more work and research being conducted on this topic!
It’s important to realize why you left, otherwise you can fall into the trap of being manipulated and believing again. You have to ask yourself are you the easily appeasable vulnerable type.
37:54 Apparently it’s “mind-blowing” that Jesus went moping to his buddies after getting laughed out of the room. Great episode Brandon, keep them coming!
Great video. I feel like the exception that proves the rule in that my deconversion happened extremely quickly. I did go through about a 2-3 year period in which my faith was 'liberalized' (where I accepted annihilationism, evolution/big bang, errors in the Bible, etc). And the adoption of these ideas didn't bother me because I had catholic friends who were much more devout than I was (and I didn't set the standard low) who had problems with none of those things. But for me the period of anguish where I was faced with the idea that caused my faith to come crashing down lasted about 5 minutes. There are multiple factors that are unique to me that allowed for this to be easier for me than others though including not being scared if change in general and having an incredible secular community from a big hobby of mine where I feel validated and cared for in the same ways provided by my church community. Had either of those factors been missing the psychological and social consequences of deconverting would have made it much more difficult to go through with. Lastly, I spent a couple hours yesterday literally charting (by age) out the ideological journey of my faith to the point of deconversion. It just felt really cathardic to see how my ideologies developed over the years and what caused them to change (for instance a missions trip to Mexico resulted in me changing my stance on illegal immigration which triggered a reconsideration of all my political beliefs (which mostly formed in my early grade school years) in mid highschool. Some of my political beliefs (such as global warming) were tied to science. When I reconsidered the science for my political beliefs I reconsidered the science for creationism and accepted evolution amd the Big Bang. Yet despite all this I did (and still do) think that that trip largely strengthened my faith by showing me what I thought was evidence of Christlike love that transcended cultural and lingual barriers. But yeah, it was an immensely satisfying experience to chart the evolution of my ideologies and see exactly what experiences my current and past beliefs are linked to. (And its got me really excited about the project which I did it for)
As usual, a fantastic video. As you say and as I agree, everyone’s deconstructing story is different. People are complicated. Mine began with a real concern over what awaited me in heaven. I was 73 at the time and I know that death is real. The more I looked into the Bible the more I realized it is a man-made book written by ancient authors in a no-longer existing world spinning tales.
I am always so impressed when people are able to do this at later stages in life. I could see how easy it would be to ignore the issues and just ride it out. Thanks, Duane!
I love how Brandon always predicts the likely responses lol. Keep demanding consistency! I love how comprehensive, consistent and scripture-backed your arguments are, and there's no place for people to hide with shifting goalposts.
Vulnerable response incoming. Trigger Warning regarding abuse: I was groomed and then S* abused at the age of 19 by my pastor, who had watched me grow up. I was made to feel like the whole relationship was my fault. My mother still attends that church and yes, she knows that I was abused. I left that church and went to another where I joined the worship team, taught Bible study, was a leader and basically volunteered for anything that was needed. I was later told by THAT pastor that I wasn't correctly submitting to him (not to god, mind you, just to him) and had no choice but to leave that church too. I was devalued and degraded by these two men. It took me a while to realize that if two basic, barely educated, barely influential men could manipulate and "control" a couple hundred people, imagine what an entire council of highly educated, highly influential men could do! That's when I de-converted. I tried to keep my faith, but realized the Bible falls apart on its own and especially in the hands of men. It was never "god's."-- Which reminds me of the line in the book "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, where a blind man on the road says, "There is no god and we are his prophets." And that's how I feel now.
Thank you for sharing. I am so sorry to hear about the trauma you suffered from this religion. Many will say it was just two bad apples but at what point do we not see a pattern? How many who profess christ need to have no fruit before we say maybe the christian soil is no different than any other. I am so glad you made it out.
@@MindShift-Brandon It's definitely a pattern. It's kind of like those Magic Eye posters from the 90's though, sometimes people are just too close to see it. When you take a step back it's so obvious. It took years for me to even be able to talk about it, and the more I do the less shame that surrounds it. So, thank you for the work you're doing and for putting so much thought and care into this channel.
I think you hit the most important point in that the difference between deconstructing all the way or not is what one sets as it's end goal... Are they wanting the truth about all of it or just truth about some scriptures If they set their mind at the beginning of their deconstruction that God is real the Jesus rose from the dead and that heaven is real etc. then they're not really gonna analyze things that challenge those ideals.. They'll just challenge the less important parts of the Bible . so they are essentially just doing a half ass self reflection But I would say half or even most Christians were brought up more like I was .. (indoctrinated since birth) We didn't go to church very often at all smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol worked hard, told dirty jokes, many of them have cheated on their girlfriends or wives and did lots of stuff we knew we weren't supposed to (Think of all your blue-collar people from welders to construction workersetc, think of your country music songs think of your rock bands people out there stealing car stereos gangbangers etc.. they all believe in God or most all of them do.... but they don't live how Christians are supposed to live and that's what gave us or gives us or gave them great testimonies because they felt sorry for the bad they did after being in indoctrinated with how they were supposed to live. so they live in a perpetual state of doing bad and asking for forgiveness and they are willing to die for God even though, just like me , they didn't/don't know 90% of what's Actually in the Bible so I wish way more Christians would actually read their Bible starting in the Old Testament Number one way for people to deconvert is to actually read their Bible and think about what they're reading and what it would mean and the consequences of it
I agree with you, once again, even as a believer. I feel like you can't have faith, if you're not challenged on it/answering the tough questions. I see it even in today's progressive social belief system. In regards to "obeying God because you love Him", it makes sense, to me. How can you love someone (for example) if you continue to rebel against their wishes? It makes sense to me, that obeying His commands comes, naturally because you love Him. If you have to force it, then you don't truly love Him, I'm sorry to say. God bless you Mindshift!
Respectful, don't you think that threatening people who don't love you to go to Hell for an eternity, is kind of forcing love? Or do you think that people are doing it to themselves by rejecting God by following other beliefs that they have come to know as true, just like you have with God and Jesus? Or is it something else? not a rhetorical questions feel free to give any input.
@@James-dq6yp Hey! Thanks for reaching out! I actually do give my thoughts on what I believe Hell is, on another one of MindShift's videos: th-cam.com/video/OZ2FcbVlcEk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xBUVRw8JdYLaZT_u
@@James-dq6yp hell is separation from God. Why would God force himself on you, and why would someone want to be with God for eternity. If YOU don’t choose Him while on earth then it wouldn’t make sense for you to be united with Him after death..?
Read that paper so many years ago. For me I lost my wife and became depressed. I lost my house, vehicles etcs.. so all of my pillars crumbled to the ground. I’ve prob told over 100 people about your belief system to be like pillars holding up your reasoning, beliefs and sanity. It’s easier to rebuild one or two pillars and not be effected too much. So little change may occur. But when all of your pillars are under attack, your brain resorts to fight or fly. For me I entered into a critical thinking stage like no other. I read over 500 books on so many academics. It’s been 11 years since then and I’ve only strengthened my atheism since. I was a believer before that that was pretty active.
You apologized for making this about your deconversion, but having your story alongside Truth Snack’s reconstruction was really helpful. The key difference is that you wanted to know what is true, and he wanted to prove it was true. It’s following the data verses interpreting the data. It was so disappointing when I went to my pastor doubting the gospels when I learned how late they were and why they’re certainly anonymous. He pointed to the verse about all scripture being God breathed. Like, I’m doubting the book, and you use the book in doubting to justify the book. It was even better when I learned that the book that includes that verse is a likely forgery. I don’t really know where I’m at anymore, but thank you again for your videos. They help remind me to be intellectually honest.
I practically started my deconstruction journey the day i got saved. First thing i did was read the New Testament and when i read those four different crucifiction burial and ressurection accounts i knew they could not all be right. Cognitive dissonance took over and i did what my church family said "You just dont understand but God knows, you will find out in heaven, trust God, His ways are higher, blah blah...." so i continued on the path of brainwashing for the next 25 years before my critical thinking skills began to reawaken and i could no longer bear the mental anguish of acceping glaring contradictions as the infallible God breathed Word. Deconverting was the most painful, stressful thing ive done in my life and it cost me plenty. I cried for years after, and still do, because i SO WANTED it to be true. It was heartbreaking to go through that, it drained me mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Like so many orher truths about this place ive discovered, once you SEE you can never unsee. There's no going back even if i wanted to. I know too much now.
Do you still believe in spirituality ?you said it drained you spiritually. Genuine question, I’m going through a similar experience right now with deconverting
Thank you Brandon for actually getting me an atheist for more than 40 years to read the Bible I grew up in a Catholic home for a boys in Long Island, and lived in a dormitory with the priests coming in to select their flavor for the night. It was pretty horrifying that it might be my night again, but what was even more horrifying, that it was not my night, but my brothers or my best friend I knew at age 11, that what the priest was doing every Sunday was not holy. Thank you Brandon for the very first time in my life, you have me reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament but the new as well. I always felt in my heart that the biblical God is evil, I had no idea that he was as evil as the old testament describes him to be. I will continue to watch your videos and read more passages in the Bible to reinforce my belief that this God not only does not exist, but if he actually does exist, he is the most evil living thing that is ever existed in our universe.
Well, it all boils down to if it were true, there would be no doubt, and nor would there be any differing interpretations of the Bible....a perfect being would produce a perfect book that is clear, concise, unambiguous and timeless.
The Bible is God's perfect word and timeless: The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple (Psalm 19:7); But the word of the Lord endureth forever (1 Peter 1:25a). God's word gives knowledge and understanding: I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation (Psalm 119:99). Reading and study of the scriptures are necessary: Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). We are ALSO warned of unbelief and doubt (see Hebrews 11:6, James 1:5-8). Though scripture covers thousands of years of mankind's history, showing God's work to redeem mankind through his Son, Jesus Christ, God used an incredible economy of words sufficient to educate us and to save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15). Scripture also acknowledges a coming day when all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). Be careful about projecting your thoughts onto God's word; he anticipated everything!
The Bible is God's perfect word and timeless: The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple (Psalm 19:7); But the word of the Lord endureth forever (1 Peter 1:25a). God's word gives knowledge and understanding: I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation (Psalm 119:99). Reading and study of the scriptures are necessary: Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). We are ALSO warned of unbelief and doubt (see Hebrews 11:6, James 1:5-8). Though scripture covers thousands of years of mankind's history, showing God's work to redeem mankind through his Son, Jesus Christ, God used an incredible economy of words sufficient to educate us and to save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15). Scripture also acknowledges a coming day when all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). Be careful about your assumptions; God anticipated everything!
The Bible is God's timeless, perfect word (see Psalm 19:7, 1 Peter 1:25a). It gives knowledge and understanding of God and salvation in Christ (see Psalm 119:99). The Bible must be read, studied, and received with meekness (see 2 Timothy 2:15, James 1:21). We are ALSO warned of doubt and unbelief (see James 1:5-8, Hebrews 11:6). Though scripture covers thousands of years of history as it shows God's work to redeem mankind through the Lord Jesus Christ, his Son, God used an incredible economy of words, sufficient to teach us and save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15, Romans 1:16). Scripture teaches a coming day when all believers in Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). All people must receive the forgiveness of their sins through faith in Jesus Christ who bore their sins upon the tree, died, and rose again the third day that they might be forgiven (see 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Romans 6:23). Be careful about your assumptions; the Bible anticipates all!
@@sm8johnthreesixteenGod’s "perfect” word has a ton of contradictions, and shows us god is allowed to break his own rules and allow his chosen people to do so.
I definitely relate to what you described in the intro about having a Christian community that permitted questioning up to a certain point, but with the implicit expectation that it was only permissible insofar as you arrived back where you started.
I find it fascinating hearing stories about struggling with theological questions and undergoing deconstruction before arriving at deconversion. I came at it from the opposite end. I deconverted for entirely internal reasons that I won't get into here. Put simply, God broke all his promises. Once I realised this, I became numb to the Christian life and stopped living as one. I still believed in all the fundamentalist things (young earth creationism, Biblical accuracy on most subjects, etc), I just didn't believe God had any personal interest in me specifically. It was only a few years later that I stumbled across a Darkmatter2525 video (Worst Invasion in the Bible) which led me down the path of deconstruction. I didn't start dealing with all the theological and philosophical fluff until well after I had abandoned my faith. I also find it irritating when people say things like, "just tweak how you think about this particular theological issue and your faith with be saved!" No it won't. God had every opportunity to keep me in the faith. The ball is in his court now. If he wants me to come back, he's going to have to come to me.
A lot of it was internal reasons for me as well. There is no point in having a relationship with a being that can’t keep or even breaks his promises. I’m no longer interested because the trust is broken. So I’m at the point where if he exists, I don’t care to acknowledge him ever again. And then there is logic when it comes to the claims of the Bible.
This was such a great video Brandon! I can relate to so many of the pushbacks that you have gotten from Christians. The extreme either/or positions are the most familiar to me.
Pereption vs Reality. The Christian perception - those who deconvert had one bad thing happen to them and chose to abandon their faith. The Reality - a person deconverts after years of struggle and only after a molehill of problems turns into an insurmountable mountain of them. Eventually there comes the straw that breaks the camel's back, but that only happens after a mountain of straw was put there in the first place.
Every video of yours Brandon is well detailed and to me spot on. I enjoy every one of them so far. My wife is a Christian and I am the skeptic and when we got married we used the pastor from her church and before our big day the pastor did his interview with us and the big thing that bothered me is that he said "believers should only marry believers or Christians" he told me I need to pray and sort things out so I can be a believer and be part of the Christ or Christian family. I go to church to make my wife happy and I am ok with that and she is ok with my skepticism and we have been together many years. I feel there is a religious bigotry after hearing what the pastor had said and it seems to be in most, or if not, all religions where we marry our "kind" per say. I was raised as a Mormon and stopped going to church at 18 because I found it hard to believe everything that was taught to me, Adam and Eve, Noah's flood and the tower of Babel and even how Moses got the ten commandments besides christs resurrection. I just didn't feel the spirit or the truth in me even after my bishop at a young age to me to pray and pray often. Still nothing and of course you just give up. I read the Bible over a course of months in Sunday school and of course that book scared me to death! All the wrath and killing in the Old testament and it seemed God was around all these people and prophets.....where is he today? Why is he not going to war with any leaders or prophets today? Where is he wrath now since it seemed so abundant then. I know Christians will say the new covenant or New testament is more important but what does that really mean? Was hod wrong in the Old testament or old covenant and now he is trying to do right? Sure doesn't sound like a perfect God to me. I feel the Bible is book written solely by man and it is filled with "human" emotions and human love and human anger and human philosophy. God would never have all this since we glorify him as "perfect" and all knowing and his wisdom and knowledge would be much higher than what's in that book. Heck we see similarities of the biblical God in the Odyssey and the book of Gilgamesh and others and that was way before the Bible. Your videos confirm all that I am mentioning and I love watching them! Still not understanding how we have so many different religious denominations if God only has one book that we need to follow. Seems God does not want us to know the truth as it is so hard to understand the Bible yet alone the other religious books and why are there other books? So many different ways to worship? Why do some believe in Christ and others don't. Just a bunch of mass confusion and it looks like I will always be the skeptic till my last breath. No evidence has proven anything about the Biblical god and Christ to change my mind.
Awesome insights and commentary as always Brandon. I found your outro where you talked about being accused of being too fundamentalist/evangelical/literalist and therefore susceptible to deconstruction to be particularly amusing. I'm from a (relatively) liberal catholic background that taught evolution and big bang cosmology as well as that much of the Bible (especially OT) was allegorical. So I've had the same accusation leveled at me but in the opposite direction- getting told that I fell away because I wasnt fundamentalist/literalist enough....or even more often "catholics arent christians" (except when we need them to bolster our numbers and claim Christianity is the largest religion on Earth)
I deconstructed Abrahamic stuff and the more New Age/Occult stuff. Living without a map is so disorienting :P You don't get the smugness of make believe certainty, but you do get the rush of adventure! :)
Wow on the Setting Conditions. Not applicable to me: I was Methodist - you can't get any more moderate than that. And yet, I no longer believe in a god. Because I went on a search for Truth and concluded that there is no god(s). I don't think a sample size of 12 is even remotely enough.
That's kind of funny to me because I went to a Methodist church as part of my deconstruction process - I tried liberalizing my faith in order to save it. It didn't work, lol. All it did was to help make the cracks more visible in my previous fundamentalist indoctrination.
As a life-long atheist, i am very glad to have stumbled across your channel. I had often wondered if the reason i didn't believe in a god (especially the Christian one because i have a lot of very good friends who are Christian) is because i was too close minded and hyper-critical. However, hearing you articulate everything i had issues with (the paradox of free will, the narcissistic nature of the Christian god, how most people who have ever existed would be doomed to hell through no fault of their own) in a logical manner using examples from the bible itself has helped me reach the conclusion that if there is a creator, it sure as heck isn't one of the Abrahamic versions (or any other version that human kind has conjured up for that matter). Love the calm, logical manner in which you present as well. You're defo my favourite atheist TH-camr
1972 (14) to 2018 (60) for me. I do get ticked off about the lies, the money, my time, my effort, my compliance with church "authorities". It makes me forge on to open those windows for others to see out of the silo.
I didn’t “loose” my faith and religion. I gave up my faith and religion after study, in-depth research, and realizing the lack of evidence religion claims. After over 50 years of faithful adherence to my faith, I’m actually using my brain and I couldn’t be happier!
Brandon doesn't want to slam the "research" for being too short ... so I will. Joel's article is nothing like an actual PhD level "case study." There's no data about the case members, no review of prior research, no comparison of his model to other models of deconversion, no analysis of how well his model works and where it doesn't, no survey data to back up factual claims about groups, and no citations or references to anything at all. Hey, if all Joel wanted to do was write up an idea he had in the shower and put it in a blog post on the Internet, mission accomplished. But nobody should mistake this with research or scholarship.
I am a VERY analytical person. And the “you just need to have faith” has always felt like a copout, even when I was a kid. When you grow older, you want to have some legit reason for your belief so at some point, you go in honestly looking for those answers. In my case, at every turn, every claim the Bible made was demonstrably proven to be false. The Christian excuse patrol had to throw a PhD’s worth of apologetics at me to kinda sorta rationalize my issues with the Bible. I find it ironic how often this happens to atheist and agnostic people. Their deconstruction began by trying their hardest to be a better Christian. Ironic huh? But what do I know? I was never really a “true” Christian, right? lol lol lol
I lost my faith when I could not reconcile the commandment of "thou shalt not kill" when God himself does it at will and without remorse. He wiped out whole tribes of pregnant women and children without a second thought, so how can he tell his own creation that it is wrong? 😮
I absolutely did not want to deconstruct and deconvert. I was raised by two ministers. I became a minister myself and started a ministry that engaged with multiple churches and Christian organizations, 20+. Most of my social interactions was with other believers for ministerial purposes. I fought really hard to hold on, but the cognitive dissonance and my logical understanding couldn’t reconcile biblical teachings anymore. Deconstructing gave me massive anxiety and I hated it. I loved it because I want to be a person of integrity that follows truth wherever it lies, but it is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done… and I still am in the closet to most of my peers! I still honestly don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m convinced right now that it’s a problematic, outdated, and false belief system for lots of reasons, but its still very difficult socially. I certainly wasn't your typical churchgoer. I was a leader and I know the Bible fairly well. I just wanted to live a life pleasing to God and to rest in the finished work of Christ. I was also a freakin evangelist! This is so uncomfortable for me, but I'm certain I'm correct in my current views and that spiritual/religious systems are merely an echo chamber groupthink of superstitious people who make their god or higher powers the way they're taught to make them or how they choose to make them… and that's the honest truth
@@MindShift-Brandon Thank you for what you’re doing. It’s kinda funny. I was also in the free grace camp before I started deconstructing similar to you. Watching your deconstruction video was the catalyst to my deconstruction. When I heard that you ended in the free grace belief, I instantly knew that it was over for me tbh. I tried to fight it, but everything you were saying was right😭. And it led me down a rabbit hole of ex Christian content to where for the first time, I gave myself the freedom to challenge and criticize my beliefs in this way. I never would’ve done this a year ago or prior. It would’ve been too sacrilegious to even question God and the Bible this way lol. Interestingly, being free grace and believing that I couldn’t lose my salvation under any circumstance was a huge reason I felt “safe” enough to go down this path
Love getting into the topic of deconstruction more. Thanks for being here for it!
👍
I'm just excited to see all of the "you just want to sin" or "you were never a true Christian" comments.
Cristians are Dumb hypocrites
@@Brownjesus123you don't need to be here trolling. No thanks.
Maybe you could touch on how an inability to let go or refusal to accept that it might be false may lead to some really nasty extremist behaviors? That's just my logic. Great video regardless.
You losing your faith because you were wanting to be honest in what you taught you kids is a really sweet deconversion reason.
Thank you for that. That was the final push i needed to stop ignoring what i knew better than the whole time.
No no no, pretty sure he just wanted to SIN!
My push was similar. I was playing piano to accompany the kids singing in church, and as I listened to the words, I heard Christopher Hitchens in my mind saying “It is wrong to lie to children.” Hit me like a Mack truck.
@@acebailey2478sarcasm is dangerous
Hopefully if I ever have a wife neither of us will be religiously inclined and we won't force any of that shit on our children if we have any at all.
Please don't apologize for the lengthy content. We wait patiently for your videos and appreciate your thoughtful and sincere delivery.
My thoughts exactly.
Thank you so much!
Right? When he says "I digress" or "I've been going on too long" it's very cute for its politeness and discipline, but I'm always surprised like;
"really? I hadn't noticed coz I was very interested in the thoughts expressed!"
It's basically a replacement for church at this point 😂
@@Muhlurito be honest, parasocial relationships with atheist content creators (Brandon, the ACA, GeneticallyModified/Cosmic Skeptic) does create a sense of community that we often lose when we leave the church
My deconstruction was like a whirlwind. All of the unanswered questions, contradictory doctrines, and hypocrisy finally clicked into place. I hadn’t really believed for a while I just needed to become self aware of it. Unfortunately I still have to go through the motions if I don’t wanna be homeless
Sorry to hear that. Its terrible when we cannot be honest about our lack of belief without major consequences from those we might depend on.
@@MindShift-Brandon Lack of belief + extra. My entire family is Baptist and I don’t think I have to do any more implying to what they would absolutely blow a gasket about more than atheism
@@SiFireHasSpeedMy family is also baptist, and it's difficult. At least I don't rely on them financially, as Im old and don't live under their roof lol. I've told my wife (hardest thing I've ever done) and her family also now knows, and they have accepted it completely. I have not told my side of the family, though, and I don't know how to. I'm sorry you're in such a spot, and I hope you can get to a place you can be yourself, however that plays out.
@@andrewt3768 thank you I appreciate it. It sucks being a college kid in a time where unpaid internships are seen as “Normal” for a field as lucrative as Computer engineering. I’d even take half the pay of the people I work with and I’d be fine with some stretching 😂
Sorry this dark age logic is still chaining you down my friend. My parents are devout Christians and they still don't understand why I get upset when they're talking shit about natural disasters heralding the return of Jesus just to name one of the things that still deeply desturb me about the religion I have left for the final time. Do not let them fool you it does get easier. Trust me I know.
A god who isn't big enough to be questioned isn't big enough to be worshipped.
I’m going to have to use that one
That should be a bumper sticker. 😆
That doesn’t make any sense because Job did the same thing and look at how that turned out..
@@aheartonfire7191 Ah Job, God's boytoy. He had real fun messing with his life.
@@aheartonfire7191 Have you read the story of Job? Righteous man. Satan tells God "of course he's righteous. He's got the perfect life. Take that away and he'll curse you." Now IF God is actually omniscient, Satan would know that and God could just say, "no, he won't. He'll stay faithful." But NOOOO....God proceeds to UTTERLY DESTROY Job's life to win the bet. Now everyone points to how Job was "blessed" at the end of the story. But do you REALLY think that REMOTELY made up for the anguish of losing ALL his children, etc.? Seriously? I would bet Job was screwed up the rest of his life. PTSD...grief, etc. Utterly preventable IF god was actually omniscient. Which over and over the bible seems to show he isn't.
Losing my faith provided me the most amazing gift: the gift to be able to say, “I don’t know.“. It also provided me with the very serious discomfort and horror of saying, “I don’t know.“.
I hope you won't always find "I don't know" so awful. I've been saying it all my life and it doesn't both me, I'm ok not knowing. Some people answer it with, "I wonder why?" and that's how the human race has made progress.
@@katherineg9396 thank you. I hope so too. Fundamentalist Christianity trains you to pretend to have certainty. So having illusions shattered is good and also a bit uncomfortable. Recovering Calvinist here.
@@JohnOrbit My best wishes to you. I hope you find peace of mind.
@@katherineg9396 thank you sweetheart! ❤️
This is an honest, self aware comment I can certainly relate to.
I completely agree with your analysis of “tipping point” vs “trigger”. It reminds me of hearing something clanking in the dryer. First you sort of ignore it (you rationalize “probably a loose buckle NBD), but as it goes on you reach the point where you have to yank the door open and see what’s in there.
Lol love that example!
What I’ve really gotten out of your videos is this concept. If every single issue in the bible could somehow be addressed 100% to my satisfaction that still wouldn’t answer the question, why is this necessary? This book is supposed to be the best effort of the supreme being at communicating with us. It shouldn’t require a hoard of apologists and theologians to write 1000 books trying to fix everything that seems wrong with it. It’s ridiculous.
On a separate note, Brandon, I am really coming to appreciate that all of this is flowing out of your desire to be a moral person. You seem like a really kind and honest person. Thanks for putting yourself out there.
Man, thanks for the love. Really appreciate your thoughtful comment here.
100% agree!
That last bit of intellectual humility is also known as: How much are you willing to overlook, to bargain, to accept against your own values and authenticity to hang onto your faith for unexamined emotional reasons?
Yes exactly
Very well said. I'm writing this down in my journal. Thank you.
"your own values and authenticity" That really exposes the truth. The values of the self centered life verses the God centered life in Jesus Christ.
@@christophergibson7155 what exactly are you trying to say here christobal
@@novi_keyA life without God is a life of self centered values. Sin has made you the god of your own life.
I so appreciate how your own story places you in a position to understand how HARD leaving the faith is for those of us who were once UTTERLY convinced of the truth of it all, just as you were. It is NOT an enjoyable process, and you have referenced that yourself many times. Believers seem to think that coming to the realization that something that was core to who you are as a person is not true, not believable, not trustable, etc. is fun. It isn't. It is a GREAT loss in many areas. I believe that I went through a period of mourning for several years when I deconverted. Believers seem to think we just cavalierly tossed it all away. NO clue as to the immense struggles that make up the process.
Mourning is a great word as there is indeed so much loss. Loss of the familiar, the comfortable, friendships, relationship dynamics and on and on. Thank you!
Exactly. I'm processing it all and deconstructing right now, and it's no fun. It is actually excruciatingly unpleasant and lonely. 😕
I hope his comment makes it to the top.
It hurts. You're not just losing your dad. You're losing someone who convinced you he created you out of pure love for the unique you, who will shelter and shepherd you forever.. be there for you when no one is.
Except he isn't. The arguments to defend it are illegitimate and ignorant. From Aquinus to the common scrub.
Yet, what happened to your love for Jesus?
@@daddyg9401 Here is a suggestion meant with good will...Fall on your face before The Lord Jesus Christ and weep before Him in repentance. No matter how long you are there, stay there until you know that the presence of The Lord is forgiving, cleansing, and lifting you into the throne room of God. I know, from personal experience. It happened to me.
I come across this ALL THE TIME! Tried explaining to certain family, and heres the response.
"You should pray and really really try and believe"
"Maybe you went to the wrong church"
"You never really believed, did you?"
"You need to read your bible"
"What happened to you?"
"You cant have morals or be a good person without god"
"Did your cancer come back?"
Ive been called miserable, had my father breakdown because he's scared I'll go to hell. I started losing my faith around 2002 or earlier, it was a slow process. I had been "convicted" or saved, "felt" the holy spirit and been baptized. Im no longer try and justify my decision, "you have a brain and are capable of critical thinking, you should use it" annnnd then its the devil that makes me angry.
You cant reason with people that have this mindset, its just something they have to figure out on their own.
Yep. If you really really try to believe in ghosts, you'll see them. Does that mean ghosts are real? It's possible but unless you can prove it in some way, it could just as easily be your mind giving you what you want. Your brain can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality. If it can't be shown by the scientific method then how do we know it's not just someone's schizophrenia or delusion?
I'd also beg the question if your dad is so scared you'll go to hell for such a petty reason, would that god even be worth worshipping? Because it sounds like he wants you to worship out of fear - which would make Yahweh Darth Vader.
This is why I just ghosted. My family does not allow for nuance or non-conformity of any kind. I won’t tell them any of my genuine thoughts or ideas, because I’m not heard anyway. They’re going to slap their own narrative on it regardless, so they can just do it without my help while I live my best life over here. Going on 4 years no contact with no regrets (in fact, another family member is about to be added to the list). I hope you are thriving!
I didn't "lose it," per se. As I got older and more educated, I started to align my perception and thoughts with reality. I never thought the flood literally happened, but I did think the Exodus happened. Of course now, I know how silly it all is. If over a million Jewish people got up and left Egypt, there would be a signifigant record in Egyptian history, yet they have no mention of it. Reminds me of Mormons, claiming that Jesus came to the American Natives, yet no American natives have any knowledge or history of this.
The actual exodus only involved two people the rest is compound interest.
@@timfallon8226 LOL!
Never having grown up reading the bible, I just assumed Exodus was plausible (esp. when I heard about the Hyksos dynasty). The first tip off was that, to my surprise, the book never names the Pharaoh involved...Which really would have helped confirm it. Then when you look at the archeology and the actual text, it becomes clear it is a legend. What is fascinating to me is that this legend was being written around the same time that Homer* was writing the Illiad and both stories are referring to events that 'happened' around the same time (5 centuries or so before, I think)
I grew up Mormon and whenever you have doubts, you're told to take that doubt, put it on a shelf, and ignore it. Most ex-Mormons will talk about their shelf breaking, that moment when there's just too much to keep believing. For me it was the weird instances in the scriptures that either didn't match up or didn't make sense. There's a story in the Book of Mormon where a man is commanded by God to murder an unconscious man so he can steal some records of his family from the guy. Stories like that just clashed with what I was being told I'm supposed to do. Since I left, I've learned more and more that has reaffirmed my decision to leave.
Hello @gamergirl24! I’m so glad that you shared. I was raised in Christian Science but converted to Mormonism in my early twenties, following my older sisters into the faith. One of my sisters has left Mormonism and my other sister and her family, kids and grandkids, are still heavily involved. My reasons for leaving the church have more to do with recognizing that Joseph Smith was a con artist, than anything having to do with LDS church doctrine.
To this day, I reject all Christianity out of the recognition that con artists have been around for just about as long as conscious human humanity. Who exactly, was Jesus? And why would humble fishermen with seemingly successful fishing businesses, up and leave it to follow a self-proclaimed messiah around? Who was Paul? Here’s somebody who beat Joseph Smith to the art of running a scam, by two thousand years.
I’m not only not a Christian, I’m an atheist. I proudly proclaim it. I don’t believe in ghosts, holy or otherwise. I have no reason to believe that there is a god and I have not been shown any actual evidence that would prove otherwise. I do not proclaim that there is no god. I reject being called “agnostic.” It’s incumbent on the believers to make their case.
Again, thanks for sharing.
@gamergirl24 Exmo here, too. I had lots of shelf items: modern prophets contradicting each other and scriptures, the church hoarding wealth in complete opposition to what Jesus taught, the succession crisis and Brigham Young’s not-subtle-at-all seizure of power, etc. Eventually found myself attending as an atheist just for the community, but quit going completely after last conference and Mr. Nelson’s banger of a talk about ignoring everything nonbelievers say. What a joke the church is.
At least now days labeling you as an apostate is no longer a death sentence, in fact all of their death sentences have been reduced to, " you're gonna burn in hell" which is about the equivalent of telling a teenager that Santa is gonna leave them a lump of coal in their stocking.
That might change soon because the trump Christian’s are taking over the country within a year.
Just saying, you might need to pretend to be a Christian here if you want to live.
But at least when that will be the final proof that it’s all wrong
If you havent heard or read the Project 2025, you need to. Im adding to the comment about trump, it pretty much says in there that America will be a christian nation again with ALL its wonderful values.
@@Grayraven777 yeehaw!! Surprised you made it this far in the comments. Doesn't this kind of talk scare you? Lol go back to your echo chamber, intellectually challenged clown 🤣
@@thatone2586ummm....no. Trump is a Holy Innoculate cultist.
Indeed. I wonder how many would have deconverted over the centuries had there not been a threat of literal, physical torture and death?
I lost my faith after I became scams victim, got treated very badly by the police, and a few other bad events, including being harassed by a coworker, the company covered it up by firing me and paid me a few months additional salary after I brought the issue to the labour office. I maybe could get much more if I sued them at the industrial court, but at the point, it's too much and I just wanted to escape from the bad situation. The harasser and the protectors used religion quote in their status and pretended to be nice people. My ex-pastor kept saying that God had more beautiful plan for me, but after being bombarded by series of unfortunate events and no one helped me, I decided to throw away my faith, found some atheist videos and got a scholarship! All happened after I left my faith...this God feels like demon in hiding...just like the harasser, police, and all the 'good people' involved...it took me almost 4 years to throw away my faith after all my prayers did not get any positive response and the pastor kept saying some bullshit...I do not deserve any bad things that happened for me..healing now..without that invisible bystander in the sky
You have much courage. It's not right what happened to you and you are showing incredible strength in holding on to your sanity.
I'm certainly not saying God is real, but....., Based on what I've been studying for over a year now, the current Christian god is most likely a Satan creature.
I see far more evil coming from the "nice" people than those who're more atheistic, agnostic, or secular people.
If God and Satan are real, then the minds of the believers has been captured by the deceiver long ago.
Or, most likely, a morally inferior creature created the idea of God and Satan and set up rules for people to follow that would "lift" them up out of the dirt and peacefully enslave them into becoming voluntary tax cattle.
I sensed that something was wrong even at an early age. I never really suffered like this but I was smart enough to leave for good when I reached a certain age.
I cannot say that I went through the same string of events that you did. I can say that I did go though workplace harassment at my first full-time job, and it was not just from one coworker, but several, including some of my bosses. It felt like even more of a betrayal because I first got the job through a connection my father had in the religious group he was a part of - and this same connection would be involved in the harassment.
Sure, my faith was already shattered from the death of a high school classmate from stomach cancer (and this classmate was a real golden child: smart, athletic, sociable, friendly, and an all-around good person), but during my first two years at that job, me and the man who hired me (he was the company's president) got along - maybe not enough to be friends, but still at least cordial. By the fifth year, I hated his guts, and yes, he and the other harassers were quoting the Bible as justification for their behavior.
Unlike you, though, I did not try to sue them for what they did. Part of it was because I was not good at social navigation at the time (lifelong nerd and loner by that point), but because legally, there was nothing I could realistically do. Judging from you stating "labour office," I am assuming that you are not in the US whereas I was (Texas specifically before I moved to New Zealand over 10 years later). Well, Texas is a part of the US that has this thing called "right-to-work laws," which should already be sounding alarms as to what they actually entail - i.e. stripping employees of pretty much any standard legal recourse. My final days at the place did not go well for me at all, and looking back, I would not be surprised if it ever turns out that they thought they could get me "dealt with permanently" by the police by pushing false allegations against me.
Sure, the harassers would later be taken down in a pretty big lawsuit from another worker, but it was in one of the few matters in a right-to-work part of the US that an employee could pursue legal action over. Still, at least this other employee effectively sued the pants off of them, so I got to enjoy the outcome vicariously through him.
Regardless, if you really wanted a setup for someone to deconvert, this probably would do it. Granted, it is just a part of my story (the move to New Zealand was for completely different reasons, though watching my parents go down the same path as those harassers has been strong motivation towards not going back to the US), but it is both amazing and mundane that so many deconversion stories are just so similar.
Hang in there. Neither you nor I or many others will allow BS - especially religiously motivated BS - beat us.
Good for you.
Yeah that section from 37:18 - 38:40 was fascinating. He recognized that evaluating these beliefs by first assuming they must be true is a poor methodology...and then proceeded to do it anyway.
He was so close! I literally cheered and then dropped into a sad "awwww" like Peter Griffin.
Lol yes exactly!!
He cites a story about Jesus asking his disciples to leave after his bizarre blood magic ritual explanation like it was proof of something.All I was thinking was that is exactly what every cult leader does when the leader goes off the rails. That's a red flag, not an answer to honest doubt.
One or 2 more triggers will probably break his floodgate and complete the deconstruction. The dam that he’s built to hold back those doubts is so flimsy.
“Then he quoted the Bible.” Yes, because there is nothing else. That’s the problem with starting deconstruction with looking for reasons to keep believing. You may still get there, but it takes longer since we try to make things fit beliefs we are reluctant to let go of. It is very difficult for many people to objectively start with an empty table and say “what is true?” gather as much information as possible, look for unbiased sources, analyze objectively, and on and on. This was very intense, Brandon, so well done!
Thanks, Maggie!
I majored in Biology in college. Some people think that the complexities of life point to the biblical god. I didn't come to that conclusion. I looked at the contents of the bible where it describes a god that commanded animal sacrifices and loved the smell of burning flesh and I thought "would this god have had the ability to create the DNA molecule?" How could this god create the intricacies of genetics if this god also thinks that putting rows of sticks in front of breeding goats will make the offspring striped?
Maybe sticks worked different in the past 😅
1000%! This god looks utterly ignorant in light if what we know now
@@MindShift-Brandon An undefinable god is no different, practically, than a non existent god. If it ever "exists" outside of space or time, it becomes by definition, outside of reality: aka "make-your-self-believe" fiction.
The problem believers find with defining god is that if placed within reality, it becomes testable and therefore falsifiable. The dishonest just move goal posts, semantics, and bait and switch tactics.
I really appreciated your fairness in this one and recognizing how kind this individual is coming across while also showcasing the issues.
The world needs a lot more kindness, love, and understanding. Not ingroup vs outgroup.
Thanks for that encouragement!
I’m glad I deconstructed my faith because I’m better off in terms of mental health than when I was a believer
Hey, Nightwolf. I'm a struggling Christian who is finding precious little comfort in my faith right now. It's pushing my OCD, my inability it be perfect, and self-judgement. I'm feeling like a unworthy, weak failure, and there are so many troubling parts of the Bible I'm trying to accept that my skeptical, rational brain is rejecting. Can you share more about the ways Christianity (I assume) is negatively impacting your mental health? Thanks.
Same here. The brainwashing was horrible. It was so disempowering.
@@RichRocketManFor starters it makes you weak and passive.
God isn’t going to protect your children, heal your friends cancer, or make you money.
It’s up to us, as humanity.
@@RichRocketMan first it was really stressful at the time I was trans before I knew it. So when preachers about how sinful was to be that and that made ashamed about myself. Second depression from anxiety that I gave up hope to live thinking life in heaven would be better than living. The whole belief killed my inspiration for living so when I left I find it more comfortably to find reasons to live even with no afterlife
@@nightwolf9430 Thanks! Interesting. Living for the afterlife in heaven instead of trying to find joy/happiness on Earth was "bringing you down" or causing depression? If yes, I can understand that. It seems as though God would want us to find joy/happiness in BOTH places, but it is hard to view it that way. Did your trans condition/feelings make you feel like God won't accept you? Like God and Christians believe you are sinning all the time by being trans? I might be pring too much, but I'm trying to learn and help myself with my own struggles with Christianity. Only answer what you feel comfortable answering. Did being a Christian and trans make you feel guilty all the time? Shame? Self-loathing? Thanks so much.
My indoctrination literally began in the womb. (my mom quoted scripture to her stomach) I have decades of false information to combat. Please never apologize for 'going on' about this or that too long. I NEED TO HEAR THE ANTIDOTE. And it's gonna take a long time to sink in deep enough to get through all those years of programming. Your longer videos are my favorite for this reason. Thank you for your help.
My deconstruction came suddenly, like a fever breaking. It happened when i was a teenager. I told my religious studies teacher that I didn't believe in God, and realised that I meant it. She went nuts, but I stood my ground. I was almost expelled because the headmaster didn't believe me, and thought that I was trying to cause trouble, but I told him that I genuinley didn't believe anymore, and wasn't sure if I ever did. He was a good man and respected my honesty, but I was taken out of the R.E class for the rest of my time at school. I had plans to join the army, so I studied German instead.
I'm pretty sure I was more convinced in the existence of Santa Claus than I ever was of Yahweh. At least with Santa Claus as kids, we're given what we think is proof of his existence through receiving presents and leaving out milk and cookies. The milk and cookies OBVIOUSLY could have only been consumed by Santa and no one else. lol. But you get no such evidence with Yahweh and church is a boring AF obligation where you get talked at by a bunch of old people who don't want you to ask questions.
I decided I wasn't going to identify as Christian in the 5th grade when I couldn't shake the feeling Christianity hates girls.
If there is just one channel on TH-cam,among the many other similar channels I would direct people seeking logical and critical thinking about their religion, to view your outstanding content. Keep up your outstanding work. Truth does not fear scrutiny.
Thank you so much for that!
I have an issue with the "trigger" step in my own deconstruction. I didn't have any big "trigger," all of my experiences at church were really positive. My trigger was simply thinking about and exploring me beliefs and I found them, literal or metaphorical, to not comport with reality.
As I've begin to learn more about the beliefs, origins, etc... I've found more and more reasons they don't match reality.
This is the same as my current journey
Yeah, people can be "triggered" simply by realizing they might be wrong and they have an issue with being wrong.
The only reason I can see for this idea of a big "trigger" being so popular (besides its utility in allowing believers to dismiss ex-believers)...is that it's true for many ex-believers simply because their religion had put so much work into suppressing smaller triggers...for example, simply realizing a contradiction in the Bible, or having a question that no one has a good answer for, or a total lack of evidence for their religion.
A neutral seeking of the truth can technically be a trigger, in which case I'm triggered every day lol.
Same, I actually wanted to stay a believer, and did so for years. But I found out I couldn't keep lying to me and everyone else. I was a closet atheist for 3 years, still going to service and all. People often gave me visions and words from God where they praised my devotion and faith and I just chuckled because I did not believe at all.
Leaving was one of the hardest decisions in my life, everything and everyone I knew was Christian, I felt so isolated. But at the same time, it was liberating. I had to build a life and find friends outside of the religion, and it was hard but worth it in the end. Not because I do not miss my friends or life, but because it is best to be honest.
The kids part hit home. I’m new to marriage and parenthood and I’ve been diving deep into the word to learn how to be a better husband and father and wanted to rightly teach my kids. I made up my mind to be as honest and objective as possible. I traded and shed so many doctrines. And it has finally led me to deconstructing. It’s scary. But I can’t ignore it anymore. Thank you for your work man.
Good on you man! What more could we do as parent than just be honest and open and objective. I know its scary, but it really does get easier.
Having raised 3 kids, this was my process: “people believe different things. Some this, some that. You are free to make up your own mind. You don’t have to decide now and can always change your mind. I myself do not believe their is a god”
I’m in the de-conversion process (raised in a non-denominational Christian household). I realized that “my” faith was actually my parents’ faith, not my own. I faced trauma around the time of my baptism and it wasn’t a genuine act of faith. I am re-discovering who I really am while in my 30s. I now see worship service and Bible passages very differently than I used to. I finally got tired of living a lie, and I’ve started to question everything I grew up learning. I constantly ask questions and try to search for answers which I never seem to find. I will say, your videos have helped me make sense of what I really want to say and what I really believe but couldn’t really express. Thank you!
You're exactly right. All their premises for remaining a convert come back to their conclusion; the Bible has to be true because it's true. I saw that moment at the end as it was happening, and was so glad you caught it too. How could he not have caught it?! They always fall victim to circular reasoning. They always include their conclusion in their premise. It does help to see things like this because when people I looked to all my life for spiritual guidance are suddenly calling me a fool, even though I know I'm not one, it still hurts.
Yes exactly!
@jmparker78 I'm so sorry to hear that you've been called a fool by people you love and perhaps once looked up to. Keep it moving friend. I know that you will as we have no choice. ❤
@@henriettegraham9230 I referred to Bart Ehrman and the scholarly consensus that no one really knows for sure when the books of the Bible were written, except that they definitely weren’t contemporary accounts, and that we don’t have the originals, and twas told that what I was saying was so foolish that if we continued the conversation I would just embarrass myself so let’s end it now. I know these are the words of a threatened person, but when they come from your father, who is also the one you spent your life thinking of as wise, it really cuts deep.
@@jmparker78ouch it sure does!
This is a great video Brandon. According to Rabbi M. Kaplan (1881-1983) all theists follow a religion based on 'the three B's'; Belief, Behavior, Belonging. If we map the 5 points of consideration for deconstruction mentioned in this video it would look like this:
BELIEF: (4) Spiritualism
BEHAVIOR: (1) Performance Control, (2) Textualism, (5) Compulsive Certainty
BELONGING: (3) Isolationism
I find it quite fascinating that behavior modifications are by far the number one issue related to deconstruction according to this map. This actually does make sense when we consider that positive and negative feedback is a primary factor in the relationship to our behavior. If something provides a positive feedback it reinforces that behavior and visa versa when something provides a negative feedback.
Ohhh love all that. Would love to make a video diving deeper into to those ideas. Thank you.
Some chose to embrace faith and live in denial while others chose to leave faith and live in reality
I have never been able to believe anything by an act of will.
Well said!
Well said when you're close minded enough to leave no room, for even the possibility of God existing in reality. That reaction is understandable because sadly a lot of Christians are close-minded about their faith. However, I think It's important that everyone deeply considers that they can be wrong. Which includes not making bold proclamations such as "some choose to embrace faith and live in denial while others choose to leave faith and live in reality." With that revelation I think that we would find plenty of Christians, atheists, agnostics, Hindus, Muslims and more who honestly think that their beliefs and reasons are a true depiction of reality. I'd like to say that I am one of those Christians who has constructively criticized his Faith, and still has Faith and sound reasons to affirm that belief.
@@theintelligentmilkjug944 * whiplash noise *
@@theintelligentmilkjug944
When I was a Christian I was very devout and sincere, and when I had doubts about my faith I decided to study the Bible in college hoping to strengthen it and get answers to my questions. The more I learned the more difficult it was to believe, and I spent many nights at my study desk in tears praying to God not to let me lose my faith.
In my Comparative Religion class the professor asked:
_What objective criteria can you apply equally and universally to all religions and their gods, past and present, that can conclusively prove that one religion is true and all others are false?_
That was the nail in the coffin of my faith because I had no answer to that question, and still don't. Belief or disbelief isn't a matter of choice or will, it's something that happens to you. We can only believe what makes sense to us. Belief makes no sense to me, but it does to others.
Atheists and Christians both accuse each other of being unreasonable, but what bothers me most is that it is Christians who often accuse atheists of having "made the wrong choice", as if they know some objective truth that atheists don't. Yet Christians can't even answer the basic criteria for truth from the question above, and since all religious claim lack any factual evidence and all rely equally on hearsay and testimony, rationally there is no more justification for believing in one god than there is for not believing in any of the other.
Maybe you have reasons why you believe in your god, but there is no logical reason for believing in any god at all.
Satan and I had dinner last evening. He said, "My, you look lovely tonight."
I thanked him, and after we finished eating, he invited me to church...
"Church?" I asked. "Why the hell do you want to go there?" (Pick your denomination)
Satan chuckled mischievously, then simply said, "Dear lady, church is where I do my best work!"
While the above story is fictional, from what I've seen in the various churches I had visited in my youth, my fiction could be a docucomedy, lol.
Truth be told, the "loss" of my "church community" was the loss of a boulder on my shoulder.
You must have been looking and viewing all the wrong things. Did you not love The Lord Jesus Christ with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength? What happened to you?
@@christophergibson7155 I guess you can't even imagine.😔
@@blueStarKitt7924 Of course everyone has their own story as to why they left The Lord Jesus Christ. Yet in all my experiences on these channels show me that almost all left because DOUBT entered their thinking.
This is exactly what happened with Eve in the Garden of Eden. What were the first words that the serpent (Satan) said to her? "HAS GOD REALLY SAID?" And he was able to place doubt into Eve's thinking, even though she already knew what The Lord God had said to her and Adam. She let herself be deceived.
@@christophergibson7155 And he let himself be deceived by her...
That's the tail wagging the dog, my friend.
@@christophergibson7155 In all seriousness, I will reply with this. I am an investigator. I work with evidence, and facts. I looked at the evidence of a fragmented, divided, and hateful religion filled with contradictions, and blind willingness to defend those contradictions, and almost government-like protections of a deity's darkest deeds, whether by direct action, or by agents robbed of free will. The evidence moreover shows that "believers" believe what conveniently suits them to believe. There is so much more, and my personal experiences with Christianity, and its adherents, were simply the *resting of my case in the court of real life.*
My journey out of religion was slow, taking over a decade. I was raised as a Christian, albeit a weak one. I never memorized the 10 Commandments, and I didn't even know God's supposed name until well after leaving the faith. My family emphasized the importance of deeds over faith, and from an early age I was taught and shown that good deeds are their own reward. Heaven was just a much appreciated bonus. So I never feared for my place in heaven. Why should I? I lived then and continue to live now by my family's selfless example.
I never thought much about the stories in the Bible, except for the life of Jesus. I would work myself up thinking about Jesus to the point of being near tears while saying grace each evening at dinner. I guess I thought of the other Bible stories the same way I did the parables of any other culture or religion. Culturally significant, but it didn't really matter if they were true or not. If I'd realized those stories are the foundation of Christianity, then my faith probably would have died a lot sooner.
The first thing that started to unravel for me were the moral depictions of the Sunday school stories, Adam and Eve, Jobe, Noah's flood, etc. I still saw them as fables, so the scientific issues didn't concern me yet, but the moral character they portrayed of God did. The hate and tribalism displayed by Yahweh were incompatible with the loving and just figure I'd been raised to believe in. If God loved all living things, as I had been told, then he could not sacrifice the well-being of one person/animal to act as a lesson for another. Yet this is exactly what happens in the Bible, over and over again. It's as if only the main characters of any particular story have any value or agency. A moral God CANNOT behave this way. At some point, I started to understand that these weren't just supposed to be fables, and from there the historic impossibilities started to creep into my thinking. Then, the scientific impossibilities. Miracles could explain the events described but not why they had stopped as soon as we could investigate them, why they were never corroborated by outside sources, or why even the biggest ones left no evidence. At this point, I had just entered college and was calling myself agnostic (still leaning in favor of faith). I couldn't trust the word of the church anymore, but I wasn't willing to give up on theism yet. I started taking psychology courses and became enraptured by the science of the human mind and by proper modes of research and bias control. I decided, on my own, to start living my life by these methods, and began the long and difficult task of analyzing all of my beliefs. To my horror, I found that none of my political (story for another time) or religious beliefs held up. Even my rationalizations for nebulous faith started to crumble as I learned the mechanics of how the mind tricks itself. I'm sure my professors didn't intend for me to use their lessons in this way, but I did nonetheless. It was like finding a magician's instruction book. Once you understand how the trick's done, the magic is gone and can't ever be reclaimed. It was disheartening, sobering, anger inducing, but also freeing. Not in the sense that I could "do whatever I want" or "am my own God." I'd never felt in danger of judgment in the first place, and I have always been happiest when I'm of use to others, so neither of those applied in the slightest. I was free of the cognitive dissonance. Things fell into place and all the pieces finally connected. Bare reality was a good deal uglier than I'd hoped, but still had its charms and was more than worth living.
Eventually, I lost faith in the notion that any God has ever contacted humanity. The methods by which all religions have started and spread fall too far beneath what should be expected of such a being. In fact, they all seem to have started in the exact same way. Word of mouth and sometimes scripture spreading from a single location in a single language that is then translated and spread entirely by humans with no conclusive evidence of any external being (let alone a god) being involved at any point. Every part of the proliferation is done by humans, just like it would be if it was all false. Even hypothetical advanced aliens could have done a more convincing job than any of these proposed gods just by air dropping pretranslated copies of a book at different, unrelated locations across the globe. I expect better of any interventionist God that cares about its message, tri-omni or not.
I know more about the Bible and history of Christianity now than I ever did as a Christian. And to this day, the more I learn, the worse my perception of it gets. In the beginning, I still thought that it was good for people even though I no longer believed. Now I know how much it's been influenced by secular ideas. Basically, everything healthy about religion has been appropriated from secularism. Community, compassion, the golden rule, all of it predates Christianity by millennia. All Christianity did was wrap it up with a whole lot of toxic baggage and mechanisms of control. I can't respect that anymore now that I see it for what it is. About the only good thing it does is inoculate people against the influence of other, sometimes more harmful, religions. Even then, it's useless unless the competing ideology includes a competing God belief. Christians fall for all kinds of harmful ideologies all the time. Bad as it is, though, some other religions are far worse, so I am glad Christianity acts as a buffer against those. But the last thing I'd ever want to do is give Christianity back its teeth. It's only somewhat acceptable now because it's been declawed by the return of secular ideals (for which it now tries to steal credit) and the separation of church and state (which it's constantly trying to undermine). When it had power, it committed some of the most heinous atrocities in human history. Many of the church's devices would put even the Bible's depictions of hell to shame, were it not for death delivering them from the church's hands.
I did hold on to hope of an afterlife for a while, mostly out of longing to see my loved ones again, but that too eventually faded. Now I've resolved to spend as much time as possible with the people I still have, to talk to them about their pasts and help them with their futures, so that I have as few regrets as possible when we are inevitably separated.
I know I will someday die, and eventually, I will be forgotten. The memory and even the effect of my deeds will fade to nothing. And that's ok. For now, in this place, my life has meaning for those around me. For a time, my memory will have meaning for those I'll leave behind. Eventually, that memory will be set aside, so that future generations can forge their own purpose, unburdend by the memory of someone they never knew. Hopefully, they will get to start their own journey on slightly firmer ground because of the work I did. My legacy will be a shining brick, then an unseen foundation, then a piece of the nameless soil upon which a new foundation rests. That is all I could ever ask for. That is enough.
Honestly, I like to break things down until they're simple. Till they're at the point that if I was asked something such as how people keep their faith after doubting. I honestly would just flat say "Lie to themselves. Keep lying until they believe it" which seems dismissive of people's feelings. Probably because it is? Dunno, but there's no part of any of that stuff that came across as real to me since I questioned it as a child. Now as an adult, I look at it all and I genuinely do not understand it. I hate being lied to the most for several personal reasons and lying to myself isn't in my nature it would disgust me. I couldn't keep holding onto a pretty lie to forsake an obvious truth. Painful or loving, the truth is all I could ever want.
Same reason I like science. It isn't set in stone and can be tried and tested time and again to achieve desirable results.
Exactly how I've felt since childhood. thanks
If it seems dismissive of their feelings it's probably because the lies they tell themselves are playing on their emotions more than anything else. Intellectually, I think most of them can figure it our pretty easily, but it makes them feel yucky because they've built up their illusions into something they imagine would be devastating to lose.
You articulated so well my frustrations with the progressive “deconstructed but not deconverted” community. On my way out of Christianity, I just kept asking everyone’s they were giving me their version of the faith or how they look at Jesus, “How do you know that’s true?” And everyone just kept telling me, “Well, that’s what I believe.” And when I wanted answers and certainty on at least SOMETHING, I was told that I was expecting too much because “it’s supposed to be mysterious and require faith.”
I’d just had enough.
Ok, I went in a tangent maybe away from what you were mainly talking about, but I think it’s connected.
I distinctly remember having a lot of real questions about my faith and worldview in general, but telling myself, "one of these days, I'm gonna sit down and figure out all my questions and get things settled so I don't have to live with confusion". Well, I finally did that at age 22, and I became an atheist within a couple of weeks.
Man, sometimes thats all it takes. A real and dedicated look at things.
@@MindShift-Brandon ngl there's still a lot of confusion that I'm working through (i.e. do I have free will, how will my political views change, what do I do now that I don't have a God-ordained mission for my life?). But I can learn and wrestle with these ideas without the constant fear that I might take one step too far from the "official" opinion of my faith and lose who I am.
@@riskybiscuits688 for political views, I recommend using the same method of truth seeking but with a healthy dose of world history and economic analysis, along with a critical examination of the motivating factors behind advocating one historical narrative or economic system over another. For what to do, hopefully your journey through political theory will eventually lead you to the principal that material conditions are after all the primary driver of historical events & you'll act accordingly.
I haven't watched the video yet, but I think there are 3 things that need to happen before they deconvert:
1. They have to have gotten to a point where their rational brain has wrestled with enough things to such a degree that the dissonance between their primal brain and rational brain causes a break.
2. They have to be honest enough with themselves that they are willing to admit that that is what has happened and that they rationally understand that they were wrong.
3. They're willing to give up all of the benefits that arise from being in their religion. For many people this includes loss of income, loss of respect and reputation, loss of close friends, loss of connection with immediate family, and more.
I would love to ask the author of the paper "What is the difference between intellectual humility (see 26:00) and deciding that you just don't care if the religion doesn't make sense?"
Good thing this discussion will be of someone actually having research at hand, and not just reactionary content from the likes of frank turek
Most theists excuses for their "research" or lack there of always runs something like "for the bible tells me so". 🙄
I hate that guy. I've seen him know and feel his arguments' weakness before, and yet grind through it, for the audience and the camera. Painfully. To confused and unsure claps after.
@@thegametroll6264 The Bible is where one must "do their research" to find the truth. That is....if they really desire to find it. Making excuses will never fly on the Day of Judgment before The Lord Jesus Christ.
@@christophergibson7155 So, you deny the fact that people deconvert while and after studying the Bible? I was studying to be a minister. BA degree in Bible, minor in NT Greek, learned Hebrew. It was Bible study that turned me into an unbeliever. What it really comes down to is ones mindset or approach while studying the Bible. Are you studying to try to support or defend what you already believe ? or are you studying to learn the truth wherever it takes you by applying intellectual honesty and sound reasoning?
@@billguthrie2218 All that endeavour led you away from the cross of The Lord Jesus Christ. Did you know and love Jesus with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Were you born again by the Spirit of God?
Were you baptized in the Holy Spirit? The downward spiral of the de-converted all begins with DOUBT.
Just like Eve in the Garden of Eden? What were the first words that the serpent (Satan) said to Eve?
"HAS GOD REALLY SAID?" And he has been whispering that into the minds of people since the dawn of mankind. Next in the downward descent is DISBELIEF....then DISOBEDIENCE....and finally DECEPTION.
Have you hit bottom yet? If so, then it will be so difficult to repent and return to the Savior to find salvation.
Deception is when a person believes something to be true, when indeed it is a lie.
I have... no idea how to describe the situation.
All I can paint my deconversion is just falling from the cliff, but instead of an abrupt end, I just keep falling. The only time the falling stops is once I realize how everything going on is just a farce. Sometimes I'm numb, sometimes I vent, sometimes I shrug and laugh, sometimes I'm just... nothing.
And the other part is just me going nihilistic, whether it's a response to what my indoctrination was like or not. Trauma response? Not physically, but emotionally. My only answer? "I don't know."
23:25 - I would personally called it the "build-up". It just keeps building up until the mask eventually breaks, until you lose it, until you have no choice but to just admit that you're not a believer anymore... Personally, it's because of familial pressure, even if when you're an adult, YOU have the right to believe what YOU want to believe. But there are a lot of reasons why people struggle to come to terms with their doubt, until the bottling process is... broken.
Intellectual humility is hard to process. I just don't get it.
Nothing adds up for me.
Anyway, just another Atheism discussion makes me flex my critical thinking cells again, and learn new perspectives in another pair of lenses.
I’d been questioning my faith for a while but the trump era really blew the doors off and made me take a hard, critical, second look
When I say the average Christians idolizing a guy like trump while the average atheist was concerned about the well being of others it exposed that there wasn’t something special within Christian’s on average.
By that point, the Bible did the rest of the work. There were so many things it said that I’d never noticed before, but if I had, I probably would have rejected it a lot sooner.
The biggest expose about Christianity is how devoid of love they are. Now, I’m not talking about the ones who are simply telling you about your “sin”, I’m talking about the ones who hate refugees and don’t see a problem with the genocide of Palestine
If Jesus said love your enemies, and he’s real, but god isn’t outraged at the genocide in Palestine, then you should t follow that god even if he were real
Lots to unpack here....
I guess the CIA would never lie to you about a conflict miles away😂
Me too! Exactly! My deconstruction started in 2016 when I noticed more Christian friends, pastors, leaders and politicians absolutely devoid of the fruits of the spirit and loving your neighbor while calling themselves a faithful follower of Christ. I started questioning my evangelical denomination, then questioning the Christian faith and the Bible. Then finally why I would continue to prioritize my life around religion having just faith, without good reason, evidence or proof. 😕
Same for me. The Trump era was my tipping point. Kinda solidified my questioning. I was trying to be okay with living a “good moral” life. If it wasn’t real, at least I was “good.” Funny thing is, I feel as though I’m a better person on the other side of it.
Yeah, sometimes one trigger causes another causes another until it becomes an avalanche. It just needed that one snowflake to upset the balance.
Excellent post. Donald Trump exposed Christianity for what it is. Even now, his biggest supporters are Christians. Look at the Speaker. Trump drop the border bill, he drops it. It’s crazy.
I noticed when I was a Christian there was a tension between the ethic of Jesus and the ethic of Paul. I noticed most Christians gravitated towards the hatred and exclusion of Paul.
Hey Brandon! Just wanted to say I also have a business degree from a Christian college, and I also am a deconvert, and I also love your channel.
That's all!
Haha! More bible than business, am i right?! Thanks for being here
I cannot express how meaningful your videos have been to me. Thank you for all the time,quality, and care you put into your content. This is definitely one of my favorite videos of yours.
Thats so nice and encouraging to hear. Thank you!
My tipping point was seeing deprivation of others, while living a charmed life.
Didn’t seem fair to me.
If god was good to a wretch like me, why couldn’t he do that for everyone?
You know? All powerful etc?
I'll put this simple. I left the faith a long time ago. I was borned into a christain family and I left the faith but I am grateful that God never gave up on me. Reconstruction of my Christian life was completed and I stay by what I believe about christainity. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
I didn’t even want to deconvert. I prayed so hard for god to show up. I was done hearing convoluted answers from people. I just wanted to hear answers from god, I believed he could show up. I self harmed and did as the Old Testament Israelites did, cry roll around and pray. When that didn’t work and my mental health was at its lowest, I was done.
The Bible also says don’t test God. Mathew 4:1-11 (satan tempting Jesus in the wilderness)
Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. “If you are the Son of God,” he said, “throw yourself down. For it is written:
“‘He will command his angels concerning you,
and they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’
Jesus answered him, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.
@@socorro_0 Jesus showing us that the Bible contradicts itself?
OK, thanks for the ammo...?
@@BlockyBookworm what do you mean…?
@@socorro_0 The Devil says one thing to tell Jesus how to act, and Jesus contradicts it with another thing.
@@BlockyBookworm that is definitely not the correct interpretation of scripture.
I love the longer videos honestly we are here to heal together, healing takes time, and patience! These videos really show how much you care, your research is flawless, thank you for caring so much
Thank you, Stephanie! That is really heartening.
My experience of going to Church, and I went to several different ones, bares almost no similarity to the issues listed at the start. I never felt a need to perform, and while we considered the Bible important it was rarely put forward as the be all and end all for everything. I had lots of non-Christian friends and we were encouraged to get out there and talk to non-believers. Though I knew some people I would consider "too spiritual" I generally stayed away from all the talking in tongues, slain in the spirit stuff. And as for compulsive certainty, we were encourage to discuss our doubts with others and never (at least until I started losing my faith) looked upon badly for having them.
None of these things are why I stopped believing. For me it was pretty much all down to reading the Bible and realising just how awful much of it was, and how clearly it could not have come from the God I believed in. That, and also the eye opening realisation that when two people on different sides of an argument claimed to have prayed and heard from God about it, they both couldn't be right, but they could both be wrong. Those were the things that started me down the path to losing my faith completely, though it was a journey of many years to get that far.
Thanks!
Thanks so much, John!
Excellent breakdown.
Another essential classic.
Length is great.
38:40 Also, the “sleight of hand” used when using the Bible to justify continued belief for the Christian God is a sneaky one - I am glad you were aware of it.
Much appreciated!
Thanks for sharing.
Appreciate this. Thank you!
Very much appreciate the callout of the difference between a trigger and a tipping point. At some point one straw breaks the camel’s back, but it wasn’t just that one straw.
Yes! I/we LOVE the longer videos!
That right there, at 36:30 describes my path towards deconversion I started to really think about the fundamental truths of Christianity and I came away with very little eventuality realizing I didn’t believe it anymore. I had to be honest with myself and my family.
I asked, "What does it mean to live by Faith?" I was in Church Culture for over 40 years at the time. Something didn't seem right. What I was hearing/reading and what I was seeing in church life didn't match up. I went from Evangelical to Progressive, to Zen Christian. Religion failed me. I became spectacle. I started reasoning. The final Jenga block was seeing the Gennesis stories as myth. The Garden story, Jesus' death because "we are sinful" were foundational to my faith. The Belief Tower fell, turned to smoke blew away. My faith went with it.
Yep. That's what happens to all the professing atheists, the de-converted, and the false converts....DOUBT comes in-
-to their thinking. It is too sad that so many don't take to heart the lesson that Eve went though in the Garden of Eden. She entertained the serpent (Satan) when he said to her...."HAS GOD REALLY SAID?"... She fell big time for his deception. And he has been whispering that into the minds of people since the dawn of mankind.
@@christophergibson7155 doubting / questioning is the path to knowledge. Believing without evidence is gullibility.
@@mender722It certainly wasn't for Adam and Eve when they ate from the tree of the KNOWLEDGE of good and evil. A knowledge independent of the Spirit of God. A knowledge that is self centered and not God centered. As it has appeared to have happened with you also. Repent, turn around and have a change of mind and heart toward sin and self. Then TOTALLY TRUST JESUS to save and rescue you from all your sin.
For S.I..N is that "selfish"--"independent"--"nature".
@@christophergibson7155 I was a born-again Christian for 35+ years. I do not believe Adam and Eve were real. This scenario violates the science of genetics, for one thing. Other sciences show that there were already established cultures around the world "6000 years" ago. Talking snakes, Magic trees. I don't think so. Church Culture has nothing for me. I have nothing to repent of. I cannot force myself to believe that which I no longer believe. I am an Apistevist.
You became eye glasses? 😂
Brilliant as ever Brandon. Thanks for your intellectual honesty and transparency, you are helping me so much. Keep them coming.
So glad to be helpful. Thank you!
Love his way of deconstructing religion.
Me, a all time Atheist.
From Belgium as well.
The section starting 37:18 is 🔥
Why would the most powerful being need us to cherry pick from an imperfect and dated book
I was like your mom. I am not a Christian anymore. Watching this has been painful for me, but has shown me what I did to my kids. I need to ask their forgiveness. Thank you for showing me what it was like for them.
As someone actively doing an empirical study on the deconstruction process in psychology, and having gone through it myself, deconstruction isn’t a universal experience. The only way to put forth a true model of deconstruction would be to make it incredibly abstract and broad to be truly generalizable. From the results of my study (hopefully publishing soon!), this model is consistent with the model I’ve developed as well. Great to see more work and research being conducted on this topic!
That is so interesting, I would love to read it if you ever where to publish :D
@@Lestat1349 I'll keep you in mind! Should be presenting it in the coming months to APA!
@@atwitzend nice :D thank you for that :)
Events in my life and my illness did it for me.
It’s important to realize why you left, otherwise you can fall into the trap of being manipulated and believing again. You have to ask yourself are you the easily appeasable vulnerable type.
37:54 Apparently it’s “mind-blowing” that Jesus went moping to his buddies after getting laughed out of the room. Great episode Brandon, keep them coming!
Haha. Thanks, Jon!
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Great video. I feel like the exception that proves the rule in that my deconversion happened extremely quickly. I did go through about a 2-3 year period in which my faith was 'liberalized' (where I accepted annihilationism, evolution/big bang, errors in the Bible, etc). And the adoption of these ideas didn't bother me because I had catholic friends who were much more devout than I was (and I didn't set the standard low) who had problems with none of those things. But for me the period of anguish where I was faced with the idea that caused my faith to come crashing down lasted about 5 minutes. There are multiple factors that are unique to me that allowed for this to be easier for me than others though including not being scared if change in general and having an incredible secular community from a big hobby of mine where I feel validated and cared for in the same ways provided by my church community. Had either of those factors been missing the psychological and social consequences of deconverting would have made it much more difficult to go through with.
Lastly, I spent a couple hours yesterday literally charting (by age) out the ideological journey of my faith to the point of deconversion. It just felt really cathardic to see how my ideologies developed over the years and what caused them to change (for instance a missions trip to Mexico resulted in me changing my stance on illegal immigration which triggered a reconsideration of all my political beliefs (which mostly formed in my early grade school years) in mid highschool. Some of my political beliefs (such as global warming) were tied to science. When I reconsidered the science for my political beliefs I reconsidered the science for creationism and accepted evolution amd the Big Bang. Yet despite all this I did (and still do) think that that trip largely strengthened my faith by showing me what I thought was evidence of Christlike love that transcended cultural and lingual barriers. But yeah, it was an immensely satisfying experience to chart the evolution of my ideologies and see exactly what experiences my current and past beliefs are linked to. (And its got me really excited about the project which I did it for)
I think this is my favorite video that you have done, I relate to a lot of the topics and talking points that you covered
As usual, a fantastic video. As you say and as I agree, everyone’s deconstructing story is different. People are complicated. Mine began with a real concern over what awaited me in heaven. I was 73 at the time and I know that death is real. The more I looked into the Bible the more I realized it is a man-made book written by ancient authors in a no-longer existing world spinning tales.
I am always so impressed when people are able to do this at later stages in life. I could see how easy it would be to ignore the issues and just ride it out. Thanks, Duane!
I love how Brandon always predicts the likely responses lol.
Keep demanding consistency! I love how comprehensive, consistent and scripture-backed your arguments are, and there's no place for people to hide with shifting goalposts.
Thank you for this! That is indeed the goal. I try to leave as little wiggle room as possible. So instead i just get lots of personal attacks lol
Vulnerable response incoming. Trigger Warning regarding abuse:
I was groomed and then S* abused at the age of 19 by my pastor, who had watched me grow up. I was made to feel like the whole relationship was my fault. My mother still attends that church and yes, she knows that I was abused. I left that church and went to another where I joined the worship team, taught Bible study, was a leader and basically volunteered for anything that was needed. I was later told by THAT pastor that I wasn't correctly submitting to him (not to god, mind you, just to him) and had no choice but to leave that church too. I was devalued and degraded by these two men. It took me a while to realize that if two basic, barely educated, barely influential men could manipulate and "control" a couple hundred people, imagine what an entire council of highly educated, highly influential men could do! That's when I de-converted. I tried to keep my faith, but realized the Bible falls apart on its own and especially in the hands of men. It was never "god's."-- Which reminds me of the line in the book "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy, where a blind man on the road says, "There is no god and we are his prophets." And that's how I feel now.
Thank you for sharing. I am so sorry to hear about the trauma you suffered from this religion. Many will say it was just two bad apples but at what point do we not see a pattern? How many who profess christ need to have no fruit before we say maybe the christian soil is no different than any other. I am so glad you made it out.
@@MindShift-Brandon It's definitely a pattern. It's kind of like those Magic Eye posters from the 90's though, sometimes people are just too close to see it. When you take a step back it's so obvious. It took years for me to even be able to talk about it, and the more I do the less shame that surrounds it. So, thank you for the work you're doing and for putting so much thought and care into this channel.
wow, great video. Thanks a million for posting this video.
I think you hit the most important point in that the difference between deconstructing all the way or not is what one sets as it's end goal...
Are they wanting the truth about all of it or just truth about some scriptures
If they set their mind at the beginning of their deconstruction that God is real the Jesus rose from the dead and that heaven is real etc. then they're not really gonna analyze things that challenge those ideals..
They'll just challenge the less important parts of the Bible . so they are essentially just doing a half ass self reflection
But I would say half or even most Christians were brought up more like I was .. (indoctrinated since birth)
We didn't go to church very often at all smoked cigarettes, drank alcohol worked hard, told dirty jokes, many of them have cheated on their girlfriends or wives and did lots of stuff we knew we weren't supposed to (Think of all your blue-collar people from welders to construction workersetc, think of your country music songs think of your rock bands people out there stealing car stereos gangbangers etc.. they all believe in God or most all of them do....
but they don't live how Christians are supposed to live and that's what gave us or gives us or gave them great testimonies because they felt sorry for the bad they did after being in indoctrinated with how they were supposed to live. so they live in a perpetual state of doing bad and asking for forgiveness
and they are willing to die for God even though, just like me , they didn't/don't know 90% of what's Actually in the Bible
so I wish way more Christians would actually read their Bible starting in the Old Testament
Number one way for people to deconvert is to actually read their Bible and think about what they're reading and what it would mean and the consequences of it
Just wanted to say how much I appreciate what you do.
Thank you!
I agree with you, once again, even as a believer. I feel like you can't have faith, if you're not challenged on it/answering the tough questions. I see it even in today's progressive social belief system.
In regards to "obeying God because you love Him", it makes sense, to me. How can you love someone (for example) if you continue to rebel against their wishes? It makes sense to me, that obeying His commands comes, naturally because you love Him. If you have to force it, then you don't truly love Him, I'm sorry to say. God bless you Mindshift!
Respectful, don't you think that threatening people who don't love you to go to Hell for an eternity, is kind of forcing love? Or do you think that people are doing it to themselves by rejecting God by following other beliefs that they have come to know as true, just like you have with God and Jesus? Or is it something else?
not a rhetorical questions feel free to give any input.
@@James-dq6yp Hey! Thanks for reaching out! I actually do give my thoughts on what I believe Hell is, on another one of MindShift's videos: th-cam.com/video/OZ2FcbVlcEk/w-d-xo.htmlsi=xBUVRw8JdYLaZT_u
@@James-dq6yp hell is separation from God. Why would God force himself on you, and why would someone want to be with God for eternity. If YOU don’t choose Him while on earth then it wouldn’t make sense for you to be united with Him after death..?
Read that paper so many years ago. For me I lost my wife and became depressed. I lost my house, vehicles etcs.. so all of my pillars crumbled to the ground. I’ve prob told over 100 people about your belief system to be like pillars holding up your reasoning, beliefs and sanity. It’s easier to rebuild one or two pillars and not be effected too much. So little change may occur. But when all of your pillars are under attack, your brain resorts to fight or fly. For me I entered into a critical thinking stage like no other. I read over 500 books on so many academics. It’s been 11 years since then and I’ve only strengthened my atheism since. I was a believer before that that was pretty active.
I started deconverting while on a mission.
That probably happens more than we would think. I am sure it brings a lot of things to the surface.
I'd like to hear that story
Your passion is palpable, & it makes the difference
Thanks for the kind encouragement!
You apologized for making this about your deconversion, but having your story alongside Truth Snack’s reconstruction was really helpful. The key difference is that you wanted to know what is true, and he wanted to prove it was true. It’s following the data verses interpreting the data.
It was so disappointing when I went to my pastor doubting the gospels when I learned how late they were and why they’re certainly anonymous. He pointed to the verse about all scripture being God breathed. Like, I’m doubting the book, and you use the book in doubting to justify the book. It was even better when I learned that the book that includes that verse is a likely forgery.
I don’t really know where I’m at anymore, but thank you again for your videos. They help remind me to be intellectually honest.
Thank you for this
I practically started my deconstruction journey the day i got saved. First thing i did was read the New Testament and when i read those four different crucifiction burial and ressurection accounts i knew they could not all be right. Cognitive dissonance took over and i did what my church family said "You just dont understand but God knows, you will find out in heaven, trust God, His ways are higher, blah blah...." so i continued on the path of brainwashing for the next 25 years before my critical thinking skills began to reawaken and i could no longer bear the mental anguish of acceping glaring contradictions as the infallible God breathed Word. Deconverting was the most painful, stressful thing ive done in my life and it cost me plenty. I cried for years after, and still do, because i SO WANTED it to be true. It was heartbreaking to go through that, it drained me mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Like so many orher truths about this place ive discovered, once you SEE you can never unsee. There's no going back even if i wanted to. I know too much now.
Do you still believe in spirituality ?you said it drained you spiritually. Genuine question, I’m going through a similar experience right now with deconverting
@@truehzrecords
I try to keep an open mind, Christianity is very closed minded. No one knows what happens after this until we get there
Million likes, from Namibia.
Thanks so much!
Thank you Brandon for actually getting me an atheist for more than 40 years to read the Bible I grew up in a Catholic home for a boys in Long Island, and lived in a dormitory with the priests coming in to select their flavor for the night. It was pretty horrifying that it might be my night again, but what was even more horrifying, that it was not my night, but my brothers or my best friend I knew at age 11, that what the priest was doing every Sunday was not holy. Thank you Brandon for the very first time in my life, you have me reading the Bible, especially the Old Testament but the new as well. I always felt in my heart that the biblical God is evil, I had no idea that he was as evil as the old testament describes him to be. I will continue to watch your videos and read more passages in the Bible to reinforce my belief that this God not only does not exist, but if he actually does exist, he is the most evil living thing that is ever existed in our universe.
Well, it all boils down to if it were true, there would be no doubt, and nor would there be any differing interpretations of the Bible....a perfect being would produce a perfect book that is clear, concise, unambiguous and timeless.
This should be one of the first things said when defending obvious truth
The Bible is God's perfect word and timeless: The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple (Psalm 19:7); But the word of the Lord endureth forever (1 Peter 1:25a). God's word gives knowledge and understanding: I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation (Psalm 119:99). Reading and study of the scriptures are necessary: Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). We are ALSO warned of unbelief and doubt (see Hebrews 11:6, James 1:5-8). Though scripture covers thousands of years of mankind's history, showing God's work to redeem mankind through his Son, Jesus Christ, God used an incredible economy of words sufficient to educate us and to save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15). Scripture also acknowledges a coming day when all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). Be careful about projecting your thoughts onto God's word; he anticipated everything!
The Bible is God's perfect word and timeless: The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul: the testimony of the LORD is sure, making wise the simple (Psalm 19:7); But the word of the Lord endureth forever (1 Peter 1:25a). God's word gives knowledge and understanding: I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation (Psalm 119:99). Reading and study of the scriptures are necessary: Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15). We are ALSO warned of unbelief and doubt (see Hebrews 11:6, James 1:5-8). Though scripture covers thousands of years of mankind's history, showing God's work to redeem mankind through his Son, Jesus Christ, God used an incredible economy of words sufficient to educate us and to save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15). Scripture also acknowledges a coming day when all believers in the Lord Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). Be careful about your assumptions; God anticipated everything!
The Bible is God's timeless, perfect word (see Psalm 19:7, 1 Peter 1:25a). It gives knowledge and understanding of God and salvation in Christ (see Psalm 119:99). The Bible must be read, studied, and received with meekness (see 2 Timothy 2:15, James 1:21). We are ALSO warned of doubt and unbelief (see James 1:5-8, Hebrews 11:6). Though scripture covers thousands of years of history as it shows God's work to redeem mankind through the Lord Jesus Christ, his Son, God used an incredible economy of words, sufficient to teach us and save us through the preaching of the gospel of Christ (see 2 Timothy 3:15, Romans 1:16). Scripture teaches a coming day when all believers in Jesus Christ will have a unity of the faith (see Ephesians 4:13-15). All people must receive the forgiveness of their sins through faith in Jesus Christ who bore their sins upon the tree, died, and rose again the third day that they might be forgiven (see 1 Corinthians 15:3-4, Romans 6:23). Be careful about your assumptions; the Bible anticipates all!
@@sm8johnthreesixteenGod’s "perfect” word has a ton of contradictions, and shows us god is allowed to break his own rules and allow his chosen people to do so.
I definitely relate to what you described in the intro about having a Christian community that permitted questioning up to a certain point, but with the implicit expectation that it was only permissible insofar as you arrived back where you started.
I find it fascinating hearing stories about struggling with theological questions and undergoing deconstruction before arriving at deconversion. I came at it from the opposite end. I deconverted for entirely internal reasons that I won't get into here. Put simply, God broke all his promises. Once I realised this, I became numb to the Christian life and stopped living as one. I still believed in all the fundamentalist things (young earth creationism, Biblical accuracy on most subjects, etc), I just didn't believe God had any personal interest in me specifically. It was only a few years later that I stumbled across a Darkmatter2525 video (Worst Invasion in the Bible) which led me down the path of deconstruction. I didn't start dealing with all the theological and philosophical fluff until well after I had abandoned my faith.
I also find it irritating when people say things like, "just tweak how you think about this particular theological issue and your faith with be saved!" No it won't. God had every opportunity to keep me in the faith. The ball is in his court now. If he wants me to come back, he's going to have to come to me.
A lot of it was internal reasons for me as well. There is no point in having a relationship with a being that can’t keep or even breaks his promises. I’m no longer interested because the trust is broken. So I’m at the point where if he exists, I don’t care to acknowledge him ever again. And then there is logic when it comes to the claims of the Bible.
This was such a great video Brandon! I can relate to so many of the pushbacks that you have gotten from Christians. The extreme either/or positions are the most familiar to me.
Pereption vs Reality. The Christian perception - those who deconvert had one bad thing happen to them and chose to abandon their faith. The Reality - a person deconverts after years of struggle and only after a molehill of problems turns into an insurmountable mountain of them. Eventually there comes the straw that breaks the camel's back, but that only happens after a mountain of straw was put there in the first place.
Every video of yours Brandon is well detailed and to me spot on. I enjoy every one of them so far. My wife is a Christian and I am the skeptic and when we got married we used the pastor from her church and before our big day the pastor did his interview with us and the big thing that bothered me is that he said "believers should only marry believers or Christians" he told me I need to pray and sort things out so I can be a believer and be part of the Christ or Christian family. I go to church to make my wife happy and I am ok with that and she is ok with my skepticism and we have been together many years. I feel there is a religious bigotry after hearing what the pastor had said and it seems to be in most, or if not, all religions where we marry our "kind" per say. I was raised as a Mormon and stopped going to church at 18 because I found it hard to believe everything that was taught to me, Adam and Eve, Noah's flood and the tower of Babel and even how Moses got the ten commandments besides christs resurrection. I just didn't feel the spirit or the truth in me even after my bishop at a young age to me to pray and pray often. Still nothing and of course you just give up. I read the Bible over a course of months in Sunday school and of course that book scared me to death! All the wrath and killing in the Old testament and it seemed God was around all these people and prophets.....where is he today? Why is he not going to war with any leaders or prophets today? Where is he wrath now since it seemed so abundant then. I know Christians will say the new covenant or New testament is more important but what does that really mean? Was hod wrong in the Old testament or old covenant and now he is trying to do right? Sure doesn't sound like a perfect God to me. I feel the Bible is book written solely by man and it is filled with "human" emotions and human love and human anger and human philosophy. God would never have all this since we glorify him as "perfect" and all knowing and his wisdom and knowledge would be much higher than what's in that book. Heck we see similarities of the biblical God in the Odyssey and the book of Gilgamesh and others and that was way before the Bible. Your videos confirm all that I am mentioning and I love watching them! Still not understanding how we have so many different religious denominations if God only has one book that we need to follow. Seems God does not want us to know the truth as it is so hard to understand the Bible yet alone the other religious books and why are there other books? So many different ways to worship? Why do some believe in Christ and others don't. Just a bunch of mass confusion and it looks like I will always be the skeptic till my last breath. No evidence has proven anything about the Biblical god and Christ to change my mind.
Hey Doug. Its a tough spot but sounds like you guys are making it work. I feel all your frustration for sure though and appreciate you sharing here.
I love to tell Christian channels with large followings to listen to you. I haven't heard back from any of them.
Its very quiet on me except for a few smaller channels. Not sure if its a compliment or insult lol. Jk
No it’s because we accept all the arguments you guys make against Gods character.At the end of the day life is not fair it is what it is get over it.
@@emmanuel4451 "This channel doesn't have any content" oh I guess he didn't mean you.
Awesome insights and commentary as always Brandon. I found your outro where you talked about being accused of being too fundamentalist/evangelical/literalist and therefore susceptible to deconstruction to be particularly amusing. I'm from a (relatively) liberal catholic background that taught evolution and big bang cosmology as well as that much of the Bible (especially OT) was allegorical. So I've had the same accusation leveled at me but in the opposite direction- getting told that I fell away because I wasnt fundamentalist/literalist enough....or even more often "catholics arent christians" (except when we need them to bolster our numbers and claim Christianity is the largest religion on Earth)
I deconstructed Abrahamic stuff and the more New Age/Occult stuff. Living without a map is so disorienting :P You don't get the smugness of make believe certainty, but you do get the rush of adventure! :)
Ok this feels so therapeutic. Hugs from Belgium xx
So glad to be helpful!
Wow on the Setting Conditions. Not applicable to me: I was Methodist - you can't get any more moderate than that. And yet, I no longer believe in a god. Because I went on a search for Truth and concluded that there is no god(s). I don't think a sample size of 12 is even remotely enough.
Yes! Great example. Many people end of deconverting simply because truth is important.
That's kind of funny to me because I went to a Methodist church as part of my deconstruction process - I tried liberalizing my faith in order to save it. It didn't work, lol. All it did was to help make the cracks more visible in my previous fundamentalist indoctrination.
As a life-long atheist, i am very glad to have stumbled across your channel. I had often wondered if the reason i didn't believe in a god (especially the Christian one because i have a lot of very good friends who are Christian) is because i was too close minded and hyper-critical. However, hearing you articulate everything i had issues with (the paradox of free will, the narcissistic nature of the Christian god, how most people who have ever existed would be doomed to hell through no fault of their own) in a logical manner using examples from the bible itself has helped me reach the conclusion that if there is a creator, it sure as heck isn't one of the Abrahamic versions (or any other version that human kind has conjured up for that matter).
Love the calm, logical manner in which you present as well. You're defo my favourite atheist TH-camr
So very kind and encouraging. Thank you for all the love!
For me, none of these were the factors. I left Islam because I learned about the principle of falsifiability and that was it.
Great video. Excellent analysis and conclusions. Great commentary.
Thanks so much!
From 1977 when I was 12 until 2022 I was a hardcore Christian believer.... So you can tell why I'm a little aggravated
Yeah i wonder why we would be anti when having wasted so much time believing and living for a lie
1972 (14) to 2018 (60) for me. I do get ticked off about the lies, the money, my time, my effort, my compliance with church "authorities". It makes me forge on to open those windows for others to see out of the silo.
Wow that's such a long time. At least you didn't fall for the sunk cost fallacy.
I didn’t “loose” my faith and religion. I gave up my faith and religion after study, in-depth research, and realizing the lack of evidence religion claims. After over 50 years of faithful adherence to my faith, I’m actually using my brain and I couldn’t be happier!
Brandon doesn't want to slam the "research" for being too short ... so I will. Joel's article is nothing like an actual PhD level "case study." There's no data about the case members, no review of prior research, no comparison of his model to other models of deconversion, no analysis of how well his model works and where it doesn't, no survey data to back up factual claims about groups, and no citations or references to anything at all.
Hey, if all Joel wanted to do was write up an idea he had in the shower and put it in a blog post on the Internet, mission accomplished. But nobody should mistake this with research or scholarship.
This! I've seen more detailed and thorough high school group projects *about* doing research - and some of those were garbage!
Okey, this video was a good comeback to in my opinion the best of your content. Especially after the He Gets Us video.
I am a VERY analytical person. And the “you just need to have faith” has always felt like a copout, even when I was a kid. When you grow older, you want to have some legit reason for your belief so at some point, you go in honestly looking for those answers. In my case, at every turn, every claim the Bible made was demonstrably proven to be false. The Christian excuse patrol had to throw a PhD’s worth of apologetics at me to kinda sorta rationalize my issues with the Bible. I find it ironic how often this happens to atheist and agnostic people. Their deconstruction began by trying their hardest to be a better Christian. Ironic huh? But what do I know? I was never really a “true” Christian, right? lol lol lol
OUTSTANDING! Well done, sir!
I lost my faith when I could not reconcile the commandment of "thou shalt not kill" when God himself does it at will and without remorse. He wiped out whole tribes of pregnant women and children without a second thought, so how can he tell his own creation that it is wrong? 😮
The hypocrisy of this perfect god is an excellent reason to make a uturn!
And Christians usually respond to this with "those weren't people, those were half-demons" as if it was ok to kill human mutants.
Then he turn the other cheek cause he was scared to fight the romans so they hanged his ass
@@krembryle always reminds me of 90s X-Men. "Mutey"
The Trey Jadlow vs David Smalley debate about forty five minutes in is a great example of that failure to address this issue by an apologist.
You are a genius. I thank you for choosing to exist, and following this path to enlightenment. :) No sarcasm intended.
I absolutely did not want to deconstruct and deconvert. I was raised by two ministers. I became a minister myself and started a ministry that engaged with multiple churches and Christian organizations, 20+. Most of my social interactions was with other believers for ministerial purposes. I fought really hard to hold on, but the cognitive dissonance and my logical understanding couldn’t reconcile biblical teachings anymore.
Deconstructing gave me massive anxiety and I hated it. I loved it because I want to be a person of integrity that follows truth wherever it lies, but it is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever done… and I still am in the closet to most of my peers! I still honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.
I’m convinced right now that it’s a problematic, outdated, and false belief system for lots of reasons, but its still very difficult socially. I certainly wasn't your typical churchgoer. I was a leader and I know the Bible fairly well. I just wanted to live a life pleasing to God and to rest in the finished work of Christ. I was also a freakin evangelist!
This is so uncomfortable for me, but I'm certain I'm correct in my current views and that spiritual/religious systems are merely an echo chamber groupthink of superstitious people who make their god or higher powers the way they're taught to make them or how they choose to make them… and that's the honest truth
Thanks for sharing this!
@@MindShift-Brandon Thank you for what you’re doing. It’s kinda funny. I was also in the free grace camp before I started deconstructing similar to you. Watching your deconstruction video was the catalyst to my deconstruction. When I heard that you ended in the free grace belief, I instantly knew that it was over for me tbh. I tried to fight it, but everything you were saying was right😭. And it led me down a rabbit hole of ex Christian content to where for the first time, I gave myself the freedom to challenge and criticize my beliefs in this way. I never would’ve done this a year ago or prior. It would’ve been too sacrilegious to even question God and the Bible this way lol.
Interestingly, being free grace and believing that I couldn’t lose my salvation under any circumstance was a huge reason I felt “safe” enough to go down this path
That is reallly interesting and insightful about feee grace giving the room! And i am honored to have been a part of your process.
Right on, Brandon!
Reading the Bible deconverted me.
That will do it!