RationalWiki Atheism FAQ for the Newly Deconverted
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Quotes
"I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mahatma Gandhi
"'Dad, what religion are we?' — 'You know... the one with all the well-meaning rules that don't work out in real life... Christianity!'" - Bart and Homer Simpson
"Christianity got too many lawyers and too few witnesses." - C.J. Hambro[23]
"Christianity supplies a Hell for the people who disagree with you and a Heaven for your friends." - Elbert Hubbard
"Intolerance has always been one of the cornerstones of Christianity -- the glorious heritage of the Inquisition." - Madalyn Murray O'Hair
"The Bible is bullshit!" - Corporate Avenger
If you found this article, you very well might have recently lost faith in your god, or some particular religious teaching. Some people are raised to think that life without their religion is utterly unthinkable, so a loss of faith can be a difficult and trying event to deal with. Even without this, religious belief is often deeply ingrained and so is difficult to lose and it can be uncomfortable to deal with it being challenged. Someone suffering a "crisis of faith" may wonder if there's something wrong with them, or if they've wasted their life, or if their life is now devoid of meaning.
Our mission in this document is to help you find your way out of this darkness and confusion and into a place where you can be happy making decisions on your own, based on reality-based data. It's okay to not believe, this is the first step in dealing with any loss of religion - merely going back to religion because you feel you have no other choice is no choice at all. This is simply the basis of an open mind. Whether you have recently de-converted completely, are teetering on the brink of losing a religion or have been a non-believer for a long time, these questions and answers aim to give an overview of life without religion for you to consider. It is by no means comprehensive as no single document, or even collection, ever could be sufficiently vast to answer everything. You have entered the world of atheism and rationality; here we'll tell you what's important to us, where we get our morality from, and how we face the peer pressure to return to the church. If you do find yourself having to choose between belief and non-belief, you can do so with an informed mind and make a real choice.
