Around the World, Many People Are Leaving Their Childhood Religions

wincy · 2025-03-29T18:33:15 1743273195

I was a hardcore Dawkins fan at 16. Insufferable edgelord sort, and thought I’d stay that way. Then again I grew up Mormon and their theological rigor is… extremely tenuous. My grandmother was Catholic but I wasn’t really exposed to it as a kid.

I’m 38 now and in the process of becoming Catholic. I’ve started going to mass every day. I’m not really sure why but I feel really great.

Our goal is to inoculate our children from atheism. We knew a lot of people who killed themselves over the years who were part of the “atheist church” we went to in our 20s. I’ve stopped caring about being right, and don’t really care to argue about religion with people. Instead care about living a life I find meaningful. I want the same for my children. After exploring the other options, I think a religious framework is what makes that possible.

kelseyfrog · 2025-03-29T18:11:16 1743271876

I left in my teens. Religion seemed, at that time and still does, appears to reinforce systems of power and conformity rather than do good.

Non-believers often ask themselves, "what god would have the ability to eliminate suffering and choose not to?" We should also ask, "What religious institution and followers, having amassed the riches of the world, would choose not to eliminate suffering when they could?"

The weight of these contradictions eventually breaks belief. There's one way to win back believers and it's to eliminate in-group/out-group dynamics and replace it with material acts of benevolence - akin to large scale public works projects to eliminate suffering.

smallmancontrov · 2025-03-29T18:32:38 1743273158

I am not a believer anymore but I can find a few silver linings to miss.

Pope Francis is the only authority figure espousing leftist politics who my parents do not actively hate and I am fairly certain they would engage in no charitable activity if the church did not apply social pressure to do so. Also, churches are a third space in a world with too few.

The church has too mixed of a record to firmly categorize as a force for good and it is clearly not the only solution to these problems, but it does some good and it's always a pity to see that diminish.

Filligree · 2025-03-29T18:32:27 1743273147

> There's one way to win back believers and it's to eliminate in-group/out-group dynamics and replace it with material acts of benevolence - akin to large scale public works projects to eliminate suffering.

That would make me think more of the organisations in question, but I don’t understand why it would affect belief. It has no bearing on the correctness of the claims they make.

627467 · 2025-03-29T18:27:34 1743272854

I don't think this is religious institution v non-religious institutions scenario where the first stopped caring and the second cares. I think it's: more comfortable/complacent societies don't care about eliminating suffering so established institutions (religious or not) just stopped caring too. Plenty less-established religious institution are (at least) convincing enough people they are focused on reducing suffering. (in Christianity look at the evangelical movement around the world)

BJones12 · 2025-03-29T18:18:58 1743272338

One important detail in the article, but not the headline, is:

> In short, these age patterns might be signs of secularization... However, it’s also possible that some of the age differences in religious affiliation revealed in a single survey could result from people becoming more religious as they grow older.

Here's an article from the same research firm last month that examines a different measurement: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-c...

iandanforth · 2025-03-29T18:09:03 1743271743

Good, I'm strongly against supernatural beliefs and any trend towards greater secular thought is a welcome one.

JKCalhoun · 2025-03-29T18:24:54 1743272694

I was born atheist as I think we all are. But I rejected the kind of indoctrination that follows pretty early on. More or less when I found out Santa Clause was a social construct that everyone agreed to lie about I started to question everything really. But also asking myself, "If this is bullshit, why would people lie about it?" I was satisfied in my atheism.

Weirdly though, my mom took my sister and I to a Quaker meeting when we were 10, 11 years old and I thought it was kind of cool. Still didn't believe in a god or whatever but I liked the people and the kind of lack of hierarchy of Quakerism (no priest, just people sitting in silence facing one another, etc.).

I was surprised to find myself seeking out a Quaker meeting again recently — here now 50 or so years since. Perhaps memories of that time came back when reflecting on the past after my mother's death a couple years ago. Perhaps the times we are living in caused me to look for "community".

And I have enjoyed finding the small group of Friends I could in Omaha. When I told one of the regulars that I was atheist, he was cool with it. "Atheism is a necessary step on the way to enlightenment," he told me.

Still puzzling over that.

throwanem · 2025-03-29T18:33:10 1743273190

Oh, he just means you need the experience of doubt before you can approach the experience of acceptance, because otherwise how'd you know the difference between what's true and what you'd like to believe?

Quakers like as much as anyone else to be taken as having had some special revelation, especially if they can get that to happen without having to show so bold as to overtly seek to claim it. Don't go thinking the names they call themselves are any truer by default than anyone else's.

deadbabe · 2025-03-29T18:30:23 1743273023

Unfortunately, people will believe equally stupid and magical things that are just as bad as religions, so this isn’t the win you think it is if you’re hoping for a more rational, stable world.

Religions help keep destructive people in check. There are people who readily admit that the ONLY reason they haven’t gone on a shooting spree ending with blowing their brains out is their religious faith.

blindriver · 2025-03-29T18:05:46 1743271546

I'm switching back to religion. I used to not believe but after the pandemic and researching the immune system, I don't believe that a complex system like simply the immune system can be not only created by chance but can be spread across an entire population. There are many components of the immune system and even the endocrine system that requires things to be designed together, not randomly across millions of years and I've decided that we were designed at some point because it's too perfectly intertwined across different body parts.

drowsspa · 2025-03-29T18:29:55 1743272995

If we were designed then it was a very sloppy designer. We can easily think of a myriad of ways it could have been done better. And quite mischievous to just leave all this evidence of evolution.

I think that the gnostics with the idea of a malevolent creator god would fit our world better.

candiddevmike · 2025-03-29T18:22:21 1743272541

It's unfortunate that your research led you to religion instead of learning more about evolution

cde-v · 2025-03-29T18:27:44 1743272864

It didn’t. Just typical religious lies about how various things are too complex to have been “random”. The use of the word random gives it away.

throwanem · 2025-03-29T18:30:47 1743273047

Be a little kind, won't you? It's always an occasion of pity to see someone turn his face from the world, and certainly I'm not prepared to assume myself immune to the same sorry fate.

atemerev · 2025-03-29T18:03:52 1743271432

For many people in post-Soviet countries, it was the other way around: raised as atheists, many of them found religion when it became allowed.

I wonder if the same thing will happen with China.

throwanem · 2025-03-29T18:29:18 1743272958

It's been unfashionable to be loudly or manifestly religious for quite a long time in mainstream American society.

Though the trait originates in the useless prejudices of the useless English, in a pluralistic, liberty-oriented culture it is a habit coincidentally serving several valuable purposes, none of which will require the clarification two decades hence that they would need just now. Unfortunately, liberty itself being entirely out of fashion among the nonces for the nonce to the fore, there is not much point either elaborating on or expecting the sorts of reforms which an aficionado of liberty, not at all the same as a soi-disant "libertarian," would appreciate.

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