Finally realizing that I'm not a worthless piece of shit; that I could free myself from my self-deprecative attitude; that I mean something to the people around me.

I used to be a Christian. When I say that you might not get what I mean, so let me explain.

I used to be a Christian. My friends were all Christian, I listened to Christian music, I read apologetics, and even at one point planned to join JPUSA ( http://jpusa.org/ ). I did not understand how other people were not Christian. I could not wrap my head around the idea that other people had opinions that were different than mine. I lived with a group of Christians who I considered my friends. I tried very hard to do what God had intended according to leaders of churches and interpretations of the bible.

I had attached myself to this idea. I had made it my identity. I was a Christian.

Then one day I was driving my car, and I had felt full of emotion and pain for things I could not explain.

I pulled over and just cried. I cried because I realized how selfish and stupid I was. How arrogant I was. How much of a hypocrite I was. I cried because of the guilt that I imposed on myself. I cried because I finally didn't have to feel that same guilt anymore.

I just suddenly realized that I no longer believed in God. It's weird, there was a physical feeling of the world turning underneath my feet. It's so vivid in my mind. I can remember the smell of the car seat being slightly musty and wet. I remember that it was the morning and the sun was pulling itself up behind the houses. I don't remember why I was where I was, but I can remember being there.

I just sat there for hours and cried and cried. It was like a self immolation but in reverse. My emotions and brain and self, were tearing me down.

I look back on that memory of pain very fondly now. Knowing that it was both very hard and very necessary for my growth as a person. I can always look back at that and use it to help me get through difficult times. While I never regret being a Christian, I sometimes do think about what I could have been without Christianity, I could have left so much guilt.

Thank you for asking this question beezneez I had to end the day on kind of a lousy note and reminding me of this time has helped me to gain some perspective.

Probably beginning to come out of my depression was a big one, though I don't know if I can attribute it to any one moment. Mindfulness, counseling, and a roof rack for kayaks ended up doing wonders for me, and I've retaken some very valuable, productive and healthy mindspace from my personal demons. A large part of what allows me to feel a little bit better about my still admittedly poor long term career/life prospects are as follows.

1. I will die someday, and I have 0 control over when that will be. Therefore I should live my life in such a way as to maximize the value of my time alive.

2. I consider a life well spent if it included a good mix of work vs. play, and action to improve the lives of others. I should therefore first pursue careers which I would find fulfilling(Would directly benefit the lives of others), and would pay well.

3. Contrary to my own opinions, I am a person of value. I have positive and negative traits, and so far, the positive outweigh the negative in the minds of those whose opinions I value. (What does that say that I don't value my own that much now??) So, through the lens of others who appreciate me, I can like myself, at least a little bit, for trying to do the things that I want to do, after having been through the life events I have.

4. I do not have to 'earn my right to exist.' This one took some digging. I am an expensive person. I had my first open heart surgery at age 11, my first pacemaker placed at 14, second at 19, and innumerable visits to the cardiologist, electrophysiologist, pediatric cardiologist, pediatric electrophysiologist, genetic counselor, geneticist, etc. I've seen the bills. A very large dollar value has been attached to the value of my life, and a large part of my issues with self-hate and feelings of worthlessness have come from this unbalanced ledger. Rationally, I know that this doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but at a level I cannot shake completely (yet) I feel indebted.

Probably the day I checked into emergency and realized the multi week fever I had was not the result of a flu or the common cold, but the result of an extreme case of severe aplastic anemia. And had I chose to 'sleep it off' one or two more days like I planned to, I probably would have died in my sleep. I'm still recovering, not cured, but stable.

It made me realize that I'm not afraid of death. When the doctors were diagnosing me it took a few weeks to come to a conclusion. On my first night in emergency they told me it could be Leukaemia. I was waiting for the shock to wear off, but it never came. I wasn't in shock. I was annoyed. That this circumstance it going to be a ball and chain on my existence. Just a privileged reaction, far from noble. Being in Canada with paid health care and all.

It's been a few years. I can't really place it. There has been a big shift, but I don't know what. It's kind of like how we can't recognize definitive fashion eras, or pop music tastes until 10-15 years later. Petty things don't matter. Big things don't matter. I speak more frankly about my opinions. Maybe that would have happened regardless of this event. The only things I care about is people I'm close to and family. But there is always a voice in the back of my head saying that we're all no more complex than some hyperactive bacteria in a petri dish, and when we perish it was all for nothing.

Just FYI, to "lose your religion", originally at least, has nothing to do with religion. It means "to lose your shit", roughly.

I was raised Christian, but gave it up in my early teens; called myself "agnostic" for a long time, but "atheist" is clearly the correct term, for me.

I don't remember any specific trigger; but it wasn't long after I read the entire Bible that I changed my mind. Actually reading the book goes a long way towards exposing the lack of coherence in Christianity; possibly moreso for me, because the sect I was raised in (Southern Baptist) is one of those that strongly believes in the literal truth of the Bible.

Mine's a lot less dramatic than some of the answers already here, but about 2 years ago I stopped being a Christian.

Basically for as long as I've been able to think critically about my own beliefs, I've understood intellectually that there's no rational reason to be religious. I struggled with this for a long time. I didn't want to believe in God, since it didn't make sense to, but for some time I had an overwhelming feeling that Christianity was true, so I believed. Then a couple years ago, and I can't say exactly what triggered it (although it might have something to do with the end of a period of consistently feeling lonely and powerless), I realized one day that that feeling was just gone. So I stopped believing in God.

When I realized that other people didn't all suck, and that it was actually me who had the shitty attitude about everything. People didn't avoid me because they were dumb jocks/stuck up preps, they avoided me because I was a creepy asshole.

Pretending that this post is about religion, I was raised in a fairly religious Christian household and absorbed surprising, and actually really useful in a literary way, amounts of Christian mythos. Around 13 I started checking out Wiccanism and was into that on some level starting at "very literally and seriously" and devolving into "not really very literally or seriously but meditation and nature are good" by 18. I did help found a Pagan club at college but that's a story for the "what event changed your life" thread that I'm not yet telling.

I had been interested in Buddhism and meditation for a while by that point. Around the time college started getting hard and I started getting anxious I had a very dear friend who taught me the mantra "om mani padme hum" and showed me her prayer beads. Repeating that mantra, often with the use of prayer beads, over the next two years helped keep me sane and keep my anxiety in check. I would often think I couldn't breathe and would use the mantra to distract myself (prevent myself from making it worse) and then regulate my breathing. It was very meaningful to me. During some of this time I also believed in reincarnation. Reincarnation was actually really important to me for a while then. As a result of the Buddhist influence on my life I got a tattoo of the Om symbol on my chest. It remains very meaningful. I have found I have picked the mantra back up lately, and also in times of stress or stressed breathing (when I think I can't catch my breath, for instance).

It became clear to me, probably by the end of high school but definitely by the end of college, that the existence of divinity simply wasn't very important to me. If a God did exist that cared about whether I had premarital sex and worshipped him, not questioning anything "he" said (and by "he" I mean "his disciplines wrote down hundreds or thousands of years ago before there was a reliable way to copy this information other than by hand" aka "how many layers did this get distilled before i saw it?") then I didn't care for that god and that god seemed petty and stupid. And in that context hell could be a great party: sex, drugs, and rock'n'roll baby! If there was a God that didn't care about the particulars but just wanted me to be a good person I figured hopefully we'd square at the end and if we didn't, well I deserved it right? But still if I was all powerful, why would I spend my existence caring so much about one species on one measly planet? Fuck that I'd be exploring the solar system. And if there wasn't a God, then I was also square.

I can't find a version of God that makes sense to me. I don't bother with superstition if I can help it and I don't like to believe in things that don't make sense and especially those that don't make sense and don't have any evidence. Joan of Arc was cool for instance but she was also nutso. Pretty sure most prophets, etc, were.

The question that arrives in my mind when faced with the idea of a god is why? Why would a god exist? What evidence is there? Why would God only care about humans? Why would God only care about this planet? Why would God care about tattoos (levitcus) or pork (muslims, jews)? How petty of such a being - how vain of us to imagine we would be his or her only, entire concern! The only thing so interested in the fate of humans is humans.

It comforts me to know/believe that this is it; that when we die, we break apart like a spark; that our existence, singly or as a whole, is far from the end all and be all for this world and universe. There is more beyond us, it's just what's around us every day. It's just us and the void but the fact that it's a void encourages me to stay out of it, and live with what i've got to the utmost.

If there is a thing that exists that seems to us like a God, I posit it is a member of the fourth dimension, not unlike the 3-dimensional sphere that intrudes on Flatland and baffles the flatlanders. It is not something we can comprehend, and as a result it is also nothing like what we imagine - but it is, in the end, explicable.

It happened sometime during my sophomore year of college. I had been raised Baptist and it was during this time I was really checking out what other traditions had to say. I was especially checking out Buddhism and had started meditating around this time.

What really did it for me was when I realized the magnitude of the word "omnipresent." Christians are taught that God is omnipresent, omnipotent, and omnicient. Well, I thought, if God is omniporesent, doesn't that mean that I'm god? Doesn't that mean everyone else is god? Doesn't that mean that the gods of other religions are the same god I beileve in? I realized how silly the concept of religion is. It merely categorizes different ways of having reverence for and experiencing the same power. To me, whether he/she/it is referred to as God, Source, the Universe, Allah, YHWH, etc., it's all the same thing and it's within us. Lately I've been been on a path that's leading me to believe that God is a term for experienceing pure love.