Religious Disillusionment Quotes

I have no problem with religion, and I grew up with a strong curiosity about spiritual matters, but my searching took me away from church and community worship to the internal journey. Before my recovery began, I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

I abandoned my religious teachings after I read the Bible twice - cover to cover. It took me a couple of years.

The Pope is a mere tormentor of conscience. The assembly of his greased and religious crew in praying was altogether like the croaking of frogs, which edified nothing at all.

I went to Catholic school in and out. I'm what you call a recovering Catholic. I have many major issues with the church.

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I’ll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I’m keeping the last shell for myself.

All theological lore is becoming distasteful to me.

I did everything religion told me to do for a long time only to end up frustrated, beat down and jaded. I couldn't keep up. No matter how hard I tried, it was never enough. So I decided to quit. And I did.

Although I am a Christian, with what religion has become - a tool for so much of the bad stuff - I just say to people that I'm a person of faith.

Mary, my little girl, was confirmed in a Buddhist temple. She saw the Life write up on Buddhism, with pictures of the ceremony, and she said she wanted to be confirmed there because she only liked Jesus as a kid. She was a little disappointed in him when he grew up.

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

I don't believe in hell. The idea that a supreme being would make hell is ridiculous. An eternity of pain that results in no learning, reformation or rebirth is a nauseating idea. It's one of the reasons I left Christianity. I simply could not accept that version of God.

I did 12 years with nuns, you know. So I came out of it going, like, 'I think Jesus is all right.' The rest of it I think stinks to the high heavens.

I left the Church of England because there was a huge bundle of straw. The ordination of women was the last straw, but it was only one of many. For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England's compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn't care if something is unpopular.

I was brought up Catholic. I'm lapsed. From the age of three I was with the nuns. Now I'm an atheist.

I was about 12 or 13 years old. I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend ,just as if it were a novel, very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.

I am what is known as a benched Catholic and disillusioned by the church doctrine. I believe in things the Catholic Church does not believe in: divorce being one, and a women's right to choose being another.

I once heard a preacher who sorely tempted me to go to church no more.

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

I was born and raised in the University of Chicago area and had an uneventful middle-class Catholic childhood. I had a heavy Catholic upbringing and Catholicism is terrible - it's the reason there were slaves. Mass every morning at seven o'clock during Lent. It's a totally negative, man-made religion.

I still consider myself a very spiritual person but the structure of the church isn't really for me.

I am pleased as punch no longer to believe in a god who declares reason a sin, who will not choose many noble and great and wise things but has chosen the base things of the world, the foolish things, the weak things and the things which are not. A god who can choose his companions in eternity and prefers Jerry Falwell and Tammy Bakker over Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. I am no longer a fool for Christ's sake. And I have no more desire to be a sheep than to be a fool. It is possible to pull out justification for imposing your will on others, simply by calling your will God's will.

I was raised in a religious home. It was unreasonable enforced religion that turned me off it. It was a joyless, unpleasant, stupid, barbaric thing when I was a child and I've never gotten over that feeling. If you're talking about religion it's one thing; I don't hold Jewish religion with any more seriousness than I would any other.

You need to remember that being rejected by church is not the same as being rejected by God. God did not kick you out of church, honey. The church kicked God out of church.

When I look back at the church I grew up in, I realise that nothing about its behaviour was very Christian. It was just a social club on Sundays where people would meet up with their mates.

Christianity was from the beginning, essentially and fundamentally, life's nausea and disgust with life, merely concealed behind, masked by, dressed up as, faith in "another" or "better" life.