We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (with Kate Cohen)

Today's guest Kate Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post and author of the new book "We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too)."

[deidrekline]

I grew up mormon and I just didn’t take any of it seriously. I enjoyed the social opportunities. I just walked away at 15 because they didn’t like me questioning. Never looked back. Never considered it for my kids. It just seemed silly. After listening to the difficult emotional and practical struggles of people who believe and then lose their faith, I’m so glad I’ve never had to deal with all that trauma and self doubt. I never cared what others believed, their right, but recently the Christian Nationalist movement, trying to take away my rights, force their beliefs on me, I’m becoming hostile. It’s now become important to declare my atheist position.

[mrenrollment]

there is pressure, there is condemnation, there is rejection, all from the loving believers

[uncleanunicorn]

Definitely does not need to be passed on to the next generation. Let faith be a relic of history.

[kfaulknerstudio]

I got to a point where it was impossible to hide my facial expression and reaction when when a family member would talk about belief in actual angels on earth etc. Now, I see it as a necessity to speak out against magical thinking if we’re ever going to have a shot at solving real problems.

[thinkthinker]

I reacted the same way around having a child. The buck stops here! No brainwashing and BS. I taught him TO THINK, to ask questions. I have been as honest and transparent as I could be about everything with my son. He is a grateful 20-something now. He is no fool. He is a kind, smart and self-aware young man.

[captainsunshine]

It was becoming a pastor and feeling an immense responsibility for what I taught others that made me finally have that honest conversation with myself and brought me to the point of admitting to myself that I no longer believed. Excellent video and great topic!

[erink]

I *did* create my own winter holiday: Redire ad solem (return of the sun), celebrated the day after the winter solstice. I chose this because I recognize the very strong connection between my mood and the amount of sunlight. And that is a very real thing, much more real than a sky daddy. I don’t worship the sun, but I acknowledge its importance in my life, and I celebrate my hemisphere’s tilt back in its direction.

[eagle-eye]

I can’t describe the terror I felt as a child trying very hard to “believe” knowing that I would go to hell if I didn’t.

[EllEss]

She was an absolute delight to listen to and I look forward to checking out her book! Thanks for having her as a guest!

[EnlightenedMindset]

People who speak up and speak out in favor of secularism, atheism and against religion are heroes for doing so regardless of their circumstances. Their courage is rare and should always be acknowledged and rewarded. Religion has had it's "fun" with it's never-ending terrorist campaign upon all of humanity since it's inception. It's well-past time we all move on from it.

[kellydalstok]

I have heard people complain about how impersonal and formulaic church ceremonies can be, especially at funerals. The advantage of secular ceremonies is, that you can make them entirely about the persons involved. No deity or their son will take center stage.
My son’s funeral service was incredibly sad, just thinking about it makes me tear up even after nine years, but it was also very beautiful because of the way his two best friends spoke about him during the service. It was 100% about him.
Similar with my daughter’s wedding; the ceremony was relaxed and personal.
I have been an atheist for all if my 63 years and I never felt like there was a god-shaped hole in my existence. Not for one minute.

[lynnejarrow]

I also came from a background like Kate's but I'm in my 60s. My mother and grandmother were Holocaust survivors so I knew of this atrocity at an age when most kids didn't imagine such things. I was 7 when I realized I didn't believe in God. In a way I never actually "believed" actively - my parents told me there was a God and I accepted that as being true just as I accepted everything else they told me in the way that small children do. I never experienced "feeling" God as some people say they do. No one answered me when I prayed.

I was bothered about something they told me about God: God was all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere (invisible but could appear as a burning bush or stuff like that). Why did God allow the Holocaust to occur? If I were all-powerful, I would never allow such a thing because that would be evil. Was God evil?

In the foyer of the temple my family attended was a marble wall with the 10 Commandments chiseled into it. Why was the first commandment - "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Why even say this if there is only one God?

Possibility #2 was that maybe there were other gods too. What were they? The only other gods I could find anything on in the library were the Greek gods. I liked them better because they had goddesses, especially Athena - she was right up my alley. I tried praying to Athena but she was just as unresponsive as Yahweh.

This left me with the final conclusion - God didn't exist. I didn't know there was such a thing as atheists. I thought I was the only person in the world who didn't believe. I knew I was supposed to believe. I begged God to show me some evidence he existed - a burning bush, a voice from the sky, anything but there was nothing.

I was nine when I "came out" to my parents. I am disgusted by lies and could not pretend any longer. Furthermore, I harbored then, and still do, the suspicion that many people who claim to believe don't actually believe, the topic of Kate's book. My family escaped people trying to murder them because they wouldn't say Jesus was born of a virgin etc, so I figured many people were too scared to say they didn't believe. Other people who claimed to believe behaved really badly and I didn't understand how they could be so dishonest, cruel and greedy if they actually believed God was in the sky taking notes on them.

It was not talking snakes that made me an atheist - I was willing to accept a talking snake. What I could not accept was the tree in the Garden of Eden story. Why would God put a tree in the garden and then tell the people not to eat it? But even stranger was the nature of the tree: the knowledge of good and evil. I thought the whole point, the necessary prerequisite to being a good person, to living a moral life, was knowing what was good and what was evil. I could not get past Genesis without being utterly disgusted by God's behavior.

Morality made me an atheist. I wrote a book of that title because I'm sick and tired of people claiming you need religion to be moral. In fact, the more religious you are, the more likely you are to be just the opposite based on what I've seen in the world these 67 years.

[michaeldeaton]

When I started doubting Christianity, I was about 8 years old in Sunday Bible School at my church and we were having a group prayer. For the first time during a prayer in my life I looked up and opened my eyes, looked at the people around me.

I realized the majority of them, like me, didn't really believe this nonsense. What they wanted was to believe, so very desperately they wanted to believe, they wanted it to be true, but you could see on the faces of those children and those teachers, the truth. They didn't really believe it either. They just wanted to believe it very very badly.

Pretty much from that moment on I've been an atheist I guess. It sure feels like that's the moment I lost any hope of believing. I simply did not want to believe something that isn't true that badly. I was not emotionally attached to this fiction like those around me were.

[tdsollog]

I completely agree. Ask questions and think critically. Live an authentic life.

[baskeptic]

I had doubts in Sunday school when they told us we had to have "faith". I thought, "huh, they can't prove this stuff". I probably would have been an atheist as a kid but I saw a film about near death experiences and clung to that as "proof" of afterlife. It took me another 30 years to accept that I had no good reason to believe any of it. Good for you for figuring it out so quickly.

[seandonahue]

I like a magnet I got in Portland. “Bigfoot saw me but nobody believes him.”

[f.demascio]

Grew up w/o any formal religious practice in my family, but they were allegedly Lutheran.
When offered to attend church qith friends and neighbors, i always accepted and went. Mom looked at me screwy.
I attended:
"Christian" with the fundamentalists down the street.
Baptist with the kids i met in the neighborhood.
Catholic with the next door neighbors.
Attended CCD classes after being shipped off to my dad.
Four Square Pentecostal with my eventual foster family.
Always had doubts about the "truth."
Became agnostic then atheist.
Did not raise my son in any religion, but always talked to him about going ro a church if he ever wanted to.
During covid lock downs, he found christianity with a friend from school. He began reading the Bible on his own and I always engaged him with what he read, and continued to offer to take him to church. He declined.
Then as he read many horrible things in the Bible, he had a crisis. Too many contradictions.
We put him in touch with someone who was a professor of theology, and Jewish.
After getting his questions answered, he put down the Bible, shook off the crisis and wept. He's now free of it and identifies as an atheist.
If you really look into organized religion...
The hipocracy you encounter will open your eyes.

[puttentanesame]

Lucked out growing up having both parents (pre-kid) fed up and done with Was invited by neighborhood kids to attend Sunday school at the nearby Assembly of God with the promise of pink & white frosted animal cookies. With sprinkles. I vaguely recall a fight Mom & Dad got into over us going. Our lust for those cookies won out. For a few tortuous Sundays, I impatiently waited for the end of 'Outer Limits' sermons, song-singing and prayers. For that sweet, sweet payoff. Thanks for the cookies, Assembly of God!

[MikeOfKorea]

My change was slow. I left evangelicalism for the Episcopal Church in an attempt to salvage my faith without the evangelical bullcrap. However, about age 40, during the Nicen Creed, I realized I actually did not believe this. I picked up my jacket and hat, and quietly left the building. I stopped going to church 20 years after my first passing doubts while I was in christian college.

[madeleine]

I was raised in Christian Science.
Finally left after 30 years.
I’m happy to be free from the insanity every day.
Thank you for this terrific talk.