Jasozz,
I am a Christian and became a Christian as an adult. A few things I noticed in your post.
I started to notice the discrepancies in the religion, such as asking myself how it is fair for God to judge me, who was raised in a loving Christian family, and also someone who grew up in a Hindu culture loving that religion, or in a Kiberan slum, knowing nothing but pain and sorrow for most of their life. How is that fair to begin with, coming from an all-loving God, and how is it fair for them to be judged equally on their eternal fate?
You don’t trust God to judge people fairly. How do you know God won’t take all this into consideration? In fact, if you knew your Bible you would know that it teaches God set the times and places where each of us lives. It was never by chance.
With doubt, came my engrained fear of Hell, and I told myself that I was just going through a phase, and kept going to church and tried not to think about it.
After becoming a Christian and getting to know God, I also had questions about hell as many portrayed it and the goodness of God that I was getting to know. After a study on hell, I found it is not a place of eternal torture that many portray. In fact in the end both death and hell are destroyed.
I could no longer, with a clear conscience, say to someone that I believed in God.
Since believing in God and trusting God are the basis of Christianity, then if God does exist you’re not fooling him anyway. The God of the Bible would have known all along where your heart would lead you. You may as well be honest.
The ONLY thing tethering me to Christianity was my fear of Hell and punishment, as well as the pain of losing or hurting my family if I became the ONLY non-Christian in our entire family, but that wasn’t enough to make me want to keep going to church.
If your family is the Christian family you described, then they will love and accept you no matter what your decisions in life. It may hurt them, but I doubt you would lose them.
After a rough breakup and some pretty deep depression, I thought connecting with a church might help me out a little, but unfortunately I found I could no longer get engaged with the church. I joined a Men’s group that was all about being a better man/husband/etc., which I loved, because I was still CULTURALLY a Christian, and to this day I still deeply value the teachings of serving and loving others unconditionally, as well as a great deal of other non-deity-related teachings. This wasn’t enough to light my spiritual flame though, and I stopped attending and went back to ignoring the issue.
Without a faith in God, there is little to connect you to a group of Christians.
We were discussing something about creationism in schools, and something she said took a stab at Christianity, and I immediately went on the defense to defend Christianity, and realized I had nothing to say.
Why would you if you no longer believe God?
I’ve concluded that I no longer accept the Bible as truth, and haven’t for a long time. While there are some great lessons in the Bible, overall, I do not believe in the Christian doctrine.
Again, why would you if you don’t believe God?
Now, I’m facing a lot of huge, looming fears with deconversion.
1. What if I’m wrong and there is still a God/Hell?
2. How do I tell my entirely Christian family that I don’t believe anymore?
This is not a decision that takes place in your mind, but in your heart—the totality of who you are. If you don’t believe, then you don’t believe. If there is a God you will be wrong, but you can’t believe if you don’t.
Be honest with your family. They deserve that much from you.
4. (The Big One) I now feel like life is pointless. Recently I can’t get excited about anything because my mind just jumps to “it won’t matter and you’re going to die eventually”. I’ve also developed a MASSIVE fear of my own mortality since this deconversion thing kicked into high-gear, due to A) being afraid of being wrong and there being an eternal punishment and B) feeling the brevity of life now that I’ve started really thinking about it.
I don’t think anyone can stay committed to belief in God because they fear him. People come to God because of his love for them. If you don’t have that, then a relationship with God would be pointless anyway. As for what you make of your life without a Christian understanding I cannot say.