While I have covered the topic of reasons for leaving faith before, there is an interesting piece on NPR with interviews of actual young people who have walked away from their religion of upbringing. Here are some samples.
Kyle Simpson, 27, raised Christian. He has a tattoo on the inside of his wrist that says “Salvation from the cross” in Latin.
“It’s a little troublesome now when people ask me. I tell them and they go, ‘Oh, you’re a Christian,’ and I try to skirt the issue now. They go, ‘What does that mean?’ and it’s like, “It’s Latin for ‘I made a mistake when I was 18.’
Maybe when he was a believer he should have learned about Leviticus 19:28.
19:28 Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.
Here is another interesting one.
Yusuf Ahmad, 33, raised Muslim, is now an atheist. His doubts set in as a child with sacred stories he just didn’t believe.
“Like the story of Abraham — his God tells him to sacrifice his son. Then he takes his son to sacrifice him, and he turns into a goat. I remember growing up, in like fifth [or] sixth grade I’d hear these stories and be like, ‘That’s crazy! Why would this guy do this? Just because he heard a voice in his head, he went to sacrifice his son and it turned into a goat?’ There’s no way that this happened. I wasn’t buying it.
“Today if some guy told you that ‘I need to sacrifice my son because God told me to do it,’ he’d be locked up in a crazy institution.”
It is encouraging to see this kind of insight among those raised Muslim as well. But he is, of course, not the first to have found this story unfathomable.
“If any us saw Abraham on the roof of the building raising his knife, we would, at the very least, call the police!”
And this “wisdom” comes from Abraham, the patriarch of all three “great” faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
