Why I Left Christianity | From Seminary To The Cemetery

Overview

Justin explains his personal journey leaving Christianity, emphasizing that he is not trying to convince others to leave and that he feels no anger toward God or the church. He frames his change as a shift from belief to nonbelief—one that then compelled him to stop living in ways consistent with that earlier belief.

How His Exit Began

• Commitment in his mid-to-late teens: He says he committed his life to Jesus around age 16–17, after growing up with some Catholic/Christian background and after feeling his teenage life was headed toward trouble.
• Active church involvement: He became an active church attendee, said the “sinner’s prayer,” made vows, and pursued discipleship.
• Initial confidence from the New Testament: At first, he felt his faith held up while reading the New Testament, which he claims contains fewer issues that challenge belief.

Bible Study and Training Increased Doubt

• Bible College/Seminary did not resolve questions: After high school, as he studied—including pursuing a master’s in divinity—he found the process produced more questions rather than answers.
• Textual criticism and contradictions: Reading and comparing biblical contradictions, especially after becoming interested in textual criticism through Bart Ehrman, led him to conclude that some conflicts are not easily resolved.
• Old Testament problems he says go beyond rationalization: He argues there are deeper issues, including:
  • Samuel vs. Chronicles numeric discrepancies in David’s campaigns—different counts of horsemen/foot soldiers while the same events are retold.
  • Cause-of-census contradiction: in Samuel, God incites David; in Chronicles, Satan incites David.
• Scientific/accuracy concerns: He claims some topics are often treated as ancient misunderstandings, but remain troubling because the Bible is portrayed as word-for-word inspired, including:
  • The firmament as a physical dome.
  • Dietary rules describing animals as “chewing the cud,” which he claims conflicts with the biology described.
  • Passages implying a cosmology inconsistent with modern understanding (including Earth’s shape), while noting apologetic responses (e.g., “circle” vs. “sphere”).

Text Preservation and “Inerrancy” Didn’t Reassure Him

• Doubts about certainty: He struggles with claims that only the original autographs were inerrant, arguing that if God could not preserve the text reliably, believers cannot know what the originals actually said.
• Reconstruction still feels uncertain: He says later attempts to reconstruct original wording (e.g., Dead Sea Scrolls, the Septuagint, scholarly guesses) do not provide certainty about the exact original text.

Moral and Theological Issues with the Old Testament

He says his doubts deepened when studying the Old Testament’s portrayal of God, including:

• “Ban”/conquest violence against the Canaanites: He argues that common justifications—that the people were wicked and therefore deserved it—do not resolve the ethical problem, especially because the biblical text frames the Canaanites’ “cursed” status as tied to earlier genealogy. He also contends the “ban” closely resembles broader ancient Near Eastern conquest practices, where total dedication/annihilation is treated as a sacrifice to a deity, making it feel culturally embedded rather than uniquely divine.

• Sin/impurity and ritual mechanisms: He critiques the worldview that connects impurity to unclean spirits and ritual processes:

  • He describes blood rituals (including Day of Atonement and purification rites) as functioning like a kind of spiritual “detergent,” transferring impurity through ritual.
  • He specifically challenges the logic of the scapegoat rite, arguing that if sin/impurity is transferable, it contradicts his understanding of causality and contamination.

  • Laws affecting women and slavery: He argues certain laws subordinate women and non-Hebrews, including:

  • Sexual violence laws that, in his view, protect male perpetrators and compensate husbands rather than centering the victim.

  • Different manumission rules for male versus female slaves.
  • Jubilee/slavery of foreign nations: he interprets Leviticus 25 as allowing lifelong hereditary slavery for non-Israelite “foreign nations,” which he claims would perpetuate harm indefinitely across generations.
  • Ancient misconceptions about sin/corruption: He argues the Old Testament reflects ancient ideas—such as hereditary “seed” corruption—that he sees as misguided about how sin and corruption work.

Big-Picture Cosmology and Afterlife Doubts

• Divine “location” and the heavens: He questions the Bible’s depiction of divine location, arguing biblical “heavens” function like a physical celestial realm, yet he sees no evidence for a separate spiritual plane.

• Heaven/Hell framework: He challenges the logic of salvation as achieved through Jesus’s blood/faith rather than actual righteousness, suggesting it would be unnecessary to create an Earth-and-afterlife system—why not create the redeemed directly in heaven?

• Resurrection coherence across the biblical timeline: He claims later-stage Old Testament views of resurrection (while implying earlier views differ) undermine coherence across scripture and points to apocryphal/apocalyptic sources (such as Enoch and Dead Sea Scroll materials) as places where ideas are more developed.

Final “Straw”: DNA and Human Origins

• DNA evidence: He says a culminating turning point was DNA evidence, particularly “DNA scarring,” which he claims shows patterns shared with primates but unique to human primate ancestry.

• Conclusion about origins: He interprets this as evidence that humans emerged from primates and concludes that the best explanation is evolutionary descent, not divine creation.

• Afterlife and God become less plausible: He implies that once he accepted this, the afterlife and God became less convincing.

The Moment He Fully Stopped Believing

• Years of continued attendance: He initially stayed in church for years, hoping new evidence would restore belief.

• Prayer without change: He prayed for guidance but felt nothing changed.

• Belief cessation as “waking from a dream”: He describes belief ending like waking from a vivid dream—religious guilt and fear-based motivations disappeared, along with the need to “please God” or constantly manage Christian obligations.

• Unavoidability through behavior: He says leaving was unavoidable because his actions were tied to what he believed.

Closing Stance

• No bitterness: He repeatedly states he has no bitterness toward Christians and sometimes still attends services for social reasons.

• Not trying to push others out: He does not want to push others to leave, but says he personally cannot remain Christian because the claims no longer seem true to him.

• Outcome: He concludes that he found “better answers elsewhere.”

Presenters or Contributors

• Justin (speaker)