I made the large meme down below some time ago and thought I'd share it here. What do you think? I would love to hear from you about the WHYs of your EX-believer status. I often feel such a sense of community with ex-believers. So many of us have experienced enough cognitive dissonance that we found it intolerable to stay in the church. As for me, the mind games and shame didn't sit well with me. I couldn't ignore them in the church when I was working so hard in my life at the time to be completely honest and healthy with my thinking. Making the decision to live a highly ethical life meant that my brain was in turmoil over my religious beliefs. The internal struggle for me began in earnest in the early 90s, I guess. I have always been a heavy reader and my reading at that time was deeply spiritual and widely religious and psychological. It didn't take long for the cognitive dissonance to set in. I tried to make it all work for so long. First I decided that it was religion in particular that I couldn't live with. I left the church but kept on with my belief, my reading, my thinking. The intellectual struggle kept me upset and in distress quite often in those days. How about you? Have you read any of Karen Armstrong's books? It might have been her book A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that nailed the final nail in the coffin of religion for me. Not the final nail for a god, but for religion. The final nail for any belief of a supernatural being of any sort came to me while I was reading The Bible.