Welcome to the asylum. Enjoy your stay.

I was never a believer in christianity, so there was no "leaving".
From a very early age, I knew it was ALL garbage.

The stupid shit that it claims.

I turned fourteen.

As a child I was raised in the JW cult and they just love all of the gory bits of Revelations. I would have to sit through hours of talk about the global slaughter to come when Jebus and his host of angels would slaughter the unrighteous (non JW's - what a surprise) to the point where the bodies would be piled high around the surviving JW's and the blood would reach up over our ankles. A my mother wondered why I had nightmares, possibly from the mental child abuse of having to listen to that sick shit every week and then fight my way to and from school through every schoolyard bully looking for a JW to pick on.
Religion is some very, sick shit.

I was teaching a year 6 class when one rapture was announced on the news, we discussed it and on the day as people arrived we all joked about how we were not good enough to be raptured. One student was not there at roll call. Rounds of laughter about how god was going to regret that (she was a lovely kid but could talk the hind leg off a donkey) then she turned up late. For the rest of the year the students all joked about how she was returned by god. She claims she slept in.

Reading the whole bible made me stop being a christian.

Shortly after I was confirmed as Anglican, around age 11 or 12 there was a phrase the congregation was obliged to repeat during a service one Sunday . Went something like.. “I am not worthy to pick up the crumbs from under the lord’s table.” I immediately took offence and thought, “why not? What did I do that was so heinous?”

I couldn’t think of a reasonable answer and from that moment on I felt the whole thing was bullshit.

Once I started to really think about it it all just seemed soooo...stupid.

I pray every day that all these assholes will get raptured up, yet my prayers go unanswered!!?!

I was never in it, being raised in a mainly secular home.

I left Christianity when I realised that I had been told nothing but lies by self-seeking ignorant assholes.

I feel for your young daughter and I hope she recovers. I had her experience when I was nine years old.

I always thought it was bullshit. I finally read the Bible front to back and that just reinforced my non belief.

I studied it. Once I learned about it’s history, politics and opportunistic mythology, leaving was easy. Low-hanging fruit. I didn’t go straight to atheism, however, but explored a much more intellectually rigorous and abstract theistic tradition, which made me work harder to poke holes in. But I found those holes, and poked them.

Rapture anxiety. Oh, yes. That "great joy at his appearing" built on very little scripture at all. The belief that the world gets so wicked that god will have to remove believers from it and this could happen at any time (but nobody knows just when) so you have to be sharp and stay "prayed up." I love it. The book of Revelation talks of this and that book was declared to be a part of our modern day biblical canon some 300 years after the time of Jesus. I guess this means Jesus knew nothing of Revelation at all. Those that control us know all about it. There are so many different religious writings and all of them did not make it into the one big book. They are contradictory. Those within the big bible book and those that are not.

It was bible study that brought me to a conclusion that most of this is ridiculous nonsense. Recently in posts online a believer told me that "when I die I will know the truth of heaven and hell." I asked her to explain exactly which heaven or hell I was going to go to. Christian, Muslim, or some other lesser known doctrinal place. She was Christian and you cannot prove the bible with the bible. Religion is a farce!

I remember having vivid dreams as a child. Everything was chaos, earthquakes and fire! Angels hovered in the skies above. There was a large billboard rising up out of the mountains. It was filled with the names of those who were saved. Frantically I searched and searched for my name, but couldn't find it!

I would wake from this dream terrified !!!

Got tired of the bullshit

Sanity.

I was a Mormon, freshly baptized even, when I took a college class (Ethics) for fun. The teacher, Mr. Scott, hosted a student activist meeting at his house and introduced me to Age Of Reason.
When I closed that book I became a Deist. When I told a friend about it he showed me a cute book called Tao Of Pooh and I loved it but didn't become a Taoist then. Just aware of it. First I evolved into an Atheist and I tend to share my thoughts with folks. That lasted for 20 years but 18 months ago a friend pointedly asked me why I kept going on about religion being the problem and it had an impact. I couldn't have said why, then, but it made me question the value of believing in nothing. That tears down a belief while offering nothing in return so only leaves folks empty. I saw that intuitively at that point. I then looked around and saw Tao quietly waiting in my closet. Since I recently vacated that closet I hadn't noticed but there it was and I embraced it. I began meditating more than usual and the dominoes began falling faster after detaching. That is where I am now and it's having physical effects on behavior I consider ingrained in me. Something I was powerless to prevent happening (bipolar shit) has not happened in the last month. It's had provocation but the frustration didn't get acted out. I do not remember a time when that didn't erupt out of me like a slipping fault. I must say that I like this calmness. Jesus didn't provide it but I'm no longer antagonistic toward him, either. He was god as we are all God and said as much. He's not to blame for what men have done with him.

You know when they started talking about sex being a sin, I was like fuck this shit....

In response to the meme, unfortunately, it's not limited to religious folks. For example, environmental activists scare children with a similar effect by saying that our planet is being destroyed and we are all going to die soon. That is the kind of line one ex Extinction Rebellion member used to say repeatedly to his daughter. When she started having nightmares and dreading the thought that she has only several years to live, the father left the group, realising how he's almost destroyed his daughter. Children are our future. Why do anything to destroy their minds instead of protecting them?

I left the church at 14 and gave up believing when reaching the age of reason and possesing the ability for critical thinking sometime in my twenties.

My mom had been exposed to hardshell BS as a kid and saw right through it. She was quietly relieved when I steered away from the militant types during my short foray in Christianity.

I stopped making exceptions for religion and the supernatural and started applying the kind of reasoning to those things as I did to everything else in my life.

It all fell apart pretty quickly.

People that feel they have the right to say that to children should have the shit kicked out of them.
That idiot missionary whose body was dragged out to the beach when he visited a primitive island a few years got what he deserved.
The entire Rapture/Tribulation mythology is fairly recent. Sometime in he late 1800's.

I never left, simply because I was never a member of Jesus and god(s) lovers death cult society!!!!