It’s very common for deconverts to turn to other belief systems. Both my wife and girlfriend are ex-Christian, but they ultimately turned to paganism. It makes them happy and they don’t require me to agree with them, so tolerance is possible.

For myself, I think we experience things we don’t understand all the time. The problem is that “I don’t know” doesn’t justify “therefore god/magic/supernatural.” I don’t question that people experience extraordinary things. I question their conclusions about things they don’t understand.

There seems to be significant crossover between people who believe in religion and the supernatural/conspiracy. The simple belief in a higher power of any kind is already requiring a person to use belief instead of fact.

The few people I know who were religious as young people and turned atheist tend to also not believe in other supernatural or conspiracy nonsense. This is, likely, due to the similar qualities it takes to believe in god are also required to believe in aliens or ghosts or Bigfoot.

Watching the UFO subreddit (when I used Reddit) convince themselves they are looking at a UFO that is clearly a balloon being filmed from a plane moving at 400 MPH is so silly. But as silly as people believing in god. At least IMO.

I “believe” in aliens. I also believe in psychedelics.

I do not believe in the supernatural whatsoever. Some things have yet to be discovered, certainly, but we’re not going to suddenly prove the existence of ghosts, curses, werewolves, bigfoots, etc.

The reason for my deconversion was entirely related to my epistemology; I realized that one could believe literally anything if one did not require reliable, high quality, supporting evidence of said belief.

This thought hit me in an instant sometime in 2016, when I had been out of church settings for a long time by that point but one day I was thinking about christians convincing themselves that a certain US presidential candidate was anointed by God / on their side / whatever. It was like snapping out of a dream/delusion; belief in anything without good evidence suddenly seemed ridiculous.

Since insufficient evidence is available for any supernatural thingies, I no longer believe any such claims.

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Absolutely not. I think some religions have some good qualities if you cherry-pick them at face value, but the requirement to believe in something that some ancient guy says “just trust me, bro” about doesn’t work. The supernatural aspects are part of their control system, kind of like how scam emails are riddled with typos so only the most susceptible will fall for them.

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When I left Christianity, it liberated me to explore other faiths and spiritualities outside of what was allowed of my very narrow and restrictive upbringing.

I’m still mostly a skeptic, but I still find religion fascinating, and leaving my faith got me to discover more about Christianity than I have in the past. I’ve also been doing research into Islam, Buddhism, and generally any faith that has peaked my interest.

I do find reincarnation by Buddhist traditions to be the most comforting. If there was to be any version of the afterlife, I like the idea of a continuation of existence, or even existing as a different form of life or being, rather than being in an unchanged state for eternity.

I’m still figuring myself out for the most part.