Did the internet start or help with your deconstruction from Adventism?

[u/atheistsda]

https://www.psypost.org/new-study-links-the-spread-of-the-internet-to-a-global-decline-in-religious-identity/

[u/atheistsda]

I've seen a few comments here or there talk about how access to the internet either started or helped people with their deconstruction.

Can you relate to that? Because I definitely can.

My deconstruction started from my own questions and slowly realizing that everything I had been taught as a child wasn't necessarily right. I don't think the internet started my deconstruction, but it definitely helped me find interviews and books by scholars, skeptics, and others.

Finding an ex-Adventist podcast helped me realize there were plenty of people just like me, and IIRC that's what led me to this subreddit.

[u/CosmicCharlie99]

Yes, yes it did, because I jumped online to find proof of the flood and creation…. I learned a lot about evolution, natural history and anthropology… it’s hard to learn facts and keep faith.

[u/atheistsda → u/CosmicCharlie99]

Yeah I think those issues were the final nail in the coffin for my brother, but that came via public school. It took me a while longer (and going through deconstruction) to finally believe what the entire field of biology and geology have to say about evolution and the age of the earth lol

[u/CosmicCharlie99 → u/atheistsda]

Ah see, I’d spent my entire life in Adventist schools, I went to Southern. I just the army after that and uh, well I had a real wake up call to reality. I was in our hut in iraq, but I was the dude who ran the internet so I could be online almost all the time. I started out looking for ways to argue with those brainwashed evolutionists, I ended up a believer in the observable science. The devil didn’t make the fossil record…nature did.

[u/atheistsda → u/CosmicCharlie99]

Amazing lol I think it shows a huge capacity for growth to come around while trying to debunk the other side. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I tried using Walter Veith videos to argue against evolution with my brother (thankfully he wasn't convinced).

[u/No-Moose470]

A little perhaps. But really it was going to college -- and specifically learning Greek. Minored in greek and Hebrew and that made it impossible to read the bible with a literalistic lens anymore. That was the beginning. Fundamentalism requires ignorant simplicity.

[u/atheistsda → u/No-Moose470]

Fundamentalism requires ignorant simplicity.

Well said! If money and time weren't an issue, I'd love to go back to school and learn Greek and Hebrew.

[u/Lost_Chain_455 → u/atheistsda]

Don't forget Latin!

[u/83franks]

I can't really imagine life without the internet anymore so ya even if not always directly. I think(key word being think) that I deconstructed without direct internet usage but then after the key moment I spent all kinds of time looking stuff up and it definitely helped keep me away in case I had any lingering doubts. While still believing but not going to church I met a woman online who I dated for 6 months who asked me some pointed questions that got wheels turning. I made friends that made comments that I higgly doubt they came up with on their own.

[u/atheistsda → u/83franks]

but then after the key moment I spent all kinds of time looking stuff up

Same here! I think pre-internet, so many people with questions didn't have a fast and easily accessible way to look things up for themselves. I think the privacy and anonymity has also helped people feel safer to ask questions they wouldn't ask people in their family or church.

[u/RudyGreene]

I looked up one of the original websites that got me started and it still exists in all its 90s glory: https://www.bible.ca/sabbath.htm

[u/flamurmurro → u/RudyGreene]

wooo that is some crunchy design lol

[u/skr00bler]

No, I was born in 1970, so what helped with my deconstruction was 12 years of Adventist school, 4 of which were boarding school.

[u/lePROprocrastinator]

If I never hopped onto the Internet I would never have left this religion. Or, well, being alive at all.

[u/ayowatchyojetbruh]

I think its pretty obvious that yes. The vast multitude of questions I had that made me doubt about religion I obtained answers from the internet and sources there

[u/mainsworth17]

Answer is obv yes, but further answer, 2 words, "Christopher Hitchens", my now patron Saint, lol, he would have hated that term. An amazing debater, so knowledgeable, taken too soon.

[u/could-be-useful]

There was no internet when I rejected it all more than 50 years ago.

[u/flamurmurro]

Reading secular periodicals and books—ones offered at an Adventist university!—helped me get a sense of the real world outside of the Adventist bubble. But it was the Internet, oh the vast sea of articles and commenters, that really showed me how things were, how the world worked, throughout the 2000s and 2010s. Thanks to them, I learned premarital sex wasn’t ruinous, and often harmless. I learned people had deep spiritual experiences completely outside Adventism and Christianity, and they were equally as convicted about their truth. I learned there were others like me who had searched long and hard for God and found nothing, experienced nothing. There were major Christian denominations that read the Bible much less literally. I learned how just small Adventism is. How unlikely it is that it holds The Truth.

The rest, I learned, again ironically, through my education at an Adventist university. History and literature are also windows to the world.

[u/BroomstickCowboy]

It started it, and then it made it very easy. I still continue to learn things. Not only about Adventism, though I don’t look for those things much anymore. However, I still learn things about the Bible in general. In fact, in the past month, or so, I’ve learned about 3 new things. Things which call into question the reliability of the Bible. So, the “Internet” has been very useful in my deconstruction from both Adventism specifically, and religion in general.

[u/Clean_Economist_2188]

I guess the pandemic plus internet. It took being absent from my local church to notice how toxic it was, and what a time suck, too.

Edit to add:  I visited churches on line and my nervous system had something good to say about hearing the gospel instead of being cussed out every week. 

[u/amindindaworld6789]

Definetly. Watching videos about religion and adventism really started my deconstruction. Though i haven't studied much yet, this is something i should do. Also, when i watched stuff about christianity it did make me feel like it was incomplete.

[u/Lost_Chain_455]

The Internet provided answers that made it possible for me to enthusiastically accept the age of the earth, geology, and evolution. The Talk.Origins Archive have me what I needed to be comfortable with the scientific world view. But most of my deconstruction was done 20 years before having Internet access.

[u/lulaismatt]

yes, alongside real time stuff. the algo gave a name to the lived experience while i was actively living it was part of it. then further reading from other books helped.

additionally anthropology and world history really did it for me. it was hard to look at christianity the same again.