The Atheist Blogger

Whether you like the term “deconvert” or prefer “conversion to atheism”, a recent investigative essay by Kieran Bennett has had quite a varied response. In light of this, I thought it might be interesting to run a poll to see how many people attribute their “deconversion” to Kieran’s conclusive factors.

Unlike previous polls, you can select multiple answers since there are probably multiple reasons. I’ve tried to reword a few factors so that ex-Muslims, Jews etc can also answer.

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Kieran Bennett (an atheist blogger and member of the forums) has analysed 117 Christian deconversion stories, and written a very interesting and informative essay on “What works in deconverting Christians?“.

His investigation found that:

• 14.89% were dissatisfied with some of the answers given to them by priests or other religious people.
• 14.89% saw that the religious doctrine wasn’t compatible with science and reality.
• 12.76% came to the realisation that religious dogma was “internally incoherent” and illogical.
• 10.63% read the Bible and found that for the Holy Book of Christianity, it didn’t reflect modern day Christianity at all.
• 8.51% found the corruption and scandals following the church as a persuasive argument against following their doctrine.
• 8.51% gave up on prayer and religion when they realised that nobody was going to listen, let alone answer to them.
• 8.5% thought the similarities of Christianity with so many other religions (and yet so different at the same time) the primary factor of their deconversion.

Surprisingly, less people found that an exposure to atheism / philosophy / skepticism was a factor in their deconversion (I guess we’d better try harder). Likewise, only a couple people saw the association of violence with religion and attributed it to their lack of faith.

As for how we can deconvert more people, Bennett hits the nail on the head, and comes to the conclusion that whilst we can push and prod people towards the big ideas (science, logic etc), a successful deconversion is all down to the individual. We can’t force our ideas onto people, only sow the seeds of doubt by asking the right questions.