Jagella

I’d like to first explain two important points about this thread. First, as many of you may have noticed, the title of this thread, “Why I am not a Christian,� is the same title as Bertrand Russell’s famous critique of the Christian religion. I may make comments in this critique that overlap Russell’s points, but I hope you realize that I’m not deliberately copying what he said. Second, I believe that this thread could also have been entitled, “Why I am No Longer a Christian� because I am a former Christian.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic and was educated in Catholic schools until the age of 15. My Catholic education came to an abrupt end when I injured my back, and I was no longer able to attend the Catholic high school I was enrolled at. I need to use a wheelchair as a result of my injury, and the Catholics weren’t willing to pay to install an elevator in their school. It was perhaps one of the first experiences I had being excluded as a result of my being mislabeled, and I was soon to learn that this behavior had much more to do with attitudes than money.

My mother, a devout Roman Catholic to this day, was very abusive with me. She routinely mocked my needing to use a wheelchair, and her abuse made me wish I was dead. She told me that God had injured me as a “punishment.� She used to ask me if I wanted to go to church, and out of fear of her abuse I would answer in the affirmative (actually, I didn’t want to go). One day, however, I finally told her the truth that I didn’t want to go. She then went into a tirade telling me I was going to hell. I retorted back that the worst people I knew attended church which was a subtle reference to my mother as well as other people.

As the years progressed I lost much of my faith. After being mislabeled by a prejudicial society and being forced into segregation, I could see no good reasons to believe God existed, and I started to describe myself as an “agnostic.� However, that feeling turned out to be short-lived, and ironically I soon found that my faith had been renewed—but it was not to last very long either.

In 1984 I finally found a wheelchair-accessible apartment that I could afford, and I moved out of my parent’s house to escape the abuse of my mother and my two sisters—all of whom were and are devout Christians to this day. About a year after my move I met a Pentecostal minister who pastored a local Assembly of God church in the small town in which my apartment was located. I decided to join his church. I felt guilty that I had not been living a religious lifestyle, and I wanted to know if God was real and that Christianity was true. As a result, I ended up becoming a born-again Christian.

Needless to say, my conversion didn’t last long. My days as a Pentecostal lasted only about 18 months. A major component of my renewed faith was to find “healing� for my injured back. My pastor assured me that God could and would do it. I started praying for this miracle to take place, but it never happened, of course. I literally wore out my paperback copy of the New King James Version of the Bible looking for those magical words that would result in my miraculous healing. My frustration grew as a result of these futile efforts, and one day I woke up and realized it wasn’t going to happen. My Christian faith then collapsed.

My unsuccessful attempt to find a miracle is by no means the only reason I lost faith in the Christian religion. For example, one day I decided to wed the four gospels into one complete story. I must have spent a week or two on this project, and by comparing the various passages in the gospels I soon realized that I couldn’t reconcile them. The genealogies in Matthew 1 and Luke 3, to my consternation, were almost completely different! Not only are most of the names different, but Matthew contains fewer generations than Luke. I also found discrepancies in the resurrection accounts, and I wondered just how many “angels� were present at Jesus’ tomb: Was one angel there (Matthew 28:5), or were two angels present (John 20:12)? I pointed out these contradictions to my pastor, and he was unable to explain them.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty I encountered in the Bible was those very odd and numerous passages in the New Testament that predicted the “end of the world.� Of course I understood that a very long time had passed between those prophecies and the present, and the world is still here. How could the Bible predict an imminent end when that end has yet to happen? For example, Matthew 24:34 quotes Jesus himself as telling his listeners that their generation was to experience the events he described when the world was to end! If Jesus really made that prediction, then he got it wrong. An omniscient God would not and could not make such a mistake.

Logically, I realized that if any God like the one described in the Bible exists, then he cannot fail to be able to heal a person, neither could he make mistakes by contradicting himself, and he would not utter false prophecies. I realized that apologists attempt to explain away these difficulties, but after reading a lot of apologetics, I remained a skeptic. One day my pastor was visiting me, and I once again asked him to explain why the Bible contained these errors. After seeing that he couldn’t explain much at all, I set my Bible down and said: “Jim, I don’t believe this stuff anymore.� Soon after I realized that I was an atheist, and I’ve been an atheist ever since.

Evidently I was naïve about my loss of faith, and I thought that people would be fascinated by what I had discovered. Obviously, I soon realized that few people shared my enthusiasm and fascination with finding errors in the Bible and that miracles of healing were questionable at best. I was told that I would go to hell for being an unbeliever. Even a woman I had known for years whom I never knew to be religious suddenly became defensive about my skepticism, and apparently out of nowhere she started talking about God and prayer. She insisted that I respect her view about religion, yet she had little tolerance for my being a skeptic. She denounced me for being an atheist, and she would angrily say: “I know there is a God.� All my explanations made little difference to her and other believers, and I soon realized that Christian faith was a powerful bulwark against the inconvenient facts that an honest person might unearth about their religion.

So here I am many years later explaining to a predominately Christian forum why I am not a Christian. As you can see, much of my skepticism is intimately bound up with my personal experiences. Will I remain an atheist for the rest of my life? In all probability I will, but I’m very open to good evidence that some God like that of the Christian religion exists. Evidence for God that I might find very compelling if not convincing would include one of the following:

1. Pray for the healing of the injury to my back. If such a healing occurs, and if I have reason to believe that prayer is the cause of that healing, then I will accept that a miracle-working God exists.
2. Pray for knowledge from the Christian God that I can verify and that you could not know otherwise. If he provides that knowledge, then post it in this forum. If I realize that such knowledge is accurate, then I will accept it as evidence that an omniscient God exists. Examples of such knowledge might include details about my life that only God and I might know such as the content of dreams that I may have had recently.

Good luck!

Jagella

Clivedurdle

Your post immediately raised the thought "institutionalised discrimination"!

Social model of disability

This seven page pdf file is the British approach to these issues, US has some good laws- mainly put through by vietnam vets - not xians, but it is fascinating how this religion that states God is love fails completely to act appropriately and is even unaware of how appalling its actions are!

Tybalt

I'm surprised you didn't simply believe that there was a god, just not the christian god. I am an atheist by belief, being that I realise I don't know if there is a god or not, but I don't believe there to be one. If there is a god, it is most certainly not the god described in the bible, more of a sceintist than a savior.

Jagella

As a result of some of my experiences, I decided to create my web site to tell people what’s going on. While I by no means only blame Christians and Christianity for “ableism,� Christians and their actions are a significant factor in discrimination, in my opinion.

The link you posted looks interesting, but I tried in and got a message stating that it no longer exists. Do you have any alternate links to it?

Jagella

Jagella

I don’t know if I’d describe the Christian god as either a scientist or a savior. Ironically, when Christians tell us that “Jesus saves,� they’re telling us we need to be saved—from Jesus' “Big Daddy� up in the sky who will damn us forever if we don’t have the “right religion�!

Jagella

Toto

I fixed the link - it had an extra space in the title.

Jagella - could I be so intrusive to ask if you have a medical diagnosis saying you would never be able to walk? Did the Christians (or others) think that your back problem had a psychosomatic aspect to it?

judge

I'm not surprised. I don't think many (if any) would be able to sustain themselves in the face of this sort of thing

It is quite possible this descrepency is a result of a mistranslation of one word from Aramaic to greek


Yes there seems to be descrepencies. But these are quite like descrepencies that occur in court when more than one witness describes the same event.

Well there are believers who think that the world did end.
You may be interested to check out an upcoming debate between myself and JPHolding here

I think it can be verified by a continued trial, but perhaps first throw out all and any preconceptions of what God is like. Particularly those from religious environments.

Try to treat your investigation as scientifically as possible (if that makes sense)

John Kesler

Judge, reprinted below are Matthew and Luke's resurrection accounts. Notice that in Matthew's, women at the tomb actually meet the risen Jesus. However, in Luke's account, the women don't see Jesus. Instead, their memories are refreshed by the (presumably) angels (plural) and then the women report to the disciples and "all the rest." This is but one discrepancy; the resurrection narratives have more inconsistencies than just how many angels were at the tomb.

Chris Weimer

About discrepancies - this isn't a matter of whether the car was navy blue or dark green depending on the light, it was who was where and when.

And I don't know about you, but I'm still living, so the world hasn't ended yet. (Word of caution, no one go to theologyweb.com - you know it's a terrible place when someone says that America should kill all non-Christians, and the moderation/admin does nothing...

judge

Yes you are right. Unless there is something about this I don't understand or some information left out (I can't imagine what it might be though) then these two accounts are not the same.

That is not a problem for me. I don't believe that this is the "word of God" or anything