Unbeliever

Ah, I see, so the words of Jesus were only meant for that culture, at that time.

greyline

A friend of mine believes in predestination - it caught me off-guard. Her argument is:

- God is omniscient, therefore he already knows who is saved.
- So nothing anyone does to spread the Word makes a difference.
- If someone is supposed to be saved, the Word will be taken to them eventually.
- But not by me, because I'm shy.

Although she presented her argument in that order, I suspect that when she was forming the argument she did so in reverse order. I'm fairly shy myself, and the idea of "witnessing" when I was a teenager was extremely stressful.

My feeling is that permanently deconverting liberal Christians like her is harder than deconverting fundies. They might fall away from the church in their youth, because it's boring or restrictive or they lost interest, but some of them return to it once they have children - perhaps they assume it still provides the best moral grounding for their kids.

Do many deconverted fundies return to the fold? I doubt it.

jjramsey

Actually, the classic evangelical response you'll get to that is that the culture of the time shaped the content of the NT, but it nonetheless has timeless teaching; one then has to do the legwork to separate out the teaching that is applicable to today from the stuff that was bound to the culture of that time. The catch, of course, is separating out what is culture-bound can be a subjective process.

If you want to see how Christians who are theologically conservative but not dumb-as-stump fundies think, I suggest you get an old copy of How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth. There is even a bit of ammunition in it for you, such as stuff about sensus plenior, that is, why the NT writers are allowed to quote the OT out of context though you are not.

greyline

Surely not!

Converse02

Come to think about it, I think using the Bible is perhaps the best and least offensive way to deconvert a Christian.

In high school, I was fascinated with the possibly the Bible could truly be the word of God. In a English class, the teacher asked us to analyze the first few chapters of Genesis, writing a least a page per chapter. I realized the writting styles were vastly different myself and the stories often contradicted each other chapter after chapter. It was like it the Bible was a combination of various slightly similar stories squeezed together. We then learn about the Documentary hypothesis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis

How could I disagree with this hypothesis, especially since I figured it out myself even before I ever heard of it?
After this, I realized the Bible surely was written by mere men. I could never believe it was truly fro m a perfect God.

Next came reading stories about rape and wonton killings in the bible. Talking snakes, Planet-wide flood, fitting a zoo on a boat, gays evil, divorce evil, women second class citizens, slavery okay, witchs, dragons, do I have to go on? I think reading the inaccuracies in the bible is a pretty good method to plant the seeds of truth. It is something both the atheist and Christian can agree to as a standard.

Joan of Bark

I want this poll back at the top of the threads.

Thank-you.

quester

Hey, David, over in E/C you were trying to tell us that you, a self-admitted layman, understood physics and geology better than PhDs.

Or did the Holy Spirit tell you that Einstein was wrong about E=Mc^2?

OldYgg

I'm not in to deconverting people. But what I would like to see - is a well done movie (who knows how long or how many parts) that represents the bible as well as a commentator that re-hashes things - sometimes by himself and sometimes interviewing god.

It would take a long time to do - but I think it would be worth it.

The scene where the bears kill the children - I don't see how that could be represented in a clean way.

The scene when Jesus loses control and destroys the temple - I don't think it is a misrepresentation of who Jesus was. It is the perfect justification for road rage and many other less savory ideas in society. In fact I read a column when I was living in the South - saying 'Why are Northerners such wimps?' in response to the statistics that there were more road rage incidents in the South than the North.

A good scene representing Adam and Eve - and a put stop with the commentator saying things like:

If men are so mighty and powerful - why is it that it took a supernatural creature to get Eve to eat the apple and all she had to do was wag her hips in order to get Adam to eat it?

If god is all-knowing, all-powerful, yadda yadda - How come he wasn't a good parent to Adam and Eve and stop them just before doing what he didn't want them to do and explain why it was a bad thing to do and tell them not to do it again. Or - simply change them so that they didn't eat the apples once it was apparent there was a flaw in the design of humanity?

After one of the few scenes of genocide - god instigated in some cases and human instigated for god in the bible... Ask why genocide is justified in the bible, but that humans in the Enlightenment found philosophical justification that genocide is wrong - in finding that there are basic rights of humanity.

In the many sections of the bible that punish women more than men, say women should be submissive to men - have the commentator ask god if he is sexist? Show god avoiding answering the question and a puzzled looking commentator.

And depict the horrible deaths of humans in Noah's flood - and explain that there had to be children - and many of them alive during this time period - by showing them drowning by the thousands. Not some cleaned up video of just the humans disappearing as I have so often seen. Depict the size (approximately) that the ship would have to attain in order to hold all the animals and have the commentator discuss with an engineer why structurally this isn't really a possibility given the materials of the time. Ask what all the other animals did to deserve this genocide. Have the commentator talking to a biologist - asking why if everyone is descended from a small group of people that genetically mitocondrial DNA shows up to be much older.

Even if any particular point shown on video isn't commanding material - the point is that a visual representation of everything in the bible would command attention and understanding of basic points in arguing about the bible.

And the story of Joseph - as a parent I've always wondered about the justification any child could have in not telling their parent they were ok once they attained safety. Its told as some great story - and I can only see that Joseph was as bad a child as the ones that sold him off to slavery. They apparently had letters or even messengers - he could have notified his father without telling the others - and it would have been the choice of the father to reveal Josephs continued existence and welfare or not.

Old Ygg / Alex

nygreenguy

Hows that saying go...."The truth will set you free" Im GLAD i have given up religon, as i truly feel like an individual now.

scisyhp

I was able to deconvert my roomate with it, now I'm working on the other two