christ-on-a-stick

(apologies for the long and winding preamble to the Biblical prophecies part, but it's sort of relevant I guess...)

I had quite the interesting and unexpected experience last night... for those of you who read my story-thing, remember Vincent, superfundy husband from so many years ago? Well.....

We haven't spoken or seen each other in almost 5 years. I would hear things through the grapevine (my aunt, they attend the same church) such as his re-marriage and having a child. So, right now Dan (NobleSavage) is out in CA visiting, and he calls me up at work around 5pm and says "Um, do you know anyone named Vince?"

"Just my first husband".... He says that's the only person he could think of too, but wasn't sure. My suspicion was confirmed, however, when he said that upon telling the visitor I wasn't home, he said "OK, I'll probably stop by her grandparents".

So I call over there and say to my grandpa "Weird question, but - is Vince there any chance?" He laughs and says "yes, he just got here, I'll put him on".

So we talked for about twenty minutes... how's (various family members), the wife/kids, etc. etc. He was unaware that my second marriage had gone kablooey. As it turned out, the reason he was stopping by was a minor thing -he and his wife are refinancing their home and an old credit card that he and I once had (long since paid/canceled) was for some reason popping up on their credit report. He had already called but apparently I needed to as well. So, no big deal. But THEN....

He asked if I was still going to (any) church at all. After a brief moment of weighing in my mind "to discuss it, or not to discuss it", I responded that it was funny he should ask because I had just finished writing down my experiences as they related to my leaving Christianity entirely and considering myself an atheist.

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. He sort of chuckled, and said (in a lighthearted way), "Whoa! How'd they do that?"

I wasn't sure what he meant by "they", but I replied that "there's wasn't any 'they', it was a conclusion that I came to after a lot of reading and studying and investigation, and it was over a pretty long period of time, not overnight or anything".

His next question surprised me somewhat, but leads us to the point of this post... he asked, "But how do the explain away all the prophecies in the Bible? I mean, that stuff is right on".

Whoa Nelly! I only had a few more minutes to chat before I needed to leave work, and that (Biblical prophecy) isn't exactly a three-minute conversation.

Basically I said that while it was much too complicated a topic to discuss in a short phone conversation, I'd learned a lot of things by looking at the claims of Christianity from various, more objective POV's outside the church, that made me realize the claims of "prophecy" are not all they are cracked up to be. He made some sort of vague response like "Well I don't know about that, but anyway..." and the conversation came to a natural conclusion.

In reflecting on this conversation later in the evening, I realized that the issue of Biblical "prophecy" was not one of the major issues in my deconversion. In fact, it was one of the pieces of "evidence" oft used to argue for Christianity that was never highly persuasive to me even as a believing Christian. The purported prophecies always tended to seem too vague and easy to twist around to fit where desired, and of course conveniently ignored or explained away when they were NOT fulfilled. So all things considered, it wasn't a big hurdle on my path away from Christianity.

But I am curious about a few things:

A) For those here who have de-converted from Christianity:

1) Was the issue of prophecy something that was a "linchpin", so to speak, of your faith? Something you strongly believed in, studied, etc.?

2) If so, how did it affect your deconversion?

3) If so, what were the various factors that led to your eventual rejection of the claims of fulfilled Biblical prophecy?


Thanks in advance for any experiences or thoughts you may wish to share. Apologies again for my long-windedness.


Lauri


*edited 'cuz I hit submit accidentally...

jafosei

To be honest, I never thought about prophecy at all. To me, it never seemed to have any real relevance to my faith. Frankly, I thought it was all too vague to be useful.

In church, I remember being told one story about a group that sold everything they had and went to a mountain in the US somewhere to await their trip to heaven. Naturally, nothing happened, and the group came home. Most actually stayed with the faith anyway, re-interpreting the failed prophecy to suit the circumstances.

The story was told to us as a warning against cults, of course. But one of the messages that sunk in for me is that prophecy isn't something you base anything practical on, since it's either wrong or mis-interpreted all too often. And frankly, if you can't interpret these things correctly most of the time, what's the point?

Since prophecy never mattered much to me, it didn't factor into my deconversion.

As for fulfilled prophecy, the "fulfillment" seems to be based entirely on interpretation after the fact, or trying to tailor current events to fit in with past prophecy.

TySixtus

1) Prophecy was covered a lot in Catholic School. My HS was run by Basilican priests- these guys do know their bible, unlike many sects of Catholicism. I took a class called 'Old Testament', then next Semester, 'New Testament'. So bilblical prophecy was a huge deal.

2) This was the first thing to go, in my deconversion. Simple one- claiming Jesus was from Nazareth, when Nazareth didn't exist. :huh: Then, seeing how the NT tried to make it fit. Not only that, however, was the huge point of how many prophecies weren't fulfilled. You could write a book on those.

3) Kind of answered above- just realizing that by the time it came around to write the NT, the writers figured that they had better start matching some shit up, or else. So the very liberal creativity they took on 'apologizing' the old texts to the new is readily apparent, at least to me. :sneaky:

I got to use the new smilies! Kick ass!

Ty

Gullwind

I would have to say that failed prophecy (Tyre, Babylon, etc.) played a part in my deconversion, but what was even more pivotal was the false prophecies about Jesus in the NT. If the entire virgin birth was dependant on a passage in the OT that has nothing to do with predicting the Messiah (Isaiah 7), then a large chunk of credibility disappears from Christianity. That dealt a big blow to my beliefs at the time.

BeansRBad

I was a member of a church body that certainly utilized the alleged "prophecies concerning Jesus" in it's apologetic defense of the Bible as being Divinely inspired. However, this church body was not pre-millineal (they are amillineal) so they never used current events as tea leaves or signs of a second coming or coming kingdom. That, however, is irrelevant. Prophecy did not figure into my deconsversion.

Afterward, however, I did begin to see the circularity to using such argumentation to prove the Bible to be inspired. Consider: The argument is that the Bible is of Divine origin and Jesus is divine and the Savior as foretold in the Old Testament based upon Jesus' fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the New Testament. The entire argument is to get someone to believe that the Bible is trustworthy and of a Divine source. Wouldn't one, however, have to first believe the stories in the New Testament before accepting them as true fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies? And if one is going to read the New Testament as actual history, accurately recorded, then there is really no need to appeal to alleged prophecy fulfillments in order to get one to believe the New Testament. One has believed it already!

Also, aside from the fact that so many of these alleged prophecies are as vague as vague can be, and some are not even prophecies at all, and that some were not fulfilled correctly - even if they were, it is no stretch to suggest that there were four hundred years between the Testaments and that the authors of the New Testament books were well aware of Old Testament prophecies and probably made lists of them. How difficult would it be to simply write them into the Jesus story?

Yahzi

But that's the part I liked! I always like your stories. Except for this Dan character, he quite confused me, until I realized he was staying in your house while you were at work. I think you should rewrite it so he's the pool boy, that would work a lot better.

I've never seen Biblical prophecy be important to anybody. Sure, some talk about it a lot, but they are never wedded to it: what happened long ago to people far away is not the emotional basis of their faith. Prophecy is just the icing: you can scrape it all off, but the cake is still fattening.

JohNeo

Lauri,

Sorry to hear about the reappearance of Superfundie Vince. I read your story and can only imagine what kind of mental deficiency he must have to not understand it's none of his damn business. Sorry, that's probably not for me to say, but I have a (close) friend who is behaving the same way toward me (read "With Friends Like This" in Secular Lifestyles if you're interested). I don't even give him the chance to bring up religion anymore, because I know that the conversation always ends up right back where it started.

As for the prophecy stuff, I'll agree with you, the prophecies never meant much to me. I figured, either it's true or it's not, so I believed the basic things like the virgin birth, resurrection, miracles on faith as I was told to. I always wondered why believers had to make things so much harder than they had to be.

Anyway, I started having doubts as I noticed that the prophecies barely fit the fulfillments. Of course, we only studied the "fulfilled" prophecies anyway.

I started reading refutations to the prophecies, several of which pointed out that the Virgin Birth was never prophesied in the OT. The Virgin Birth was only written about in the NT [btw, I'm at work and I don't have access to the Bible], and in an attempt to cover up the superfluous error, the KJV re-translated the Hebrew OT to read "virgin" instead of "young maiden." The New Revised Standard apparently rectifies this mistake. This led me to ask why it was so important that Mary had to be a Virgin in the first place, and of course that led me to ask again why Jesus' lineage was even relevant if the father was God. :down:

The convenient Song of Simeon (Luke 2:21-35) that our Rector went into great detail about only made me more skeptical. Simeon looks on the baby Jesus and identifies him as the Messiah, and this is supposed to pass for prophecy. If there had been a published account when it happened, and then the rest of the story happened the way it was purported, I could maybe see it being a prophecy. Otherwise it's nothing but reporting after the fact. :down:

This led me to re-examine the Gospels on the most important part of the docrine: the resurrection. Of course it had been predicted in the OT that a Messiah would be sent and that he would be resurrected. It's really easy to write about something that supposedly happened a decades earlier, which was already prophesied. They didn't even do a good job of writing the Gospels to fit the prophesies anyway. :down:

THEY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH

So for me the prophecy fallacy was one of many parts that led me to reject Christianity. I consider myself atheist, but I do think that parts of the assumed teachings of Jesus have some useful application to life (i.e., Love Thy Neighbor). I'm not completely certain there is no god, but I find Christianity as a religion laughable. If there is even the remotest possibility of a god, he must be laughing at Paul and the rest of the disciples.

As for my friend, I have told him not to try to use logic to argue for faith. "Either you believe it or you don't--well, I don't."

Sorry I tend to get long-winded too.

Peace,

JohNeo

Amlodhi

Hi Lauri,

It's been a long time since my deconversion, but independent study of OT prophecy did play a part. Although, I think it was not so much that I found out that so called "OT prophecy" wasn't, as much as it was the diverse and disingenuous rationalizations I received when I asked my religious peers and mentors about it.

Glad to hear you are well,

Amlodhi

Lugubert

I was a very devoted Christian from ca. 14 years of age until rather recently (close to 60). I hold a Master's degree in engineering, and didn't bother about miracles and prophecies, but tried to see the message behind those fables.

My deconversion came after studying Asian languages and religions. I had sneered at Vishnu walking on earth as an assortment of avatars, and thought that reincarnation was outright crazy.

Then I got to study Comparative religion (which in my town is heavily centered on Christianity). Fortunately I had a teacher who made me think for myself when reading the Bible. Previously, I had read it from cover to cover, just accepting everything. I began to notice all the terrible things in the OT and a number of contradictions I couldn't handle.

One of the final blows came when I realised that I believed in exactly what I rejected in Hinduism: I believed that God sent his avatar to walk on earth as a human, and I believed in one reincarnation, aka resurrection. Just that one extra life broke the principle.

The ultimate blow, and was that a severe one!, was when I realised that the Lutheran dogma as stated in the confession of Augsburg (adhered to by the Church of Sweden) was that the flesh and blood of Christ was physically present in the communion. Until I checked that one out, I thought that the bread and wine were merely symbols, and that Catholics were <guess what I thought> to believe that bread and wine were transubstantiated into flesh and blood. Finding that the molecules of the flesh and blood of Jesus were supposed to be there, interspersed between the molecules of the bread and the wine, made me make up a philosophy of life of my own.

Going back to the question posed, I rank fulfilled prophecies among supernatural happenings like miracles. Now, the only supernatural thing I believe in is subatomic physics. My current philosophy is rather like Daoism: Have a good time, follow nature's ways, don't harm anybody (including myself) or anything.

When looking thorugh my post, I realise that it may look strange that I am studying at my advanced (I don't dare to call it mature...) age. I had a stroke some three years ago, and I can't work in a normal/traditional employment situation. Thanks to a fairly adequate disability pension, I now do what I like and, above all, when I like. A theory that struck me (no pun intended) just now is that my brain infarction might have destroyed a credulity centre...

Beetle

1. While prophecy was something I believed in, it wasn't really a lynchpin, or something that I concentrated on. (I was a calvinist, not a pentecostal )

2. It was almost an after thought, honestly. Once I became convinced of historical errors in the Bible, I was forced to lose the doctrine of biblical inerrancy. That was really the watershed event in my deconversion. Once the bible was seen to be without real authority, everything else didn't have a leg to stand on.

3. Even though they weren't the bedrock of my faith, Biblical prophecies were something I had to deal with in my deconversion process. Like Gullwind, the failed prophecies were things I'd never been able to explain away. But what really shook my faith in Biblical prophecies were the New Testament fulfillments of Old Testament prophecies. When I started reading them with a more inquiring mind, I came to the conclusion that the NT writers had to do a lot of twisting to make the OT passages apply to their "fulfillments." Using the priniciples of exegesis that I'd been taught, there was no way I would've thought the NT events were answers to those OT passages.

It still feels strange to refer to myself as having deconverted and being an ex-christian... but it's getting easier all the time. :devil3: