brighid

Amos,

I am doing quite well these days. Thank you very much for asking.

But dear, one moment you say such nice things and then other times you say such virulent and disturbing things that I find it difficult to surmise your actual opinion. Other times I feel as if I need some hallucinogenic to decipher what ever it is you speak of. Therefore, I am not entirely sure if you actually know what you are speaking of from one moment to the next. But perhaps ... ahh ... my twain mind failing to converge ... or something

Good day,
Brighdi

brighid

Ah ...well then through research and some more time spent here you will be able to either confirm or deny my assertations Stick around and have fun. I certainly don't expect that anyone here agree with me simply because I feel a certain way.

Brighid

Thieving Magpie

I intend to. Thanks.

Malcolm

Blondegoddess,

I want to welcome you to the forum as well. It has been a great source of encouragement to me.

My story is too long to go into any detail, but essentially I slowly deconverted from Baptist lay-preacher to atheist over a period of about 3 years. My whole family is Baptist (3 ministers among them), and I am very much out on a limb. The reasons for deconverting are very similar to those mentioned by others already - especially the doctrines of hell and original sin.

Quite honestly I have found it very difficult. I too have had the sense of liberation in now finally being able to think for myself, finally getting rid of the nagging doubt that God was going to end up throwing me into hell no matter how sincere I was, and finally becoming a normal human being - not some saint just "passing through" and therefore different to the rest of lost humanity.

pug846 makes a lot of sense. Religion was indeed my identity. I was a christian 24 hours a day, and it determined the way I acted in every situation. It was my security blanket. For me a good analogy is the way a long term prisoner acts whe he is finally released. Although the prison was awful, it provided a structure for his life. He didn't have to think for himself, his clothes, food and shelter were provided for him. Now he is out, liberated and happy, until he realizes that with this freedom comes the responsibility to start looking after himself. I believe some prisoners become so desperate to get back to their familiar routine that they commit another crime, just to be locked up again.

I certainly don't want to try and influence you either way, but I do want you to know that you are not alone. Depression, confusion, feelings of regret and so-on are very common - someone said normal. Being ostracised from your old christian friends sometimes happens too, though I have been very fortunate in that way. So hang in there, it is difficult, but it is definitely worth it.

I would also like to recommend Leaving the Fold by Marlene Winell. It was the single most helpful book that I have come across on the subject. I would also recommend Dan Barker's Losing Faith in Faith for his own story as well as some useful arguments against Christianity. And I would also suggest hanging around here. I don't post a lot, but I have been very encouraged by a lot of what I have read. It is an excellent forum, and the library is fantastic.

Best wishes, Malcolm

Philosoft

I do not practice faith relativism. Nor do I have anything like the faith Amos seems to have.

Whatever, but I'd bet a bundle you'll never see a subset of Catholicism as, um, eclectic as Amos'. That said, Amos is certainly capable of intelligent (intelligible?) dialogue; I think most of us have seen it at one point or another. What I question is the necessity of playing the True Scotsman on a thread obviously intended to gather responses from atheists. I'm not saying Amos is unwelcome to post on this topic, just that his response seemed far more unnecessarily judgemental than any atheist's so far.
Actually, sometimes it's rather remarkable how Amos still gets reasoned responses given the, ah, reputation he has among many of us.

Amos

That is a good suggestion. Nobody has to take my opinion at face value because some of the things I write are indeed hard to swallow and this gets worse if they hit home. Brighid, you are a lovely writer and you comments are always welcome.

Amos

Sorry Philosoft but nothing is more liberation than the truth and I will always stand by that point. Allow blondgoddess to reach a crisis point in her life and she will be greatfull forever. Flattery is not always the answer and she seems to get enough of that already. Honestly, I do it for her benefit.

Bill

You know, its the "crisis point in ... life" where a person is supposed to turn to God. But for me, it was quite the other way around. When I was serving in Vietnam in 1968 (yes, I am that old...), the first seeds of doubt were planted in my brain. The Catholics were supposed to be our "friends" over there, and the Buddhists were supposed to be our "enemies", but the more I looked around, the more I could not help but view the Catholics as the bad guys and the Buddhists as the good guys.

(And, by the way, I did get up on the stage in DC as one of the "foxhole atheists" who showed up at the Godless Americans rally..... I really, really, resent the idea that people in crisis will automatically turn to "God." That is a ludicrous idea, and it flatly isn't true, as the couple-of-hundred "foxhole atheists" who stood up in DC could surely testify. Frankly, the best thing to do in a crisis is to ACT! Those who just pray have a far better chance of ending up dead.)

=====

While I never went to Northern Ireland, the battles there were in the papers on a regular basis (back when I read a newspaper on a regular basis ...), and once again, we had two religious groups, this time both allegedly Christians, who were battling it out with terror campaigns against the civilian populations of each group, with the Catholics living in segregated areas just like the American blacks of not too long ago.

Ultimately, it was easy for me to conclude that neither Catholics nor Protestants had any real contact with God, so I set out on a mission to find out just where God was really hiding, and just who God was really talking to. At the end of that mission I had to conclude that, if God exists (which is debatable), then surely God speaks to no man (nor woman). And those who have claimed to have been spoken to by God produce the most remarkable piles of crappy literature imaginable. Particularly the Quran. Mohammed had an extremely vile mind, full of all sorts of perverted sexual lust (I mean, 72 virgins per man? Each of them self-regenerating so that you get a virgin each time you "do it?" What a concept!), and he poured those vile thoughts out in large measure into the Islamic holy book.

And it is in fact very easy to conclude that the writers of the Christian New Testament had nothing at all to do with Jesus. Paul simply fantasized a meeting with Jesus, and out of that delusion came everything holy to Christians today. At the end of their analysis, the Jesus Seminar concludes that the entire New Testament contains but ten authentic thoughts that derive from the preachings of Jesus. And frankly, there isn't a one of those which is undeniably authentic!

The origins of the Hindu holy texts is so lost in the mists of history that nobody can say for certain even what millenium saw them first committed to memory (long before they were committed to paper). And Buddhism is to Hinduism sort-of what Protestantism is to Catholicism: a reformed version of the same old stuff.

That's just the major religions, and the minor ones are generally either themes and variations on the above, or else they are clear nut-cases who are leading their sheep to their doom in one way or another. There is hardly a religion on Earth that deserves to be believed by rational humankind.

=====

If all substantial religious movements are bunk, does that mean there is no God? Of course not, but only because there is no fixed definition for what "God" really is. Each person can define "God" to be whatever that person wishes "God" to be. If I wish to see "God" as the "First Cause" of the Universe, then to me, that is "God." But if that is how we discover "God," then "God" is just a human inventiion anyway, clearly explaining just why "God" ends up being so much like mankind; an anthropomorphic deity in most cases. If that isn't a clear sign that "God" is invented by man, and not the other way around, then I don't know a damn thing!

=====

Anyway, pardon my rant. But I did want it to be known that my wartime experiences made a large contribution to how I came to be an atheist (from a Christian perspective, anyway). I can't respect any "God" who can't keep even the majority of His own followers in line. What sort of an impotent "God" would that be, anyway?

== Bill

Amos

No objection Bill but I did not want to 'shock' blondegoddess into finding God but help her to understand that where she came from was literally hell and that is not easy to walk away from (my apology followed with regard to the intensity of her hell which was determined by the amount she drank from the cup of God's wrath and the strength it was poored (Rev.14:10).

I have always maintained that God is not part of religion or there would be temples in the New Jerusalem (Rev.21:22). Religions are for sinners and Catholics have the confessionals to prove it.

schu

"When I became convinced that the Universe is natural--that all ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts, and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all thewide world-- not even in infinite space. I was free. . .

" And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain. . . And I vowed to grasp the torch that they held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still." Robert Green Ingersoll

Ol' Colonel Bob still said it best.