Do You Still Have Any Spritual Beliefs?

[★ Citsonga ★]

This is an Ex-Christian forum, and there seems to be a lot of atheists on here.

 

But I was interested to know if anyone who walked away from 'Christianity' still has spiritual beliefs in any form.

 

This is not a trick question, I won’t come back and say' well if you believe such and such why not his'.

 

Also, again as this is Ex-Christian, and Christian by default is a believer Christ, is it the teachings and character of Christ himself that was the barrier?

 

I did not really "walk away from Christianity," but rather I learned that it is a big, fat lie.

 

I consider myself agnostic with regard to there possibly being some sort of deity, though I am increasingly finding it difficult to believe that there is one. I am absolutely certain that the "God" of the Bible is fiction, though.

 

To answer your main question, I am highly skeptical of all supernatural claims. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I have yet to see any concrete evidence of supernatural claims.

 

Nobody knows (including you) what the "teachings and character of Christ" really were, or if Jesus even actually existed. All we have are highly problematic and contradictory religious accounts written decades after the alleged events.

 

If you really want to know what my reasons were for no longer believing in Christianity, then you can read my very detailed letter (49 pages) to my parents, which is downloadable from post #13 in the "Letter To My Christian Parents" link in my signature.

[Xeneverus]

Honestly, I don't believe, but I would really love if Hellenism (What the ancient greeks believe) were true.

[Orbit]

I don't believe in the supernatural but I do have spiritual experiences, where spiritual refers to a sense of connection to the universe. The label that comes closest to describing it is Pantheism, but I'm also an atheist.

 

http://www.pantheism.net/manifest.htm

[Leo]

I was increasingly atheistic in my thinking as a Christian as years went by. Even when I was in the Pentecostal churches, I was secretly gobbling up the anti-miracles apologetics of Hank Hannograph and others. Some of them come startlingly close to rational inquiry. My challenge was that I really didn't understand psychology. My understanding is still rudimentary at best, but I know enough now to understand where so-called spiritual experiences come from. The Norse myths I find relatable in some ways. No, I am not a fake Viking. But the whole Odin / Thor / Freya and the rest, their myths seemed more relatable to me than Middle Eastern myths like the Bible.

But here's what I mean by my thinking becoming more and more atheistic, even as a Christian: I read about, and identified with, a missionary in one of the pacific islands. At least this one incident he ran into. He was called to come help a man who felt sick every morning after a Voodoo master manipulator, whatever they're called, would put an egg in a glass of water ouside the guy's house. He convinced the man that Voodoo wasn't real, his sickness was psychologically induced. And he proceeded to cook and eat the alleged cursed egg. After that, the guy did the same thing till the voodoo guy decided to stop dropping by free eggs every morning.

I also had experiences and dreams that I thought were spiritually induced. Things the Xians could never really rid me of. It's not their fault: they couldn't. Their methods simply don't work. And I had an experience after the fact that fully verified this.

For years after a terminally ill brother of mine had died, I had dreamed I would run into him abandoned, all alone, and not really dead, but wasting away as having been ignored.  It was awful. And then he would turn into some undead monster and start charging me. I thought it was spiritual, as did everyone else. Of course, nothing of theirs worked.

Now, I admit, I have a problem with taking responsibility for things, or what the Wife calls a rescuer complex. I also tend to internalize it and feel like a failure when things don't work out right. Add to this, that I was responsible for a lot of my brother's physical care when I was a teenager. A person with different tendencies in my situation could have come out of that situation totally differently. But this is how it affected me. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes when I had to turn him over three or four times in a night, and he would then ask for some small unwrinkling of the sheets and such, I even struck him at times. This led to guilt the nonexistent Xian god could of course do nothing to alleviate. I had even dreamed once that I had killed him, only to awaken the next day alone, convinced I had done this for a quarter of a day. This sounds really dramatic, I know. But it was food for the Xians' explanations by spirituality. Especially the undead monster.

Well, a month or so out of my full deconversion from Christianity, and I started to have that dream again. Only this time, it was different. No spirit, no monster, no calling out to Jesus in my mind. For some reason I saw the thing for what it was: an impostor. I was filled with violent rage at it, for the first time seeing it for what it was. I shouted "Pussy!" at it (sorry ladies), challenged it to come get some, and rushed it. But when I jumped on it to choke it, it turned into a clay statue. Just a piddly little thing. I picked it up to check it out, I can't see in my dreams any better than when I'm awake. And it crumbled to dust in my hands.

Someone who knows psychology really well could explain this, perhaps. But I awoke knowing that dream saga which has troubled me for nearly a quarter century was over forever. No gods, no demons, no spirits, nothing.

That did not make me turn atheist: I already was one. I'd been highly atheistic to all other spiritualities including bigfooters and things for years as a Christian, and had been more and more so to Christian spiritual experiences towards the end of my Christianity, every time I saw a reasonable way to explain one away. Once it's gone, you can't really go back. Just like you can't believe in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.

Learning more of how the mind works, and in particular how we so easily trick ourselves, has really helped. I admit, most of psychology is beyond my pay grade at the moment.

Also, Christianity makes it easy to be an atheist in many ways. Christianity teaches that all experiences are to be measured against Biblical accuracy. So, yu're already taught to measure experiences. Even the most strange name it and grabb it dancing bears I've seen, deep down, really did believe that stuff. After you deconstruct the Bible for what it isn't, you still have all the atheistic measuring tools for experiences. Once you get rid of gods, devils, and so on, with the Bible gone, you still have all that training for measuring experiences. So now I would just use that same atheistic training to measure things against how we understand the mind. Try and look it up if it's something I don't yet grasp. But can usually default to say I'm kidding myself in one form or another.

Don't know if this makes sense or not. Sorry it's a bit long, but I thought the explanation might have had some value.

[directionless]

^ Leo, that is interesting. Your experience with the recurring dream reminds me of a similar story from a biography about a CIA officer. I don't remember the name of the book, but the CIA officer crash-landed in Africa and his injuries were treated by a local shaman - only it was a very stressful and dangerous situation. He had a recurring dream for many years that an African tribesman was threatening him with a spear. Finally he was able to change the dream so that he pulled out a gun and shot the tribesman dead - no more recurring dream after that.