Ellinas Posted September 6, 2014 Share Posted September 6, 2014 If you walk away from the recent certainties of your life, of course you will face some worry, anxiety, fear etc. But as you become accustomed to your new outlook, that will pass. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator Joshpantera Posted September 6, 2014 Moderator Share Posted September 6, 2014 ^ Exactly. Now I haven't set foot in a church in the last 20 years aside 3 funeral services for people whom I cared to attend their services. Never a Saturday service in 20 years. I was raised Seventh Day Adventist so the services are Saturday or Sabbath services. Now the most recent time that I've so much as set foot in a church was this last Tuesday because one of my best friends Dads, a principle of his local SDA school for 28 years had passed away. He was a pillar of the community and a second father to just about everyone, especially me since I was friends with his son and lived in his house for a while. We were friendly enough to where back when I started reading up on critical works against the founder of SDAism and it's doctrines, I made sure to lend him all of the books I was reading and asked his opinion. And he was shocked by some of it but knew other parts. He ultimately agreed that the founder was basically a hoax. But he still believed in God and figured the Bible was true in any case. I left that alone. I figured it was a big enough step to admit that the domination is based on illegitimate claims. It was painful, very painful to set foot into the domain of this cultish environment and observe the congregation from the perspective that I have now. I suppose it was always a sense of seeing everyone for the blind sheep that they are, but never before so much as from my perspective now. Back when I left I knew they were blind sheep, but the details were mysterious. Now the details are bold and irrefutable. I went out of respect for one of the only administrators in the entire denomination that I have any respect left for at all. And that was the only reason that I could even stand to sit through the entire service. They were all sad, crying, and trying to make sense of what happened. There was a lot of Bible quoting and talking about the 2nd coming of Jesus where SDA's aver that the dead sleep in the ground until the final trumpet as per described in Revelation. They went on to talk about the person they knew, the one who due to his station had to toe the party line in front of everybody. I knew the after hours guy. The guy who paid no mind to the ridiculous idea of subscribing to the ancient Jewish Sabbath as advised by the SDA founders. The guy who didn't turn off the TV's on Friday night's after sun down until sundown Saturday evening. The guy knew better than to subscribe to superstition about eating clean or unclean meats as described in the Books of Moses, which, weren't written by Moses! The guy who didn't mind loading up and going fishing on the Sabbath. The guy who was just trying to get through to retirement without making any waves that could potentially harm that retirement. I can't tell you how bad it hurt my mind to see the degree of blind ignorance going around the room. How something that I overcame 20 years ago as a youth is still fully deluding the mind of fully adult and senior citizens who have never had the right courage to simply question what they're being fed as absolute truth. Just the smallest amount of intellectually honest inquiry would have rendered huge results. I went through years of going around and around taking second looks at the Bible and going through spiritual journeys from western to eastern and then dove tailing it all with scientific reading. The trying to satisfy uncertainty stage went on long enough to where I eventually made friends with uncertainty and accepted it as the foundation from which everything arises and returns. A lot of people standing in that room may not have the mind for such a journey into the unknown, although I've always liked to think that any one can do it. Maybe not everyone can. And that's really disappointing to me. When you become such a hardened 20+ year exC as I've become, turning back to the flock is probably the most unthinkable and unimaginable thing in this world. Sticking to the path of seeing things as they really are is like leaving behind the Matrix. You can go back in and interact, but you're completely conscious of where you are and the level of intellect that everyone else is operating from....... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
RipVanWinkle Posted September 6, 2014 Share Posted September 6, 2014 It takes some time and thinking to get used to your new world view. Think of it from the perspective of having never been presented with any religion. Nature granted us a life on earth which will never, in all probability, occur again. At least we have no reason to believe it will. After living an unknown period of time we are to be no longer. Now what are we going to do with the time we have? Lament the fact that one day it will end? Fail to take advantage of this incredible world teaming with life and beauty we can not even comprehend? Those ideas are stupid and can only come about if you lie to yourself and believe that a different existence was possible and we should have been given it. Those ideas are not any more logical or reasonable than Xtianity with its false promises. The only reason we would complain about the opportunity this life has given us is because we were misled by a deceptively inviting myth, making false promises that can't be kept. Without the myth we would not expect anything but what we were given and what we could do with what we had. We wouldn't be disappointed. We would simply enjoy our life by putting our mind and bodies into it for that purpose, while remembering to take part in the betterment of mankind, because there is no spook in the sky that will do it. bill Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Blood Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 Finally I got to Jude and his quotation of Enoch that came from the non-canonical Book of Enoch and I just couldn't find a good enough answer for that. It was obvious to me that Jude lifted that quote from a book he THOUGHT was inspired - but wasn't. I couldn't buy that the bogus Book of Enoch miraculously preserved a 2,000 year-old lost quote from before the flood... so Jude referenced a bogus quote... So what did that say for Jude? Maybe Jude didn't belong in the canon. But then how can I trust the process of forming the canon? "Deconversion by Jude" is certainly unusual. What is remarkable is how the church brainwashes people so thoroughly that it prevents them from asking the most basic questions for years, decades, or lifetimes, such as, "Who decided on the New Testament canon?" They don't know, and they don't want you to know that they don't know. So they never bring it up. You just have the canon. No questions, please. Questioning is Satan's handiwork. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sdelsolray Posted September 7, 2014 Share Posted September 7, 2014 Finally I got to Jude and his quotation of Enoch that came from the non-canonical Book of Enoch and I just couldn't find a good enough answer for that. It was obvious to me that Jude lifted that quote from a book he THOUGHT was inspired - but wasn't. I couldn't buy that the bogus Book of Enoch miraculously preserved a 2,000 year-old lost quote from before the flood... so Jude referenced a bogus quote... So what did that say for Jude? Maybe Jude didn't belong in the canon. But then how can I trust the process of forming the canon? "Deconversion by Jude" is certainly unusual. What is remarkable is how the church brainwashes people so thoroughly that it prevents them from asking the most basic questions for years, decades, or lifetimes, such as, "Who decided on the New Testament canon?" They don't know, and they don't want you to know that they don't know. So they never bring it up. You just have the canon. No questions, please. Questioning is Satan's handiwork. Actually, it's worse than that. They do not know that they do not know, and they do not want to know that they do not know that they do not know. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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