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Goodbye Jesus

Was There An Issue Or Event That Cracked Open Your Jail Cell Door?


Mythra

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I was kind of hoping that there was some magical answer to how to get through life without feeling like you're wearing a mask and barely keeping your head above water, but perhaps that's not the case.

 

No, I'm afraid there isn't any magical pill hon while working through those tragic things in life, including finding out that chritianity is a huge lie. Everyday, a lot of people must force themselves up, maintain a positive attitude, eat properly, get the right amount of sleep, exercise, take medication if necessary, have a good RL support system and a good on line support system like EX-c and possibly a really good councilor. Making nice new memories when you've been hurt really helps. Anytime you can create a fun atmosphere, you will create new, happy memories. I watch a lot of Ruby Wax. She's a comedian (and a non-believer) who quit being a comedian, suffered and then studied depression and has turned her life around to help others with mental distress. She has many you- tubes about mental issues. Look her up. She is completely inspiring. This is her new book. I just ordered it.

 

http://www.amazon.ca/Sane-New-World-Users-Normal-Crazy/dp/039917060X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448054386&sr=8-1&keywords=sane+new+world

 

((hug))

 

Here's two of my favorite talks with her.....

 

 

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Thanks Margee.

 

smile.png

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9/11 and Islam did it for me.

 

I knew almost nothing about Islam before 9/11, but I was always taught to believe it was a "cult".  When I found out it was second largest religion behind Christianity, it started me wondering what makes it so different from Christianity, yet it's called a cult by Christians?  And Christianity isn't a cult?    That can of worms opening started me on a 2 year struggle that ended in atheism.

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When studying physics, I realized that the Earth is not 6000 years old. This made me realize that the Bible cannot be literally true in every respect. At least some parts of it require interpretation. My question then became "interpretation by whom?". Those who interpreted the Bible seemed to me to be claiming to know God's will. I knew that didn't have any special knowledge of God's will, and nobody else seemed able to explain to me clearly how they did either. And I saw many times that those who claimed to have heard from God eventually realized that they had been mistaken. So I began to wonder how anyone could be sure that they knew God's will at all. Then I extended this wondering to the authors of the Bible themselves. What if they were mistaken? I carried on down this road until I realized one day that the only reason I had for being a Christian was that I had always been one. That was the day I left Christianity behind.

 

So, no, not really a global event for me. Just a series of personal realizations.

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I grew up in a church that believed in literal Adam and Eve and Noah's ark. But I loved birds and science and went to college for that. I took a class on the creationism debate. I tried my hardest but I could not defend creationism to the class. I remember the college library didn't even have books about creationism because it was not taken seriously. Now I even love learning about the evolutionary relationships among birds, some serious shifts in the last few years because of DNA work.

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I had never even considered the possibility that there wasn't a god. But earlier this year my 4 month old granddaughter died. She endured two open heart surgeries to correct a congenital heart defect. Many, many, many people were praying. It was heartbreaking when we lost her, but I came through faith intact. It was God's plan I rationalized. But for my son, who was her dad, he knew that day that God was not real. Prayer doesn't make sense. It always gives God a pass no matter the outcome. His deconversion is probably more complex, but in this way it relates to me. He didn't tell me though, because he didn't want to hurt his Christian parents.

 

I happened to see a "like" of his on Facebook from an atheist page. It was as I was going to bed. Even though I knew what he had just gone through I was livid. How could he turn his back on God? But I thought I would at least read the "I fucing love atheism" website before I asked him what was going on.

 

So I stayed up hours, pouring over stupid memes that held more truth than I had ever admitted. It sounds ridiculous, but all the cognitive dissonance that I'd tried to reconcile about the Bible, about creationism, about suffering, and about prayer made sense when I considered that there was no god. And poof. It was gone. Faith was totally not there anymore. Life made so much more sense.

 

Sad to say, but the religious brainwashing is so severe that the only possible thing that can rupture it in most cases is to experience personal tragedy. 

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Sad to say, but the religious brainwashing is so severe that the only possible thing that can rupture it in most cases is to experience personal tragedy.

 

 

Blood, I would say in most cases, this would be the dilemma. I often wonder if life had been a smooth ride for most of us, would we have questioned god as much. As much as I had so many questions about the bible and the way things were in the world, I may have just let that go if some of my prayers had of been answered. (how self-centered, eh)

 

Even when I reverted to New Age thinking, I was asking myself Why any type of deity would use these losses that caused so much heartbreak to help you grow up or to learn some type of lesson about life.  I mean, what lesson could the so-called witch learned by being burned at the stake. Wendyshrug.gif  I questioned Neale Donald Walsh, the author of Conversations with God on his Facebook page and got attacked by everyone. Lol I left that group in a hurry knowing fully well that they would try to explain away the suffering question......

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^ But for many, even the tragedies don't do it. My mom lost her father at age 16 to cancer and her husband age 64 to cancer and she has still hung on to faith. I wonder if it's more of an emotional/rational thing. My mother is a very soft-hearted emotional person. I am a very concrete rational thinker. I never cried when everyone else would and thought that something might be wrong with me. Now I just think it's a difference on how we think. It continues to mystify me as to why some of us escape and some of us don't.

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^ But for many, even the tragedies don't do it. My mom lost her father at age 16 to cancer and her husband age 64 to cancer and she has still hung on to faith. I wonder if it's more of an emotional/rational thing. My mother is a very soft-hearted emotional person. I am a very concrete rational thinker. I never cried when everyone else would and thought that something might be wrong with me. Now I just think it's a difference on how we think. It continues to mystify me as to why some of us escape and some of us don't.

 

The funny thing Daffodil is that I am a softhearted person. But I also have seen some of my most soft-hearted clients over the year continue strongly in their faith regardless of what had happened to them in life...so that is a really good point hon. 

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One or two events didn't do it for me. A better analogy would be that the bars of my cell were slowly sawed off one by one:

 

I came to Austin and met Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, weird new-age people, agnostics etc. and they didn't seem worse off than I was. Sometimes those people with their weird belief systems were more accepting than the Christians, but I was supposed to believe that they were going to Hell.

 

I joined Mensa and met even more strange people!

 

Prayer didn't seem to make any difference. Disabled people remained disabled. Cancer killed people unless the doctors could cure it. Life was just as much a numbers game for people who went to church as for everyone else.

 

People sometimes prayed for me (or preyed upon me) and touched me and made me fall on the floor when I didn't want it. Why didn't God bother to tell them this was unnecessary?

 

Evolution was elegant and interesting, but I wasn't supposed to believe in it, or only in certain forms of it. There's a Christian site called Reasons to Believe which has a lot to say on the subject. I tried to join the local group once, but since I was blind I couldn't view the pictures they emailed to everyone to invite them to their events. For some reason, they deleted me from their mailing list for pointing this out.

 

I have Asperger's; I think too much.

 

I watched people lose their memories. I study computer science so tend to think of memories as data. These people had no way to back up their data, so how exactly were all their memories supposed to be intact when they woke up on the other side?

 

Finally I read some books and met some real-life atheists who didn't seem too depraved. I let go of the last truly pitiful reasons I still had for belief. I lost my fear of death and Hell. All this and more, and it took forever, and I fought it every step of the way.

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Just living in Austin, Texas is going to put most people's "faith" in intensive care. 

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Avandris, Daffodil, Blindsighted, Margee, Disillusioned, Mythra ... Mike D ...wow, I am in shock.  Reading everyone's stories one after the other.

 

Someone should do something with this thread.

 

Especially the failed promises about God's answering prayer. Where two or three are gathered together... yeah, what about dozens, hundreds, of all ages, little children praying. And nothing. The person dies anyway.

 

An outcome just like what you'd expect if God were made up.

 

My hat is off to everyone here.

 

BTW my story is like many others'. Being gay put me in a place of cognitive dissonance where my faith would have cracked eventually. It was very clear that God was unjust. It would have been one thing if there was some unique thing wrong with me that blocked me from a righteous marriage acc. to church teaching.  But for millions to be blocked in just the same way ... or shoved into marriages that are mistakes... and on and on.

 

So I was holding the "God is unjust" thought suspended in mid-air for a some time, not allowing myself to follow it through.

 

Then a fellow student had cancer. Everyone prayed. Even little kids. Rod died anyway.

 

My faith didn't last long after that.

 

It was only some years later that I came back to some of the questions and started to realize how full of errors and contradictions is the Bible. How full of BS are the arguments of apologists. How much political power churches still wield (especially with so many secularists not voting, in the US, anyway). 

 

So I became more pointed in my realization that it matters where we stand.

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If I think back real hard, I believe it was the time I found that passage in Ephesians about women submitting to their husbands. Couldn't understand why that was necessary. That lodged firmly in my head and I found other passages about subjugating women, which led to the other horrors in the bible. So to the apostle Paul, I'm eternally grateful. :)

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For me, the final straw was 9-11-2001 bombing of WTC, New York, and the backlash of bullshit from religious leaders in the US and their lies concerning POTUS. Fox News was instrumental in my deconversion as were most televangelists.

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I think living in Afghanistan really challenged me and the constant feelings of vulnerability, loneliness and fear helped to erode many of the psychological barriers I had erected. (I was on a slow, deistic path prior to that if I'm to be honest.) After returning home I was dealing with a spinal injury on top of the myriad of emotions from my time away. In other words, I was pretty vulnerable and trying to put the "pieces back together." Due to the believe that I may have physical limitations stemming from my spinal issues, I found myself back in college and taking STEM courses such as physics and chemistry. These combined with my fragile mental state allowed for a sort of "re-programming" so to speak. On top of that I was forced to work and study with a cohort of folks who were younger than me, that came from all walks of life and had varrying world views. This actually enabled me to find and establish a deep connection with humanity and perhaps is part of why I'm generally optimistic regarding the younger folks (not that I'm an ancient old fart IMHO). This really helped me develop feelings of empathy and connection. Finally, a few of my flight medic friends were killed in a helicopter crash during that period. Slowly over a few years, as I put it all back together a "new" person emerged. Not only was I able to toss aside dogmatic, faith based viewes but I was able to emerge a better person in terms of my capacity to feel empathy, to love, to allow myself to experience a more expansive landscape of thoughts and feelings.

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Christian s all taking my lying psycho ex wife side when we split up coz they believed her crocodile tears and "wee woman " act.the fact that all the "men" of the church and seminary did this without considering for a second that I might actually hav my reasons for leaving her.they probably all wanted to "kinsman redeem" her...christianese for "quick,fuck her now she's single".Fucking mangina's.

I just couldn't believe they could not see that's there are 3 sides to a marraige break up: her side,my side and then the truth.

There were other things too inc her compulsive lying and gaslighting but that was a biggie.

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Yeah, right?  So far, not a single "I wanted to sin and not feel guilty". WendyDoh.gif

 

Just tales of survival.

That was my reason LOL. Well, slightly more complicated.

 

My first deconversion was in college. I believed in evolution, the Big Bang, etc., but I also believed the Bible 100% (Noah's ark, etc.). My friends were dismayed to discover that I believed these things, because our college specialized in science and technology. Nobody tried to put me down, but their reaction caused me to think. I also was brought up to believe that masturbation was sinful, but I couldn't live up to those standards. I prayed for God's help. All I wanted was a little sign as evidence that God existed. I tried attending a charismatic mega church in hopes that I would receive the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, but that didn't work. So eventually I decided God didn't exist or that I was one of those predestined for hell. So I stopped trying to be a Christian. That was around 1990. I was irreligious for the next 20 years.

 

My second deconversion was just a couple of years ago. I had a psychotic breakdown and became a very gung-ho Christian. I gave away most of my savings to charities and my church. Eventually I started to come back to my senses. I had one particular religious experience where I prayed and a cross apparently appeared from thin air and fell on the ground in front of me. That experience bothered the rational part of my personality. For several months I would think about that experience in an almost catatonic state. I kept thinking about the nursery rhyme with Hansel and Gretel. I was living in a nursery rhyme. Gradually I became disillusioned and stopped going to church and started reading books about why Christianity can't be true and talking to people on this forum and others.

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There wasn't really one particular thing, there were things in the bible that had never made sense to me and things I didn't like and didn't think were fair, especially the hell doctrine. Thanks to the internet I learned about logical fallacies, but I learned about them in a way where xianity was not involved. When learning about fallacies and why certain arguments are flawed I couldn't help but notice that many of these fallacies are used in xian apologetics.

 

A few years before learning about sound logic (2006) the youth pastor at my church who I really adored told the church he had cancer. He was in his late 20s. After two years he admitted he didn't have actually have cancer. People had given prophecies and had visions about his healing but clearly none of those were from any God since this man was never even sick.

 

In 2010 my brother told us that he was gay. He was in a xian school, my mother worked in xian radio and we attended church every week. My brother had prayed and tried to be straight for 5 years and we hadn't known about it. This put me in a position where I learned more about homosexuality, and seeing my brother struggle so much woke me up to the fact that this wasn't a choice and it couldn't be prayed away. Unfortunately most of the xians around us didn't agree. My brother became suicidal and threatened to jump off a cliff at a school camp in 2011.

 

In late 2010 I was having major issues with xianity and the poor logic and nasty doctrine and I got to the point where I simply couldn't stomach going to church anymore. I'd been a xian since 2004 but I was having major trouble at this point.

 

In late January 2011 my mother reported a fatal motorcycle accident on the radio (she did traffic, weather, and presented the music) and half an hour later she got a phone call from Anna; a family friend she'd known for over 30 years. Turns out the fatality was Anna's husband. The next day my mother, brother and I went to where the accident had occurred and we each took a plastic bag and picked up pieces of Kevin's motorcycle that had been smashed all over the nature strip around the power pole he'd hit. I still have that bag full of those pieces. Anna had been a xian for many years and is one of the nicest people you could ever wish to meet. Seeing what her husband's death did to her was awful and she didn't deserve this.

 

In early 2012 my curiosity got the better of me and I finally allowed myself to get on the Internet and search "debunking Christianity". I look back now and feel frustrated that it took me over a year after leaving church to feel confident enough to search for things picking xianity apart, but that's indoctrinated fear for you. That night that I started looking at arguments against xianity I stumbled on the website 'Why won't God heal amputees' and with all the questions about xianity I read that night, something finally snapped and I didn't believe anymore. It still took me another year before I could say that I wasn't a xian anymore, and a bit longer to say I was an atheist.

 

Ultimately I stopped believing because it made no logical sense and was based on flawed arguments that didn't prove anything, and because there's no evidence to prove xianity's claims. Towards the end of me being a believer I considered the xian God an arsehole, I couldn't stop thinking about all the other people who had different religious beliefs and how they were supposedly going to suffer eternal torture for having the wrong beliefs despite the fact that xianity doesn't and can't prove its claims and neither can any other faith system. People would always say the xian God was fair but there's nothing fair about any of that. When I accepted the lack of evidence I simply couldn't believe anymore.

 

I remember being astonished at how quiet my mind became at that point, I didn't have to constantly repent for thinking things I shouldn't, and I'd been constantly repenting in my head all through the day for years. My head was no longer crowded and I could think. I could think about anything I wanted and I didn't have to censor my thoughts or apologise for them. I was finally free.

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I had started doubting when I was about thirteen, and it picked up when I was fifteen. That was around the time I knew deep down that I was trans, but my father's negative reaction to the concept of someone being like that made me push it down even further. I questioned a lot of things, and my dad encouraged it. So did my mom. They wanted me to have my own faith, one that was strong because of my own convictions and not theirs. That was probably a huge mistake on their part, haha. We were visiting a huge baptist summer church camp, and I started taking notes on the evening speakers. I criticized everything and talked to my dad about it. I heavily started questioning things then, wondering how so many prominent christian men of fatih could have such disparate opinions on the gospel.

 

There were other nails in the coffin, one of my closest friends coming out to me, my atheist friend giving me a beautiful description of the world being intertwined, seeing how blinded a lot of my missionary friends were.

 

The final one was the biggest thing. I was on a mission trip, and my dad was the head of it. My whole family was there for the summer but it was my first time being independently on a trip since they were staying somewhere else. I remember feeling like I finally had a calling. The week had gone so well, and I was doing so well with my group. God was definitely calling me to work in Japan. Things were lining up.

Then my father was accused of several awful things. I had no idea, my parents wanted me to be able to finish one week at least. I went to where my parents were staying excited, I wanted to tell them everything. My mom sat with me as I poured everything out. Then she told me I wouldn't be going back. She told me everything that had happened. I was crushed. I was hurt that people would even think to say those things about my father, I still loved him very dearly then. I didn't know what to do.

I missed my opportunity to say goodbye to everyone the next night, I passed out due to fever in the metro on the way back from picking up my stuff. I was in bed for a week.

When I finally could sit up again I found out that the group leaders had told everyone we had to leave the country early. I had a pile of letters from everyone. All of them were sweet and misinformed. I never got to say goodbye to any of them.

My dad didn't leave his room for almost three weeks except to go to the bathroom and eat when everyone else was in bed. My mom tried to keep us all together. We couldn't go back to our actual home because of legal stuff. We were stuck there for three months waiting it out.

I remember lying in bed and crying, screaming in my head about how unfair everything was. When I sat up I realized that god didn't give two shits about my family.

 

This was only reenforced over the next six months leading to our return to the states, when everything that could go wrong did. We were forced from our home into guest housing, we were forbidden from seeing anyone from our group. We were isolated, even after the ban was lifted. No one knew how to talk to us, or wanted to.

 

When we got back all the people who had been talking behind our backs at the church pretended to be there for us only to turn their backs once they realized how broken we were, and how getting a house and jobs meant nothing more than survival and their little checklist was completely useless.

The elders of our church completely excluded my mom from everything, she had no one to talk to, and my dad was fed horrible thing after thing.

 

I had given up on god back on my bed in a foreign country but I didn't voice any of that for almost a full year.

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Guest Furball

While reading lee strobel's the case for the real jesus, another christian scholar fundie admitted that the bible was tampered with. Having been wearing the armour of god at the time, it was the first real cut through my armour. Even strobel had a surprised reaction to hearing what the guy said. 

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RedStar, I also stumbled unto the 'Why won't God heal amputees' website, by chance. In 2013, I was thrown off by the retirement of Pope Benedict. I was not Catholic, though. I knew that pastors and fathers retire, but I guess I had a different mental image of the pope, and that the pope was pope for life. I found out later that a pope or two had stepped down or retired in the distant past, but something about Pope Benedict retiring just did not make sense to me at the time. I remember reading a related article on CNN, and in the comments section, someone kept posting a link to 'Why won't God heal amputees'. I decided to browse to the website and started reading the various chapters. And much of it made sense and started me to think of the Bible and Christianity from a different perspective. I eventually found this website and others, and the more I read, the more I started thinking critically. At some point, I learned about the historical-critical method of studying the Bible, and that really opened my eyes. The first major aspect of the Bible that really gave me cognitive dissonance was learning about the multiple endings of the Gospel of Mark, along with how the earliest version ended. Made me wonder what else I did not know...

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My conversion started when I started to have a little more free time on my hands to think about it. Growing up, I believed what others told me and I didn't have a lot of free time to think or challenge, whether it was school, sports or friends. It wasn't a focus until post school when things started to unravel.

 

For the longest time, I thought everything in the bible was true. Boy was I wrong!

 

I think Mose's exodus (or the lack there of), flood stories and bible contradictions-doublets started me to really think about the bible and religion in general. Just unraveled from there...

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