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Goodbye Jesus

Christian Books


Cabbie

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I started my new job at a thrift store yesterday, pricing the donations. We received tons of books and I was instructed to only keep the best books as we receive far more than we have space for and everything else goes into "salvage". While it was heartbreaking to throw out books I myself would have loved to buy, it was exhilarating to toss all of the Christian books. To play a small part in stopping the spread of that garbage warmed my heart. Just thought I'd share. ????

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Good for you! I've thought about spending a few dollars at the dollar store when I see bibles there. Take a few home, put them in a garbage bag and throw them away.

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To be fair I donated mine to the charity shop. I used to toss away secular books I thought were dodgy back in my Christian day. Now just feels like censorship: knowledge at least should be preserved. Though I must admit the idea is tempting. Yet if it does actually help someone, hard to believe...?

 

One Christian book which make me oddly curious just yesterday was one I found when browsing the local second hand bookshop was one by Richard Wurmbrand suggesting Marx was influenced by Satanism or something. Seriously. I mean I know the guy suffered a great deal under the Romanian Communist regime that imprisoned him, but that seems like conspiracy theory stuff. (Ironic note: the bookshop is run by socialists!)

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I started my new job at a thrift store yesterday, pricing the donations. We received tons of books and I was instructed to only keep the best books as we receive far more than we have space for and everything else goes into "salvage". While it was heartbreaking to throw out books I myself would have loved to buy, it was exhilarating to toss all of the Christian books. To play a small part in stopping the spread of that garbage warmed my heart. Just thought I'd share.

 

Heartwarming. No loss. 

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As much as I'd enjoy throwing out Christian nonsense, I try not to throw things away because I disapprove of them. One time I got very upset with my mother because she had torn to pieces a book that had belonged to me, because it was about a transgender person. She claimed she'd thought I had meant to give it away. Anyway, destroying something you don't like just because you don't like it sends the message that you're afraid of what it has to say. I try to follow that rule even when it comes to Jesus nonsense. People will get their hands on Christian books if they really want them, and reading that sort of thing might help them figure out how it all makes no sense. My faith actually ended while I was reading a Christian book because it said God's salvation plan was ultimately for his glorification rather than saving humanity - thank you, Jack Popjes! To speak against ruining some books while getting rid of others is a double standard. Censorship is censorship.

 

I know that Cabbie was doing his job, and that's a different story. I'm responding to the question of whether to toss out some things on principle.

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Ha! That's awesome. How freeing to be able to purge some evil from the earth!

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Good for you Cabbie,glad you found it a bit cathartic.It always makes me smile when i hear of ex christians doing this as I'll bet so many of us all did the same thingas christians  ; a personal little 'hezekiah's reform' in our life from time to time; 'I'll destroy all this non christian crap and then god will get a hard on for me and i'll really start making some headway (lol) in my christian life'. For those that did engage in this i think that getting rid of your christian paraphanalia after deconvesion is very telling..... I mean its clearly a sign of FRUIT in your non christian life hahahah.

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i still have one christian book in my possesion actually.Its a rather heavy copy of the letters of samuel rutherford which helps keep my broadband router upright on top of a cabinet as the weight of ethernet cables tend to pull it over, it helps keep my faith strong every day by stopping it leaning to the side.

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Meh. To be fair, I did price some very nice big family bibles. I don't believe in it anymore, but I don't believe in tossing "quality" books (even if I find the content low-quality or even harmful). If you've been to a thrift store book section lately you'll know that there's no shortage of Christian books anywhere. I tossed Sarah Palin's book because it felt great seeing her face sail into the trash bin. ????

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Good for you Cabbie,glad you found it a bit cathartic.It always makes me smile when i hear of ex christians doing this as I'll bet so many of us all did the same thingas christians ; a personal little 'hezekiah's reform' in our life from time to time; 'I'll destroy all this non christian crap and then god will get a hard on for me and i'll really start making some headway (lol) in my christian life'. For those that did engage in this i think that getting rid of your christian paraphanalia after deconvesion is very telling..... I mean its clearly a sign of FRUIT in your non christian life hahahah.

Exactly! Haha. I'm sure a fundie in my position would toss an atheist book. Which is a shame, really, because atheist literature is so hard to find in thrift stores, and it's usually more expensive when I do find it. I guess that's my beef with the whole situation.

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Good for you! I've thought about spending a few dollars at the dollar store when I see bibles there. Take a few home, put them in a garbage bag and throw them away.

 

Purchasing them just allows a company to profit off of printing them, and the stores will simply keep stocking the shelves with items that sell. Regardless of that, definitely don't put them in the garbage to add to the landfill; recycling is a much better choice.

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Good for you! I've thought about spending a few dollars at the dollar store when I see bibles there. Take a few home, put them in a garbage bag and throw them away.

 

Purchasing them just allows a company to profit off of printing them, and the stores will simply keep stocking the shelves with items that sell. Regardless of that, definitely don't put them in the garbage to add to the landfill; recycling is a much better choice.

 

 

I was about to say this. If you really think that destroying books (or other information-bearing items) is good for limiting their spread, then choosing to buy new will just encourage further manufacture as demand is seen to increase. Better if at all to get rid of second-hand books, as one will find in the average charity shop. Though, with some of the cheapo discunt stores, much of their stock is probably clearance stuff that the distributors couldn't shift normally anyway, so the effect is probably the same.

 

What I would like to get rid of is some of the cruddy records and videos that sometimes clog up the shelves. Especially VHS tapes, which often get chucked for the sole reason they are VHS tapes and won't shift by virtue of being old hat, when there might be some hidden gems amongst all the popular films and Catherine Cookson adaptations (very much a thing of this region, as she was a popular local author).

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Having said that I do reccall from volunteering in charity shops just how much does get thrown away because it is likely difficult to sell, even if I'd be apt to want to keep it if I had the space. The only thing I saved, though, was probaly an old record case which may or may not have since fallen to bits.

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The only Christian books I still have are my annotated Bibles and a few heavily annotated books (I was one of those "cool" evangelicals that engaged with the word with highlighter pencil crayons! No bleed through= wining for Jesus!!)

Its weird how detached I feel from them these days... I used to love just holding my annotated pocket Bible, feeling calm when it was on my person.... (weird I know) 

But I still can't bring myself to chuck them; but I can't donate the really annotated ones because they're all written in. My girls bible study group used to do a weekend a term reading through a Christian book too- those are all annotated from studying.....

 

I don't know...

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  • 2 weeks later...

It took me over ten years to finally get rid of some of my Christian books. I have a very hard time to throw books in the trash and I usually give them away to a second hand book store. I didn't want to do so with the Xian books though... Just threw them out, and it actually felt good. I bet my mom is happy, too, since she is agnostic and those books were sitting on a shelf in her apartment whereas I moved out years ago... There were some I adored back then ("Classic Christianity", "Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire" "Journey of desire" (Sounds like a cheap porn title, doesn't it?)) and others that I found wacko even back then. There was one that said MTV was evil and today's youth was lost... I can't remember the title, but I had to write a book report back then. It'd be interesting to read that one again... I also annotated quite a bit.

And of course all these books were written by men ("Dr Larry Crab" (Crabb?), just to name one). What the f****.

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