Dead Again: Director Of Theological School De-Converts

[James23]

Hello. I’m new to ex-Christian.net coming all the way to you from New Zealand (look at your Globe, go down, no further, right down the bottom, find Australia, just South East of that). I became a Christian in my early twenties after going through a fairly traumatic series of events. At the time I didn’t see that those events could be psychologically impacting my decision-making. I asked a lot of questions before I converted, but there was an extremely clever young pastor who was doing a degree in theology at the time and he was able to answer all of my questions to my satisfaction. Reflecting back now I can see that at the heart of it I really wanted to believe (X-Files styles!). I was a good Christian, I did my best to follow the ridiculous rules of Christianity, both written and unwritten. I read widely, that is to say widely within Christian authorship, prayed and read my Bible religiously. There was a particularly large group of people my own age at the church at that time, so we were all able to engage in self-convincing, confirmation bias. This of course further reinforced my zeal. Over the years I went through a number of training courses within the church, moving cities I changed churches and went through all of the swings and roundabouts that someone who has been in the Evangelical community for any period of time will be familiar with. I should clarify that I was Charismatic/Pentecostal during the early part of my walk and really just defined myself as Evangelical in the latter part of my walk. I did fundamentalism, prophecy-mania, laughing in the spirit, end times fanaticism, you name it. Finally I ended up in a large church which was considerably more spiritually conservative than some of the previous ones I had attended. At this church I became involved in teaching and taught theology, biblical studies, philosophy, ethics, leadership and discipleship for ten years. For the last four years I was the director of a theological training institution. In the latter period I studied theology at an accredited academic institution. This was a real eye opener, and was the beginning of my journey out of Christianity.

 

I should also mention that starting at the first year that I became a Christian I began to have health problems which slowly transitioned revealing themselves as a chronic pain disorder which affects me to this day. Unfortunately, this condition has been life defining affecting my work and home lives. Going through the process of praying for healing, not receiving it and feeling (and being told) that it was my fault because I didn’t have enough faith was agonising. But over time the continual lack of answered prayer and absence of any real voice of God became revealing. I grew distant from God because there was simply no relationship. I wasn’t trying to manufacture one, so I was able to see the complete lack of God. This allowed me to drift closer towards objectivity so that when I did my theological studies and was able to see the enormous flaws in hermeneutics, Christian theology and the Bible itself I was in a good place to evaluate them. During the process of teaching I had allowed for an element of grey. In other words, there were not clear answers to all of the questions within orthodox Christianity. My studies allowed me to see that every single area of theology is grey and that in fact there are no clear answers to any area of Christianity. For one reason or another I began to study the problem of evil with fresh eyes. I had been teaching about the problem of evil for almost a decade, but observed that as time went on the answers that I felt so convinced about at the beginning seemed weaker and weaker. I listened to a number of debates and searched for adequate answers to the problems presented by the atheist position. I became more and more convinced that the problem of evil could not be solved by the trite, and often pathetic religious answers. I wrote a forty page document effectively just blurting out my thoughts and offering arguments as to why God was necessarily evil if he existed at all. I contacted a number of people who I trusted as mature and qualified theologians and gave them this document, asking for answers. I also submitted it to a world expert (who will remain unnamed) in the theodicy. The answers that I received I had all heard before. And in fact, conversations revealed the frailty of their position. At the end of the day, even from the lips of theologians, I was still asked just to have faith that God was good. But, by that stage faith had evacuated the building. I was looking for logical answers and nothing else would satisfy.

 

So about three years ago I made the decision to stop following God. I only told a few people because I wanted to collate my ideas, continue my research and provide an opportunity for people to offer me satisfactory answers. I also prayed from time to time during this period asking for God to reveal himself if he was genuine. Basically, I have given God every opportunity possible to prove himself. The sad truth is that I was praying to an empty sky. If Yahweh exists at all he is necessarily evil, so I really hope he doesn’t! I may not be a Christian anymore, but it is more difficult to suppress my teaching urges. I have created a website devoted to exposing these myths in the hope of helping other people who are imprisoned by religion to become emancipated. I have published a number of articles but it is still in its early days. Please come and check it out here, and follow it if you are so inclined:

 

https://thoughtcontrol.wordpress.com/

 

Thanks for letting me share. It is great to be able to talk to some people who understand where I’m coming from.

 

Jason.

[TABA]

Welcome Jason!

 

I don't know if you're the first Kiwi here but it's certainly great to have you! I think you'll find it a supportive and encouraging place to hang out. I hope you'll be a regular here so you can share some of your knowledge and experience with all of us. I've already taken a quick look at some of what you've written and I know it will me useful to me and to others.

 

I tend to read more than speak on here (which is kinda the opposite of how I am in person!) as there are many others who are more wise and eloquent than I am, but this place has meant a lot to me in the short time I've been active.

 

Again, welcome and I'm glad you're here. BTW I sent you a message, which you may or may not have noticed already.

[searchinwithnoagenda]

"I wrote a forty page document effectively just blurting out my thoughts..."

 

I find it a sign of incredible strength and character for skeptics to carry all of this around without engaging in a verbal assault on xtians. Yet it is the skeptic that is looked down upon. Xtians seem to interpret the lack of rebuttal to their baseless claims as acceptance when nothing could be further from the truth. Xtian, are you listening?

[♦ nivek ♦]

James23,

 

 

Welcome to ExC. That you found a way out of that damn maze of total religious religious inclusiveness. Breaking out of a cookie cutter molded assembly line preacher making machine is fan-fuckin'-tastic.

 

 

You'll find fellow travellers here.

 

kevinL

[James23]

Hey folks, thanks for your comments. It is certainly good to be away from the madness. There is freedom outside of Christ Jesus! I've been having some interesting exchanges with Christians that I know on Facebook since I "came out" a couple of months ago. It's scary to see just how nutty they sound trying to defend obtuse positions.

[josh1975]

Hi curious, great to have a global friend joining the ex-Christian community. I studied New Zealand as part of geography class in my high school. A trivial fact I know is that the movie " fellowship of the ring" some scene was taken from NZ, beautiful landscape !  Thank you so much for sharing.  I know your pain as for some of us long timer (myself been 40+ walking with Christ), Christianity has such a death grip on you it is for me impossible to let go. I still feel guilty all the time that it is me not God who cause where I am now spiritually - must be God punishing me for some sins I committed that is why I am fallen. Time is the best healer, I do feel better as compared to three years ago when I stopped all Christian activity.  It is very liberating. Yet without the framework of eternity, I struggle to make sense the purpose of my life. You died then what ?  I do miss the "to-die-is-to-gain" concept that Apostle Paul advertise so much as the joy of being a Christian.

 

To me God is an absentee father who created mankind but leave him/her to fend for herself. What so callous is the fact that " the Holy Spirit whisper". Why don't the father , the son and the holy spirit speak louder and more often to us mere mortal so we do not have to guess.  All the wonderful promises in the Bible are so phony, seldom if ever it will come true- the checks bounce all the time.

 

Thank you so much for sharing, thank you for this ex-Christian.net/ I look forward to share more as we journey together in this uncharted water, as ex followers of Christ.

 

You may want to check out this collection of testimonies in  http://infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/   Really good, as I read some of them like Amanda Avellone. I thought it is my own story.  Meticulous story of their journey like yours and many others.

[qadeshet]

Reading, studying, and asking questions leads to only one honest conclusion. Bible god, if it exists, is a monster. Many of us have followed a remarkably similar path to de-conversion. I have been unable to find a single instance in the Bible where Yahweh did anything for Man's benefit. Everything he did was to glorify himself.

[Ellinas]

Welcome.

 

Congratulations on escaping from the strait jacket.

 

As a matter of interest, did your argument concerning god being evil (if he happened to exist) have any relation to gnostic ideas of the demiurge?

[bornagainathiest]

Hello Jason and welcome!  

 

Fyi, there's a highly-active, long-time member of this forum who's a Kiwi too.  Here's a link to her profile page.

 

http://www.ex-christian.net/user/21538-freethinkernz/#.Vy9Z64QrJD8

 

Thanks,

 

BAA.

 

 

 

 

 

p.s.

Don't worry if you can't use the, 'Send Me A Message' function on her page.  There isn't a glitch or anything bad like that.  It's just that the Ex-C private messaging system only comes online for new members once they've made a certain number of posts.  So... just make some more posts and soon enough you'll be able to talk privately with FTNZ.

 

[Guest]

Hello. I’m new to ex-Christian.net coming all the way to you from New Zealand (look at your Globe, go down, no further, right down the bottom, find Australia, just South East of that). I became a Christian in my early twenties after going through a fairly traumatic series of events. At the time I didn’t see that those events could be psychologically impacting my decision-making. I asked a lot of questions before I converted, but there was an extremely clever young pastor who was doing a degree in theology at the time and he was able to answer all of my questions to my satisfaction. Reflecting back now I can see that at the heart of it I really wanted to believe (X-Files styles!). I was a good Christian, I did my best to follow the ridiculous rules of Christianity, both written and unwritten. I read widely, that is to say widely within Christian authorship, prayed and read my Bible religiously. There was a particularly large group of people my own age at the church at that time, so we were all able to engage in self-convincing, confirmation bias. This of course further reinforced my zeal. Over the years I went through a number of training courses within the church, moving cities I changed churches and went through all of the swings and roundabouts that someone who has been in the Evangelical community for any period of time will be familiar with. I should clarify that I was Charismatic/Pentecostal during the early part of my walk and really just defined myself as Evangelical in the latter part of my walk. I did fundamentalism, prophecy-mania, laughing in the spirit, end times fanaticism, you name it. Finally I ended up in a large church which was considerably more spiritually conservative than some of the previous ones I had attended. At this church I became involved in teaching and taught theology, biblical studies, philosophy, ethics, leadership and discipleship for ten years. For the last four years I was the director of a theological training institution. In the latter period I studied theology at an accredited academic institution. This was a real eye opener, and was the beginning of my journey out of Christianity.

 

I should also mention that starting at the first year that I became a Christian I began to have health problems which slowly transitioned revealing themselves as a chronic pain disorder which affects me to this day. Unfortunately, this condition has been life defining affecting my work and home lives. Going through the process of praying for healing, not receiving it and feeling (and being told) that it was my fault because I didn’t have enough faith was agonising. But over time the continual lack of answered prayer and absence of any real voice of God became revealing. I grew distant from God because there was simply no relationship. I wasn’t trying to manufacture one, so I was able to see the complete lack of God. This allowed me to drift closer towards objectivity so that when I did my theological studies and was able to see the enormous flaws in hermeneutics, Christian theology and the Bible itself I was in a good place to evaluate them. During the process of teaching I had allowed for an element of grey. In other words, there were not clear answers to all of the questions within orthodox Christianity. My studies allowed me to see that every single area of theology is grey and that in fact there are no clear answers to any area of Christianity. For one reason or another I began to study the problem of evil with fresh eyes. I had been teaching about the problem of evil for almost a decade, but observed that as time went on the answers that I felt so convinced about at the beginning seemed weaker and weaker. I listened to a number of debates and searched for adequate answers to the problems presented by the atheist position. I became more and more convinced that the problem of evil could not be solved by the trite, and often pathetic religious answers. I wrote a forty page document effectively just blurting out my thoughts and offering arguments as to why God was necessarily evil if he existed at all. I contacted a number of people who I trusted as mature and qualified theologians and gave them this document, asking for answers. I also submitted it to a world expert (who will remain unnamed) in the theodicy. The answers that I received I had all heard before. And in fact, conversations revealed the frailty of their position. At the end of the day, even from the lips of theologians, I was still asked just to have faith that God was good. But, by that stage faith had evacuated the building. I was looking for logical answers and nothing else would satisfy.

 

So about three years ago I made the decision to stop following God. I only told a few people because I wanted to collate my ideas, continue my research and provide an opportunity for people to offer me satisfactory answers. I also prayed from time to time during this period asking for God to reveal himself if he was genuine. Basically, I have given God every opportunity possible to prove himself. The sad truth is that I was praying to an empty sky. If Yahweh exists at all he is necessarily evil, so I really hope he doesn’t! I may not be a Christian anymore, but it is more difficult to suppress my teaching urges. I have created a website devoted to exposing these myths in the hope of helping other people who are imprisoned by religion to become emancipated. I have published a number of articles but it is still in its early days. Please come and check it out here, and follow it if you are so inclined:

 

https://thoughtcontrol.wordpress.com/

 

Thanks for letting me share. It is great to be able to talk to some people who understand where I’m coming from.

 

Jason.

 

Followed! Thank you for sharing your story. 

[James23]

Hi, apologies I don’t know how to reply to an individual poster yet.

 

josh1975: thanks for the link I will check it out.

[James23]

Hello Qadeshet, yes Yahweh is a conceited megalomaniac who seems to enjoy treating human beings like puppets. I have theorised that he could be a child God, completely immature but extremely powerful. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

[James23]

Hi Ellinas, thank you for your welcoming words. I do indeed feel I can move a lot more freely without the constraints of the religious straitjacket . Interestingly enough the more I began exploring the idea of the evil God, and the massive disparity between the OT and NT,  the more I began to empathise with the Gnostics. I had previously taught that the Gnostics were a crazy religious cult from the early Christian era, but I can see how they came to rationalise the idea of the demiurge when looking at the OT God. I wonder if they weren’t more reasonable than their orthodox Christian counterparts.

[James23]

Hello bornagainathiest, glad to see that you have been washed in the blood of the infidel. Wow, that doesn’t sound at all good outside of a church context does it? Hey I appreciate you informing me about the other NZer here, and thanks for the info about the site.

[James23]

Hi Abijah, thanks for following , I hope you get something out of it.

[searchinwithnoagenda]

Hello Qadeshet, yes Yahweh is a conceited megalomaniac who seems to enjoy treating human beings like puppets. I have theorised that he could be a child God, completely immature but extremely powerful. Let’s hope that’s not the case.

"child God"

Omz, if that is the case and a day is like a thousand years, when oh when will he/she/it/they grow up.

[James23]

Yes, perhaps our planet is just part of a starter universe built with a grand Meccano set in the sand pit of an interdimensional kindergarten. Yahweh is the spoilt 5-year-old brat of 2 hipster gods who control much better universes with a much better class of creature. “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God, and I don’t like to share my toys either.” Naughty human… Squish!

[hockeyfan70]

Hey there, welcome to the site!

 

I'm a former pastor (worship and student), it was my career for 23 years. I've been slowly deconverting for years, but the beginning of this year, it moved fast and now I'm officially out of the church and done with religion.

 

Now I'm trying to find a new normal, which has been interesting.

 

Anyway, glad that you're here!

[miamia]

Welcome

[Jeff]

Welcome and congrats on the newfound freedom

[Ellinas]

Hi Ellinas, thank you for your welcoming words. I do indeed feel I can move a lot more freely without the constraints of the religious straitjacket . Interestingly enough the more I began exploring the idea of the evil God, and the massive disparity between the OT and NT,  the more I began to empathise with the Gnostics. I had previously taught that the Gnostics were a crazy religious cult from the early Christian era, but I can see how they came to rationalise the idea of the demiurge when looking at the OT God. I wonder if they weren’t more reasonable than their orthodox Christian counterparts.

They were, as I see it. Though, to be fair, that particular bar of reasonableness is not set very high...

[James23]

Thank you everyone for the warm welcome.

[James23]

Hi hockeyfan70, I can relate with your slow de-conversion. For me it seemed like a very organic progression, and it is very difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when I stopped believing. I know from experience that being in Ministry can leave a scar, I’m sure you have many interesting stories to tell. Finding the new normal is a challenge. Personally I became a Christian as an adult so it’s probably less challenging to me that it is to someone like my wife for example who converted at the age of 5. I know that she sometimes doesn’t know how is she is supposed to “be” in the world. As I see it, this is all a part of the way that religion damages us. It can feel as though we have to delouse ourselves from the emotional and intellectual trash that we were exposed to. Anyway, all the best and I hope to see you floating around the forums or on my blog (shameless plug).

[James23]

Ellinas - agreed that the bar was not set particularly high. However the Gnostics, at least as I see it, were making some attempt to rationalise the nature of Yahweh versus Jesus and the intersection of the Testaments (albeit in a superstitious and myth-ridden manner). It is interesting to think that Gnosticism almost won the day. I wonder what Christianity would look like today if that had happened.

[qadeshet]

Ellinas - agreed that the bar was not set particularly high. However the Gnostics, at least as I see it, were making some attempt to rationalise the nature of Yahweh versus Jesus and the intersection of the Testaments (albeit in a superstitious and myth-ridden manner). It is interesting to think that Gnosticism almost won the day. I wonder what Christianity would look like today if that had happened.

 

Epicurus got it right:

 

 

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

ironchariots.org

 

The Gnostics, like the Zoroastrians, still exist, just in smaller numbers. If the Gnostics had won, Islam might be the dominate Religion. A really horrible thought.