What Line Of Argument Ended Your Christianity?

[Guest revolvingprovince]

Hello all,

 

I am a rather convicted atheist in a very serious long-term relationship with a devout Christian. We both recognize that with the barrier of religion, we can't hope to sustain a marriage, so we've agreed to open a serious dialogue on the topic.

 

I come to you in hope that, having once been a part of the religion, you might have suggestions as to what type of argument is most persuasive to you. As a physicist, I'm most partial to scientific arguments, but her schooling lies more in the liberal arts. Is a scientific argument (evolution, big bang cosmology, etc.) more convincing, even to those who aren't scientists, or would she be more likely convinced by another path- and if so, which do you think would work the best?

 

Particularly, if any of you could recommend a book or books that served to open your eyes beyond Christianity, it would be very helpful

 

Thank you very much!

[Vigile]

Discovering that I was lied to about evolution was a huge, huge blow to my faith, but I'm not sure that it is a completely convincing approach for all. For one, Christians can accept evolution and remain Christian. It does not eliminate god, it only explains how biological creatures change over time.

 

I would think that a liberal arts major might be more convinced by the fact that there is no secular historical evidence for even the existance of this man who Christians suppose revolutionized the entire human race. Others here, like the member Mythra, are much better versed on this subject, so hopefully he/they will chime in with more useful info for you. The author Price is particulalrly compelling in this area I'm told.

 

As an LA major myself, I also found Greek and Roman mythology to be very convincing. The fact that Oedopus Rex, a story which predated Christ by hundereds of years, paralleled so closely to the sacrifice theology of Christianity was quite convincing to me. Other Christ-figures such as Mythras is a slam dunk on any intellectually honest Christian who has even a weak grasp of the concepts of logic.

 

Also eye-opening to me was the fact that few believed as I did, which dawned on me as I started to travel. I had a very provincial view of Christianity. When I was exposed to Christianity Washington DC, then in Costa Rica and then in Italy, I realized that views of the folks back home where I grew up were quite in the minority. Either I could accept the fact that only the very few with my narrow beliefs were going to be saved and the rest sent to hell, or I had something wrong.

 

Finally, the concept of hell just could never mesh with a loving and benevolent god. This one was always on my mind and eventually the question just grew too big for me to manage my faith any more.

[Jubilant]

Mine wasn't ended not by an argument, but rather by a verse. The final two years of my Christian faith were spent countless hours on the computer and in the Bible over contradictions. My husband and children missed me, I was very legalistic, and had started to move into the area of obeying ALL OT Law. Then I started questioning all the atrocities and contradictions and sought answers and apologetics, the Bible was my life. Anyhoo, long story short...my family was being ripped apart and just before Easter of 2005 I was reading the Bible and came across the following scripture:

 

Luke 14:26"(A)If anyone comes to Me, and does not [a]hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.

 

I announced outloud to myself that I LOVE and CHOOSE my family, said a hearty, "Fuck You Jesus!"...closed my Bible and haven't touched it since.

[Checkmate]

First off, welcome to the site.

 

Second, there is no ONE method that works best. There is NO "magic bullet" argument, method, book, etc. Since everyone is unique there is no way to tailor make a deconversion technique. You'll just have to use the hit-or-miss approach. Sorry.

 

However, the book that convinced me was the Holy Babble itself. That and studying all the denominations, their dogma and creeds; the history of the church, religion and myths, convinced me that it was ALL invented goobledygook. Just humans being humans. Ignorant, superstitious, controlling and intolerant. No "divinity" involved at all. Pure, unmitigated DELUSION. [see my signature.]

 

That was enough to convince me to chuck it all in the bin. Haven't looked back since.

 

Good luck to you.

[Taphophilia]

Being as right brained as I am, the deal breaker for me, like Vigile said, was learning that Christianity is nothing but an adaptation of Ancient Pagan faiths. Everything in Christianity had existed centuries before Jesus. There was no big bang Christianity with the appearance of Jesus, as all Christians are taught. Everything, except Jesus, was already a part of their culture to begin with. However, the process took a couple of years.

 

Pagan Origins Of The Christ Myth

 

"Misquoting Jesus" by Bart D. Ehrman

 

"Decontructing Jesus" by Rober Price

[HoustonHorn]

What started the snowball for me was something our pastor said in church one day. He told us that everybody, newborn children included, was inherently evil. That really bothered me and I started questioning everything about Christianity I thought I knew.

 

And good move on recognizing this as a potential problem and working on it with your girlfriend.

[Godless Wonder]

I just wanted to say good luck to you. I was in a similar situation once, and it didn't work out in the end. I don't know if I'd take what I've written below as advice. More like some ideas to keep in your pocket in case you are forced to use them.

 

You are likely to run into the problem that people do not usually change their minds about something like this overnight, or over a few days. Most times, when people do change their minds, it takes months, or years. For instance, there's a guy at work who was a pretty hardcore fundy Christian in 2004. Now, he's more like a deist. But it took two years of me arguing with him off and on for this to happen. When you've spent a lifetime building up the self-reinforcing physical structures in the brain representing certain beliefs, those structures don't get torn down overnight.

 

There is a fear component to most Christian's beliefs, whether they admit it or not. Making them face up to the fact that their religion teaches of how a "loving" god condemns the vast majority of humans to eternal punishment for finite sins, or simple ignorance is one powerful idea you can use. (If she's the type that doesn't believe in Hell, well, there's the end of Matthew, ch. 25, in which Jesus is pretty clear about it, so in that case you can make her disagree with what the Bible says Jesus says.)

 

For some Christians, salvation by faith, or salvation by works can be a contradiction which is irreconcilable.

 

From here: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/don...sistencies.html

MT 7:21, LK 10:36-37, RO 2:6, 13, JA 2:24 We are justified by works, not by faith.

JN 3:16, RO 3:20-26, EP 2:8-9, GA 2:16 We are justified by faith, not by works.

 

The Bible's promotion of slavery (and failure to condemn it -- why isn't "thou shalt not own people as property nor have slaves" one of the commandments?), and other atrocities, can be problematic.

 

See, Leviticus 25:44-46 for slavery

Numbers 31 is a good (but maybe too well known) one.

 

But, in any case, do not expect that you will lay out your flawless arguments -- rat-tat-tat-tat-tat -- and she'll say, "Oh, i see. How stupid of me, you're right." Not likely to happen.

 

She will likely take refuge in faith. You can argue against this rationally -- what is faith, but believing something to a degree of certainty which exceeds what is warranted by the available evidence? And why is doing that a good idea? By deliberately deciding to be too certain, who are you fooling, except yourself? And how is that honest? Faith is inherently dishonest in this way. And what sort of deity would demand that a person should somehow force himself to be too certain of the truth of a rather ridiculous story, on penalty of eternal punishment for failure to do so?

 

It is rather easy to paint Christianity as rediculous (in fact, it's hard to make it appear anything but ridiculous, to my way of thinking) but this is a rather good example of it: http://www.extian.org/home.htm It's clearly ridiculous, but everything in it is terribly accurate. Christians upon reading it have a tendency to sputter and fume, but cannot find anything really wrong with it, apart from the irreverant tone. (Not to say they are convinced of anything by it.)

 

The story of kissing Hank's ass may lighten the mood... not sure it will help. (funny though.) http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php

 

She may complain that without God, life is meaningless. I say "complain," because this is not really a valid argument, it's a bit like complaining that your $200.00 bank statement cannot be correct, because if it is, it means you're not a millionaire. Yeah, life has no meaning -- in the sense they mean it -- you were not purposely devised and caused to be put on this earth to fulfill some divine purpose. Too bad, get over it.

(I admit this is not really a line of argument likely to win anybody over emotionally.)

 

You may find her retreating into explicit irrationality. (That is what happened in my situation.) She may say things like the world is divided into the material realm and the spiritual realm, and she knows God exists and that Christianity is correct by means of senses other than her usual five -- her spiritual senses -- and that God's ways are not man's ways, and God's ways of thinking are not man's way, and rational arguments do not apply, God is not bound by rational thought and logic. In this case, you are well and truly fucked, for she has preemptively dismissed any argument based on rational thought -- which means all arguments. In my case she then had the audacity to further claim that *I* was being too closed minded. Ha. I can laugh now. (It is a bitter laugh though.)

 

 

Hope you have better luck than I did.

 

Many would advise you not to attempt to deconvert her, and this is probably wise advice, as you cannot deconvert her. She must do it herself, and if she desperately wants not to deconvert, she will not. (Well, this last is contradicted by the many ex-C's here who found themselves deconverting despite desperately attempting to cling to Christiantiy, so, who the hell knows.)

 

You might try also asking for advice on the Secular Lifestyle forum over at iidb.org. They get a lot of cases like yours over there.

 

Edit: You should also read as many deconversion stories as you can. There is a good list on http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/index.html (a very good site btw, you should check out the rest of it as well.) What you'll find is that there is no one killer argument. For any individual Christian, there may be one killer argument, but it differs from Christian to Christian, and in many cases it's not so much a killer argument, as the straw that breaks the camel's back. Christianity dies the death of a thousand cuts more often than it dies of a well aimed arrow.

[Checkmate]

..............

Christianity dies the death of a thousand cuts more often than it dies of a well aimed arrow.

 

I couldn't have said it better! (And you KNOW what great affection I have for my OWN intellect.) That was a phenomenal post, GW. I may have to copy and save this.

[The Sage Nabooru]

Is she happy in her Christianity? If she is, then why attempt to make her into something that meets your own approval?

 

By "happy" I mean well-adjusted and enjoying her beliefs, not going around in an everlasting worry about guilty and shame, obsessing over the souls of every other living being and crying in church.

 

You may have to break off the relationship. Just as people who otherwise get along perfectly split up due to one or the other's imbibing of alcohol, so do mostly content couples part over opposing belief systems. As an above poster said, nobody can change her beliefs but herself. It's a sad thing if you consider it your responsibility to convert her - no better than her own conviction to convert you.

[Lycorth]

Welcome to the site

 

Sage brings up a good point. If she's happy being a Xian, and you're happy as an Atheist, why bother to change each other? Just live and let live.

 

However, that can be problematic, and if she's serious about Xianity, it will become a problem, eventually. Very few serious Xians will even tolerate non-believers as friends, much less as significant others. It's better that you and her discuss this now than later.

 

For me, it was many things. Indeed, my Xianity died of a thousand cuts rather than one big wound. Like Jubilant said, verses such as where Jebus requires that we must hate everything and everyone we love to be worthy of him eroded my loyalty to Xianity bit by bit. Turning the other cheek was another - who in the hell is God to tell me to not defend myself? Or the verses in the Old Testament about killing witches and homosexuals and so on - eventually, I could not find a shred of rational justification for murdering people based on religious differences or sexual orientations.

 

Further examination of the Babble revealed many such flaws. Perhaps the biggest was the nature of the Xian god. The Xian deity is supposed to be all-knowng, all-powerful, and all-loving. Yet he does not do away with evil and restore the paradise the world once was? Does he simply not care about the presence of evil and the millions of souls that are lost to it, or is he simply not powerful enough to destroy evil? Or the fact that all living beings must devour or destroy or oppress each other in some way in order to survive. Why would an all-loving and all-powerful god create beings which have to devour each other? Humans and animals kill and eat each other, plants and insects do the same, humans and animals destroy and devour plants and insects for food or to make room for living space, and so on. Why would a god make a world like this?

 

The characteristics of God simply do not make sense, given the world in which we live. We are frail beings in many ways, and can be killed by the smallest virus, or an injury in the right place. Not to mention old age and the havoc it wreaks. Why would a god of love want a world like that to exist, especially when he's powerful enough to make it anyway he wants, and intelligent enough to know better?

 

Also, consider the difficulty of Xian doctrine. Why would an all-knowing god decide on using human language to convey his message to humanity? Wouldn't he know that people would find it confusing and would reject it based solely on that? If God were all-loving, all-powerful, and all-good, surely he could invent a better system than human language to convey his message, and would not expect us to believe in him when he doesn't show up or answer prayers. He would know better, and would know just how to reach each person to convey his message in the most effective way. If God won't destroy evil, surely he's good enough and smart enough to do that, right?

 

But according to Xian cosmology, he doesn't.

 

To me, many wounds killed Xianity, but the biggest is perhaps the contradictory nature of God. Not to mention the Babble is chock-full of contradictions about practically every major and minor point of belief a Xian is supposed to hold.

 

I've gathered together all the anti-Xian links that I find useful onto a page of my website - click here to check them out. Perhaps you may find them useful.

 

Good luck with smoothing this difficult topic over

[white_raven23]

..............

Christianity dies the death of a thousand cuts more often than it dies of a well aimed arrow.

 

I couldn't have said it better! (And you KNOW what great affection I have for my OWN intellect.) That was a phenomenal post, GW. I may have to copy and save this.

 

I'm going to re-post that because that quote really is THAT good Godless Wonder.

 

And so true.

 

It's funny, when christians demand to know the reason for your leaving, they really are looking for the well-aimed arrow. Because a well-aimed arrow, as definative as it seems, is highly specific and can be extracted with ease by a skilled dogmatic orator.

 

And when you stand there trying to think about what specifically made you leave....because in truth it is a thousand cuts, christians like to interpret that as "you really didn't think it through at all, you just think atheism is 'kewl'".

 

That quote is awesome. Godless Wonder, you really should submit that somewhere. That needs to be preserved!

[Eponymic]

Is a scientific argument (evolution, big bang cosmology, etc.) more convincing, even to those who aren't scientists, or would she be more likely convinced by another path- and if so, which do you think would work the best?

 

Particularly, if any of you could recommend a book or books that served to open your eyes beyond Christianity, it would be very helpful

 

Personally, I stick more toward logical arguments than scientific arguments. The more it can be put in laymans terms the better is what I think.

 

For myself, I'd say the thing that really cinched it was that there is no definitive way to say what exactly God is or if he even exists for certain. Sure there are forces at work at there, but you can in no way attribute them to any of the Gods that people have created for themselves.

 

Biblical Nonsense is the only book that's coming to mind at the moment. White Raven knows a bunch of them, you should give him a few girlfriend.

[Ouroboros]

The line of argument that was part of why I lost my faith (there are many reasons, but this is one major one):

 

First look at these two quotes from the Bible:

Matthew 6:25-34

25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life? 28 "And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. 29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. 30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? 31 So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' 32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. 33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 18:15-20

18 "I tell you the truth, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. 19 "Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. 20 For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them."

 

I lived by them, believed them, and could never think they wouldn't be true.

 

One day I have to send my family (wife and kids) on a trip, we pray, together with a relative for protection. 3 strongly faithful and believing Christians asked for protection. And also, God should always protect them anyway, no prayer really needed, because he supposedly take care of us. We don't have to worry about things, because he is with us.

 

A couple of hours later I get a phone call that my family has been in a terrible car accident, and my life and my family's life got completely turn over. Still, 10 years afterwards, we are suffering the consequences and for years I asked God for help and support through our hard times, and the answers where either silence or things got worse. One of my sons are paraplegic from this, and I lost my career I had going and many other things. We do live a fairly good life today, but it's because my wife and I are fighters and came through by pure human strength, without God and without supernatural influences or beliefs.

 

I realized a couple of years ago that God doesn't answer our needs or help us. So my reasoning was that either God is evil or ignorant or non-existent. So to settle the facts I made my last sincere prayer in my life where I asked God to hint to me or show me or prove to me that he did exist. What he had to do was up to him, he only needed to give me faith in him again, but I didn't receive any faith. Basically the next seconds the last drop of faith or belief was gone. Nothing more, nothing less, it was just not there. If faith is supernatural in nature I don't' have a control over it, and only God can give it, but he didn't answer even this little prayer of a person with dying belief. And that shows how little power God has, which is none.

 

-edit-

 

Oh, I forgot. Also, we had about (our estimate) 20,000 people around the world praying for us (several hundreds of congregations, US, Sweden, even Africa!), and including the President of US (Bill Clinton - we have a personal letter), but my son still can't walk.

 

How can a loving god hurt my son? I could understand if he had let me get hurt, but my innocent son? There's no answer to that question, only because there's no one that will answer it.

[woodsmoke]

There's a really simple answer to this one, which others have already stated.

 

You can't change her beliefs. You can lay out information for her to digest and interperet (or not) as she sees fit, but in the end she's the only one who can make the decisions.

 

Personally, I think you'd both be better served by breaking it off without wasting each others' time. Call me jaded, but experience has taught me that, practically speaking, intimate relationships between believers and nons simply don't work. It's all well and good to say you're grown adults and there's no reason a little thing like religious belief should interfere with an otherwise great relationship, but when you come back from your happy little jaunt into neverland you'll find the Earth still orbits the sun, gravity still holds its sway and she still believes you're tragically bound for hell.

[white_raven23]

Biblical Nonsense is the only book that's coming to mind at the moment. White Raven knows a bunch of them, you should give him a few girlfriend.

 

White Raven "knows" a bunch of them? White Raven OWNS a bunch of them! As you well know my friend. Thought I'd created a monster when I gave you access to my library!

 

Biblical Nonsense is a good one, and exists almost entirely online here EASY READING:

 

http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/

 

However, if you want to support the author, and spend less time reading from the unholy light of the computer monitor, then buy the book:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Biblical-Nonsense-Re...TF8&s=books

 

A personal fave of mine for it's EASY READABILITY and similarity to 'Dummies" book bulliten points is right here:

http://www.amazon.com/Kens-Guide-Bible-Ken...TF8&s=books

 

For a more in-depth analysis:

http://www.amazon.com/Here-Lies-Bible-Jeff...TF8&s=books

 

And a personal fave of mine, as it analyzes how social systems work in ther first place from an evolutionary and macroorganic perspective in terms of the existence and reality of "evil" and it's function in society (FYI I loaned this one to Eponymic and he went so far as to make his own notes for this one!):

http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Principle-Sc...TF8&s=books

 

And we've got to have some Carl Sagan:

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-...TF8&s=books

 

My dad even read this one, as well as Demon Haunted world:

http://www.amazon.com/People-Believe-Weird...9078240-2797437

 

These are good if somewhat indirectly related:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Origins-Profo...9078240-2797437

 

 

http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Origin...9078240-2797437

 

http://www.amazon.com/Browsers-Book-Ending...TF8&s=books

 

Hmmm....as I look at those, I see a few I don't own.....Here's the page I'm eyeballing with pure mental lust:

 

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-h...harles%20Panati

 

 

 

 

I'm still reading Dawkin's "The God Delusion" and so far, I'm liking it.

 

I have "The Atheist Universe" on order and it has not arrived yet.

 

I'm at work doing this from memory....so I suspect there are more books at home I'm accidentally leaving out.

 

Those "thousand cuts" have to start somewhere....here's a few "razors" to leave lying around on the coffee table!

[Trancelation]

The straw that broke the camel's back for me was:

 

"If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him."

 

I know, I know, what does THAT have to do with Christianity? Everything. For so many years I had a preconcieved notion of Christianity, but when I examined it from another angle, I saw there was less to it than I thought.

[Gobbler]

As others have said, the absurdity of the bible! Original sin, god's need of human and animal sacrifice, eternal damnation for finite sin, etc. I mean, just look at how the bible was put together, Council of Nicea, hundreds of translations, etc. Look at all the urban legends we have today that people take for fact, yet are not even close to the truth. So how can we even begin to accept something that was written nearly two thousand years ago? Even things we were taught from our own american history have been proven to be filled with out and out falsehoods. Ya know, Washington cutting down the cherry tree, Patrick Henry stating "Give me liberty or give me death!" Never happened! Yet we were taught to take these things as truth. Unfortunately you can bring up these things to your girlfriend until your blue in the face and you will never convince her. She will have to come to this on her own like the rest of us here. Hopefully with logic and reasoning and much questioning.

[Llwellyn]

The whole issue of God's non-corrective punishment is the aspect of Christianity which proves that it is nonsense. Consider this line of reasoning:

 

If cruelty is from His point of view 'good,' telling lies may be 'good' too. Even if they are true, what then? If His ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls Heaven might well be what we should call Hell, and vice-versa. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. We have no motive for obeying Him. Not even fear. It is true we have His threats and promises. But why should we believe them?

 

You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing — the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact — our worst fears are true — all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It's only our depravity that makes them look black to us.

 

And so what? This, for all practical (and speculative) purposes, sponges God off the slate. The word good, applied to Him, becomes meaningless: like abracadabra. Finally, if reality at its very root is so meaningless to us — or, putting it the other way round, if we are such total imbeciles — what is the point of trying to think either about God or about anything else? This knot comes undone when you try to pull it tight.

 

Who wrote this bit of thinking? It was C.S. Lewis in "Grief Observed" (slightly rearranged). Lewis did not believe in Biblical Christianity and neither should you. Lewis wanted to massage the Christian doctrines in order to make the religion "better" and had no belief in Christianity as it exists in the Bible. Other passages like the one above can be found in Lewis's letters to friends, in "Problem with Pain," and elsewhere. Lewis was not a Christian in the way that word is understood.

[godlessgrrl]

Hmmm. I have to say I'm very jaded about your chances of success together, if she is a devout believer and you aren't. You've already indicated that your differing religious positions have precluded marriage. You can discuss the issue with her until you're blue in the face, but be prepared to be kicked to the curb in the interest of her finding a more doctrinally sound life partner. (This verse right here will always trump genuine love and companionship, for Good Christians™ ).

 

When Xians are forced to choose between their deity and their loved ones, the loved ones always lose. After all, it's what Jesus told them, and it's in the Bible.

 

Believe me. I've been there. On both sides of the fence.

 

But if you're going to optimistically keep hoping that love will win out in the end, you could certainly throw some things at her like the Epicurean Paradox or the Problem of Evil. With us LA-educated folks, a philosophical approach is often better than a scientific one.

 

Good luck, in any case.

[garrisonjj]

Hello all,

 

 

Two things come to mind. Once in a confession the priest told me that I already abandonded my earlier catholic teaching and I already decided against it . I left thinking,,,you know, you are FUCKING right!

 

Then at my son's 1st communion, the priest's sermon was a warning to parents. That if you don't stringently see that your kids are trained in religion, you should tie a brimstone around your neck and jump in the ocean. While always having doubts, this sealed it for me. Religion can go FUCK itself and ever since I've been an atheist. My life has improved GREATLY without the fuckin baggage of religion. I tried all my life to be fuckin holy and curchgoing for nothing. It was all senseless fucking brainwashing!

[Carolyn the Red]

To be honest, what made me atheist was the realization that I'd never had more reason to believe in God than in Santa Claus. I was an obedient and respectful child, and I believed what adults told me. I never questioned these things, and I first doubted there was a god when I learned about Santa and the Tooth Fairy. Finally, as an adult, I let myself think about myself as a product of my culture and upbringing, and really ask myself why I believed in such things.

 

I think it's probably worth it for every believer to really think about why they started to believe, and how things might have been different were they born elsewhere or to different parents. It helps immensely to realize what glasses you have had on through your life, that affect what you see and how you interpret it.

[StewartP]

This one did it for me:

 

“I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

 

Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71)

 

At our church we we always studying and decrying various cults. Of course Islam, Busddhism & others were completely beyond the pail.

 

One day it dawned on me - why were we right and evryone else was wrong? Maybe we were all wrong.

[garrisonjj]

Hello all,

 

 

Two things come to mind. Once in a confession the priest told me that I already abandonded my earlier catholic teaching and I already decided against it . I left thinking,,,you know, you are FUCKING right!

 

Then at my son's 1st communion, the priest's sermon was a warning to parents. That if you don't stringently see that your kids are trained in religion, you should tie a brimstone around your neck and jump in the ocean. While always having doubts, this sealed it for me. Religion can go FUCK itself and ever since I've been an atheist. My life has improved GREATLY without the fuckin baggage of religion. I tried all my life to be fuckin holy and curchgoing for nothing. It was all senseless fucking brainwashing!

 

 

Imagine, how I went into that confessional as a humble repentent person. The priests words and attitude gave me the courage to say FUCK CONFESSION! This practice caused me such grief over the years no more!!!

[necrosmith]

The Bible is the inerrant, perfect word of god.

 

People say that, but if you read it you find it is far from perfect and far from inerrant.

 

With so many contradictions and things flat out wrong in the Bible, it loses any sort of authority. If one part is wrong, how can you know if any part is right?

 

Among other things..

 

You could also give her a copy of Thomas Paine's Age of Reason to read and then discuss.

 

Paine pretty much destroys Christianity in that book.

 

That said, cognitive dissonance is an amazingly powerful force. You may never be able to convince her Christianity is crap.