Bhim

This appears to have been before his full deconversion. From what I've come to understand, he repudiated his prior teachings before he finally repudiated the Jesus.

Daily Wire is where I first heard this news (oh yes, I'm a subscriber). Poor Knowles was lamenting this. I like the guy despite that he is Catholic, but to me his lament was a cause for celebration. Hillsong Church is a powerful force in evangelical Christianity, and the departure of one of their own is a decent blow to them at a cultural level. Maybe these people will found a more public ex-Christian community.

Hi RC. Sorry to see you go, but I do understand your reasons. I'm sure I'm one of the people with whom you have differences, but I'd like to think they are not irreconciliablen in that we could likely disagree without being disagreeable. Or to put it more succinctly, I support Donald Trump but don't derive my identity from him. I likewise wish the atheist community would return to its earlier state. I remember that back then, I was two years into ex-Christianity and considered myself very liberal. My views haven't changed all that much, and yet here I am watching YouTube atheists who are staunch conservatives. I hesitate to discuss too much politics at your sendoff from ex-C. I've always viewed this place as a sort of alcoholics anonymous. I may not derive my identity from the President, but unfortunately I'll always derive part of it from Jesus in the sense that I identify with not believing in him. Even my aforementioned politics derives from my eschewing of Jesus' values of compassion for strangers and larger social responsibility. So whether on ex-C or elsewhere, I doubt I will ever stop connecting with the community of ex-Christians. Yet there is something healthy about your view of this forum as a medicine. You're letting go of Jesus in a way I am not, and that's a good thing. I hope you will at least check in from time to time, but if not I wish you all the best. And hey, I'm glad you're dragging this out so that you and I can exchange any final thoughts that are on your mind.

That would be me. Apologies for the late reply, I'm catching up on a bunch of posts. I don't personally believe in God or the supernatural, but after deconverting I did find it important to explicitly identify as Hindu and to engross myself in Hindu practices once again. That's where I've been the past nine years!

A certain poster on ex-C once wrote very wise words which I wll repeat. I will become a Christian again if I hear the literal, audible voice of Jesus of Nazareth speak to me from the heavens, invite me to touch his hands and side, and give me explicit instructions on what I ought and ought not to believe. Nothing short will suffice.

Hi all, hope I'm not late to the thread. I don't know if I was presumed to be among the ranks of 'the forgotten.' I realize I haven't posted here in a few months. It was not a conscious choice. Honestly, it was simply that my wife and I have gotten a fair bit more social of late and spend most of our weekends out with mutual friends. That's of course a good thing, but it resulted in my inadvertently neglecting this community. My apologies. I'm sorry to hear BO is gone. He was a rather course individual, but I appreciated that like myself, he rejected all forms of orthodoxy. By that I failly specifically mean that we both support Donald Trump and reject any suggestion that ex-Christians must be politically and socially liberal or support any specific doctrine by virtue of our rejection of Jesus. Regardless, I'm looking forward to re-engaging with all of you and catching up on your respective non-faith journeys.

I've been off the forums for a few months due to having an overly active social life, but I was actually coming back here specifically to post about this. Joshua Harris...wow. This is quite significant. I learned about this in a rather roundabout way. As you all are aware, I'm interested in conservative politics and follow a number of commentators. I generally stick to secular people and Jews, and I avoid any evangelicals like the plague. But I'm willing to listen to Catholics. It was a Catholic commentator who mentioned the apostasy of Harris. To him it was a lament, but I took it as a cause for celebration. You often hear about vapid and superficial Christian leaders deconverting (e.g. Marty Samson, who actually deconverted just the other day). But Joshua Harris was, shall we say, "the real deal." He was a member of Sovereign Grace Ministries, whose theology is fairly rigorous, insofar as Calvinist Christianity can be rigorous. At this point it's been over nine years since I was a Christian, but when I was steeped in the faith I followed Joshua Harris to some extent. I was in numerous Bible studies where dating was discussed at length, and the teachings of Harris were firmly impressed upon us. Ironically I was never into dating (maybe at a subconscious level I knew I would revert to my native Hinduism and get an arranged marriage), so his admonitions to avoid kissing before marriage were not particularly burdensome to me. I remember how many of the other Christian men in my group struggled with this, and would confess to succumbing to sexual temptations and the like. I deconverted in 2010, and though I checked in on the Christian world from time to time via the blogosphere, I never bothered to find out what came of Harris until this past week. Apparently, even before deconverting himself, Harris repudiated certain aspects of "I Kissed Dating Goodbye," stating that it deemphasized the grace of Christ. I would disagree with him. Jesus is unquestionably clear in the New Testament that looking at a woman with even the semblance of sexual appetite is tantamount to adultery, and that it would be better to dismember yourself than to go to eternal conscious torment in hell because of your sin. Harris' doctrines logically follow from the New Testament and his act of distancing himself from them was an admission that the teachings of Jesus simply do not comport with human psychology or basic moral truths which can be derived from casual observation. I suppose his deconversion was inevitable. I further suppose I'm glad he escaped the mental prison in which the cult kept him captive. At the same time, his teachings caused a good deal of harm, and I can't say I'm sympathetic at the loss of his livelihood and his ability to earn an income. I too have suffered social consequences from escapting Christianity. Maybe Joshua should have picked up some marketable skills while he was learning the art of telling non-Christians that we're going to hell. Regardless, I've reflected on this a lot the past few days, because this is a person who was part of the same charismatic Calvinist tradition as myself, and who departed for reasons other than collapsing under the weight of a groundless theology. Anyone who's read my own ex-timony (I realize it's quite aways back in the forums) knows that I did not leave for intellectual reasons. It was not a scientific elucidation or a logical contrivance in Christian theology that was the impetus of my departure. Nor was it financial or sexual temptation, as is the case for many prominent former pastors. It was simply that I could not live the Christian lifestyle of consigning every soul around myself to eternal conscious torment in the hell of fire. For Harris it seems to be a similar issue. He divorced his wife, he realized that all of his moralizing did not concur with the morality suggested by casual observation, and he simply did not want to live in the moral universe of Jesus. Anyway, despite my annoyance towards the man, I can nonetheless identify with his spiritual struggle. I do wish Harris the best (and a "real job" in the very near future), and perhaps he will even grace these forums with his presence.

Wow, this is exactly how I found the show too. We only ended up watching about one and a half seasons before my wife got bored, but it was pretty interesting. One thing I noticed is that the Christian theology on the show is awful. Obviously this doesn't bother me on anything more than a purely intellectual level, but if I were still a Christian I would be deeply annoyed at all of the elements of the show that have no basis in the Bible at all. It's a very interesting window into what the general, Biblically-illiterate public think about Christianity.

Well, I don't know if it was the first or the second (since Sgr A* has also been studied). But the Event Horizon Telescope collaboration has reported results here: Event Horizon Telescope Very important discovery, in part because data from multiple telescopes designed by different collaborations was successfully combined.

Heh, no argument from me that BAA's absence is sorely noted here. He would have had a field day with a paper like this. I only skimmed the paper, but it looks like they made some probabilistic assumptions about the factors of the Drake Equation and computed conditional distributions. I would say that all hope of intelligent life is not lost. The paper's conclusion states a 53-99.6% chance of no life in the galaxy. I'll see if I can examine this further and see what the posterior distribution looks like in order to find out what is the expectation value on this distribution. Thanks for tagging me on this guys!

Yeah that's a good point. I'm living the life now, but I suppose we're one economic collapse away from me being out in the cold.

I'm surprised no one likes to talk about this. Since the Vietnam Era the President's powers have increased dramatically, and it is Congress that has ceded this power. The liberals are currently complaining about Trump's National Emergency declaration, ignoring that this power is made possible by an act of Congress. I'm glad Trump is doing what he is doing to stem the effects of Obama's leniency towards refugees and Muslims (neither of which have a place on American soil, in my opinion). But in general, I hope this leads Congress to take its power back from the Presidency.

Well, we're not just standard conservatives. We're ex-Christian conservatives, meaning we think for ourselves! I have no idea if this is a liberal or conservative position, but I would actually say that it's a bad idea to comment on the situation in Venezuela. I think Trump might be using this as an opportunity to bash socialism (in which case I agree with him). But taking sides in the affairs of craphole countries is a bad idea. It's like getting in the mud to wrestle a pig. It just makes you dirty, and besides that the pig likes it. In keeping with my apathy towards those less fortunate, I would say that we should let these people kill each other if only to reduce the pool of potential illegal immigrants.

Wow, is that possible once you've defected to private industry? I don't think I could take the pay cut, but I do miss something about academic life, Chinese speakers and all. My company lets me go to an academic conference every year, and I have to admit it makes me miss that side of the world. I'm happy for you Prof!

Thanks for engaging me on this. The reason I don't want to spend a single dollar on these people is because I don't care about them. You do care about them, and if you'd like to spend money on them then I wouldn't stop you (the vacation suggestion was hyperbole, charity would indeed be more efficient). But you should spend your own money, right? There's a common understanding we all share in civilized society that your rights end when your actions begin to affect me. Spending your own money doesn't affect me, but spending money from the communal pot of tax dollars that we have allocated for the good of the tax payers has a deleterious effect on me. So by the code of ethics that we both share, it's wrong for you to do this.