Neon Genesis

Please explain to me how a lack of evidence constitutes evidence because I just don't get it, especially when you yourself say that the ones testifying the evidence were considered unreliable sources of evidence. And you can't use the bible to prove the bible is real. That's just silly and pointless. The difference between proving events in ancient history occured and that Jesus is real is that we have actual evidence that these events occured, like the various temples in Greece or the ancient pyramids in Epgyt. These ancient people left behind psychical evidence that we can see and touch to prove that they were real. All we have about Jesus is a collection of stories that were written many years after his supposed death. There's lots of movies and books about leprechauns that exist out there but no psychical evidence to prove or disprove their existence. Now if I told you that I believe leprechauns exist and because you can't prove that leprechauns do not exist, that must mean leprechauns exist. Now replace leprechauns with Jesus and ask yourself if your belief that Jesus is real is rational.

But this is one of those things about Christianity that I never understood. Why are some biblical stories that are clearly illogical fairytales made by scared goat herders are accepted by Christians to be a metaphor like the falling stars in Revelation but then other clearly illogical fairytales made by scared goat herders are accepted as being literal truth like the book of Genesis, or walking on water, or some prophesizing carpenter guy gets ressurected after being dead for three days? Kat22 obviously knows that stars falilng to Earth literally is illogical and so it becomes a metaphor. But then Kat22 turns around and accepts the book of Genesis as being literal truth. What makes God creating the universe in only six days, talking snakes, and magic fruits more rational for Christians to accept as literal truth than falling stars.

When I was baptized, I didn't feel much different than before I was "saved." I was taught that when I was baptized and became a Christian that my life was supposed to be different than before, but my way of thinking wasn't much different from before, I suppose because I was always raised to believe in the bible and I was never really fired up for Christianity. But when I deconverted from it, it was scary at first, and there are still sometimes where I have to fight back against that fear of hell I was raised with, but as a whole I feel far more liberated than I did when I was "saved." Whereas my life didn't really change much after my baptism, my way of thinking about the world and religion is entirely different now that I've deconverted. What you're feeling right now Jean is entirely normal for anyone to feel that way when they've realized they've been decieved. It's like when you first make a friend and at first everything starts out great but then you find out that friend was really a malicious back-stabber all along and you feel anger at them for not being honest with you.

So, if God didn't really mean he was talking about actual stars when he gave John a vision, why didn't he say what he actually meant? Surely wouldn't an all-knowing omniscient God realize ahead of time that we mere mortals wouldn't be able to understand his coded message? Why does God want us so badly to believe in his truth but then turns around and speaks his message in smoke signals instead of speaking clearly what he intended? Why should the fate of our souls be depended on God's guessing game?

Thank you everyone for your support and thanks Dave for the book recommendation. I've made sure to bookmark it to check it out sometime. I think part of what made agnosticism appealing to me when I left Christianity was it had a sort of neutral stance, that neither side of the debate can know the truth. I also think part of it is because I just don't know enough about the big bang theory and human evolution to feel confident enough to debate the subject when people challenge me about it as science has never been one of my best subjects. But maybe it's also like what you said and it's just difficult for me to let go of what I've been taught since I was born.

As someone who is still uncertain about how they feel about the existence of God, I like this quote from one of the intro tracks on the Our Lady Peace album "Spiritual Machines" that I think does an excellent job of explaining about how I feel about the meaning of life even if there is nothing left for us after death. "Take death, for example:a great deal of our effort goes into avoiding it. We make extraordinary efforts to delay it, and often consider it's intrusion a tragic event. Yet we find it hard to live without it. Death gives meaning to our lives. It gives importance and value to time. Time would become meaningless if there were too much of it. If death were indefinitely put off, the human pshyche would end up, well, like the end of a twilight zone episode."

This reminds me of that email someone sent to the Dr. Laura radio show once: http://www.anvari.org/fun/Jokes_by_Email/Dear_Dr_Laura.html

I personally don't believe there is such a thing as "good" and "evil". I think these are merely labels society uses to describe productive behavior vs destructive behavior and "morality" is simply the measure that we use to gauge how beneficial our actions are to society. I don't go around lying and stealing from others because "God said so." I don't do those things because it doesn't benefit anyone to steal or lie. I think humans are creatures that depend on other humans to exist. If everyone lied and stole from each other, it would create feelings of distrust and hatred between each other. If humans aren't able to trust each other and become isolated from each other, then the growth of human society becomes stunted, and if human society's progession becomes stunted from isolating each other, I feel like that it will eventually lead to the destruction of humanity. Likewise, I don't go around murdering everyone not because God said so but also because I think murdering people is never beneficial to anyone. Since humans depend on other humans to survive, if we kill every human we see, then we'll have no one left to depend on to help us survive, thus murder doesn't benefit us. And I don't go around raping people because God said so but because likewise it causes feelings of hatred and distrust between people and the health risks involved of raping everyone doesn't benefit anyone. If we all went around raping each other, it would spread diseases like wildfire and if we couldn't have sex anymore without getting a disease, then sex is no longer pleasurable for anyone, thus rape doesn't benefit anyone. This is why the main philosophy in life that I follow is " "An Ye Harm None, Do What Ye Will." It's nice and simple and it's just plain common sense. And I've noticed that when people don't follow this philosophy of not hurting others, they're usually behaving non-sensically when they do hurt people.

I've been lurking at these forums for awhile now and I've enjoyed reading the topics here, but I finally decided to join the forums to join in on the discussions myself, so here's my testimony about my deconversion from Christianity. I guess it started around the time I realilzed that I was gay. I was raised by parents in the Churches Of Christ and was taught to believe that homosexuality was a sin and that I would go to hell if I was gay. At first I tried to ignore my feelings but when that didn't work out I tried to pray to God to help me overcome what I was taught to believe was a "sin." That didn't work either and after that I resigned myself to believing that no matter what I was going to go to hell. I couldn't talk to my parents about it because they hate gays and I was afraid they would reject me if they knew I was gay (they still don't know that I am gay or that I no longer believe in the bible). Sometime later I started to question the authority of the bible. I just couldn't believe that a "just" God could give someone infitie punishment for finite "sins." It just didn't make sense to me. I started to read more from different sites about the contradictions of the bible. I was shocked and angered at how many innocent children God killed in the bible. I had always known that the Jews had stoned disobedient children and about the firstborn children being killed by God in Exodus but I had always been taught that those actions of God could be rationalized. But when I read the other stories about God killing innocent children like all the millions of people in Noah's ark that died in the flood and how God ordered all the Amalekite children and women to be killed and how even in the New Testament God still thinks disobedient childred deserve to die, I knew I couldn't worship such a bloodthirsty God anymore even if he was real. When I started to doubt Christianity, I started to doubt other religions as well. I wondered what the point of it was when all religion was is a guessing game where everybody went around trying to prove why their invisible best friend is more right than your invisible best friend and I felt like religion was a waste of time. Though I no longer believe in religion, I'm still uncertain about how I feel about the existence of deities. I've been identifiying msyelf as an agnostic to people that ask but while part of me still believes there's a possiblity God could exist but that that existence is unprovable, and that if any deities did exist, they would be beyond any human comprehension, the other part of me wonders what the point of believing in it is when there's no proof. And sometimes I wonder if I'm only hanging onto the possiblity of God's existence because this belief has been so ingrained in me since my childhood that it's difficult to let go of it, but then other days godisimaginary.com's leprechaun analogy makes perfect sense to me. So I'm still confused about God's existence and I hope I can sort out my feelings about God through learning more from the threads at this site. All I know for certain is that I think religion is the biggest waste of time mankind ever has come up with and I want nothing to do with it anymore.