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The Testimony Of Tabula Rasa


Tabula Rasa

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I was born to southern baptists parents, and me and my older brother were raised as such. I don't know that my dad really cared for church that much, even though he went every sunday with my mom who insisted we go. She was the spiritual leader of our home, and thought she was doing the right thing. I remember as a kid feeling great dread of God sending me to hell if I didn't get saved,(got saved at eight) and even still felt dread that God would get mad at me if I didn't behave right.

 

Even with the religious indoctrination of the church, I still was fairly curious for a kid, and was a fiend for dinosaurs, monsters, comic books, and eventually science fiction in my teens-early twenties. My teenage years were probably the toughest time, because the Youth pastor thought nearly all rock music was bad, the comic books I read were bad. I was also sneaking peeks at girly magazines.

 

(Pm me and I'll tell you the absurd circumstances of my second time getting "saved" at 16. Can't take a chance of revealing it here.)

 

I had ups and downs of indulging in the things I liked, and then repenting of it.(Usually it was that "debbil rock music.)

At a youth retreat when I was twenty back in 1986, I got fired up for the Lord by a charismatic, tongue talking preacher,(odd since the church was baptist.) and was certain that I was going to do right by God. A few months later, the emotional high was gone, and I sunk back into my old "bad" ways.

 

In 1987, the preacher scandals hit. Oral Roberts saying God was going to "take him home" if he didn't get a million dollars by March 31, Jim Bakker's tryst with a doped Jessica Hahn, and in 1988 Jimmy Swaggart being caught with a prostitute.

 

I lost all faith in preachers and stopped going to church. Bakker and Swaggart were "holy men" and having extramarital sex, and I was feeling guilty for reading Playboy and looking at porn films.

From then on I sort of meandered, still believing in salvation by grace, and "once saved always saved". I thought that what I was doing really wasn't so bad. I hadn't taken drugs, I only drank every once in a while, and I didn't see what was wrong with girlie magazines and porn.

 

I don't know if I could be described as a Christian in name only,but at the least I was developing somewhat liberal attitudes about things. As I got older, even more and more liberal. Out of desperation, I had encounters with two prostitutes in 1995 and visited quite a few "Health spas" in 1999, sort of losing my virginity in one visit.

 

This is getting long so let me fast forward to Feb 2007. Over the years, it'd bother me that anyone who wasn't saved, no matter how good would go to hell. This intensified and I started learning about religion on the net. It tore at me and tore me until it came to a head in an unbelievably symbolic way. It was August 25 2007 and I was taking a shower and the same awful thoughts were plaguing me, then finally something just snapped.

 

I thought to myself, and all powerful being could do much better by it's creations than what's described in the bible.

It wouldn't send people to eternal torment.

 

An all powerful being would have much more compassion than human beings. A gigantic weight lifted off my shoulders, and I went looking for further support on the net. It led me here, and while I still wasn't deconverted, I started taking small steps until I think I finally made the leap into ceasing to believe in christianity totally I'll say about early 2008.

 

I still thought that maybe Yahweh of the old testament wasn't so bad, then I found out what an absolute monster he was, and the rest of the old abrahamic indoctrination started to crumble away.(Reading the articles and opinions here helped immensely)

 

The final blow was when I went toe to toe with the sum of all fears on November 14 2008 and blasphemed not only the holy spirit,but denied the divinity and existence of it, Yahweh, and Jesus.

 

Nowadays, I'm not certain what I believe. I think there may be some sort of God(guess that makes me a deist) but it doesn't care if it's worshipped or not by way of omnipotence and transcendence. The one thing I know for sure, is that whether there is a God or not, the universe is not ruled by an omnipotent egotistical psychopath named Yahweh.

 

Whew. Took me a long time, but there it is.

Tabula Rasa

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Guest QuidEstCaritas?

I am glad to see you let it all out.

 

An omnipotent sociopath is still a sociopath nonetheless.

 

If somehow the "God" of the OT existed we would all, every last one of us, be fucked. Even those that served it would be fucked.

 

So it's good to see that you saw through that "facade" that you had constructed for yourself concerning this alleged entity which has nill proof for it's existence.

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Honestly, I wouldn't even care about debunking Christianity if it wasn't for the doctrine of hell.

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Guest Net Eng

 

Honestly, I wouldn't even care about debunking Christianity if it wasn't for the doctrine of hell.

 

The YouTube video was perfect Jedah!! :funny:

 

Glad to see you made it out Tabula Rasa!! I felt the major relief as well when I finally came to the conclusion that Christianity (and religion in general) was crap.

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Tab it was so nice to hear your testimony. We each had our own path of what lead us away from xtianity and no matter what path it was, there is pain. I am so glad you found this site and found help from here. I did too. This site has given me so much information, support and great new friends too. You are one of them :grin: I value your friendship Tab. Your a great guy. Thanks for the testimony, and I hope you continue finding all the answers you need for your life. :P

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Hi and welcome!

 

I remember all those evangelicals being busted. Don't forget Robert Tilton! He probably wasn't as mainstream as the others. My family had known him and I was even on one of the televised sermon's from his church in Dallas when I was like 8. He was accused of... money laundering? Well accused of pretty much of stealing money from viewers.

 

Nice to see you on the bright side.

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Honestly, I wouldn't even care about debunking Christianity if it wasn't for the doctrine of hell.

 

The YouTube video was perfect Jedah!! :funny:

 

Glad to see you made it out Tabula Rasa!! I felt the major relief as well when I finally came to the conclusion that Christianity (and religion in general) was crap.

 

Thanks guys. Jedah, the video had me laughing my butt off in some places. Especially the parts at the strip club and the four gang bangers blasting away at each other and two of them doing matrix style moves.

 

Early on, I held on to a belief in an afterlife, God and the angels, but I reasoned, if God's all powerful , what does he need servants for. Some might answer to worship him, but if you're the Ultimate Being, the source of anything, you wouldn't care if you had a bunch of beings kissing your butt. I had some trouble giving up the idea of Jesus, but the part I was glad to give up, was Yahweh.

 

I mean, holy fuck, how do they defend such an evil bastard?I guess the fear is ingrained deep in a lot of poor souls if they can ignore what a complete douchebag Yahweh is in the Old Testament. It probably wouldn't be a stretch to say Yahweh would kill people if they looked at him wrong.

 

Denial of the Holy Spirit was the toughest part. I probably still have some residual fear left I have to uproot. One thing that concerns me, is that if I'm afraid it may seem to easy for me to have deconverted. I haven't set foot in a church more than three times in a church in the last 22 years, and I'm concerned I might still be vulnerable to some of the tracts, and sermons.

 

I'm fairly resilient so far, but can anyone suggest any ways to reinforce my anti-dogma armor?

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Welcome, TR!

 

I agree with you that if a true god existed, she (hee hee) would be much more compassionate. I don't think most Christians really believe in Hell anyways, because IF they really thought that their neighbors, friends, and even family members would burn in hell for eternity, they would be preaching from every street corner 24 hours per day.

 

But instead they go to church for 90 minutes a week.

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No, they believe it...but only when you really push them to admit it.

 

I suspect that most Christians know deep down inside that the doctrine of hell is ridiculous and unjust, so they attempt to block it from their everyday thoughts. This would also explain why the majority of them don't aggressively proselytize, as a small part of them knows that it's inherently wrong. If I honestly believed people were going to be tortured for eternity if they didn't do a certain thing, which I happened to know about, I would dedicate a fairly large portion of my life to getting the message across. The fact that most Xians hardly do anything shows that they are either far more sadistic than me ( Unlikely ! ) or subconsciously understand that the belief is garbage...but hang on to their "Personal relationship with God" because it makes them feel better about life. Could be other reasons, but I doubt it. The point is most people do not actively think, so contradictory philosophies in the same mind are common.

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I don't think most Christians really believe in Hell anyways, because IF they really thought that their neighbors, friends, and even family members would burn in hell for eternity, they would be preaching from every street corner 24 hours per day.

 

Hi again, Becky!

 

I think the doctrine of hell (in retrospect of course, I never hesitated about the doctrine of hel when I was a christian) is absurd in that the level of intensity it calls for on the part of evangelicals is so great it is impossible to maintain. I think that is why , by 30, people rarely witness / evangelize on a personal level.

 

It's not that they are no longer smug in their assertion that they are going to heaven and "those sinners" are going to hell, they just can't maintain the sense of alarm and distress heaped upon them. In southern baptist and other evangelical circles there is no priestly system of penance, confession and other measures to manage the burden of hell. So they just give up by age 30 because they are not about to fall down dead and the Lard is not going to come get them (a la Kirk Cameron and Left Behind) any time. Life must go on. They know it, so it just doesn't get done.

 

It is a realistic response to an unreal religion.

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thank you for sharing that,

 

my experience was that I was indoctrinate since childhood to believe how loving this god was, and sending his son to die for our sins,

and then after this foundation was established in me they dumped everything else, so no matter how evil god may have looked from a outsider, to me I knew he was all loving and I would like alot of xians would rationalize every action as something justified and that it was his victims that were evil but never this god, and if I ever did get a thought of god being wrong, it was ether the devil or my evil flesh that had to put under captivity to Christ,

 

I did believe in hell, because I believed you have to believe everything in the bible otherwise you would be a fake xian, and I never found it ridiculous at all, and am pretty sure my old church really believes it to,

one of the big steps in my de conversion was when I started believing in my own thoughts and stop dismissing them as evil and become critical of this god, which I was taught as a child to never judge god and that it was evil,

but now since I left, this god really disturbs and sickens me now.

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