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Goodbye Jesus

Ok Finally Posting My Testimony


Guest riverrunner

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Guest riverrunner

I grew up a Christian, first Catholic and then Fundamentalist Christian. I held these views strongly all the way through college and well into adulthood, but I was always trying to reconcile what the bible said and what we observe in the real world. Some of the most glaring inconsistencies are from the very first book. The earth is much older than the bible says. The world was never covered in a flood. We did not come from someone called Adam and Eve. So I learned to compartmentalize these errors as 'not literal' and focused instead on the new testament and Jesus. Eventually this led to the same problem. People are not raised from the dead, no one walks on water, the blind do not see, prayers are most definitely not answered. Once again I was faced with the fact that the bible is not true.

 

When I finally came to this realization I was naturally angry, bitter and resentful (can you tell?). I wasted so much time, and now I can clearly see the harm religion does to the world (god told you to invade who?) - not to mention the mental abuse Christians impose on human beings when they threaten them with hell. There is no hell. There is no heaven. There is no reason to think we go on after we die. My cat has as much of a 'soul' as you or I and she doesn't care that there is no god. Someday I will learn not to care, but right now my goal is to free as many people as I can from the lies that enslave them. I will use logic, reason and sometimes ridicule, because religion has had a free pass for too long. The spectacular claims of religious people can no longer go unchallenged.

 

Thank you.

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Welcome to common sense and logical thinking riverrunner.

I too was angry, bitter and resentful when I finally woke up to the lies

of religion and the church. That anger has since turned to fascination with mythology and the capacity

of humans to believe anything.

 

I am not fully convinced though that there is absolutely no possibility that

our consciousness could somehow survive our bodily demise. But if it does, it has nothing to

do with heaven or hell, gods or religion. It would be just the way of the universe.

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I grew up a Christian, first Catholic and then Fundamentalist Christian. I held these views strongly all the way through college and well into adulthood, but I was always trying to reconcile what the bible said and what we observe in the real world. Some of the most glaring inconsistencies are from the very first book. The earth is much older than the bible says. The world was never covered in a flood. We did not come from someone called Adam and Eve. So I learned to compartmentalize these errors as 'not literal' and focused instead on the new testament and Jesus. Eventually this led to the same problem. People are not raised from the dead, no one walks on water, the blind do not see, prayers are most definitely not answered. Once again I was faced with the fact that the bible is not true.

 

When I finally came to this realization I was naturally angry, bitter and resentful (can you tell?). I wasted so much time, and now I can clearly see the harm religion does to the world (god told you to invade who?) - not to mention the mental abuse Christians impose on human beings when they threaten them with hell. There is no hell. There is no heaven. There is no reason to think we go on after we die. My cat has as much of a 'soul' as you or I and she doesn't care that there is no god. Someday I will learn not to care, but right now my goal is to free as many people as I can from the lies that enslave them. I will use logic, reason and sometimes ridicule, because religion has had a free pass for too long. The spectacular claims of religious people can no longer go unchallenged.

 

Thank you.

 

Well good luck with all of that. People are not going to see it your way unless they are ready for it. You can show them all the evidence in the world against the existence of god and they are more likely to not believe it (trust me, I have tried). They base the existence of god on "faith" and according to Dan Barker in his book "Godless", Faith is the evidence of non-evidence. 9 times out of 10, christians are not going to believe any evidence that you give them that god does not exist.When i was a christian and some of my friends who were atheist would try to covince me, I thought they were crazy and I believed the bible because: god said it, I believed it, and that settled it. Now I see how uneducated I actually was and how frustrated my friends must have felt with me.I agree with you that people do need to be "free from the lies that enslave them" but it is very difficult to make them see that what they believe is actually a lie. I just wanted to give you a heads up that it will be frustrating. Good Luck, I haven't had any so far.

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You went from Catholicism to fundamentalism? (Protestant?) How did that come about?

 

I agree with lookingfortruth that it'll be hard to convince more than a very rare few with logic and rationality alone. I'm currently trying to get my fundie friend (who is the 'best' friend I have right now) to try to at least understand my position, and he's telling me that what I say about my journey to atheism is "the stupidest thing" he's ever heard. I may have to keep trying though...

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I enjoyed your testimonial, riverrunner, and I applaude your goal to help others see that Christianity is a lie. But keep a few things in mind.

 

I love rationality and logic. But as a Christian, the religion was exempt from them both since God was above the mental abilities of human beings who depended upon them to understand the world around us. As has already been said, there is something more required for a true believer to leave the religion behind. But once they have that "something more" then rationality and logic will confirm their newfound belief that the religion is not right and will help them make the final break. But rationality and logic alone are not enough for the true believer.

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Thanks for sharing that! I'm pretty disgusted with Christianity too. I think it's a horrible insidious trap and that it can fuck with people's heads for their whole lives, even if they've had the guts to free themselves from it. Ugh...

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Thanks for sharing - I went from being a catholic to being a fundalmentalist as well. When I started having serious doubts I thought about returning to my catholic roots, until I went to my mothers funeral, but luckily that put me right off!!

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Appreciate reading of your de-conversion, which is very similar to mine as well. As a child I was raised Catholic and became "born again" or "saved" when I was 16 in a fundamentalist conservative baptist church. I'm 38 now and de-converted myself a few years ago with the same vigor to confront the ignorance and superstition that so many Christians believe.

 

But as others just eluded too, it is a highly highly, I mean highly frustrating endeavor to try and reason with most Christians. I think those who developed Christianity early on and in their writings did a good job of creating an "encrypted" set of beliefs. I'm not glorifying it, no way; it's just that for about every point, argument or reasonable position you may take, they seem to counter it rather easily without much thought.

 

For example, several months ago I got into a debate with a fundamentalist and the conversation went something like this:

 

Me: "I just think that it sounds absurd that the supposed creator of the entire known universe, to you would find it necessary to have a blood sacrifice to prevent billions from spending an eternity in hell"

 

Xian: "Christ provided the proper blood sacrifice"

 

It couldn't go anywhere from there.

 

You try and bring up the barbarity of Jehovah in the Bible and they say it's "dispensational" or relative to it's time.

 

You try and bring up why you are an ex-Christian and they bring up the Parable of the Seeds. "You received the word, but then a time of testing came, you feel away".

 

You ask for evidence of God and they say it's "spiritual" and can't be proven by science. God is supposedly in this spiritual realm and trumps all scientific reason/observation. so you must be "born again".

 

You speak out against "religion" and they tell you it's a "relationship".

 

Good luck though! As irritating and frustrating and hopeless and angering it is to reason with such ignorance, I do think we have an obligation to educate and expose religious superstition, bigotry, and discrimination. You are right, we cannot give it a free pass anymore! I'm at a point now, I try to ignore Christians, but if cornered and they get in my face, I will confront.

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Thanks for relating your testimony to us.

 

The "outline" of my deconversion is similar to yours. Much of what went on in the Genesis account was relegated to myth and eventually I saw the claims of the New Testament as being bogus.

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Guest riverrunner

well I think you guys are right about some people - like j-sea in the lions den. he does not have enough of a grasp on how things work to argue with. but I did have a pretty good scientific framework and rational people were able to help me out. so I guess I'll concentrate on them.

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