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Goodbye Jesus

Pressing On?


Victory2011

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Do you ever feel like you have come this far as a Christian, that you feel you should go on with it and stick to it? Yeah there are some problems that I see in Christianity, but what is the point of quitting now? I have been saved a long time, I have my doubts, but something always brings me back to it. Don't you feel like pressing on? I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us. In fact He said it would be difficult. I am curious as to what people here think? I am sort of new, most read things, but seldom post here.

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Why continue living in a fairy tale world when you know none of it is real, not even Jesus? You dig deep enough into it, you find that the Jesus in the Bile never existed. So why bother with it? You can still have similar values and ideals without the mythology. So what's the point of continuing/pressing on with the myth? Just so you can live in the Wizard of Oz's world? Makes no sense to me.

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I am curious as to what people here think?

You know that cliche about not being able to unring a bell......? I've never wanted to go back because once I thoroughly read and studied the bible, its history (roots), and the history of christianity, I never could go back.

 

If you read through the Testimonies of Ex-Christians, Ex-Christian Life, and Rants & Replies sections, and the Main Blog you'll see many varied experiences.

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

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Whatever floats your boat. I doubt many here are going to tell you what to do.

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I "pressed on" until the religion and its venerated Book revealed themselves as frauds to me, a sincere Christian. Once I had studied too much and thought too much and reasoned too much and observed reality too much, there was just no more "pressing on" with the lie.

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You should decide for yourself what to do. But don't make the mistake letting fear control you. Fear can make very good arguments to you of why you shouldn't let something go.

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

 

It seems to me that you have answered your own question. If it's real to you, then have at it.

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I "pressed on" until the religion and its venerated Book revealed themselves as frauds to me, a sincere Christian. Once I had studied too much and thought too much and reasoned too much and observed reality too much, there was just no more "pressing on" with the lie.

 

hi Victory. I have to agree with florduh 100%. The more I studied, the more questions I had and they couldn't answer the really difficult questions like: If adam and eve and the talking snake were the ONLY people on earth at that time - then who stood outside the garden and documented the whole thing? They just could never answer my questions. :shrug: So I am a lot like florduh - the more I read the whole bible - The more I deconverted.

 

I believe that one of the main reasons that it seems so real to you is because you have been indoctrinated for a very long time.

 

Best of everything, my friend. I understand that it's a very difficult place to be -I was there for many years.

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The whole problem for me was with the Bible as the infallible word of god. Once I investigated its origins and the history of the church (which was something never taught in Sunday school) I was convinced it was false. Once the inerrency and infallibility of scripture was proven to my satisfaction to have no basis, the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

 

If I had been raised in a different kind of church, with a different view of the Bible (not a protestant one), I might still be a Christian. I doubt it, but it might have happened.

 

You see, I still believe in the fundamental value of a spiritual life. That has never left me. The doctrines that Christians hold dear, such as their idea of salvation and what constitutes "evidence" have been blown out of the water. so to speak. Once a person has reached that understanding, they cannot go back.

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Christians are performance artists who have forgotten that they are pretending.

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

To me, Jesus and Christian God are just as real as Santa Claus, or more correctly, Jesus is just as much imagination as Santa.

 

If you (perhaps) once believed in Santa Claus, but then learned and realized he didn't exist, why did you give up believing in him? The answer is, it wasn't much of a choice when you realized it was just fantasy. You can't believe something to be real when you believe it is bogus.

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It's only real to you because you are too blind to see fact.

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Do you ever feel like you have come this far as a Christian, that you feel you should go on with it and stick to it? Yeah there are some problems that I see in Christianity, but what is the point of quitting now? I have been saved a long time, I have my doubts, but something always brings me back to it. Don't you feel like pressing on? I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us. In fact He said it would be difficult. I am curious as to what people here think? I am sort of new, most read things, but seldom post here.

 

Everybody who ever deconverted did so when their particular tipping point was reached. I didn't quit because it was difficult, I came to the realization that the facts , both the subjective personal ones involved in how I experience life and the objective, logical facts, do not support the existence of a god, at least not the god of Christianity.

 

Once you don't believe, you just don't believe. It's not necessarily a matter of throwing up one's hands and quitting because things got tough and it's just easier to quit.

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Everybody who ever deconverted did so when their particular tipping point was reached. I didn't quit because it was difficult, I came to the realization that the facts , both the subjective personal ones involved in how I experience life and the objective, logical facts, do not support the existence of a god, at least not the god of Christianity.

 

Ditto to Oddbird. Any version of Christianity that makes any sense to me is not all the dogma and doctrine that one must believe in order to be a fundamentalist Christian. The progressives have adopted more of a humanistic style philosophy which is similar to some of what Jesus supposedly said, and that works fine for me. I still won't call myself a Christian though, because of the negative connotation.

 

 

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

You sound almost if you are trying to convince yourself. You tell yourself it's real, and then express your own dismay that those who claim to hold to their heart what you do to yours are so flawed that you have to make a special pleading for them in the light of a 'greater good'. I hear someone baffled themselves.

 

You sound young to me. That's fine. I know what that is, and you sound as if you're just starting to try to sort it out for yourself. I'll share this with you as someone who was probably just as wanting to make it work for themselves as you are. It's fine if you find you have to find it yourself, to the point even that you have to accept what you see in those who you think share what you do internally, in fact are not talking the same language, or singing that same tune. Be true to what is in you, even if it means rejecting those who claim to have the answers. They really don't, one bit more than you do already.

 

I'll put it in simple terms, I outgrew it. So will you.

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Outside of my extremely strong emotional connection to christianity, I can see no evidence that any of it is true.

 

 

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I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us. In fact He said it would be difficult.

 

 

 

This is one reason I was a Christian for so long, these sayings of Jesus that seem to ring true - I'd figure, he must be God, he is so right about everything! However, I don't see it as a prophecy any more. Life is difficult for everybody. Lenin could have said the same things, that building Communism wouldn't be easy, but difficult, and he wouldn't have been wrong, and it probably would have served to keep the faithful working towards communism.

 

And such words of Jesus are dangerous, because there is no grievance process in Christianity. There is no policing. Abusers love to talk about how Jesus never promised us that things would be easy, that way they can force people to have crappy lives and they can't argue back.

 

 

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Do you ever feel like you have come this far as a Christian, that you feel you should go on with it and stick to it? Yeah there are some problems that I see in Christianity, but what is the point of quitting now? I have been saved a long time, I have my doubts, but something always brings me back to it. Don't you feel like pressing on? I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us. In fact He said it would be difficult. I am curious as to what people here think? I am sort of new, most read things, but seldom post here.

 

No. De-converting was one of the best decisions of my life. Now I see Chrsitianity from the outside, I see the big lie it is, the evilness of the whole system, and I bash myself for sticking to it for so long. I often shake my head at myself for wasting so many years in it. I finally feel free and happy, I understand the world more than I ever did in Christianity. Why should I go back? To me Christianity equals to darkness now. It's how I see it from the outside.

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

 

You clearly have a lower standard of evidence than many of us. I see nothing but baseless claims and emotional appeals. What is it that causes you to believe that stretches beyond emotion? What empirical evidence do you have?

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To me it is not unreal. To me it is real, it is just that I know there are lots of problems with Christianity and even Christians themselves. Should I quit altogether because there are things that I do not like? That would not make sense to me.

 

You are quite far from where any of us were when we left, let alone where we are now. It would be erroneous to think that any of us left because we saw problems with people. Christianity just doesn't make sense. The Bible doesn't harmonize nor does it match up with history, theological doctrines go against logic and and are absurd to boot. I didn't leave because some Christians weren't nice to me or because I found it hard to live by some Christian moral standards. I left, and left for good because despite every fiber in my being screaming "say it isn't so!" I knew Christianity was a lie from top to bottom.

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Yeah there are some problems that I see in Christianity, but what is the point of quitting now? I have been saved a long time, I have my doubts, but something always brings me back to it. Don't you feel like pressing on? I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us.

Back in the day, I used to see the problems in Christianity as mere flawed humanity. I always said that if I ever found the perfect church, I'd just join it and ruin it.

 

But that isn't the point for me, or I daresay for anyone here. We have our occasional rants about hypocrisy or issues in the church but don't make the mistake of assuming any of us left it primarily for those reasons. It's not that the church didn't meet our unrealistic standards, it's that its teachings have been outed to us as a complete and utter fraud.

 

Also, as AM pointed out, we've outgrown it. We have no need for imaginary sky Daddies. Some of us have redefined God as something internal to ourselves and some of us have just dropped the concept altogether. We don't see Christian dogma as a flawed but useful paradigm, we see it as a completely invalid paradigm.

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Victory, your opening post reminds Me of the saying "good money after bad." I see no good reason for pursuing something as immoral and absurd as Christianity, and I think it's vitally important to extricate oneself from a bad gig at the first possible opportunity.

 

Christianity has been a dog's breakfast of questionable ideas for nearly 2000 years. It isn't going to magically get better just because you have a strong desire to cling to it.

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The more I studied, the more questions I had and they couldn't answer the really difficult questions like: If adam and eve and the talking snake were the ONLY people on earth at that time - then who stood outside the garden and documented the whole thing? They just could never answer my questions. :shrug:

 

So lemme get this straight, becuz you couldn't identify a reporter or amanuensis or court recorder or SHEESH, just stinkin' someone who could write >> and they had to be outside the Garden (????); well, you just can't believe the Bible. What kinda church did you attend?

 

Do you believe that mutations + natural selection + time = the world we have today?

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Do you ever feel like you have come this far as a Christian, that you feel you should go on with it and stick to it? Yeah there are some problems that I see in Christianity, but what is the point of quitting now? I have been saved a long time, I have my doubts, but something always brings me back to it. Don't you feel like pressing on? I mean Jesus did not say it would be easy for us. In fact He said it would be difficult. I am curious as to what people here think? I am sort of new, most read things, but seldom post here.

 

Why continue if you have doubts? Why not explore those doubts? What do you think you might find if you investigate those doubts? You have been saved a long time so you fear what other people might think of you if tomorrow you discarded your faith? Better to live with those haunting doubts in your heart is it?

 

What I found was that when I separated myself from those who believe, Christianity evaporated. No one was around to be the puppet master. See, Jesus doesn't really talk to people because he doesn't exist. People used to tell me , "Jesus wants you to do this and believe in that" , so they were manipulating the strings of the Jesus puppet. Really , it wasn't Jesus telling them things, it was their own imagination working in concert with the indoctrination they were subjected to , in some cases from birth.

 

Btw, Jesus gave me a word. He told me you should investigate your doubts. :) Should you believe me? I once considered myself a Pentecostal Christian. I could be telling the truth? :) Do you live your own life? Or do you live the life of your church mates who tell you how to behave?

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