Personal Experiences

[Taphophilia]

Christians seem to think that because they have had a "personal experience" they have the corner on the truth. What pisses me off is that they discount the "personal experiences" of ExChristians when they themselves were Christian because they no longer believe. My "personal experiences" were as real to me when I was a Christian as they are to them now.

 

What "personal experiences" did you have while you were a Christian?

 

Here are a couple of mine:

 

I had severe complicaions during childbirth and was told I would never be able to have anymore children. Two years later my son was born.

 

My parents were involved in a horrific truck accident. They were carrying bombs for the military, one of them exploded. Their truck was melted to the pavement, and they walked away from it.

[♦ nivek ♦]

Dunno Taph..

 

I've been knocked off my bike more than once by uncaring drivers, bike crashed enough to wreckit, I walked with road rash and some assorted scars.

 

Got icepicked in hand by a very pissed off gentleman who wanted not to go back to jail for stabbing his SO to death.. Doc's told me right thumb "would never work again".. Healed, it works and I can do the human mankeee opposabe thumb thing still.

 

Have been part of roadside and farm accident rescues wher the victims *shouldn't* have lived, but did.

Would like to say it was my teams good work, but other th an bandaids and some breathing, alls we did was hustle to hospital..

 

Seen a lot of inexplicable *miracles* happen, and I can honestly say that I simply just don't frackin' know why some shit happens. Good people die, bad ones live, shit happens, and life goes on.

 

Gotten past the point of blaming or praising some unseen diety for what happens. Life for daFatman just simply is.

 

kevinL

[aynalhub]

why do people *always, always* ignore

 

1. mystical experiences of adherents to other systems

 

2. the people, including christians, who get their butts ripped open and *do* die in accidents, and *do* stay barren

 

3. miraculous escapes and healings of non-christians and non-believers

 

>???????????????????????????????????????

[JeffXL]

Nothing in particular, except at age 10ish there was a bit of glow in the world, and God was watching over all of us.

 

I have lived a pretty fortunate life. My wife's fundy cousins and aunt & uncle, on the other hand, have been through some pretty rough shit (they're E-Free, although a couple of them have jumped to other fundy churches due to a pastor who is awful). Disease, economic hardship, and some awful kids.

 

1. Where is gawd for these people? 2. I thought rearing your children under the holey spurt made them better than we evil non-Christians!

 

Damn, I hope I made sense up there. Caffeine is making it's way to my slowly firing neurons even as I write.

[Vigile]

Once I needed my faith bolstered so I prayed for a sign. The heavens literally opened up and angels physically surrounded me. One of them touched me and my faith was restored and I vowed to preach the gospel 'till the day I died.

 

 

 

 

But seriously, I got nothin'.

 

I used to just believe because I somehow knew that I knew, you know?

[Alice]

I think its the interpretation we put on things ...

 

recently I had a bad few weeks motoring ... two speeding tickets, an accident and a breakin ... although I have insurance it didn't cover the sat nav, and with the cost of this, the excess and the fines it amounted to about £600.

 

I went out to lunch with a christian friend of mine on thursday. I tell her all about the above in a 'and you'll never guess what happened after THAT' narrative to make her laugh. At the end of my tale I make a passing comment - that 'actually although I'm laughing now - none of it was funny at the time - especially financially, and it couldn't have happened at a worse time - what with christmas coming up and everything'

 

and she says : God will provide - you should pray about it

and I say: you know that's something I don't believe anymore

and she says: well I'll pray on your behalf

 

and Friday my boss phones up - and asks me the cc of my car and (after I've checked with hubby becaues I'm hopeless at knowing things I consider irrelevent to life) I tell him - and he says 'you've been claiming your expenses at the wrong rate for three years' and he does a quick calculation and says 'looks like you'll be entitled to a rebate of about £600.'

 

Once upon a time that would have had me up the front of church at testimony time. Have to admit that in a split second I was a bit spooked ... but it's either a co-incidence or evidence of something I want no part of.

 

I'm embarrassed to think that once I would have interpreted this a s God's blessing on me - I don't want pay outs from a God who lets children elsewhere starve.

 

I know that it happened because the kind of person who scattily leaves her sat nav in the car is also the kind of person who fills in her mileage claims wrong.

[godlessgrrl]

Hmm. Did I have any Uniquely Wonder-full At-one-ment God-Breathed Personal Experiences ™ when I was a Xian?

 

Um... no.

 

Actually life was pretty crappy overall when I was Xian. I had no self-esteem, went from living in a shitty alcoholic home with an abusive parent to a crappy marriage where I was lucky if my spouse even looked up when I walked into the room (much less said "hello, how was your day"), was suicidal most of the time, lost jobs, was generally a flake, was depressed all the time, nearly unable to function... and thought that it was somehow All My Fault because I wasn't a Xian enough wife. Despite going to church nearly every Sunday and desperately trying to get something good out of it, desperately trying to get some kind of positive contact with a god who basically didn't give a shit anyway, because he was made up.

 

Yeah, and did I mention that half my family died of humiliating degenerative diseases? And we had a period of about 5 years or so where it was just one disaster after another for my entire family: deaths, serious illnesses, moves, job losses, people getting sued, layoffs, financial disasters... It got to a point where I dreaded answering the phone, because there was a good chance it was going to be a report of yet an other beloved family member or friend coming down with an incurable disease, or being dead. I scored over 950 points on the standard stress inventory psych thing, for a period of less than 3 years. (100 points in a year increases your chances of suffering from a stress-related illness by like a millionfold or something like that.)

 

Funny how it all kind of eased up after I got a divorce and gave biblegod the finger.

 

The way my life was as a Xian, I don't give a rat's ass whether or not any True Believer ™ today says that my "experiences" weren't somehow genuine. I didn't have any positive wonderful miraculous Xian experiences. I just had nearly a decade of crappy bullshit, and nothing about Xianity helped at all. And it wasn't that "god was testing me" or "Xianity isn't about making your life easy"; that's a load of honk. Truth was I just had a bad period in life for awhile, and Xianity was partly to blame.

 

Life is actually much, much easier now that I'm not Xian anymore. That's the kind of experience I have to offer any Xian who asks about it now - and I don't think that's the kind of testimony they really enjoy hearing.

 

Whew! That was a rant. Thanks for reading, I guess I needed to get some stuff off my chest.

[willybilly30]

No real miracles I could say wouldn’t of happened if I didn’t pray.

Their anyone who has had miracles that could not say well that was going to happen anyway. Kind of like praying to get well from a cold and a week later when colds usually end your healed! Well that’s not really a miracle.

[Taphophilia]

Qwenmead,

 

I can kind of relate to you. I was in a horrible marriage. Bad things happened and people died. My ex went off the deep end drinking a lot and doing drugs, cocaine. Things went from bad to worse. I HAD to stay in that marriage, because I was a Christian. I tried to be the good Christian wife, even though he didn't bother to be any kind of a husband much less a Christian one. I stayed in that marriage for nine long horrible years, because I had made a vow to God not my husband. Getting a divorce was out of the question.

 

Finally, he had an affair and it was my ticket out. When I found out he was having an affair, I was so happy. He broke the vow, I didn't.

 

I was so damn stupid.

[Amethyst]

Hmm. Did I have any Uniquely Wonder-full At-one-ment God-Breathed Personal Experiences ™ when I was a Xian?

 

Um... no.

 

Same here. My self-esteem was extremely low, and I was constantly bullied in school all the way through high school (even the fundy Lutheran school I went to up til Jr. high), and I probably had depression but didn't know it at the time. To top it off, my fundy mother died from breast cancer despite the fact that everyone in our church prayed for her, and I had crappy temp job after crappy temp job despite having a college degree (probably because of my low self-esteem).

 

Maybe if my experiences with Christianity had been 100% positive, I would never have questioned it. But I never fit into it from the start, and I never will.

 

Christianity (and other organized religions) are designed for people who need to be around other people all the time in order to feel fulfilled and happy and all that good stuff.

 

I'm an introvert. Meditation is more my style. I just do not have the need to be around others in RL constantly, and I don't have a need to belong to a large group in order to find life fulfilling.

 

Sure, I join small groups from time to time, with specific interests (like Star Trek or creative writing). But I don't need to be around people all the time. Some people think that introversion means there's something wrong with you. But it really is just another personality type.

 

I am afraid that they will eventually label introversion as just another mental disorder, though. Today's doctors have a tendency to label things as disorders just so they can sell drugs to treat the symptoms, rather than treat the underlying condition.

[knowmad]

Qwenmead, words fail me. All I can do is weep when I read your "rant".

Yet out of that, your inner strength just blows me away.

 

Wait a minute.....

No, I'm sorry I'll post later.

[knowmad]

Seems many of us have deep internal pain.

I wonder what the corellation is between this and having religious beliefs.

Seems religion offers hope to a hopeless situation so we are drawn to it.

 

Yet it's when the promises of the religion fail to deliver we stop believing.

Anyway, off topic there.

 

My experiences while I was a xtian have always been cerebral in nature.

Insights, words of knowledge, a knowing that situations will turn out favourably.

And a strong ability to see deep within people's hearts, especially if I can see into their eyes.

 

And I've had many incidents of material aquisitions of an extreme bargain nature that are more than just being in the right place at the right time.

I seem to know something is mine before I even start looking for it.

 

And the sometimes scary incidents of seeing things in conversations and interactions that others can't see that explain the situation very clearly.

 

Wonderful to see that these things still happen since I deconverted.

Which explains a lot of confusion and thoughts of insanity I had when I was young.

 

I suppose the only religiously connected experience I had was a few months before my X left.

No matter what was being preached at church or waht I was reading(religious material) I heard this loud voice telling me to prepare because massive trouble was coming my way.

 

Oh and once an angel visited without us knowing and changed my son's nappy because we were so tired.

In the morning we asked him who changed his nappy and he said a nice man, all white and shiny did it for him.

LOL makes you want to believe again.