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Goodbye Jesus

My Thoughts


BlooKazzoo445

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One day I may write a huge, long de-conversion story, but I honestly have no big emotional stories from my childhood. My childhood was a fairly normal one, the only odd thing about them I suppose is that thier huge Aggie fans...almost religiously. (It's really strange how sports and religion are really very much the same....emotionally charged, and no matter how many loses your team has, if you're a 'true fan' you still must see them as awesome). That's what makes me sad the most, honestly. This is just one more thing seperating me from my family. I have no interest in sports at all...all I know about football is that you try to run to the goalpost with the ball, without anyone else getting it, then there are a lot of rules and junk that make no sense. :P I'm now the only one in my family besides my uncle who has not gone to A&M...my sister's boyfriend is in more pictures my family takes than me because of the fact I'm never at the games. (I also hate people taking pictures of me :P...so, there's that too), and there's a ton of people and stories they know and I don't. There's also very conservative...now, I'm pretty dumb on ecomonics. I get confused with it and honestly don't get the economic systems both liberls and conservatives want...I have no idea what taxing people more or less actually DOES, that's how dumb I am. If anyone has any book recommendation of some sort of beginner's ecomonics, I'd love to read it. :) I just began thinking that the general capitalist mode seems strange...in order for it to work, you have to keep buying. The theroy, according to my parents at least, is that when you buy you give others money and this stimulates the economy. But...doesn't that promote greed? You have to keep buying, buying, buying? It just seems greedy, that's all I know. So, ya, my views are just another thing that seperates me from them and now I no longer think I can accept the Christian God.

 

I don't know when it started. When I was a child I guess you could say I was too...imaginative for religion? I don't know...I was too interested in making up wild stories of my own then focusing on any sort of religion. I also began rejecting anything 'boring...' which really just meant anything in reality, or what my parents said was reality. This may seem really weird, but I honestly thought the world was boring and only my imaginative world was worth anything. I'm not excatly sure why. Then, as I got a little older, say...late elementary, I suppose, I went even furtur and concluded that NOTHING WAS REAL. I don't even remember where that thought came from, but I remember thinking that things like manners and clothes matching did not seem to make any sort of logical sense or have any sort of reason (honestly, I'm not sure what sort of reason I was looking for....a divine message in the sky? A deep, life-changing, meaning-of-life revelation? Matching clothes just looks nicer as a reason just seemed too mudane for me, is all I know). This sort of thinking does not give one very many friends and after a while I was no longer interested in having friends. I'm also asexual (I think...if I've had a sex drive I don't know about it so...I don't even know how one would know if they have one :P) so all this talk about boys and all that junk was not interesting to me. Short story is....I got kinda trapped in my own little world and then got depression....but, got medicine so it was all taken care of in the end. :)

 

Anyway, all this does not give one motivation to think about God. I remember this one time...I must have been about 6 maybe?...in Sunday School we were talking about how Heaven is forever and for some reason this scared me so much....wouldn't it get borning after a while? What would I do...forever? And the night after I didn't want to sleep because I was afraid I would die and be stuck in chuch forever. A bit funny when you think of it. :P I went on a sorta 'faith journey' when I got to college, and I'm still going to a church there on Wednesday night. I really wanted to be a liberal Christan at first but the whole thing just seems...dishonest, not intentionally, I don't think....but it's like, isn't the whole point of CHRIST-ianity believing Jesus is the son of God and all? I mean, that's the big seperater for Jews and Christans. I started a Bible reading plan a while ago, and really only read the New Testament, and one story of Jesus I couldn't get past: the story when Jesus' family came and Jesus basically shuts them out, implying that Mary is not following God. Wow, way to speak to the woman who agreed to be the bearer of the Son of God. She could've said no, ya know. And, weirdly enough, it was a Christan book that really got my thinking. It was about 'preaching the gospel to yourself' or something like that and one chapter was talking about sin and it said something to the like of, "Think of it, even a small baby is under the wrath of God...isn't that amazing," like it's amazing that God would frogive a sinful baby. And it talked about how God does things only, 'for his glory...' so...um...HOW was the Ressuraction some great form of love if God did it for HIMSELF, only thinking of what he would get out of it? What does "the glory of God" even mean? What good does it do to know that things would be set in God's glory? What good is that to us? Why should I worship a God who only cares about his glory? I also saw a movie on Netflix about the story of Hosea and...I'm sorry, I really can't believe Christians look up at it as some great love story. What if Gomer didn't want to marry Hosea? Maybe THAT'S why she kept leaving!? Also, even as just a metaphor it has bad implications...God will force you to love him, rather you want him to or not. And does Hoesea even love Gomer. It seems as if he only did it because God told him to. I never really read the story or heard it preached much...I've heard it as a great love story about God and us and that's it.  I feel kinda bad because I haven't gone through some big, deep de-conversion where I had this great relationship and prayer life with God and read through the whole Bible...but, I can't help it. The Bible does not seem God inspiried. I've been looking into paganism, which is supposedly a Satanic religion, and even though the gods are rather violent, they (At least in the Poetic Edda, it seems) don't seem to just randomly smite humans for not believing. They don't really seem to care to much if humans believe. That's another thing...Why does God CARE so much if we believe? Enough that he wants us in Hell if we don't?

 

I know this all sounds rambly, but I had to get these things out, and I'm really sorta busy in school right now so just never had the time to think up a big long ex-timony, but these are just thoughts I feel I had to get out. Also, I'm totally serious on any good books about economics or the world in general. I have this strong, idealistic idea inside of me that I want to help the world...I know it's still, but that's really what I want to do and I can't do that if I don't know about the world.

 

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Guest r3alchild

You nailed it! Christianity is like a football team, you support it no matter how shit its been and you never admit they will lose the next match. You allways hope, hope and hope some more.

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(I always wondered if some far-future archaeologists will conclude that stadiums are worship sites for local totemistic deities. Mascots, surely, were highly respected and revered high priests who took on the very form of the city god. Icons and representations of the gods were standardized, and the faithful wore clothes to reflect their devotion. As for the games themselves, I'm not sure they won't conclude that major championships ended with sacrifice. It does have precedents... like the Mesoamerican Ball Game. I mean, public, professional sport is less than 100 years old... there's no reason to assume that the culture of the future will have anything at all like it. But chucking people down cenotes to make the corn come up is pretty much universal.)

 

Anyway. Hello, and welcome, BlooKazzoo! I don't think you're stupid at all. It takes serious brains to think for yourself! And that's exactly what you're doing. You've got sharp critical thinking skills, the master key to the storehouse of knowledge. As for the economics thing...

 

Some ideas that will be useful for this clip coming up:

Supply and demand - basically, when there's a lot of something people don't want, it's cheap, because nobody wants to buy it, and when there's few of something people do want, it's expensive, because they'll pay anything to get it.

Taxes - once people started to live in larger groups than a tiny village of hunter-gatherers, (farming, whoo hoo!), it becomes important for there to be some kind of government to make decisions and decide how the city's resources will be spent. One of the most important powers of a government is to be able to tax, or get resources from the people it rules, otherwise things everyone needs that nobody wants to pay for won't get done. Like roads, or a military, or education programs. Taxes pay for things that keep larger human societies running, but no individual likes taxes, because they (individually) have to give something up. Societies have come up with many ways to deal with this, and the United States, particularly, has a very interesting relationship with taxes. (The Constitution is, in fact, a second draft. The Articles of Confederation were the miserable failure of a first try, mostly on that taxation issue, and other matters of shared resources, despite all fighting a war for survival together. That's why the Constitution was written so much after the Declaration of Independence.)

Tragedy of the Commons - basically, with nothing to stop them, people will ruin themselves by trashing shared resources, because everyone shares the loss, but keeps all of the gain for themselves. Imagine farmers with sheep on a shared field (the commons). Each farmer keeps all the product of their own sheep, so it's best for each single farmer to pack as many of their own sheep as possible onto the field. If the sheep do well, they keep all the gain. If, however, there are too many sheep, the field will be eaten bare, and everybody's sheep will starve. Individual interest, if kept unchecked, will trash shared resources.

 

With that out of the way, and no further ado...

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I actually had a story idea of a post-apoctalyptic world where everyone thought that the things of our culture were gods and set up thier whole religion based on things we see as important today. And, those were good vids. Thanks. :) From the vids, it seems like even the government doesn't even really know about economics and how to keep things stable. I do sometimes wonder if money causes all these problems if we shouldn't just get rid of it. :P My viewpoint on religion now is that I'm not sure why a God would choose a written revelation in the first place. Espescially a written revelation written thousands of years ago that modern folks aren't likely to believe, and I would assume a God would know that we'd be very skeptical about material written thousands of years ago. And the Old Testament was oral stories at firstl, so how would we even know what changes came when it was written into verse? My problem is that I cannot say to myself, "I reject Jesus." I know it's so, but somehow I can't say it. It's strange, I can say the Bible isn't the word of God, that the God of the Bible isn't true, but I can't seem to say to myself I do not believe in Jesus even though I know I don't. I think I still want that label and I guess years of being told about Jesus really effected me more than I thought. Jesus was a friend...our sacrifice, even if I know see it wasn't a sacrifice really. It seems wrong, somehow, to deny Jesus, even though I know I already have.

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Thank you, I'm glad you found the economics video useful.

As for everything else, give yourself a break. biggrin.png Nobody around here is going to tell you there's some kind of timeline, or police your thoughts. Everything, especially heavy stuff, takes time. Just talking to people here may help. That's what we're all here for, after all. Going on an info binge about the history of the Bible may help - about how it was written, and by whom. There's a massive body of scholarly research on it. For everything you've got questions about, there's probably history or science for you out there somewhere. Libraries and the internet are your friends!

 

Turns out youtube user Evid3nc3 has a nice pair of videos (the bible part 1 followed by the bible part2, in his deconversion playlist) that gives a very fine overview of how the bible was written.

. There's also a ton of books.
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It's strange, I can say the Bible isn't the word of God, that the God of the Bible isn't true, but I can't seem to say to myself I do not believe in Jesus even though I know I don't. I think I still want that label and I guess years of being told about Jesus really effected me more than I thought. Jesus was a friend...our sacrifice, even if I know see it wasn't a sacrifice really. It seems wrong, somehow, to deny Jesus, even though I know I already have.

 

You sincerely believed all the stuff about Jesus for a long time.  It is hard to give up on a friendship that you thought was real and was meaningful to you.  Even though I had been away from Christianity for a long time when I deconverted, I was really scared when I first realized I did not believe anymore.  Give yourself time. Read, watch videos, and keep hanging out here.  It takes a bit of time for the dust to settle after an explosion of lifetime beliefs.

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Guest ThereIsNoGod

You nailed it! Christianity is like a football team, you support it no matter how shit its been and you never admit they will lose the next match. You allways hope, hope and hope some more.

I sometimes compare christianity to pro-wrestling. Some of them know it's fake but they never admit it to the public, lest it cause a loss of profit.

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Guest r3alchild

 

 

You nailed it! Christianity is like a football team, you support it no matter how shit its been and you never admit they will lose the next match. You allways hope, hope and hope some more.

I sometimes compare christianity to pro-wrestling. Some of them know it's fake but they never admit it to the public, lest it cause a loss of profit.
Yup
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Hi and welcome. I can relate to a lot of the stuff you said :)

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