John Piper: Ex-Christians are "enemies of Christ".

[buffettphan]

29 minutes ago, Ellinas said:

Leaving all else aside, all I really need to look at is the title of this thread:

Ex-Christians are "enemies of Christ".

To which I reply:

"Yep.  Is that supposed to be news?  Or something of which to be ashamed?  I don't think so..."

 

Yeah, when I first read the title of this thread, my initial thought was "Damn right I'm an enemy of christ and all the misery that "his" religion - christinsanity - has caused throughout the entire planet."

[☆ DarkBishop ☆]

I know that as Exchristian we are considered his enemy. But I try to live my life without regrets and without living in bitter resentment for the rest of my life. I try to look at the positives in my walk as a Christian. I did meet a lot of good men and women. And yeah there were some asshole and hypocrites in the mix. As well as some racists, especially in the south. 

      But all n all I know that they mean well. I witnessed and tried to push my faith on peoplem but it wasn't because I was an asshole. It was because I was programmed to believe in a torturous hell and I didn't want them to go there. I can't blame them for not seeing what we all see here. They are programmed to believe. In some cases some are better off believing. Without fear of God some people would return to a life of drugs, etc. No one is wired the same way as the next. The majority of us in this group can live our normal lives without God but I can't say that for everyone. 

     I try to focus on the positives that I experienced while being a Christian rather than the negatives I now feel toward being brainwashed. The only ones we can really be pissed off at is Christ if he did exist, or whoever else was responsible for starting the religion knowing they were going to deceive people into a belief that would keep them forever subject to a false god.

 

DB

[Guest]

3 hours ago, L.B. said:

@TrueScotsman

 

Thank you, doctor; I feel much better now.

Not your doctor, just another person who is an Ex-Christian and likely shared some of your experiences talking to you about mine.  Listening is just as important as learning how to formulate your own opinions.

 

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Here's the thing: I don't believe there is any validity to religious beliefs in personal, knowable deities. Whether I am bitter or not is of no consequence. My bitterness makes not a shred of this bullshit any less than bullshit.

What do you mean by validity?  You're a primate sitting on a patch of land in an imaginary political system and culture using signs and symbols to communicate that have no meaning outside of the shared concepts between you and your fellow mammalian primates.  Everything is bullshit, but bullshit appears to be necessary when it comes to the organization of mankind.  Out entire political system is built upon myths about human rights and the natural state of man in nature of which we are interpreting within our own value structures, and thus creating various ideologies.  

 

How does one in a pluralistic and democratic society, which is itself a mythically based society deal with different interpretations of reality when the entire history of humankind was wrapped up in a belief in deities and rituals?  Do we just grant their equal validity in society and culture to shape how we structure that society?  No, but I think some measure of respect for appreciating common humanity and to recognize that belief in a god has been for a very long time been a perfectly human thing to do.  Indeed religion was necessary for bands to become than meager groups of familial relationship, as the tribal familial systems required other religiously based tribal membership and therefore familial ties.  The Abrahamic religion it can be seen was based first and foremost on tribal membership, which meant that they were children and heirs of the Covenant promise through Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob from whom came the 12 tribes of Israel.  This is how tribal religious identity functioned in many cultures, giving a familial nature and thus integrating naturalistic inclinations from our production of oxytocin to bond to those we view as in the group (usually family) and further accentuating those outside of the group.  Israel it must be remembered was mostly defined by what it was set apart from, the purity and holiness laws of the Mosaic code were of course mostly tailored towards making the Israelites distinct from all other people's.  Not mixing fabric or intermixing in the other nation's cultures and therefore god's, the extent by which social ties were structured were to be totally inseparable from their belief in a god.  Which of course would have been the only way (or through some similar means) for such a large number of people without any kind of universal civic culture would require to collaborate with millions of other people.  The Egyptians it must be remembered were not just beneficiaries of favorable geography, but their homogeneity of religion and culture were absolutely essential to sustain the Myth of "Egypt" which only existed in the minds of human beings and was therefore instantiated into reality through this commonly shared myth.  

 

That's the point I am getting at, is that religion has served an important social function in society as well as being an oppressive factor especially among the monotheistic faiths.  Human being's rationality has not been shaped to understand reality, it has been shaped to understand shared myths between other human beings for the purpose of wider relational contexts.  

 

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You asked, "Is the entirety of humanity a collection of assholes who up until just recently have all believed in some kind of god?"

 

No, the entirety of humanity is not a collection of assholes; religion is run BY assholes, and those who embrace it and push it on others are also assholes until they come to their fucking senses. Many millions of them were NOT assholes; they chose to believe shit that MADE them into assholes, because they needed rationale for the shit going on in their lives (see "BOOM" below).

Who are the assholes?

 

1) Those who run religion.

2) And those who embrace it

3) And those who push it on others

Condition: until they come to their fucking sense.

 

I'm struggling to see how someone simply believing something to be true (i.e. religion) makes them an asshole automatically if they accept that as truth.  I sincerely believed Christianity was true and was on my way to become a Pastor, one of those guys who would run religion, and I can tell you from my personal account that I was not pretending or trying to delude myself.  I believed probably just as confident as you, but it is when we pretend like the other person would have to be crazy to come to different conclusions that we fail to reach any kind of understanding.  

 

Seriously, why care about reality if we fail to try to understand the reality that most of humanity has believed religion, and that the whole "human beings just made it up to explain volcanoes" bullshit is not anywhere close to a scientific answer.  It might explain the content of certain beliefs within religion, but it does not explain all the various roles in religion and its evolution which precipitated the agricultural revolution (see: Gobekli Tepe).  

 

Should religion be the primary means of organizing social ties in society in the future?  No, but I think just treating the vast majority as assholes in the meantime is a pretty good way to find yourself pretty isolated, which is bad for your well being (not talking about Church, just general associations).

 

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No one is an asshole unless and until their unfounded, ignorant beliefs become the ground upon which our relationships, our business dealings, our politics are based.

Christianity might be part of the foundation of western Civic society, but it is perfectly possible for someone to have an alternative basis for western civilization and that secular tradition has been developing over the past two centuries exponentially. Somehow we have to coexist and collaborate in civic society and business, if not in personal relationships and I find it difficult to have a prejudgment of someone being a moron if I find out they genuinely believe in god.  Especially when I have actually gotten to know brilliant people who believe in god, even among those who "run the thing."

 

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I think I don't give a shit. The people I am referring to are not all swaying under the bristles of a broad brush. The people I am referring to have particular sets of stupid, annoying qualities that are engendered in them by their unreasonable bullshit fairy-tales.

People who happen to genuinely have beliefs that we find abhorrent, right?  When it causes them to say bullshit like Ex-Christians are the enemies of Christ, which certainly is bullshit.  The problem is when we go another step further and assume ill intent or malicious intent in the other person in communicating and believing those things.  Certainly there are abusive pastors who manipulate the message for money and power, but a guy like John Piper I would say authentically believes in the Calvinist interpretation of Christianity.  If you just call these people idiots or assholes then you will continue to fail to understand them, which it appears you don't give a shit.  But hey, just another Ex-Christian offering my perspective as someone who has reflected on this a good bit.

 

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I also don't think your argument about Arminians, Eastern Orthodox, etc holds water, because every one of them was an offshoot of an offshoot, and none of them accurately reflect THEIR original intent, either. I believe my point, wherein one can either be right with a god by effort or by "divine election", stands. None of the splinter groups you mentioned have a core, central belief in regards to relationship to their deity that differs from one of those two positions.

Arminianism is far different from Calvinism (the further you get away from the Reformation albeit) and is also quite different from Roman Catholicism, as is Pentecostalism and other off shoot religious denominations of Christianity.  There is no such thing as "Christianity" except in our shared concepts, and to divide two millennia of evolving traditions which ignore the Gnostic's, and various other Christian heretic sects is again not a good way to go about understanding the religion.

 

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Lastly, I am not here to understand religion, prop anyone up by saying I understand why they believe bullshit, or any other nice things like that. I am here to vent, to fuck with the Christards who come here trying to proselytize, and to be myself while I am surrounded by people who won't let me be that.

I have plenty of my own angry fucking posts on this website going on about how evil Christianity is and how fucked up it is regarding how it makes people act.  I eventually got sick and tired of being bitter and saw how the tools for understanding reality (science) could be applied to understanding religion and culture in a more realistic way.  As I had to come to grips with the fact that I was a genuine believer, could I hate myself for being "tricked" into believing?  Or is it different than that?  

 

What is being yourself mean?  Your personality, or are you believing that all those cognitions swimming around in your prefrontal cortex is anything more than the narratives your neurophysiology is concocting as it has been wired and connected over the experiences of your life.  Assuming that your current neural configuration as your "true self" can be inhibiting to knowledge.  

 

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You want a perfectly naturalistic explanation of how those beliefs developed? Volcano went BOOM, thunder went BOOM, earthquake made things go BOOM. Primitive, barely-out-of-the-caves people shit themselves because BOOM. Imagined that a great big version of themselves lived in the sky and made BOOM. Soon, one primitive figured out how to control the fears of the other primitives by making up stories about the Big Primitive Who Goeth BOOM. The "smart" primitive could then leverage his "knowledge" and get extra food from the scared tribesmen.

Yeah this kind of malicious intent theory of the invention of religion has been debunked for a long time.  

 

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Fast forward, and the clothes are better, and the beliefs apparently more nuanced, but in the end, some assholes tell stories about BOOM, and people who want to explain their fears and rationalize the bad things that happen flock to the leadership of assholes telling fairy-tales, and they gladly pay in food and money and fame.

The religious mystics who would live out in caves, destitute and in squalor, what kind of assholes were they?  The shaping of the religious mind within these cultures is tremendously complex, this simple BOOM + Malicious Intent Theory does not account for widespread genuine belief throughout much of history.

 

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Sure, by now, there are lots of assholes in leadership who are too far removed from the origins of BOOM to remember WHY they are telling such magical bullshit, so they earnestly believe this shit now, but that makes it bullshit nonetheless.

So early on they knew it was bullshit, but now we've just been saying it so long that we believe it?  It seems people have always believed this bullshit, especially those who spread it.

 

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You can tell me that the thunderstorm is a big, angry man going BOOM all you want, but once you start telling me and my neighbors that Big Angry BOOM is coming for ME, you've got a problem.

You're giving too much credence to the bullshit content of the beliefs, which is a consequence of the religious texts that they believe.  If you want to be more effective in reforming people who are genuinely religious then it will help if you don't have these assumptions.  Or you could continue not giving a shit, which is a legitimate option.

[L.B.]

Or you could continue not giving a shit, which is a legitimate option.

 

/topic

/thread

/my feelings about any sort of legitimacy vis-a-vis the Jeebus Bunch.

[SageHealer]

My answer to Piper as to why I left xtianity is simple:  misogyny and homophobia.

 

Oh yeah, and that little thing about being created as a sinner (human), not having a choice in the matter yet being told I "choose" to sin, and being condemned to hell for eternity for simply doing what I was created to do.