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Goodbye Jesus

What Made You Walk Away?


Knightley

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It was a bunch of things for me.

 

 

 

Hell, damnation, xians. I hated all the guilt that I felt, how insensitive xians were, I hated the theology, I didn't agree with it at all. I was just at the end of my rope with xianity, it was making me paranoid and I was acting like a mental patient with my irrational fears. :Hmm::ugh:

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I think I mostly got sick of saying "THIS DOESN'T MAKE ANY SENSE!" all the time. :wacko_old:

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Um for me it was the concept of hell and the fear associated with that which made me like go in a cacoon and pretty much put me in a depression. As well as the guilt that contributed to that. Concept of hell still angers me.

 

Oh and in my prayers i would try to love the lord by chattin 2 him nicely n wat not (i was crazy mmmKAY). But more often then not it would turn to me being annoyed at him and starting to question the hell concept and how most of my mates were going their etc. So my 'relationships' was based on a duty to love him but i couldnt fully shake of my rational thought and my conciounce about the injustice of it all.

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After years of lying to myself and trying to wrap my natural Heathenish and Deistic way of thinking around Xian mythology and dogma, I just gave up the charade one year ago this month :)

 

I just couldn't keep bullshitting myself anymore.

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It was the cruelty I saw in the Christian bible at first.

 

But that was only the beginning. Then there was the notion of this god allowing "Satan" to exist to trick people. Even at an early age I found that to be unfair and sadistic.

 

Then what I thought was an empowering church (even had a woman pastor—back then I knew a lot of Christian churches wouldn't dare let a woman be in the pulpit) started to morph and become more conservative. Then the pastor began ranting about gays. And I'm thinking, holy crap this is so hypocritical considering most churches wouldn't let her be up there in the first place.

 

So I left and never came back. And that allowed me to realize I didn't need a supernatural force to make my life work. I felt that I was in control, that my destiny would happen because of me. And thusly, I felt better as a result.

 

-Seth

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I started my departure about... ten years ago, IIRC, when I started questioning things.

 

Christmas, '02 was the last straw, though, I think... after being forced to sit through a "Christmas" sermon about how evil, stupid, and weak women were.

 

I never set foot in another church after that, even when my father tried to use his same old blackmailing tricks on me...

 

The rest of the deconversion followed swiftly afterwards.

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I'm rather proud to say the initial motivating factor in my deconversion was plain old laziness. :HaHa:

 

Dad was out of town for the weekend (wouldn't have dared otherwise, the Old Man would have hauled me bodily to church in a wrestling lock) and my interest in religious living had declined considerably in recent months, so when Sunday morning came I just decided "Screw that, I'm sleeping in!"

 

Of course, after that came the learning and the realization of what a festering pile of shit the whole thing is, but even then and still today apathy plays a significant role. I just don't give a fuck. :Wendywhatever:

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I just couldn't keep bullshitting myself anymore.
This sums up my reasons pretty well.
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My reason? Rapture!

 

Not that rapture you silly! :lmao:

 

Honestly - the 99 % social. nominal christian I was before happened to start reading the Poetic Edda some years ago and was overwhelmed by a religious revelation if I ever had one. The feeling that knocked me down can be best described as "Home at last!".

 

Some days after that, after quite some contemplating the alternatives and their respective consequences, I went out to get me my first Mjolnir amulet. That day I personally left the German Lutheran church. Some months after that I officially signed my declaration of leaving the faith - why should I continue paying church tax if I don't believe anymore? :fdevil:

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It was a bunch of things for me.

 

 

 

Hell, damnation, xians. I hated all the guilt that I felt, how insensitive xians were, I hated the theology, I didn't agree with it at all. I was just at the end of my rope with xianity, it was making me paranoid and I was acting like a mental patient with my irrational fears. :Hmm::ugh:

 

 

My reasons exactly

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For me it was a gradual process.

But mainly Christianity became a exclusive club for domesticated animals.

My eyes were opened to how ugly Christians really are.

Christian's have an attitude that only a monster could love and as for the Father I do not think so.

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All the Christian's manipulative crap does is shut down the origins of original thought and thrives on the power of suggestion and turns the reader believer into a mindless domesticated animal worthy of slaughter in hell and produces congregations of gutless unaccountable cowards that cower in the shadow of a scape goat because they're too scared to be responsible for their conduct and need someone else to be afflicted in their place because they can't get the idea of mercy into their tiny egg shell minds.

I don't know do these one eyed monsters know that original sin doctrine was invented by Augustine.

 

If I sound like I am being a bit harsh, you know I am and it is intended that way.

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A few major things happened for me:

 

1. I realized how unjust, evil, and immoral the Hell doctrine really is.

 

2. I no longer wanted to be associated with a group whose most vocal sects are among the most hateful, bigoted, and prejudiced people you could ever meet. I realize not all Christians are like that, but I still don't want to be part of a group with a fairly large number of prejudiced people in it.

 

3. I realized it was a myth and that cherry-picking doctrine was like cherry-picking which of Santa's reindeer you want to believe in.

 

4. Lost my mother in high school. She was a fundy. Everyone prayed for her, including me, although this was by no means the turning point. I clung to my religion like a security blanket for a long time after that.

 

5. A few years ago, I was subletting the basement in a townhome. My housemate, who lived upstairs, committed suicide by fire. I was lucky to get out. For a short time, I tried to believe what everyone told me and even started going to church again, that it was a "miracle" and "all in god's plan", etc., but I couldn't get over the idea that according to the fundies, my housemate was in hell.

 

Even if you don't go to hell for being suicidal, he was there for not being Christian. What kind of a god kills one person and tortures them forever to let another person survive? Not one I want to worship. Plus, how selfish is it to think that you are oh-so-spechul to survive something like that when another person dies and is supposedly being tortured in hell? That kind of selfish tripe pisses me off. Nobody's better than anyone else. I just was lucky.

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Among other things, i felt like I was too old to have imaginery friends...

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I suppose it's a combination of a lot of things, but it all boils down to opening my eyes. All I had to do was look at the world around me, read the bible and see that the god of that book does not mesh with reality.

 

If you'd like a little more detail, here it is.

 

Hypocrisy, hatred, anger, selfishness, gossip, ignorance, callousness, piousness, pride, self-righteousness, rudeness, deception, fear, intolerance and any other characteristics of christians that I may have missed.

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It all started with the Flood. I tried to go from global to local flooding in Genesis and in the process discovered that neither story held water! (so to speak) It was mainly the math. All that water came from where? Went to where? Left no trace?

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Well the idea of hell kick started it. I started looking into alternative beliefs regarding hell...got called a heretic a couple times because of that. Then it went from there...once I started actually questioning something I started questioning everything.

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Nothing ever made sense to me anymore. I was becoming increasingly bored with it. It got to where I hated going to church. The contradictions and inconsistencies were maddening, and I hated always having to "Wait on GAWD." I was sitting and watching my life pass me by "waiting on god." I realized I had to take some initiative before I wound up 80-years-old, in a nursing home, with nothing to show for it except being dysfunctional. I also got tired of believing that everyone who didn't believe the way that I did was going to hell.

And the most important of all was my own well being. Growing up a closeted gay teenager in an evangelical church is MURDER on your self esteem...and I died a thousand deaths in church before I finally said fuck it.

 

But, the final nail in the proverbial coffin was the 2004 presidential election. If I didn't like Christianity before that fiasco pushed me over the edge. Those Bible Thumping, Cousin Humping, Monster truck rally lovin losers can have that religion.

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Well I guess it's all the years of working at a big city truama hospital and ajoining cancer center. You just realize how random and brutally unfair life really is, and it just doesn't matter if your religious or not. I've seen death and great suffering of children, and young adults that could not be happening if there were a loving god who is all powerful. I just got sick of the bullshit religious logic assosciated with such events. If I kid survived cancer it was a miracle from God, but if a kid died after a brutal battle with Luekemia, it was God's will and we must trust in him, or perhaps God took this child's life to teach us something. The way people can work God's love into a child's death is beyond bullshit. I can't really remember what drove me to this website where I finally found the truth. I am so thankful for the brains of this operation that finally set me free.

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It was a big snowball effect for me. What got the ball rolling was a problem with the hell doctrine - being told that the only relatives who really ever unconditionally loved me had gone to hell when they died. That just seemed fucked up to me.

 

So I got mad. Getting mad gave me permission to start asking questions. I was still asking questions even after I stopped being mad. And no answers made sense or were any good. So I just kept getting farther away.

 

And then there were people, doing all kinds of shitty things and justifying it with their Jeezus. Shitty things to me, to the world, to each other. My doctrinally sound Xian marriage was a miserable, barren nightmare... a Xian ex was particularly judgmental and cruel... I went to CF to get a reality check. And y'know? CF has kind of clinched it for me.

 

Xians are just like anybody else. There isn't anything so amazingly special about them and their religion that I'd ever want to join up again, no matter how much any Xian might crow and flap about how wonderful their life is now that they've found Jeezuz. Their lives aren't really any more amazing and spectacular than anybody else's. I can only conclude Xianity doesn't really improve your life more than anything else might. CF has shown me that.

 

It's also contributed to my working hypothesis that any god, any religion, are just mirrors for the human ego. We worship gods as extensions of ourselves. And I guess I figure - if following a god is a form of self-worship, why bother with the middleman? Why bother with the god at all?

 

Anyway. Just some rambling, thanks for reading.

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Me?

 

I began questioning in the late '90s, but it wasn't until 9/11 that I did two important things:

 

1) I saw the cruelty of religion, and those who ran it.

 

2) I read the Bible cover to cover and saw that the evil it described far outweighed the good.

 

I made a decision: That if the God in the Bible, or any other religious text was such a petty tyrant, then I would sooner burn in hell than to have anything to do with him.

 

Did I mention I consider people like John Scopes and Prometheus heroes?

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Xians are just like anybody else. There isn't anything so amazingly special about them and their religion that I'd ever want to join up again, no matter how much any Xian might crow and flap about how wonderful their life is now that they've found Jeezuz. Their lives aren't really any more amazing and spectacular than anybody else's. I can only conclude Xianity doesn't really improve your life more than anything else might. CF has shown me that.

 

 

 

 

I've been a sufferer of bouts of depression my entire adult life. Someone suggested to me that finding Jesus was the answer. I knew if I did find Jesus I would simply be a Christian suffering from depression. My hypothosis was proven correct when I befriended an ordained minister(he was a really cool guy I met at the hospital) who confessed to me he suffered from depression requiring medication. It would seem if anyone could be immune to depression it would be a man of God, but I guess not.

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Xians are just like anybody else. There isn't anything so amazingly special about them and their religion that I'd ever want to join up again, no matter how much any Xian might crow and flap about how wonderful their life is now that they've found Jeezuz. Their lives aren't really any more amazing and spectacular than anybody else's. I can only conclude Xianity doesn't really improve your life more than anything else might. CF has shown me that.

 

 

 

Exactly true. It all depends on perspectives, belief can be just as strong as unbelief.

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Actually, I should also credit my fiancee with helping to give that boulder of doubts and criticisms and such the final push down the mountain. Her own doubts encouraged mine and mine encouraged hers - we kind of brought each other out. But her influence on me was instrumental - and wonderful :)

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