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Well-stated!
This is the enigmatic conflict so many of us face on the spiritual path, and I compassionately understand how it often becomes the gateway for atheists — how could there be a loving God that allows this level of suffering and stupidity? Every organized religion from the beginning of history has tried to come to terms with it in various stories, myths, doctrines, philosophies, revelations…..
Thrillobyte,
The fact that you are pulled so strongly to “reflect” on your past decision, and to come here and post often, to question, to debate, to preach, to argue, and to listen — tells me that there is still a hidden longing, a hunger and restlessness to connect with something that’s “authentically” spiritual. I say hidden because it is deeper and quieter than the level of your thoughts, ego, and emotions.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mountainrose
I can’t answer for Mystic, but you are anthropomorphizing God with human and gender qualities. That’s organized “religion.” Not the authentic spiritual experience of God.
For those of us who experience God, it is not an “unknown.” God reveals itself continually, many of us are not “oblivious” to God, but not in the way you refer to God as a gender with supernatural human qualities like a magician pulling out miracles from a hat….
But due to the limitations of our temporary human condition/incarnation we end up having to surrender to the mystery of it all. I know this irks you intellectually, but for many of us it is what it is……
Thank you, rose for your thoughts. Here's my honest feelings:
Innocence once lost is never regained. When a Christian takes off the rose-colored glasses and makes a sincere dive into Jesus' background Pandora's box is opened. I could never go back to Christianity knowing what I have uncovered about Jesus unless Jesus appeared to me, and I'm not expecting him to do that anytime soon. I have no doubts Most Christians are terrified of researching the dark underbelly of Christianity because it might shatter the safe comfortable little bubble they have encased themselves in. They have wrapped themselves in their their beliefs about the Jesus mythos and have no desire to escape to reality.
I have repeatedly requested two members here who constantly post mocking ridiculing diatribes of me in another thread here. I don't attack them, I post something about Jesus and they attack me. One has to wonder what is in their dark subconscious that would cause them to be so aggressive to a person who previously had never said an unkind word about them. When I ask them to merely give one secular reference to Jesus that isn't shrouded in controversy they immediately go on the attack. One would think a logical person would simply fulfill my request and shut me up for good. But they don't. Instead they continue to unleash a barrage of insults and jabs at my sanity. Why do you think that is, rose? Wouldn't a sensible decent person just answer the question if they have nothing to hide?
My analysis. These two members of the board are terrified of going through the same soul-searching experience I went through of having to come to terms with the fact that the gospels Jesus was a myth. They have to cover up their insecurities with outward displays of aggression and indignation that I would question the existence of their god. I find it a bit pathetic and sad.
Think of it, rose: a mountain of secular evidence proving the gospels Jesus was a syncretic invention of the tumultuous times Christianity sprung from can be found at the link below:
And against this mountain of evidence for Jesus being myth, a couple of Christians cannot find a single secular name to prove he was real. Which side would you go with?
Just to clarify, are you saying that atheists are mentally ill?
Because if you are...
No. I was saying that what another poster said was very strange and "mental". I was referring to that reply and only that reply. Making a choice to believe or not believe is certainly your own, nothing mentally ill about that at all.
There are reasons (HIS will) why things happen, and HE knows the end result of everything.
How do you know this?
And as you believe we can not go against your gods will, that means he knows who will go to Hell, and they can do noting to prevent it, otherwise your god is not all knowing. And your god allows this.
Do you even understand the logic of your own beliefs? If not, you should not be accusing those who do of being mentally ill.
Just to clarify, are you saying that atheists are mentally ill?
Because if you are...
No, they simply do not understand the logic of their own beliefs. But then they do think the trees in my garden is evidence for their god, and the falling leaves are a miracle.
Ah, the so-called Sallman's Head painting. The painting was so successful in capturing everyone's projections about Jesus that miracles have been attributed to it:
How many people knew that there's a hidden wine chalice on his temple and host on his forehead?
How cool! Never noticed that before.
One of my younger brothers' high school graduation photo looked very similar to that painting to the point where an aunt saw it and gasped, "Johnny looks just like Jesus in that photo!"
No, Johnny looks like my father and maybe resembles the painting. He'll be 56 next week and we're pretty sure by now that he is NOT Jesus! He likes to fish and is pretty good at carpentry, though.
I refuse to believe in the concept of a vengeful god who would cast one into hell to burn for eternity for not worshiping him properly. We make our own hell or heaven in the here and now. There is no "afterlife" I know because I died several times (Respiratory and cardiac failure) from an accident four years ago and fortunately was revived. No "tunnel of light" or out of body experience just nothing. I woke up a month later remembering nothing. Some call it a miracle, others a second chance. I called it a will to live. Enjoy the here and now. There's no "other side".
Epic post. Many people think that reality or the playing out of the laws of physics is the universe or others being 'against' them. Many people, religious or not, go through the mental gymnastics of making everything about them. When they say 'God-centered' or 'Christ-centered' they really mean centered around their own ego. Many, many people confuse the concept of 'God' with what THEY want. If things aren't going their way they vilify anyone with a different opinion. If others are not in agreement with them, some don't just think they are 'against' them, which is silly enough, no, they may think those others must be evil. After all, 'God' is all about them getting what they want. Disclaimer: not every religious person is that way, but many more are than some can admit, even if it's in a mellow way.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mordant
I've shared mine many times, but I'll try it from a little different starting point.
I was converted about 3 months shy of my 6th birthday, and around that time all of my immediate family joined a fundagelical church. The proximal cause of that was that my oldest brother, who was having trouble figuring himself out and was acting out quite a bit, falling in with the "wrong crowd" etc. and got straightened out by a conversion experience at this church. I think my parents were terribly worried about him and were impressed with this seeming lifeline. In retrospect I think my brother just found a less dysfunctional group to "belong" to. He was one of those people who needed structure. ANY kind of structure.
I speak of him in the past tense because he's no longer with us. He would be 85 if he were still alive; he died at 67, just after retiring. Fatal cancer diagnosis. It devastated him. He was convinced god was mad at him. He was an elder at this same church now, and had lived an exemplary life, but god had struck him down. What would become of his wife? What had he done to deserve this? I just said to him, sometimes bad things happen to good people. No, he said, it was the sins of his youth; somehow his repentance and righteous living were not enough to compensate for it. He was inconsolable.
By that point in my life I had already deconverted for my own reasons, but I focus on my brother (he was the oldest of four; I'm the youngest) because his life story arc was what brought us into the fold, and the way it ended for him is pretty evocative of why I left the faith. Authoritarian Christianity makes a lot of promises about improving your life and making it "victorious" (a favorite adjective in our circles) and generally tidy and orderly and predictable. But it didn't.
In my case, it was the unraveling of my ambition to be "the husband of one wife" as per Biblical specifications. My first wife, and the mother of my two children, went mad basically. Paraonoid schizophrenia and borderline personality disorder. It wasn't supposed to be in the script. Eventually I was forced to leave her and take the children because she had become violent and dangerous.
Today, I just see this as what, sadly, happens sometimes to people in their twenties. Back then, I saw it as a complete collapse of the contract so to speak. I had committed my life wholeheartedly to god, I had gone to the point of considering a call to the ministry in fact, and I supremely loved my wife and children and here I was experiencing the Marriage from Hell. I experienced things in that relationship that I didn't know were possible to experience -- Kafkaesque betrayals, emotional abuse, forms of heartbreak I didn't know existed -- culminating in me narrowly escaping having my throat slit in my sleep. These kinds of experiences tend to, shall we say, leave an impression on you.
Even so, it took me a few years after I left her (an act that nearly killed me in and of itself!) for me to solidify the growing impression that I had been living a lie. I did not admit to myself that I just didn't believe anymore until partway through my 2nd marriage, when it became apparent THAT wife was going to die from a rare illness.
Those were the proximal causes of my apostasy, but in the decades since, I have gotten enough emotional distance to understand that my confusion and disappointment and sense of let down was just a function of my religious faith being a failed epistemology. It was a poor model of how the world worked, hence all the surprises.
So when my mother died in a car accident and my brother died as described above and my son died six years ago at the age of 30, I had opportunities to respond differently to tragedy and sorrow. Instead of taking it personally, wondering, as my brother did, what I was doing wrong, I was able to see these things as just part of a series of things happening, and some of those are just unpleasant. It's not personal or directed, or supposed to be prevented. It isn't unfair (or fair). It is just stuff happening. So I could experience the pain of the loss in its own right, without it being embellished and amplified by my religious notions that god was trying to Teach Me Something or express his Displeasure or Test Me. These post-deconversion experiences with grief and loss were no fun either, but far less crushing and more pure and easier to take something positive away from.
I am sure that there are religious people who at this point are saying, well, DUH. What kind of bizarre sect were you in that taught you such things? And you're right, not all compartments of Christianity are quite so full of all this turgid horse-pucky where it's all about me and my righteousness and the rewards it should be giving me. However, once I understood that I had been bamboozled, it was hard for me not to see the same problems in all the Abrahamic religions, even if sometimes at a much lower amplitude. I just found it simpler to take god out of the equation and see life / reality / existence on its own terms, without trying to read so much into it.
As I've ran with that now for some 20 years full throttle, I have found myself to be a much more content and serene person, with FAR more realistic expectations of life. I am able to "hold fast to the good" better. The tragic aspects are in my field of awareness, but my primary thoughts now about all these people now lost to me forever -- even my first wife -- are about the best parts of them, not the disappointments or imperfections. I just don't see how I would have achieved this in the context of religious faith. Nor do I see how I would have kept my sanity, frankly. Everything had to be so perfect, so exactly according to dogma and plan. Now I can accept the vicissitudes of life in a much healthier way, and they don't pollute or ruin the parts of my life that aren't dramatically painful.
That's MY story. I don't imagine that everyone, faced with what I was faced with, would necessarily make the same choices or see the same benefit. But it has been fantastic, FOR ME.
How would a parent know if praying for his child's recovery is in God will?
And think about this: Let's play 'God' for a minute. What if you saw someone's kid about to fall off a bridge into deep, churning waters where they would most assuredly drown. Let's say the parent was unaware. Would you wait for the parent to ask for help before alerting them to the situation? Whether the parent was aware or not, if you were closer and could grab the kid before they fell, wouldn't you whether the parent asked you for help or not? Why wouldn't a just and loving omnipotent 'God' just get rid of cancer for people of all ages?
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What if you saw someone's kid about to fall off a bridge into deep, churning waters where they would most assuredly drown. Let's say the parent was unaware. Would you wait for the parent to ask for help before alerting them to the situation? Whether the parent was aware or not, if you were closer and could grab the kid before they fell, wouldn't you whether the parent asked you for help or not? Why wouldn't a just and loving omnipotent 'God' just get rid of cancer for people of all ages?
