Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I appreciate your sentiments, Miss Hepburn. I am not an easy person to read I admit. Christians absolutely drip with contempt for me, as anyone would whose hero's credibility is being shot down in flames by someone.
Some people get something good out of Jesus, I realize this and I encourage them to stick with him. I always say, "Use whatever is at your disposal to get to the end of another extremely difficult day in this miserable wretched life, whether it is sex, drugs, rock & roll, and yes, even Jesus." Just know both sides of the story before you (meaning anyone) make any commitments to stick with Jesus for life.
I detect that you have been able to get past the Fundamentalists' caricature of Jesus being a real divine god-man who walked the earth and performed miracles. I can assure anyone who is reading this that if a god-man had really caused an army of zombie saints to rise out of their graves and march on Jerusalem and started appearing to thousands of inhabitants--their ragged rotten shrouds dragging behind them, eyeballs hanging out of their sockets and ribs showing through their black mottled skin, all this courtesy of Matthew's incredibly inventive imagination for the macabre--then somebody, whether Roman or Jew, SOMEBODY would have recorded this terrifying event. But outside of Matthew no one, not even the other gospel writers know of this. Why? Because it never happened, as simple as that. So much for the believability of the gospel stories.
Actually, no one has contempt for you. I pity you and feel sorry for you but I have no contempt whatsoever. Anyone is free to believe anything they want. You must think very highly of your opinion. I mean come on , this is an anonymous forum. How can anyone find you in contempt is beyond me.
Folks are super sensitive,and insulted by this or that. In an anonymous forum with anonymous names with anonomous moderators. No one really cares what you think. Your not that important. Another lost soul, so does it matter. Why do you even come here, to get uplifted by claiming you left Christianity. Maybe you never really joined.
But seriously I would really like to hear other's de-conversion story--what caused them to fall away from God. Phetaori started to nibble the bait but then he was Gone With The Wind....eh, current that is. Too bad.
Actually, no one has contempt for you. I pity you and feel sorry for you but I have no contempt whatsoever. Anyone is free to believe anything they want. You must think very highly of your opinion. I mean come on , this is an anonymous forum. How can anyone find you in contempt is beyond me.
Folks are super sensitive,and insulted by this or that. In an anonymous forum with anonymous names with anonomous moderators. No one really cares what you think. Your not that important. Another lost soul, so does it matter. Why do you even come here, to get uplifted by claiming you left Christianity. Maybe you never really joined.
Awww, you just had to get your licks in there, End, didn't you? "I don't have contempt for you, I pity you." That's supposed to be the ultimate slap, isn't it--pity? And I'm supposed to go, "Ouch, that really hurt, End. Why are you so brutal", right?
Of course Christians around here have contempt for me. Even you do. Let's count the ways:
1. I pity you
2. You must think very highly of your opinion.
3. No one cares about you
4. You're not important
5. Another lost soul.
6. Why do you even come here?
7. maybe you never were a Christian.
Why your post just gushes contempt, End.
But I'll answer the charges:
1. Pity's a free emotion. Go ahead.
2. My posts are informational. Jesus never existed. Don't throw your life away on him because there's no evidence he ever lived. Get out there and have some fun because there's no pie in the sky waiting for you when you die, just a hole six feet under. You only go around once. Get the most out of this life.
3. Who says? You? Did you take a poll to find that out?
4. Who says? You? Did you take a poll to find that out?
5. A fact, or your own personal opinion?
6. I would have thought that is obvious. Read No 2. The answer's there.
7. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. All I know is I followed Jesus the best I could for 60 years and I finally came to the conclusion those years were flushed down a toilet. If you want to pity me, pity me for that--certainly not the other.
"I pity you." Wow, still smarting over that one. You really know how to hurt a guy, End. For pity's sake pull your punches, willya?
So let me understand this: God's will is that millions of children die of cancer, right?
I mean a parent prays, "God, if it be your will please grant in Jesus name that my child be healed of cancer." And the child dies x's millions of children = God wills that millions of children die of cancer. Is my equation correct?
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.
Still waiting for some de-conversion stories. Anybody have any?
I was an observant Catholic for about twenty years. Observant having a particular meaning of not believing but going through the motions.
It was a combination of behavioral inertia and a genuine fascination and connection with the past. When I sat in the pews during the mass I would be comforted by the thought that my ancestors had done the same 1000 years ago, and that this chain had been unbroken. It was a kind of ancestor worship.
I did not want to be the last link in that chain. But chains can also enslave and sometimes should be thrown off.
In retrospect I was a very early example of what is now known memetically as a "trad Cath". It was fun while it lasted. Many of the churches are quite beautiful, and the mass as a ceremony grows on you as you get older. It is really a fine performance that has been honed for over a thousand years.
I understand this kind of posture towards religion is common among Jews, observing but not believing.
I finally threw off the chains after the sex abuse scandals. At that point it seemed wrong to continue.
Did I ever really believe in God? As a young child, yes. But starting around age seven or so I stopped praying as it never seemed to do anything. I seriously considered not being confirmed but went through with it because it would have made family life difficult as my mother fancied herself a pillar of our parish.
In college I stopped observing, which continued for about five years. I also publicly identified myself as an atheist for the first time once my parents' "eye of Sauron" could no longer reach me. I have never told my mother I am an atheist because I know there's no point. It will just cause rancor. I have told my father and he confided in me that he is also an atheist.
I picked up observed religious practices in my late twenties after I had processed my initial falling away and come to peace with it. It was a kind of curiosity about my own past and my ancestors' pasts that drove it.
Even when I believed as a child I never really tried to argue against science when science and religion would conflict. I knew that was a losing battle so I didn't fight it. Eventually the gaps in my scientific knowledge were filled in and god was squeezed out.
There was no a-ha moment that led to my loss of faith. It died the death of a thousand cuts. I must say the biggest shock was when I realized the Bible was mostly fabricated. I had thought before it had some historical accuracy, but the degree to which it's just a collection of made-up stories still takes me aback. What sort of person would participate in crafting such a book?
Still that didn't have much of an effect since I didn't revere or read the Bible. I actually tried to read it once, and got to Leviticus before I crapped out. It was the story of the consecration of the Ark of the Covenant that killed it for me. It's an obscure story, but basically Aaron's sons get a little happy with incense during the ceremony, deviate from the god-given protocol, and for this transgression God roasts them with fire in front of the whole Israelite people. At that point I knew I wasn't going to learn any great moral lesson from the Bible so I stopped.
A Catholic with scant knowledge of the Bible? Guilty as charged. Of all the criticisms you can level at the Catholic Church, that's about the weakest once you realize what the Bible actually is. Once you realize that "biblical Christianity" is a hopelessly ascetic, millenarian cult, all the pagan customs adopted by the Church of Rome don't seem all that bad. The pagan stuff was the most fun.
Does anyone actually pray that millions of children be healed of cancer?
Do millions of children have cancer or die from cancer?
Rogue, I see you have rep of 40 so of course you're new at this. But I can't believe what you are asking.
Did you actually ask, "Does anyone [translated: any ONE PERSON] pray that millions of children be healed of cancer?"
My best response is: only parents who have millions of kids who get cancer.
Honestly, I don't know if I'm talking to a 12 year old or a fully matured adult after that one, but I will assume you meant, "Do millions of parents pray for their children to be healed of cancer" and I think the answer is obvious, "If those parents love their children then you're gd'ed right they pray for their children to be healed, or they wouldn't be parents--good ones, anyway.
As to your second question, here's a statistic for you:
Globally, 400,000 children get cancer each year. And that's the ones we know. In a 10-year period that's four million kids so yeah, it stretches into the millions.
But you're splitting hairs with me. How about this statistic: each year 3.1 MILLION children die of malnutrition. 5 MILLION die of disease. If Christians represent 1/3 of the world population, then that's better than 2 1/2 MILLION Christian kids dying of malnutrition and disease EACH YEAR. Note cancer wasn't included in that statistic.
So do you really have to ask, obviously just to dodge answering the question, "Do millions of children have cancer or die from cancer?
So I ask again and hopefully you'll be a little more honest in your response--if indeed you actually do respond:
"A parent prays, "God, if it be your will please grant in Jesus name that my child be healed of cancer." And the child dies. Now multiply that by the millions of children whose parents prayed such a prayer. Is it God's will that those millions of children should die, whether of cancer or other disease?
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
