Why Religion Fails

[Aardvark154]

Stalin advocated STATE religion, and wasn't an atheist in the true sense of the word.

With the minor exception of the Second World War (The Great Patriotic War) when he used both religion and Russian Nationalism in an a frantic attempt to rouse the people of the U.S.S.R. to expell Germany the ever charming Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, did his utmost to destroy religion and in particular the Russian Orthodox Church. Likewise, to attempt to claim that Hitler was a good church going Roman Catholic is total tommyrot.

Further, I do love how the work of academic historians is ignored because it doesn't support certain poster's "the Nazi's loved the church" theme.

 

[Aardvark154]

By the way RLD, you were spot on back in post 226

 

[Aardvark154]

Orthodox Church clown insults and dehumanize women

"We should create an all-Russian dress code," top Church official Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin said in a letter published by Interfax news agency Tuesday.

"Either scantily clad or painted like a clown, a woman who counts on meeting men on the street, in the metro or a bar not only risks running into a drunken idiot but will meet men with no self-respect," he said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20110119/lf_nm_life/us_russia_church_women

That's certainly a unique way of looking on it "Canada-Man". In fact a great many Russian would treat such a statement with great respect. The very fact that you choose to make a fuss about this and consider it a statement against women, leads me to doubt that you have any experience with Russia or The Russian Orthodox Church.

 

[sidebanger]

Just for you Canada Man

Atheists are not motivated by their atheistic beliefs, to kill. Religious people are often motivated by their religious beliefs, to kill.

Lunatics don't kill because they are athiest. Lunatics kill because they are lunatics or religious.

Also... morals and ethics do not come from religion.

 

[canada-man]

A deconversion story I found:


I was assaulted in the name of Jesus

By Suzi Q ~

Between this past Christmas and New Years I was physically assaulted by my own brother, a Christian, for being an atheist. But that is not where I want to begin my story. I want to go back to my childhood.

My parents divorced when my mother was eight months pregnant with me, so I laughingly call myself a reverse bastard. But the sad reality is that my father was an apostolic minister and terrorized my mother, which is why she left him. I have seen my father exactly five times in my whole life, and I am now 31 years old. I am the only child that my parents created together, but have 12 brothers and a sister of which I am the youngest by almost 10 years. My siblings started having grandchildren before I ever had my first child. There is quite a generation gap to say the least. Amongst all those siblings I have various levels of relationships – two I’ve never met, three deceased, and two I haven’t seen since I was three years old. Growing up I was only close to two of my brothers, and only spent any considerable time under the same roof with one of them. With him I was the closest, and he was the one who eventually assaulted me.

For the sake of this testimonial I shall call my brother Rick, but that is not his real name. Rick is nine and a half years older than I am, and he was my childhood hero. I remember at the age of five I thought I would grow up to marry him – not understanding at five years old that siblings don’t marry. I just loved him. Anything he did I wanted to be a part of. He loved Kiss and the Beatles and Queen – so to this day I love those bands. When he wanted to start a band of his own I wanted to play keyboards in his group. When he married and had children I was 11 years old, and his children became my entire world. I wanted to spend every waking minute with my brother and his babies, that’s where I was the happiest.

About the time I was 12 my brother started to seriously seek God. Growing up our mother was very private about her own beliefs, but she let me go to church with any friends I wanted. It never mattered the denomination – Catholic, Pentecostal, Assembly of God, whatever – so I considered myself a general Christian but never gave it serious consideration. But when Rick started fervently seeking God I followed along happy to be with him. I have to add that at the age of 13 I was raped, so I was broken and hurting in my own way. Christianity fed on that pain and gave me a place to feel safe and loved – and as a bonus I got to be with my brother the hero.

My brother’s quest for truth led us to the United Pentecostal Church – hard core fundamentalists. The one thing the fueled my brother’s fervor with Christianity was the end times, the rapture, the apocalypse, whatever you want to call it. I remember watching the “Left Behind” videos with him and having them scare the hell out of me – or scare me out of hell as it were. From that time on I was the best little Christian you could imagine. I carried my bible to public school (8th grade at the time) and wore my ankle length dresses with pride.

Around that time my brother and his family moved away to another state. I was devastated. So I started spending all my time with the church – the pastor’s family specifically. They had five children under the age of eight, and my being 14 made a great babysitter. I spent the night at their house and I traveled with them to every revival, camp meeting, youth group and other gathering that came along. I taught Sunday school and went door-knocking and everything. When they decided to start a grade school in the church I bid public school adieu and began my high school education at my church. I practically lived at the church, when I wasn’t at the church I was at the pastor’s house. The church was my life – I did absolutely everything the church doctrine said I needed to in order to be saved. I stopped cutting my hair, I stopped watching TV, I only wore dresses – I was perfect in every little detail because I was so happy to belong, to have friends, to be loved, to be saved.

My freshman year went fine, but things started to fall apart in my sophomore year. I did that one unthinkable thing that you are never, ever supposed to do as a Christian – I started to ask questions. The answer I got was, “If you pastor says it over the pulpit then it is law,” by the pastor’s wife. That didn’t sit well with me, but I let it go. One day though, I was struggling with something in my life and did what I was supposed to do – I talked to my pastor about it. And I’ll never forget him saying to me, “Well you can believe that if you want but don’t shove it down our (his family’s) throats.” I don’t even remember what the subject was about anymore, but his reaction stunned me, shocked me, and hurt me. Two other things happened that made me lose faith in my pastor and his family. First, I had another brother that was and still is an atheist that I adore, and I was told to never see him again unless he was on his death bed and asked for prayer. Second, I had a friend who was a Wiccan – I was told she was pure evil and I couldn’t accept that because she was the sweetest and kindest person I’d ever met.

That was the beginning of the end. I stopped going to school and church (same thing) and fell into a deep, deep depression. The church had hammered it into my head so hard that they held the only truth that I knew for a fact that by not going to church I was going straight to hell. That led to awful panic attacks. One panic attack lasted two whole days and the only thing that calmed me down was me making my mother swear she wouldn’t take the mark of the beast even if it meant losing her life. She swore me she wouldn’t, but I think it was just to calm me down since she didn’t believe. The ONLY thing that kept me from killing myself is the belief that suicide was a one way ticked to hell – seriously.

For months I didn’t get out of bed, or bathe, or talk to anyone except my mother. When I did finally pull myself out of it I found myself 17 years old with a 9th grade education. I decided to get my GED, which I did in the course of one week. Then I wanted to go to college, but with a 9th grade education the only place that would look at me was community college. I have to point out that I still considered myself a Christian at this point – I held my own bible studies and hung out with a group of Seventh Day Adventists. That is actually where I met my husband. I was hard core Christian too – I bought a parallel bible that had the original Greek and Hebrew along with their literal translations and read the whole thing in my search for truth along with the Apocrypha and Dead Sea Scrolls. I still believed that the world was going to end at any moment so we got married soon after I turned 18 - because I didn't believe I had much time left.

In college I took every course on religion and philosophy that I could get my hands on. There I discovered Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Hinduism, Yoga and every other major world religion. I expanded my personal religious philosophy to include many teachings from all of these “Wisdom Traditions” as I was taught to call them. Eventually I swung from Christian all the way to Pagan. I bought all the paraphernalia and attended rituals. I wore my pentacle with pride. I want to say that I have met some lovely, lovely people during that time that I will be friends with forever.

When I graduated college I had Bachelor of Science degrees in both Mathematics and Psychology. That was 2005.

Let’s turn back to my brother, Rick, who had had an ugly divorce in the meantime. We had lived apart from when I was a young teenager until 2007, when he moved to my town along with 2 of his 3 teenage children. I moved here to go to university in 1999, my mother moved here when she closed her business in 2005, and Rick followed when job opportunities dried up in the town he lived in. I was still a Pagan at the time he moved here. Shortly afterward I told him that I wasn’t a Christian and hoped he was OK with it. He responded rather indifferently, saying something like – I believe Jesus is the way but it’s your life. And that is where the conversation ended, he didn’t ask any details.

A few weeks later Rick and I got into a fight about something totally unrelated to religion. He ended up getting mad at me because I disagreed with him and ended the fight by yelling, “You need Jesus!” and slamming a door in my face.

My personal quest for truth continued without Rick’s involvement or knowledge, though he eventually found out I was a “Pagen” as he spelled it. I have to say that it was well over a year ago that I found ExChristian.net and I still thought of myself as a Pagan. But on the site I found videos and resources that cascaded into more and more and more info than I imagined. One video series that I found particularly touching was the one from Evid3nc3 about his process going from Christian from Atheist – I still watch his new videos as he produces them. After all that I read and saw I realized that even though I’d called myself a Pagan for a long time, I really was an atheist all along – and atheist with a pentacle. I never really believed in the multitude of gods that pagans invoke. I realized that I loved the fantasy of it all - The special robes and pretty decorations and oh the jewelry – it appealed to my fantastical nature.

But the side of me that pursued a degree in Mathematics -- Magna Cum Laude – knew better. When I really started exploring atheism it was the only thing that made sense. I want to say that I was torn between studying Mathematics and Physics, even though Mathematics ultimately won Theoretical Physics holds a special place in my heart and on my bookshelf.

So for two years an unsaid agreement existed between me and my brother – I didn’t mention anything non-Christian and he pretended that the whole world was Christian. He’d left every church he’d ever gone to because he found something to disagree with them about in the Bible – he even got himself ordained online because he couldn’t find a church who agreed with him. Whenever he tried a new church and inevitably found something they did wrong and left I had to listen to it. I listened to him quote Bible verses that “proved” the offending church wrong and he was right. I listened to him when he would tell me about the things God had told him – prophesies and promises. And I never said a word – I smiled and nodded to keep the peace even though I found many things he said to be offensive. I didn’t even speak up when his 16 year old daughter told me that I would burn up if I went into the local Christian bookstore.

I want to make a special point here that when I got rid of all my bibles and Christian materials I gave them to my brother – that’s how "unsupportive" I was of his Christianity.

more coming

 

[canada-man]

part 2

One day things blew up between us. On his Facebook status he wrote:

“If we ever forget that we're one nation under GOD, then we will be a nation gone under..' -Ronald Reagan, someone should tell this to Obama that says, "We are no longer a Christian nation. That was only about 25 years ago, people wake up, Jesus is coming!”


I replied by telling him that we are not a Christian nation and provided the following quotes from the founding fathers:

George Washington "The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”.

Thomas Jefferson ""No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever." and "Christianity neither is, nor ever was, a part of the Common Law."

Benjamin Franklin "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches." and "In the affairs of the world, men are saved, not by faith, but by the lack of it."

Thomas Paine "All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

Abraham Lincoln ""The Bible is not my book, nor Christianity my profession."


That sparked a fight between us that was ugly, but we ended it in a fairly civil manner. But the damn had broken. From that point on whenever I saw him post offensive things – about gays, or atheists, or whatever – I would comment. Every time it sparked a fight. One time he even told our mother he was never speaking to me again and that she should never invite us both to her house at the same time. Then later he called me and told me that God said he should forgive me.

Things went back to being the way they were before. He spouted off Christian things all the time and I said nothing – except once when I said all religions were myths. He got mad at me, and in the end he asked me, “If you don’t believe in an afterlife why not live for God just in case?” That isn't a direct quote, but the gist of what he asked me - twice. I didn’t answer him right away, but thought about it. A few days later I sent him a link to a video from Edward Current as an answer to that question – a satirical video where Edward had converted to ALL religions just in case one of the many gods out there could damn him to hell. I found the video witty and thought it made the point perfectly of why I can’t live for god ‘just in case’.

That started a maelstrom. My brother HATES Edward Current with a passion and refused to watch the video at all. He responded by telling me, “I honastly believe that you suffer the way you do because you have rejected Christ. Not that I believe that Jesus has done this to you, but rather Satan has you bound.”

Mind you I’ve been suffering from terrible back pain since I was a child from a congenital birth defect – and I've suffered before, during, and after the time I was a Christian. Hurt beyond words I told him that any god that would make me suffer like I do for using the free will he supposedly gave me is beneath my contempt. It degraded even further from there with him telling me that I was going to Hell and that it was probably too late for me to be saved, yadda, yadda, yadda.

Bless my tolerant and loving mother. The whole situation hurt her, her children fighting and hurting, so I agreed to talk face to face with my brother for her sake. The conversation started out calm and civil. He said I was militant anti-Christ and I told him the Bible was historically inaccurate, but it was honestly calm. Up until the point when he told me how much I’d offended him by calling all religions myths (which happened WEEKS earlier). I told him that he had said things I found offensive but I never held onto it or held a grudge over it. He asked me, most condescendingly, what had he ever said that I found offensive (from his tone I could tell that he sincerely believed that he’d never said a single offensive thing in his life and that I wouldn’t be able to come up with an example).

In response, I started listing off all the times he’d told me about God speaking to him and all the times he’d walked away from a church because of a disagreement and needed to tell me all about the bible verses that backed up his opinion – and I gave specific examples, not generalizations.

Well, that started him on a tirade of verbal abuse. He started shouting things at me like, “I don’t like you” “I don’t care about you” “I hate people like you” “If you weren’t my sister I’d never associate with you” and other things. Now my 4-year-old son kept trying to get into the room Rick and I were talking in, so I stood in front of the door to keep my boy from seeing his uncle yelling at me.

I couldn’t get a word in edgewise while he was yelling – I kept saying, “Can I say something?” to no avail. At one point I asked Rick, “Where did this anger come from? What did I say?”
He responded by saying, “That’s it, I’m leaving.”

Since I was in front of the door to the room he grabbed me. In defense I pushed him off of me and said, “Listen to me.”

He grabbed me again and threw me to the ground hard and said, “No I’m not,” then stormed out of the room. I mentioned that I’ve had terrible back problems most of my life – the impact of being thrown to the ground, over a pile of boxes has caused me terrible pain ever since.

Now Rick hasn’t spoken to me since that night, but he told my husband that he has nothing to apologize for because he’s done nothing wrong. He has told our mother that I pushed him first and that I “fell” over the boxes. The final blow was him writing a blog on his public MySpace page about being “forced” to end a relationship with a non-Christian family member. It was full of hell talk and self-righteousness.

I’ve been crushed ever since because my one time hero turned into my abuser – all over religion. His daughter refuses to speak to me, and our mother is hurting but sympathetic. I have an appointment to speak to a psychologist soon to help me deal with the emotional impact of the situation. The simple fact of the matter is that no one has done more to turn me away from Christianity than Rick has – I think that is poetic irony.

Today I am a confident atheist, one not afraid of god or hell. And if I could say one thing to my brother is that he shouldn’t bother to pray for me because I’ve committed the unforgivable sin – I DENY THE HOLY SPIRIT!

http://new.exchristian.net/2011/01/i-was-assaulted-in-name-of-jesus.html

 

[Mervyn]

Atheists are not motivated by their atheistic beliefs, to kill. Religious people are often motivated by their religious beliefs, to kill.

Lunatics don't kill because they are athiest. Lunatics kill because they are lunatics or religious.

Also... morals and ethics do not come from religion.

Nor do they come from Atheism.

 

[Phil C. McNasty]

Hitchens latest interview (his health seems to have taken turn for the worse)

 

[danmand]

Whatever you think about him, he has a way with words:

I have stage 4 cancer, and there is no stage 5.

 

[Mervyn]

No, but they have NOTHING to do with religion.
Right?
Right.

No, it has to do with what I've been saying all along, the problem is not religion, the problem are caused by humans.

 

[SilentLeviathan]

No, it has to do with what I've been saying all along, the problem is not religion, the problem are caused by humans.

Pretty much. The problems with organized religion are the same problems faced by all large hierarchical organizations.

 

[rld]

All fundamentalists and people of radical schools of thought are very hard to accomodate in a diverse society. That is where the problem lies.

 

[slowhand0724]

Great question. Damned if I know.

I also guess it depends on how you evaluate them. What is important to you or your culture.

I just meant when people start competing as to who's religion is the best thats when it starts to fail because the real meaning is lost.

 

[rld]

While I don't agree with everything this chap says, he has an interesting agnostic perspective on the value of religion, that I think in oft ignored by the "four horsemen".

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Athe-ists-Nar-row/126027/

 

[GotGusto]

The religious will inherit the Earth. Over 97% of the population growth on Earch is occuring in developing nations, and they're overwhelmingly religious.

http://fora.tv/2010/09/05/Eric_Kaufmann_Shall_the_Religious_Inherit_the_Earth#fullprogram

Religious populations emigrating from the developing world to Europe and North America bring religion with them and we all know that the floodgates remain wide open. Secular populations will be displaced by religious populations by sheer volume. Then secular populations will be outbred of existence.

It's going to be an uglier more violent world when the non-Christian religious populations take over the few secular nations that exist.

When that happens, society will begin to retrograde. Civilization will end. And when food becomes scarce, human population will take up eating bugs for survival. Bugs are plentiful and healthy. But no more beef, chicken, no more chocolate bars or ice cream. Human factions will war over territory, bug/food supplies, and water sources. The old once flourishing concrete cities will lay in ruin for thousands of years, if not forever.

 

[canada-man]

A South Carolina woman is claiming an act of canine cruelty was simply an act of divine intervention.

Miriam Fowler Smith, 65, told cops on Monday that she hung and burned her nephew's pit bull after the animal took a bite out of her bible.

She claimed God urged her to kill Diamond, a 1-year-old female dog, because the animal was a "devil dog" and would hurt neighborhood children.

Smith was arrested on Sunday and remains in Spartanburg County jail. She could face faces 180 days or up to five years behind bars if she's convicted with felony animal cruelty.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/nat..._devil_dog_after_pup_eats_.html#ixzz1CM06ZFB9

Self-confessed Christian hypocrite vows to unseat the Lord Mayor of Sydney

theocratic nutcase thinks he has a divine right to impose his religion on civil society

http://www.news.com.au/national/i-w...re/story-e6frfkvr-1225994542432#ixzz1C977tBNo

 

[canada-man]

UK’s craziest evangelist, Stephen Green, exposed as a dictatorial, violent monster

STEPHEN “Birdshit” Green, 60, tireless campaigner for a more moral, less gay UK, has been exposed as a cruel, delusional wife and childbeater by his former spouse, Caroline Green.

According to this report, the Christian extremist – creator in 1994 of Christian Voice, as well as a newly launched blog, Christian VoiceUK – often punished his ex-wife for failing to be a dutiful and compliant wife.

Caroline revealed that Green wrote a list of her **failings then described the weapon he would make to beat her with.

He told me he’d make a piece of wood into a sort of witch’s broom and hit me with it, which he did.He hit me until I bled. I was terrified. I can still remember the pain.

She added:

Stephen listed my misdemeanours: I was disrespectful and disobedient; I wasn’t loving or submissive enough and I was undermining him. He also said I wasn’t giving him his **conjugal rights.

He even framed our marriage vows — he always put particular emphasis on my promise to obey him — and hung them over our bed. He believed there was no such thing as marital rape and for years I’d been reluctant to have sex with him, but he said it was my duty and was angry if I refused him. But the beating was the last straw. It **convinced me I had to divorce him.

And during the time he was terrorising his wife and their four children, he was also revelling in his self-appointed public role as guardian of the nation’s morality.

He routinely inveighs against the abolition of the death penalty, no-fault divorce, Islam, abortion and, his particular bête noir, homosexuality. Violent crime and rape, he laments on his website, have risen dramatically in the past 50 years, while he points out that “virtue is derided”.

When Caroline, 59, contemplates the disparity between his public pronouncements and his private persona, she is sickened.

Whenever I watch him on TV spouting verses from the Bible, or see him quoted in a news**paper, it turns my stomach. I’ve decided to tell the truth about him now because the people who support him financially and morally should know what he is really like.

The fact that Caroline remained married for 26 years is surprising. But, she explains, she was intimidated and terrified to leave him. She was also aware — because she had no money of her own — that she depended on the £800 a month that he gave her to bring up their children.

It was almost like living in a cult,. We were all subjugated to his will and cowed by him. Over the years he belittled us and made us feel worthless.

In 1992 he wrote a virulently anti-gay book, The **Sexual Dead End, which Caroline says marked ‘the beginning of the end’. Two years later, he abandoned the Conservative Family Campaign, which he regarded as too moderate, and set up Christian Voice in order to pursue a more radical course.

And the more his religious crusade consumed him, the more extreme Green’s behaviour became. Said Caroline:

He had very high expectations of the children; nothing they did was ever good enough.He bullied them mentally and manipulated them. And they always had to be **chaperoned. He wouldn’t countenance them having boyfriends or girlfriends.

There were occasions when his explosions of wrath became physical. He assaulted not only Caroline, but their sons.

He beat our middle son with a belt, in front of his best friend, for answering him back. I tried to intervene but he pushed me away. My eldest son was hit with a broomstick and kicked on the back of his legs. He still has scars on his shins. On one occasion Stephen beat him so hard with a piece of wood that we thought he might have broken his arm. When we took him to hospital, my son pretended he’d fallen because he didn’t want to incur his father’s anger.

It took the smallest of misdemeanours to trigger Green’s wrath. Caroline says:

They were trivial things. He’d say the children had been disobedient or insubordinate. He would retaliate really spitefully. When our youngest son left a small heater on in the bedroom of the mobile home, Stephen **confiscated it as a punishment for wasting electricity. The boys slept in freezing conditions for two years. A window was broken and he replaced it with plywood, which in turn got damp and froze. These were the sort of privations we all had to endure.

Caroline described his state of mind “hyper-manic”. She said:

For years he’d been **controlling, spiteful and self-righteous. But later he became delusional and completely uncontrollable. I’d obeyed him as a dutiful wife, but my love for him had corroded away. People must wonder why I stayed as long as I did. I was **embarrassed and humiliated by his behaviour. But actually we were all brainwashed. My self-esteem ebbed away to such an extent that I felt worthless and stupid.

She finally cut free from him in 2006. A loan from her brother — in whom she confided about Green’s behaviour — allowed her to buy a caravan in which she established herself and her children while she awaited her divorce.

When invited to respond to his ex-wife’s allegations, Stephen Green made no comment.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...fe-beater-says-partner.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

http://freethinker.co.uk/2011/01/29...een-exposed-as-a-dictatorial-violent-monster/

 

[sidebanger]

Nor do they come from Atheism.

Nothing comes from Atheism. I don't believe in unicorns and nothing comes from that either.

Morality and ethics appear to stem from the need for survival in social groups.

 

[canada-man]

a random Deconversion Story

http://new.exchristian.net/2011/01/from-baptist-to-atheist-my-deconversion.html

From Baptist to Atheist - My Deconversion Story

By Jake, blogger at "From Giants' Shoulders" ~

I am sure it is apparent, as I have made no effort to keep it a secret any longer. I am not at all the boy I once was. This will be my first attempt to put the evolution of myself into words. I have waited until now because of fear; fear of what people would think. However, I am no longer afraid; this is who I am and I how I got here. Enjoy.

I am an atheist. A godless, secular, science-loving atheist. Misconceptions of the word ‘atheist’ and perversions of the ideology it entails have run so rampant that entire books may not suffice to set the stereotype straight. Simply, I deny the existence of god(s). I don’t hate god, and I am not in a celestial pissing match with the big man. I do, however, strongly disapprove of the Judeo-Christian, Islam, and Hindu gods’ doctrine. I also dismiss the existence of the supernatural in its entirety. Many things have brought me to this point in my life and I will do my best to explain.

First of all, I was raised in a wonderful home characterized by overflowing love and support, one that I wouldn’t trade for anything. My father, an entrepreneur, has been a well-respected man of the church for years. My mother is the poster-child of an ever-faithful, compassionate caretaker. I also have a beautiful and talented sister, Mikayla, who never fails to make me laugh. My family is amazing and I owe everything I am and may ever be to their undying ability to show me love - even when I make it increasingly difficult to do so. I love you guys more than anything and nothing will ever change that.

One major factor that has lead to my disbelief is my education. Being Bible-based Baptists, my parents thought it appropriate to enroll me in kindergarten at Calvary Christian School at four years old. CCS was a quaint school in its prime educating around 750 students K-12. (I say ‘was’ because it is now about half that size.) I remember my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Butler, teaching the ABC’s along side the seven days of creation and the story of Jonah and the big fish. And so on throughout grade school I was taught the normal subjects of reading, history, and math, but most importantly Bible. As expected, an incredible amount of emphasis was placed on educating us in Bible and Christian practices. The school’s motto is ‘Educating youth in the truth’. Having been a part of the curriculum, I cannot help but see it as childhood indoctrination; the free will of a child to formulate opinions of the world for itself stripped away. A literal heaven and hell, Christians and lost, creation and original sin ideology was pumped into my malleable consciousness as far back as my memory serves. The obvious goal of the school and affiliated church, of which I attended three times a week, was to create super Christian children capable of continuing and growing the faith throughout maturity. They were doing a damned good job. I, along with a majority of my peers, had accepted Jesus Christ as my personal savior and committed my life to serving him well before middle school. By this time I was able to recite numerous lengthy passages of scripture, discuss theology in-depth, and fluently lead an unsaved person to believe in Jesus as their own personal savior. Never once did I consider this odd. I mean, why would I? I spent every waking hour surrounded by Christian adults and peers who discouraged me from associating with the worldly (unsaved). I was so engrossed in the faith that I was hardly aware of other beliefs. (Except of course the Catholics who were, by the school's teaching, going to hell for their belief in salvation through works.)

Fortunately, the close-minded teachers started to rub the untapped rational side of my brain the wrong way. In middle school my Bible teacher preached to us his unwavering belief that the smurfs (yes, the little blue elves) were satanic. His entire theory based off the name given to the antagonist’s animated cat, Azrael, was blatantly delusional. (Azrael is the name of the fallen arch-angel of death - Satan’s right-hand man) He also made a repeated point that we would never graduate from high school because we would be ‘raptured’ beforehand, sparking the end times prophesied in Revelation. Ideas like these (there are so many more ridiculous teachings I could put here) planted seeds of doubt in my mind that would lay dormant until high school.

At this point in my life, I was being tormented daily with doubt that I had never ‘truly’ been saved. I was taught that thinking about women in a ‘lustful’ way was equivalent to committing adultery, which was punishable by death in the Old Testament. Being a normal pubescent boy, I was obviously pissing off god a lot with this one. This coupled with guilt over other petty sins bothered me so incessantly that many nights were spent crying to God for forgiveness and begging Him to save me over and over again. This continued for months and is undeniable evidence that Christianity’s doctrine is optimally formulated to trap its constituents in fear and guilt. The Bible says a man is never worthy of god’s love and he can only have a relationship if he begs forgiveness of his sins. This relationship’s strength is solely dependent on Christ-like behavior and any sin unconfessed inhibits such a relationship. When doubting your faith is considered a sin and hinders your relationship with god, one is trapped, unable to question their beliefs without overwhelming guilt.

I eventually moved past this guilt by getting saved and baptized for the second time. Foolish I know, but I could never ‘feel’ a relationship with god and the public demonstration brought me enough attention to fill the god-crafted god-shaped hole in my consciousness for the time being. I was looking for an emotional relationship with god that I saw in the people around me, but could not attain myself, no matter the amount of effort invested. I would read my Bible, pray, go to church, play guitar for the church bands, go to bible study, and more, I’m sure. I was the poster-child of my Christian peers and despite all of this, I never felt loved by god, nor could I see his work in the world around me. I remember being told that god provided for me and loved me. In reality, I knew my father had worked his ass off every day to provide for me, and god’s methods of showing love were bizarre and empty. Towards the end of my sophomore year I was questioning everything I had been taught quietly inside myself. Not having answers to these questions and being surrounded by people blindly following a god I couldn’t see or relate to led me to be a very bitter person throughout the rest of high school.

During my junior and senior year I took an attitude of indifference. I attended church, mostly so I could play guitar, and I would have claimed Christianity in a debate solely to debate. In the absence of belief I still followed the motions because it was all I knew. I could never openly question anything out of fear of being scolded or worse, embarrassing my parents. I was always fascinated with science but was deprived of anything resembling an adequate education in the sciences. At school Darwin was portrayed as a pawn of Satan, taking evolution out of the picture and leaving biology practically worthless. Intelligent design was preached along with its lie-filled apologetics. The defenses of ID are hardly arguments, but red herrings taking the focus away from actual science whilst hurling ad hominem attacks at some of the greatest thinkers in history. Ex: ‘Dawin was a sexist, racist, etc’ or ‘Darwinism teaches we are just monkeys. If you teach kids they are monkeys they will act like monkeys.’ Stupid shit like that. Ken Ham and Ray Comfort might as well have been our school mascots. The banana man’s videos were shown in all their glory - and people believed it. Ken Ham actually claimed our church as his home church in the states and being so geographically close to the Creation Museum, CCS took frequent field trips, often behind the scenes.

There is one specific incident that wrecked my already low view of the Christians around me. Every Wednesday our high school student body came together for an hour long chapel. We were in a series where faculty and teachers were put on a panel and students were allowed presenting social and theological questions. One student, b********** than I, presented a brilliant question to our administrator. “Would a girl that was raped and pregnant as a result be expelled for being pregnant?” The gymnasium went silent for a few seconds and our administrator responded simply with “Yes, she would be expelled.” He then tried to justify his stance by saying they would do their best to help her through her troubles, but having a child out of wedlock violates the schools code of conduct. How fucked up! I could not believe the ugly intolerance displayed by a human, let alone a Christian. However, I was not the only one outraged and I knew that my administrator's response was not the opinion held by most Christians. However, the situation gives insight into how pulling objective morals from an ancient religious book can dull ones desire and ability to think critically and rationally about current moral issues in our world.

Being thoroughly frustrated with my high school experience I was eager to start school at UC. Initially enrolled in aerospace engineering, my father constantly pushed me to consider biomedical engineering. One of the best decisions of my life was listening to him and switching majors during orientation. I immediately fell in love with biomedical engineering and school was finally enjoyable. Living on campus gave me instant access to the different religious views of others and I was finally able to ask questions about evolution, physics, geology, and religion that were off-limits in high school. I was learning so much and intentionally subjecting myself to foreign ideas. If the lunatics at CCS benefitted me in any way, it was by showing me the detriment caused by having a closed mine. One key enlightening conversation was with my neighbor. He explained that he had never believed in God and didn’t need the Bible or a God to live a morally fulfilling life. The idea was preposterous at first and I was baffled. Another was with a group of friends at lunch where religion was brought up. They were stunned that I had never been taught evolution and encouraged me to research it for myself. So I did.

One of the following weekends I sat in my room, scared shitless with my computer. I anxiously searched youtube for ‘How Evolution Works’ knowing that what I was about to learn had the potential to destroy my entire world-view. A series of eight videos entitled ‘How Evolution Works’ by the user DonExodus2 were the first results of the search. I watched one after another until all eight were finished. Sinking further into my chair I was amazed, awe-struck, delighted, and terrified all at once. I would describe it as a religious experience, but it was more than that. Religion cannot begin to touch the beauty and wonder our earth and universe so readily evoke. Evolution’s plausibility opened countless doors to new realms of knowledge. I became obsessed with studying the amazing processes of evolution and further obsessed with studying the rebuttals to the petty arguments I had been previously taught. The foundations of my prior beliefs soon gave way completely and my new personal relationship with science commenced.

Here is a link to the videos:
How Evolution Works Series by DonExodus2
http://www.youtube.com/user/DonExodus2#grid/user/019F146277A3EDFD


more coming

 

[canada-man]

part 2

The next couple months were particularly hard. I was ecstatic about learning more about biology, astronomy, cosmology, geology and anthropology - and every new bit of information brought me further away from religion. This was the most emotionally painful part of my deconversion. Even as I was delighted with my newfound unbelief, I knew my family would be torn over it. I was constantly plagued with the fear of hurting my family, but I could not continue pretending to be a Christian. I slowly started dropping hints and before long they were very concerned and started asking question. The truth was soon revealed.

Telling my parents about my deconversion was one of the most emotionally intense things I’ve yet to do. Being shortly removed from their point of view I knew what they were thinking. I was going to burn in hell for eternity and there was nothing they could do. Our discussion was heated and fairly awkward. I did my best to kill the stereotypes of atheists that the church had poisoned them with. I would rather not go into details, but they have since been torn over my decision, and the pain it has caused them has not been easy to bear.

Telling some of my closest friends also ended poorly and I have been all but shut out by many of my former peers, even best friends. Few have come to me with levelheaded concern and I have been privileged an engaging, calm, and intelligent discussion with them. However, some are so close-minded and have been so deprived of a science education that the discussion bore nothing but hot air. This whole process has been emotional and at times very lonely. I remember discussing my new views with a professor when he said, “I realize this is emotionally risky, but growth is not always a picnic - it takes stretching, accommodating and changing”. He has been absolutely right.

It has not all been bad, though. This experience has grown me as a person and solidified my ability to defend my views. I have become very close to other skeptics and atheists with similar views and ideas as my own. It has been these people that I find most respectable, moral, ambitious, and honest. It seems that when a person is not so distracted by trying to live for an imaginary God, they become more sensitive to bettering themselves and trying to make this world -this very real and tangible world- a better place for all of its inhabitants. Since my deconversion I find life more livable. Life is wonderful and everyday is a new opportunity to help others. I wake up in awe of the universe around me and delighted that I get to spend my day learning about the intricacies of its inner workings. The very small probability of our existence that creationists hide behind is what allows me to appreciate my life and time spent here. I refuse to allow my meaning and purpose to be endowed upon me by a malevolent, inconsistent, and petty supernatural being; I make my life’s meaning every day and I take full responsibility for how my actions affect others. I have so much to live for and life holds a new grandeur. I would attempt to elaborate if I was a better writer, but I’m not, and this video is too damn cool.

I can only imagine the conversations this will spark, and I look forward to them. Whether we are close or haven’t met, I would love to talk to you about science, philosophy, religion, and/or my deconversion experience.

With love and respect,
Jake