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Sincerely reading the Bible broke my faith

Posted Tuesday, November 18, 2008. — View & Post Comments »


Sent in by Jessica

I have never sat down and actually written this in its entirety. I can imagine it to be pretty
therapeutic. Anyway...here is the shortish version :)

I am 18 years old and currently in my first year of university. I have been brought up in a
fundamentalist Christian environment where the family's core is the bible. Everything within my
parents' lives is based on 'the word of god'. My dad was an elder in the church until they made
the whole family up sticks and move away in order to start a house church. The thinking behind
this was stripping church back to its old testament roots. A number of other families moved away
to embark upon this venture with us. Needless to say this resulted in a closed, tight, little
Christian community. All my parents friends were Christians, all of my extended family were
also of the faith.

This way of life was completely normal to me and I was actively involved in church life. I
enjoyed the social aspect of it and having a massive support network for me there. This all
happened when I was about 11 years old. However as I grew up I started to notice things about
this set up which were not good. The community was very shut off to the point of intimidating
any newcomers, the members of the church were very judgmental and seemed to take it upon
themselves to make those judgments heard. I just took this as normal and carried on with my life.

It wasn't until I was about 17 that I started to have many doubts about Christianity and ultimately
my entire belief system. I found myself entering debates with friends and losing. I had always
been openly Christian and therefore people liked to question me. I got to the point where we
would be debating and someone would come up with an excellent point about evolution, or sex
before marriage, etc. I also found myself arguing mindlessly and saying what I had been taught
to say rather than because it was what I believed.

The negative thoughts and doubts were pushed to the back of my mind as the implications of
them were too scary for me to contemplate. However over a period of a few months I could no
longer ignore these niggling doubts... I had to face them.

Over the last 6 months I have done endless amounts of thinking, researching, reading, praying
and talking to the point of exhaustion. However it has led me to what I believe to be the truth.

All of the evidence was pointing me towards a conclusion that I didn't want to believe. I turned
to the Bible to save me, wanted it to reassure me and for me to read something that would make
all the doubts go away. However it was the proper reading of this book (something which I had
never done before, despite claiming to live my life by it) which broke my faith.
I came to one of two conclusions:

1. The bible is a book which was written by some good men, many thousands of years ago but is
not the word of god, therefore I do not need to live my life by it....or.....

2. The bible is absolutely the word of god and represents him exactly as he is. If this is the case
then the unloving, devious, revengeful tyrant presented is not someone/something I want to
spend my life trying to serve.

I think I would describe myself as agnostic these days: I am in the middle, undecided, I don't
know!! However one thing I am sure of is that I cannot invest my life in Christianity and the
bible when I do not believe it to be true.

My friends and boyfriend all know about my journey however my parents, nor the rest of the
church know about my walk away from the faith. The day that they find out terrifies me. My
parents are good people and I'm sure they love me but I know that this news will break their
hearts as their lives are completely devoted to Christianity. I don't know that I'm ready to see that
disappointment in their eyes.

However I do know that I have found the truth, or lack of it. I am now grown up enough to make
my own decisions and life choices. I just hope desperately that when I do feel ready to tell my
family, the will do their best to accept them.

That was much longer than I thought it would be, but thanks for sticking with me :)

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Buzz up!
Why would I ever want to go back?

Posted Monday, November 17, 2008. — View & Post Comments »


Sent in by Danny

I don't think I've ever really sat down and wrote out the story of my deconversion. You'll have to
forgive me if it comes out a bit jumbled. Like many of the stories I've read, it wasn't something
that happened suddenly for me. I was a slow and arduous process.

I was born into a Presbyterian family. My mother and father were very active in the church. In
fact, my mother worked in the office as a secretary and taught sunday school classes. I went to
church every Sunday, attended almost every church function. During the summer, I would go to
Vacation Bible School, and would be at the church almost every day. My parents weren't
literalists. They didn't believe, for example, that the human race had started in the Garden of
Eden with Adam and Eve. They didn't tell me this when I was young, of course. I guess they
didn't want to confuse me too early. My Sunday School teachers taught us all the nice Bible
stories about Moses's heroic rescuing of the Israelites from Egypt, and Jesus's teachings. I didn't
hear any of the nasty stories.

I always believed in God, but for some reason, I never really liked going to church. Partly
because I didn't like getting up early and getting all dressed up, but mostly because, from an
early age, I preferred to study on my own and come to my own conclusions. I was a very
introverted and thoughtful child. The first time I read the bible front to back I was perhaps 9
years old. Of course, I didn't understand a lot of it. It was a King James version, so I had a hard
time grasping some of the passages, and this was compounded by the fact that I simply was
unaware of certain adult concepts like sex that I found in my reading. It did, however, start me
questioning things. Even at that young age I could see contradictions in the text, and they
confused me. I hadn't yet been instructed not to take everything literally, and I knew nothing of
the origins of the bible. The first question that ever came to me was about hell. I was,
understandably, terrified of ending up there. I knew that there were any number of sins that could
land me there, and though I knew god would forgive me any of these sins if I'd ask him to, but I
wondered what would happen if I sinned, and then died before I could ask for forgiveness. This
bothered me quite a bit, and I began praying fervently every chance I had, just to make sure I
didn't die without a sin being forgiven.

I was around ten when my faith took it's next hit. I spent a lot of time at the church in those days,
running wild and exploring while my mother worked. I knew every nook and cranny of our
church. One day, I wandered into the auditorium while a man was speaking to a crowd. I stood in
the back of the room and listened to him for a while. He was talking about how some stories in
the bible were metaphor rather than literal fact. By this time, I had had some serious questions
about a few of the old testament stories. I knew that some animals only existed in certain parts of
the world, and since Adam was supposed to have named all the animals, I didn't understand how
he got to Australia to name the koalas and kangaroos, or for that matter, why nobody could tell
me where the garden of eden was. I had thought that a beautiful garden surrounded by a giant
wall and guarded by an angel with a flaming sword would be pretty easy to find. This new idea
of metaphor helped answer some of these questions, but it raised another huge one. If some of
the stories in the bible were real, and some were not, how could I tell which was which?

Fast forward a couple of years. I'm in the youth group program. I still don't like going to church
on Sunday mornings, but now we get to do fun stuff too. We went on weekend trips, did
volunteer work at Union Station feeding the homeless once a month, and of course there was
summer and winter camp, where I got to go up to the mountains and sing and play games and
hang out with other good Christian kids. I always came back from these weekend and week long
trips feeling energized and spiritually high, ready to recommit my life to Jesus. It usually wore
off in a few daysto a week, and the questions came back. These questions were never sufficiently
answered, and they always led to more complicated questions.

In junior high, we were required to write a report on the historical person of our choice. I wanted
to do my report on Jesus, but my teacher told me I couldn't do that unless I could find historical
information on him that didn't come directly from the bible, or another source that got their
information from the bible. I didn't think this would be a problem. I figured an important guy like
Jesus was bound to have tons of third party historical records. After a week of scouring the
library and what was at the time a very primitive Internet, I found nothing. This confused me.
How could the most important person in history not have any mention of his existence outside of
the bible?

When I was 16, I was going to weekly family therapy sessions, for unrelated reasons. It was at
one of these, in the middle of an argument with my parents, that I told them I didn't believe in
god anymore and didn't want to go to church. With therapist's encouragement, they agreed to let
me stop going. The problem was, I didn't really mean it. I still believed in god, and I was scared
that what I'd said might condemn me to hell, but the questions had piled too high at that point
and I just couldn't go to church any more.

Up until the time I stopped attending church, I can't say I had any bad christian experiences. This
changed soon, though. I had few friends at the time, and all of them were from my church. When
I stopped attending some of them were reluctant to talk to me at school anymore. My parents
also seemed a little more distant from their heretic son. By leaving the church, I had torn a huge
hole in my life, and I felt compelled to fill it with something. I began to study other religions. My
parents didn't mind this so much when I was studying Judaism, Islam, and Zen Buddhism, but
then one day when I was 19 I came home from the library with 3 books about Wicca. My parents
saw these, and were furious. They accused me of devil worship. My father told me if I didn't
throw that shit away, he would kick me out of the house. I didn't throw the books away, and in
fact began taking Wicca classes at an occult bookstore an hour away. I didn't tell my parents
about the classes, and I didn't throw away the books, but my already strained relationship with
my parents neared the breaking point as a result. Shortly after my 20th birthday, I left my home
in southern California and moved to Las Vegas, a Wiccan true believer.

I got involved with a woman who was also Wiccan. She claimed to have telepathic and
telekinetic powers, and be a 30th generation witch. I believed everything she told me, despite the
fact that I never saw any evidence of these so called powers, except for a few cold readings and
mention of parts of my past that I'd mentioned to her before, but forgot telling her about. She
loved telling me about my past lives, and how she was involved with me in them.

The relationship lasted about a year and a half and ended badly. Later, I began to question the
things she had told me, and after that I began questioning Wicca itself. Over the next few years, I
studied more religions, rejecting one after another. I can't really pinpoint when I became an
atheist, or what made me make the last leap, but I spent the first 16 years of my life firmly in the
grip of Christianity, and the better part of a decade after that struggling with general theism.

Nowadays, I'm proud to call myself an atheist. Every once in a while, a stranger or coworker will
try to witness to me and convince me to come back to the church. When this happens I become
uncomfortable, and if they're persistent enough I'll get angry. I've spent the majority of my life in
a bad relationship and a flurry of rebound relationships. Why would I ever want to go back?

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Buzz up!
The More I Learned, the Less I Believed

Posted Sunday, November 16, 2008. — View & Post Comments »

Freedom by Funky64
(www.lucarossato.com)Sent in by Jackee Gianfelice

I was brought up in a devoutly Christian household. As a child in Sunday school, I learned


biblical stories (carefully selected biblical stories, to be sure) and stories about Jesus. God and
Jesus were presented as loving, caring, and compassionate, with all the unsanitary parts of the
bible edited out in the readings and lessons we received in church and Sunday school.

Even so, I was shocked when, at the age of about seven, I was sitting with my mother in church
and the pastor began his sermon by stating, "Aside from a few cranks and revisionists, the vast
majority of historians and archaeologists agree that Jesus did exist."

I was stunned. It had never occurred to me that anyone would think Jesus was real! I thought of
the bible stories as superhero tales, with the character of Jesus just that--a character, there to
point up the moral of the story. I quickly looked around and was doubly shocked that all the
adults were nodding in agreement. I couldn't understand how they could believe in multiplying
loaves and fishes, people walking on water, and people coming back from the dead, etc.--things
that obviously did not happen in real life.

My immediate next thought, however, was that if they all believed and I was the only one who
didn't, there must be something wrong with *me*. I must be a real sinner, a really bad person, if I
couldn't even do the minimum requirement to be a good person, i.e., have faith. That was the
beginning of a long period of guilt, anxiety, and self-hate that darkened my life for a long time.

Finally, in my twenties, I began to read the bible to bolster my faith. It was a big shock. Suddenly
there was god in all his "glory": bloodthirsty (commanding the Jews to kill their enemies' babies
by throwing their heads against rocks); manipulative (deliberately hardening Pharaoh's heart just
to be able to torture his entire country with another plague); chauvinistic (telling Lot it was OK
to give his daughters to be raped by invaders so that they would not demand to have sex with his
sons); devious (telling the Jews to say they would spare the Philistines if the Philistines agreed to
be circumcised, then, when the Philistines had had the operation and were in pain, to go
slaughter them); two-faced and conniving (just read the book of Job).

And I was supposed to love this "god"...or else he would torture me in hell for all eternity. I was
terrified of hell, so I tried with all my being to believe, and to love god, but always inside was the
seven-year-old girl who did not believe. I tried to drown out that voice for years.

I was in my early forties when the whole thing came crashing down. Due to many reasons, I had
what might be called a nervous breakdown or crisis and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
This forced me to really face myself in the mirror and confront my life. I made some huge
changes that were long overdue, and finally, with my life in order and medication controlling my
illness, I undertook the most difficult task of unraveling my religious life.

The more I looked, the more I read, the more I simply thought for myself, the more obvious it
became that religion (all religion, not just Christianity) was a nothing more than a convoluted,
superstition-encrusted creation of human beings. It was scary at first to even entertain such
thoughts, but the first view of freedom came when a woman in my support group said she was an
atheist.

I had never heard anyone say that out loud, but when she did, it crystallized things for me. The
god of the bible was not only a human creation but a repugnant one. My seven-year-old self had
been right! It was all fairy tales. I could choose to let go of it and live in reality instead of trying
to zombify myself into a "faithful disciple." At that moment I made the break to freedom.

That was six years ago, and I can truthfully say that life has been much better without god and
religion. All the guilt and shame are gone, and by taking control of my own life I have improved
it. I enjoy life instead of feeling burdened, and I have such a sense of freedom and possibility that
I never had as a religious person.

I'm sorry this is so long, but for those who've managed to make it this far, I appreciate them
taking the time to read it.

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Buzz up!
What do you think of liberal Christians, and how do you deal with them?

Posted Sunday, November 09, 2008. — View & Post Comments »


Sent in by Lance

Let me start off by saying that I was a liberal Christian. I had gone through fundamentalist
phases earlier in my 30 years as a Christian, but I moved to a somewhat liberal belief system
before I ended up pitching the whole thing.

I rationalized hell by saying it was only a separation from God -- whatever that meant. But I did
not think it was a literal lake of fire. I believed in evolution, and reconciled it with the bible by
saying that just as Jesus spoke in parables, the god of the old testament used myth to convey
truth. In the same way we humans can use fiction to convey truths about the human condition. I
looked at the creation story in Genesis as if it was saying something like "The world, the stars,
the physical universe in total, is just stuff that god made. We should worship god and not the
stuff." That was enough for me. I did not try to make sense out of the 6-day creation, and thought
it foolish to even try to twist an obvious myth into facts.

It got harder when I saw how the myth of Adam and Eve at the beginning of Genesis moved
directly into what was obviously written as history in the later part of Genesis. I could not find a
clean dividing line to separate the myth from the history. So I figured god must have used fallible
humans to write the bible, so we did not need to treat it as if god dictated every word, and thus
we could expect weirdness like that. But I still believed that god somehow was communicating
his story to us through the bible in an imperfect and subtle way.

I had a even harder time when looking at the atrocities god commanded the Israelites to commit,
but I kind of ignored that and figured he must have decided that was the best way to deal with
such a primitive people. I just did not look too closely at this and chalked it up to the belief that
we can't understand god's ways. To be honest, I simply did not think about it too much, and I
would avoid reading those parts of the bible as they made me uncomfortable.

I thought the message of Jesus was about love and helping the poor, and not about hating gay
people or forcing my opinions on others. I figured Paul was just an imperfect guy that god used
for that time and place, so I did not need to listen to everything Paul wrote as if I was listening to
god himself.

I think you get the idea. I had the same problems with fundamentalism and the bible that all of us
have, but I was able to kind of wish them away and pretend they were not there, as I let what I
thought was god's spirit guide my life.

It was a comfortable place to be, and I was able to maintain those beliefs for a long time. It was
not until I left the liberal leaning San Francisco Bay Area and moved to Central Oregon that I
was hit again with the fundamentalist belief system. As a Christian living near Stanford
University, there were plenty of what I called "thinking Christians", who shared my
"enlightened" way of trusting god and viewing the scriptures. (Kind of arrogant sounding, huh?)

At first I tried to reason with my new fundamentalist friends in Central Oregon, and explain my
approach to finding biblical truth. But they explained how they had to believe the entire thing as
literal truth, or else the salvation of Jesus was pointless. Why, they asked, would Jesus need to
redeem the world that had fallen into sin because of Adam and Eve, if there had been no Adam
and Eve? The long history of human evolution did not mesh with the concept of a fallen world in
need of a Savior. If the world had always been like that, then what was the point of Jesus'
sacrifice?

My fundy brother-in-law told me that if I did not believe in the 6000-year-old earth, and a real
talking snake in the Garden of Eden, then the whole Christian religion would come crashing
down. At first I said that no it did not. That we could still hold the Christian faith together even
with an imperfect bible.

My liberal thinking did not mind leaving stuff like that in the realm of mystery, but my new
friends got me to thinking more deeply about what exactly I did believe. I decided that if my
brother-in-law was correct and if it did all come crashing down, then I was willing to let it crash
if I was going to have to believe such craziness. I started to wonder why I was trying so hard to
hold it all together when so much of it did not make sense.

I went back to the bible and started reading again. This time I looked at what ideas the myths
were actually conveying, and I also wondered why I went to such extreme lengths to create such
a convoluted mental framework where so many conflicting ideas could be forced to live together
in my head. I decided that if god was real, then he would meet me on my honest quest for truth.

I prayed about it, then let it all come crashing down. I wanted to see if there was any core truth in
the midst all my scaffolding, or to see if my belief system was nothing more than a lot of
carefully laid duct tape and bailing wire. I wanted to know god in truth, not in some mental
construct I had created.

In the end, god never showed up. All I found was nothing but the duct tape and bailing wire. The
recent post here by David H called "Under His Robes" sums this up much better than I can.

I am so much more free now that I don't have to try to make sense out of the craziness. My
brother-in-law was right, the whole thing does indeed come crashing down. But oh how
wonderful when you can look at the rubble and see it for what it is. And then just walk away.

But now I have a minor dilemma. What do I do with other liberal Christians that I meet and
know?

These are not the fundies that threaten us with fire and brimstone. These are not the people that
want to tear down science and teach creationism in schools. These are not the people that try to
shove their beliefs down our throats. These are not the people who think the world is going to
end because Obama got elected. Hell, a lot of these folks voted for Obama.

I actually enjoy a theological discussion with a liberal Christian. Although they are infuriatingly
difficult to pin down, as they mold and shift their beliefs when they find it necessary. I still have
lunch with a couple of them I know. I don't mind living side by side with these folks. When I
have a discussion with one of them I often feel as if they really are trying to understand my
position, and they don't accuse me of running away from god. They accept that I went on a
search for truth, even if they don't think I have found it yet.
But what they believe is still nuts. And they are not that far removed from the rest of
Christendom.

So do I encourage them to take the path of reason and leave their comfortable faith, or do I just
let them be?

What do you think of liberal Christians, and how do you deal with them?

Thanks for listening.

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