This is a letter that was inspired by my son passing away, back in 2008. I cannot claim to have written it, only composed it. Although most of it is what I have personally written. I give respect to my atheist community that has helped me with the information it contains. My reason for writing this is for me or anyone who feels backed into a corner by a Christian about their beliefs can give the aggressor this letter. Its a long read but worth the look. Hope you enjoy!
A letter to my former Christian self.
Ray, I want you to imagine a life of happiness, more happiness than you know of now. This happiness comes through understanding and knowledge. Understanding that God does not exist. Its hard to imagine a happy life without God because you have been taught that God is what gives life happiness. Without God, one cannot be happy. Its contradictory, I know. But it does happen, it will happen to you, Ray. A new and exciting world opens up to you that you have misconceived this whole time. This is the life of what you thought you would never be. An atheist. It will be hard for you to accept this word “atheist” for awhile because you are sure right now that atheists have hate in their hearts, cannot love, have no compassion, and many other bad things. This new life affords you a rush of information that you have always longed for. A feeling of relief knowing that life is not just some big test. This life is wonderful, this life is important, this is heaven, right here right now. When we die, we are gone forever. We can make the most of it only when we realize that it isn’t just some prerequisite or test for another dimension. Its a feeling of wearing a blindfold your whole life and removing it for the first time. After you realize that there is no God to judge your thoughts, you are free to think at will without any religious teachings keeping your thoughts in check. And think you do like no other time in your life. You begin to question the origins of life. You begin to question the reality of God. And with the answers that come it brings much more satisfying answers than the pre-packaged answers you are used to receiving, “Because God did it” and “God works in mysterious ways”. The answers you get with a much more open mind make much more sense to you. Bad things happen to good people, they just do. Its the natural order of the world. It is a world that has no evidence of any deity at he helm controlling it all. Good things happen to bad people too. This seems to be evidence of that fact. Your questions about why didn’t God do this for me or why did God let me down in this situation is all answered in a single epiphany. You begin to learn things that the church has been protecting you from all these years, written in the bible. You begin to realize who wrote this book and for what reasons they composed it. The people’s ancestors who we are at war with today wrote and composed the bible. Uneducated, primitive, war torn and murderous people. People who needed a book to show that God was with them, a book to flaunt in the face of anyone who opposed them. You do not believe in the Muslim faith just as the Muslims do not believe in your faith. But who is to say that you are correct? How do you know that God did not visit Mohammad in the caves? There is no way of knowing. Every Muslim has the same devout belief in the Muslim faith as you do in the Christian faith. There is a vast amount of literature in the Koran that proves (in the mind of the followers) that Muhammad was the most recent Prophet of God and anyone who believes that Jesus was divine will spend eternity in hell. But those reasons do not compel you to believe in the Koran. If you believe that Muslims are fooling themselves and have the burden of proof on their hands before they make one more claim then you know what it is like to be an atheist in respect to other people’s beliefs.
I know you are headstrong in your belief in God, Ray, but you will become what you now fear and oppose. I still cannot believe it but I am glad of it. This will never happen to you you say? Don’t fear, its not bad at all. You are still a great person, you let people merge in traffic, hold doors for people and respect other people in general. You have quite possibly become a better person after loosing your religion. Your only fear is that your majority Christian friends will not like you any more if they found out that you were an atheist. But as time goes on, your friends seem to be accepting of you still. So my gift to you is this composition that was not necessarily made to change your mind about your beliefs, but rather to convince you to be open minded and respect other people regardless of their beliefs. We all have to share this planet with one another so lets find the good in each other. With all the judgments and religious bloodshed, there is no evidence that anyone will come and save us from ourselves so lets play nice and try and make this world a more beautiful place. Lets share this earth with kindness. The following will allow you to see that atheism has merit and should be respected. Please go on believing in God, no harm is done there as long as you think about humanity first when making decisions. Just keep an open mind from now on.
“I know how you feel when someone like me comes along and tells you that he can prove that God does not exist. First you think, “yeah right, that’s impossible” or maybe you think “I don’t care what he thinks he can prove, I know how I feel and that’s all that matters”. The truth is, I understand as most atheists do, exactly why we all choose to believe in God. Life is not easy, it’s difficult, and its scary and its lonely. Nobody wants to think we’re alone, nobody wants unanswered questions, nobody wants to think death is the end. And in tough times it comforts us to think somebody is looking out for us. For most of us the comfort that faith gives us is worth the risk of being wrong and faced with the frightening alternative. But just like children eventually must let go of their belief in magic or fairies or Santa Clause, eventually we all reach a certain maturity level to look at things rationally. And as cold as it may seem at first, we all have to come to grips with the truth; we are alone on this planet. There is no plan for us. And death when stripped down to the skin is nothing but tragedy. Maybe your not ready to admit that yet, maybe none of us really are. But it takes a certain kind of maturity to look at a grave and admit that when people go, they never come back. But when we take that step and begin to understand how things truly are, you gain the ability to make them better. In the same way that we learn to wear sunscreen we can prevent sunburn. When we realize the truth, We can feed the hungry instead of praying for the supernatural to do it. We can heal the sick, we can be there for each other when we’re afraid, we can share our own futures, we can explore, and discover truth. We can touch the heavens and see the vast and beautiful universe and we can bring world peace for ourselves. Its not easy, its never easy. I’m not saying its easy, I’m saying its worth it… With love, ahuman.” -AHUGHMAN08 (youtube)
I will give you a little history about what will happen to you up until where I am now. Ray, you will continue to be a good Christian, you might not make it to church like some say you should but your faith in God is solid. You have a relationship with God. You are thankful to Jesus for dying for your sins. You thank God for all the blessings, many times a week. You believe that if you are good, you will go to heaven when you pass away and meet God, Jesus, Abraham, your Grandmother, your sister, and many more people who are currently residing in heaven. You long to ask God all the questions you have saved up to ask him. You take comfort knowing you are not ever alone. Your world fills up with joy when a beautiful baby boy is born into it. You will name him Preston. You teach him respect, love, compassion, honesty, and the glories of God. But it all will come to an abrupt end on April second, two thousand eight. Preston is now four years and four months old. You will find yourself staring at the machines keeping him alive through your tears because the thought of loosing him is unbearable. So you quickly renew your faith in God and ask God to make his beautiful creation better. Help him to continue to live in a family that loves him so much. You will build the faith in your family that is with you at the hospital, you become a beacon of hope for them. You tell them that he will indeed be a “miracle baby”. “The lord will not let him die”. He will be on the news tonight as an example of God’s grace. You pray and pray. You thank God for allowing him to live. After all in God’s divine word it clearly states in Matthew 21:22 “And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive”. And in Luke 11:9 “And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; You have faith in these words. In Matthew 17:20 it reads; “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you”. You are fully aware of these passages and you know that God would not lie to you. I helped the family gain faith in God and his grace. We built up our spirits and faith in God’s ability to heal and waited on the good news. News comes but not the news you expect. Had the God that I knew would protect and heal if I only had faith forgotten about me? Had he ignored my pleas? I thought I had done everything right, prayed in Jesus’ name and all. Did I not do something right? Was this a lesson for something I did wrong? My four year old bundle of joy passed away and nothing could bring him back. I suddenly realized that God did not listen to my prayers. It suddenly made everything else about the world make sense. I took comfort knowing that God had not ignored me, he simply was not there. This understanding keeps you from being a very bitter man at God and all of his creation, turning his back on me when I needed him the most. You will feel silly for believing in such illogical and magical things. There is no pattern or plan to life. The world is full of chaos, good things happen and bad things happen. It just happened to Preston that day. It effected a whole family. It is just life. This truth was very liberating to you.
“Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, ‘atheist’ is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a ‘non astrologer’ or a ‘non-alchemist’. We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to ‘never doubt the existence of God’ should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day.” –Sam Harris, “Letter to a Christian Nation”
After mourning the loss of your son you begin to ask, “who else believes the way I do? How can I support my claims?” Then with the help of your fellow atheists they help you make sense of your new belief. You are not making claims, you are at the most logical standpoint. You are not stating that there was a flood that covered the whole earth, putting two of every creature on a small boat, Jesus rising from the dead, magical trees, unicorns, talking snakes, a story of a man living inside the belly of a whale for three whole days, the list goes on and on. You are stating that there is no solid evidence for these claims. You cannot believe until there is. The burden of proof is on the theists. You look for that proof and only find more logic from the free thinking community. You find; “Nature and reality are congruent words, nature is reality, reality is nature. All that exists is real, and all that is real exists. Everything that is real is governed by nature, it is nature. From every dimension, to every black hole, hyper-nova, solar flare and gravity field. If something does not exist, it is not real. Therefore if it exists, it becomes part of reality, ergo nature. So if something “supernatural,” were to exist, by its own definition is illogical and non-existent, it would no longer be “supernatural,” merely natural. That which does not exist is intangible [I.e. A concept] It cannot exist, being logically impossible. That makes sense, intrigued, you keep looking and you find; If God exists, that means that it is part of nature. If it’s part of nature, it is not supernatural. Also, as something which exists, it cannot be inconsistent. There is nothing that is tangible that is inconsistent. For example, A being which is omnipotent (almighty or infinite in power) must be illogical. Can a God make a rock bigger than he can lift? If so, then he would be unable to lift it and therefore not be omnipotent. If not, he wouldn’t be able to create one bigger than he could not lift. Therefore God would be bound by the laws of logic. I.e., God is a natural entity which had a beginning and cannot do the impossible. A “God” that had a beginning, could not do the impossible, sounds a lot to me like… a human being. Nor would this God be omniscient (having complete or unlimited knowledge, awareness, or understanding) or omnipresent (present everywhere at the same time)… God(s) can ONLY exist as a concept. At some point you have to think, does all of this really make sense? This is what I have done. It better be logical before I devote my life to it.
Think about your beliefs: Why is there an eternal struggle between good and evil? Is God not more powerful than the devil? If he isn’t, then there are two Gods. If he is then why not win the struggle if he is all loving? Does the devil help God design humans with hate and desire in our hearts and God put in emotions like love and jealousy from his own image according to Christianity’s teachings? We have free will but we still succumb to the devil’s will? Why not design us to be resistant to the devil’s will? God’s will is good, the devil’s will is evil. We apparently do not have our own free will, we are the puppets of two different gods with matching powers. If we are puppets and had no input into our design, then why blame us for our own downfalls and punish us to hell for eternity. Would an all powerful and loving god allow this to happen?
You believe in an almighty god who loves the world so much that he gives no proof of his existence… Except for a visit two thousand years ago in a primitive time and location, Jerusalem. Isolated from the rest of the world. And a book finally written by the hands of men during the intellectual immaturity of the human race, before it learned the obligations to speak the truth, 70 years after the fact. Its translations questioned by scholars, content added and taken away by politicians with political agendas on many occasions and constantly debated, while chaos reigns worldwide. Natural disasters, disease, poverty, world hunger, cancer, divorce, terrorism, child abuse, birth defects, freak accidents, genocide, rape, murder, war, and confusion. Were any deities listening to the prayers of a small boy asking for help while he was being molested by a priest in the deities very own house? Amidst all of this, God’s divine plan is to remain invisible. If God showed so much interest in Saddom and Guamara then why didn’t he do anything about the holocaust? Why worship a god who does nothing?
“We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.” -Gene Roddenberry
Where did God come from? Nothing can cause itself to happen. Nothing. How could it DO anything if it does not exist? When did God come about? Has God been around for infinity? Then why wait so long to create us? Why after all that time (during this infinity) did he feel the need to create us? If God is perfect then there would be no need for change (from being content of having no earth to wanting an earth). If he does change, then one can not discount the possibility that he changed from caring about the earth to not caring also.
“Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.” — Benjamin Franklin
What is the purpose of life? If God loves each of us then why not just let our souls live in heaven forever and worship him rather than to remain hidden away, giving no proof of existence. And give his followers the chance in a debate to finally say, “here is your undeniable proof of God”. But that has never happened. You say the meaning of life is to make sure a soul is worthy of heaven? Then why allow a newborn to die, a one yr old, a three yr old? They were given no chance to prove anything. If there really is a heaven then why toy with our souls by testing them on earth first?
Imagine if God came to you and said “I can do anything you ask of me” And you say, “Make a square circle”. And he makes a square circle and gives you the ability to comprehend a square circle. What would be the circumference of this object? If we applied the math to this object and found that it is not a square or is not a circle, then it isn’t a square circle. If he cannot do this then he has limits. A god cannot exist as reality, only a concept. This sort of logic proves that theists have compartmentalized insanity. The theists do not apply logic to one particular subject in their life. Unfortunately its teachings spill into the rest of their lives in a negative way. The man is taught that woman was put on earth for man. Not man was put on earth for woman. So the man takes control in the family and leaves the woman no choice in a matter. This is God’s way they reason and if the wife rejects it then she is going against God’s way. Its very difficult to reason with a person who has God on their side. The influence of religion makes them unreasonable. And many marriages have been wrecked with this type of hostility. Who says that we are better than women? Who says that we are any better than dogs, or monkeys? Dolphins probably wonder why in the world do we build buildings when there is so much work involved. They clearly have a better life, so simple, so carefree. Just swimming around all day eating fish and playing in the water. God has definitely smiled upon them. The birds could use the same reason because they can fly and we cannot. Politicians still make decisions based on bible teachings. People alienate others, abuse and kill those who do not believe in God. There is a well funded organization that is fighting against giving out condoms to the highest aids sufferer country (Africa) right now. This organization is known for it’s scandals in how its leaders have raped very young and vulnerable boys, then cover up the crime and leave the offender in power. The Catholic church certainly hasn’t proven to be in good graces with any loving deity. I wouldn’t think that a god would allow this to happen and tarnish his name. These are not the only ways that the belief in God spills into the world in a negative way. There have been many cases of parents placing their faith in God to heal their children, and refusing doctors help because it would not be placing faith in their god. Just look at the number of child neglect court cases where parents have cried about their deceased children when they could have done something about it and just forget about this God for a minute.
“Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion –- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.” -Mark Twain
Why would anyone worship a deity that supposedly has the power to stop 40,000 children from dying of starvation every day, yet doesn’t? “It was a picture of a black woman in Northern Africa. They were experiencing a devastating drought. And she was holding her dead baby in her arms and looking up to heaven with the most forlorn expression. I looked at it and thought, “Is it possible to believe that there is a loving or caring creator when all this woman needed was rain?”” [Charles Templeton, former evangelist, referring to a picture in Time Magazine, when asked by Lee Strobel when he realized he lost his faith]
In order for something to cause itself, it must precede itself. Nothing precedes itself. Therefore, it is illogical for something to cause itself. So where did God come from? How come there is a God instead of no God? A similar question is asked about the universe by creationists, “why is there everything instead of nothing?”. Scientists are willing to ask that very question and seek answers with facts and tests instead of philosophy. Science has answered many questions that humans have sought in the past. If you had asked a creationist 100 years ago how life arrived on earth in the first place he would have told you about the magic and glories of God. We now have a better understanding of how it happened. We can actually recreate it! There is still a lot we don’t know but we are finding out. So if we can create life, then are we God? Are we doing only what God can do? Are we forcing God’s hand to create life? Perhaps 100 years from now we will be able to describe the process in which life is created. It has happened many times before, no understanding of something, assuming that God does it and then learning the reason why it happens. Instead of just saying “God did it” we now learn the facts, test the hypothesis, and with the inability to disprove the hypothesis, arrives the theory.
As babies we believe that the world revolves around us and some people never seem to grow out of that. But most people have to eventually face the fact that it doesn’t. The world proved to them that it doesn’t. But this built in human cognition has us believing that the whole universe was designed for us. Every plant, animal, every molecule was for us and some higher being other than ourselves made us to enjoy all of this. The earth was, of course at the center of the universe and everything revolved around us. Even when Galileo disproved this, the roman catholic church, as powerful as the followers had made it, put him on house arrest for publishing such nonsense. They wanted to believe it, what their hearts told them took presidence over science. Humans used to think that the earth is young, about 6000 yrs old (sadly, some people still do). But the church was found to be embarrassingly wrong. We now know for a fact that the earth is more like 4.6 billion yrs old. God did not create us, science has proven that man evolved from the primate called the great apes and not special as the children of God. Life started on this planet through a process known as abiogenesis. But still today Christians deny what science has uncovered. The sun was not a perfect body that God carried across the sky. But just as the case that the sun was a God that illuminated the earth for us was finally decided that it was not a god, but God did in fact carry it across the sky was met with much aggressive resistance. Then again when science proved that the sun didn’t move, the earth in fact revolved around the sun. Before we knew what the brain was for (just useless gray matter) there had to be something that gave us conciseness, so we gave the credit to our newest idea, the soul. It gave us the ability to think and even manipulate this earthly body with our heavenly soul. We found out that a soul wasn’t necessary back when we found what the brain was for but we still held onto the soul belief. We really want to feel special and better than every other being even to ignore a mountain of scientific evidence. As sad as it is, this is human nature. Of course there is resistance to it all, history has shown over and over that this is what to expect from a human society and eventually concede in later generations that the church’s teachings were wrong. The fact that we have created this God is a testimony to our wonderful human imagination. Logic tells us that God does not exist. Most people ignore the logic, blissfully ignorant and blindly believe what the church tells us generation after generation. After all, it is what they want to believe. But other people evolve into a maturity level not common and see the world in a different light just as the 10 yr old who realized that the world didn’t revolve around them. Atheism has merit and does not constitute disrespect from the religious world. Did the church kill off all the witches, or was that another concept gone way too far? A concept just as fictional as were the gods of the Egyptians, the Romans, the Aztecs and unicorns as believed to exist by the early Christians and as stated in the bible.
God is an idea created by primitive man to explain the unknown. In the time that God was created, there was much unknown. The world was a wondrous and magical seeming place. The wind blew from an unknown force, the waters of the ocean splashed the ground with waves caused by Triton, the God of the seas. Those who had answers were revered and became powerful. The primitive mind thought this sounds good so I should believe in this. The force of the God’s was the only explanation that anyone could give at the time. Over the thousands of years we have filled our books and minds with other teachings called science. Science has taught us that the world is not so magical after all. We know why wind blows, why the ocean waves, why lightning strikes. We now know that people who are sick need to see a doctor, not a priest. They are no longer possessed by demons and God is here for us to shoo away the demons. Doctors have done a much better job at healing than God has. This is why we take people to doctors in the first place. Does this mean that our technology has surpassed the abilities of God? We have apparently done it before as stated in the bible; “And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron”. (Judges 1:19) God is helpless when confronted with the technology of the humans. And this was something as primitive as a chariot. God’s power multiplied by one thousand could not match the power of just one fighter jet today. In a world with a god who heals, we would not need any doctors. The world would have lined up in their best interests and never had the need for medicines and doctors. The churches would have wings of hospitals where people would come to receive their healing. Paraplegics would roll in on a gurney and walk out. Blind people would feel their way in and drive off in a car. Cancer patients would never have to suffer through chemotherapy or radiation treatment and God’s belief network would definitely be at 100%. Perhaps we have found a better way to shoo away demons than our faith in God can. This means that our technology and material has realized a way to effect a supernatural being (a demon). Does this mean that our technology and material can effect the devil himself? We should begin working on this right away, right? Or is it that demons do not posses bodies at all. Is it viruses, bacteria, cancer, infection and other things that these ancient people deemed to be demons? So we have ruled out demons, why do we still believe in a god?
Until just a couple of hundred years ago, most people thought that a god or gods controlled everything. Why did the wind blow? Why was there lightning and thunder? Why did the sun, moon, and stars apparently go around Earth? Why did someone get sick and die? Why did anything happen? Well, obviously, God did it. If a person doesn’t know how something works or why something happened, they can say, “God did it.” This is known as the “god of the gaps,” or the “argument from ignorance,” and it is at the heart of the conflict between science and religion. Science looks for natural causes, while religion looks for supernatural causes. Science is steadily winning, because as we understand more and more about the universe, the gap where a god might function grows smaller and smaller. Every time we learn more, gods have less room to operate. When we learned what caused the sun to apparently move across the sky, there was no need for the Greek god Helios and his chariot. When we understood what caused lightning, there was no need for the Greek god Zeus, the Roman god Jupiter, or the Norse god Thor. In fact, the understanding of lightning was one of the first areas of battle between science and Christianity. When Benjamin Franklin discovered that lightning was just a big electric spark, he invented the lightning rod. It was enormously successful at preventing buildings from being struck by lightning. However, this caused a bit of a conundrum for the church leaders; should they trust in their god to prevent lightning strikes on their churches, or should they use these new lightning rods? Up until then, lightning hit churches much more frequently than other, more “deserving” buildings — such as taverns or houses of ill repute. “Why was that?” they might have wondered. Could it be that churches had spires and were taller, or was it SATAN and his WITCHES? Actually, that is what they often believed, and many a supposed witch was executed for having caused the destruction of a church. When they started putting lightning rods on churches, witch killings stopped soon thereafter. It’s a good thing that the churches eventually did place their faith in human technology over faith in God, imagine being dragged away from your family and being burned to death. The truth is that the story of God has long been the explanation of the unknowable. This is how very primitive man gave the concept of God his beginning. No amount of logic or pondering told these people that God didn’t make lighting strike. God is just a concept that has been blown way out of proportion to win power, both politically, socially and in business. So we have been conditioned that believing in a God was a good thing. It has helped people gain resources otherwise lost if not in the “belief” club, all others were not welcome. Humans have an infinite desire to find meaning in our lives. With a wonderful human imagination and philosophy, came meaning. It gives simple humans a feeling of superpower. We do not have superpowers but if we had a friend that did, and was on our side, that could be a loophole. When we need anything, we go beyond what natural laws of logic detain us to and pray to an almighty God; someone who does not follow natural laws of logic. All we have to do is praise him. So to give up God would be to give up this superpower also. It also gave us confidence over ourselves when we were alone. We are never alone. God was by our side.
“To pray to God is to flatter oneself that with words one can alter nature.” -Voltaire
Religion adopts parts of anything that might confirm its wild allegations, and rejects those that don’t, unlike science which takes the good with the bad and is OPEN about the fact that its theories may have some drawbacks. Basically, religion doesn’t care if it is right or wrong, only that it seems like its right, whereas science only cares if it is truly right from all perspectives, and if there are holes or flaws in a theory, it will tell people about them, and they may be filled in the future. When you learn science in school, it may be taught almost as religiously as the bible, but this is only done to cement certain basic knowledge in the mind to form a basis to build upon, and may change at any time, at which point, science will go back and change all the text books. Religion stubbornly does not change any outdated book.
“The church says the earth is flat, but I know that it is round, for I have seen the shadow on the moon, and I have more faith in a shadow than in the church.” — Ferdinand Magellan
Thinking is hard, and scientific thinking is hardest; it often leads to unpleasant conclusions with little emotional payoff. Dramatic religious story-telling that supports wishful thinking is usually easier, more interesting, and much more emotionally fulfilling. But does this mean that it is the truth? No, its just easy and comfortable. One large difference between science and religion is this: In science, if the facts don’t fit the theory, the theory is modified or tossed out. In religion, if the facts don’t fit the theory, the facts are often tossed out. All too often, people reject evidence and the findings of science because they conflict with their religious assumptions. With their minds thus unhinged from the real world, they can have problems distinguishing fantasy from reality. If we go to a football game or a concert with a full crowd your state of consciousness changes. You slip into a state of euphoria. Your brain physically goes through biochemical changes. The church sets people up to feel the same euphoric experience. It is the very same biochemical changes happening in the brain, the only difference is that the person experiencing it believes that it is a divine being making it happen. They believe it to be spiritual. In this altered state people can be more easily manipulated into giving money or believe in magical stories. Whether or not you heard them for the first time in this altered state, you relate it to the euphoric feeling and the belief is set in stone. Love is also a euphoric feeling, you cannot see or touch love. You cannot even prove that it exists. It is just an word to describe a feeling. You get a feeling of bliss when you are in love. It fills up your mind with wonderful thoughts. The idea of being attached to someone that makes you feel good is an awesome feeling. The feeling of love is what is so wonderful, not love itself. Love does not care for you, love does not concern itself on whether you live or die. Love is not a person or any deity but you still have a euphoric emotion that you attach to the word. Love is a feeling that you get, just like the feeling you get from your god. The idea of God fills your mind with a euphoric feeling knowing that you are attached to something so wonderful and mighty. An idea that excites your imagination into amazement. Thoughts of never having to be alone ever again, always having someone to talk to, getting to see the people you fell in love with in life once again in death and to have for yourself a god powerful enough to give you favors through prayer are all imaginative and phenomenal thoughts. And to have this god for yourself who has counted the hairs on your head! Count me in, or at least until reason sinks in.
“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.” — Dalai Lama (Head of the Dge-lugs-pa order of Tibetan Buddhists)
You must consider that since a casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith proves nothing. It proves everything equally, from 2+2=5 to “God exists because I have faith.” It’s an insane concept without justification. The belief in a God or supernatural being is classified as being delusional (A false belief strongly held in spite of invalidating evidence). Some even call it “compartmentalized insanity”. It is a mental fault that most people share. Religion is a virus that is spread by its followers and affects you and closes your mind through fear. Do not worry, there is a healthy and natural cure called atheism.
When a person imagines, perceives or has an apparent “experience” which comes from their God, then it must also pass through their mental systems before it is understood. Therefore it is easy to see that no two people can ever perceive the same God – for example, every Christian believes in a slightly different God depending on their own personal experiences and thought patterns, and psychological needs and wants. Nobody can perceive the absolute God without first having to think about it and therefore corrupt the image. Therefore the same God is not in all of our hearts. It is not the same God revealing himself to us. This is proof if there ever was one that God didn’t create us, we created God. Otherwise God would reveal his true self to all of his children. People who claim to know that the version of God they believe in is the right one are claiming that their own nervous system is not capable of mistake -that their thought process is infallible. Claiming to have a brain that can observe absolute truth and not be corrupted by our fallible neurons is claiming to what only God can do: Observe the absolute reality. Every person has a unique set of neurons within their brain and a unique filtering system for the input that their brain receives. This means that no two people ever perceive the same experience at any given event – each person’s neuronal brain will interpret it and present it in a slightly different way. Just as one person may enjoy a movie that another person does not. Each person will have a slightly different version presented to their conscious self even before having time to consciously think about the event. Andy Thomson, a leading psychologist talks about the recent findings of psychology of the human brain in Atlanta Ga in 2009. To believe in a god or gods is the mind’s “resting place”, its default setting. It is cognitively more difficult to reason the non-existence of any god or gods. So it is not surprising that the majority of people believe in a god.
“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. (having unlimited authority or influence)
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. (wishing ill will toward others)
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
–Epicurus
Why would Jesus perform miracles in front of an audience? To prove to the world that he was the son of God? Because he wanted to heal the sick? If he is still looking over us, why does he not still heal the sick? Does he not still care? Imagine if the hospital had a quadriplegic, a spinal separation, and suddenly he was able to walk. Someone lost their arm and was able to regenerate a new one overnight, someone blind suddenly able to see again! An amazing story like one of these would certainly be on national news. You say “God must remain hidden”. If you define “hidden” as performing miracles in front of droves of people and putting it all in a book, making it the #1 selling book in circulation, then your hidden theory falls apart pretty quickly. According to the bible, he is jealous and loves to be praised so he did all of this on earth to convert people to believe in him. But he is only at an 87% (amount of believers) success rate. And of all the religions it seems that none can even settle on what his name really is. Yahweh, Allah, Elohim, Braman, Jehova, Krishna are all names made up to address him. Why couldn’t he reveal to everyone his true name, his true identity, the one true feeling and structure of a religion? Is this good enough from someone we call God? Why didn’t Jesus do the one thing that he said anyone could do with just a grain of faith, move mountains? Even Jesus who performed miracles never did this, and he said anyone could do it. This is written in the true word of God. If it were written in the bible that he had moved Mount Sinai to Jordan and to this day we could go to Egypt to see a perfectly smooth and polished mountain base, then go to Jordan to see a mountain with a perfectly smooth and polished bottom that matches up perfectly to the base 200 miles away, then I would be dramatically more inclined to believe. But nothing in this world like this exists. No proof whatsoever. This would be much more convincing than an easily forged trick of healing people. We already know God does not heal, this is why doctors are so trusted and make so much money. Why would we need doctors if Jesus is looking down on us and is still alive and cares for us? Has his personality changed, does he not care about the sick anymore or is he now incapable of healing? Why did God design disease in the first place if he wants to heal them as Jesus did? Even Jesus Christ himself spoke these very words, “Oh God, why have you forsaken me?” This was his last revelation just before he passed. He worshiped a god his whole life, only to realize just before he passed that the god he thought was there, wasn’t. Why would you worship a God who had forsaken his only son? God had forsaken his very son as stated by Jesus and for what? To pay for all of our sins? Ever wonder why we still have to pay? It seems like he died in vain to me. Remember, we don’t have any input into our humanly design. The teachings do not make sense, do they?
Why does the natural order of the world, the struggle between good and evil follow exactly in sync with a world with no interference from a God? As I write this a friend is saying to Praise God that her boyfriend was not hurt in a car accident (except for some bruising and soreness). “He must have had an angel protecting him!”. I saw on the news one night not long ago where a tree fell on a roof where a family was staying during a storm. It knocked out a window causing glass to spray into a female resident’s face. A torrential downpour forced the family out of the house. They exclaimed on the news, “God was looking out for us”. This is how people of faith reason the existence of God in every way. Is this how God looks out for us? A perfectly planned out disaster? He allowed the truck to crash into x object. He could have made the driver more aware of dangers, removed the danger, or he could have simply caused the truck not to start that day. But he in all his power and might allowed him to suffer a crash. Now he is bruised, shaken and sore. It seems like the angel wasn’t paying attention. God could have strengthened the tree so it would not fall onto the house scaring a whole family, removing them from their home when they needed a home the most, spraying glass into the eyes of a mother of two, and ruining and otherwise good day. Not to mention all the red tape they will have to cut through to have their home repaired. “God was looking out for us”. God must have been looking out for me, an atheist, during each time. I was not in a car accident, I didn’t have a tree fall into my house. Do I want God to look after me after hearing those examples of how God works? No thanks. I am blessed already. I feel blessed all the time. Who gets credit? It is the natural order of the world. My life hasn’t changed for the worse since I broke it off with my almighty buddy. I still get unexpected gifts that seem to fall from the sky. Just like when I would thank God for it. I still get unexpected bills too. Nothing has changed. I now realize that God hasn’t done anything for me that wouldn’t have happened anyway. This is a natural world, nature is in charge here. This is why children die from muscular dystrophy, dog attacks, Ebola, and meningitis. Tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, and forest fires have plagued good men since the beginning of time. If God is in charge of this chaotic world then why call him God? Why does God design retarded babies? Is that a cruel joke he is making to allow someone to experience life mentally retarded? Or without a leg, or born with some cruel disease? Why call him God if these are his products?
“All thinking men are atheists.” — Ernest Hemingway
Love is not Jealous. God is Love. God is jealous. It doesn’t add up. What reason does God have to be jealous anyway? “Jealous” is the only name the bible gives to the christian god. This was clearly added in later by a political need to help abolish paganism. He is almighty, right? Sounds very immature. I have known people who were jealous, I have seen it tear apart relationships over and over. It did not seem like a supernatural or loving emotion. Immaturity like jealousy seems more like a human emotion. Does an all powerful all mighty, all knowing deity involving himself with jealousy sound right? Religion is based on fear. Worship me or burn in hell. Loving beings do not want to be worshiped, narcissistic beings want to be worshiped. Loving beings want to be loved. Why doesn’t he give us an outlet to love him if he is loving or even exist? I feel better when I am able to love, not worship. Why doesn’t he give us examples of love instead of a feeling that can be recreated at a rock concert or giving material possessions to followers only to find that atheists also get the same comfort out of life? Our only option is to worship the idea of god. So many people believe in God out of fear, this is not love. It does not teach love. It teaches narcissism, fear, and guilt. Is this why Christians have a higher divorce rate? Wives fearing their husbands instead of loving them? Husbands looking up to the idea of being a god and being worshiped? Why can’t God see that this is the wrong example to make to us humans? Perhaps because God is a man made institution. It makes you seriously think is this fear based religion is really encouraging more love in the world? A true jealous God would show partiality toward his followers, but the world operates exactly as if no deity is at the helm controlling it. Everyone would have aligned themselves to the one true religion that God approved of. Instead, people align themselves with the religion they most agree with. A true mighty and jealous God would definitely make himself known to all, and prove himself to exist. God wants to be praised all the time and he is jealous. Doesn’t he seem insecure? Perhaps he is a juvenile God, created the earth and lost interest. What comparison do we have to go by that this world is all that great? There could be much better worlds out there that we don’t know about. He may have created a perfect world somewhere later and we were just a trial run. You cannot disprove that idea. It makes perfect sense if you must believe a god. You look at history and think that God should have had a better message of unity. Instead he pushes a message of doing pretty much anything we want and get away with it as long as we ask for forgiveness for it later. It teaches fear of the wrath of God and being cast outside of heaven and burning in hell when we are dead with no hope of ever earning back rights into heaven. It has taught many nations and armies that we can destroy other nations and innocent people who do not agree with us, as long as God is on our side. There is enough content in the bible for everyone to conclude that God is on my side and I am right. It is a good thing that we have evolved beyond the bible’s teachings of a primitive and superstitious past. Why are we still hanging on to this unevolved book when we know how wrong so much of it is? Even God himself is described as doing some immature and petty things not characteristic of a God but more characteristic of primitive man. Read on to see examples.
“A man is accepted into church for what he believes–and turned out for what he knows.” -Mark Twain
You begin studying the bible that you thought was divine and good and learn some horrible truths, it is not so divine after all. You have been trained since childhood to have “blind faith”, to ignore any evidence against what you have been taught. And you have been doing a very good job with your blindness. You were told very early on in life about all the splendors of religion, before you could reason against it all. Just like Santa Clause, you believed it wholeheartedly even though it made no sense at all. You had blind faith about Santa because everyone told you it was the truth. Why question it? The reasons are far more important not to question your religion because God knows your heart. But what if you looked at the bible in its raw form, as if it is a book that defined our past, more of a history book instead of a religious book. After all it was never intended to be a book for the masses, it was a book for governments. It was their own constitution. After all, most of the population was illiterate.
“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.” -Thomas Jefferson
Think of how many people have died for an “all loving” deity… Just in the christian religion alone! The holocaust, the inquisition, crusades, Waco Texas, Salem witch trials, massacre of wounded knee, trail of tears, Cortes and Montezuma, the list goes on and on. The fact is is that religion has been a thorn in the side of the world since its conception. How much blood will be shed in the name of God? We are at war as I write this with the very same group of people who wrote the bible. And still the same mindset. Why would a God allow them to kill 3,000 people with three planes in his holy name? Couldn’t he stop that? It would seem that his name is worth more than allowing a few people to tarnish it in the worst way. And we all know that the planejackers were wrong. It is obvious that this very mindset is a mindset that the world cannot tolerate. Right now Christianity has a high following, and it is certainly a good thing because the church has proven in the past that they are easily threatened and use force against people or groups who threaten their power. And we read and follow a book that came from a mindset of jealousy, oppression and war? No, we only follow the good, the beautiful parts and ignore the rest. Pretend that parts of God’s divine and perfect word is not really there. But it is there.
“Two hands working do more than an infinite amount clasped in prayer.” –Unknown
Lets look into what the council of Nicea deemed worthy to put into this book and call it the divine word of God. You open the Bible to a random page, and you find this:
“Any of the people of Israel, or of the aliens who reside in Israel, who give any of their offspring to Molech shall be put to death; the people of the land shall stone them to death I myself will set my face against them, and will cut them off from the people, because they have given of their offspring to Molech, defiling my sanctuary and profaning my holy name. And if the people of the land should ever close their eyes to them, when they give of their offspring to Molech, and do not put them to death, I myself will set my face against them and against their family, and will cut them off from among their people, them and all who follow them in prostituting themselves to Molech. If any turn to mediums and wizards, prostituting themselves to them, I will set my face against them, and will cut them off from the people. Consecrate yourselves therefore, and be holy; for I am the Lord your God. Keep my statutes, and observe them; I am the Lord; I sanctify you. All who curse father or mother shall be put to death; having cursed father or mother, their blood is upon them. If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbour, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall be put to death. The man who lies with his father’s wife has uncovered his father’s nakedness; both of them shall be put to death; their blood is upon them. If a man lies with his daughter-in-law, both of them shall be put to death; they have committed perversion; their blood is upon them. If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death; their blood is upon them.” [Leviticus, chapter 20]
You open the Bible to another random page and you find this:
“When you buy a male Hebrew slave, he shall serve for six years, but in the seventh he shall go out a free person, without debt. If he comes in single, he shall go out single; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s and he shall go out alone. But if the slave declares, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out a free person’, then his master shall bring him before God. He shall be brought to the door or the doorpost; and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him for life. When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. If she does not please her master, who designated her for himself, then he shall let her be redeemed; he shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt unfairly with her. If he designates her for his son, he shall deal with her as with a daughter. If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife. And if he does not do these three things for her, she shall go out without debt, without payment of money. Whoever strikes a person mortally shall be put to death. If it was not premeditated, but came about by an act of God, then I will appoint for you a place to which the killer may flee. But if someone willfully attacks and kills another by treachery, you shall take the killer from my altar for execution. Whoever strikes father or mother shall be put to death. Whoever kidnaps a person, whether that person has been sold or is still held in possession, shall be put to death. Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death. When individuals quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or fist so that the injured party, though not dead, is confined to bed, but recovers and walks around outside with the help of a staff, then the assailant shall be free of liability, except to pay for the loss of time, and to arrange for full recovery. When a slave-owner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished. But if the slave survives for a day or two, there is no punishment; for the slave is the owner’s property.” [Exodus, chapter 21]
Exodus 22:18- “Thou shall not suffer a witch to live”. How could God allow this verse when the effect would have been that thousands of innocent women were tortured and burned to death because of it? Just the terror alone to women was horrible.
Leviticus 12:1-5- “A woman who gives birth to a boy is to be unclean for 7 days. Then she needs 33 days before she is purified. If its a girl, the woman is unclean for 66 days to be purified. What this is saying is that girls are twice as dirty as boys.
Deuteronomy 21:10-14 (God speaking) “If you notice a beautiful woman, bring her into your house, make her shave her head, trim her nails and put aside the clothes she was wearing when she was captured.” “You may go to her and be her husband. You must not sell her because you have dishonoured her.” God gives permission here to kidnap and rape women even though he points out that it dishonoring to the woman. Imagine today, following the word of God, kidnapping a woman as she screams and cries for help, the kidnapper takes her to his house and shaves her head, trims her fingernails, throws her clothes in the trash, proclaims himself to be her husband and rapes her. How did this ever get to become the beautiful word of God?
Deuteronomy 22:13-21 (God speaking) Stone to death any woman who isn’t a virgin when married. “If no proof of the girls virginity can be found, the men of the town shall stone her to death.” Do you understand how a stoning works? The woman is wrapped tightly in a sheet, buried up to her neck with her hands tied behind her back. Spectators carry out the execution by hurling carefully selected rocks at her. The stones are large enough to cause pain but not large enough to kill her in just one or two strikes. She has to suffer to death as the Christian God commands. (Muslims still carry out stonings.) Imagine this happening to you.
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (God speaking) “If a man rapes a virgin, he must pay the girl’s father some money. He must marry her, and they must be married for the rest of their lives.” The raped woman MUST marry the man who raped her and stay married to him her whole life! Remember this is a direct command from God.
The bible is the second most bloody and violent book ever published, the Quran is the first. Thousands of people have been slaughtered on God’s command. Examples are as follows:
When we read of the Isrealites: “that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spare neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women and children; that they left not a soul to breath…” On Gods command. And these nations had given the Jews no offense. Can we believe that this was really God’s command? After all in the same book the sixth commandment from God is, “thou shall not kill”. Is this book written by man, or God? If there is a God, would not these stories be a blasphemy to him?
Ezekiel 5:9-10 (God speaking) “And because of all your abominations I will do with you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again: Therefore fathers shall eat their sons in the midst of you and sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to all the winds. Even as a threat, this is pure evil.
2 Kings 2:23-24 God kills 42 playful children by having them mauled by two bears, after they made fun of Elisha’s bald head. Almighty God, yes. Loving God, apparently not. They were just children!
Numbers 31:15-18 (God speaking through Moses) Have you allowed all the women to live?… Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. So God commands here to Kill the boys and mothers and rape the daughters. Put yourself in the situation of one of these mothers. Your husband is already dead. You and your son will be dead soon and your daughter will be held captive and raped, most likey by elder priests claiming that God wants them to do this to you.
Exodus 32:27 (God’s command) “Take every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” 3000 Isrealites died here, massacred by their own Levite tribe at the command of a God who would brook no disloyalty.
2 Kings 9 is a story about the lord telling Jehu, “You are to destroy the house of Ahab, your master. The whole house of Ahab will perish”. God is clearly telling Jehu to kill Ahab’s whole family. Next Jehu carries out Gods instructions
2 Kings 10; Seventy children’s heads were collected at Jezreel in two baskets and sent across country to Jehu. They were left in two piles at the city gates overnight. Jehu goes on to kill the rest of Ahab’s family. Then in 2 Kings 10:30 “The LORD said to Jehu, ‘you have done well in accomplishing what is right in my eyes and have done to the house of Ahab all I had in mind to do.'” At this point God seems very happy with all the bloodshed, and piles of children’s heads. But… in Hosea 1:4 (God speaking) I will soon punish the house of Jehu for the massacre at Jezreel” We are now reading things written by a different scribe- working for a different king. This one discrepancy is your undeniable proof that the bible is not the word of God- but of men.
Genesis 19:24 Christians read without a blink of an eye how God killed every inhabitant of two whole cities; Sodom and Gomorrah. A story that is clearly the root of disapproval of homosexuals.
Genesis 22 God asks Abraham for his son as a sacrifice. Surely Abraham fails the test by agreeing to an insecure, power crazed manipulator, toying with the lives and emotions of his subjects.
Exodus 12:29 God murders all the first born sons of Egyptians. Why do we excuse God when these acts are clearly insane and evil? This portrays God as a racist child murderer. It wasn’t God, it was for human political reasons.
Exodus 14:27,28 God kills all the hosts of Pharoh, including the captains of 600 chariots, who drown in the Red Sea while pursuing the Isrealites. Compare this with Romans 2:11- “God does not show favoritism”.
Numbers 16:1-40 God slays 250 Levite princes of the Jews who challenged the leadership of Moses. Then the Lord proceeded to open up the earth and bury alive “the wives, sons, and little children.
Numbers 16:41-49 14,700 Jews are eradicated in a plague because they rebelled against Moses after the killing of the 250 princes. Wouldn’t you have had concerns about Moses and his killing spree just like the Jews? It is clearly a mistake to argue with Moses.
Numbers 21:3 At the request of the Jews, God utterly destroys the Canaanites at Hormah and the Amorites at Heshbon. Moses summed up the slaughter in Deuteronomy 2:34; “We utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little ones. We left no survivors. This sounds a lot like the ones we are at war with right now as they also have no regard for the lives of innocent people.
Numbers 21:34-35 God orders the destruction of all the sons and subjects of the King of Bashan. As far as we know, this was an innocent race of people who had done nothing to offend the Jews. They were simply in the way of a brutal religious tribe.
Numbers 25:4-9 God is angry with the Isrealites and murders 24,000 of them.
Numbers 31:7-8 God orders the killing of all the men of the Midianites, and their wives and male children. Now all that was left was young and baby girls with no parents.
Deuteronomy 2:19-21 God commits genocide, killing the Ammonites so that Lot might possess their land.
Deuteronomy 2:22 And again, he commits genocide, wiping out the Horims, slaying them so that Esau might acquire their land.
Joshua 8:1-30 At the city of Ai, all of the men, women and children are exterminated and the city burned, in an ambush directed by God. Joshua and his men smote them with the “edge of the sword” all because they agreed that God wanted them to have that land.
Joshua 10:28 All the people of Makkedah were slain by Joshua, then all the people of Libnah, not a soul remained. Then in verse 32 all the people of Lachish, then in verse 33, all the people of Gezer. “And Joshua smote the people, until he had left none remaining.” Verses 34-35 All the people of Eglon were murdered. “They left none remaining”. Verses 36-37 all the people of Hebron. “They totally destroyed all who breathed.” Remember this was all on God’s command. We have no evidence that these other people were offending the Jews in any way.
Judges 1:3-4 10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites were wiped out by Judah and Simeon. The motivation? – To take the land “allotted to us”.
Judges 8:16-17 Gideon tortures the elders of a town with thorns. Then he wipes out the town. This was done because they didn’t feed him.
Judges 14:19 Samson murders 30 young Philistines. His reason to murder them? They guessed his riddle. “The spirit of the Lord came upon him in power. He struck down 30 of their men.”
1 Samuel 6:19 God strikes dead 50,070 people of Beth Shemesh because a few of them who were working on a field happened to glance into the Ark carrying the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments.
1 Samuel 7:13 many Philistines were killed under Samuel. “And the hand of the lord was against the Philistines.” Does God really like anybody?
There are hundreds of stories in the bible just like these. In total God kills 371,186 people directly and orders another 1,862,265 people murdered. That’s almost two million people! “Thou shall not kill”? Only if you really want some land or someone guesses your riddle or does not feed you or for some unknown reason, (which you may be punished by God later for obeying him in the first place) apparently.
“If there is a God, atheism must seem to Him as less of an insult than religion.” –Edmond de Goncourt
This account of God is equivalent to a cruel overlord who flies into jealous rages at times. You say this is all Old Testament, as if it is not part of God’s divine word. The book that you praise as if it fell from heaven. Even Jesus says in Matthew 5:17, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill”. He obviously has no objection with the Old Testament or the testaments as at the time, were not old. Jesus goes on to say in 5:18, “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” So Jesus says that the Old Testament laws are binding on everyone forever. After all Jesus himself was a Jew, and the Old Testament was the Jewish Bible. But I know this doesn’t satisfy you so lets focus on the New Testament.
1Tim 2:11-12 11 “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. 12 permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent.” We know this is ridiculous and very wrong.
Col 3:22-24 22 “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord. 23 Whatever your task, put yourselves into it, as done for the Lord and not for your masters, 24 since you know that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward; you serve the Lord Christ.” Here the word of God addresses the slavery issue but fails the test of a good book by not condoning slavery at all. It simply states that slaves should be obedient.
Luke 14:26 ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. So the lord wants us to hate our own family in order to join his cause. We should all be very concerned about an organization that uses this book as a basis for its teachings.
The New Testament is full of contradictions and discrepancies. For example if you look in Matthew 1:6, Jesus’ lineage was traced down through David’s son, Solomon. But if you look in Luke 3:31 his lineage is traced through David’s son, Nathan. Now this is the divine word of God right? In 1 Thessalonians 2:13 the Bible says: “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God.”
In Luke 1:26-31 The announcement of the special birth came before the conception, but in Matthew 1:18-21 the announcement came after. Ok lets remember that this is the word of God as stated In 2 Peter 1:20-21 the Bible says: “Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.” This theory that God wrote it seems to be falling apart.
In Matthew 1:18-21 and in Luke 1:28-35, Jesus’ parents were told of their son’s future greatness. But in Luke 2:48-50 they knew nothing about it. Is this law of the lord perfect? Should we ask the bible if it is perfect? Psalm 19:7 thinks so “The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.” This is the only evidence in the world that the bible is infallible. Suppose someone told you something and to prove he was right he told you that he was right. This is the exact case we have here in the Bible. Lets look further into the infallible word of God to see what God himself wrote.
In Matthew 1:20, “But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”. The Angel is telling Joseph about Jesus. But in Luke 1:28 the angel tells Mary instead.
In Matthew 1:17 there were 28 generations from David to Jesus “Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Christ”. But in Luke 3:23-31 the Bible breaks it down in a lengthy passage to uncover 43 generations and it names them all. You might be asking why did God inspire two different people to write two different things?
Jacob was Joseph’s father in Matthew 1:16. but Heli was Joseph’s father in Luke 3:23.
Jesus was tempted during the 40 days in the wilderness in Mark 1:13. But Jesus was tempted after the 40 days in the wilderness in Matthew 4:2,3.
The devil first took Jesus to the pinnacle, then to the mountain top in Matthew 4:5-8. But in Luke 4:5-9 the devil first took Jesus to the mountain top, then to the pinnacle.
In all there have been found 194 contradictions in the infallible word of God. And this is just the New Testament alone! These are just a few examples. By the way, why did God not include the “golden rule” in the ten commandments? “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” It would have covered most of the commandments already there.
There are droves of people who lost their faith in Christianity just by reading the bible. Ask yourself this simple question: Why, when you read the Bible, are you not left in awe? Why doesn’t a book written by an omniscient being leave you with a sense of wonder and amazement instead of mostly boring? If you are reading a book written by the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving creator of the universe, wouldn’t you expect to be stunned by the brilliance, the clarity and the wisdom of the author? Would you not expect each new page to intoxicate you with its incredible prose and its spectacular insight? Wouldn’t you expect the author to tell us things that scientists have not been able to discover yet? This book, “The word of God” could have included a recipe for an antibiotic. If Jesus wanted to heal people, wouldn’t that have healed millions more? The bible could have included a book devoted entirely to the wisdom of God. God could have spoken to John the Baptist and told him that the earth is round. The church wouldn’t have been embarrassingly wrong on so many occasions. This would have proven that the wisdom of God is real. The son of God who was a carpenter couldn’t even share the formula for pi. Only computers have been able to formulate that or an all knowing God could. Think of how far that would have advanced carpentry and convinced so many people that he was the son of a benevolent God and Christianity was the true religion. So much wisdom to share, but only nonsense written by primitive man. Right now we would be trying to find the Higgs Boson particle at the LHC particle accelerator to celebrate yet another truth proven right in the bible. You keep opening the book to random pages, and nearly everything you find is utter nonsense. Either it is meaningless, completely irrelevant, disgusting or downright wrong. Be prepared to be let down when reading a book written by a far margin of comparison, the smartest being that exists. The bible is full of this mindset. Homosexual hating, prejudism, sexism and on and on, from front to back,… See why the world cannot tolerate it? It is a very good thing that Christians do not follow the Bible to the degree that very few Muslims follow the Koran. To be fair, there are fundamentalist Christians who believe every letter of the Bible should be followed. Lets just hope they don’t have children. The Bible, a book that advocates senseless murder, slavery and the oppression of women and has no place in our society today. Just like the science books are updated regularly, these teachings should be updated to me more inclined toward love. It is time for us to recognize this simple fact. Each religion can recognize that all other religions are wrong, but still fail to see that their own religion is wrong.
“How do I define God? I don’t. Divinities have been understood in various ways in the cultural traditions that we know. Take, say, the core of the established religions today: the Bible. It is basically polytheistic, with the warrior God demanding of his chosen people that they not worship the other Gods and destroy those who do — in an extremely brutal way, in fact. It would be hard to find a more genocidal text in the literary canon, or a more violent and destructive character than the God who was to be worshiped. So that’s one definition.” -Noam Chomsky
The books of the New Testament were not written down until around 70 years after Jesus’ death. His disciples didn’t write down anything that he did, they were written by people who assumed the things they knew. They went on stories handed down from previous generations. The names “Matthew”, “Mark”, “Luke”, “John”, and others were made up because nobody even knew their names. Imagine how much else was lost and changed over the generations. The four gospels do not even agree with each other on major stories. If they are to be taken as the truth, they should at least agree. An awesome story handed down from the previous generation can be misconstrued terribly, especially by illiterate people. How bad can people stretch truths or even fabricate lies in 70 years? Sounds like a creation in itself, a creation of MAN, to perpetuate a long held lie to himself that he is special.
The main biblical references to Jesus are in the gospels, which were written by unknown authors after 70 CE (and quite possibly decades later). In an illiterate and superstitious society, that’s a long time after Jesus’ supposed life — a long time for myths to grow. Most scholars agree that the first mention of what we call the gospels was by Justin Martyr about 150 CE. The earliest gospel, Mark, betrays its author’s lack of knowledge of the geography and social situation of Palestine — showing that the author was not a local. (Mark 5:1-13, Mark 11:1, Mark 10:12) Why do Mark and John begin with Jesus already a grown man — with no virgin birth, magic star, or other childhood stories? These stories are definitely spectacular and each disciple would have definitely included it in their respective book. If the gospels were written by eyewitnesses, why don’t they describe Jesus? Why are they written in third person format (like a story), instead of first person format? Why do the gospels of Matthew and Luke plagiarize up to 90% of Mark (and add the childhood stories)? The gospel of John hardly refers to Jesus as a real person with a real life. Like Paul, the author viewed Jesus as more of a sky-god.
The Christian religion only included the devil after meeting with polytheists and borrowed the idea from them. This in itself shows that man had a hand in writing the Bible. Translated many times to appeal to certain politicians. Politicians who had all other text burned. And original writings omitted from the bible because they didn’t line up with the politicians agendas. The same political party that had Jesus put to death. The gospel of Philip has already proven the bible wrong. It was left hidden, untarnished by politicians and found much later to reveal a terrible lie in the bible. Mary Magdalene was not a whore, she was Jesus’ lover. I wonder how that would make Jesus feel to know that we are all studying a book with such a lie and calling the woman he loved a whore? Jesus himself broke the law of the bible. Jesus Christ broke the Sabbath and justified his disciples in the same in John 5:16 and Matt 12:1-3,5 Why so much confusion on what we must do? If Christian means to be Christ-like then are we to go against the bibles teachings if they align with our own needs or wants? To study a Christian’s lifestyle is to understand that this is how a common Christian lives their life for God.
“Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.” — Edward Gibbon
As for the extra-biblical historicity of Jesus, there is absolutely no reliable contemporary evidence that he ever even existed. He made no impression on any historian of the first century. If Jesus existed and if the spectacular events in the gospels really happened, they would have been noted by many writers — including Philo of Alexandria, Seneca the Elder, Pliny the Elder, Justus of Tiberius, and over thirty others. None of these men referred to Jesus or the fantastical biblical events. The earliest extra-biblical supposed references to Jesus or Christ are in one paragraph and one sentence in the writings (about 93 CE) attributed to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (who also wrote about Hercules), and the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (about 117 CE). However, the veracity of these references is highly questionable; many scholars are convinced that Christian transcribers added them much later. The reference by Josephus was almost certainly created by “church historian” Eusebius, who first referred to it in about 324 CE — for Emperor Constantin’s Council of Nicea. The reference by Tacitus was probably added in the 1400’s (likely in 1468 by Johannes de Spire of Venice), because no mention is made to it in any known text prior to then.
“The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.” -Denis Diderot
Why do some people get to live a heathen youth, grow old, give their heart to God just before passing away while others die while they are still young heathens? They never had the opportunity to realize that death was near like a cancer victim lying in a hospital bed and accept God into their heart just before dying. If he plans our birth and death then how unfair is a God of that nature?
“Question with boldness even the existence of God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.” –Thomas Jefferson, 1787 letter to his nephew
A benevolent and all-knowing god has only one option in any situation, and that is the option that causes most good. Therefore a perfectly good all-knowing God has no free will. An all-knowing god instantly knows all of its future actions and therefore has no free will to change them. Therefore a god with no free will can not be moral. If an all-powerful and all-knowing God exists then this denies any free will of any living being. If God has free will, but never chooses evil, it is immoral because it could have created life in the same way: With free will, but also never choosing evil. Therefore God must be immoral, not all-powerful or not all-knowing. The existence of a moral, all-knowing and all-powerful God is in contradiction to free will in many ways; both for God itself and any living beings. If God is moral then everyone has a chance to enter heaven. This means people who never learn which religion is correct, or even accept the wrong religion, have a chance at entering heaven. Our moral actions must determine whether or not we enter heaven, not our knowledge of religion, therefore revealed religion must be false.
“This whole Christian theology thing is that God came down to experience life through his son. Well, how’s he experiencing life if he doesn’t get laid? Give me a break. And why would he not get laid, as he created the apparatus in the first place?” — Tori Amos, interview in Vox, May, 1994
I wish there were a God. We would be the product of a perfect being. We would be in no danger of cancer, we would not need sleep, 4 year olds would not pass away suddenly, there would be no racism, rapings, or murder. The Bible even supports racism, rapings and murder. We have enough without religion supporting it. The world around us would be as we had wished it to be, everyday. The earth would be created without the mishaps that it suffers like drought, tsunamis, and earthquakes. Instead Christianity has produced a God that has designed everything riddled with problems. If God were a car company, God would be out of business. “If God is all-powerful and all-good, it would have created a universe with no suffering and no evil. But, evil and suffering exist. Therefore God an all powerful and all benevolent (characterized by or expressing goodwill or kindly feelings) god does not exist. Attempts to justify the existence of evil are called theodicies. There are no fully working theodicies, even popular ones such as the free will theodicy were rejected thousands of years ago for reasons that still stand today. It seems that if there is a god, it is not the all-good moral being that classical religions would have us believe.
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.” -Buddha
People once believed in many gods. There was no other proof that there wasn’t just one. It was the popular opinion. Did any of these precious souls make it to heaven? If there really were a God, Wouldn’t he have exposed himself to these early humans and we would still have just one true religion instead of as many religions that human imagination can create?
“It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.” –Carl Sagan
Christianity isn’t even a pure religion. If you look around it is steeped in paganism. The vestiges of pagan religion in Christian symbology are undeniable. Egyptian sun disks became the halos of Catholic saints. Pictograms of Isis nursing her miraculously conceived son Horus became the blueprint for our modern images of the Virgin Mary nursing Baby Jesus. And virtually all the elements of the Catholic ritual – the miter, the altar, the doxology, and the act of “God-eating” (communion) – were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.” The Christians were apparently trying to get more converts so they “paganized” the Messiah to make him more attractive to pagans. They even officially brought the feast of the unconquered sun into their worship in 336 AD. This is the origin of Christmas.
Very little in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian pagan god Mithras – called the Son of God and the Light of the World – was born of a virgin mother on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days… (Sound familiar?). By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans. (The sabbath day is Saturday. SUNday was the day the pagans paid homage to their Sun God, the day of the sun) The image of the devil is taken from the pagan’s God of fertility (Baal). As you can imagine this was a highly respected God for them. The devil is a fabricated deity by people wanting to give evil a face, not the reason behind all that is evil. Paganism is where Christians get the ritual of communion. Ritualistically eating the flesh and drinking the blood of the god’s. Peganism was steeped in rituals of animal sacrifice, Christianity took the idea from the pagan religion and was the first to sacrifice a human (Jesus Christ). You can thank The Roman emperor, Constantine The Great, a pagan politician who composed the books of the bible in a closed setting with only his cabinet and had all other teachings that they didn’t line up with their political agenda burned. Valentines day, and Lent are originated from Paganism. Easter had celebrations in Babylon over 4,000 years ago, in Asia Minor over 2,500 years ago, and in pagan Rome in 100 A.D.
I don’t believe in God. My god is patriotism. Teach a man to be a good citizen and you have solved the problem of life. — Andrew Carnegie
There are no absolute morals, all things are experienced by Humans subjectively. The existence of morals does not imply the existence of God, and, if God has morals it wants us to follow we have no methods of knowing for sure what those morals are. God has more often been used to justify immoral actions, such as war, oppression, the dark ages, etc, than it has to support good morals. Good morals can all be derived through humanistic logic, reason and biological emotion, there is no space for a competition between “God” and morals. Love, compassion, integrity, sympathy, and guilt are all human emotions, not religious emotions. Religions just play on them to increase their popularity.
“Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.” –Steven Weinberg
The popular churches use guilt in addition to fear as a structure. Other religions have come and gone that didn’t use guilt. This is a powerful tool to the church. People keep coming back to relinquish their guilt. Telling you that you are a bad person, born with sin and only a life with God can keep you clean. For a God to play on fear for his benefit is not in line with a loving God. To threaten anyone with burning for eternity and no way of ever paying off your debt is a very serious threat. Think about that for a moment… eternity. I cannot think of anyone who deserves that much punishment. It would make me very sad if I thought this story was true to know about this enormous number of souls are going through such torment right now. Just one day of burning would be terrible. Anyone else who says submit to me or suffer is considered a terrorist. But to benefit the church should we look away? It is bad enough that they have lied to us for thousands of years about miracles happening. The lame walk, the blind see, the sick are healed, the dead are raised, demons are expelled, and the laws of nature are frequently suspended for the benefit of the church. But is it right to take advantage of people with blind faith?
“Religion, the daughter of hope and fear, explaining to ignorance the nature of the unknowable.” -Ambrose Bierce
Church doesn’t teach proper ways to live. It teaches you subconsciously that you can pretty much do anything as long as you apologize and ask for forgiveness afterward. It doesn’t teach love for yourself which is very important for a loving society. It holds faith above love. It expresses how we should hold on to faith and ignore logic first and to love second. It teaches that we are bad, a “wretch” as the song Amazing Grace says. We are not all bad people, it should be teaching how to love ourselves, that we are good people, that we should respect other people because we are not born with evil in our hearts. But in any case we can always be forgiven for being such wretched beings, and have the need for the church to give us that forgiveness. But it doesn’t help make us as a society a better people. Just as Alcoholics Anonymous has a very low success rate for telling them that they are alcoholics. They always will be. These people accept it as fact, it is burned into their brain. How can they ever get better and overcome their “bad” ways if this very powerful organization whom many people believe in tells them that they are forever bad? They are NOT forever bad, they can overcome their bad ways, they can be a good addition to society if this organization would only tell them that they are not bad people and not that the only way to be forgiven is to come to our organization. Not very effective, but it sells by way of guilt. Think of how you measure the church and A.A.’s success. By the number of participants and people who believe in it. NOT by the effect it makes on society.
We overcame slavery without the help of the Christians or the teachings of the bible. We gave women the rights to vote, have a voice in their own home and outside of it. Christianity fought against it saying that the woman is to know her place and remain silent just as the bible states many times in it. We no longer stone our children in the streets for being disobedient. We no longer stone women in the streets to death for having sex out of wedlock while the men are free to do so with little repercussion. Progression as a human race brought us to this point, not the teachings of a primitive book. Human intelligence is what tells us this is wrong, not religion.
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” -Susan B. Anthony -Womens civil rights leader
I want to share some history about Susan B. Anthony. Every black person knows who Martin Luther King Jr is, every woman should know who Susan is. She was a civil rights leader during the late 1800’s. The only difference is that she lead the cause in liberating women. She is every woman’s hero. She made powerful strides in liberating women until the religious women prayed for the success of the movement, set it back each time. After a major setback she stated, “I don’t know what better one could expect when our ranks are now so filled with young women not yet out of bondage to the idea of the infallibility of that book.” referring to the bible. She spoke out against the church many times and told the world how their teachings were holding back humanity. “To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom. — Susan B Anthony” Can we really live with ourselves if we forget anything she ever said or everything she ever did? This wonderful atheist, fighting against the setbacks the church imposed on woman’s rights. Her fight that lasted for 60 years gave women the rights to vote, own property, divorce their husband, gain custody of her children and many more freedoms. How could we let her voice be forgotten and fade with time?
“During the youthful period of mankind’s spiritual evolution, human fantasy created gods in man’s own image who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate influence, the phenomenal world… The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old conception of the gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes… In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is, give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast power in the hands of priests.” –Albert Einstein, reported in Science, Philosophy and Religion: A Symposium
A study by the Barna Research Group released results about marriage that still has the churches scratching their heads. The results of their poll about divorce on 1999-DEC-21. They had interviewed 3,854 adults from the 48 contiguous states. The margin of error is ±2 percentage points.
The survey found:
* 11% of the adult population is currently divorced.
* 25% of adults have had at least one divorce during their lifetime.
* Divorce rates among conservative Christians were significantly higher than for other faith groups, and much higher than Atheists and Agnostics experience.
How is this possible if the old adage goes, “the family that prays together, stays together”? Were these marriages not blessed by and in front of God? Why do atheists have better success in their marriages? Why are marriages that are blessed by God cursed to have a higher divorce rate than any other group? These facts should really concern you about what the churches are teaching.
According to the CIA World Factbook, the US population is approximately 78.5% Christian while China’s population is only about 4% Christian.
If Christianity makes people more moral, why is the rate of incarceration so much higher in the US than it is in China? According to the CIA World Factbook, only about 2% of Japan’s population is Christian – yet as this chart below shows, it has one of the lowest incarceration rates of any major industrialized country. If Christianity correlates with greater morality rather than greater immorality, how can this be? Why doesn’t a country with very few Christians such as Japan find it necessary to lock up far more of its population than the much more Christian United States?
Consider: We find the same pattern within the US that we find in the world at large. The Bible Belts states of the South have by far the highest incarceration rate of any area of the country (about 180% the rate of the Northeast). And the very religious states of Louisiana and Mississippi have incarceration rates that are some 330% and 280% that of what seems to be our least religious state (Vermont). If Christians really are more moral than non-Christians, how can this be? Why do the most Christian states apparently have the highest percentage of their people behind bars? In addition, in 1997, the Federal Bureau of Prisons released the professed religious adherence rate of those in the U.S. Federal Prison system: Christians make up about 80% of the American population AND prison population. However, Atheists make up about 8% of the American population but only 0.2% of the prison population. One could even come to the conclusion that one moral function of religion is to allow bad people to feel good about themselves.
On the flip side, only about 1-3% of Americans are Muslim, but 7.2% of inmates are Muslim.
According to a study by Paul Bell, published in the Mensa Magazine in 2002, there is an inverse correlation between religiosity and intelligence. Analyzing 43 studies carried out since 1927, Bell found that all but four reported such a connection, and he concluded that “the higher one’s intelligence or education level, the less one is likely to be religious or hold ‘beliefs’ of any kind.” A survey published in Nature in 1998 confirms that belief in a personal God or afterlife is at an all time low among the members of the National Academy of Science, only 7.0% of which believed in a personal God as compared to more than 85% of the US general population.”
“When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free–free to think,to express my thoughts–free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination’s wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.” -Robert G. Ingersoll
If you still want to believe something that is really important to you that you wish was the truth even though there is not any evidence to back it up, but you still want to pretend its totally and completely reasonable to believe it and you want to assure other people that it is true too? Then you will need faith. Lots of it. I will close with a neat poem I came across.
-Ray
The Monkey’s Viewpoint
by Anonymous
Three monkeys sat in a coconut tree
Discussing things as they’re said to be.
Said one to the others, “Now listen, you two,
There’s a certain rumor that can’t be true.
That man descends from our noble race. . .
The very idea is a disgrace.
No monkey ever deserted his wife,
Starved her babies and ruined her life,
And you’ve never known a mother monk
To leave her babies with others to bunk,
Or pass them on from one to another
‘Til they scarcely know who is their mother.
And another thing you’ll never see. . .
A monk build a fence ’round a coconut tree
And let the coconuts go to waste,
Forbidding all other monks a taste;
Why, if I’d put a fence around the tree,
Starvation would force you to steal from me.
Here’s another thing a monk won’t do. . .
Go out at night and get on a stew,
Or use a gun or club or knife
To take some other monkey’s life,
Yes, Man descended. . . the ornery cuss. . .
But, brother, he didn’t descend from us!”
Tags: Letter to former CHristian self atheist history Jesus God Bible
Soothsaber's Blog 
January 15, 2010 at 1:18 pm |
You have obviously put a lot of thought into this blog. You quote many scriptures and once again prove that a man can prove anything they want to by using the bible. You say that the bible is a “boring” book but to me it is alive and gives me life and hope. You say the miracles don’t happen anymore but I know of a baby in the hospital right now who had a horrible surgery and part of her small intestines have grown back. You suffered a horrible tragedy and almost anyone would question things after that; but you are trying to understand spiritual things with a natural mind. Even according to the Bible that you quote; that cannot be done. Spiritual things have to be understood spiritually. I guess you will think I am one of those weak minded people who takes things by faith, and maybe you are right. I certainly do take the things of God by faith. If I am right then there is a place prepared for me later. If you are right all I did was live a good life. If you are wrong; you seem to know enough of the Bible to know what is the end for those that don’t believe. You see so much bad in the world and use it to justify your belief that there is no God. I see the evil in the world and see such a need for God. You are obviously seeking and I hope you will continue to do so.
January 15, 2010 at 6:47 pm |
I dont think you are weak minded at all, I used to see the world through your eyes and be just like you. If you are right or I am right, either way, we both lived a good life. I just explored it more. I hope you didn’t take this blog the wrong way, I do see much beauty in this world, I LOVE IT! I can’t get enough of it.
Thank you for your comment landsway.
January 15, 2010 at 1:19 pm |
It’s a fine bit of work!
This piece is quite large in scope. Readers might benefit from a series of articles, each expanding on just one point from this letter at a time.
Thanks for sharing.
Black
January 15, 2010 at 6:57 pm |
I spent quite a bit of time on this Black. After I improve it a bit, I hope you understand that I am glad to be finished with it. I may explore it again later when its not so habitual.
January 15, 2010 at 8:04 pm |
Thank you for your response. I don’t think this journey for you has been an easy one. I know that most people from “my side” of the tracks can be very judgemental; but what I can tell you is that you and I have both had some questions about life, the Bible, and a true God. On my blog I encourage people daily to question why they believe what they do. Way too many believe because someone told them to. You and I came to different conclusions but I wish for you the best. I am glad that you have found happiness; but if you ever question again, I think God would be there for you. I hope you take no offense at that. I once heard someone say that if you truly believe in God; how much would you have to hate someone not to tell them. I still believe that God is real and that He loves you. I don’t understand everything; but I do believe that. Good luck to you.
January 15, 2010 at 8:23 pm |
I take no offense at all, I understand your intentions are what is best for me. If more people in this world had your intentions it would be even more beautiful.
Be well.
January 17, 2010 at 7:19 pm |
I really liked what you wrote above. Really, I do. The amount of thoughts and inner reflection involved is astounding to me and echoes how self-reflection is the only way to return to logic and reason.
I once heard on a Christian radio show how we should encourage an open dialogue and relationship with God. In fact, one of the panelists made quite a lengthy argument supporting her view of relationship with God vs. forced to obey. I completely echo your sentiments above because the last time I checked, relationships involved both trust AND open communication. How can anyone have open communication with 2,000 year-old words not spoken by the one they’re supposed to worship?
Anyway, I find your letter above wonderful to read and not because I am an atheist. Because you obviously took a great deal of time to reflect and share something very personal. In a way, I’m privileged to have read it and know you in this way.
Best,
Matt
January 21, 2010 at 8:21 pm |
Thanks Matt. It was tough for me to share something so personal. But it changed my life and I had to get it out.
January 26, 2010 at 9:24 pm |
I approve! I’ll be honest, I don’t have time to read the entire thing, but you did catch my eye in the part with all the horrible Bible verses. Gotta love that crazy shit!
“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”
Isaiah 29:14
January 26, 2010 at 9:28 pm |
I hope you get the chance to read it all sometime. There is some good stuff in it!
March 16, 2010 at 5:46 am |
Thank you for sharing. You obviously put an incredible amount of time & effort into this. Wonderful!
November 19, 2010 at 4:17 pm |
Thanks Charlotte. 🙂
November 12, 2010 at 4:43 pm |
Hi Ray! I haven’t read the whole thing yet but it’s interesting so far. I’m curious if you think your former Christian self would have even read such a letter, or if he would have tossed it out once he realized that it was talking him out of belief.
Now to figure out how to send emails back in time…
November 19, 2010 at 2:40 pm |
I have always enjoyed thinking about things like this, I have also questioned this idea of “God”, but I still held onto it. Nothing really sent me over the edge until my son passed. I think I would not be the normal Christian who tears it up, burns it and throws a crucifix on top for good measure. I wish I knew exactly how I would react to it but I can only guess. I think I would read it fully and not be so judgmental toward atheism afterward, but still hold onto the belief in God. Who knows, I may have allowed it to bring me to the light after really coming to grips with all that it contains.
November 19, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Linz, since we are in the same boat, it would be interesting to know what you think would happen if you gave it to your former Christian self as well.
January 23, 2011 at 1:17 pm |
Thank you for writing this. I too am a former Christian and have found the deconversion and gradual “coming out” process incredibly difficult, but liberating. It’s been so painful to let go of all of the old beliefs which once soothed my concerns and anxieties about the world – but life is too short to spend it lying to yourself…
October 23, 2011 at 10:39 pm |
Exactly. Thank you for reading it. Hope it helps quell the pain of letting go, Apostateangelica.
October 23, 2011 at 9:05 pm |
That was a very good read…pieced together nicely. I found myself smiling, laughing and agreeing the whole way through. So much in fact it really boosts confidence that undeniable proof is intangible and blind faith should be scoffed at. No one can provide absolute truth to gods existence but you can undeniably argue gods existence. With that resolve in a godless world you feel superior and free and have the responsibility to respect all living things since the thiests of the world are too ignorant or malevolent to be free and see clearly the true order of nature.
October 23, 2011 at 10:36 pm |
Glad you enjoyed it, Holly. I remember self-imposing my own willful ignorance. I wish I could let theists know how wonderful it feels just to let go of those superstitions and really let their mind be free. The world makes much more sense, confusion and fear are gone. Appreciation for life is magnified since my former religion cheapened life so much suggesting that we suffer through this life until the better life awaits us. I have learned to make the best of it, look for the best of any situation and realize that this is heaven. This is life. I can’t get enough of it. I don’t look forward to death or sing praises about it like the songs we used to sing in church. I look back and think, “how morbid”. It definitely is a feeling of superiority, but very humbling at the same time knowing that I was wrong the whole time and I felt so strongly about it. I never felt more sure about my beliefs until I became an atheist.