I can be reached at revoxley501 at gmail dot com

Judge Tauro came to his ruling for various reasons; the atmosphere at the time of  DOMA’s passage in the senate was one where epithets and religious jargon were openly used in the chamber to describe the homosexual act leading him to believe that DOMA was intended to punish a group of people that were politically unpopular,  nor did the law do anything to protect the family as was it’s stated cause, most importantly for the purposes of the points I intend to make is that Section 3 in particular is a violation of States Rights as guaranteed by the Constitution in the Tenth Amendment.

One of the original resolutions held by the Republican National Convention has been the preservation of States Rights and this recent DOMA ruling returns to the States the right to define marriage as they see fit – so I think that Republicans should be partying in the streets!

Sadly this isn’t happening because the fact is that every single Republican Senator at the time voted to pass this bill, they voted not only AGAINST their original platform but also against their standing platform at the time. This begs the question:  Are there any real Republicans left? The elected Republicans allow for their hatred of a minority group to completely dismiss the foundational statutes of their organization so much so that they don’t even recognize when they’ve done it!  These people aren’t Republicans – they simply take the name because they can use it to appeal to a mass of voters who also don’t know or care about the real Republican party. These people are NeoCons at best and from what I’ve seen they are wholly uninformed or unconcerned regarding what they once cared about greatly.

Will the real Republicans please stand up?

Now, lets not forget the Democratic Party here either. The Democrats are often (wrongly) seen as the party of the people whom fight for civil and economic justice – 32 (if I counted properly) Democrats in the Senate voted to pass DOMA while only 14 did not. This doesn’t at all sound to me like the party that defends minorities and freedom, it sounds to me like a member of a false dichotomy or in other words, the other side of the Republican coin.

I personally refuse to claim either party, they both make me sick, but I’d be a lot more likely to support the Republicans if they’d return back to that original and beautiful platform that once united them.  As for the DOMA ruling – hopefully this will bring my gay and lesbian friends ever closer to no longer being treated as a second class citizenship.

These statistics are not new to me though. This information bugged me deeply when I was a Christian and even more-so now. In this post I intend to show you why.

Christians, by and large, believe that the Bible is “The Word of God”…or at least most of them will make that claim. In fact it is considered by most Christian denominations to be a cardinal doctrine of their faith, that the Bible is the infallible ‘Word of God’ and is without error. It absolutely amazes me that many people that identify as Christians who have not read the full text of the Bible or even spent a large amount of time in study of it often make this same claim. Why is that a problem? Shouldn’t this news make me, as an atheist, very happy?

It doesn’t make me happy at all for a number of reasons:

For one, it tells me that Christians are believing things without even knowing what those things are. One might believe that the Bible is 100% authoritative in all things, yet may not understand that this belief entails justifications of god’s prophets sending bears to slaughter children (2 Kings 2:23–24), mass racial genocides (Joshua 6:20–21, Deuteronomy 2:32–35, Deuteronomy 3:3–7, Numbers 31:7–18, 1 Samuel15:1–9), condoning of rape (Judges 21:1–23), and child sacrifice (Judges 11:30–39). I know that the majority of Christians have never heard of most of these stories from the Bible, yet they still hold to the idea that it is perfection and breathed from god’s lips — would knowledge of these stories and supposed “Truths” change their view of the Bible?  For some it would have to.

Keep reading:

My second reason actually has a lot more to do with how I felt as a Christian who was frustrated by his peers and their complacency in their faith. IF you claim to believe that a book is the direct word of God, it seems to me that you would want to absorb as much of it as possible. I know that I certainly felt that way, I couldn’t get enough of the Bible — even the most gruesome parts — and I studied it for hours a day for quite a few years because I believed it was God’s uncompromisable word. I learned to cherish every word of it because of that belief. If a person calls themselves a Christian and claims to believe such grandiose things about the Bible, one would think that the evidence of such a conviction would be a nearly constant study or love for it — yet this is far from the case! One must wonder if these folks truly believe in this god or his book!

In retrospect, the third reason is in reference to the first, but it has to do with the fact that a faith that requires no knowledge or understanding of what that faith entails can’t really qualify as a faith at all. Perhaps I focused on correct doctrine a bit too much as a Christian, but it seems to me that understanding the rudiments and then the more advanced intricacies of one’s faith should be a defining aspect of a faith. Instead, we often see folks that only believe that Jesus died for them on the cross, yet couldn’t for the life of them explain or discuss even the cardinal doctrines upon which the church was built on. If you don’t know whether or not you believe that Christ was deified or not, or if there is or is not a trinity, or even why there was a need for perfect human sacrifice in the first place, then I have to question whether or not you can actually count yourself among the believers. It’s one thing to blindly place one’s faith in the Bible, it’s all together another to actually KNOW what things it says and still believe in it!

My purpose for writing this was two-fold. For one, I fully believe that every Christian (or other believer) has a responsibility to themselves and to their god to seek out the Truth…if you believe that something is true then you should lather yourself up in it, soak it in, live it, study it, understand it to the best of your ability. If you refuse to do so then you should be asking yourself whether or not you truly believe in it.  Secondly, I also know just how powerful the words of the Bible are and I know very well how the Bible is the number one tool used in helping believers become skeptics and atheists. I don’t believe I would have ever let go of my god had I not had such an unquenchable thirst for the Bible, so much so that I began to recognize the inconsistencies of it and later became able to reject it and it’s god.

I’d like some feedback from both Christians (devout and non) and atheists regarding this subject, so please leave comments and share this with your friends.