RagingRev

I have had various people approach me, generally Christians, whom think the idea of doubting god or god’s existence is unethical. Obviously I think the idea is ridiculous, but I would like to give my take on it. We aren’t really talking about morality here, that has been handled in depth more times than I care to count on this blog…what I am referring to is the actual ethical nature of the individual whom doubts. My contention is that a person skeptical of the existence of god is ethical in a more altruistic sense than the individual whom accepts god and dogma without question.

Before I go into my reasoning I would like to point out that this isn’t intended at an accusation against the believer…I contest that believers (those that believe in god) can just as well be skeptics and doubters not exposed to the same information or unable to get past the religious programming they may have endured. I for one know very well that overcoming all that fear, nervousness, and denying my devotion to god is incredibly difficult. I suggest that the more devoted to your god you are the more likely you are to challenge him, at least that was my own experience. This most certainly qualifies one as a doubter in my book and therefore somewhat more ethical than ones sheepish counterparts.

My standard of ethics is that an ethical person will fight and seek truth no matter what he finds to be true. Despite what I may find to be true I will still attempt to validate that truth and fight for it’s survival, hence you have this  blog in front of your face. In my view, both the pursuit of reality (truth) and  the propagation of it meet the very definition of ethical behavior. Proliferating one’s faith is altruistic as it generally tends to attempt to save wayward souls, but it is only pure when an individual is willing to endure the struggles of his faith….some Atheists lack the experience of faith and therefore an understanding of the difficulty that a person of faith can face in daily life. The doubter loves his non-existent god, his god is real to him, he fights everything natural to him to keep that god happy – my own faith kept me teetering on the border of sanity and insanity almost constantly and it was incredibly difficult- far more than the scapegoat that some Atheists may believe it to be.

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Hello everyone. Once again I have come to a point my my blogging where I have a difficult time thinking up new things to blog about, so, I need your help!

I want to do a series of Q & A style posts, where someone—anyone really, simply asks a question in as much detail as possible and I attempt to answer that question to the best of my ability. So, all i need you to do is comment below and ask the question you want to ask, if it is chosen it will be featured in a blog post shortly with a link to your own blog or website of your choice if you so choose to have that done…don’t worry though, anonymous questions are fine and i will be honest.

Questions should be at least generally related to religious topics or Atheism, but questions about my personal life that have not been adequately answered on this blog are just fine too.

Tweet this or email it to anyone that you know may want to ask an Atheist Ex-Christian a question!

As promised, I am going to attempt to respond to Guy from Heresy Today ’s egregiously long response to my “Dormant Christian” post. So after much hesitation, mainly due to the fact that because of the schedule I am on at my job is screwing with my head (No one else is seeing the pink elephants?) and making it incredibly difficult for me to even sit down and read a comment very well, much less respond to it coherently.  So I will do my best here…at 4:30 in the morning.

Regarding the podcast mentioned below, I am listening to that finally now as I write this, I may make responses to bits and pieces of it here, but we might have to save it for later…another debate perhaps. Guy really should consider manuscripting his podcasts! 72 minutes!

Keep reading for more:

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Frigga responded to my last call for a muse with a question….I thought it was broad enough to make a short post about, thanks Frigga for the inspiration!

Frigga says:

I’m curious what your thoughts are on Afterlife.  What do you think happens?  What do most atheists think happens?  What do your others readers think happens?  Do you believe in near death experiences?  How about ghosts?

The afterlife is one of those things where I can definitively say I don’t have an answer…I can even definitively say that NO ONE has an answer…I just don’t think it is possible, but I have thought about it before…of course. When I was a Christian I would often ponder about heaven and just how close I could be to God if he would allow me, I was convinced that heaven was a reality and that my seeking God on earth would help me be closer to him one day. Now that I have rejected that view of life it feels kind of silly to think about heaven and hell…so I generally don’t.

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Last night I was doing…something, hell if I can remember, and I stumbled upon Yahoo! Answers and decided to answer a question regarding why one should or should not believe in god. Well, I gave an answer to that question and then browsed around for more interesting questions and before you know it I was addicted.

Since my account is still at level one I am limited to 20 answers per day but I find myself checking for new questions to answer and it drives me crazy. Go sign up it really is a lot of fun

Here is how it works:

Someone asks a question. Anyone with an answer writes up an answer for the question. Anyone that reads the questions can give the answer a thumbs up or down. The asker can either choose which answer is best and it gets featured at the top of the page, or the thumbs up eventually make something the best answer…Answers get you 2 points, questions take away 5 points, best answers give you 10 points and a thumbs up gets you 1 point.

It is rather addictive, thought I would share, if you join add me to your buddy list on my Profile

A quick note here of two huge Entrecard Credit contests going on.

The first one is by Makoy, he is holding the BIG MAK blog contest…I happen to be sponsoring 1000EC  AND 10$ in paypal cash to the pot of prizes  so head over there and enter it OK! a full list of the sponsers will be after the next part of this post.
Entrecard is also having a GIGANTIC Win a Bazillion EC Credits and More contest. I am hoping to win as many EC credits as I can, and maybe an ad of some sort. click on the link to read how to enter.

go check out these sponsors of both contests:

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Robert posed a few questions on the Morality and God post that I thought deserved a little attention (actually, all of them from everyone were good, but this is a good easy place to start I think, the conversation that ensued after the post delighted me though, so thanks to those of you that participated, feel free to continue!)

Robert says:

Matt you say God created man and woman imperfect. Is the freedom and ability to do wrong an imperfection or part of perfection?

I don’t really think freedom nor ability to do wrong would be the act of creating imperfection…but creating us in the LIKLIHOOD that we will screw it all up and then planting the device by which we will fail Him in the middle of the garden, then providing the Serpent to tempt man. It’s that the Bible teaches that God essentially SET MAN UP FOR FAILURE that makes HIM the bad guy, that is imperfection.

Regarding God creating evil? I think God IS good (He defines it by his being God). Evil exists when we do that which is not of God. Its not created surely?

Lets take a literalistic view here.

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” (Isaiah 45:7, KJV)

The Bible says God created evil. Creating choice is one thing, but creating evil is entirely another. IF god created something (out of nothing or void) that we can definitively say we don’t need (bad things aren’t needed surely?) then isn’t that just setting us up to fail? Why create the unnecessary? And the Sovereign God argument, that God did it so it must be part of his perfect will etc, is bunk because he must know that it is far beyond reasonable comprehension for us feeble minded humans and that our lack of understanding will CAUSE many of us (myself) to go astray. Once again HE is creating the chaos, just like the Bible says.

I know this is brief, tomorrow I intend to bring up the different views that exist regarding God and Satan—one being that Lucifer is the good guy—what do you think?

Adding more information here for Russ:

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Anticipate some downtime tommorow on the blog, Wordpress 2.7 should be releasing tommorow. In the mean time I would like to have anyone that reads this blog comment below with answers to the following questions:

1: What is your belief system? Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Wiccan etc etc…be as detailed as you like, even tell us why if you wish. You dont have to be a frequent commenter to answer.

2: How much do you think your environment growing up had to do with the eventual embrace of your current faith? IE: Did your Christian parents likely influence you in your current beliefs? etc

thanks

Cetta responded to my recent Bloggers Block post with this request:

I’d really like to see you try to rationalize the supposed power of the occult, without anything to balance it out (like say, Christianity, or even just God in general).

I think this is a really good request–its something I have been mulling around with for quite some time-you see, I experienced a lot of things that most Christians had barely even heard of-very real things that are difficult to reconcile without having some semblance of faith. So here I will attempt to do that.

What Cetta knows, that a lot of my readership will not know, is that I was an exorcist just a few years ago. Without giving away far too much detail, I performed the ritual of exorcism with many clients under a lot of different situations and ailments. Sometimes the event itself was rather dramatic. IE: convulsions, vomiting, hearing the voices of the “evil spirits” speaking etc—almost anything you would see in The Exorcist or The Exorcism of Emily Rose movies. All this, along with my own very radical experiences with the “holy spirit (or ghost as you pantycostals say)” like speaking in tongues, being “slain in the spirit”, visions, dreams, prophesying, and etc. Cetta wants to know; How does one, once he loses his faith, reconcile those events?

Warning: May be triggering past this point-if you have experienced emotional trauma or are undergoing any sort of exorcism or therapy for ritual abuse or other reasons.

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In my perpetual  need for inspiration to overcome my bloggers block I asked for some folks to provide with some questions or topics of interest….I’m gonna hit all of the replies as i go along, but this one seems like the easiest one to answer, from Frigga:

I could suggest a few topics and definitely ask a bazillion questions… but I haven’t read your archives, so you’ve probably covered lots of stuff so far.

I’ll ask one anyway. I’d be interested in reading about your journey to becoming a Christian, and then your journey away from Christianity. What was it that made you believe so strongly, and then not believe so strongly?

Do you have any doubts that you could be wrong?

Firstly, anyone can feel free to ask or bring up any topics of interest they want to, rehashed or not, because if it is something i covered more than probably a year ago, it was still with some semblance of Christianity left in me. So really anything is fair game.

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