RagingRev

Some time last week I saw someone mention that they had “Just led __ to the Lord”. After noticing the comments of this post I gathered that this was the persons child that had been “led to the Lord” so I decided to inquire as to the age of this child…which got me thinking about faith and children. This man’s daughter was six.

I was “Saved” at the ripe old age of 6. That’s right, at 6 years old someone believed that I was at an appropriate time in my life to decide the fate of my own mortal soul and to ask forgiveness for the plethora of sins I was guilty of. This, of course, was not true…the “gospel” was something I could nary understand at the time and I didn’t really grasp the cardinal doctrines of Christianity until I was around 14, when I became more serious about my faith. Until then I didn’t understand that the God of the Bible required sacrificial scapegoats  to atone for the sin of man or that Jesus was supposed to be the end all be all of sacrificial lambs. I simply knew that the Bible was supposed to be true and that I felt an emotional “tug” at my heart when this whole Jesus thing was presented to me…so I said a prayer and I cried and I spoke in tongues etc.

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Pastor Guy recently responded to my request for some inspiration, his original topic starter was the inability to prove that emotions exist in the human race. I have to say that guy may be confused as to just what human emotions are other than chemical reactions in the body/brain but they seem to be pretty well set in stone to me- so that’s one worm I won’t bite. However, when I asked Guy in a private email to explain his contention a little more clearly he left a little quip at the end of the email that made my knee jerk just a bit. Pastor Guy knows how to get a rise out of me (Which is why he might just be the resident smart ass here at RagingRev- a title I think he may gladly accept).

So, what did Guy say?

…could my statement of “Dormant Christian” to describe you be a worthy topic?

What an interesting position…”Dormant Christian”! Guy is proposing that because I was at one time a devoted Christian (Saved, if you will) then technically I am still a Christian. Guy evidently ascribes to the doctrine of “Once Saved , Always Saved”…if you aren’t familiar with that, its one of those small controversial doctrines that Christians like to debate and argue over. When I was a Christian my position was strangely similar to Guy’s, however I was not very solid on it…it wasn’t considered cardinal in my life but I always WANTED to believe something like that. Now though, I have to look at it from the outside…and it’s just one of those things that you don’t think about until you hear it or read it like I did when Guy said that…it kind of…caught me off guard.

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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

so the other day i posted my stat counter….got 30 hits in less than 2 minutes…i have had alot more traffic lately…but i do have to Halve the total i thought i had…the other stat code is still on the front page….i didnt realize that…hehe

things at work have gotten better this week…lets just say i am glad to be able to rest a bit.

I am becoming more comfortable every day with not having god as a crutch…and i am still working on the rebuttals to the people that have responded to me…i should be able to get a couple out this weekend

Alienware is a pain in the ass with their BIOS and Upgrade policies…if a company doesnt trust you to put in a bluray drive…they might just be halfwits. Its really shitty when they have to have a specific bios for a widely available mobo just because it is in their system…with no possibility of an override without consulting the company first.

oh…www.travian.us and www.travian.com…awesome…im on the new speed server if you like

So like I said, I really want to write all this down, its just that my emotions are…crazy right now…it happens to me about every 6 months or so I just have a few days or a few weeks where I feel like I cant function and I don’t enjoy anything…I am sure it will pass but it’s a little disturbing the whole time it goes on.

One thing that is rather overwhelming is that I have been through some pretty radical changes in the last couple of years…putting those changes and the emotions that accompany them is really difficult, because the rate at which my mind is having to process all this is insane…and trying to find the time to put those thoughts down is even more difficult. So , this is one more, likely feeble attempt at an essential extimony, as a remnant of my faith I guess I still have the innate need to share my experience and understanding…and even promote it for others…evangelical atheism-as odd as that sounds…I have been told by other atheists that the desire to deconvert others passes with time, I hope that is true, because I feel so weird undoing a lot of what I have already done…bringing people out of the faith I once had and actively brought others into.. I guess it is like making amends to humanity for the evil I did bringing people into a faith that I now see as a crock and a fallacy. My whole goal in my religious life seems to be centered on helping other people question this faith….because if you are a Christian already no one can tell you nor prove to you that your faith is in vain, you have to come to the realization of your own volition, but I feel that my goal is to just make the questions come up that you must ask in order to relieve yourself of your dependence on deity. Not everyone will or is capable of shedding the skin of religion and renouncing god, which is why so many do not…religion holds people that way, it is powerful in that way because the emotions connected with religion and Christianity in particular are incredibly strong, especially for the devoted follower.

Christianity, in the orthodox consideration, is build upon doctrines that require strong emotional relation to the doctrines: Jesus Loves You evokes the emotion of love and gratefulness for having a deity care for you. The thought of Hell invokes an insane amount of fear, as it did for me when I was younger and unsure of my “salvation”. The stories in the Bible either focus on g-ds wrath, g-ds greatness, g-ds sovereign nature, or g-ds providence…in some way almost all of the time….alot of the stories, the book of Job in particular, really make g-d look like a huge asshole if you think about it more critically…I used to think Job was a beautiful story by the way.

When anything has such strong ties to ones emotions it is hard to override that, fear and love are very hard to deny oneself. Emotions, even when based on superstition and fallacy become reality, because you can physically feel fear and love, I know I have multiple times been overwhelmed by the love of god, feeling the embrace of the divine. How does one experience that and then months or years later break free from the illusion that it is?

Religious ferver, or as some would have me say since, “Christianity is a relationship not a religion” therefore Christianity or Relationship with God is very much an emotional state, not a reality. I believe now that the emotions I felt, the things I saw (up to and including miracles and participating in exorcisms on extremely numerous occasions) were all results of my emotional status.

Thusly we begin our story: (dates and times are really fuzzy, its all kind of a blur but I am telling this to the best of my memory without stretching anything, if I say something happened in 2005…it could have happened in 2003…I cant keep years straight to save my life.

It must have been the winter of 2004 when I left Holy Ground Outreach…a church I loved very much and was very active in, I was probably at the church at least

3-4 times a week, doing church services, participating in youth, helping my mentor at the time, and we also prayed there on certain nights. It was a comparatively good church as far as that goes, they had a food ministry, and they went to the ghetto’s and places to give away free food and such…things that bigger churches rarely do for some reason…they did…worship services were active and somewhat charismatic. It did have the flaw of being very involved in the Word of Faith movement…which, even though I was big into it at one time, became a bit of an issue with me after a little while, I realized that prosperity was not the god I believed in from my understanding of the Bible…so Monica and I, we went together, discussed it, and we decided to just leave. It was near Christmas time…that was hard enough, but it was the only way we knew, we didn’t tell anybody, we just stopped showing up. At that point I decided to read the Bible, like I had done many times before, and seek God, to find out what was the ultimate Truth.. I pretty much didn’t talk to my wife actively about this from then until just about 6 or so months ago….

During those few years, I was still sure of God and Christ for a very long time, as a person whom had done a lot of study in apologetics I knew a lot of the Bible “difficulties” and could defend it pretty well…but what I decided whilst on this journey, was that I had to completely and totally take my own emotion out of it…which is what I spent the bulk of my time doing…just deciding not to allow the emotional self, which is what I now know as the easily duped self, get in the way of God and my understanding….I wanted my relationship with God to be entirely pure and unadulterated…I stopped praying for myself, I refused to pray for anything other than “Gods will”…I don’t remember the series of events after that, but there came a time, about a year ago…when I questioned hell, and the bible…

I am not going to point out specific areas in which the Bible contradicts itself…the only people that wont see that are fundamentalists and people that will continually lie to themselves…just know that at some point I had to make that admittance…The Skeptics Annotated Bible is a great resource if you are curious to know though (http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com) . If it doesn’t quash any idea that the bible is the perfect word of god then you aren’t reading it…but that is beside the point. The greatest conflict in that line of thought , for me, was regarding the sovereignty and kindness of god…is god benevolent?

Here was my approach, and still is; Assuming God exists and is the creator of all things…then 1: God must have created evil, simple yes, but none the less conflicting as to the contention that “God is love” 2: God tempted man in the garden by proxy by having created Lucifer and via permission (as was required in

Job) 3: God created Hell 4: God created the nature of man to be fallen and 5:

God by creating man in such a way that he thinks logically and processes information the way we do knew that eventually science would come in to play to cast doubt upon his existence, not to mention the fact that god has allowed thousands upon thousands of unique and salvation (in some way) providing religions most of which claim to be the sole connection with god…by allowing that god proves that he is cynical and cruel and NOT loving, and thereby a contradiction in his own terms…any terms that contradict, mathematically, are null and zero…and thereby the only logical conclusion my mind is capable of coming to is that god does not exist.

This is the realization I came to…I don’t remember the day, it really took months to say out loud and to come to the conclusion in a definitive way. Whilst doing this it was as if both my Father and my Best friend were dying slow and painful deaths. I cried a lot for these months in my quiet drives to work in the morning, a lot of the time I put on some MewithoutYou to see if I could still feel him and commune like I remember.. It was devastating. I hid it pretty well I think…but it was both the darkest and most enlightening time in my life…only recently, within the last few months, have I come to terms with a dead god. I stopped feeling god in me and around me

The aftermath is deciding, that since there is no reason to believe in heaven, hell, or any proof of an afterlife…what does one live for…I have made the decision to live for myself, my wife, and for humanity over all. I feel that I can serve mankind much better without being tied to a deity of any kind, my old god was a jealous god full of wrath, my new god is my own ability and engineering, my old god refused to change, I change readily when it is necessary. I think I am doing a much better job than he ever did.

Overall, despite the last couple of days and the depression that hit, I can say that this writing has taken a load off of my chest…I hope to be able to keep it up and use this LJ account as a way to express my thoughts and connect with other people that are going through similar things. I also welcome anyone that is willing or able to present your ideas, from any religion or background…including Christians. I am very open to a kind debate of myself vs. believers at any time.

as posted on:?http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?showtopic=24987

Hello,

nice site you guys have running here, I found it through Facebook—I hope I can use this as a place to be comforted when I need it, because this process has been mentally and emotionally challenging, as well as a place to perhaps sharpen my teeth when it comes to debate or de-evangelism. (not sure how that is viewed but i will explain as we go)

i sincerely apologize for the incoherence here.

Short informational intro:

I am 22 years old, male, and from the heartland of the Bible belt (yippee!)—Georgia, small town about an hour and a half below Macon, 3 hours South of Atlanta. I have held membership at many churches since I was very young, probably 6 or so, when I was “saved” in a Pentecostal Church of God church.—I “fell away” or backslid-what have you, for a few years until i was about 12 years old, i found a little Southern Baptist church and got involved, and starting studying the Bible alot. I was definitely the most well read of the youth at the time, and very quickly surpassed the pastor as far as biblical understanding (I’m not bragging, he was a nice guy, but not well educated as far as that goes)

The longer stuff:

after a couple of years at the little Southern Baptist church the deacons decided that the pastor was not right for the church, mostly because he had become a bit of a pentecostal Word of Faith-er (if your not familiar with this just check out Benny Hinn and Creflo Dollar—indeed the worst of the worst)….I loved my humble pastor and followed him into a new church…there from day one we built a church in an old DEFACS building called Holy Ground Outreach. I assisted the music director, helped alot with the youth group and led most of the youth group sessions, I also assisted in baptisms and was one of the “catchers” when someone was “slain in the spirit” (a pentecostal term…think falling down due to being overwhelmed by the “holy ghost”) . At 16 I was generally at the alter laying hands on people whilst they fell out…in other words i was “anointed”. I was ordained at 15. My ministry was separate from my church…it dealt with the occult in large, as well as apologetics against Atheism, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc…I studied tons of “cults” and alternative religions in order to bring people into the fold. In the years between 12 and 19 (roughly) i probably led around 500 people to “salvation through christ”—I was very outspoken in school (public school) and enjoyed debating with my teachers (even though in south GA not many opinions stray from the norm). I was actually the radical all those years, instead of hating homosexuals and such, i believed in loving them, even though i thought of the act as not necessarily good…its sad that i was the most open minded religious person i knew, because i still believe i was a bit of a zealot. As it stands, I hate who I was, when I see people whom are the way I was, I feel a disdain for them.

I was an exorcist primarily…this is a long and very hard to explain story, because I dont have the answers anymore.

Straws, back breakage, and such:

I always remember seeing biblical passages with “difficulties”. At one point i was sure that the Bible in its original languages was certainly Inerrant, but no English translation could suffice…i used a Strong’s Concordance a lot to help justify that, occasionally if failed miserably. I was also a big fan of the Finnis J. Dake Bible/Commentary…I still think it has some fairly strange and progressive views. Anywhoo—i think it was the ever present question of Hell that actually broke my theological back…how could a loving God create mankind with such flaws as to require hell as a recompense for those flaws, provide only one way out of that, and then provide absolutely no evidence to help us believe it. Billions of people are in hell with this type of theology…so i sorta kinda, for a very short time, embraced a universal approach to god, god will save us all IF indeed he is loving. I think that was finally overcome by the thought that if god were so great and powerful then he would have certainly provided a means to the conclusion that he is great and powerful, god couldnt even create a book that was perfect much less prove himself to us.

I was out of the church for a good 2 years before i came to this conclusion, i left the Holy Ground Outreach church due to problems i saw in the Word of Faith, name it claim it doctrine—i saw it as selfish and so i left and never really could find a church i was comfortable with. I think that made this process somewhat less difficult…i didn’t have to be met with challenges from my once prevalent church family or risk being shunned because i was falling to the wayside like this. So that much i can say was probably easier….however this whole process…of leaving and denouncing the thing that defines your life…has been incredibly difficult. I have spent many nights crying out to a god that i can now say simply isn’t there, looking for answers that never came.The hardest thing was admitting that all of my “holy spirit” moments in life, and the anointing i thought i had, were simply emotional controls that i had over myself and others. I spent 6 years as an exorcist, and now i believe the conclusion is that emotion is the main factor in this as well.

The hardest things:

The hardest moments of this process that i can remember:

1: a friend of mine was going through a lot of pain and had alot of spiritual questions, he knew that i was a minister and generally was able to answer these questions at one point…i had to tell him that i didnt know any more, that i was out of answers and i didnt understand all this crap anymore…that was hard to admit…he turned out ok…but it was difficult to have to say , i dont know, when i always had some sort of answer before.

2: talking to my ex-pastor about this…and him bringing up really bad analogies for why christ was real (ie: he was the only man to ever split time in two…BC and AD…yes stupid i know). I just didnt have the heart to explain all this to him…to break his whole world down like mine had been broken.

3:i had to tell a few of the people i had brought into the fold about all this…it hurt them alot and it hurt me to see them hurt so badly by it.

4: that moment…where it just all falls apart, i guess this probably happens with all of us that leave the fold…it just happens in an instant , or it did for me, and i said to myself ,”its all a lie”.

5: talking to my wife, whom suprised me that she had kinda reached alot of the same conclusions that i had…we dated for 8 years before we married, we were virgins when we were married and made vows that we took very seriously before god and men…she knew me as the bold minister and the grave doubter…thankfully she understands…

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I also post on www.religiousforums.com, www.bleedzao.com, used to post on www.unworthyunwritten.com also…

more later