Too late, we're married 15 years now with two kids. I stopped believing when the youngest was 5, so I was a Christian for 10 years of married life....
Bummer. This means that divorcing your wife is not an honorable way to solve your problem, even if it turns out to be the only way.
and even a Sunday school teacher and a music minister at a prior church.
Amazing that you were so steeped in this vile crap that you could indoctrinate little children in it, yet eventually discovered the truth. I wonder how you feel about all those poor kids? Not to mention your own poor kids!
We both left the church at the same time and she finally found a replacement.
Aha. So you would have some justification in saying that she's the one who bailed out on you. This gives you a morally stronger position.
There are countless reasons and countless personal experiences that led up to when I stopped believing.
I hope some of those reasons were logical.
It did not help when I came to the realization that deacons, priests, pastors are just as screwed up as the rest of us. How can you follow or even try to believe in something when the expert disproves everything they teach? That's forgivable and understandable, but it leaves the student lost and without direction.
Religion cannot be expected to make you
be better, at least not very much better, not for a scoundrel to turn into a saint. Merely to
feel better.
The straw that broke the camel's back was when we stepped in where God should have. We had to answer our own prayers. It was then that I realized, there really is no god. Then I thought, if everyone in the world started answering their own prayers, then they wouldn't need god either.
Rent "The Ruling Class" starring Peter O'Toole. The essence of the plot is that his character thinks he's God. The reason? "I realized that when I was praying, I was talking to myself."
There's nothing wrong with saying that God is within you. After all, isn't that what the faithful actually want?
A lot of interpretation , that why we have to keep studying, and not following someone's interpretation
This is a key difference between Judaism and the Abrahamic religions that evolved out of it. Every male Jew (and in many modern congregations also the women) is expected to learn to read and write Hebrew. That way they can read the
original text of the Torah instead of a Latin, Greek or English translation. They are expected to discuss it among themselves and discover the truth that way. The Talmud is largely a collection of discussions of the Torah by people who are regarded as gifted students. If your rabbi tells you something you think is bull, you have a right and a duty to stand up and tell him so, and then he will try to explain why you are wrong. The rest of the people listen and are welcome to chime in, and they may each go home with their own interpretation.
Yeah, I don't agree with Christians enforcing OT laws against homosexuality.
People routinely make lists of the OT laws that would get you thrown in prison if you tried to follow them today. A few made sense in their day, such as avoiding pork, since pigs by nature are scavengers and back then probably had every microbe and other pathogen within ten miles in their bodies. But then why did they allow eating carp, the bottom-feeding "pigs of the water"? Much of the code of law seems to be one weird guy's kinky fear of blood, including not shaving with a blade that might cut the skin, draining all the blood out of a prey animal
before it dies, and not having sex during a certain time of the month.
You are right about abiding in Christ makes no sense if Jesus wasn't divine.
As I've pointed out before, what's important about Christ is the
wisdom attributed to him, not the fussy details about whether he was a real person, much less anointed in supernatural mojo. I think you could make a lot more peace with your family if you could feel this way. I was born and raised as an atheist, yet I very seldom get into arguments with Christians because I have no quarrel with most of Jesus's teachings.
In fact when it does happen, it's usually on SciForums.
That is the point of this thread. I just can't do it no matter how hard I try to appease the ones I love because I don't believe.
You don't have to appease them. Let that be
their problem, not yours. If you can stand to live with a Christian because you love her, why should she not have the responsibility to reciprocate? It's time for you to stop playing
defense here! Tell these bullies that you are sick and tired of the way they treat you and it has to stop
right now or you're going to have to reconsider where you live.
You don't seem to have the strength to stand up for yourself. In this case
nobody will be able to help you and this thread is pointless.
Is it even worth keeping an open mind about?
Keeping an open mind about whether some preposterous fairytales might be true? Please tell me you're joking. You'd have to be a different person to buy into that dreck. Sure you were raised that way and that gave you an excuse because it's hard to stop trusting your parents. But you managed to outgrow it and now you see the world more logically and analytically. There's no going back! "Open mind" has no place in your rhetoric.
You're an atheist. I get it. But you're not, nor have you ever been a theist, and now you're making stuff up about what you think the scriptures mean and using that to justify you're natural position.
You are one of the most dishonorable people on this forum, to say a ridiculous, hateful thing like that. I was right when I told this poor guy to put you on IGNORE. You are poison and should be avoided like poison except by those of us who are older and wiser and can eat supernaturalist trolls like you for breakfast.
Who the hell are you to say that you know whether or not he was a theist? Basically what you're saying is that no one who was ever a true theist could possibly become enlightened and recover from it. Like I said, you're poison. You imply your own point of view and then speak of it obliquely as though it's universally accepted as truth.
Oh wait, you're a religionist! That's the way you all argue! You assume that anyone who disagrees with you is just not thinking clearly.
You add nothing to this discussion and you're just making Jay's journey more complicated. He needs to hear from people who can help him, not people with their own insidious evangelical agenda, who insist that after this long, agonizing journey, which has required great strength and has taken an enormous toll on him, he's actually merely misguided and should give up.
Who cares whether or not Jesus performed supernatural feats? Do you think those feats are reason behind everybody's belief in him?
Actually, for several centuries they were that reason. People in those days were more gullible. Even as recently as the 19th century many rural Americans were fooled by the performances at snake-oil patent medicine traveling shows. Just look at the Old Testament. People were expected to believe in God because he did frightening things, not because he might some day turn out to be a good guy. That was precisely what Jesus, the First Hippie, was supposed to turn around, to convince everyone that the Big Guy had just come back from an anger management class and he was ready to be a better father figure.
If you were a theist then you shouldn't have a problem in explaining why you were. Okay?
No. Once again you're making an insidious assumption and arguing disingenously. He was raised as a theist and children simply don't understand this stuff. They're theists because their parents are theists and they trust their parents to teach them right and wrong. It isn't until adolescence that we start to rebel against our parents and look skeptically at what they've taught us. In his case this adolescence took a long time, but eventually he did come to the realization that they were wrong.
Belief doesn't develop without some kind of experience . . . .
Yes, but for the vast majority of religious people the "experience" is sitting on their parents' laps and listening to them talk about their own particular belief system.
. . . . and the thing is, you haven't had an experience that validates theism, which is why you aren't a theist (unless you have but chose not to disclose it).
Once again you're being a hateful troll, telling this poor fellow that sitting on his parents' laps wasn't good enough
for him, even though it's what makes 99% of all Christians, Muslims, Jews, Rastafarians, Hindus, and virtually every member of every other religion, accept the truth of that religion.
Sure, some people actually have epiphanies that reinforce their belief in their parents' religion (or perhaps another one), but not the majority. Certainly not in the USA, where so many churches don't even stress the supernatural aspects of their particular brand of Christianity.
You're an atheist, you always was an atheist . . . .
More of your insults. Telling the man that his own understanding of his own life is
false. Where do you get the balls to treat people this way???
Spiritual, is the essence, the exact thing that makes it THAT thing. Spirituality is the process to realise this. . . . . So ''spirituality'' is realising who and what we are, and where we came from.
No surprise that you have a very narrow definition of "spirituality" which (what a coincidence) happens to exactly validate your own religious nature.
Everyone has a spirit. Our friends and loved ones pick up a little of it from us. A painter or a composer leaves quite a bit of it in his work, so that "his spirit lives on" in his portraits or his symphonies. Civilization itself, that wonderful 12,000-year project of the entire human race that is still in progress, could be defined as the collective spirit of everyone who's lived during that time.
God has a spirit. It came from the people who invented his story, just as the spirit of Kermit the Frog came from Jim Henson and lives on long after his death, being shared with every child who watches "Sesame Street."
With the living being, the essential thing is the spirit soul, and God is the reservoir from which that soul comes.
No, you've got it backwards. God is a creation of humanity. He comes from our spirit, not vice versa.
