ExChristian.Net -- encouraging ex-Christians

Religions: The More They Differ, the More They're the Same

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:11:58 PDT

By Carl S. ~

There are times when l ﬁnd myself wishing this were not an ex-Christian, but an ex- believer, site. There are good reasons for this. For one thing, shared experiences for the sake of comparison would be eye-opening amongst believers of many faiths. For another, the rationalizations and convoluted defenses of the faiths would be exposed; those ways in which people were conned into accepting them in the ﬁrst place. Then there is the emotional involvement, the dedication and utmost certainty each testiﬁer would have to offer as evidence why he or she stayed in the respective faith. And, why each believer in each respective faith thought he or she was in the one true one.

It would be enlightening to note that all religions begin with miracles, that all of them somehow manage to lose all the “evidence” for their claims even at their beginnings. And that the conﬂicts in interpretations of their beliefs at those beginnings are still unresolved to this day, as ﬁrmly as they are taught to be believed unquestionably by each religion and sect. Each believer would share the fact that none of the beliefs has evidence to back them, that their god or gods are invisible and untouchable. And, that the commandments from their god or gods are quite different for each of them, dependent on geographical location.

Every religion claims visions, miracles, and martyrs as reasons they are true. But, if believers are willing to die for each faith, and each division within their faith, that is no proof at all of any of them being true. Within every faith are heretics, and, since no one has any evidence of what is true or not in belief systems, everyone is a heretic. Visions and voices of an invisible god are no different from mind hallucinations, and yet all religions reference them as portals to spiritual knowledge.

Every religion begins as a cult.

All former faith adherents can tell you how they claimed to “know in my heart” as their primary reason for believing in their deity's existence. Note that, to members of various faiths, the real deity can be and is Krishna, Jesus, Zeus, Thor, Venus, etc., etc., throughout the centuries. Each religion claims that you need to believe in it completely to be good, and that without obeying its rules you will be immoral and condemned to a fate worse than death. Some will forbid pork and/or alcoholic beverages. All of them will tell you how to control your sex life, what and who to avoid like the plague, and urge you to suppress your curiosity about the world in general, since their scriptures disagree with it. Each of them creates their own “reality.”

Religions depend on the willingness of their members to lie to themselves; in fact, this is a necessity which they elevate to the status of virtue. And, they are well aware of how willing humans are to be deluded (and easily prone to self-delusion). They demand allegiance to them as the price to pay to be “forgiven“ by their deity, and them, for whatever your offences to the rules might be. And, the rules vary with the sect. (Of course, yours is the “true” one.) And, if you walk away from any of them without explanation, forget all that propaganda about being forgiven. There is nothing to be gained for them from a prodigal son, a moral person who can't accept the dogmas any more, who doesn't repent and bow down to ask for forgiveness. You are ostracized or even killed for not accepting the loving forgiveness of the god and his people. (And to think that you lived with so many strings attached to truss you.)

I wonder if every “ex” from religion has taken the same paths to reach reality, choosing morality over blind adherence to belief systems. It would be great to compare experiences, don't you think?

Why do most people easily trust anecdotes and dismiss data when paranormal is served?

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 01:54:02 PDT

By Doubting Thomas ~

Recently I spoke to a friend of mine about a car of a one German producer which has been proclaimed by a study as the most reliable machine on the market. I’ve said to him that I would love to have that car. He looked at me with a smile and said: “No way. That car sucks. I know a guy who bought him and had a lot of problems with it”. He simply discarded data from analysis I showed to him and not even bothered to read it.

This example proves that testimonies are more accepted as evidence of truth than ‘boring’ and comprehensive analysis. That is a known fact which is used in marketing since humanity exists. Let us apply it to religion. When people hear of personal testimony of somebody’s conversion or miracle story they will easily believe it and accept it as a self-evident proof of God’s existence. On the other hand, when you show them medical data or present them with other more plausible scientific explanations they will in majority cases discard them, because “one of those miracles is surely a genuine one”.

Evolution made as we are – some of us are more prone to supernaturalism and some less. Paranormal perspective is mysterious and people are natural mystics.Something similar happened when I had a discussion with an acquaintance who has just graduated in psychology. The topic was psy abilities. While I said that evidence for psy is weak or non-existent, when proper experimental conditions are approved, he replied that “there are millions of testimonies and stories that can not be all false and that modern science can’t grasp or explain psy or other supernatural phenomenon”. Frankly, I was kind of disappointed. This guy studies psychology and before he tried to give some rational explanation he immediately skipped to supernaturalism explanations of strange phenomena. I wanted to say that maybe problem was with cognition processes of people who report anomalous experiences and explain them the best they can in frames of their beliefs and education, or even if we do not have a plausible rational explanation there is no need to skip to a fantastic one, but I gave up…

I don not want to be a hypocrite and say that I am immune to this kind of reasoning. Evolution made as we are – some of us are more prone to supernaturalism and some less. Paranormal perspective is mysterious and people are natural mystics. Probably that makes our lives more interesting or complicated, if you cross the line of exaggeration when magic and supernaturalism is involved. Culture and what we learn also plays important role in this kind of reasoning. That is way despite all the scientific progress majority of people will always be cautious when paranormal is served on the menu. Hopefully, that will change…

A Confused Christian

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Wed, 22 May 2013 02:01:27 PDT

By Princ ~

I became a saved Christian on January 2013 when I came across the concept of salvation on the internet. I decided to become a Christian because I was interested in following the commandments of God and I also liked the idea of Jesus caring about everyone. Two weeks after my conversion, I decided to read the bible and that is when I was so shocked at the cruelty of God. The Old testament is filled with violence, genocide, rape and threats against the Israelis. I was disgusted at the fact that God orders his people to invade other lands, kill all the people and take virgin women as wives.

There are also detailed instructions on how to beat your slaves. I could not believe that many Christians were defending this type of cruelty by claiming that the Canaanites were so evil or God has the right to kill anyone. I also realized that there were thousands of different doctrines regarding salvation and the afterlife. One doctrine is the once saved, always saved doctrine, another one is the lordship salvation and the third one is the salvation based on works. I was so confused as to which one is the right one. I was also confused and scared when I came across the doctrine of eternal torment. I did not know anything about hell when I initially became a saved believer. Needless to say, the concept of eternal torment caused anxiety, scrupulosity, fear and pessimism in me. I was very concerned that my family members were going to hell because they are not saved.

Many people say that they felt peace or hope when they came to know about Jesus. In my case, I think that converting to Christianity was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my 21 yrs on earth. As of May 2013, I am on a breaking point. I am not sure if I should completely fall away from Christianity or if I should continue in my faith. Christianity has been a source of fear for the past 4 months. I am not sure what to do.

Will the Catholic Bishops Decide How You Die?

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:05:50 PDT

By Valerie Tarico ~

What happens when religious institutions get to manage public funds, absorb secular hospitals, and put theology above medical science and individual patient conscience?

In 2010, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, an elderly woman was rushed to a local hospital called St. John. She had suffered a massive stroke and could no longer eat, drink or speak. Mercifully, she was one of the growing percent of Americans who have prepared for such an eventuality by writing an end of life directive. Hers said that said she did not want artificial hydration or nutrition if she wasn’t going to recover. Unfortunately, St. John is a facility where the directives of the Catholic bishops take precedence over the directives of individual patients, and one such directive orders hospitals to feed and hydrate end of life patients whether they want it or not.

Americans would do well to consider what happens when theology dictates health care.

In the official language of the Bishops, St. John is a “Catholic health care ministry,” their term for all Church affiliated hospitals and clinics. Catholic health care ministries are publically licensed institutions intended to serve the general public. They are highly subsidized by public dollars. To fund them the Church uses a variety of public revenue streams including Medicare, Medicaid, county appropriations, federal dollar allocated through the 1946 Hospital Survey and Construction Act, and tax exempt government bonds. As with any hospital, additional revenues come from insurance payments and investments, with the end result that the Catholic Church contributes less than five percent of the funds flowing through their hospitals and clinics. And yet the Bishops place theological restrictions on care for all patients and sometimes forbid providers from telling patients that treatment options exist elsewhere.

According to MergerWatch, Catholic control of health dollars and hospital facilities is on the rise across the U.S. In Washington State, for example, if all currently proposed mergers go through, almost half of hospital beds will lie in the hands of religious institutions by the end of 2013. Across the U.S., as Catholic systems such as Peace Health and Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI) quietly absorb secular hospitals, the Bishops are fighting in court for the religious equivalent of corporate personhood, claiming that the constitution gives them institutional conscience rights that trump patient choice. Meanwhile, Catholic owned pharmacies are suing for the right to deny services; and other Catholic owned business are demanding (and winning) religious exemptions from health insurance obligations.

In an effort to standardize the rules of Catholic institutions and the advice that priests give lay people, the Bishops have created what they call “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care," called ERDs for short. When secular and religious institutions merge, the Bishops’ directives often restrict services in both. Patients may not realize that a once secular institution named Swedish or Highline is now subject to theology and could impose religious beliefs at odds with those of the patient. Following mergers, changes often are gradual, occurring slowly as staff leave and are replaced with believers, which makes the shift even harder for patients to detect. (Religious hospitals are exempt from non-discriminatory employment practices, somewhat remarkable given that so much of their funding is public.) Hospital administrators may state that they do not interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, while at the same time advertising for staff who are “deeply familiar” with the Bishops directives.

From a consumer standpoint, one problem with putting religion rather than science in charge of healthcare is that patients may not know they are being denied the full range of medically appropriate options. They may have no idea when institutional rules prevent doctors and nurses from honoring end-of-life wishes or discussing services that are available in secular settings, services like contraception, abortion, tubal ligation, vasectomy, fertility treatment, or death with dignity. For example, one woman tells of being diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy at a religious hospital. She was advised that she needed to have her fallopian tube removed. Fortunately, she consulted her smart phone and realized that elsewhere she could simply obtain a medication to end her nonviable pregnancy. The medication is safer and leaves fertility intact, but the Catholic directives treat this as a direct abortion, while the surgery (which damages long term fertility) kills the fetus indirectly and so is acceptable.

Other countries where Catholic theology limits health options offer a dire warning of what might happen here if the Church had an equal hold on the levers of power. In El Salvador, Catholic theology was written into law in 1998, banning all abortions, even those intended to save the mother. As a consequence, a twenty two year old mother named Beatriz, who carries a nonviable fetus, lies in a hospital bed with her kidneys failing, hoping to be granted an exception by El Salvador’s Supreme Court. She has been waiting for over a month. In Catholic Ireland last October, a young dentist, Savita Halappanavar, died after being refused an abortion.

In an ironic twist, the extremity of Catholic directives leads many people to believe that they couldn’t possibly be implemented here. Consider the case of Beatriz. She is the mother of a young child. Her fetus is anencephalic, meaning it has no brain and never will be a person under any circumstance. (Note: Somewhere between sixty and eighty percent of human fertilized eggs self-destruct naturally before a full-term gestation, most before a woman knows she is pregnant, and many because they are defective.) In other words, the Salvadorian anti-abortion law risks the life of a young mother for an incomplete fetus that is a normal failed reproductive product rather than a potential child. For someone who thinks that morality is about wellbeing, this just sounds crazy. Of course this could never happen in the US, right? You may be astounded to learn that a Phoenix nun was excommunicated and her hospital was forcibly disaffiliated from the Catholic Church for allowing an abortion under similarly hopeless circumstances.

In Ireland, after Savita’s unnecessary death, thousands of men and women demanded medical services based on scientific evidence and individual conscience. Savita became the tragic face of an international movement. Even so, given the power of religious institutions and traditions, legal change in Ireland is likely to be minimal. The largely Catholic Irish Medical Association has declined to request abortion rights even in cases of incest, rape and nonviable fetal anomalies. Currently Irish law allows abortion only when a mother’s life is threatened, which is not good enough for a case like Savita’s. A leading obstetrician testified that Savita probably would have survived if she had gotten an abortion during the first three days of her hospital stay. But at that time, there was not a “real and substantial threat to her life.” By the time she met the legal criteria, it was too late.

Patients count on their doctors to know and suggest their best options to protect health and wellbeing. But as medical options increase, especially at the beginning and end of life, the range of services excluded for theological reasons also increases. Catholic “ethicists” devote millions of dollars to analyzing biomedical technologies in the pipeline and then advocating policy based on theological priorities. They block certain lines of research and prevent affiliated hospitals from participating in clinical studies that require participants to be on contraception, for example a cancer treatment that might cause fetal defects. Procedures opposed by the theologians are likely to be absent altogether from patient-doctor conversations.

Some patient advocates say that mandatory disclosure is part of the solution: Pharmacies that refuse to fill some prescriptions should post the fact that they are not full-service. Church-run abortion diversion centers known as crisis pregnancy centers, should post that they are not medical providers. Treatment consent forms should list the scientifically and medically accepted practices that a doctor or hospital refuses to provide so that patients know that these services are available elsewhere. Conversely, providers who sign onto a “Patients’ Bill of Rights” promising to base care only on medical science and patient conscience could get the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Catholic theology sees pain as having positive soul-purifying benefits.But disclosure alone won’t ensure state-of-the-art health care for many Americans, especially those living in small towns or rural settings. Sometimes one clinic or pharmacy serves a wide area, or all nearby services are managed by the same religious institution. In these cases, a woman with a painful and life-threatening ectopic pregnancy might not be able just to get in her car and drive to another clinic. Denial of service hits low income communities hardest because members often have less flexible time off work, transportation, and childcare. The right of religious doctors and institutions to deny services obstructs the right of patients to receive timely care that meets normal medical practice standards, which are designed to maximize wellbeing.

That is because Catholic theology isn’t necessarily about wellbeing; it is about submitting to the perceived will of God. Sometimes these two align, and sometimes they don’t. To serve God’s will, Catholic theologians attempt to derive moral principles that are about the inherent goodness or evil of certain beliefs and behaviors, regardless of their consequences. In this way of thinking, contraceptives or abortions should not be provided because they are “intrinsically evil,” even when contraception or abortion may save a woman's life.

To make matters worse, Catholic theology values passive submission to harm when it is believed to serve Catholic practice or faith. Saints are heralded for their commitment to theological principle even in the face of outrageous and foreseeable outcomes, including martyrdom. In fact, Catholic theology sees pain as having positive soul-purifying benefits. This is called redemptive suffering. In the ERDs, it is offered up as an alternative for patients whose unbearable pain leads them to seek death with dignity:

Dying patients who request euthanasia should receive loving care, psychological and spiritual support, and appropriate remedies for pain and other symptoms so that they can live with dignity until the time of natural death. . . . Patients experiencing suffering that cannot be alleviated should be helped to appreciate the Christian understanding of redemptive suffering.

Former nun Mary Johnson (author of An Unquenchable Thirst) spent twenty years working with Mother Teresa’s organization, the Missionaries of Charity, who have been accused of providing substandard treatment and pain management. She explains the sometimes abysmal conditions in their facilities thus:

Most people today would say that we help the poor by helping them out of poverty. That was never Mother Teresa’s intention. Mother Teresa often told us that as Missionaries of Charity we did not serve the poor to improve their lot, but because we were serving Jesus, who said that whenever service was rendered to one of the least, it was rendered to him. Jesus promised eternal life to those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked.

The point, in other words, is not necessarily to solve the problem but simply to perform service. Ultimately, it isn’t about real world outcomes for the person on the receiving end but about eternal outcomes for the person on the giving end. The difference is important. And although Johnson doesn’t mention it, the passage she quotes mentions the ill as well as the hungry and naked. The Jesus of the gospel writer promises eternal life to those who feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit prisoners, and care for the ill. When religion and healing are at odds, the way to get to heaven is to offer theologically principled care, even when more compassionate options are available.

This difference in objectives seems like reason enough to separate religion from medicine. Thanks to science, fertility treatment has come a long way from the mandrakes and dove blood prescribed in the Bible. Victims of sexual assault now have options other than being forced to bear rape babies (also the Biblical solution). As we face death, we have alternatives to convincing ourselves that suffering is redemptive. Do really we want theology at the helm of our biggest hospital and clinic systems?

If not, it may be time for ordinary men and women to speak our minds. In Washington State, where the battle over Catholic hospital mergers is heating up, the state constitution specifically prohibits the use of public funds to support religious institutions. Despite that prohibition, one district actually has a line-item in the property tax code to subsidize a Peace Health facility, leaving the local community with no secular alternative. With the Peace Health clinic newly open the local bishop has already tried to block the now Catholic system from providing lab work for Planned Parenthood, as was done in the past. Legal challenges may play out in court thanks to a patients’ rights campaign by the ACLU and grassroots groups, but the broader question is this:

When it comes to medical options, whose beliefs count, the Bishop’s or the patient’s? Who gets to say whether one woman is forced to incubate a pregnancy gone wrong or another is force fed at the end of life? Whose version of god gets to dictate how you live and how we die?

If you have had medical interference from a religious institution, please share your story with the ACLU of Washington, whether you live in Washington or not: http://www.aclu-wa.org/myhealthcare .

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Subscribe to her articles at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

This article first published at Truthout: http://truth-out.org/news/item/16391-will-the-catholic-bishops-decide-how-you-die-or-whether-you-live

Related:

On Loving Life and Leaving It

Eight Ugly Sins the Catholic Bishops Hope Lay Members and Others Won’t Notice

The Difference Between a Dying Fetus and a Dying Woman

Catholic Hierarchy Lobbies to Suppress Religious Freedom

Self-Flagellation and the Kiss of Jesus--Mother Teresa's Attraction to Pain

Anti-Contraception Cardinal Paid Pedofiles to Disappear

What religion has contributed to the world this month - Episode 6 (April/May 2013)

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 01:55:23 PDT

By ConversationWithA ~

This series of videos chronicles month by month the reported horrid acts committed by the followers and leaders of religions from around the world. This episode illustrates the hate, bigotry, and ignorance spread by religion from mid April 2013 to mid May 2013. You may be shocked at how much harm religion can cause in just one month. Viewer discretion is strongly advised

God condemns himself -- updated and further refined

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:18:04 PDT

By Brian Kellogg ~

I recently had an online discussion with a fundamentalist Christian that encouraged me to think deeper about the below argument. This is the beautiful result of honest debate. It either further strengthens your reasoning or it shows that you may be wrong. Either result is good even when we find we are wrong. Life is about growing. I'd rather not live with my fingers forever metaphorically in my ears.

English: Abraham embraces his son Isaac after receiving him back from God (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This argument was one of the lynch pins as to why I had to leave Christianity. Christopher Hitchens was the one who initially caused me to honestly and critically analyze the story of Abraham's attempted murder of his son Isaac with one of his often finely tuned and targeted retorts in a debate. For this I am indebted to him to do what little I can for the cause of free-thinking as well.

Any Christians reading this please post your rebuttal(s) as I know I am not infallible.

Let's look at the Abraham Isaac fiasco a little more. If we were to judge this event by new testament standards Abraham would be guilty of human sacrifice. Jesus tells us that if we just consider committing a sin in our mind we are guilty of it (Mat 5:28). Unfulfilled intention is as damnable as the intent fulfilling outward act itself. So, in short, we have god tempting Abraham causing Abraham to commit human sacrifice. Whether Abraham actually followed through on his intent to perform the heinous act motivated by god of sacrificing his son Isaac doesn't matter according to Jesus who is proclaimed the son of and equal to god in the new testament.

Now, the christian god does not change (Mal 3:6) so what god considered sin in the NT applies to the old as well. As we have already seen, unfulfilled intention is as damnable as the intent fulfilling outward act itself (Mat 5:28; 1Jo 3:15). The christian god also decrees that human sacrifice is evil (Deut 12:31, 18:10; 2Ki 21:6). By the christian god's own inspired words he judges himself guilty of tempting Abraham to commit a vile sin and thereby is complicit in Abraham's sin of sacrificing his son Isaac. The bible says the christian god cannot be tempted by evil nor does he tempt anyone with evil (James 1:13), but yet we see that god in this case did tempt Abraham with evil.

The passage Romans 13:10 is found in speaks of love fulfilling the law and specifically states that love does no harm. If love does no harm than how can anyone say that Abraham loved Isaac and that what god commanded Isaac to do was not wrong? Given this, how can god judge his act of attempted murder as fulfilling the law as this is certainly not an act of love? This is a huge despicable inconsistency. This is even more a problem in the light of Hebrews 11 lauding Abraham's murderous faith; Hebrews 11:17-19. Perhaps love is not the greatest of these out of the choices of love, hope, and faith to the author of Hebrews (1 Corinthians 13), or the author fails to realize that what Abraham did was certainly not showing love to Isaac. Abraham would be rightly found guilty of attempted murder in our modern day court of law.

The two greatest commandments are most definitely in conflict here? Must the Christian's god's narcissism always take precedence? Would someone who says they love you really ask something like this of you? What of Abraham's narcissism who was obviously more concerned with "the promise" than his own son's well-being? This is a morally disgusting story. There is nothing worthy of commendation to be found in it. It stands entirely self condemned to any clear thinking critical mind.

Does the christian god stand self-condemned? The only way to partially wiggle out of this textual conundrum, in my humble opinion, is to admit the obvious, that the bible is not infallible. Or, the christian god is not subject to his own moral dictates which would actually hold a lot of weight from the evidence provided by the bible itself; this fits the might makes right philosophy that many of the bible authors subscribe to. After all who are we to tell the potter what it can and can't do with the clay (Romans 9:21); so just shut up and be glad it wasn't you he was screwing with.

Website: http://the-flakes.blogspot.com/

God's Justice System?

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:19:14 PDT

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

I read recently that the U.S. has roughly 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison inmates. This is a major burden on our society as prisoners are expensive to house. Across the country our prisons are overcrowded and more are being built all the time. We must be doing something wrong here.

Now some would say that the “war on drugs” and mandatory sentences are largely to blame for this problem, and they may well have a point. Nevertheless, the political conservatives are adamant that punishment is the path to righteousness and the war must be continued. So, where should we look for a solution?

Well, what if we were to take a solution from the Bible? When god found humans were doing wrongs left and right, he quickly found a solution; it’s called “scapegoating.” So that he could forgive all those wrongs against him, he found an innocent man, pinned all those wrongs on him, then tortured and executed him. Voilà, end of problem.

So, perhaps we should find an innocent man and torture and execute him so that he could pay for all those wrongs the present and future prisoners have done against our society. Then we could empty out all those prisons and put an end to our great social problem. If this is what god would call justice, should we disagree?

Of course, as the Bible tells us, we live in a wicked world, so it might be hard to find a truly innocent man. That doesn’t really need to be a problem though; surely we could find a toddler, 3 or 4 years old, perhaps, or a baby even, to torture and execute?

Here again, the Bible provides a clear precedent in 2 Samuel 12, where god is angry with King David for his adultery so he causes the infant son of David to be deathly ill for seven days and then die, as punishment for David’s wrongs.

So, what do you think, should we use God’s justice system as taught in the Bible? Are we guilty of hubris in thinking we might find a better way?

Actually, I hesitated to publish this since there are people out there who believe the Bible is the answer to all our problems. Some fool may actually think I have proposed a righteous and workable solution to prison overcrowding. I tell ya, religion stands logic on its head and makes the world a very scary place sometimes.

Happy Childless-Not-By-Choice Day

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Wed, 22 May 2013 02:01:54 PDT

By Positivist ~

Important: I am not looking for sympathy here. Please don't dish that out, or empty platitudes. This is not a sob story but a point of discussion.

Childless Millionaire and a Poor Woman Blessed with Children (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Recently a friend, upon learning of our ongoing struggle with infertility, gasped in horror, "I would DIE without my kids!" Realizing the moment she uttered those words that perhaps they were not helpful to my pain, she stopped short and looked at me strangely. The conversation changed direction abruptly at that point. This topic is not popular.

Now, several friends have dealt with infertility by extracting from the clenched fist of God that which they feel is due them, with an equally wide range of methods as results. We are one of the few folks out there who believed in the sovereignty of God and his perfect, loving plan for our prayer-filled lives.

We have finally concluded that God has nothing to do with fertility--or anything else for that matter--but sadly we are left holding the bag from a belief system that failed us monstrously, not only in this facet of our lives but in many others as well.

Shall I assume that God knows best, or should I assume instead that he has nothing to do with anything? Was it God's plan that we sell the house to raise money for in vitro--$20,000 per implantation, regardless of success? Would it be God's will that my husband and I divorce over our pain? Was it God's will that we kept attending our highly fertile church, despite the intense pain it causes us? Is it simply God's will, perhaps for the betterment of my character, that I am the only woman remaining in the congregation while all the church's mothers are called to the front to get a flower to commemorate their robust reproductive systems? Is my pain an "I love you" from God? Or is it simply God's will that I live a life of endless suffering, for his great glory, because the odour of my gaping, purulent and infected child-wound, the saline tears that flush it, and the cries of anguish that underscore it, are pleasing to God?

It is not infertility exclusively that has driven us from belief, but it certainly has not helped. The usual answers we get from religious people regarding why our prayers (for anything) go unanswered are:

We can't understand God's plan ("don't ask questions")
Our suffering may have a huge impact on God's kingdom, even decades after our death ("suck it up; someone else's salvation is more important than your peace, fulfillment or happiness in this life")
The world is a messy place and who can understand why prayers seem to go unanswered ("excellent question; wanna go ride bikes?")
God owes us nothing; we owe him everything ("who cares if it works? It's true, and that's all that matters")
You must have done something wrong, believed the wrong thing, or cherry-picked the wrong verses ("you're not doing it [the christian faith] right")

It is easy to deconstruct each of these and to show how absurd they each are. I was of the "God owes us nothing" belief, in case you're wondering, while simultaneously harbouring the belief that he loves us, loves to bestow good gifts on his children, is more kind and giving than any earthly parent, and is moved by compassion to act on our behalf. It's funny how it's so easy to preach that "God owes you nothing" when he in fact has already given you everything--you see, it's people with children who tell me "God owes us nothing" in response to my pain. Wouldn't it be absurd for a well-fed American to shrug off a Somalian child's starvation with "God owes us nothing"? Where's the compassion, never mind the logic?

Atheists, lesbians and humanists salve my wounds; they comfort me and nurture me back to health. Indeed, much kindness exists where I did not expect it.The other problem with the "God owes us nothing" tripe is the fact that the gospels send a very different message with its inane, grandiose and ultimately empty promises. I fell for these promises, hook, line and sinker. I built my life upon the shifting sands of a Middle Eastern failed apocalyptic prophet.

In all of my hardship, the message I am ultimately getting is not a religious one at all. Instead, I rue the day I stepped foot in a charismatic church. I threw away the best years and biggest talents of my life, poured them into a bottomless inferno along with all that I treasured. I shut my brain off--essentially turning off my intellectual gag reflex--so that I could swallow bigger and bigger nuggets of bullshit doled out by Bible-believing pastors. I gobbled it up, believing it was nourishing my heart, mind and spirit. I cherished spiritual food above real nourishment. Instead of thriving, though, I became increasingly cachexic. Lacking grace for my ceaseless pain and so intellectually bereft that I failed to grasp the simplest of religious notions--like understanding when it is appropriate to cherry pick which Bible verse--I finally, late in my third decade on planet earth, dragged my battered, pain-wracked and nutritionally depleted body that housed a spirit broken by God's withholding of compassion, away from the fading embers of God's cruel inferno and quietly licked my open, weeping wounds in the fading shadows of failing belief. Few followed me to this dark wilderness--but I find a kindness there I did not expect. Atheists, lesbians and humanists salve my wounds; they comfort me and nurture me back to health. Indeed, much kindness exists where I did not expect it.

The wilderness becomes my new home.

I am emerging from the debris of a life of pain and suffering. I emerge but not the way I entered my wilderness; I emerge by a different road. I am changed and so is my path. I am entering a promised land--but not the one that was promised to me. It is a new promised land but of my own making. Bereft of grace and intellectually impoverished, my feet stumbled over great pain, and my strength finally failed, but I finally am finding peace.

Tis a strange road, this path we trod, lined with flowers but paved with despair. Nonetheless, we tarry on each in our own way. May we never cease to be moved by compassion, for such is all that sustains us.

So, I wish you all "Happy Childless-Not-By-Choice Day", regardless of your procreative prowess. As you scan your newsfeed and see everyone thanking a deity for their children, please remember (and maybe even remind them) that a deity is not part of the reproductive equation.

If you are a believer reading this, please do not respond with offers of prayer. I lack the grace to hear what you actually said --"I'll pray for you"--and instead hear "fuck you". Most Christians can't handle an upset theological apple cart. Please don't tell me I "did" Christianity wrong. I didn’t.

Above all, I extend my compassion to those who have tried to become parents, without success, and to those who have found that the grace promised them has been withheld and the promises of their beliefs empty. May you find peace and comfort.

It's Obvious . . . Really?

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:06:13 PDT

By Carl S. ~

Kahlil Gibran : “The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.”

Hans Holbein- The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Prior to modern scientiﬁc forensics, there was no acceptable way to prosecute a murder suspect without the actual physical body of the victim. This is no longer the case. Fiber analysis, DNA, footage of the suspect purchasing the murder weapon, or being absent from a place where the murderer claimed himself to be at the time of the killing, etc., are acceptable evidence in courts of law. Whenever enough evidence is amassed to show that the victim was killed by a particular person, a conviction follows.

You can understand how in the past, being unable to prosecute without a body allowed murderers to get off Scott-free. Or how, even with an actual corpse, the innocent could be convicted solely on the testimonies of what presently can be proven to be hearsay and/or dubious “eyewitness” reports. (Such eyewitnesses having their own motives pro or con the accused.) By today’s standards, what was formerly acceptable as “obvious,” isn't.

If we imagine those former times, when a body WAS necessary to prove that the person was actually dead, we might conjecture this conversation:

Luke: They told me the Great One was murdered and interred near the place where the murder took place. I went looking but I didn't find his body. I thought someone moved it during the night and buried it someplace no one would think of looking for it, to cover up the crime.

Matt: I don't understand. You think someone dug up a body and re-buried it?

Luke: It wasn't buried, but I think it could be now. I've been told it was placed in a tomb. I looked into the tomb everybody mentioned, but there was no stone moved away from in front of it. In fact, there were no marks to show any stone had been moved. But, there were many, many footprints on the floor inside, indicating that much activity took place there recently.

Matt: Look. Save your time. I and many others know that the victim came back to life fro the dead and walked away. We have this information from witnesses. In fact, he went back to assure his family and close friends that he wasn't dead. They didn't recognize him, strangely, but maybe it was because of what he'd been through. I don't know.

Luke: So, let me get this straight. According to you, who got your info as hearsay, and them, he went back and returned to his former life, as if his murder didn't affect him? Like people who fail at suicide and find life to be really worth living? I'll bet that everyone who heard about him wanted to know what it was like to be dead and come back to life. This fantastic event couldn't help but spread like wildﬁre throughout the region, and thousands of people would come to visit him to see for themselves!

Matt: Well, that didn't happen. From what I heard, and believe, he just left us soon after, and was never seen again.

Luke: I'm confused. You’re saying that because we didn't ﬁnd this particular body in the ﬁrst place, it’s because the body got up and walked away? Was there really a murder? This implies there wasn’t, because the body wasn't dead after all. But, it's possible that the person ran away or was kidnapped and was never seen again and isn't dead. The rule of proof states, “No body, no murder. No body, no conviction.” A unique event, though, everyone claims?

Matt: Now that you mention it - no, not so unusual, I guess. There are OTHERS whose bodies were not found. They had already been buried, in fact. They clawed their way out from underground. They were seen by many, walking around. Maybe they went home for awhile to assure their families; maybe not. We don’t know, because they also didn't stay around; they mysteriously disappeared. Come to think of it - the one whose death you were investigating - he ﬂoated up through the clouds, and THAT'S why he was never seen again. I can believe that. And so, that's what happened to those others back from the dead; they ﬂoated up too. And some day, anyone who dies will ﬂoat away alive, into the heaven above. It makes sense.

Luke: Except that everything you're saying tells me that there is no evidence: that ALL the evidence VANISHED for major events that happened in your lifetime. Your “proof” went “poof!“ Now I suppose that those un-dead ones you mentioned went somewhere where they lived happily ever after?

Matt: You're not getting it. It's obvious, isn't it? Up, up and away into the sky!

Luke: What's obvious to me is that people DO see things that aren't real. What you've been told by these so-called witnesses usually starts with, “Once upon a time...”

Matt: Well, I believe it. It's obvious to me.

Luke: Obviously. Something else is obvious to me. Unlike you, I can read and write. For three decades now I've written down the testimonies. I've been coming around in my travels and asking the same questions of the same people, and each time they tell different, more and more elaborate stories about what happened, starting from the very beginning when I began to record them. And now, it’s reached the point where the “memories” they have are VERY different from the confused stories they initially came up with. Don't you think it's time you found someone to write them down for you?

Matt: Obviously, it's too late. Who would believe them?

Notice how evidence disappears even in the lifetimes of those “explaining” such evidence - evidence such as a cruciﬁed body, the body of Jesus’ mother, Mary, Mohammed's body, the ten commandment tablets, Joseph Smith's golden tablets, etc.?

Why They Want You to Marry Young

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:46:21 PDT

By RaLeah ~

It's getting trendy for conservatives and Christians now to speak out about the virtues of marrying young and starting a family early.

In the church where I grew up, this was the norm rather than the exception. I thought it was probably because the church was very vocal about condemning sex before marriage, and so people got married to the first person who stirred their lustful thoughts.

Now I'm not so sure.

It was true that the people who didn't get married and start a family young were the most likely to leave the church. I thought at the time that they couldn't find any suitable mates left, so they were looking elsewhere. Maybe they felt bitter at God for not giving them a spouse, so they left in an act of rebellious discontent.

I don't think that's the case either.

I chose not to get married young, because I felt I still had a lot of growing to do. I had to get to know myself first before I brought someone else into the equation. I knew I had a lot of questions about God and the Bible that needed answering before I could commit myself to another person.

But the peer pressure was there, and it was enormous. They want you to stay like them, but to me, it started looking like a trap.

What if I had married and had children and took them to church... and THEN I realized I wanted to change my religion or give it up altogether? I would be "unequally yoked" with my spouse, and I'd have to tell the kids that everything I'd taught them about God I no longer believed. It would break their trust, maybe even break the home. But if I kept silent, unwilling to risk my marriage and my kid's faith, I would be letting them down. If they found out as adults I'd lied all along about my faith, they would feel betrayed. The only choice left would be to close my mind tight and keep it closed.

In short, I would be trapped: Be true to myself, risk my family's happiness. Live a lie, keep my family blissfully ignorant.

For most of us, our late teens and early twenties are all about self-discovery, learning about who we are and what we believe and what we want to be. I started noticing the people who married young slowed their progress, and some froze it altogether. They couldn't bear to change their minds with independent thought now that they were making joint decisions that would have a direct impact on the people who they cared about the most--their own family.

So we hear about Mitt Romney giving advice to college kids to marry young and have "a quiver full of kids."

But I feel grateful every day that I didn't.

Many of those who married young ended up splitting after the kids were grown up. They couldn't stop their inevitable questioning, their growing, only delay it. They realized they didn't have so much in common after all, not after they became fully mature adults. Some stayed in their stale or unhappy marriages because their church frowns on divorce. Some of them got lucky and grew in the same direction as their spouse. Some remained stunted in their growth, living in a forced state of denial.

I waited until I knew myself, waited until my career was established in the city of my own choosing, waited until I met the right person whose beliefs were like mine. We both had the opportunity to date other people first, to figure out what we did and didn't want in a mate, and brought our maturity and experience into our happy relationship. We're now more emotionally and financially ready to start a family than we ever could have been in our twenties. (And we don't want a "quiver full" of kids, just one or two.)

To each his own, but amid all the endorsements for early marriage, I just wanted to add my own endorsement for waiting: Find a mate who supports and appreciates your open mind and allows you to keep growing and evolving. Find someone who is honest and kind, and support their growth too. While this will not guarantee you won't grow in different directions, if you treat each other with love, kindness, and respect, even a divorce can be an amicable opportunity for growth... for both of you. But statistics show that those who marry later are more likely to stay married, and that's my hope for my husband and me.

Instead of constantly reinforced stagnation holding us back, life is a beautiful adventure we celebrate together, free to be our truest selves all along the way.

Clouds in My Coffee

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 20:20:27 PDT

By SP ~

When I wrote my extimony about taking the road less traveled, the weight that lifted off my shoulders was indescribable, yet short lived. I soon realized that, not only did I need to de-convert in two steps: first from Mormonism, then from Christianity, but I found I had to deal with the aftermath first as a human, then as a woman. The woman part is proving to be the most difficult because it is on such a vulnerable, personal level. Needless to say, as a stay-at-mom my entire adult life, I put all of my eggs in one basket. My dreams and aspirations did not start out that way, however.

First, a little background; I was lucky to grow up in the seventies. My dad was in the military so I was able to live in a neighborhood with other army brats, as we were endearingly called. Everything a kid ever needed was within running distance and we ran all day until our sides hurt, playing kick ball in the streets until our moms called our names as the sun went down. We swam, rode our bikes in packs, made up plays for our parents, held block parties, played wall ball and hunted for crawdads and frogs. This was heaven to me, to have such autonomy. Even as I had a slew of friends to play with, I also valued being alone because I had a curious and imaginative mind that wondered from interest to interest. Somehow, too, I was aware of growing up at the cusp of feminism and being among the first little girls who were free to dream of being anything they wanted to be when they grew up, rather than being limited to a few roles assigned to them by society.

I ran with it too. I wanted to do and be many things. My earliest memory was to join the Peace Corp so I could help the “poor people overseas” as my dad would say. Then, as I dug for dinosaur bones in the school sand pit, I dreamed of being an archeologist in some faraway land. Then, for a brief time, I wanted to be a ballerina, until I got tired of my teacher telling me to tuck my butt in. Of course, I wanted to fit artist and poet into my life; I could have plenty of time to think up poems and stop to take pictures of landscapes to paint as I traveled around the country in my semi-truck, talking on my CB radio and sleeping in my cuddly little cab (I got this idea from a popular song). The list goes on an on.

The thing is, never did I play with dolls or play house or dream of meeting Mr. Right and being whisked off into the sunset after a dream wedding. Of course, there were some random, awkward moments and conflicts in my childhood, along with disconnected notions and questions but, for the most part, my childhood was as close to an unadulterated “me” as possible, with little interference from religious influences. At age five, however, I was introduced to God by my babysitter. My dad was away at Viet Nam and I remember her tucking me in and teaching me how to pray. It was the first time the idea of God entered my mind and it was like a whole other world had opened up. I had another father somewhere, looking out for me! I remember a feeling of sheer delight sweeping over me and, as she left the room and I closed my eyes, I imagined stuffing my pillow case with hugs and kisses, then closing it up and sending it, like a balloon, up to God. I even pictured him being smothered by my love upon opening my present.

Other than attending a bible class for children here and there, however, I never routinely went to any church from then until I was about seven, when I asked my mom which church we belonged to. Not only did I find out I was Mormon (whatever that was) but imagine, what I thought was, my good fortune upon discovering I had only to walk a few houses down, in either direction, to go to all of my various meetings! Over time, however, the person who had the freedom to develop naturally began to be snuffed out and replaced by the expectations of others. I did not think of it until recently but, part of the reasoning behind my teenage quest to find out if the church was true and if God were real had to do with my own unsureness over what kind of woman I wanted, or needed, to be. In other words, I was confused.

Now, I am not saying that I chose wrong to have the family I have now, nor will I admit that any of the struggles in my life were not worth their merit. No! I would not change any of that, nor do I regret any moment spent with my husband and children. What I do regret was how I felt about myself along the way and what I was willing to accept in my life from others, no matter who they were. That recognition hit me smack in my face even as I was basking in the light of my deconversion. I felt like a snail that had slowly climbed a wall, only to be knocked down; I knew I had to start all over again. So, I recoiled and gave myself some time to think about what that awareness meant for me and what I intended to do about it.

Luckily, even as it was painful to comprehend that the world I had constructed with my family was based on some traditional standards that weren’t working for any of us, my family was open-minded enough to allow us grow together. Also, just as it took time and effort for me to deconstruct the imaginary world of a God/spirit family, I am learning to push the limits of who I am as a whole person. Perhaps the reason I did not dream of a family when I was a little girl was because I naturally did not think in terms of other people completing me. Somehow, I felt enough within myself. Although we all need one other to get along in this world, there is a certain amount of independence we all need to achieve first, on a personal level, to be able to coexist interdependently with each other, in healthy ways.

Now, I know that that little girl did not leave me entirely, even as I needed to grow up. Also, somehow, I was able to do most of the things on my list, to one degree or another, along with many others I never imagined. Perhaps that is a perk to being a mom because, as I helped and watched my family grow, I did too. Even so, I am starting to see that I was lucky to learn how to comfort myself at an early age because now, that is helping me to push through what is uncomfortable to get to what is real, to fix what is broken and to keep what is of value. I am thankful, too, for that foundational freedom I enjoyed to dream to my hearts content, uninhibited by the expectations and agendas of others: to see clearly, to drink coffee.

Got Jesus?. Who need's enemies?.

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Wed, 22 May 2013 02:02:20 PDT

By Hellspeak ~

You're a new Christian. You've been searching for meaning in life, and are convinced you have found it in Christ Jesus. You've said the sinner's prayer, been convicted for the crime of being human, and experienced the pang's of white hot guilt. But a new hope has welled up from inside you, you've had your conversion experience, and are now on fire for God.

Now the testing will begin... the refining. You use to follow the dictates of your nature, your inner self, that used to guide you, but now you aspire to submit to a God/Man. A being, that you have never physically met in this life and never will. A man, that you will attempt to have a relationship with, and your only means of attaining this will be in your mind. How you will feel about him, will depend on how you think, as how you think, is how you feel. You will be taught, that to draw near to the thought ideal of who and what Christ is to you, you must lose yourself to find him. You must forfeit, as much of yourself as possible, to rip out and reject "you". You are now your own enemy, at odds with who you are, as you war with your nature, your humanity. Set down a path of self-loathing, yearning and struggling for impossible perfection, that will never come.

As you battle your personal war with yourself, new enemies will be converging en mass, enemies of the Satanic kind, thought enemies, invisible, ancient, and extremely powerful.

Ephesians: 6:12 "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against wickedness in high places."

By joining Christ's army, you have attracted the attention, and sounded the alarm. Droves of spirit being's, of hive mind, with singular purpose, licking at your heel's in hot pursuit, lusting for your destruction. A swirling mass of hatred, poised to strike your mind in the phased spirit realm. Penetrating claws, and gruesome appendages, infecting/injecting all manner of polluting thoughts. To entice, torment, deceive and divide, with the intent to turn you away from light to dark. There will never be a moment, awake or at rest free of these immortal malicious beings. Your only weapons in your defense, will be words, and words in this worldview speak louder than actions, and always will.

Droves of spirit being's, of hive mind, with singular purpose, licking at your heel's in hot pursuit, lusting for your destruction.We fragile beings of mostly water, with short lifespans and susceptible to a myriad of disease's, and riddled with error, are the plaything's, pawn's and trophies of God's. This is the meaning of life, there is no "grey area". It is simply, a battle between two power being's competing for soul's. The stress caused, by the warring factions on believer's minds, could be enough to tear their sanity to shred's.

Not only do you have the pressure and challenges of life to survive, and your salvation to work out, you have Satan/demon's and God to contend with. These demon's who speak through others, to discourage you, taunt you, break you, and make you say things that you never meant to say. Tempt you with vice, and lead you astray. And God allows it, to test you, refine you. To see if you're worthy enough, for his protection (His armor) and his love.

In all your interactions, from now on with everyone you meet...they could be under demonic influence. Be hyper-vigilant , have your spiritual radar (discernment) activated and on red alert!, probing others intentions, overly reading between the lines. Who do you trust?, trust no one, not even yourself.

To imagine this as reality is just astounding, and absolutely revolting. An insult to the very essence of life. These are the things of terror, delusion, and paranoia. This is not love, this is fear and control. Not spiritual, but psychological warfare perfected.

Maybe it was all too much for even God, in his human form too handle. The God/Man's death on the cross was his escape back to where things make sense. This world, is so much chaos and disappointment. Leaving but a ghost behind, to haunt with the false hope...of letting us follow.

What Christianity and Kink Have in Common

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:06:37 PDT

By Valerie Tarico ~

Want a special someone who will bring you to your knees? One who will be totally in charge? One who will tell you that you are really, really bad and threaten you with punishments? Maybe you have a little day dream about being a captive virgin. Or maybe you prefer to fantasize about a man who is helpless, who, say, has his arms secured to a crossbeam. Christianity has something for everyone.

I’m not the first person to observe that religious and sexual ecstasy have a lot in common—or that the love songs Christians croon to Jesus sound remarkably like other love songs. Nor am I the first to point out that Christian ministers, musicians, and recruiters play with this blurry boundary deliberately. Tim Tebow posing as sexy Jesus-on-the-cross for GQ kind of says it all. As if there weren’t enough Christian girls and boys struggling with Jesus fantasies already. (here, here, here)

Early pagan religions incorporated sexuality explicitly into religious practice, for example, in the form of temple prostitutes or fertility rites or sacred sexuality. Some Dharmic traditions, like tantric Buddhism, continue to do so today. Given the power of religion to arouse and exploit sexual energy, it should come as no surprise that sacred sexuality takes a wide variety of forms—or that, despite an overt attempt by the Abrahamic traditions to constrain and control sexuality, these traditions also make use of the very same urges they seek to suppress.

One offshoot of the religion-sensuality-sexuality nexus that doesn’t get talked about much is the relationship between Christianity and kink. On the surface, the two couldn’t appear more different. Christianity has often advocated abstinence or sex exclusively for procreation, as a means to propagate the religion itself, while kink is about consensual pleasuring limited only by an agreement between the individuals involved. Christianity can be thought of as seeking to sublimate, or redirect, sexual passion, while kink tries to enhance it. Christianity claims to be about the end game, while kink often is about the moment. Christianity is deadly serious, while kink commonly is framed as playful. Christianity is a multi-billion dollar, multi-billion member, multi-national enterprise, while kink is a small counter culture without revenue and membership goals.

But just beneath the surface both communities may be leveraging a similar set of human instincts and emotions. I am not suggesting that Christianity is all about sexual arousal, even sublimated or redirected sexual arousal, though that most certainly is a part of the picture. I am suggesting that kink and Christianity appear to tap an overlapping array of social and psychological impulses that include sexual arousal, moral emotions like shame and disgust, our tendency to seek hierarchy, our desire to escape rationality, our heightened sensory acuity in the presence of emotional arousal, and our tendency to take every pleasure to its extreme. In all of these, the themes of dominance and submission, inflicting pain, and receiving pain, have parts to play.

Pleasure and Pain: In the past five hundred years, few Christian writers have described the relationship between pain and pleasure as graphically as St. Teresa of Avila, whose sixteenth century vision of mystical union with God drips with sexuality:

In his hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by the intense pain that one can never wish to lose it, nor will one's soul be content with anything less than God.

Still today, in some Christian traditions, pain and religious passion go hand in hand. Mother Theresa is quoted as saying that love isn’t real unless it hurts. In one anecdote, she tells a suffering woman that her pain is the kiss of Jesus. The nuns of Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, have practiced self-mortification techniques including striking their legs with rope and wearing a spiked chain called a cilice. Dan Brown’s thriller, The DaVinci Code was a wild fantasy, but the mortification practices of the order Opus Dei are real.

The Bible’s naughty bits have been staples for generations of teenage boys stuck in church.With or without the erotic overtones, pain appears to heighten some spiritual experiences through several mechanisms. Self-inflicted pain or voluntary submission to pain can be proof of commitment, as in gang initiations. It may offer relief from guilt or anxiety or self-loathing, like self-cutting does for many depressed girls. It may produce an endorphin release as when runners and rowers push past a pain threshold. It may intensify focus on the present moment by causing distractions to recede into the background, like pinching oneself can do. It may offer a mesmerizing rhythm of sensation, as in head banging. The point isn’t that Christian penance and self-mortification are always or even usually erotic—they aren’t—but that both Christianity and kink can use pain as sensory enhancers.

Bondage and slavery: The Bible has its share of stories about master-slave relations and other funky sex—starting with Adam who sleeps with his female clone; and Abraham who has sex with his half-sister/ wife Sarah as well as her slave; and Lot’s daughters, who after being offered to a rabbling mob get their father drunk so they can conceive by him. Then there’s the temptress, Delilah, who ties Samson up and finally saps his strength by cutting of his hair after their time together; and we can’t forget Solomon with his 700 wives and 300 concubines or sex slaves. (It wasn’t violence alone that got the Bible reviewed by Hong Kong’s media regulators.) Some people were shocked by all of the humping in Robert Crumb’s illustrated version of Genesis, but the Bible’s naughty bits have been staples for generations of teenage boys stuck in church.

Of course a key difference between these stories and modern sexuality is that dominance in kink is dictated by preference rather than gender. Also, both ethics and law dictate that BDSM actions require the enthusiastic consent of both parties, which definitely is not the case in the Bible stories. Fortunately most scholars think of the Bible stories as either mythologized history or historicized mythology rather than a factual record of events. Also fortunately, (as Greta Christina pointed out in the introduction to her kinky novella, Bending) most people who enjoy fictional violence or coercion—murder mysteries, spy novels, rape fantasies, or sexual slavery—would not seek or enjoy the same experiences in real life.

When it comes to bondage, perhaps the most common stimulus in the Christian tradition is the crucifixion itself, with its glorified, beatific images of Jesus hanging and swooning, eyes half lidded. The crucified Jesus is almost never depicted as a short, ordinary looking Semite. Instead, whether Caucasian, Middle Eastern, or Black, he is usually lanky and well-muscled with perfect skin and a face that fits some artist’s version of male beauty. Small wonder Tim Tebow slipped so easily into the pose.

Discipline: Articles and forums devoted to “Christian domestic discipline” couch the practice in spiritual or religious terms: Wife spanking, like child spanking, is a means of maintaining the hierarchy that God established, with a man on top and wife as his “helpmeet.” Proponents are careful to distinguish their approach from secular kink, which they disparage. They establish a proper biblical context with texts like this one from the book of Hebrews: “Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby.” Domestic discipline is described as a means to fend off, “this unholy culture, with its radically selfish feminism, and wholesale bias against true manhood, [which] launches relentless attacks against traditional Christian family values,” and it is recommended for serious offenses such as “the four D’s” (Disobedience, Disrespect, Dishonesty or Dangerous behavior).

Pious protestations aside, Christian wife spanking is clearly erotic. If it were not, why is it practiced in the bedroom, on a woman’s bare bottom? Why not have the preacher do the spanking? In fact, why not have the preacher spank men when they are bad? Of course, penance or punishment need not be routinely sexual. Punishing or being punished may have its own satisfactions, for example, as a way of wiping the slate clean or asserting hierarchy. Punishment also can be simply a form of abuse or self-abuse. As we know, moral emotions like shame, guilt and righteous indignation can be channeled in many directions toward many ends.

Dominance and Submission:One BDSM website for Christians suggests that, “A BDSM relationship between a dominant husband and submissive wife is actually the ideal of marriage set out in Ephesians 5:22-26 taken to its logical conclusion.” The author of Ephesians had this to say:

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

While few Christian couples own gags or restraints, a great many believe that God ordained a hierarchical relationship between women and men, and that this extends to the marriage bed. Women, in this view, were made from Adam’s rib and caused sin to enter the world, and so should not be allowed positions of authority in the church or home. In the words of the New Testament, “It is shameful for a woman to speak in church. Wives should regard their husbands as they regard the Lord. Women are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate” (I Corinthians 14:33-35). This theology of “male headship” teaches that a woman’s greatest glory lies in bearing children and serving her husband. Protestant reformer Martin Luther put it bluntly: “If a woman dies from childbearing, it matters not; she is there to do it.”

Obviously this kind of relationship hierarchy and female servility can exist independent of male sexual dominance and female submission. Similarly, sexual hierarchy can exist in a more egalitarian relationship. Consequently, in any given Christian relationship, “Wives submit to your husbands” may or may not be given a sexual interpretation.

Either way, because humans are hierarchical social animals, dominance and submission may produce their own feelings of gratification. We’ve all heard that Islam means submission, literally. But submission is a pervasive theme in the Christian Bible as well. Children submit to their parents; women submit to men; slaves submit to their masters; and men submit to God, who, in many passages, is modeled on a Near-Eastern warlord. For modern born-again believers, conversion is often experienced as sweet surrender to the irresistible Divine will. In each of these asymmetric relationships, the person on the bottom gets excused from certain responsibilities, while person on the top gets power and authority. As observation of non-human primates suggests, there are privileges and obligations of each role in a hierarchy, whether dominant or subordinate.

Biblically and historically, within human society these privileges and obligations extend to the sexual domain—with men giving daughters in marriage, housing concubines, and claiming war captives. Females are, essentially, male property. (In no place does the Bible state or imply that a woman’s consent is needed before sex, and in fact nonconsensual asymmetric sex is routinely sanctioned or blessed.) In other words, within a modern context of mutual adult consent and role playing, BDSM experiments with aspects of sexuality that were non-consensual, non-playful parts of the Iron Age cultural fabric from which Christianity emerged. Whether either Christianity or BDSM is good for society or good for the people involved, I leave for you to decide. (A biblical rule of thumb might suggest that the consequences are what matters: “by their fruits you shall know them.”)

Bible believers often claim that they are a moral beacon to the world, a “light shining on a hill.” In particular many look with disgust on the curious, open sexuality of modern society. A closer look might suggest that their claims of superiority are unwarranted, that—just like the rest of us—they are complicated creatures whose spiritual and sexual practices are driven by an array of motives and instincts. Do Christian teachings and practice simply draw on the same aspects of human psychology and physiology as kink or do they actually lay groundwork for BDSM sexuality? I know of no research that attempts to tease this apart. But given the overlap, maybe someone should find out.

Related:

Jesus loves Me. He Can’t have a wife!

Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like if We Actually Followed the Bible

What the Bible Says About Rape and Rape Babies

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

Recoverying from Christianity

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:48:28 PDT

By JC Wells ~

As a recovering Christian-aholic, I must say that I am glad I stumbled onto this site. There are some great posts on here. As one who was wrapped up in Bible theology with no way out, I have found great freedom in studying the Bible and making well-informed and educated decisions about its lack of truth.

Christianity is a very dizzy ride indeed. It is a ride that involves carrots on a stick, whips at your back, and future promises of blissful states that are never realized. The real addiction of Christianity is the "good" parts of the Bible that all churches cherry pick for their own self-aggrandizement. Lessons about love, peace, kindness, and gentleness can be gleamed from the Bible. But so too can it be gleamed from every religion or philosophy book on earth. But grabbing morsels of truth from the Bible is like trying to drink pure water out of a septic tank. It doesn't work. Here's why.(Don't worry; I will not explain why drinking water cannot come from a septic tank.)

Getting truth out of a book from a god that promotes slavery, genocide, rapine, and the righteous act of stoning disobedient children is insane. This is why atheists and agnostics will battle the Christian religion till they have conquered it.

This Yahweh is a scourge and an embarrassment to any well meaning person, which is another reason why free thinkers have a difficult time showing respect to those who are steeped in their Christian religion.

And I know there are those that will say, "Well, you are going back to the Old Testament. We are now under the New Testament." Did God change his moral character in the New Testament? I mean, after all, he is the same God yesterday, today, and forever.

In the Old Testament and New, his rage and utter disrespect for humanity is made plain for all to see. So instead of apologizing for his Hitler like actions he supposedly sends this son of his to make amends. He is supposedly the creator of the whole universe and not one time does he say, "I am so sorry that I told my children to murder millions of people in Canaan." He not one time says, "Slavery is an utter sin against humanity and it must stop now!!!!!" And yet this guy claims to be the prince of peace; the God of love; the one and only.

This great God also created a special place of everlasting torment for those of us that think. Yes, we think. And we think that this god is not real. And if he is real we wouldn't follow him anyway, anymore than we would follow Mau, Hitler, or Stalin. If anything, we will all get an award for turning away from Christianity and thinking.

Stuck in the Moment - or How Religion Can Froze Your Mind

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 23 May 2013 01:57:27 PDT

By Doubting Thomas ~

I hope that somehow I will resist all religious lures and have courage to say what I truly believe in to all fundamentalist without any fear or insecurity, hiding behind my progressive/liberal religion.

“You’ve got stuck in a moment, and now you can’t get out of it”.

These lyrics from U2 song maybe describe what I feel like since I’ve started to think on my religious view in last couple of years.

I have never been a religious person in real sense of that word. I have always looked upon religious claims as some kind of symbolic messages and metaphors. Despite the fact I love to say a prayer in a silent and empty church, I have never liked crowded Sunday services and to pious believers. By the way, I live in Croatia which in the last decade has passed through some kind of re-traditionalizing process thanks to strong Roman Catholic influences, empty nationalism and general aversion toward socialist secularism. Compared to number of inhabitants I think that Croatia has the biggest number of charismatic priests and laymen. I don’t know if that is good or bad, because some of those guys have really frightening stand points which are in some instances simply crazy, and even Catholic Church tries to keep them in line. I have never doubted my religious positions, however thanks to my sensitivity, credulity and stressful changes that happened in my life lately I have arrived to the point where I have to decide where to go next.

My de-conversion or re-conversion process, I still do not realize where it will lead me, started when I heard stories of people who have found Christ in various charismatic movements. Their stories of exorcism, demons, miracles and faith healings have started some kind of negative emotion impulse in my head. They frighten me. What if they are true? I know that their claims can’t face with the scientific scrutiny, but how can they all be explained naturally? I am aware of the hook that is being offered to me. Believe in supernatural, evil can hurt you, but do not worry if you are a practicing Catholic you will be protected – just don’t do what is not part of Catholic Catechism and you will be fine. It is frustrating that this kind of argumentation haunts me for months. It is like a psychological loop. Every time I hear a supernatural story, it causes a negative emotional response in me, and them I struggle to debunk it. That exhausts me. I am aware that I can debunk every supernatural claim made by believers, but their claims always somehow stick to my mind. It’s like try not to think about white bears, and every time you do it they are there.

When looking from rational perspective I know that supernatural claims are unconvincing, but why is my brain so sensitive to them? Only thing that keeps me in this “I do not know what to believe in situation” is my fear. That is what I am sure off. Honestly, I would feel liberated if I could simple discard fundamentalist/charismatic believes. You wouldn’t believe, but there are people here who don’t have Facebook profiles because they believe that someone could bewitch them. That is bat shit crazy, but what if it is true? This kind of reasoning is making me frustrated. When I find myself in this kind of debate I cannot win with rational arguments, because they always have some kind of anecdotal stories that confirm they claims and I loose.

I believe that science still has to say a lot about this world, and that it is the most reliable tool to explain the World where we live in, I still feel like a credulous Cro-Magnon who is hooked on supernaturalism despite all the modern progress made in last couple of hundred years. I hope that somehow I will resist all religious lures and have courage to say what I truly believe in to all fundamentalist without any fear or insecurity, hiding behind my progressive/liberal religion. Alternative frightens me. Who would like to become a fundamentalist?

PS – I hope my English was good enough to read.

The Rejection Notice

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:49:08 PDT

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

To: Professor Marjie Mead

From: Referee Committee, “Journal of Earth Anthropology”

Subject: Your article submission titled, “The Earth Bible as Foundation of an Influential Religion”

We have studied your article concerning your recent excavations on Earth with great interest, but we regret to inform you that we have found your evidence unconvincing, and cannot publish your manuscript at this time

Surely you understand that to claim that the Bible was once a foundational document for one or more serious and influential Earth religions requires a very sizable body of compelling evidence. Since the first Bibles were dug up some 200 years ago, it has been widely understood that the contents were created as fiction, intended for instructional and entertainment purposes only.

Yes, as you have noted, it appears to be one of the most numerous books yet found on the Earth, and, yes, it has been found in sizable quantities near the ruins of what some have claimed were “houses of worship.” However, we, the committee, are of the unanimous opinion that Dr. W. Diggins has more than adequately explained these findings in “The Bible as Children’s Entertainment,” Journal of Earth Anthropology, Vol. 314, No. 9 (Sept. 3269).

As Dr. Diggins noted, modern children easily and immediately recognize the stories of the Bible as too far fetched to be anything but entertaining fiction. Surely the adults of the period your excavations are studying - the 21st century - were not more gullible than today’s children. After all, we are speaking of an age that had already discovered and explained the basics of atomic theory, relativity, electromagnetism, the evolution of species, and the accelerating expansion of the universe. Surely we can expect that common citizens of that age, as now, received sufficient science education to tease apart fact from gross fiction.

Also, as has been noted by several researchers, the crucial Biblical theory of the “fall of man” and the subsequent perceived need for a divine redeemer is based entirely on a story about a talking snake and a magical tree! We do not find compelling your sparse evidence that any significant number of adults of the age in question, an age of considerable scientific sophistication, could have believed such a story was actually true.

Lastly, you have failed to show us how any significant fraction of adults of the age in question could have missed the obvious. In Earth excavations of the past 200 years, fragments of numerous so called “holy” books have been discovered, as well as accounts of many other gods. Surely the religions associated with these books and gods could not have been taken seriously by reasonable, sane adults, since nothing of substance could ever have been proved concerning the foundational dogma of any of them. And surely the man in the street understood that. The very fact that hundreds of contradictory religions had been described in the literature of the time, all dependent on preposterous, “super-natural” claims provides overwhelming evidence that religions were never taken seriously as based on historical facts, and were never meant for more than entertainment purposes.

I am sorry that we cannot accept your paper for publication at this time. We will be pleased to entertain a future re-submission, if you can successfully address the weaknesses of your present manuscript that we have outlined above. Thank you.

The Circle of Life

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:51:53 PDT

By Klym ~

After almost five years of deconverting from Christianity, I can now look back and recognize that this religion is totally based on a fear of death. I can remember as a young child being terrified of death---and all because of the doctrine of hell and salvation. Now that I can see it clearly for what it is, and think about it logically and without fear, the whole idea of needing to be "saved" from death just crumbles to dust.

For ancient mankind, the world must have been a very scary place. It's still pretty dang scary today, as a matter of fact. I think that religions sprung up as an attempt to control the uncontrollable. The scariest thing in life IS death, because it takes our loved ones away from us and hurts so deeply that we scramble to make some sort of sense of it. The idea of an afterlife where everything is made right and just then becomes extremely appealing.

This will sound strange to many of you, but it was a defining moment in my life, so I want to share it with you. About seven years ago, I had to put down my sweet, sweet dog named Bear. Bear was a 90 pound hunk of love and light, a black lab mix, and it was killing me to have to end his life. He had gotten to the point where he could no longer swallow or raise himself up to a standing or sitting position. It was difficult to watch him suffer.

I put him in the backseat of my car and was on my way to the vet's office to have him put to sleep. He was hanging his head out the window enjoying the breeze on what would be his last ride in the car. I looked back at him and suddenly, this Bible verse popped into my head: "The wages of sin is death." For the first time ever, I thought, "Wait a minute, Bear has never sinned in his life. So, he SHOULD live forever, right?" (Of course when I shared this epiphany with Christian friends, they said that animals do not have a soul, so that wouldn't apply. To which I thought that if any living being has a soul, it would be a dog---dogs are much nicer than most people.)

Anyway, the epiphany I had that day planted a seed in my already doubting brain that continued to sprout until I am today an atheist. I began to look at the whole Jesus dying for our sins thing in a different light. The salvation/crucifixion story had bugged me since early childhood--the idea of my being so worthless in God's eyes that he had to torture and kill another human being on my behalf never sat well with me.

How different my life would have been if I had been taught that death was natural and nothing to fear.And that brings me to today. I am an educator, so I often read children's books. This past week, a colleague of mine gave me a children's book titled "Lifetimes" by Bryan Mellonie. OH MY GOSH---this has to be the most beautiful book I have ever read about death! I sat in my office at school and cried as I read it. It describes death as a natural, normal part of living. I cried because I thought of all the years I wasted worrying about hell and pleasing god and hoping that I was "good enough" to make it to heaven. I cried for all the children today who are being taught to fear death as I was taught. I wished I could buy a million of these books and send them to every Christian church in the world. (Here's an interesting sidenote: the colleague who gave me the book is a Christian and believes in Jesus as savior!)

I cried because I thought about how different my life would have been if I had been taught that death was natural and nothing to fear; that this life is all we have and that it is up to us to live it to the fullest and to work for justice in the world TODAY---NOT to wait for justice in some fairy-tale afterlife. To go ahead and live fully and freely TODAY---What a life-affirming message!

This tiny book opened a door in my heart and flooded me with gratitude and joy. It tells that all living beings have a lifetime---birds, bugs, humans, trees, etc. It explains that some lifetimes are very very short, and some are long. Some human lives are short because of disease or accidents, some human lives are long, and it's all OKAY. And yet it doesn't minimize death in any way---it just normalizes it. Wow...just wow....

So, we are all part of the ongoing cycle of life, like the movie The Lion King sings about. I know that's an oversimplification, but I think it's a much more positive view of life and the world than the "salvation" view. Now, how can we rid the world of such a destructive view? I'm not sure, but I will try in my own small sphere of influence to teach the normal cycle of life to the next generation. Maybe my small contribution today will make a positive difference in the lives of children tomorrow. It's a start, anyhow.

Waiting for my fall

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 19 May 2013 04:48:07 PDT

By RaLeah ~

It's hard to lose your support system. You can leave behind the church, leave behind the idea of God, but your family... they're always your family.

One of the hardest parts about being an ex-Christian is that those who love you most are still fervently praying and hoping for your return to God. They're convinced you can't live a happy life without Jesus, and that hell will be your final destination if you don't come back into the fold.

We each deal with that knowledge in different ways. Maybe we keep our lack of belief a secret. Or we hint at it gently. Perhaps we're brave enough to state it openly and suffer the consequences.

Why does it have to be so hard?

For me, I know my family is expecting that God is going to somehow either woo me back or send some terrible misfortune into my path that will send me running back. So they pray and they wait. Any day now something bad is sure to happen to me, something that will break my strong will and humble me again before God.

We were rebellious, doing what was right in our own eyes, and God is going to have to knock us down from our pride to teach us a lesson.I know why they think this. We've been told the story about the good shepherd who leaves behind his 99 sheep to find that one missing sheep. He finds it, breaks its legs to teach it a lesson about not running off, and he brings it back to the fold. He tends to it, now that it knows who's boss, and once it mends, that sheep won't forget who is the shepherd and who is just a silly little lost sheep without the guiding staff to keep it in line.

So Christians expect at any moment, those of us who have left are bound to suffer some very bad consequences. We were rebellious, doing what was right in our own eyes, and God is going to have to knock us down from our pride to teach us a lesson.

Surely we will succumb to alcoholism or drug addiction. Or perhaps we'll get an STD. Or maybe cancer. Perhaps a sick child.

At first I worried about this--not that there was a God who would actually do this, but that if any misfortune at all came into my life, my family would sigh and shake their heads, and rather than offering any sympathy or support, they would only give judgment. It must be God's doing, so I must deserve it.

Since no life is free from suffering, this seemed inevitable.

And yet... over the past decade, while I've had my share of misfortune here and there, overall I've been very happy and successful. If something bad does happen, I will know it isn't God's doing, but rather that it's bad luck. Even the Bible says: "The rain falls on the just and the unjust." Good things and bad things happen to both good and bad people. And to Christians and non-Christians.

So far, I have gracefully handled each challenge, and while they may think it's because God is merciful or blessing me anyway, I know it's because I trust myself to do the smart, right thing as best as I am able, and if I fail, I don't have to feel guilty that I hurt someone or did the wrong thing, and that I'm being punished somehow. If I live a life of integrity and good work, I have nothing to be ashamed of.

At first, it bothered me to know that I'm living my life under their microscope as they wait for me to fall, but as I've become a more mature adult with healthy boundaries, I realize this isn't my problem at all. It belongs to them. Their fear for me, their superstition, their paranoia--it doesn't have to be mine.

It never did.

This means I don't have to be afraid that misfortune will come into my life and allow them to feel their superstition was confirmed. It doesn't matter to me if they think, "I knew it" or try to say, "I told you so." Because I know the truth of my own life. And that belongs to me.

As a Christian, I was afraid of messing up or looking bad, worried about what others would think of me. Was God punishing me? Using me as a lesson as he did with Job? Or was it just misfortune?

But I'm free of that now. Free of God's judgment, free of my own harsh judgment of myself, and now... free from my family's judgment too, whether it's there or not, because it doesn't matter anymore. I don't have to own it, just because they do.

I will live my life with happiness and kindness, and I will hope for them they can do the same.

It's hard to explain, but now that I'm not modeling myself on the behavior of a judgmental yet loving God, my own critical nature faded away as well, gradually replaced with sympathy and understanding. Even more surprising to me, my black sheep reputation faded quickly too. Now I'm known as a good listener, a sympathetic confidant. They each trust me with their own hard experiences (sometimes even when they can't confide in anyone else), because they know they can count on me to offer no judgment, just warm support and love.

And I can say from personal experience, it feels like a much happier and healthier way to be.

The Ten Legalistic Suggestions

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:18:19 PDT

By Steve Dustcircle ~

I don't remember a time where we weren't going to church. My mother was very religious, and my dad seemed to tag along to keep her happy. I don't remember much about going to church, or Sunday School, or prayer services, or meetings (surprisingly). I do recall sometimes where at 7 or 8 years old, drawing Godzilla, or secretly peeling the varnish off the pew handrails.

What I do remember--and cringed at when I became "born again" in my young adult years--is the doctrine we were taught. The stories were usually always happy. Noah and his smiling family, with smiling animals, and unsmiling drowning demon-looking sinners. I remember pastel painted, Caucasian Jesus passing out uncleaned fish to masses of smiling white people. I remember clean-clothed Jesus having various races of kids sitting on his lap, accepting even the Chinese and Native American in 25 AD Israel or Judea.

But what I remember most is the LAW! The Ten Commandments! No one gets to heaven unless they are "saved" and keep these commandments. As a child it's easy to keep these commandments. I didn't covet my neighbor's wife because she was too old for an 8 year old. I didn't murder people, unless doodling Freddy Krueger counted. I didn't work on the Sabbath - my dad wouldn't even let me have a paper route. I never cursed, or said the name of "God" without reason. I was a good boy. But I did have sticky fingers. I stole occasionally, but that one commandment could be worked on. 8 or 9 out of 10 commandments, I felt, was pretty good for 8 years old, and I've got a lifetime to work it out.

Only when I was older and was immersed in a non-denominational church did I find out that the Old Testament was the Old Covenant, and wasn't to be literal. The Commandments were to be 10 "suggestions," or to show how sinful we are as humans. By the way, as an adult, I pretty much broke 8 or 9 of the commandments, and relied on grace and forgiveness in my struggling walk.

However, the walk of struggle was long. Legalism continued to creep into my Christian life. 13 years I struggled with worship leading on Sunday, and screwing the neighbor's wife on Wednesday. I'd give to the homeless on Friday night something I stole Thursday morning. I'd hug demons out of people on Wednesday night prayer services, but kill people later that evening in my heart if they would drive 25 in a 35 MPH zone.

Recently, with struggling with GRACE vs. LEGALISM, and LITERALNESS vs. ALLEGORY, I ended up finding my way into non-belief. Actually, I'd call myself an "evangelistic" or "militant" atheist. I constantly try to challenge others and their religiousness. While it's off-putting to many, I think it's a reflection of who I am: Challenging the status quo. I want people (religionists or agnostics) to know WHY they believe what they believe. I don't want people to know WHAT to think, but HOW to think. I still struggle against legalism, and fight sometimes the urge to be a tattle-tale or judge of character. I'm just as kind, yet decrepit, as the next guy.

But I'm trying. I like the freedom FROM the Ten Commandments. I like the freedom from getting approval from a deity. I like being able to _be me_ without feeling like I might be misrepresenting "God" or ruining a possible witnessing Jesus effort. Being me, without doctrine, is like having a weight lifted off my shoulders.

I can just . . . be.

Steve Dustcircle is an online activist and runs The Dissenting Heretic, a political news aggregation and human rights site [http://www.dustcircle.com]. He lives with his wife in Columbus, Ohio, and reads between guitar-playing and coffee dates. This excerpt is from his upcoming book, LEAVING WORSHIP.

Website: https://www.facebook.com/leavingworship

Wherever There is a Cross

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Tue, 14 May 2013 01:55:19 PDT

By Carl S. ~

We mourn, knowing of the deaths and massive damage done to innocent people we can relate to; especially those as a result of the “senseless” use of bombs. In spite of those religious spokesmen who insist natural catastrophes are a result of human misbehaving, we realize that they are not personally directed at human beings.

Christian Cross 11 (Photo credit: Waiting For The Word)

Days after the bombings in Boston, a neighbor lady pointed out something “horrible” she learned from the news. “The bombs were placed near children,” she said. As in the fresh memories of the Newtown massacres, children were murdered, which made me think of “positively biblical” as a way to describe them to someone.

After each event, the public fumbles to understand, “Why?” Clergy offer their usual cliché solaces to comfort the grieving, one of them being the famous, “Your children are in heaven.” (Doesn‘t it cross their minds that if this is so, then their murderers ought to be rewarded? Islamic terrorists depend on being rewarded.) Psychologists and law enforcement officers will, every time, try to analyze the minds and motivations of the murderers. From what little information they permit to be leaked out, emerges a picture of individuals who are unable to have empathy with others, or who consider themselves superior to them, to the extent of taking out their anger on the innocent and destroying them with a “clear conscience.” (With perhaps even a “god-given” right to do so?) We might consider whether, in describing a serial killer or bomber, suicide or otherwise, we ourselves can proﬁle a terrorist. And whether there can be a superior role model for terrorists.

Whether in Boston, Newtown, Oklahoma City, Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other places where random bombings occur, there is something strangely familiar about them. And that familiarity goes back thousands of years.

It is taken as a given, acceptable without thought, that the killing and torturing of the innocent, especially children, originates with a deity, and that this specific god is justified in using such means to control humans. The divine policy involves killing the innocent. Tales of the role model describe his drowning of millions of children and babies, his destruction of the ﬁrst-born of Egypt, his commands to slaughter many more, yet his non-prevention of the slaughter of many others after his favorite was born. This role model is also coldly indifferent to the effects on children tragically deprived of parents. One can see from these examples the preference this personality has for killing and damaging innocent children. These stories are supposed to convey moral lessons, but aren't they the same moral lessons of terrorists?

Those who speak of this god portray “him” as merciful, peace-seeking, forgiving, loving, compassionate, and fatherly. Not as the angry, vengeful, wrathful god of former times or any of the other bloodthirsty gods. Perhaps this came about because his “image” was changed by a man said to be his “son.” But, this son also brought the message of eternal torture for those who innocently could not accept his message. And this son, like many innocents before him, also suffered torture and agonizing death, as this new improved “father,” refused to intervene. As the story goes, after his death, the newer “message” became, “God so loved the world that he sacrificed his own son.” Here we go again, still killing the innocent. And what “loving” father kills his own son? Is this a god of life, or, as terrorists have been described, the prime example of a cult of death? Something to think about.

And every time I see a cross, it is a reminder of this killing god.

Raised by ALL Gods

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sun, 12 May 2013 07:24:30 PDT

By SmashTheCMachine ~

Perhaps this is unusual, but that has been my past. Yahweh took precedence, was the only "true" God (of course), but there was always room in my family's fantasy for Zeus, Ra, Athena, and Ares.

I suspect my deconversion was the consequence of many factors throughout my youth, I will attempt to portray the most relevant without bogging it down with excessive detail.

To give some background how I wound up with such a bizarre mish-mash of faith, I was raised non-denominational. I was fortunate to some extent that I mostly missed out on church, but there's an expression: "tit for tat", and the cost was a peculiar brand of lunacy and paranoia that even had other churches in the Devil's pocket, deliberately so on their behalf.

I should also add that while my immediate family were christian, my extended family were practitioners of ritual magic (Wiccan, Pagan, and similar practices of "spirituality"), which had colored my brother's ideology, and also had me square in the middle of fights that generally ended with my brother's stuff being burned, and accusations of satanism and witchcraft.

I do remember reading the bible in my youth. I do not remember most of it, or what I had been thinking, but I do remember one lovely little gem that caught my attention: Psalms 121: 3-8. For those who do not have a vendetta against the bible enough to know that passage by heart, it states:

3 He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. 4 Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The Lord is your keeper; the Lord is your shade on your right hand. 6 The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The Lord will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life. 8 The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.

All it took was a look around the world I lived in, and you can imagine the sort of doubts that inspired in me.

It was around that time I put the bible down. Even in my youth, at 8 years old, I had enough reading comprehension that it began to stir up questions that could not be sufficiently answered by my family, or even the pastors of the few churches I had attended in my youth.

It was at this point I peeled my nose out of the bible - reading it was becoming detrimental to my faith. The more I questioned my faith, the more nightmares I experienced of demons and lava.

I still considered myself christian for many years, although I buried and repressed much of what I had read in the bible.

It was many years later after I moved around the vicinity of my brother (My mother moved cross country around this time, while my brother stayed with our grandparents) that I started sorting out that my extended family were into occult practices.

Lets just say, I didn't have much faith at all at this point in my life, since I let him talk me into doing rituals with him, which involved waving "ritual tools" through the air and invoking spirits.

Now I recalled all the horror stories involving such practices, ranging from demon possession to hauntings. Perhaps my skepticism drained the demon's powers? I was going through those motions, and thinking "This is all hogwash".

To start to wrap up my deconversion story (I could write a novel on this topic),I buried my experiences with ritual magic and the occult, but now that I had experience with another form of spirituality to place along side my recollections of reading the bible, and thinking it was silly of my brother to hold on to "ritual practices" that effected the world around me as much as the "God" that promised to protect me from harm, despite letting me get involved quite heavily in drugs...(also a part of my history), and not only that, but early in life (by the age of 9 years old), there was something seriously wrong with Christianity that was growing in my mind.

It was then I discovered the internet, and (more importantly to what inspired my deconversion), Youtube.

I was feeling particularly depressed and stressed some time back, and I decided I had enough. I decided I would give the atheist perspective an honest evaluation. To put what I knew of "God" on 50/50 footing with the arguments and reason of "THOSE people" who kept challenging the notion of God.

At this point, I considered myself "agnostic", which of course isn't mutually exclusive to theism or atheism, but since I wasn't sure, either way, which side I favored, I simply considered myself agnostic.

I began subscribing to atheist videos, informative videos, educational, comedy... and throughout it all,I still held faith in God.

But no longer could I hold faith in Christianity. It was too flawed. Too broken.

I am now an atheist. Yes, it took a gradual diversion through degrees of agnosticism and deism, but the nail in the coffin Ended up coming to me a year ago.

I was particularly troubled by some hard times in my life, and having it topped off every day with "God this, god that", and discussion about "God's plan", and how much "Jesus loves me".

I spent two days looking through episodes of The Atheist Experience, and studying the origin's of Christianity. Two days, without sleep. I NEEDED to sort this out. Hour after hour of seeing the faithful calling in, and personal testimony being the best they had to offer.

I threw several episodes involving James Randi into the mix. Throughout that two day span, I have finally broken free of this seeming "need" for God, and realized it for what it was for me: a security blanket. Something to cling to when I was uncertain.

And that's my own deconversion story.

Why a Safe, Tiny Little Pill Scares the Hell out of Prude Christian Conservatives

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:55:08 PDT

By Valerie Tarico ~

You know the eleven year old down the street who is dividing her after-school time between the park where she gets laid and the drug store where she buys her douches? Yeah, neither do I. But apparently a number of right wing commentators live in a different world than we do—because in their world that girl is the reason all of us should have to show ID to get emergency contraception.

In their world, if we can get EC without showing our names and birthdates, then she can too—and will. Right now, apparently, this girl’s fear of pregnancy is the only thing keeping her and her peers from even nastier sex lives. Think tweens gone wild. As columnist Kathleen Parker put it, “As long as there’s an exit, whether abortion or Plan B, what’s the incentive to await mere maturity?” Conversely, if we all are willing to put up with the minor humiliation of announcing our names and ages to drug store cashiers along with our contraceptive failures, then that girl will instead turn to the wise, thoughtful parents whose supervision she’s somehow been evading. The mother and father will buy Plan B with their own fifty bucks instead of her allowance. And those parents, who have heretofore failed to notice their daughter’s precocious promiscuity, will carefully read the Plan B insert and coach her through the nausea—or at least coach her on how best to parent her baby.

And they will all live happily ever after.

In my world, where science and data matter, less than one percent of 11 year olds have had sex, and for most of those, the "sex" they had was incest, rape, or some other form of sexual assault. For twelve year olds, that number is two to four percent. When it comes to actually purchasing expensive EC, the percent of pre-teens who can scrape together $50 unnoticed may be as small as the percent who are sleeping around, like next to none. Mandatory age checks are a draconian solution to a nonexistent problem.

Tweens Gone Wild is a pedophilic fantasy.

However, teen sex isn’t. By age 15, about 13 percent of teens have initiated sex. The average age at which people start sexual activity is 17, and by age 19 seventy percent have had sex at least once. Fortunately, teens are starting sex later than the used to, but thanks in part to abstinence only education, many don’t use protection till they have a scare. Teen pregnancy, when carried to term, trashes lives. Only 40 percent of girls who give birth between ages 15 and 17 ever graduate high school; less than 2 percent graduate college by age 30. Their offspring have higher rates of poverty, learning problems, health problems, criminality, and—teen pregnancy. Even during the twenties, unintended pregnancy is associated with economic struggles, reduced opportunity, and less family flourishing.

In this world, where morality is about actually making people’s lives better, drug regulations are optimized to promote the general welfare. Public health officials do a complex risk benefit analysis to decide whether any given drug prevents more harm than it causes. Part of their responsibility is to assess whether men, women and children are best served by having that drug be available over the counter or under the scrutiny of a physician.

In the case of Plan B, every body of relevant experts—the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the FDA scientists themselves believe that the public health is best served by having Plan B freely available to all who seek it. The primary question in their minds is whether other more effective forms of contraception (including more effective emergency contraception like ella and Paragard) should be freely available as well. Their recommendations are based on research that says Plan B is safer than Tylenol, and the risks of Plan B (and Tylenol) are many times lower than the risks from miscarriage, abortion, or—most risky of all—full term pregnancy. That is why the presence of Plan B on regular drugstore shelves should be taken as a sign that the professional and regulatory bodies are doing their jobs.

So what goal does opposition to Plan B really serve?

Male Control of Female Sexuality – As futurist Sarah Robinson has eloquently described, every culture, society and religion on this planet is structured around the once universal and now obsolete fact of women having no control of their fertility. This reality gave males certain privileges that now are threatened. Every step toward better birth control drives another nail in the coffin of male privilege, which is why, as Robinson sees it, we’ll still be fighting this battle 100 years from now.
Fetal Personhood vs. Female Personhood - Despite all evidence to the contrary, conservatives continue to insist that every fertilized egg is a person-to-be and emergency contraception is abortifacient. In reality, the only established mechanism of EC action is delaying ovulation. Even the best emergency contraception available, the copper IUD (which isn’t available without prescription), prevents more fertilized egg suicides than it causes. But that hasn’t stopped the embryo advocates from insisting that Plan B murders teeny babies, which means it must be opposed by whatever means available.
Parent Rights over Child Wellbeing – In biblical law, children are property of men, as are women, slaves and livestock. Parental rights are inviolable to the point that a man can sacrifice his child and have it “counted as righteousness” rather than murder. Our culture has moved toward the ideal expressed by Kahlil Gibran in his famous poem, On Children, meaning that we house and nurture our children rather than own them. But the closer parents are to the traditional Abrahamic view, the more they mistrust tools that help teens to take care of themselves independently, even if these tools help young people to thrive.

By opposing Plan B access, conservatives betray the fact that they are willing to sacrifice women, teens and pre-teens on the altar of patriarchy and—let’s get real here--religion. The Plan B fight pits the power of the priesthood, authoritarian parents and prudes against the obligations of the public health establishment and medical care providers. The 11 year old slut fantasy is brought to us by the same people who brought us pedophile priests, Jesus Camp, Child Evangelism and mandatory vaginal probes. Perhaps instead of tweens gone wild we should be worrying about clergy gone wild.

Related:

The Big Lie about Plan B–What You Really Should Be Telling Your Friends.

What's Wrong With the FDA's Plan B Compromise? Almost Everything

Plan B Ruling: Fox and Family Research Council Seize Chance to Spread Misinformation

15 Things Old Boys like Rick Santorum Don’t Want You to Know About Your Body and Your Contraception

A Brief History of Your Period and Why You Don’t Have to Have It

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light and Deas and Other Imaginings, and the founder of www.WisdomCommons.org. Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com. Tweens Gone Wild is a pedophilic fantasy.

A Letter To A Concerned Christian Friend

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:55:26 PDT

By Kenneth W. Hawthorne ~

I’m writing this letter to let you know the main reason why I am no longer a Christian, no longer believe that Yahweh is God and no longer believe that the Bible is the word of God. These decisions were not made lightly; they were made after much thought and study. As I hope you will see, these were the only real choices that I had. But if not, as always, I am ready to consider what you or anyone else has to say on this issue.

renegade letter writing june 11 3 (Photo credit: donovanbeeson)

Simply, the omni characteristics that the Bible writers give Yahweh are incompatible with the New Testament teaching that he will send the vast majority of humanity to his eternal hell.

The Bible claims that Yahweh is:

1) Omniscient- If he is all knowing then he knew if he went with the creation of man and the “plan of salvation” for man as revealed in the Bible that the vast majority of humanity would eternally perish (see Mt. 7:13-14).

2) Omnibenevolent- The word benevolent means “characterized by kindness and concern for others”(Answers.com). There are many verses that express his love, compassion and mercy for humanity. 2 Peter 3:9 says that it is not his will that any perish.

I think any Christian would agree that the Creator is greater than the creature (man). So God’s love must be of a much greater magnitude than man’s. But no loving human would conceive a child and allow it to come into the world knowing beforehand that this child would wind up in an eternal hell. So certainly a loving Creator would not do so. But the Bible teaches that this is just what Yahweh did--multiplied billions of times, and continues to allow millions to come into the world every year knowing that most will wind up in his eternal hell.

3) Perfect and Complete- Acts 17:25 says “Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything…” The Bible teaches that Yahweh doesn’t need anything and certainly doesn’t need anything from man. The thought comes to mind--why then did he create man knowing the eternally terrible outcome? It couldn’t have been for anything that he needed. So it must have been merely for something that he wanted but didn’t have to have. However, this is completely inconsistent with his alleged love for man and his will that no human perish. So the only conclusion is that it was not necessary that he create humanity in such a way that any would perish.

4) Omnipotent- If he is all powerful this means that if it was his will that no one perish, then no one would perish. And if he is also all knowing he could have and would have come up with a plan in which no one would perish. He could have created humans like him with free will and the inability to sin.

5) Sovereign- This means that there is no authority higher than him, and thus nothing could have overruled him in achieving his will that not one human perish.

Conclusion:
No God with these omni characteristics would/could have allowed even one, much less multiplied billions of humans to eternally perish in hell. However, the Bible teaches that the alleged omni God Yahweh will do just that, allow untold billions of his human creation to eternally perish. Therefore, the Bible, being contradictory on this most important of subjects, loses all credibility and cannot be the inerrant, inspired word of God and its alleged omni God, Yahweh, cannot be God.

A Couple of Objections Answered:

"But God wants man to have free will and choose to serve him. There would be no value to God in creating robots who had no choice but to serve him."

The omni love, compassion and mercy that he has for man could not have wanted this—knowing what such a flawed, sin prone creation would do with this type of free will and the terrible eternal results.

No God with these omni characteristics would/could have allowed even one, much less multiplied billions of humans to eternally perish in hell.Yahweh also allegedly has a different want. However, this want is consistent with his omni characteristics. That want is that no one perish. His love for man, and thus his desire that no one perish, being part of his omni character, he could not have wanted something that would cause an infinite eternal calamity to his beloved human creation. It is obvious that his love for man, together with his omnipotence and sovereignty would not have permitted this eternal tragedy to happen and therefore this type of free will could not have been something that he wanted nor would/could have allowed.

Another type of free will is the type that Yahweh allegedly has. He has free will but can’t sin. He is said to have created man in his image. Why then wouldn’t he have truly created man in his image with the type of free will that he has free will with the inability to sin? Because he loves man, wants no one to perish, is omnipotent and sovereign, and there was no necessity that man be created in a scenario in which the vast majority would perish, he would have had to have created man this way (or something similar) or not have created man at all. And since Yahweh has value, has this type of free will and is not derogatorily considered a robot, then why wouldn’t man also have value (which Yahweh doesn’t need from man anyway) if he had this type of free will and also not derogatorily be considered a robot?

"Jesus died for your sins, why won't you believe in him, obey him and save yourself?"

The New Testament and Christians make much of Jesus’ alleged sacrifice to save man from eternal hell and the love that was shown by Yahweh in providing it. But if Yahweh has the omni characteristics that the Bible claims, he would have to have known, before the first human was ever created, that this sacrifice by Jesus would not accomplish his will that no human perish. He had to have known that it would only save a comparative handful. So, knowing this, the only way that his love could really have been shown toward man would have been in creating man in a way that would achieve his will that no one perish (it not being necessary that he create man in any other way).

Sending Jesus as a sacrifice was part of the “plan of salvation” revealed in the New Testament that would not achieve his will of no one perishing. In fact, under this New Testament plan the vast majority of humanity would wind up eternally perishing (refer back to Mt. 7:13-14). So the “plan of salvation” in the New Testament involving Jesus’ sacrifice has to be considered a puzzling claim, being inconsistent with the characteristics alleged for the omni God Yahweh. This enormously underachieving act is not what Love (see 1 John 4:8) would/could have done if Love is omniscient, perfect and complete, omnipotent, and sovereign. It would have been Love’s will that no one perish—exactly what 2 Peter 3:9 claims—and with these omni characteristics his will that no one perish would have been accomplished.

Website: http://www.isitgodsword.blogspot.com

Imagine No Religion. On Facebook.

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:55:08 PDT

By Valerie Tarico ~

Sometimes Facebook mirrors our world a little too well.

I go to Facebook to escape—from mounds of laundry waiting to be folded, weeds that are taking over the front yard, the ever burbling saga of minor crises in my extended family, or the frustration of not being able to find the right words for my next article. But lately, things have been reversed. The laundry and weeds have become welcome distractions from the news feed.

It’s my own fault. My Friends list is full of people who actually give a shit: curious seekers who are passionate about whatever inspires them, social activists, outspoken anti-theists, and a smattering of Christian fundamentalists who keep me up to date on the latest defense of Bible belief. Normally I’m fascinated by the mix—alternately inspired, amused, or horrified. But recently it’s just been draining. Too much bad news, and specifically too many ways that religion, which should be a civilizing influence, was making the world worse. I found myself wondering: What would my Facebook have been like this month without religion? The answer that came back was telling.

No toddler dead from faith healing. In 2009 medical neglect caused the death of 2 year old Kent Schaible. He didn’t receive life-saving treatment for his pneumonia because his parents believed the promise in the Bible, “If you ask anything in prayer, believing, it will be done.” The also believed the teachings of their church: “If anyone has more faith in doctors and drugs, than they have in the living God and the risen Savior, their salvation would be in serious jeopardy.” Now, a second of the Schaible’s nine children is dead for the same reason and child protective services have, finally, removed the other seven from the home. No religion? The Schaibles don’t have nine children. My Facebook has an article about the decline in toddler and infant mortality.

No violent protests in France over gay marriage. Gunpowder in an envelope, a young man beaten unconscious, damaged cars. . . . Ultimately, fortunately, the themes of the French revolution—liberté, égalité, and fraternité—prevailed. France’s national Assembly approved marriage equality by a strong margin, and marriages may begin as soon as June. But the opponents, largely a coalition of conservative Catholics, Muslims, and Jews, have vowed to keep fighting. No religion? The streets are filled with celebrators wearing old Mardi Gras costumes. My Facebook has an article about healthy families in evolving societies.

No Boston bombers. Some on the Left claim the Boston marathon bombing was a conspiracy by the CIA, and--in stark contrast to the other Abrahamic traditions--Islam is a religion of peace. They would do well to look at the evidence, the psychology of conspiracy theories, and the words of Mohammed himself. No religion? The Tsarnaev brothers both are college students, Dzhokhar recognizes his brother’s god complex for what it is, and the CIA (or whoever) has no Imams to quote. My Facebook devotes the space to the Texas explosion and the XL Pipeline, and how best to protect the public against industrial disasters.

No Salvadorian mom waiting to die from a complicated pregnancy. As of April 24, a 22-year-old mother, identified only as Beatriz, lies waiting in a Salvadorian hospital, unable to end a pregnancy that doctors have said is life threatening. As if that weren’t enough, her fetus is anencephalic. It doesn’t have a brain and never will. In other words, it’s nonviable, one of the sixty plus percent of fertilized eggs that never make it to the cooing-crying stage. The hospital appealed over a month ago for permission to abort, but thanks to Catholic theological influence on Salvadorian policy, abortions are illegal under all circumstances, like they would be in the U.S. if some bishops had their way. No religion? Beatriz is home with her actual, living child. My Facebook has pictures of baby rabbits and kittens and the occasional capybara.

No Christian villagers begging Israelis to not destroy their town by building a fence aimed at preventing Muslims from killing Jews. For over 10 years the Israelis have been constructing a barrier through the West Bank that they say is necessary to prevent suicide bombings (and that Palestinians say is a land grab). Local villagers have been helpless to stop them, but one Christian village has a powerful ally: a third of the surrounding land belongs to the Vatican. They hope religious sentiment and political clout will prevail where ethical appeals have not. No religion? No Church has vast real estate holdings. Medieval religious rivalries didn’t culminate in the Holocaust, so the state of Israel doesn’t exist. My Facebook advertises scuba diving in the Red Sea.

What would my Facebook have been like this month without religion?Scholars tell us there was a time when religion brought us together and enabled social order, a time when the construct of an all knowing father-in-the-sky strengthened our moral compass, a time when our hungry, precarious ancestors found solace and comfort and kindness and strength in stories that promised a better life in a world to come. Maybe so. But today is not that day. This world has moved on, and religion has not. Today, our sacred texts, the golden calves of the literate, bind us to the tribal, patriarchal world views of our Iron Age ancestors. They jail us and kill us and erect barriers through which all possible crossings are manned by armed guards.

Surely, in the age of Facebook--and Twitter and Tmblr and Instagram--we can do better. Isn’t that what social media are for? To break down the barriers and lower the guard to let old dogmas drain out and new ideas flow in? To glimpse enough pain and joy in other communities, cultures and species that we experience the flood of compassion at the heart of morality?

We are not as divided as our religious dogmas and news feeds suggest. By contrast with the hard-scrabble times when the world’s largest religions emerged, today men and women of many races and cultures rely on each other for everything from disaster relief to distance learning. True, we face moral questions and challenges that didn’t exist in the time the Bible and Koran and Torah were written. But we also know more about our past and have more power to decide our future than ever before. What might it mean to transcend the tribal superstitions of our ancestors and create spiritual community that fosters wellbeing in this modern world? Together, we have the capacity to cure polio or cancer. Or hate. If only we could stop re-enacting a set of scripts written for a simpler time.

Related:

Captive Virgins, Polygamy, Sex Slaves: What Marriage Would Look Like if We Actually Followed the Bible

Two Stadiums Where Religion Made the World Worse

Eight Ugly Sins the Catholic Bishops Hope Lay Members and Others Won’t Notice

Turning Away From God?

noreply@blogger.com (webmdave) — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:54:47 PDT

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

If you’re a Christian, or on the fence about your beliefs, I would like to recommend that you give a little thought to something important.

The Bible, and Christian clergy, writers, and apologists all make a very big deal of hewing to the faith, of shunning doubt and constantly “working on” one’s faith. They make it sound like actually thinking about and researching the truth values of your Christian beliefs is an insult to god. To question the teachings you’ve received, and actually question the truth of the Jesus story, they claim, is to “turn away from god.”

But is this really the right way to look at it? Why do they insist that you believe whatever you’re told in the Bible and in sermons? Why do they say, “Just take my word for it”?

One would have to be incredibly gullible to have no doubts at all about Bible dogma. You surely have noticed that many of the stories in the Bible are indistinguishable from common fairy tales. There are stories in the Bible about snakes and jackasses talking with humans in human language, a magical tree with the knowledge of right and wrong somehow residing in its fruit, 900 year-old men, dragons, unicorns, and a man who walked on water, made tons of food materialize on occasion, and healed diseases with a touch. Have you ever thought about that old adage, “The bigger the lie, the easier it is to believe”?

Oddly, you’ve never seen anything so miraculous in your life, or even close, ever. In fact, there is no evidence in the world today that would prove any of these claims, not one. How could you not have doubts about such outrageous claims?

It’s the Bible, the foundational document of Christianity, so doesn’t it matter whether those stories are true? If any of them are untrue, then what else in that book is also untrue? Does it really make sense to just believe what those anonymous, ancient, superstitious men tell you in the Bible? Remember; while those primitive men claimed to tell you ageless truths about how the world works, they also thought the moon made its own light and disease was caused by demons.

More importantly, who told you not to doubt, not to question what The Book says? Did god stand in front of you and tell you that? Or was it those who told you about god, who said you shouldn’t doubt? Are they really afraid you’re doubting them? And shouldn’t you? If someone tells you, “Just take my word for it,” shouldn’t you be suspicious? Why do they not want you to think about and investigate this stuff?

Perhaps some charismatic person has convinced you that the Bible has all the answers. Consider for a moment that charismatic people, those who have such eloquence and magnetism that they can get others to follow them blindly, are some of the most dangerous people in the world. Mohammed was a charismatic man, and so was Jim Jones of Guyana mass-suicide fame, and Adolph Hitler. All of these men were adored and deeply trusted by many. When people abdicate their responsibility to think for themselves, and trust others with their conscience, they tread on very dangerous ground.

Those who have seen to your religious training have likely been very careful to tell you that doubting the teachings of the Bible is a grave mistake. But, you need to understand that in questioning the Bible and your religion you are NOT turning away from god, but from the influences of those people who told you the god story. God never told you that story, humans did.

The Bible plainly states that homosexuals, disobedient sons, and people who work on the Sabbath should be executed, but I’m sure you don’t believe any of that. How can you maintain any faith in those men who wrote such ugly stuff? What else are they wrong about? You know for sure that no god told them to write such disgusting nonsense.

Must something be true just because they wrote that it’s true? Did they point to anything in the physical world around you that could prove their claims? Does the beauty in the world really prove there’s a god? If so, then why doesn’t the ugliness of the world, its pain, disease, and death, prove there is no god?

If there really is a loving god, then he cannot want you to suffer for your doubts. No sensible God could fault you for finding that you have this marvelous, wondrous gift, a brain, and using it for the purpose it was designed. And if there really is no god, or the Jesus story is not true, wouldn’t it be helpful to the successful, efficient conduct of your life to know that?

It should be clear to you by now that that “turning away from god” phrase is nothing but a scare tactic. You’re not really questioning god, you are merely questioning all those who told you about god. You’re only wondering whether you can trust them. Perhaps they truly believed what they wrote and meant well, but they’re just wrong? They’re only human, after all, and I’m sure you’ve heard that to err is human.

At the end of the day, it cannot be a sin to ask and to think, to doubt. It just can’t!

"I've never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith - it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe." - Jubal Harshaw in “Stranger in a Strange Land” by Robert A. Heinlein.