Ex-Christian Quotes

URL: http://www.infidels.org/library/magazines/tsr/1999/6/996mail.html Date/Time: 07/15/2002 16:14:02 A final echo of religion? I enjoy your writing immensely, especially the ongoing debates between you and fundamentalists. Great stuff, especially for a recovering religoholic like me. I was raised in an extremely conflicted religious environment, a hybrid of liberal Catholicism and fundamentalism. I have suffered immeasurably over the years worrying about "getting saved." As a child and adolescent, I felt as if I was completely hopeless and depraved because, after "making Jesus Christ my personal savior" (at least a dozen times) I would not be a "new creation" with a "new nature" that was supposed to be resistant to sin. Later I was a Catholic seminarian. I won't bore you with how horrible this was, but it ended with me being booted out unceremoniously because (a) I thought a lot and (b) I was persuasive enough to get other young men to think. The only thing keeping my sanity (latent, perhaps) was my interest in science. After much twisting and writhing, I am in graduate school in chemistry at the age of 34. (Religion, if nothing else, has been time consuming.) Sometimes breaking clean of Christianity is still hard for me, though intellectually I have thrown off religion. I am slowly becoming 100% free of it. I have a child, a beautiful 3 year old boy, who will not suffer as I did. I will teach him to think for himself. Actually, I have one experience I wanted to be certain to share with you. My life is so happy now, with my beautiful family life, my brain mostly free of religious garbage and recovering nicely, and my fascinating scientific career blossoming, that I find myself feeling grateful, but confused that I have no one to assign the gratitude to. I wonder if this is the final echo of my religious upbringing, the thought that I am not allowed to enjoy anything without shouting amen or doing the sign of the cross. It is just happiness, the happiness that comes naturally from living life with one's mind engaged and one's sense of purpose fulfilled. It is a happiness I could never feel trying to be a Christian. One of my hopes now is to promote science and critical thinking, not just as a scientist but as a citizen and as a refugee from religion. URL: http://www.scorbett.ca/writings/religion/agnosticism.shtml Date/Time: 08/24/2001 21:20:21 At heart, I think I wanted to return to Christianity. It's easier. Answers are handed to you on a silver platter, all you have to do is stop your questioning mind and suddenly the entire universe can be explained to you. My religious studies class from high school prompted me to read more of the bible. I, like most Christians, had never actually read the entire bible, only selected passages from it. It wasn't until I actually made a conscious effort to read and understand the entire bible that I realized just how horrible and evil Christianity really is. URL: http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9052.htm Date/Time: 06/30/2001 01:07:29 This concept of the Christian Hell and the notion of morality based upon the threats of punishment and the enticements of Paradise is, to me, pure madness, and I've always felt this way -- even when I was a Christian. This teaching is one of the many reasons why I eventually renounced the Christian religion and started speaking out against it. URL: http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml9049.htm Date/Time: 08/24/2001 02:30:40 Nevertheless, even if it could be shown that a man named Jesus once thought he was Messiah and was subsequently executed by Pilate for sedition -- even if they cough up the skeleton -- this still says nothing about the validity of the Gospel stories. The problems with the Gospel stories are legion, and none of the apologists have begun to address my basic reasons for rejecting them as fiction. When I tried to defend the Gospels as historical, I was under a lot of stress; now that I no longer have to deal with these gnawing doubts -- now that I don't have to wonder if I'm telling people that something is true when I cannot myself verify its truthfulness -- I can look myself in the mirror again and I can actually sleep peacefully at night. I am a much nicer person to be around than when I was a Fundamentalist Christian. URL: http://www.mindspring.com/~understand/BIB/fanmail.htm Date/Time: 09/09/2001 10:28:19 I was raised staunch Catholic (priests and nuns in the family), me an Altar boy, almost to seminary etc. (We still said the Mass in Latin in those days, and I could say the whole Mass in Latin). Then I saw that the Catholics were full of beans and -- get this -- turned to Protestant fundamentalism for 2 years! Go figure! Anyway, it only took me about 2-3 months to see the whole thing as a man-made fraud, after talking with a knowledgable ex-Christian. URL: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~slocks/tsr/tsr28.html Date/Time: 09/08/2001 13:35:09 When I resigned from the pastoral duties of my church in 1986, I had no intention of ever leaving the faith. However, in about 1990 I came across a book that got me thinking. This book was called Bible of Bibles by Kelsey Graves. This book challenged my confidence in the so-called infallibility of the Bible. Later I read Losing Faith in Faith by Dan Barker. This book by a former Pentecostal minister mirrored my personal experiences and made me confront myself with the fact that I was no longer a believer. Then somehow I became a subscriber to The Skeptical Review. Little by little over the years, the light has broken through and the shackles of religion have finally fallen off. I want to thank you for your contribution to my deliverance as well as, I'm sure, to many others'. URL: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~slocks/tsr/list.html Date/Time: 09/08/2001 13:31:55 Tom Brookman: "...the members of that church made a large mistake: they insisted I now needed to study the Bible. Study it I did and found so many ridiculous and unbelievable things I began to feel embarrassed that I had been 'suckered' into this bizarre belief system." URL: http://www.infidels.org/electronic/forum/ubbcgi/ultimatebb... Date/Time: 08/14/2001 14:29:13 Ron Garrett Secular Web Regular Member # 3575 posted August 08, 2001 01:46 PM Brother Sotzo writes: If Christianity is nothing but a bunch of ignorant, unintelligent, brainwashed morons, then why bother with such childish things? Christians may believe in a God who doesn't exist, but they may also be very happy doing so. If the atheist claims are correct, Christians will die the same death you will and be just as happy as you believing something that makes them feel good. You pointed out yourself some of the reasons having to do with the notion of Christians bringing back the awe and splendor of the thirteen centuries of tyranny, torture, murder, war, opression,ignorance,superstition and other delights the Western world enjoyed whilst Christians ruled. Women can return to their rightful role as cattle, blacks can be returned to slavery, and we can immediately start killing anyone who picks up a stick on the Sabbath, sasses their parents, has sex out of wedlock, to include executing rape victims. With so much to commend it, why did I ever leave the Christian pulpit? Put in a few years as a counseling pastor and stack up all the misery, anguish and suffering believers cope with because of the teachings of the faith. Spend a few thousand hours listening to women whose faith tells them in no uncertain terms they are inferior and must submit, no matter that their husband is a piece of slime. Pray with a family or two whose lesbian daughter or gay son has committed suicide. Watch a bunch of pentecostals sit on the chest of teenage girl with epilepsy driving out demons. All very biblical mind you. I've seen abuses in the church that make the worst state mental hospitals look positively progressive by comparison. In my experience it spreads more misery than anything else and the so-called happy Christian is displaying Stockholm syndrome like a battered wife. So for myself, I see the faith as utterly evil, devoid of any value, as well as the source of dire threat to the safety and well-being of non-believers. There's arsenic in the snake oil, and contrary to Christian propaganda, some atheists like myself think people seduced by Christianity and other pernicious hate-based superstitions are worth rescue... URL: http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=50&t=000343 Date/Time: 06/06/2002 10:02:23 To be fair to Christians, apologists for other religions are just as dishonest and their followers can be equally naive in trusting these lies. Listening to the crap spewed by Scientologists and noticing the similarities they had with Christians was one thing that led to my leaving Christianity. URL: http://www.users.bigpond.com/pmurray/exchristian/Stories/0197.html Date/Time: 04/13/2002 17:06:15 By that time, (my mid to late 20's), my understanding of human nature and psychology started to make a difference too. Growing up, my mother was into psychology. There were always psychology textbooks laying around, and issues of "Psychology Today" magazine. I developed a decent understanding of how people's psychs work. So in my mid twenties, I started to see how religious concepts were suspiciously ideal for meeting human psychological needs. It occurred to me, "Did humans invent these beliefs to soothe themselves?" For example, I knew that humans have a great emotional need to see the world as a fair and just place. (Thats one reason why an abused child will end up with severe self-esteem problems. It is actually less painful psychologically for them to believe that they are a bad person who deserves the abuse, than to believe that their situation is completely unfair.) And so, when its obvious to people that the world is unfair, that what "goes around" doesn't always "come around", the concept of justice being served in an afterlife is wonderfully soothing. If, say, someone was killed and the murderer goes free, believing that the murderer will end up in hell might be the only way the victim's family can put their rage behind them and live a happy life. I remember realizing, "Even if hell didnt exist, people would invent the concept". How's that for a mid-process snapshot of my transition to disbeliever?! URL: http://members.fortunecity.com/wantobe/ldjil.html Date/Time: 09/07/2001 14:07:57 Over the years, I have spent many hours studying the Bible. My first efforts were directed at looking for solutions to the problem of textual inconsistencies and contradictions. I suppose my intention was to discover that there were no grounds for my skepticism, but the more I studied the Bible, the more I realized I would never resolve the problem of biblical discrepancies, because the truth is that the Bible is a collection of books written by uninspired, fallible men, and like all fallible men they made mistakes. They probably were sincere in their belief that they were writing as representatives of God, but their sincerity didn't make it so. The truth was a long time in coming, but finally I realized that God had had exactly nothing to do with the authorship of the Bible. URL: http://members.fortunecity.com/wantobe/ldjil.html Date/Time: 09/07/2001 14:04:37 Once the seeds of doubt had been planted in my mind, I began to see that the Bible wasn't a book with just a few problems; it was riddled with inconsistencies, discrepancies, contradictions, and absurdities. As long as I believed that the Bible was inerrant, for example, I was able to rationalize the barbaric nature of God as presented in the Old Testament. I accepted the premise that God was not immoral in ordering the massacre of children and babies (Num. 31:17; 1 Sam. 15:3), for if he could create life, he had the right to take life; if he killed children and babies in the heathen nations around Israel, he was actually doing them a favor, because they would go to heaven rather than grow up to be like their wicked parents. To my embarrassment and discredit, I have to admit that I actually preached this kind of stuff when I was a fundamentalist minister. Once my faith in inerrancy was shaken, however, I was able to see the folly of stupid attempts like these to justify the despicable conduct of the Hebrew god. When I crossed that line, I had gone too far ever to turn back again. URL: http://www.skeptictank.org/history.htm Date/Time: 09/06/2001 02:24:01 I soon discovered that, contrary to what I had been led to believe, no one knows who actually wrote the Christian mythologies and that scholars label fragments of the mythologies according to letters of the English alphabet, knowing full well that the names associated with the books in the mythologies are not the individuals who wrote them. It quickly became apparent that the classical Christian mythologies were anonymous forgeries which believers tout as having been written by "witnesses" to the "Jesus" mythos' existence. Contrary to having been written by or inspired by deity constructs, it easily was demonstrated how frail men contrived the myths and set them to stone and paper with little attention paid toward addressing contradictions and obvious scientific blunders. URL: http://www.skeptictank.org/history.htm Date/Time: 09/06/2001 02:22:54 I recall early childhood at a Catholic school in Baldwin Park, California, and the Authoritarian, ask-no-questions-I-can't-answer attitudes of the nuns at the school. The inability to answer questions honestly without glibly invoking magic has been a constant theme I've recognized through the years and my first exposure to that unthinking mind set was with these nuns who expressed amazed shock that I even had the audacity to ask questions. Needless to say, I learned nothing of educational value at Catholic school. My parents eventually enrolled me in the Public School system after they grew tired of the Authoritarianistic attributes of the nuns within the school. I learned the history of the Christian cult in High School. I think it's possible that the history teacher I had was often constrained against reviewing every bloody tyranny least he draw the wrath of parents who want to pretend it all never happened and doesn't still happen, but what he did show us was how to use the references he offered to research the history of the world and, by virtue of the wars and tyrannies inflicted upon the world by Christians, Muslims, Buddhists et al., learn the history of religion. And yes, I was and remain disgusted by what I learned of the truth. There has never been a Christian I talked with who would admit that Christianity has been historically evil by its own standards and the truth was as easy to find as opening honest, scholarly history books. URL: http://the-anointed-one.com/bbu85/guest.htm Date/Time: 09/05/2001 14:06:21 I am an ex-Christian fudamentalist who is extremely disillusioned. The more I learn about the bible and all its fallacies, contradictions, and pagan origins, the more sick I become. I clicked on one of your links that was anti-Pat Robertson and anti-christian coalition. Some of the quotes from Pat R. made me physically ill. This man, along with all other christians are extremely deluded and morally deranged. These christians are convinced that those of us who do not believe in the bible are infidels or are agents of the devil. In their deluded minds, everyone but them is responsible for society's ills. It seems to me they need to take a good hard look at all the damn sh*t they've put the world through in the name of their god and their religion. You can't tell them this though. In their madness, they can justify anything. URL: http://the-anointed-one.com/bbu85/guest.htm Date/Time: 09/05/2001 14:04:15 I was raised a Jehovahs Witness and remained one for my first 36 years. After breaking free of the cult, I have found Jesus. And guess what. He was just some guy that lived 2000 years ago. End of story. No virgin birth, no ransom sacrafice, no up in heaven with God thing. In the two years since I left the mental vacuume of christainity, I have become both a humanist and an athiest. It's taken a lot of effort and "soul" searching. I've read prolificly. Ingersol, Hume, Decartes, Sagan, Huxley, Paine, Jefferson, Dawkins, Aquinas, Voltare, Nietzschie, Russel, Darwin, even that idiot Behee, the list contines on and on. I am now a much better, kinder, and truly a happier person because of it. As Ludwig Borne said: "Losing an illusion makes you wiser than finding a truth." If thinking were as simple as believing then everyone would be faithful non-theists. URL: http://www.infidels.org/electronic/forum/ubbcgi/ultimatebb... Date/Time: 09/01/2001 21:46:26 Ron Garrett Secular Web Regular Member # 3575 posted August 23, 2001 07:26 AM Bede: Many have tried and none have succeeded in explaining away clear scriptural references to eternal torment in hell. Few Christians have seen a need to run away from these teachings until now when they can't threaten dissenters and critics into silence. Today, in a free society, Christianity must once again compete in the marketplace, and a god whose fragile ego requires the eternal torment of those who have displeased him creates an insurmountable image problem for a large number of people. What is frustrating you, I believe, is the number of us who are unwilling to allow you to repackage the vengeful and petulant Christian deity for greater user friendliness. The god of the scriptures, the one most Christians appear to accept without comment or examination, is not a Cosmic Care Bear. No matter how much liberals may try to filter out the "difficulties" it is the same blood-eating god. You can put him in penny loafers and a Mister Rogers Sweater, and he is still the same deity that once wiped out the planet by flood, made genocidal war against children and pregnant women, and is supposedly returning in wrath and fury to consign the bulk of us to eternal torment. In the end, once you convince yourself all the nastiness is misinterpreted and metaphorical, why is it so hard to accept that the pleasant sounding parts are bullsh*t as well? We don't need an invisible bogeyman creator. We never did. We don't have to continue in the unenlightened path carved out by squatting savages and priest-king despots. Adults should put such childishness behind them instead of desparately trying to convince the rest of the world to share in their dangerous delusions. Freedom from gods and engagement with the real world can be a beautiful thing. You should try it. URL: http://www.infidels.org/electronic/forum/ubbcgi/ultimatebb... Date/Time: 09/01/2001 21:41:46 Boshko Secular Web Regular Member # 3400 posted July 27, 2001 09:27 AM I was a very liberal Christian. Reading Asimov's Guide to the Bible pushed me a lot of the way towards Deism but what made my an atheist was internet discussions especially when all the insane and genocidal bits of the OT were dredged up. Having most online atheists be much nicer, more intelligent, and less pompous than online theists sure didn't hurt either. URL: http://www.infidels.org/electronic/forum/ubbcgi/ultimatebb... Date/Time: 08/26/2001 16:12:43 But in the universe set forth by Fundamentalist Christianity all but the small minority who died believing in Fundamentalist Christianity will burn forever in Hell. No matter whether they have been good people or bad people, no matter whether they came by their beliefs with much honest soul searching or through lazy acceptance of what they were told, they will burn forever. And the people who died as Christians will be basking in bliss. No matter whether they have been good people or bad people, no matter whether they came by their beliefs with much honest soul searching or through lazy acceptance of what they were told, they will bask in bliss forever. I don’t believe that the Christian universe exists, not for a second. But if it does, I will burn in Hell forever knowing that I am God’s moral superior, and not by just a little bit either. If the God postulated by Fundamentalist Christianity exists, then He is by far, more evil than any human being who has ever lived. URL: http://www.infidels.org/electronic/forum/ubbcgi/ultimatebb... Date/Time: 08/26/2001 16:11:19 I will say that my original starting point was the same as I imagine yours to have been. I was born and raised a Christian and was an avid believer for the first two decades of my life, even attending Bible College for a time. I did have questions, however, and they were never adequately answered. Eventually I came to believe that God gave me a brain to use and that that use was not just to accept what I was being told. The day that I came to reject Christianity came to me as an epiphany, if you will excuse the expression. I cannot express enough the joy that I felt when I realized that I was free to come to my own conclusions about, well…. life, the universe and everything (to quote one of the great philosophers of the previous century). I have spent the last thirty years doing just that and my joy in doing so has not diminished. URL: http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~slocks/why.html Date/Time: 06/29/2001 23:11:26 It seems to me now that the idea of hell [2] is so disgusting that it makes a mockery even of the most terrible horrors of WW2. For people to believe in it or even seriously entertain the idea makes me wonder if we have learnt anything about human compassion, cruelty and our real needs. It really seems to me that the idea is so vindictive and abhorrent that it is a very serious moral defect for anyone to believe in it with any kind of understanding of what it means. The fact that the church throughout the ages and that Jesus and St. Paul even entertained the idea, really makes it hard for me to believe them to be anything more than men caught up in the religious ideas of their time. I honestly cannot believe that anyone, not even God, has the right to send people to hell or even allow people to believe in it with such conviction. I do not think I will ever believe that the butchering guards at Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Auschwitz and the like were actually perfect and that what they did to Jews, gypsies and homosexuals is justice which I will someday have revealed to me as right. Neither do I think that I will ever believe that a God who lets this happen (and natural disasters) is perfect and I will realise when I meet him that "all will be well" and it is right that people go to hell. How more offensive and ignorant can a religion be?! Far too many people believe in hell. It is a dreadful and dark thing that makes people believe in holy damnation. The fact that Jesus, as depicted in the gospels, believed in hell is to me such a serious religious problem that it was one of the things that finally broke up my Christianity. What was going on in this book! As a liberally natured Christian I had never really believed in the existence of hell, or at least I shied away from hell thoughts, as it did not fit with my idea of a loving God. Rather I thought all this hell talk must mean something else. But the problem was that there was so much of it in the NT and the fact that God seemed to allow the doctrine to be so popular within the church did bother me very much, as did the fact that if Jesus & St. Paul etc. really didn't believe in literal hell then the fact that they didn't make it abundantly transparent that they meant something else was just utterly culpable irresponsibility to me, so abhorrent is the merest sniff of that doctrine and so dreadful the consequences of Christians believing it down the ages. [2] This was the last straw. I had already found so much in philosophy, [3] psychology [4], history [5], biblical criticism and comparative religion that raised such serious questions for religious beliefs that eventually the bubble had to burst. Like suddenly seeing the solution to a mathematical problem that has so far been intractable and is now totally clear, I realised that Christianity and my feelings were all the results of messy human history, sociology and our psychological tangle with all its desire, hopes and fears. I didn't choose to suddenly believe this. It was just inescapable. I had allowed myself to ask if Christianity made more sense, and was at least equally rich if it was not of God, and overwhelmingly this was what I found. Neither did Christianity seem truly good. I summed it up at the time by saying that religion is "human and natural, not divine and supernatural."

Tekministry@aol.com Most recent update: 7/16/02