2000 years of lies
sent in by David Maas
I have decided to write about how I left. I was born into a Christian family. I went to a Christian school from K to 12, so I had 13 years of day in day out indoctrination. The church I was brought up in was the Christian Reform church and I was treated quite well. My family was poor and they did help us out a lot financially, so we wouldn't become homeless and go hungry. This also one of the reasons I stayed a Christian so long.
My deconversion started when I was quite young. My first memory of questioning the Bible was when I was in Kindergarten. The teacher was reading to us a story about dinosaurs, and there was a line in the story the said something like "millions of years before man dinosaurs roamed the earth." Well my school taught that creation took only 6 days, so I asked, "How can this be true, if it only took 6 days to create the world?" The teacher said that she didn't know and that was that. I was always very suspicious of many things taught to me as a child. I can remember a lot of little things that didn't make any sense from the Bible. I really felt sorry for the Canaanites in the Old Test. I really felt God was a mean and cruel god. I also thought that if God is all powerful, why did he have to kill his son for us? If God is all knowing, why then did he make us knowing most of us would end up in hell? As a young child I thought about all those things.
College was the best thing for me since it exposed me to people who weren?t Christian. I also really start to dislike most Christians during college. I found them boring, petty, judgmental and two faced; so most my friends were not Christians. I felt bad that they were all going to hell if they didn't convert. I thought God was really unfair to them. They were good people and more loving to others them most of my Christians acquaintances. Also, I was friends with a lot of gays and lesbians and according to the Bible they were the worse people and going straight to hell.
After college I started to acknowledge that most of the Bible was not literally true. It all started when a friend of mine pointed out to me that if God is love then all my unbelieving friends will not go to hell. Since God is perfect and I am not perfect and I don't want them to go hell then he most definitely doesn?t want them to go to hell and won't send them to hell. It took awhile for me to believe this since I was a literalist at the time. I would have say around this time I became a liberal Christian and stayed that way for several years. I even found a church that was liberal enough for me. They believed that everyone could get to heaven, but Christianity was the better way because it didn't demand works. I could live with this, and got quite involved with that church.
About 3 years ago I moved to Singapore. At first I went to my wife's church. This is when I really started to see what Christianity is really like. Her church preaches what I call a message of hate. It is a hate for yourself and others. The minister would always preach about how you are not good enough and no matter how hard you try you will never be good enough. He would also preach that God isn't answering your prayers because you don't pray right. This church also followed various methods of mind of control. The music would be so loud you could not even hear yourself sing. Also, they would repeat the song about 10 times before they would stop. This would go on for about 45 minutes, and by the end everyone would be so wired and their brains would be fried. Also, this church teaches that you are not supposed to trust your own reason and everything that you think is wrong. This really pissed me off since I am engineer/scientist and everything I think generally involves logic and reason.
After a few months I stopped going to that church and my wife goes by herself. I tried finding a liberal church, but in Singapore there is none. Since I had no one to guide me spiritually, I started to read books about Christianity and its history as a way to fill the void. What I found made me leave Christianity all together. It is all pretty much a fairy tale. It is a message of hate and anger. It is about a petty god and who is more akin to what people think Satan is. The people who put the Bible together were a bunch of evil men who wanted power and hate women. Christianity has killed more people then any other religion. After reading all this history, I get sick when I think about Christianity. It should be destroyed, since it is destroying everything else.
So I haven't been a Christian for about 1.5 years. My wife knows I am not a Christian and it makes her very sad since to her I am going to hell. Also, it ruined her dreams about having a perfect family. For her sake sometimes I wish I could go back, but I can't. Now I hope that she can someday see the light and leave the church, but all her friends are there, so there is a great social pressure for her to stay.
Thanks for reading my story. I still have a lot of anger towards Christianity. I do believe Christians need our understanding and help since many of them have been broken by their churches to think they are worthless and unworthy of happiness and anything good.
Singapore
Born into it
33
Was: Christian Reformed, Methodist
Converted because: There might be something out there
De-converted because: History and reason killed it!
Email: dmaas15ATYahoo_dot_com
I have decided to write about how I left. I was born into a Christian family. I went to a Christian school from K to 12, so I had 13 years of day in day out indoctrination. The church I was brought up in was the Christian Reform church and I was treated quite well. My family was poor and they did help us out a lot financially, so we wouldn't become homeless and go hungry. This also one of the reasons I stayed a Christian so long.
My deconversion started when I was quite young. My first memory of questioning the Bible was when I was in Kindergarten. The teacher was reading to us a story about dinosaurs, and there was a line in the story the said something like "millions of years before man dinosaurs roamed the earth." Well my school taught that creation took only 6 days, so I asked, "How can this be true, if it only took 6 days to create the world?" The teacher said that she didn't know and that was that. I was always very suspicious of many things taught to me as a child. I can remember a lot of little things that didn't make any sense from the Bible. I really felt sorry for the Canaanites in the Old Test. I really felt God was a mean and cruel god. I also thought that if God is all powerful, why did he have to kill his son for us? If God is all knowing, why then did he make us knowing most of us would end up in hell? As a young child I thought about all those things.
College was the best thing for me since it exposed me to people who weren?t Christian. I also really start to dislike most Christians during college. I found them boring, petty, judgmental and two faced; so most my friends were not Christians. I felt bad that they were all going to hell if they didn't convert. I thought God was really unfair to them. They were good people and more loving to others them most of my Christians acquaintances. Also, I was friends with a lot of gays and lesbians and according to the Bible they were the worse people and going straight to hell.
After college I started to acknowledge that most of the Bible was not literally true. It all started when a friend of mine pointed out to me that if God is love then all my unbelieving friends will not go to hell. Since God is perfect and I am not perfect and I don't want them to go hell then he most definitely doesn?t want them to go to hell and won't send them to hell. It took awhile for me to believe this since I was a literalist at the time. I would have say around this time I became a liberal Christian and stayed that way for several years. I even found a church that was liberal enough for me. They believed that everyone could get to heaven, but Christianity was the better way because it didn't demand works. I could live with this, and got quite involved with that church.
About 3 years ago I moved to Singapore. At first I went to my wife's church. This is when I really started to see what Christianity is really like. Her church preaches what I call a message of hate. It is a hate for yourself and others. The minister would always preach about how you are not good enough and no matter how hard you try you will never be good enough. He would also preach that God isn't answering your prayers because you don't pray right. This church also followed various methods of mind of control. The music would be so loud you could not even hear yourself sing. Also, they would repeat the song about 10 times before they would stop. This would go on for about 45 minutes, and by the end everyone would be so wired and their brains would be fried. Also, this church teaches that you are not supposed to trust your own reason and everything that you think is wrong. This really pissed me off since I am engineer/scientist and everything I think generally involves logic and reason.
After a few months I stopped going to that church and my wife goes by herself. I tried finding a liberal church, but in Singapore there is none. Since I had no one to guide me spiritually, I started to read books about Christianity and its history as a way to fill the void. What I found made me leave Christianity all together. It is all pretty much a fairy tale. It is a message of hate and anger. It is about a petty god and who is more akin to what people think Satan is. The people who put the Bible together were a bunch of evil men who wanted power and hate women. Christianity has killed more people then any other religion. After reading all this history, I get sick when I think about Christianity. It should be destroyed, since it is destroying everything else.
So I haven't been a Christian for about 1.5 years. My wife knows I am not a Christian and it makes her very sad since to her I am going to hell. Also, it ruined her dreams about having a perfect family. For her sake sometimes I wish I could go back, but I can't. Now I hope that she can someday see the light and leave the church, but all her friends are there, so there is a great social pressure for her to stay.
Thanks for reading my story. I still have a lot of anger towards Christianity. I do believe Christians need our understanding and help since many of them have been broken by their churches to think they are worthless and unworthy of happiness and anything good.
Singapore
Born into it
33
Was: Christian Reformed, Methodist
Converted because: There might be something out there
De-converted because: History and reason killed it!
Email: dmaas15ATYahoo_dot_com
Comments
David: Welcome to the community. You are among friends. I agree with you completely regarding Christians' views of anyone who thinks analytically. I myself, don't have a problem with using our imaginations and trying to search for answers or trying to search for a God if one exists. I am not so scientifically minded that I can't imagine a world beyond ours or a mind or minds more intelligent than ours. I am not so rational that I can't imagine another race altogether. In other words, I am not so narrow minded that I am unwilling to accept the possiblity of Something More than what we know, something Bigger, Something even more beautiful, and Something even more complex than our minds can fathom BUT to organize these musings and attach a creed, a set of rules and dogma, and claim that it is THE ONLY WAY, THE ONLY ANSWER, and if one doesn't submit to these beliefs they will go to a make-believe Hell that I only conjured up in my mind to make others conform. We can't have a bunch of people going around dreaming their own dreams now can we? We can't have a bunch of people adding their own musings to the mix now can we?
I can relate to your experience in the Singapore church. I have frequented churches that had bands that were so loud you couldn't hear yourself praying in your own mind! THey DO repeat the same lyrics over and over and over for like twenty minutes while people fall out "in the Spirit" all over the place. While people are laying all over the floor, others are speaking in "tongues". The whole time I would be longing for an escape.
Honestly, I don't know which religion gets the prize for killing the most since it is so hard to count the bodies after all these years, but from my readings Muslims, Jews, and Christians are very much into killing people when they disagree with them. I guess it is something about the desert and the heat. Thanks for sugesting those books since I have been looking for a starting place in getting an understanding of Islam.
Dave
I wish I could tell you that it would be better if you were in North America, but the truth is that it is lonely here too.
For me, this site and the sister site with the forums (ex-christian.net) have been a life saver.
The book "Leaving the Fold" by Marlene Winell also helped a lot.
I have to say that the best you can do is listen to yourself, believe in yourself, follow your hunches. Interestingly enough, that is what Buddhism is all about. There are lots of Buddhists in Singapore. Maybe you can find refuge with them.
Buddhism isn't a religion. It is a philosophy. That's why its followers don't go around killing people in its name.
Good luck to you whatever you decide to do.
Tell your wife, if there is a hell not to worry, because invisible souls cannot be burned, because they have no eyes or ears or nerve endings, because they are invisible. A soul is supposed to be a spirit, a ghost! How many ghosts come back complaining about the heat in hell, not very many...lol
She could be doing something else with her time instead of worring about a 2000 year old mythlogical fable, called hell. TC, Ben
' Obviously won't happen in our lifetime, yet, in another 2000 years, or so(if the earth is still here and it is still inhabitable by humans), they may look back in history at Christianity and scoff, the very same way that Christians now scoff at Osiris, Toth, and Ra.(Father, Son, Ghost?) lol
Think about it.
It's beginning to effect my health.Of course my divorce,deconversion,and custody battle happened all at once.I lost my friends(church),spouse and four kids all at once.That was two years ago. I have almost fullied recovered,...except some anger(watching these con-artist t.v. preachers)! That usually equals out with the laughter of listening to their ridiculous rantings.
Boomslang,.....your right unfortunately,there's a sucker born every minute,....Christianity and literalist religions are here to stay for many years to come!
I know you were speaking figuatively, Freedy......notwithstanding, we are NOT born "suckers" anymore than we are born "Christian". Christianity is a learned philosophy, and it requires one to suspend logic in order to maintain that belief...so I suppose being a "sucker" is a learned characteristic, too. = )
BTW, we're all either Agnostic, Atheist, or "God". I mean, to "KNOW" that God exists, one must be omniscient/omnipotent themselves(God). If one has "Faith" in God, then one cannot "KNOW" that God exists---for not knowing, or better put, "I don't know" = Agnostic. If one has no belief in God(s), then one is Atheist----the way they were born.
Take care.
Naomi
freely: I hope it doesn't turn out that way with my wife and me. I am usually the one upset with her. She will talk about all the "weird" stuff that is going on in her church as away to try to bring me back to her church at times. When she talks about it I usually get quite upset since most of it can be explained away. The classic ones usually involve someone getting healed of a cold or something. Commonly those testemonies go something this, "Last week I had a cold, I prayed to God everyday and several days later I got better. Praise God for the healing." It is like those people have no idea how the body works. However, she is starting to see that some of the miracles are not really miracles, but just the way nature works.
One of the things that led me to write my deconversion is the fighting going on the middle east. I want to seperate myself from any religion involved it in anyway. Since I know of no other way I desided to write my deconversion and post it here at exchristian.
Thanks,
Dave
I too am thankful to "Boomslang" to remind me of my christian heritage,..I'm not a sucker ,....thanks
David,..I too am an agnostic,...don't except a huge amount of support in this area ,..but remember,.. this is one sanctuary you can rely on to get you thru the lonely nights of non-religious neo-support your used too! Love , peace,...freedy
**** I've found agnostics and atheists to operate on a very even level here!I
hope this continues!
One of the things that led me to write my deconversion is the fighting going on the middle east. I want to seperate myself from any religion involved it in anyway. Since I know of no other way I desided to write my deconversion and post it here at exchristian.
Well since you brought it up, where the Hell is Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, etc?
God's chosen people, The Jews!!!!!
Why aren't those fat ass preachers over there praying or shooting back or something?
Because they are all over here on their fat asses counting their money that's why, they could give a diddly damn about Israel or Hamass or who the fuck ever!
God's chosen people! What a crock of dogshit, the Jews shot a rocket over to Palistine or wherever and killed a bunch of children, but that's OK Jesus is waiting for them in open arms, so keep just keep killing civilians and little children, God understands, God's chosen people, eat shit you filthy Christians and Jews, you need a Hell for yourself I hope you get a Hell, you low life scum, you fucktard cretins.
Firstly, if we "never know", then why are you acting like you DO know? What we "know", is that "cause" is an idea that takes place IN time--it's temporal, yet, your God is presumed to be atemporal. As usual, more contradictions.
"The world needs a saviour. you, me and the world can't save ourselves coz we're too filthy."
Again, if we adhere to the notion that your God is an all-powerful omniscient being, then it would stand to reason that we turned out PRECISELY as your God intended. If there is fault because of human-kind's "filthy" nature?....then it falls into the lap of YOUR biblegod. Furthermore, when you come here speaking of "filth", please speak ONLY for yourself, okay? Thanks. While we're on the subject---if my worst offenses in my lifetime are traffic violations, cutting in line, stealing a candy bar, screening my phone calls, and not believing in what I cannot see?.....I hardly think that falls into the realm of "filthy", nor does it warrant me being thrown in a fire.
heya people.. Christianity is all about relationship between God and man.
Ok, what verse in the Bible that says this????
God has never lost his power, he neither sleeps. 6 days that is written in the bible doesnt really literally mean 6 days. God's day may be like e.g. 10000 hrs, in his time. we never know.
Ok, what verse in the Bible says this????
I agree, even up to now, we're filthy man, no one is ever perfect agree? And we truly ain't fit for Heaven. But God counts us worthy to die for, for some reason. Well.. The world needs a saviour. you, me and the world can't save ourselves coz we're too filthy.
Ok if we're filthy, we take a bath, so speak for yourself!
another Idiot fundy!!!!!