Month: August 2011

  • Oklahoma Freethought Convention 2011 – AronRa

  • How I came to be an Atheist


    I had a friend email me and ask me “I was just wondering if you could share your story with me how and why you decided to leave Christianity behind?  Was it a gradual process over the years or did it happen ‘overnight’?“

    This is what I wrote to her and thought I would share it with all of you too.

    My journey to leaving Christianity behind has been taken by some to be a short process but the reality of it has been more, in my opinion, of a long drawn out process and this explanation will probably be longer than you probably intended an answer. But I want to give you the best answer I can so you understand.

     
    The reality is when I started I really had no intention of leaving Christianity behind. The idea that I would be where I am today was the farthest outcome that I had expected me to be in. In fact I tried really hard to cling to Christianity through the whole process.
     
    For me the process began with our movement toward Messianic Judaism. Traditional Christianity in most ways seemed wrong….like something was missing. My thought was that if I believed that god existed then I believed that he desired me to be the best Christian that I could be. So my journey began with the thought of “what are god’s expectations for a Christian to be one of his followers?”
     
    That brought me into Kosher Law,  Sabbath Law, Gentile requirements and the like. I gladly started to understand some of the laws and started to apply them to my life. I applied them to my life because I thought they were the will of god and had no ill or bad feelings about doing such things….in fact I found joy in them.
     
    It was around this time, that I seemed be reading blogs on various Biblical issues and saw that each issue had numerous answers most in conflict with each other. At the time, I viewed such discrepancies as more of a political stance of the specific church of the person making the comment. So, that lead me to the question “What was the real stance for Christians to take on those issues?”  I mean if we are of one body….we should be of one mind and Christianity reminded me of a body with Multiple Personality Disorder. So it was back to the question “What does god want?”
     
    You would think that answers would be easy, I mean we had the book that had all the answers….but that could not have been further from the truth. Finding answers was hard. Each issue had multiple bible verses and each Bible verse had to be taken to its original Greek Hebrew or Aramaic. In the end, I found out that there was some issues that when all boiled down had conflicting answers. Some Hebrew and Greek words have no English definitions meaning that we really don’t know what it actually meant…bible scholars just took what ever they thought it meant or what ever the cause was for the church of that century.
     
    This brought me to the question…..”If they did that, what else could have been tweaked to serve their own reasons?” the answer for me was “Start at the beginning and find our the truth…..Genesis here I come.
     
    Some of the rules I had was …
    1. All scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, correcting, rebuking and training in righteousness. Which leads to number two
    2. All stances had to be supported by other verses besides just one and all verses had to be taken in context.
     
    I had a few others but these were the most important….
     
    Genesis was where the axis started tipping.  Obviously the first issue to come up was the old Evolution verses Creation Debate. Having gone to a Mennonite school…Evolution was not in the curriculum. So I basically was able to start at square one.  I acquired all the books, blogs, Websites and debates I could on the subject of evolution and creation. This process was long and for every point made for evolution there was an answer for creation and visa versa. Then I read a book by of all people Richard Dawkin’s called ” The Greatest Show On Earth” I was hesitant about reading this because he was a staunch atheist who has a very I would say strong but strong is an understatement, view against god. But I found his book to be strongly informative. It made a very compelling case for evolution and the evolutionary process. It cited experiments that could be researched and you could see if the same conclusions he stated were the conclusions of the scientists as well. This book was the turning point to my acceptance of evolutions ….over time I accepted evolution as fact and creation was a myth.
     
    Up until this point I still wrote on my blog like there was nothing wrong….bible studies….but sometimes my questions and doubts shone through.
     
    From there the questions kept coming like …..If creation was a myth what about Adam and eve and marriage?….who can get married?…… Did god create evil?…..Why does god allow bad things?…….if god doesn’t do bad things why does seem to be oblivious to some Christians in times of extreme distress?….why are we called to be fruitful and multiply and yet some godly people left barren?…..is slavery really wrong?….what is the role of women in christianity?….
     
    For every question….there was enough material to make your head spin and you had to dig for an answer…. eventually it finally came down to there were a lot of conflicting answers (and sometimes no answers) for the first time I asked myself “What if god was not real….What if god really isn’t there? …..I was conflicted had I spent all this time to find what god wanted to only find out that god might not exist.
     
    So my efforts now turned to the conflicts that nonchristians had with the bible…..I figured that this was a do or die situation….. Either I was gonna prove to myself that god existed or it was just a myth…..again i went to books, blogs, websites and debates….and again I had enough material to go through……..eventually over time the Christian self was eroded away until one day I came to the conclusion ….Christianity is a myth…..and bye golly, I’m an
    atheist…………So the short answer is my journey from Christianity was because of the search for truth……

  • Movies, indoctrination and thinking oh my

    During the weekend I took the time to watch Speaker number 3 of the 2011 Oklahoma Freethought  Convention. Speaker number 3 was The Thinking Atheist. The Thinking Atheist is a former Christian of 30 years (and former religious broadcaster).

    In his session  he said something that caught my attention. He was talking about a film series called “A thief in the night” along with the series of movies that followed and He said concerning the film series ….

    ” I’m an impressionable kid, I’m in eight grade and raised by theologian parents, primed to receive this information as truth. So, they show a thief in the night to us. An impressive military style roundup of those who accepted Jesus after the rapture, right….it’s not to late. Jesus comes and raptures the people. You who are left can still make that choice. Those who choose Christ after the others were raptured were rounded up by vans, taken to a public square and executed by guillotine. Here is a scene from the film….

    I was a child. This was my choice. Love God or look out.  I now see this and I don’t say this lightly, I now see this as psychological abuse. The film series depicted the incarceration and execution (Loud Applause)  I always hesitate, just a second, when I say the word abuse because I fear someone will feel I am minimizing cases of abuse and I really do believe that this is ….this is damaging…it’s unfair to do this to children.”

    I, in some ways, agree with this assertion. I saw those movies as a child. The series of movies were

    A Thief in the Night (1972)
    A Distant Thunder (1978)
    Image of the Beast (1980)
    The Prodigal Planet (1983)

    They showed it at the church that my family was attending and I would have to say that some of those images had stuck with me my whole life. For  instance the bodies being carried away and the fact that the little boy was told he was going to be killed and he was going to be free because he knew Jesus.

    If you want to see the part of the movie with the little boy here it is…..

    The movie had a profound impact on the future of my life. I remember that I had bad dreams from the movies and me understanding that I had to be a christian to be saved from what I saw on the film. I was afraid and it was that fear that, looking  back on it now, lead me to my first steps of becoming a Christian.

    As I think about these movies and the tactics of scaring children into a belief. I don’t want my children to be scared in to the belief of anything. I want my children to be freethinkers. If they believe or understand anything I want it to be out of knowledge and not out of fear.  I want my children to search for answers and if in the end they believe in a or many gods …that’s what they believe in.

    The Thinking Atheist then paints the larger picture with a Barna Group study that said that 2 out of 3 people who accept Christ do so before their thirteenth birthday. He continued to state that this is about getting children when they are young.  This is about scaring a child to believe in something, then continuing  to reaffirm that belief through indoctrination, so that when that child grows up they will not question those beliefs. I agree with the Thinking Atheist when he said that

    “What they are really saying is that we are so afraid of a contrary opinion, we are so afaid that what we are teaching you will fold when a counter argument shows up that we have to make the imprint early and we have to keep imprinting until you are an adult.”

    So where do we go from here …i really don’t know but I do believe this …

    I think that people should follow something not because they have been scared and indoctrinated with it from childhood on up but because they have studied and believe because that is what the facts and evidence say. Many people tend to count feelings as evidence. Counting feelings as evidence is a gross misappropriation of the word. Feelings are unequivocally not evidence. We all have feelings about things, and sometimes they turn out to be right and sometimes they don’t. Feelings must be backed up by evidence otherwise you can not trust them.

  • A world filled with wonder

  • Oklahoma Freethought Convention

  • Should there be gay characters on children’s television?

    Should there be gay characters on children’s television? This is something that CNN is talking and reading some of the responses make me sick.

    First here is what I said


    Here are some comments that made my jaw drop…..












    What are your thoughts??
    Should there be gay characters on children’s television?

  • Bullet

  • No Return

    Weißt du noch, wie’s war,
    Kinderzeit, wunderbar,
    Die Welt ist bunt und schön.
    Bis du irgendwann begreifst,
    Dass nicht jeder Abschied heißt,
    Es gibt auch ein Wiedersehn.

    Immer vorwärts, Schritt um Schritt,
    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr ungeschehn.
    Die Zeit läuft uns davon,
    was getan ist, ist getan.
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr so geschehn.
    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück

    Ein Wort zuviel im Zorn gesagt,
    Schritt zu weit nach vorn gewagt,
    Schon ist es vorbei.
    Was auch immer jetzt getan,
    was ich gesagt hab’ ist gesagt
    und was wie ewig schien ist schon Vergangenheit.

    Immer vorwärts, Schritt um Schritt,
    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück,
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr ungeschehn.
    Die Zeit läuft uns davon,
    was getan ist, ist getan,
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr so geschehn.

    Ach und könnt’ ich doch nur ein einz’ges Mal
    die Uhren rückwärts drehen!
    Denn wie viel von dem,
    was ich heute weiß,
    hätt’ ich lieber nie gesehn.

    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück.

    Dein Leben dreht sich nur im Kreis,
    so voll von weggeworfner Zeit,
    Und deine Träume schiebst du endlos vor dir her.
    Du willst noch leben, irgendwann,
    Doch wenn nicht heute, wann denn dann?
    Denn irgendwann ist auch ein Traum zu lange her.

    Immer vorwärts, Schritt um Schritt,
    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück.
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr ungeschehn.
    Die Zeit läuft uns davon,
    was getan ist, ist getan,
    Und was jetzt ist, wird nie mehr so geschehn.

    Ach und könnt’ ich doch nur ein einz’ges Mal
    die Uhren rückwärts drehen,
    Denn wie viel von dem,
    was ich heute weiß,
    hätt’ ich lieber nie gesehn.

    Es gibt keinen Weg zurück.

    Always forward, step by step,
    there is no way back,
    and what is now,
    can never be undone.

    Your life is just running in circles,
    full of time, carelessly thrown away,
    you procrastinate your dreams endlessly.
    Someday, you intend to live,
    but when if not today?
    For one day even a dream is too long gone.

  • Happy Birthday

    Today is the birthday of @BarryDadof3



    If you want to wish him a happy birthday you can head to his page and let him know….
    http://barrydadof3.xanga.com/pulse/13528836/item.html

  • De-Conversion Stories