sent in by The MadBuni

I found your website a few months ago and subscribed to the posts, now I am addicted to getting my emails as soon as I get home from work to find out the latest topic of discussion. I knew all the sane people were hiding somewhere and I just found them! What a relief!

I rarely have enough time to stay online long enough to post anything, because my husband breathes down my neck when I am typing messages, he thinks I’m having an internet affair if I spend any time on the computer, but he is computer illiterate. He is also what I fondly refer to as a PIMA (pain in my ass). I love him, hell we’ve been together since 1967, I just can’t stand to live with him most of the time. Our son says we should have divorced long ago. Why don’t I leave? I love to spend money, and two incomes are better than one.

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For those interested in listening to some interesting discussions and debates, you might try visiting Derek Sansone's site.

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I am sorry about your journey away from Christianity, but perhaps it was a journey away from a childish faith that needed to mature. (Many adults have never grown beyond a childish faith.)

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sent in by Jennifer

To begin with, I started dating my boyfriend(who is now my husband) when I was 16.

His family is very religious and they don't believe that it's a good idea for anyone of differing religious views to be together.

My family for the most part let me and my brother choose what we want to believe in. I guess you could say I was open to Christianity and liked what I heard. So at the age of 16 I accecpted Christ. At no point after I accepted Christ did I feel different, or did I necessarily stop making wrong decisions. I never really expected to.

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sent in by Joe

I was raised in an Assemblies of God church in upstate NY since I was born. My parents are devout born-again Christians and have forced…um...highly encouraged me to attend all services (negatively termed indoctrination sessions) and to live my life for Christ until I finally moved out of the house. I can remember when I was a young boy and had asked my father if he also had a stomach ache every time we went to church. It never felt comfortable for me there but all I knew was to obey my parents and do as I was told. I loved and trusted my parents and wanted to please them very much. I honestly believed in everything that was taught to me and was a self-proclaimed Christian by age 4.

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sent in by Chuck S.

My name is Chuck S. and at the age of 23 I became a Christian out of a sense of hopelessness in life and a fear of death. Though I was young I had bouts of depression mainly because of drug and alcohol use that left me in morbid states of mind and I turned to Jesus as a means to eternal life and to reach peace of mind in this life.

I started out with a small Baptist group in Baltimore Maryland where I graduated from college and from there joined another Baptist group in northern Virginia near Washington D.C. when I moved down to the D.C. area for a job as a stock broker.

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(Click here to listen!)

This is not "new" material, most visitors here have already seen it, and I believe it originated from here: http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.php. There you can also download a .pdf version to carry with you and a nicely "sanatized" version (no cuss words) for distribution to your easily offended fundy relatives and friends.

Anyway, if you haven't seen this before, enjoy.



This morning there was a knock at my door. When I answered the door I found a well groomed, nicely dressed couple. The man spoke first:

John: "Hi! I'm John, and this is Mary."

Mary: "Hi! We're here to invite you to come kiss Hank's ass with us."

Me: "Pardon me?! What are you talking about? Who's Hank, and why would I want to kiss His ass?"

John: "If you kiss Hank's ass, He'll give you a million dollars; and if you don't, He'll kick the shit out of you."

Me: "What? Is this some sort of bizarre mob shake-down?"

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sent in by Claywise

My story is frankly a lot less fascinating than that of many posters here. But I have finally decided to lay it out.

We went to Catholic Church when I was a kid. I went to CCD -- got in trouble once for swiping unconsecrated Communion hosts with a friend! -- but my father was more or less an agnostic who had himself thrown off his Catholic straightjacket and only went to church on holidays to please my mother. My mom was never a radical, or hard core, but she went to church because, well, that's what nice American families did.

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I take it you are one in the same. Excuse me if I am in error.

I have read through your intro as to why you are where you are in life, in regards to christianity. I must admit that I found your life story,[ up to the place that you are at now] quite an emotional one. I was amazed at your willingness and earnestness to continue your search for truth, despite so many twists and turns in your life. If I did not know better I would of thought that you would be at a much differant place than you are now.

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Unlike you, I was raised in a non-religious household. My father vocally and vociferously despised all organized religion and its attendant hypocrisies, and my mother had no interest whatsoever. I consider I had a very carefree childhood in that respect, no fears of holy ghosts or anything of the sort. I have read a lot of books about Christianity and other religions and have had enough losses in my life to be tempted by the thought of life after death, but education, observation and common sense have always won out and I have never converted to any religion.

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sent in by Red

De-conversion 1.

My parents were “born again” when I was five years old. They quickly became zealots. They used our house for church gatherings and backyard bible study. People were constantly coming and going. My parents became extremely active in their zealotry, witnessing door to door and going to church three times a week This was the mid-seventies and I have nostalgic memories of the long-haired Jesus freaks coming over with their sandals and guitars. At this age I picked up and filtered the messages I was hearing at church: we are the best church, we are saved and others are not, we are good and they are bad. I was five when I formally accepted Jesus Christ into my heart. In elementary school, I was an active crusader, genuinely concerned about my schoolmates’ souls.

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Hello,

I wish to say that, although you may not be able to control it entirely, I am offended by the occasional, unmonitored anti-Semitism on this site. "Hebrew Demon God" being one of the expressions I see used frequently. Yes, the OT is an outdated, violent book. But the Jewish people have LONG ago stopped practicing any of the more primitive and vengeful things in it; unlike, dare I say, some other religions. And about the OT, as Jewish thought developed, the tales are usually regarded either as a grim moral tales about the fallibility of man, or otherwise tales of Jewish history, or semi-pseudo-history if you like.

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sent in by Chris

I thought that I had posted this once before, but could never find it when I looked. So if this is a repeat, forgive me.

I was, unfortunately, born into a family with a very typical southern attitude toward religion. What might that attitude be? Well, in my experience, that attitude is that Christianity offers the only answers to the mysteries of life; we as humans are simply unable to understand those mysteries and should therefore simply accept Christianity without question, bathing in the opulent light and love of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. Well, as Penn and Teller so eloquently put it on their Showtime program, “Humbug!” Again unfortunately, I was forced into this mindset at a very young age. I suppose you could say that my programming began at birth.


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sent in by Richard Moore

My name is Richard Moore and I am thankfully an ex Christian. I was raised in the very fundamentalist Southern Baptist Church. When I was too young to walk to Church, I was carried. There followed many years of Sunday School, worship service, vacation Bible schools, and summer youth camps. The pressure to believe is intense, and I was baptized at about the age of twelve. Christians must believe blindly and have faith without proof and doubts must be suppressed. Of course a single doubt or the wrong question can destroy the Christian programming.

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sent in by Tyson

Wow! Where do I even start? I want to try to make this as short as possible if I can.

Ok, I was born on St. Thomas United States Virgin Islands and raised 150 miles southeast on an island known as St. Kitts (Christopher). From the time I knew myself, I was going to church because I went to St. Kitts when I was 6 months old.

My grandmother raised me Catholic and you guys have got to realize that 30 years ago, the Caribbean was a bastion of Christianity of all types of faith. Slavery's legacy of learning the religion of the slavemaster for 400 years was deeply entrenched. I don't even remember Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, Wiccans or Hindus in the community much less the island. You were either Catholic, Methodist, Lutheran, Moravian, Baptist or Pentecostal.

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Christian Pop stars, Christian Pop music, Christian Pop radio, Christian Pop boy bands, Christian Pop girl bands, Christian Pop idols - sexy, young, rumpled and unshaven, Christian .... well you get the picture.

There's money in them there CD buying "Christians" and they be a spending and a spending.

Why should the "Christian" artists get all the bucks? It's time for the competing "truths" to fight back!

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sent in by John Blatt

My name is John Blatt and I am an ex-christian. The process of leaving christianity took a good two years, but now I am finally free from that fear and guilt-based Cult. Fundamentalist Christianity is literally a destructive mind-control cult and the bible is primarily a series of psychological documents. It took many years to finally come to see this reality, because I didn't want it to be so. No one in the Cult can see with straight vision, thus, the more devoted and zealous one is for christianity the more blind they are to its psychological and spiritual destruction and control.

I became a born-again christian at the age of twenty while I was in the U.S. Air Force in May of 1992.

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by John W. Loftus

What if I’m wrong about Christianity? What then? Well, then I will go to hell, however conceived, when I die. And what did I do to deserve to go to hell? I sinned and I didn’t believe in Jesus’ atonement, however conceived, and in his bodily resurrection from the grave.

Whose fault would this be? Mine? I have honest doubts. Am I to be blamed because I couldn’t understand Christianity? I tried with everything in me. I even spent several years earning three master’s degrees and studies in a Ph.D. program to figure my faith out.

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By RACHEL ZOLL, AP Religion Writer
Mon Jun 6, 7:33 AM ET
link

Religious devotion sets the United States apart from some of its closest allies. Americans profess unquestioning belief in God and are far more willing to mix faith and politics than people in other countries, AP-Ipsos polling found.

In Western Europe, where Pope Benedict XVI complains that growing secularism has left churches unfilled on Sundays, people are the least devout among the 10 countries surveyed for The Associated Press by Ipsos.

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The Evangelicals are finally up in arms about "Christian" con-artist Benny Hinn.

Finally.

And why? Because he's making a fortune!

I wonder if he'd decided to remain "officially" poor like the Pontiff, would the "Christians" be as concerned? The well documented "fake" miracles of the Catholic Church over the last centuries could fill innumerable volumes, yet no one seems particularly distraught over their lies.

Hmm...

I wonder if Benny was always a faker, or he just suddenly slid into that role? The reason I ask the silly question is because I distinctly remember Benny receiving public acknowledgment from Billy Graham several few years ago. If Billy approves, he's gotta be good!

Anyway, enough of the sarcastic commentary. click Here to read about it and watch a video.

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sent in by Brandon

One of my earliest memories is of being "saved" in my church when I was six years old. I remember feeling that I absolutely must accept Jesus into my heart to let him forgive me of my sins, so that I could live in Heaven forever with Him. It was a powerful emotional experience. I felt like I was bathed in the light of the creator of all things, that I had found the ultimate truth.

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The name of the Lord may no longer be taken in vain in the Dutch village of Staphorst.

Staphorst, in the so-called Dutch "bible belt" of eastern towns where religion holds sway, approved a ban on swearing by 13-4 council votes.

But the caveat that swearing is not banned when it is an expression of the constitutional freedom of speech may make it difficult to punish offenders.

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sent in by William E. Wallace

Hi, thanks for listening to my story! Here it is...

I was adopted into a 'good christian home" here in good ole South Mississippi. I was raised in the Methodist church from six years old through my teens. Even at the age of six I had one question 'Who made God?" No one could ever give me a satisfactory answer, I could feel their lack of knowledge, some even suggested "You don't ask questions like that". Even as a kid i knew, everything comes from somewhere and the lousy answer to my one simple question was a lie.

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sent in by chris

The background:

I have a friend who is, well, a fundy. I mean a fundy to the core. A biblical literalist, who is elderly, uneducated, and who believes in the whole deal. She spends untold hours of her life on her imaginary friend. She goes to church, she signs up to volunteer for every possible function to serve him, she gets up at 5:30 every morning to meditate and pray to him, she plays only worship music in her car and in her home. She thinks about him, talks to him, thanks him, and does his work all of her waking hours. She has felt his hands on her face, heard his voice, written down things he has said to her, gotten all kinds of revelations and answered prayers from him, and felt his presence.

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sent in by Mikey B

I began practicing christianity at age 11 with an over zealous heart to become a member of my Methodist church. I saw the older kids in youth group and immidatly wanted to fit in and play in all their reindeer games. From the teeter-totter a thons to their movie nights and discussing this book that they said to live their life by. (stuff that I wouldnt change because it has made me the person I am today)

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Christians, in the usual over-zealousness to find a new technique for proselytization, have latched onto this repackaging of the ancient argument from design. They gladly proclaim that universe must have had some mysterious designer. The smart ones, up on their studies on what constitutes a state/church violation, are slow to say what "designer" they have in mind. They say it could be anything from gods to goddesses to aliens. Therein lies the problem. A Christian, who admittedly worships a jealous god, should be very wary...

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