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A video by Penn and Teller

Penn and Teller's Showtime Network television show Bullshit! takes a skeptical look at psychics, religion, the pseudoscientific, conspiracy theories, and the paranormal.

Penn & Teller have also shown support for the Brights movement and are now listed on the movement's homepage under the Enthusiastic Brights section. According to an article in Wired magazine, their license plates are customized so they read, "Atheist" and "Godless", and when Penn signs autographs, he often writes down, "there is no God" with his signature.

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by Mriana

Image by pyota via Flickr

I have not said very much about this because I find it a very painful and upsetting subject, even though it comes out in bits and pieces sometimes. However, I do not think my story would be complete if I did not touch upon the subject of taking religion so far that it causes death. Not just death, but even attempted suicide in some cases. For me, my grandfather was the first in a series of such things and I was twenty-three years old with a newborn son at the time.

About twenty years ago, my grandfather killed himself.

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by Matthew Dolezal

Image via Wikipedia

With the chaos of daily life in modern Western civilization, the consideration of a deep philosophical question like "What is the meaning of life?" seems quite low on one's list of priorities. There are countless tasks I must complete each day in order to maintain my socio-economic and cultural status. After realizing this cycle appears infinite, one assumes his/her "purpose" is to be a cog in a machine - indeed, the word "career" seems to have replaced "purpose" in our society.

But eventually, there is a break - you have a moment of time that has not been reserved or booked or clouded with efficiency, and you look up at the stars and wonder what it’s all about. This is inevitable. Our brains are machines of curiosity. We wonder and speculate, and then, if the curiosity gets the best of us, and we begin to investigate.

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By WizenedSage

Image via Wikipedia

If you were God, would you provide your message exclusively to one prophet? Wouldn’t it occur to you that some people would try a prophet scam once they saw how a prophet is revered and the recipient of special favors, money and power? This was an essential message of Al-Razi, a freethinking Moslem (864-930 CE) that seems to have slipped beneath the radar of many of us moderns.

Of course, we can all see that at least some so-called prophets are not legitimate; even the religious can see this. No one today believes Jim Jones was an authentic prophet, and comparatively few believe in Joseph Smith. And, in the Western world, Mohammad is widely seen as a fake. Clearly, anyone with the gift of eloquence, especially if he also knows a few nifty magic tricks or illusions, is a potential prophet. Prophesying can be profitable.

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By Neal Stone

Image by Philerooski via Flickr

All of us at this site either are at that point or past that point where we finally stopped doing the Xian thing. We feel that sense of loss, frustration and anger for what we have been through and given up or lost as a result.

My time was 1998 when I had that breakdown and sense of frustration and anger over what I lost and gave up because of my life as an Xian. I went through a very dark period of my life as I gave into the anger and frustration of what I went through.

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Sent in by Brain User

It was a long time coming.

In Christian school I never really took religion seriously. All that prayer for things that never seemed to happen just didn't add up. God never talked to me and I never felt any sensations of his presence. But everybody else did, or so they said, so I went along with it. I felt emotions, for sure, but nothing that was obviously other-worldly. Like every youngster, I wanted to be accepted.

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by Shawn

Image by A Perfect Heart via Flickr

Since my de-conversion there is one statement from believers that irritates me time and time again. We have all heard it, it is the common fall back for just about every argument against Christianity. Every time I have argued the plagiarism, absurdities, contradictions, lies, cruelty and intolerance of the Bible, this statement, or something similar, invariably gets thrown in my face: “You just have to have faith”.

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A letter from DS, "The voice of one crying in the..."

Image by Colin Purrington via Flickr

this is what happens when faux christians have a little bit of knowledge of the truth, but not enough to defend themselves against the onslaught of the lies of Satan. For example, it is a scientific fact that the theory of evolution is scientifically IMPOSSIBLE, according to all of the LAWS of SCIENCE, but most faux christians heve never learned this so the bald-faced, idiotic, asinine and absurd lie of evolution lingers around in their heads as a means to destroy the truth of God's Word... Genesis.

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By Carl S

Image by Gary Henderson via Flickr

My wife tells me that I think too much, to which I might point out that I’m just compensating for all those who refuse to think. For example, she watches those TV nature shows with animals in their native habitats. These shows aggravate me. I want to watch animals, but they keep interrupting by showing the faces of narrators or cameramen. Also, some insist on giving the animals names. I’ve watched gatherings of geese, ducks, turkeys, etc, and notice how at least one of them is assigned as lookout. So, I have my own commentary that ties into thinking too much, and here’s how it goes.

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Sent in by Anonymous

Image by Ann Althouse via Flickr

As a relative newcomer to the life of parenthood, I debate many issues internally and with my wife. One of those things is the Santa Claus lie, or rather, "Should we tell our children they get presents from a mythological man who, lives forever, knows about everybody's deeds, and visits their homes one night out of the year to deliver gifts?" There are negative effects to perpetuating such a lie, but it's embedded in our culture. If you live in the US, it's unlikely you don't know about Santa Claus. So, what are the positive effects of the Santa Claus myth? I can't think of any. At some point, your kids will discover there isn't a Santa Claus and you've been lying to them.

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Sent in by Maestra

I know my story is not unique as I’ve been reading many others just like mine, but I know it will be cathartic for me to write my own. I am the granddaughter of an evangelist and I was raised in an evangelical church. I was a “Missionette honor star.” I bet some of you on this site were too! I went to Evangel College (University now) and married the son of two pastors. My grandmother was into prophesy and prophesied when my sister and I were little that my sister would grow up to be a nurse and I would one day be an evangelist. My sister is a nurse…..dun dun duunnnnn.

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by JezuzFree

Image by derpunk via Flickr

I'd like to share with you the last prayer I uttered as a Christian a few weeks ago. After 28 years of being a Christian, I'm now a very happy Atheist.

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By Astreja

I work in a large metropolitan hospital. Every day, thousands of people come and go -- Doctors, nurses, secretaries, housekeeping staff, maintenance... Police, paramedics, pharmacy technicians... Hundreds of delivery vehicles, dropping off everything from paper towels to transplant organs... And, of course, the patients and their families and friends.

This is a good place to work, but at the same time there's a bittersweet mood in the hallways. People come here because they need help for illness or injury. My daughter and I have both been patients here, as have many people that we know.

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Image by bdunnette via Flickr

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by Kate Shellnutt

As teens, they start thinking that it just doesn’t make sense anymore, and for years, it’s their secret… then, in college, surrounded by more open-minded peers, they come out of the dark, still-stigmatized atheist closet.

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by Kate Shellnutt

As teens, they start thinking that it just doesn’t make sense anymore, and for years, it’s their secret… then, in college, surrounded by more open-minded peers, they come out of the dark, still-stigmatized atheist closet.

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By Mriana

Image by Untitled blue via Flickr

"And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over."

That is basically the response I got from a long time friend that I thought I could trust or who I thought was a friend that I could trust, but, and I hope I am wrong, apparently there were conditions to that friendship. Before it was over she was telling me what I could not say, what I should write, and eventually, when I asked her two honest questions, she gave me what was, in my opinion, a trained response. It really was like I had threaten her beliefs and I could not believe she was a person who would feel insecure about her beliefs when someone expresses a different view, but I guess I was wrong.

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A letter from J Marco, Lord of the Medeci

Image by ian murchison via Flickr

I'm not sure if things have heated up around me lately, or if I am just more sensitive to it.The last several months it seems like Christianity in my area (deep South, US) has gotten much more aggressive, and more militant. It is everywhere. It's not that "can I tell you about Jesus" type; no, it's that "we have to turn this nation back to God before he rains brimstone on us type". It's that "we have to fight against sin" type. It's that really scary unhinged junk I grew up in. It's really had me gritting my teeth.

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A letter from Mark

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This website has been great. I really get a kick out of the stories I read on this site and the great insight that you guys have. As a matter of fact, I can relate to many of your experiences in the church. On that note, let me share mine. And before I do that, I must say that my story is a little more difficult and more complicated than yours and hopefully I can get some help from you guys to finally be truly free at last from the depressing mess the church life has provided for me. So here goes:

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by Doc Mike

According to the New Testament, Jesus' closest friends didn't recognize him after the resurrection. John tells us (in 20:14) that Mary Magdalene, a woman Jesus had a questionable past with, looked right at him but didn't know who he was. In Mark 16:12, two of Jesus' disciples didn't recognize him because he "appeared in another form." And according to Luke 24:16, their eyes were "holden" so they wouldn't know him.

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Sent in by Priscilla

Image by Romy Schneider via Flickr

“You know he may die during the surgery… the Bible says that the wages of sin is death.” My mother, hundreds of miles away, stung me with these words over the phone about a year ago. By then I had stopped going to church, although I wasn’t planning on leaving the faith. I was a backslider of sorts, a Christian without a church. In her comment she was referring to my then-fiancé -now husband- who had been experiencing health issues from a genetic disease and was about to have a very complicated and dangerous surgery. Our sin, according to my mother, was that we had purchased a house a few months earlier and ever since had been living together without being married. Apparently, this was punishable by death. Anything bad that happened to us was now because of this.

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Sent in by RandallScott

Image by stevesheriw via Flickr

My name is Randal and I'm currently in recovery. I'm a recovering Baptist. My sponsor told me to stay away from anyone who is condemning and judgmental, so I immediately quit going to church.

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Sent in by Alexander

Image by troismarteaux via Flickr

I have just recently made a break with Christianity. Looking back on it, it seems to be the end of 4 7-year cycles. In my early twenties, I thought more and more about little things about Christianity that annoyed me. My entire primary school education, save grades 7 and 8 (thankfully) were spent in some sort of religious school. In the South, religion is as omnipresent as Crisco. Let me say now that Muslims aren't the only one with their own fundamentalist schools. Christians have them too, and they are just as bad.

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Image via Wikipedia

A principal and an athletic director in Florida could be charged with crimes and spend six months in jail after they prayed before a meal at a school event, the Washington Times reported.

Pace High School Principal Frank Lay and athletic director Robert Freeman will go on trial in federal district court Sept. 17. They're accused of violating the conditions of a lawsuit settlement reached last year with the American Civil Liberties Union, according to the Times.

Local pastors and some students and teachers are outraged that Lay and Freeman face criminal charges, and they have protested during graduation ceremonies, the newspaper said.

"I have been defending religious freedom issues for 22 years, and I've never had to defend somebody who has been charged criminally for praying," said Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, the Christian-based legal group that is defending the two school officials.

by A Seeker

Image by State Library and Archives of Florida via Flickr

Lately, in pensive thinking of how to converse with my Mother about our past issues, many points of thought come to mind which I am not clear in. One of those is getting a clear picture of how my very religious family could have handled my leaving the "fold". I want to compare it to a normal family who has a teen/twenty-year-old, free-thinking child who wants to leave home and start out on her own.

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by WizenedSage

Image via Wikipedia

Consider the matter of the soul. Ask a Christian when the soul enters the body and he may say at conception, or some number of weeks after conception, or at birth. Ask him how he knows this and the only answer he can give is that he read it, someone told him, or “it just makes sense.” Christians have been arguing amongst themselves about this for thousands of years. Ask him how big the soul is and he may answer that it’s microscopic, or fills the whole body, or anything in between. Again, he knows this because he has read it or been told it. Ask him where in the body the soul resides and he may say the heart or that it’s diffused throughout the body. Again, he’s read this or been told this.

Ask four Christians to define soul and you’ll likely get four different answers. Ask him if a six-month old baptized baby who dies will spend eternity as a six-month old baby and watch him squirm.

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A letter from deathbyluxury

Image by Cayusa via Flickr

I’d like to start out by saying that I enjoy this community. I find it reassuring that there are other people like me who have grown tired of defying their own common sense with Christianity, and have decided to pursue something more logical (whether unto themselves or otherwise).

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By Aaron

Hi. My name is Aaron. I was a Christian for the better part of 24 years. I was very closed minded, fearful, rejecting of any other walk of life, and judgmental of any and all nouns not associated with my belief system. I also had a false moral compass. But that's not what I want to write about today... Within the past 2 months, I have deconverted, and now consider myself mostly to be an agnostic theist.

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Sent in by Escaping Religion

Image by cindy47452 via Flickr

I was raised in a fundamental Baptist family. My parents divorced when I was 5 due to domestic violence. All the time I was growing up I went to church at least three times a week, was forced to participate in door to door evangelizing and running a bus route proselytizing children, to bring them to church on Sunday mornings. All my life I heard how great this god was how he gave his followers everything,yet I grew up in poverty.

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Sent in by Joshua

Image via Wikipedia

First off, I can't believe I'm actually submitting this and putting my past on display, but holy crap!

I can be a jerk. I know this and anyone who knows me knows this. I'm stubborn, pig-headed and I think I know everything. I know quite a bit about a lot of stuff, but I like to pretend that because I have mad debating skills that I know more than most people. This simply isn't true and deep down I know that just because I might have a little more knowledge about a subject doesn't mean that I know everything there is to know about it. Ask my wife and she'll tell you.

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by Rasputin's love child

Image by ladybugbkt via Flickr

Think of the brain as a giant swimming pool. On one end it is deep, the other, shallow. The shallow end has a wading pond for those who cannot swim and detached, but nearby, is the hot bubbling sauna.

When a person is introduced to Christianity, they are encouraged to dip their feet in the warm waters of the wading pool. Slowly, they put their legs in a little further until they get used to the temperature of the water. Eventually they immerse themselves in the warm water and become baptized. They are considered "children" in the eyes of god and are encouraged not to drift from the shallows.

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by Angie

The pansy, a symbol of Freethought — via Wikipedia

My mother, gotta love her, but recently the 'christian' emails from her have been driving me insane. She has sent lots of stuff over the years but it seems to be heating up right now. She sent me the old Laminin email a couple days ago and I sent her back the Snopes.com articles on it. No return answer.

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by Eric, an in-betweener

Image by atconc via Flickr

Hi, my name is Eric, I am currently on the fence between continuing a Christian concentration and just kinda letting it go. I'm just looking for comments or suggestions or insights.

I was raised believing in God, but not very strictly or "raised in a bible" as I like to put it. In high school, some of my friends started taking me with them to the youth ministry at what is now my church. As it was the first time I had really delved into religion and Christianity, I was intrigued and was quickly pulled in.

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by Stephen F. Uhl, Ph.D

Image via Wikipedia

Yet another blessing of non-theism or atheism for American society could be immense. What if our justice system were so nonreligious that Old Testament type of vengeful punishment of criminals were not necessary? What if judges judged reasonably instead of doing the biblical eye-for-an-eye bit for criminals? Our extremely sick justice system now insists that punishment must fit the crime.

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A letter from Evelyn

Image by miss karen via Flickr

Does anyone have an amusing story? Something funny? lighthearted? Fun? Interesting facts about the brain, universe, etc...

I just need a good laugh.

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By Valerie Tarico

Image by apesara via Flickr. "Change... We don't like it, we fear it, but we can't stop it from coming. We either adapt to change or we get left behind. And it hurts to grow, anybody who tells you it doesn't is lying."

Change Happens

The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue. –Antisthenes

My parents, as I’ve said before, were three for six in terms of producing believing children. All of us accepted Jesus as our personal savior. We all entered the “age of accountability” as born-again Evangelicals. But that’s not where we ended up. For each of the three who lost faith, the path was different: One came to see the shame of his homosexuality, not as a personal failing but as a failing of our moral ancestors – which then exposed the host of other moral failings in the Bible. Another was confronted by a small child’s cancer which unearthed a mother lode of buried questions about God’s beneficence and then existence. The third was simply born able to think his way out of most boxes, and he used this ability to the detriment of his salvation.

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by Micah

Image by aknacer via Flickr

Well, I don’t know if I can exactly pinpoint when I started to doubt. I know it all started out subtly then grew. I was raised in a non-denominational church all my life. We believed in “saved by grace, not of works” like a lot of other modern churches today. I have no idea how I started to wake up out of it. I guess my brain just got the better part of me.

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by Wizened Sage

Image by evelynishere via Flickr

The father of an 11-year old girl, who died in 2008 of undiagnosed diabetes, went to trial in Wisconsin. This man and his wife believed that prayer would cure their gravely ill daughter, even after she became too weak to walk, speak, eat, or drink. Dale Neuman told police he believed God would heal his daughter, Madeline, right up until she stopped breathing. Police also said that Neuman “professed to believe God was going to bring Madeline back to life.”

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by Neal Stone

Image by Akbar Simonse (busy) via Flickr

In my last post we had a Christian show up (tlig_org) who posted the usual Christian stuff then he got blasted by me and a few others from this site. He tried to challenge my claim that my life is better by pointing out hateful and angry sounding comments I made.

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by Cesar

Image via Wikipedia

There aren't many things in this world that I hate but I can honestly say I hate religion. Religion is a cancer, a plaque on the human mind. Humanity is capable of such great things but it's a shame that things such as religion, greed and politics hold us back. So here goes my little rant, I hope this finds its way onto a person's monitor who is looking for some reason to drop religion but just can't seem to find one. So here it goes, my basic reasons why religion is bullshit.

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Sent in by A Few Months In

This has been an interesting week. People from my old church are starting to notice that I haven't been there for the past few months, and when I see them they start to ask questions. I made the mistake of being honest and telling them where I was in life, but this is before I realised they didn't actually care what I thought or how I felt - they just wanted a lead-in so they could share their "journey with god" with me (as if I hadn't heard it before when I went to church with them).

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by JahFe

Many people can go through trauma - initially through the experience of growing up in the Christian Religion, and later through the experience of breaking away from it.

The trauma sometimes means that people move from a pro-Christian worldview to an anti-Christian worldview.

I rejected Christianity very early in life.

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A letter from Lemsip

I do not support christians whatever they do but to label them all as the same and bring them all down to the lowest common denominator sucks. This is what the fundies do to non christians. You do the same to christians and some are quite lovely people.

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Another great video by ChuckyJesus666.

A debate between a Christian and an atheist.

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Image by nimrodcooper (gone for now) via Flickr

Again, I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything you ask for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. — Matthew 18:19

And the prayer offered in faith will make the sick person well; the Lord will raise him up. — James 5:15

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