Skip to main content

Who's Going to Last Longer?

By The Truth Seeker --

Unlike some of you, I am not from a fundamentalist or evangelical back ground. Most of the religious people I interact with are pretty reasonable people and don’t hold radical views about their religion. I say that with a grain of salt since what they do believe is pretty unrealistic, but at least they don’t try to impose their views on you.

After leaving Christianity and becoming a “Humanist” I ask myself who is going to last longer – Humanists or Christians?

Christians start indoctrinating their children with Christianity from the day the children are old enough to attend church. As they grow older, they attend Sunday school classes where they are indoctrinated further. Churches start youth groups where the older youth can go on outings with their friends and still learn more about Christianity through a subtle but purposeful indoctrination.

As they grow older and reach a high school age there are even more youth groups and all participate with friends and acquaintenances. They’ve known each other for years now, and they have all been exposed to the same Christian doctrine for many years. This takes place in both Protestant and Catholic churches and schools.

When they become adults, they continue going to Sunday school, church, and Bible study groups. They go on outings with each other and continue to share the Christian indoctrination they have been through as children, teenagers, and now adults. What none of these groups go through are courses in Critical Thinking and questioning what they have been taught for so many years.

So what do Humanist’s or non-theists do? Since many are from fundamentalist or evangelical backgrounds they generally want nothing to do with anything that is organized. How do they raise their children? They wait until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves and in the mean time their children are probably going to Sunday schools with their other Christian friends. There is a good chance that some of their children will be lost to Christianity since there is nothing to compete with Christianity during their childhood years.

Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong, but how do you compete with Christianity if you’re not willing to expend some effort on your own by teaching your children how to be critical and free thinkers. What if non-theists started their own Sunday schools with their own curriculum of free thinking and got their children as well as their children’s friends to attend. Non-theists have a message and they must pass that message on to others. The non-theist’s message is much more important than the Christian message because the Humanist message is the truth and the theist’s message is mostly propaganda, myths, and legends.

I think that part of the problem is that many free thinkers and humanists are introverts, extremely intelligent, and don’t really care if they socialize with anyone. That’s ok as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help in spreading the non-faith. And I don’t think it helps by sitting around and hoping others finally see the truth.

I ask these questions because here I am a newly de-converted Christian, and I have no one to talk to about this except the people on this web site. I know there are other web sites of free thinkers, but this doesn’t take the place of sitting down with another human being and discussing those things you have in common.

A while back I talked with a psychologist who comes from a Jewish background but does not practice that religion. I told her I felt alone and I was afraid to mention my situation to any Christian because of the contempt that I know they feel toward non-Christians particularly, atheists and agnostics. She told me, now you know how it feels to be a minority and how it feels for her to be from a Jewish background. I agreed with her and told her it really sucks. I know how the Jews must have felt in Nazi Germany knowing that your very existence depends on keeping quiet.

I, and I think that some of you, have an even more complicated situation where our spouses are dedicated Christians and they think we are going to Hell because of our views. That is even a lonelier situation when you cannot even talk with your spouse about your feelings and beliefs.

My question is how do you feel about your own situation and are we as Free Thinkers digging our own graves by not speaking up. How long can we last when the other side has a long range strategy, and we have no apparent strategy of our own?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two