Messed-Up Bible Stories

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

How to come out to your parents as non-religious

By Marlene Winell ~ A fter going through your own deconstruction of religious belief, it can feel like a challenge to reveal your change to your religious parents. You might have a lot of fear about their reaction – anger, hurt, disappointment in you, and so on. You might fear being disowned. This is a common concern because our families mean a lot to us. It’s natural to want approval from your parents. When you were young, you depended on them for your life; you absolutely needed their love, care, and approval. So, even in adulthood, we long for our parents to love us unconditionally. However, in terms of human development over the life span, it is necessary for everyone to outgrow their parents. Growing up to maturity involves becoming the authority in your own life and taking on the job of self-care and self-love. This is true even if you aren’t recovering from religion. Personal health and well-being, in other words, means that your inner “Adult” is tak

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

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

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

Disney, the Creator, and Christ

By Carl S ~ I s Dumbo more real than Jesus? The answer depends on who you ask. Doesn't every culture have fantasy-fabricated individuals, often with lives of heroic proportions? Haven't celebrities with their real/imagined lives, been around forever? In the beginning, man created gods and keeps altering them. My oldest brother was an artist. He could paint a portrait of someone you'd know, and change the character of that person with a couple of brush-strokes, or make a sculpture of a figure and change its proportions daily, even hourly. He made figures out of Silly Putty, and watched each one as it changed form. Eventually each melted into a puddle. All gods are like that, because they're only as "real" as a person's imagination continues to create them, at whim. Humans need outlets for frustrations, anger, fear of the future and the unknown. Ergo, in the beginning, man created entertainment, Those seeking explanations for the origins of nature, death,

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