Ran like hell away from religion!

By Harmonika Savingsbonds ~

Well, in a way, I felt I was kind of lucky in that I had a headstart. In 1960, I was being indoctrinated to do something called a First Communion. I had no idea what that meant, due to the fact that as a 7 year old, of course, I had the attention span of a gnat.

Image by ctanstfl via Flickr

I did as I was told and marched up, prayer hands in position, and want to get a cookie the man in the pretty, golden dress was giving everybody.

Walking back to my seat, I felt immediately nauseous, and this being a poor Catholic church in a small Mexican American community, had an outhouse for it's parishioners to use.

I immediately threw it all up, all the while this large butch nun who had chased after me, beating me across the back and telling me that because "you had rejected the body of christ, you are forever damned, and will burn in Hell forever!!", a premise that, to this TV fed 7 year old, was the ONLY part of their story I thought I found interesting and absolutely THRILLING!

I went home that day and told my mom that I did not believe a word of this and did not want to go to church. While she and the rest of the family attended church regularly, she never pushed me to attend. This freed me up to spend my formative years and most of my life, educating myself to the many avenues of the faith industry, and ultimately realizing that I simply could never believe such nonsense. I suspect that I was also born without the FAITH gene.

I grew up innately believing that every time I did something, I then got to see the results or effects of my actions.
It was something I did, and I was seeing the results.

It never occured to me of crediting a god or some lame, culturally popular little saviour for something I clearly did. Although my family was religious, on this topic, I had made it clear very early on that I did not buy a single word of it. I was not going to play along.

Seeing the effect that christianity, in particular the catholic version I was mentally molested with as an adolescent, had in dumbening down the stupid and superstitious of those in my immediate community, I got the hell away from it all by educating myself far away from my imposed upon reality. From the age of nine years old, I spent most all of my free time at the neighborhood library, reading and listening to anything I could get my hands on, challenging, educating myself to understand topics that appealed to me, immediately eschewing the popular, fearing I would be 'like everyone else', while living in this big, strange and wonderful world. In my teens, I was scoring free tickets to any performances I could find, anything from John Cage music to ballet, poetry reading to stage productions, opera to classical performances, while I should have been playing sports,getting in fights and finding friendships among my (ugh) peer groups.

All the while, being so obviously not like the others, and gay to boot, I heard the usual deathwishes that christians would curse me with for not being a believer. Or even caring about their faith.

With every pronouncement of my going to hell, it only reminded me of just how stupid the religious were. And while I am sure that my child self had a more visceral response to this christian hatred than I can hardly muster up these days, this only confirmed to me that all I needed to do was grow up and get far away from these ignorant people. Oddly, this taught me patience.

I purposely and consciously chose the road less traveled. And then I ran like HELL.

Comments

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

On Living Virtuously

By Webmdave ~ A s a Christian, living virtuously meant living in a manner that pleased God. Pleasing god (or living virtuously) was explained as: Praying for forgiveness for sins Accepting Christ as Savior Frequently reading the Bible Memorizing Bible verses Being baptized (subject to church rules) Attending church services Partaking of the Lord’s Supper Tithing Resisting temptations to lie, steal, smoke, drink, party, have lustful thoughts, have sex (outside of marriage) masturbate, etc. Boldly sharing the Gospel of Salvation with unbelievers The list of virtuous values and expectations grew over time. Once the initial foundational values were safely under the belt, “more virtues'' were introduced. Newer introductions included (among others) harsh condemnation of “worldly” music, homosexuality and abortion Eventually the list of values grew ponderous, and these ideals were not just personal for us Christians. These virtues were used to condemn and disrespect fro

Search This Blog