Skip to main content

Good people gone bad

By James ~

A quick intro. My name is James. I have been married for 24 years and loving it. I have three kids. 20,13,10. My oldest is in College. We have been with the Christian Church for more than 6 years.

Hate Is Sometimes ConfusingImage by Burns! via Flickr

I always have gone out of my way for others when they needed help. It is part of my personality. We helped out a neighbor during a hurricane in Florida and the next day the Pastor of the neighbors Church came over. He talked to us about coming to a Bible Study at his home. At first this new faith was intimate and uplifting for us as we were strapped financially, while both working full time jobs, but never getting ahead. We attended this friend's home every Tuesday and it was the highlight of my week. Soon though, our landlord sold the house we were renting and we had to move. There was no where to go.

We moved across the US to Arizona to live with my parents for a month or so. We prayed every night and my mom noticed. She became curious and she started to attend the church we were attending. I did not enjoy the Church atmosphere though. It was like being surrounded by hundreds of people we did not know. And not a lot of folks weren't open to getting to know us either, but we liked the music and kept attending. Anyway when my parents started going to church, my wife and I had an overwhelming feeling that we had accomplished what God had in mind for us. You see...My parents lost two daughters when I was a child and we as a family did not believe that God would allow something like what happened to take place. So we lost our Faith. That was 27 years ago.

Anyway, back to the present.

After bringing my parents back to Jesus we moved to Georgia to help out at a church where our pastor friend was helping out at. We attended for 4 years and at first it was great. But something was not right and we cringed at some of the things that were being said from the pulpit. The messages were getting worse every Sunday. Soon all we heard was Hate for our Government, Hate for our president, Hate for the democrats, Hate for the liberals, Hate, hate, hate. All in the name of a Loving God. I had to leave on several occasions and go out and pray for our church leaders. Every Bible study as a matter of fact. Then the Bible studies became a political rally and far right conservative views were being touted as truth. They were praising people who I have seen on TV bashing and calling names -- very bad behavior. I could have stayed home watching Fox News on TV rather than going to church. I would have gotten the same message! I told my wife that lies and slander were not what one should expect from church so we left. My Pastor tracked me down and met with me. I told him since coming to Christ I had no hate in my heart anymore. He told me that if I was not willing to go to Washington and pull Obama out of the White House and drag him to the hottest corners of Hell so the hounds of Hell could chew on his bones for eternity than I was not a Christian. I thanked him for clarifying to me the reasons why I left his church!

I know I should have told him that he was an Idiot, but I held my tongue and walked away, which I think made him even madder at me.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

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

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

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