Good-bye Damascus Road
I was a Christian for almost twenty years before serious doubts started to appear this year. The main root cause of my walking away from Biblegod is the reaction of Christians to the breakdown of my marriage three years ago. I was in an abusive relationship and it took me far too long to get out because I was a Christian and I believed that "God hates divorce." So, it this were true, why did god not answer any of my prayer to "save" the marriage? This started me on the road to thinking that god was not really there. I eventually left my abusive ex and tried to start a new life, only to have a whole heap of guilt piled on me, which lead to me being diagnosed with clinical depression. I was then threatened with the predictable b*ble verses, (Malachi 2, Matthew 19) and told that this was all down to me having a "hardness of heart" or that I was "in league with Satan."
My faith has been lost on this and some other issues. I stopped believing in a god who claims in his book to be loving, but then expects people to endure regular beatings, lies, abuse, maltreatment, emotional and psychological abuse just because he says so. I also stopped believing in a God who would condemn an innocent third party of adultery once a person who has been victim of abuse finds happiness and wishes to remarry.
The Christian response to this is the usual "stick fingers in ears, sing lalalala cannot hear you" or shout "the b*ble says this, that and other bullshit, and then say by the way if you disagree with me, you're on the highway to hell..." I know about the awfulness of divorce from first hand experience, but to expect someone to stay in a toxic, abusive relationship just because some book tells you to is absolute madness, of which I choose to no longer participate.
The second reason that I have no faith in biblegod is a linguistic one. I studied language and linguistics and university, and it has always bothered me that there is a distinct christian language and code employed. Many on this website will be familiar with phrases such as "move of the spirit, pressing into Jesus, supernatural provisioning, placed on my heart by the lord," and so on. From a linguistic point of view, these phrases do not make much sense at all. How can we "press into" someone who died 2000 years ago and is now allegedly in heaven? How can the lord place something on a muscle designed to pump blood? Either these phrases are not true at all, or they are made up from an over active imagination during an emotionally charged time of worship. I think that it may be a mixture of both.
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