Skip to main content

Ye Fools and Blind

By Steve ~

Ohh-kay, so the past two weeks have been a fucking circus. People near my Student Union protesting abortion by showing the whole school bloody pictures of aborted fetuses - while we are trying to eat for goodness’ sake! Two preachers on the green spouting hellfire and brimstone. “True” Christians trying to do damage control and warp their own theology to fit their views. And on a national level: even worse! The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is trying to run roughshod over the reproductive freedom of women by claiming the false mantle of “freedom of religion”! People still have their balls in a bind over abortion – 40 years after Roe vs. Wade was passed. The Right is trying to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, which looks to be a decent step in the direction of providing more people in the U.S. with healthcare at a higher quality. People are still trying to prove that the separation of Church and State is a lie and that Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptists in 1802 was not an important document. And I’ll tell you one thing – religion may give people structure, but that’s it! Their dogma, their ideology – it’s all HORSESHIT! Maybe Hitchens overreached when he said religion itself poisoned everything, but I can’t list more than maybe one or two religions that have toxic dogma. Religious ideology has become like birdshit – ubiquitous and annoying.

But people who make an apology for this kind of behavior by saying: “No, no, no! This is not how Christianity is supposed to be run! It’s about the pure love of God, not about sin or anything like that! Don’t listen to them!” don’t get my ear and they certainly do not get my respect. I have had to hold my tongue about this more than once – and I’m growing tired of it. Have they actually read their Bible? Do they know that they’re espousing a heretical point of view, similar to that of Marcion, who said that the OT and NT god were different gods? Do they know that scripture is fucking them over and they’re digging through a garbage dump of bad advice to find these small pearls of wisdom that they could have learned without this “sacred text”? Do they know that we don’t even have a good grasp on who Jesus was and what he said? Do they know that most of the OT is just a rewritten version of the NT, spoken primarily through the mouth of Jesus? Do they know that Paul and Jesus had diametrically opposite views about salvation and how to obtain it? Do they know that Jesus was a stooge and a jerk, certainly not worthy of my ear and do they know the Pharisees’ rebuttal to what Jesus said to them? Do they know that Jesus couldn’t even get Jewish history straight? Do they know that Jesus was, essentially, a country bumpkin? The Gospels cannot be considered authoritative texts.

But literally, a pure relationship with God means to be free of all sins and all selfish desires. Love of the self leads to sin and the only way to have a pure relationship with God is to be rid of that sin. People can NEVER have a pure relationship with His Holiness. Christianity sees sin as selfishness, so there is honestly no way to have a pure relationship with God. Sin is either “missing the mark” (amartia) or doing something that negatively affects your relationship with God. And the Biblical authors don’t like sin. The Lord is so pure that his eyes cannot look at sin! In essence, a personal relationship with God will not benefit you because God does not care if you are happy, but he damn sure cares if you are holy! A relationship with God is a master-slave type relationship; Paul often wrote about how he was a slave to Christ. Christ used slaves in one of his parables to illustrate the relationship between the believer and God. It didn’t paint a very nice picture – one slave receives mercy and although having done evil things is beaten with few stripes, but the other is beaten with many stripes! Why do you want a master-slave relationship? Is this how far a human is willing to sink for eternal life? Don’t we have more dignity than that?

As this writing draws to a close, I am reminded constantly of the almost omnipresent power of religion in our daily lives, but that power is almost always its sick dogmas. “Pray for me, I’ve got to make a decision about my summer plans!” – make your own decision! You have a brain; don’t appeal to your skydaddy and his followers, instead seek advice from those you trust, research, and make the BEST decision you can! And stop evangelizing so damn much! Most people hate that shit and it makes you look obstinate and foolish. If you want to host an Interfaith Week at my school, why the hell don’t you include opinions from those who have no faith? I don’t see any indication that you have – our view on religion is a just as valid, and probably more so than your beliefs! I see religion every damn day and for once I wish believers would take a look at themselves and realize that they don’t know who they are at all, and that those of us who are out of the bubble know them better than they could ever know themselves.

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

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