By Cris ~ W hen I was about 13 two major things happened to me that have shaped my life since: I got "saved" and I discovered a love for music and a desire to be a musician. I was going to an Assembly of God church which is a pentecostal / evangelical type denomination. Up till this time my family had been church goers but it was just something we did on Sundays. This new church was exciting and fun. Instead of dry old hymns accompanied by the typical piano / organ duo, this church had drums and electric guitars! Not to mention the highly emotional and entertaining preaching, the youth group full of average kids my age (and some cute girls!) We went to concerts, had camp outs, special guests,etc. Over time I started owing the excitement and "high" I felt in church to the religion (rather than the meditative and soothing effects of music,repetition of praise songs,etc) - For the first time church was interesting and made my heart pound, I owed this to the

By dealdoctor ~ G uys, each of us has been involved in Christianity and many of us in a brand of Christian Evangelical fundamentalism that really caused many of us us feel guilty about our sexual urges and as teenagers, masturbation in particular. I think you might find interesting this YouTube video lecture by Alan Watts a one time Episcopal priest who later became deeply involved in Eastern mysticism and Zen Buddhism . Watts is an outstanding intellectual of top rank who does a sharp analysis of the relationship between Christianity, sex, and masturbation. He explores its Jewish and Greek foundations. Anyway it is always good to know the source and cause of matters this includes the way things are in Christian churches as they relate to the "let me make you feel guilty abut sex stuff" brand. Watts will entertain you and he is an educator who is very well educated. Here is the YouTube lecture. See what you think. Might this be the reason Churches think about sex

By Carl S ~ F or reasons mentioned in a previous testimony, I used to attend church services with my wife. She still goes there, and meanwhile I have the “benefit” (or curse) of going there to pick her up after the services. The attendees know me already, which places both them and me in awkward positions, because I wear my "Out of the Closet - Atheist" cap in their presence. I challenge, thereby, their tolerance, charity, and faith, at the same time. Whereas I was an outsider amongst them before, I am now overt, and in a position to continue my observations of believers. Needless to say, they confine themselves to small talk with me, which is the last thing you'd expect to hear from people who have spent the last hour and a half hyping themselves into belief. Last Sunday was different. Teen Challenge was making its annual hitting-up-for-money there. The belief seems to be that if a 'charity' is beseeching in a church, it is God's own, and ergo, deservin

By Monica ~ I was raised Christian ( Methodist ) my entire life. My extended family is crazy conservative and deep in their faiths, and my immediate family are all definitely believers, just not as intense. As a kid, I whole heartedly believed it because that's what I was taught and I wasn't old enough to have an opinion. It was just like any other subject. I didn't question reading or math, because I was just a kid, and I did what I was told. So Christianity was just a way of life for me, and that was that. I started going to summer camps the summer after third grade, and that's probably where I noticed that I was the less than emotional Christian. Yeah, I believed because I was told to, but even still, I didn't feel the need to raise my hands up during songs or cry during the end-of-camp communion service. I tried, really. I wanted to fit in. But it just wasn't me. In eighth grade history class, we learned about all kinds of different cultures and rel

By Evs ~ F inally, atheists, the evidence you've been so patiently waiting for, proof that God exists . First, a conundrum. Belief in God is illogical, implausible, and insane. Such an idea should be cast out completely around the same age belief in Santa Claus goes. Yet many otherwise sensible people believe in God well into adulthood. How does one explain such a contradiction? I explain it with omnipotence . Omnipotence is very simply defined as unlimited power and more intricately defined, well, a number of ways. The problem with properly describing omnipotence can be easily elucidated using a common paradox: Can an omnipotent being create a boulder so heavy it cannot lift it? Similarly, can an omnipotent being create another being that defies its will? And if an omnipotent being gives up its omnipotence, was it really omnipotent in the first place? One more refined definition of omnipotence stands out from the others as being able to answer these questions. Essentially

By J. Lords aka boomslang ~ R ecently I attempted to find common ground with a Christian apologist (female) in a discussion over an article she had written titled, "Securing a More Stable Future". Towards the end of the article, she added... "This is why the Founders lamented that children must receive a good moral education in order to secure this Republic." The reason that this caught my attention and prompted me to chime in, is because, as a former believer myself, I know what she had in mind, and that is that children need to be taught (indoctrinated with) Christianity and that morals come from "God", namely, the Christian god. We know that this is false for many reasons, one of which, is that in order to know that "God" is things like moral and good in the first place, you'd obviously have to have a preexisting standard of morality with which to compare to this "God". If you don't have a preexisting standard and

By Faithfool ~ Message: “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” ( 1 John 4:8 ) G od is love. This well-known passage in the Bible describes love: ”Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy , it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” ( 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 ) If God is love, he must consistently display these attributes. Let’s pick out just a few attributes of love and see if God measures up: Love does not envy. So to envy is to not love. But wait a minute. “I, the Lord your God am a jealous God.” ( Exodus 20:4-5 ). That sounds like envy to me. Love does not boast, is not proud. Yet when God speaks to a traumatised man ( Job 38-40 ) whom He has allowed to suffer terribly so He could win a bet with Satan , God offers n

By Valerie Tarico ~ S eattle family planning doctor Deborah Oyer routinely asks new female patients, “How often do you want to have your period? Monthly? Every three months? Or not at all?” Until she asks, some don’t know they have a choice . Like every other aspect of reproductive health, menstruation is a fraught topic. A woman who is actively managing her period is in control of her fertility; in Judeo Christian folklore, she is cheating Eve’s curse . Even talking about menstruation can violate taboos. Consequently, most of us are astoundingly under-informed about a facet of womanhood that affects anyone who either has a uterus or loves a person who does. For example, did you know that: Modern Western women have four times as many periods over a lifetime as our hunter gatherer ancestors and triple the number for women just a hundred years ago. In other words, what seems “natural” now is very different from what our bodies have historically supported or have evolved to suppor

By Older1 ~ RUTH BERNHARD (b. 1905) Perspective II, 1967 W e lost our daughter to fundamentalism when she was a teenager, some 20 years ago. Since then we have had an understanding that we will agree to disagree, and we just don’t discuss religion. We have a strong relationship in spite of it, and we get together frequently. There is none of the strife that inflicts so many other families that are split by differing religious outlooks. My wife and I have recently provided significant financial and physical support to the family as they have adopted three disabled children all under the age of five, and we continue to visit regularly to baby sit and taxi the older children about town. Our home is in a rural area and is way out of the way in respect to the daily travels of our daughter and her family so we didn

By Paul So ~ D eductive view on life: 1. Laws of conservation of energy: Energy is neither created or destroyed, only converted . "Relativity", the sixth and last sculpture of the Walk of Ideas in Berlin, on the occasion of 2006 FIFA World Cup Germany. The sculpture was unveiled 19 May 2006 in Lustgarten. The Altes Museum (Old Museum), built between 1825 and 1828 by Schinkel, is visible in the background. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) 2. Einstein 's Mass-Energy Equivalence (a.k.a E=MC squared ): mass is the property of energy, and energy is the property of mass; in other words they are equivalent. 3. Entropy : Areas of the total system can lose energy/heat while other areas consequently gain energy/heat. 4. Universe is an isolated total system with its sum total of energy, including mass-objects that are simply condensed energy(Mass-Energy Equivalence, proposition 2) that remains constant but its content can change, but it cannot be created or destroyed ( L

By dmat ~ Atheism-tortise (Photo credit: AlphaBetaUnlimited ) T he internet played a major role in my deconversion from belief in god. Of course some would say it was the devil using the internet to destroy my faith! I recently saw Josh McDowell say that the internet would be a strong weapon for atheism to spread. For once i agree with Josh!Only through the internet was I exposed to a different world view than my middle class white suburban evangelical upbringing. I was exposed to atheist authors, and two books particularly were helpful: Losing Faith in Faith by Dan Barker , and Leaving the Fold by Ed Babinski. It has been about six years since i gave up faith, though i have never revealed it to anyone. I just couldn't do it to my family, as they would be crushed. I often think that there are thousands just like me who don't believe but prefer to kept it hidden so they don't lose the respect of family and friends. So now i feel like i am starting life over

By Brent ~ E ven though I still attend a sunday service, I have defected from the Christian faith. After doing thorough research on the internet I came to the conclusion that all or at least majority of the denominations in Christianity are just like the political parties the public watches on the news channels. Many have their own documentation following alongside what is taught in the Bible. Also, the bible itself does not promote public prayer according to Matthew 6:6 which would nullify televangelism and other denominational churches. Even the argument for public prayer in schools should be nonexistent because of this verse. Next is what l call "union dues" that the church calls tithing. Which poses the question "Why would God require that which is Caesar's ?" Wouldn't God want people to serve him and tithe through other various avenues of worship like volunteerism or teaching others valuable skills or teaching commonsense living. I have tende

By Klym ~ I just read the article below on Yahoo . It is very, very sad and disturbing. This is an example of using religious faith in the most abusive way imaginable. Worst Parents of the Week Brandi Bellew's first husband, Brian Sprout, died of sepsis from a leg injury after failing to seek medical treatment, but still she wasn't moved to bring her son Austin , 16, to the hospital during the week he languished at home before he passed away last December. The Daily Mail reports the cause of death has not been released but investigators said it was "highly treatable." According to the Register-Guard , Brandi and her second husband, Russel Bellew and their six other children, are members of the General Assembly of the Church and of the First Born in Pleasant Hill, Oregon , a congregation that believes in using prayer to treat illness. On Monday, April 15, 2012, the county juvenile court ruled that the remaining children would be wards of the state. They

By JonTheFro ~ I t all started at the end of my freshman year of high school. I started to notice a depreciated value of community at church. Back then I was as much as a bigot as much of my extended family and the sort of people I was surrounded with. And people hated me for it. I was rude to my biology teacher- it's something I'm actually annoyed at myself for, even after all these years. The year after that I began questioning the status quo, by the means of science, and truly exploring what evolution was, how it worked, and how it could be applied in an all-encompassing way that religion had for the entire duration of my life up to that point. By senior year I’d become what some would call a Creation-Evolutionist, which worked well for my political positions in high school. I refuted atheism as being brash and difficult to latch onto simply out of the fear of the unknown. But everything changed when the fire nation attacked. Or something of that magnitude- the polar

By Valerie Tarico ~ T he Southern Baptist Convention is a force to be reckoned with. As the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with over 45,000 affiliate churches, it have been shaping and channeling conservative Christian sensibilities since the Civil War, when Southern Baptists split from the North so they could advocate on behalf of slave owners. They fought to keep slavery and lost. Then they fought for Jim Crow laws and lost. Then they fought for segregation and lost. Now, faced with eroding membership, the Southern Baptist leaders are fighting for relevance. Unfortunately, they have committed to a strategy that will make it harder for their members – and for all of us—to move toward a future based in collaboration, compassion, and practical solutions to real-world problems. With secularism on the rise, entrepreneurial Christian denominations have evolved a variety of survival strategies. Anglican theologian John Shelby Spong ( Why Christianity Must Chan