Hostage Crisis
By redharry ~
There are so many people that will ask me, “Why don’t you believe in God anymore? You used to be such a passionate believer and so inspiring. What happened to you?”
In the interest of preserving truth, I must say that it isn’t easy to come up with the easiest answers to these questions. There are times that I want to believe in a higher power. There are times I wished I could jump right back into Christianity and proclaim Jesus as the Son Of God and that the trinity is real and active in our world today. I wished I could get myself to be afraid of Hell and believe in Satan’s power over this world, and I wished I was moved enough by this reality that I would want to be delivered from this world by the return of Jesus through the Rapture. I wished I could go back to believing in Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. But there is a reason that I cannot allow myself to persist in Christianity.
Quite simply, to believe in Christianity is to believe yourself and the entire human race as unwilling cosmic hostages.
I spent millions upon millions of years nonexistent before my father’s sperm met the mother’s egg. Once the sperm met the egg, a cell is fused and my fetus was created. This fetus sat in the womb of the mother, and for at least three months this fetus is neither male nor female. Once nature decided that I was going to be a boy, I fed on my mother’s unbiblical cord until at the last stage, I came out of her womb into this brave new world. I did not come of my accord and I did not ask to be born, it was the will of my parents to give birth to me.
To believe in Christianity, I have to believe that this god understood this process perfectly well. This god also understood that before I was born, that I was dead/nonexistent and void of its presence. This god knows that heaven and hell exists, and it knows that people go there after they die, for an eternity. But instead of communicating this plan pre-birth, it decides that it will hide its presence. And then, once I come into my five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, it decides to use my parents, community, and family as an extension of its presence to tell me that I have been marked with a curse. That this curse has marked me for death, and that I must atone for this curse that I was not warned about in advance. This god then pulls out a gun and aims it straight at me. This god tells me that it loves me, but that if I don’t choose him, he will pull the trigger and that the bad man standing across from him, called Satan, will then take his lighter and set me ablaze--forever. I can’t be allowed to die, I can’t be allowed mercy or recourse, I can’t appeal to god’s mercy and beg for it to end, I must be tortured for the rest of time.
I am now an unwilling hostage in a fight between two deities. And why have I been set apart for this? Because once upon a time, a man and a woman once ate from a magic tree thanks to a serpent possessed by the devil (somehow) tricking the woman into eating from it. This god tells me that Eve disobeyed his order (despite god allowing the serpent to be there in the first place AND recklessly allowing the tree of knowledge to be within reach of his creation) and that because of her disobedience the world was cursed to evil, including its inhabitants. I must pay the price for her sin. But instead of using its own free will to forgive its creation and understanding that descendants can’t be guilty for someone’s crime, it decides to fix it by sending its own child (who is himself) into a virgin women to be born, perform some miracles, and preach to people before being killed for our “sins”, only to be dead for a weekend, descend to hell to rescue lost souls, before coming back to life to declare that it is the son of god, and go back to heaven to rule forever. If I want to be saved from the devil’s fire, I must accept the authority of the son of god as sovereign because of a single conversation in a magical garden. And that because of this outrageous scenario, I must choose unwillingly between heaven and hell, neither of which I get to see with my own eyes until after I return to the same nonexistence I sat in for millions of years before I was born. For generations, this process of unwilling captivity of human souls will persist until god's bloodlust is finally satisfied and his ego is fully stroked.
I am no longer a Christian because I am no longer allowing myself to be considered a hostage or a slave to either to Jesus or Satan, nor to their respective creator, Yahweh.If you are a believer, you must accept the above story without question. You must accept that you have been sent right into a cosmic fight between these two otherworldly forces negotiating your eternal fate, unwillingly. And that without plausible explanation, an innocent man had to be killed to allowed you and millions of others atonement. And that in exchange for this security, you must be willing to terrorize children with horrific descriptions of eternal torture, hate gays and lesbians for their sexual immorality, consider women inferior to men, and defend a god who sanctioned genocide, slavery, rape, blood sacrifice, and a promise of seven years of bloodshed, torture by the Antichrist, disease and disaster before destroying earth and its inhabitants, but not before re-establishing his “chosen” nation of Israel and creating a New Jerusalem in The Book Of Revelations (never how a god who created an entire galaxy has one chosen nation and one chosen people.)
I am no longer a Christian because I am no longer allowing myself to be considered a hostage or a slave to either to Jesus or Satan, nor to their respective creator, Yahweh. I don’t consider myself a retched creature who was born in filth and sickness thanks to the sin of Adam and Eve, I am a million to one chance of evolutionary biology whom nature selected to win his shot at discovering the universe as it is. I am not a hostage to gods, I am a human being who was born without debt. I declare myself free from tyranny, because my mind belongs to me. And it feels so good to be free.
In the interest of preserving truth, I must say that it isn’t easy to come up with the easiest answers to these questions. There are times that I want to believe in a higher power. There are times I wished I could jump right back into Christianity and proclaim Jesus as the Son Of God and that the trinity is real and active in our world today. I wished I could get myself to be afraid of Hell and believe in Satan’s power over this world, and I wished I was moved enough by this reality that I would want to be delivered from this world by the return of Jesus through the Rapture. I wished I could go back to believing in Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. But there is a reason that I cannot allow myself to persist in Christianity.
Quite simply, to believe in Christianity is to believe yourself and the entire human race as unwilling cosmic hostages.
I spent millions upon millions of years nonexistent before my father’s sperm met the mother’s egg. Once the sperm met the egg, a cell is fused and my fetus was created. This fetus sat in the womb of the mother, and for at least three months this fetus is neither male nor female. Once nature decided that I was going to be a boy, I fed on my mother’s unbiblical cord until at the last stage, I came out of her womb into this brave new world. I did not come of my accord and I did not ask to be born, it was the will of my parents to give birth to me.
To believe in Christianity, I have to believe that this god understood this process perfectly well. This god also understood that before I was born, that I was dead/nonexistent and void of its presence. This god knows that heaven and hell exists, and it knows that people go there after they die, for an eternity. But instead of communicating this plan pre-birth, it decides that it will hide its presence. And then, once I come into my five senses of taste, touch, smell, sight and sound, it decides to use my parents, community, and family as an extension of its presence to tell me that I have been marked with a curse. That this curse has marked me for death, and that I must atone for this curse that I was not warned about in advance. This god then pulls out a gun and aims it straight at me. This god tells me that it loves me, but that if I don’t choose him, he will pull the trigger and that the bad man standing across from him, called Satan, will then take his lighter and set me ablaze--forever. I can’t be allowed to die, I can’t be allowed mercy or recourse, I can’t appeal to god’s mercy and beg for it to end, I must be tortured for the rest of time.
I am now an unwilling hostage in a fight between two deities. And why have I been set apart for this? Because once upon a time, a man and a woman once ate from a magic tree thanks to a serpent possessed by the devil (somehow) tricking the woman into eating from it. This god tells me that Eve disobeyed his order (despite god allowing the serpent to be there in the first place AND recklessly allowing the tree of knowledge to be within reach of his creation) and that because of her disobedience the world was cursed to evil, including its inhabitants. I must pay the price for her sin. But instead of using its own free will to forgive its creation and understanding that descendants can’t be guilty for someone’s crime, it decides to fix it by sending its own child (who is himself) into a virgin women to be born, perform some miracles, and preach to people before being killed for our “sins”, only to be dead for a weekend, descend to hell to rescue lost souls, before coming back to life to declare that it is the son of god, and go back to heaven to rule forever. If I want to be saved from the devil’s fire, I must accept the authority of the son of god as sovereign because of a single conversation in a magical garden. And that because of this outrageous scenario, I must choose unwillingly between heaven and hell, neither of which I get to see with my own eyes until after I return to the same nonexistence I sat in for millions of years before I was born. For generations, this process of unwilling captivity of human souls will persist until god's bloodlust is finally satisfied and his ego is fully stroked.
I am no longer a Christian because I am no longer allowing myself to be considered a hostage or a slave to either to Jesus or Satan, nor to their respective creator, Yahweh.If you are a believer, you must accept the above story without question. You must accept that you have been sent right into a cosmic fight between these two otherworldly forces negotiating your eternal fate, unwillingly. And that without plausible explanation, an innocent man had to be killed to allowed you and millions of others atonement. And that in exchange for this security, you must be willing to terrorize children with horrific descriptions of eternal torture, hate gays and lesbians for their sexual immorality, consider women inferior to men, and defend a god who sanctioned genocide, slavery, rape, blood sacrifice, and a promise of seven years of bloodshed, torture by the Antichrist, disease and disaster before destroying earth and its inhabitants, but not before re-establishing his “chosen” nation of Israel and creating a New Jerusalem in The Book Of Revelations (never how a god who created an entire galaxy has one chosen nation and one chosen people.)
I am no longer a Christian because I am no longer allowing myself to be considered a hostage or a slave to either to Jesus or Satan, nor to their respective creator, Yahweh. I don’t consider myself a retched creature who was born in filth and sickness thanks to the sin of Adam and Eve, I am a million to one chance of evolutionary biology whom nature selected to win his shot at discovering the universe as it is. I am not a hostage to gods, I am a human being who was born without debt. I declare myself free from tyranny, because my mind belongs to me. And it feels so good to be free.