By Aaron Mark ~ G rowing up, I have moved 16x in my life, and have lived in 7 different states, and also one foreign country. I have attended the following types of churches: non-denominational, bible, Baptist (more than one kind), Lutheran, catholic, Methodist, etc… I have studied and obsessed about Christianity for years. I remember when I was a teenager, I was picked on so much, and shunned away anyone whoever cared for me, that Jesus was my only friend. I would obsess about Jesus, and actually “preach” the “good news.” I was part of Baptist churches that had a heavy emphasis on “soul winning”. In other words, your get out of hell free card. Actually, up until the time of my enlistment in the Army, I actually wanted to be a missionary. I wanted to spread god’s “love” to everyone. I considered going to a Christian college, and getting my degree in “missions” I felt sorry for all the missionaries in third world countries and hostile countries where they were being persecuted and

By Tracey ~ T his piece has been four years in the making. I have had a difficult time stopping for long enough to put it on paper, mostly because I don’t like to think about it. I will not be changing names, as I believe each man in this story deserves full credit for his actions and I wouldn’t want to take that away from them. This is a short memoir – a testimony, some might say, about what a difference a godly man made in my life. When I was young, I was very overweight and I had a self-esteem problem. Around the age of seventeen I began to lose weight and ended up at a very healthy weight of about 125 pounds. Suddenly I began to be noticed by men, something I had never before experienced. By the time I graduate Air Force basic training at age nineteen, I was a very confident young woman. I moved to Anchorage, Alaska , where I was stationed, in November of 2007. That is where I met a very godly man. His name was David and we met in early 2008. He was a Presbyterian, as was the

By Aaron ~ I need to get this stuff off my chest where some adult out there will hear me and not act like I can't think for myself. I've been a Christian for all of my life and I don't feel connected to religion anymore. We'll start at the beginning: My parents divorced when I was 3, although they work together and maintain a strong bond. They'd take me to church most sundays, but usually my mom would consistently take me. My dad was pretty lax about going to church, and he still is. I went to Catholic elementary school , where every day before class would start, there would be a daily prayer talk in the gym with something or other about God and Jesus and salvation, etc. As you can guess, when you're 6, you'll basically believe whatever grown ups tell you. How could they possibly be wrong? They wouldn't lie to you right? So from when I was 6 to 12 I went to Catholic school. We went to church during the day once in a while, and my friends and

By Christian Charette ~ I don’t remember the day I stopped believing in a personal god. My exodus from Christian faith was a gradual process fueled by asking skeptical questions. I’m an insider who approached his own faith system the ways I had approached all other faith systems. The trajectory of my life, from being the little preacher boy who took the stage to preach at age 7 to a man who started his own church was, in retrospect, always deconstructing the system of Christianity I had adopted culturally. I was sincere and a true believer but a Christian by default. It started when I was 5, living in buffalo, NY. My mother had joined a local Presbyterian bible study. Raised catholic, she came to believe that she wasn’t a true Christian with personal faith and decided to become a Christian. This was a decision that had significant impact on our family. After a rough patch, my father also converted and we began attending a Presbyterian Church in Armour, New York. I remember telli

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ F or years, I have considered the population of the world. I remember the times when I would hear on the news that the world population had reached 5 billion in 1987, then 6 billion in 1999, and recently, 7 billion in 2012. In college, I took a course in Differential Equations. One of the few things I remember the professor teaching was that population grows exponentially. Theoretically, the population of the world by now should have been over-run with humans. But in practicality, something always occurs in nature to dampen the exponential growth. In many cases throughout history, the dampening mechanism for human population has been wars, disease and starvation. I found this fascinating. As a creationist, I had the idea that you could back-calculate, taking into consideration a plague or two, several world wars, and prove that humanity could be traced back to one man and one woman about 6000 years ago. Of course, I found that this was n

By Incongruous Circumspection ~ I know. Shocking. Actually, it's not really that big a deal. As a child of a fundamentalist and crazy Mama, my brain told me she knew everything about me because she wielded such heavy-handed power and control. If I was fifty states away from her, I would still feel as if her watchful eye was hovering above me, waiting for me to screw up, just to give her the chance to bring that boar-bristle, hardwood brush down on my head (thankfully cushioned by my wavy and thick locks). But she never did. I kicked my own arse by telling her about all my infractions when I would get home. She didn't even have to ask. I just did it. It felt cleansing. Like admitting all your impure thoughts about ice cream during lent, to a priest. So, naturally, I thought that all parents of all children kept track of everything their kids did and learned. I know now that most of those fundamentalist parents lived in a state of denial, while their kids hi

By Carl S ~ T he other day, I sent a get-well card to my wife's pastor and his wife. When it came time to address the envelope, I was told to make it “Pastor”... etc. This I will not do. (She did not question why I won’t.) I would have told her that I will never again use the addresses pastor, reverend, your eminence, father, Holy Father , and so on. First of all, I find nothing to “revere” about them. Second of all, such terms are not appropriate in these United States, any more than Your Majesty or My Lord are. I don't care if the President addresses a catholic cardinal as “your eminence.” He shouldn't. (Right now one of those “eminences” has been charged with covering up for priest pedophiles in California.) Thirdly, consider the history of priesthood and its psychological effects. Let's go excavating. From the most ancient of recorded histories, priests have prospered alongside the ruling class, including present times. In every civilization recorded, priests

By Dano ~ I t's ok to be ignorant about god. I am even willing to admit to having an almost absolute conviction that there is no evidence of anything like Bible God, being "out there" I also believe that if organized religions hadn't taken over their minds, most people would admit to being ignorant also.The majority of people won't admit it though because of the connotations of what the word ignorant implies. Let me tell you, realizing that I was completely ignorant of what god is, never mind what it wants from me, has been the most freeing and satisfying conclusion I have ever come to, and then to realize that every person on this planet is just as ignorant as I am as to whom or what created everything, is like being born again. Now I think most people on this web site would be willing to agree that I lack a few to many literary refinements to be considered educated or at least that it is fairly obvious that I am not one of the most complicated thinkers he

By Maddeline ~ I just don't care any more! That's right, I said it, lol. I was raised in a Christian home and still live there. I am busy trying to get my career started and get my own place but it has been difficult. My mom still goes to church every week. I find her to be terribly obnoxious. She is one of those lazy housewives that hasn't worked for thirty years and she is always guilt tripping me. I am tired of all this guilt! I just want to shed it all. I am tired of playing this game in my head. Is God listening to my prayers? I don't really care anymore. I just want to live my life. I am looking for support from this community and I have to say I love it here. I just want to live my life without all this guilt. I am more nihilistic now. Sex, money, power, it all seems great and fulfilling to me, lol. I have admitted to my supportive sister that I have basically rejected the faith and am also bisexual and love gorgeous well-hung black men.

By Faithfool ~ I feel like I’m culturally malnourished . For me, coming out of Christianity was like being on a potato-only diet for 28 years, then one day stumbling across a gourmet buffet. OH MY GOD! WHY DIDN’T ANYONE TELL ME HOW INCREDIBLE THIS FOOD IS! For the last year, I’ve been feasting on science, history, literature, music, art, poetry, philosophy, drama, dance, psychology and everything in between. It’s not that anyone had stopped me from enjoying this stuff before. I just didn’t think about it really. I was all-consumed by everything Christian. Christian radio in my car, Christian podcasts in my ear, Christian TV in my home, Christian websites on my PC, church activities in my diary, predominately Christian family and friends... you get the picture. My mission was to become more and more like Jesus. So wasting time on secular stuff made NO sense to me. I just didn’t have the palate for it, let alone the constitution. Now I can’t stop reading. And watching.

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ E ven a cursory reading of the Bible demonstrates that Bible-God is a crude caricature of a god. And this may be all the evidence one needs to believe that Bible-God is merely a man-made construct, and not a real god. Now, I’m not talking about any “higher order” conceptions of a god as, say, a spirit of love, or as a ground of being, or the Deist god. I’m talking about the god portrayed in the Bible. It seems to me that we should expect, in a real god, all of the best personality attributes we find in the best of humans – and more. Yet, in Bible-god we find mostly what we find in the worst of humans. We don’t have to read very closely to see that Bible-god simply has no class. Think about the character of Bible-God. He is claimed to be the ultimate intelligence and all-powerful, yet he is jealous of other gods and, indeed, says as much in Exodus 20. How does this make sense? This is like the President of the United States being jealous of the May