Skip to main content

I'm Free!

By Tim Wolf ~

I didn’t grow up in a churchy family. My parents had been active in the local Presbyterian Church. But my mom told me that since I was allergic to penicillin as a small child, the doctor said it was best not to over-expose me to public venues. I don’t know if this was the reason or not, but it doesn’t really matter.

At around 13, I started to become interested in Christianity on my own. I was baptized at the local Presbyterian Church and became fairly active there. I guess I could be described as a hot and cold Christian for the next several years. But then in my junior year of college, two guys knocked on my apartment door and explained to me about being born again. I didn’t pray with them then in front of my roommate. But I sought them out later and prayed with them. At that point, I was on fire!

Over the next several years I moved a lot but stayed active in the church. For several years I was a youth leader for a parachurch organization for a large high school near Raleigh, NC. Later I became a youth Sunday school teacher in a church in Illinois. It was during this time I decided to take the next step. I decided I wanted to be a missionary and spread the good news overseas. The process of becoming a missionary for this group was long and difficult. In the end, they said I was not accepted because one of the ten people who was to supply a reference for me had failed to do so. I think it was really because I was divorced, but they didn’t say that. Anyway, during this same time I was pursuing a possible overseas mission, I also immersed myself in Bible study. I entered an online Master of Theology program and also just spent a lot of time reading the Bible. I had read through the New Testament many times, so I decided to focus more time on the Old Testament. I read through the entire Old Testament (except the genealogies) twice. Of all of the bizarre stuff I read in the Old Testament, one thing sticks in my mind. In Exodus, why was God looking to kill Moses? This made no sense to me and the flimsy explanations I read in Bible commentaries didn’t help either. With all of the rape, incest, and murder in the Old Testament, I don’t know why this verse just stood out to me as being completely inconsistent. But it did.

Also during this time, a friend at church was telling me about a prayer group he was forming to “pray for our church.” I knew these were some of the key members at my church in this group, so I wanted to be a part of that. What I quickly learned was this “prayer group” was actually a weekly planning meeting for a coup to overthrow the senior pastor. I was shocked! I loved the pastor. He had even invited me to spend Christmas with his family since I did not have any family in the area. The more involved I got in this church, the more I realized there was a lot of nasty politicking going on behind the scenes involving all kinds of issues. I had gotten a peek behind the curtain of the church and I was shocked and dismayed at what I saw. I remember a sermon around this time where Paul explained that when someone is in Christ, they are a new creation. The old is gone and they become new! I was thinking if these people are a “new creation”, I’m not sure the conversion process is a good one.

As an aside, there was another huge New Testament concern I had had for many years that nobody was able to explain to my satisfaction. And that is that the book of James absolutely contradicts all of the stuff that Paul was teaching throughout the New Testament. And oh yeah, I heard all of the arguments about how James was really agreeing with Paul and just saying faith without works is dead. But look, I’m a smart guy and I can read. James is not agreeing with Paul. James is taking Paul’s doctrine of salvation through belief and turning it on its head. I was so sure of this; I had even considered this as a thesis topic when I was taking graduate courses in Theology.

So shortly after I moved from Illinois to Alabama, I learned that the pastor at my old church had gotten the boot. Even today as an atheist, it bothers me how this honorable man who had treated me like a son, got such an unceremonious ousting from his church. He deserved better.

Something that helped in my recovery from the damage the church had done to me was to make friends who were not “church going.” Wow, was that refreshing!In Alabama, I decided to join a very large church and planned to keep a low profile and avoid the church politics. But the senior pastor at this church delivered powerful sermons. And each Sunday morning, he made me feel more-and-more guilty for not getting involved whole-heartedly in church activities. So eventually I gave in and started calling various associate pastors and lay leaders trying to find where I would fit in. What I learned was they didn’t want me involved in their “ministry.” It felt just like high school when you tried to join a club with the “cool kids”, only to find out they didn’t want you. I learned later from an associate pastor there that I was not alone in this problem. Many, many people in the church felt torn apart because the senior pastor blasted them for not getting more involved, but the associate pastors didn’t want their help. And this led to more feelings of guilt as we weren’t doing “God’s work.”

After I left Alabama, I had become completely disenchanted with the church. Later I even found out that senior pastor in Alabama with the fiery sermons had been fired as chaplain at a large university when it was revealed that he had been having an adulterous affair for many years.

Something that helped in my recovery from the damage the church had done to me was to make friends who were not “church going.” Wow, was that refreshing! I still maintained that I was a born-again Christian, but these friends were ok with that. I could even express my issues with the church and the Bible and not be judged. Even in this freeing environment, it took me another decade to fully realize I just did not believe in this Biblical foolishness anymore. One day as I perused some books on amazon.com, I came across a book “Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity” by John Loftus. I don’t know why this book came up in my search, but I’m glad it did. I downloaded it to my kindle and devoured it over a weekend. I emailed John Loftus and thanked him for writing the book and quickly received a nice reply from him. Then I started reading other books like “The God Delusion” and “De-Converted,” and visiting atheist websites. I used to think Richard Dawkins was probably the most evil man on the planet. Now I realized I had more in common with these atheists than I had ever had with people in the church. And who knew, atheists can be very nice people!

I encourage anyone who has issues with the Bible or the church to not just accept the “church line”, but explore it for yourself. Guess what, the book of James is in contradiction to the writings of Paul. In fact, the New Testament is chock full of contradictions if one will just look at them critically and not buy into the excuses made by Christians. To quote Luis Bunuel,
“Thank God I’m an atheist!”

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

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

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