Getting out of Christianity

By J. S. Dollin ~

Here’s my life. I’ve been ruled by Christians. I’ve been directed by Christians and now, I don’t want to be one anymore. And that’s okay with me. Do I need to admit to my family?

What will make it so that I can be free completely?

I didn’t party in high school. I didn’t even know that world existed. I was so naive that I didn’t even realize what exactly happened when this guy jerked off into the ranch dressing as a joke and got suspended. Sex, wasn’t ever on the table. I never pursued the knowledge of what sex was and when I finally asked Mom about it, she got this picture book for me when I was 12 or 13 from the Christian library. I didn’t really get it until I watched movies. Honestly, I don’t know how I didn’t know anything about it, it just never came up.

I didn’t get my period until I was 16. I was a late bloomer and a late developer, which made me always feel like I was behind. I felt like I never understood what was happening and I didn’t have any friends to help me get through it and explain some stuff to me. All of my friends were church-goers, conservative and private about their lives.

The Christian lifestyle. The Christian world I grew up in, did not help me grow. It did not help me become the person I am. It only hindered me from thinking outside of the box. It only hindered me from taking control of my life and being okay with myself. I had no one telling me that I was okay with the way that I am. I had no one making sure that I knew that I was myself and I was damn incredible how I am. I had no one following up to double check that I wasn’t getting too hard on myself. I had no one who would validate the reasons why I did things.

It was only Jesus who could validate things in my family. None of our decisions were good enough. Looking at Christianity, I see how wrong we interpreted that. Jesus didn’t want to make it so our decisions weren’t true or important. He wanted us to trust in him and trust him with our decisions, which we took as complete disregard to our own needs and wants.

That still doesn’t make sense to me in Christianity.

The Christian world I grew up in, did not help me grow.I think about college, where I continued this Christian mission, giving hot chocolate to drunks between parties in the cold, going to bible studies, starting my own bible study, heading to Chicago for my senior year and everything changing. As I felt stuck in doing teacher stuff and stuck in my apartment in little village, I also had much more that changed when I stopped going to church. I didn’t think it made sense anymore. I was influenced by my peers, but also it was the summer before in Guatemala that made it completely ring true my disbelief in the Bible.

I went to a book store in a random nook with internationals leading the way to find great novels and amazing stories. I don’t remember how it came up, but I left the store with a book that I never was able to finish that brought up the inconsistency of the Bible. The same topic that Bill brought up to me in 8th grade. Why would you believe this?

As I read a sufficient amount of it, I began to believe that this Bible I had spent so many times delving into, trusting with my life, was not well written. It was wrong. The truth was that so many of the parts that don’t make sense were translated poorly. The words I took so sacredly throughout my life made me cringe with the fact that there were 17 different ways to say the same words, which then changed the words and its meaning completely. How could anyone believe this?

The obsession with Christianity in our culture is extreme. I cannot believe how much the Christian society expects to see Jesus at every turn.

Maybe I need to separate myself completely from my Christianity. No verse reference passwords anymore. No pretending otherwise. This is how I can be true to myself.

Comments

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

Search This Blog