By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ D ear Christian Facebook Friends, If you don't know by now, I have deconverted from Christianity. And if you couldn't tell, after 30 years as an adult Christian, I have an ax to grind. In the last 2-3 years, I have made many new like-minded nontheist friends, and we like to talk about religion. I have not unfriended any of you since many of you are truly my "real" friends and even family. But now it has gotten to the point that when I have passionate facebook conversations with other Christians who enjoy that sort of thing, some of you go haywire. And by haywire, I mean you cut and paste my comments (out of context of the conversation) and email them to my non-facebook wife, as if I need to be "told on". Know this, that you are "sowing discord". So please obey your own God and stop it. If you don't want to see these conversations, unfriend me right now. Some of you would like to see my marriage en...

By Daniel out of the Lion’s Den ~ A fter a period of turmoil in my marriage, my believing wife and I have reached a point where we can accept that the other does not hold the same beliefs regarding religion or the cosmos. In order to help her to not feel alone at church, I decided to attend the Sunday worship services with her. I do not, however, attend the Adult Bible Fellowship, Wednesday Bible Study, Sunday Evening Home Group, or any other activity meant to keep a Christian mind from straying. I tell myself that I can sit through one sermon a week, and that it’s a good place to work on material, keeping my mind sharp as I mentally challenge everything the pastor says. And I have rarely been disappointed. The mega church has multiple facilities. One satellite building in particular was built three years ago. Before a certain area was carpeted, church members took Sharpie pens and wrote names of people they would like to bring to Christ on the subflooring. This past Sund...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ W hen a Christian attempts to convert a person to their religion by preaching the Gospel, then introducing the need to make a decision to either reject or accept their man-god, Jesus, into the would-be convert’s heart, they are exercising logic. Most Christians hate that word, since it is the application of logic to the tenets of their religion that result in many people leaving the faith. Nevertheless, they are in fact, knowingly or unwittingly using logic. They will say you have to make a decision: Yes or No. There cannot be a maybe; there is no gray area. The answer must be binary… 0 or 1, on or off, black or white, yes or no. Furthermore, they will extol the simplicity of this divinely hatched plan. All you have to do is say yes, and your eternal fate is sealed: Destiny Paradise! An answer of “no” results in dire consequences: Eternal Burning. Such a simple plan of salvation, it must be God-breathed. It doesn’t take much to illust...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ M y wife asserts that I am being blinded by Satan , and that he uses science to bring about my unbelief. This certainly attributes a great amount of ability to this creature. That he can telepathically implant thoughts and ideas in my brain to alter the process of how I arrive at rational conclusions? That he has just the right biochemical substance to create a neurotransmitter, injecting it at just the right location in my frontal lobe to be carried across just the right synapses to bring about doubt in the existence of God, the deity of Jesus and the inerrancy of Scripture? Whoa, if somebody could bottle that… Thinking about Satan was a big part of my deconversion. Consider all the human perspectives of this being, everything from a hideous monster to a beautiful angel. All these images concerning a being that has never been seen! Yet, 57% of Americans assert that Satan is real. It’s all a part of the clergy casting their net of fea...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ A s I began to give my Christian friends notification that I was no longer a member of the club, I found that they didn’t really believe me. They would say things like, “It’s perfectly normal to doubt or question.” And, “I know exactly where you’re coming from, I feel unworthy at times, too.” On top of that, the invitations to come to this meeting and that outing were relentless. I didn’t realize how deep in I was, and that I had to be pulled out by the roots. I could see that a more forceful approach would be required. One friend heard of my “faith issue” and wanted to talk about it over lunch. After an hour, I was no where near finishing my explanation. I saw that it would be logistically impossible to meet individually with all the people I needed to tell for three hours each. As much as I don’t like the impersonal approach of e-mail, I decided to write a letter explaining my deconversion. I understand that I could just say, “Adi...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ A ccuse a Christian of being a polytheist by worshiping three gods, and they will vehemently deny it. Yet in their own creeds and hymns, they confess that they worship three persons. In a feeble attempt to hold onto the Jewish monotheistic roots of their religion, they have conjured up a three-headed beast that they can’t even explain. Its funny how Islamists, who are farther removed from Christianity, can make the objective observation that Christianity is polytheistic. Since the Jewish and Christian religions have historically cobbled their gods together by borrowing bits and pieces from other world religions, I thought it would be interesting to look for hints of the Trinity in mythology. These puzzle pieces could reveal how such a notion came to be. I have read that Christians in the first several centuries would evangelize by comparing elements in Christianity with similar elements in other religions. “Jesus was born of a virgin, co...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ I ’m reading Richard Dawkin ’s book, The God Delusion . Now, I have read the entire Bible, and most assuredly have read the books of Matthew and Luke many times over. And due to enduring countless Advent and Christmas Eve services, I have listened many more times to Matthew chapter 1 ad nauseum, and Luke chapter 3 to a lesser extent... which is why this astonishes me: that I have never heard of or noticed what Dawkins describes in his chapter ‘ Arguments for God’s Existence ’ in the section ‘The Argument From Scripture’. He points out that the genealogy of Jesus documented in Matthew is markedly different than the one documented in Luke. Specifically, the lineage from King David to Joseph (the husband of Mary) not only contains predominantly different names, but Matthew has 26 generations from David and Joseph, while Luke has 41! Needing to see for myself, I created the following table from the two books, showing the discrepant patriarc...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ N ow that I’m out, I’m finding that I must going through an out-processing of sorts. There was the talk with the pastor who wanted me to know that I was no longer welcome to play with the worship band (I told him I didn’t have a heart for it anyway with my new worldview and was looking for an out). My wife interviewed me and made notes concerning the tenets of Christianity with which I disagreed (“All of them” was not an acceptable answer). Then there was the well-meaning adult Bible class teacher who wanted to do lunch to find out what was going on in my head. Upon deconverting, I had no idea that I would have to generate my own set of ex-Christian apologetics, but that is exactly what I had to do in order to not come across as petty and shallow. I’m concluding that there are major tenets of ex-Christianity , such as the mortal Jesus (who died and stayed dead just like everybody else), Old Testament mythology (Adam & Eve, Noah’s Ark, T...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~  M y wife caught me medicating with cannabis… alright, she caught me smoking pot . But when you say it like that, you think of a teenager enveloped in a plume of bong smoke, eating Doritos and listening to Pink Floyd . I truly medicate to alleviate anxiety, or so I have convinced myself. Without going into the long and drawn out reasons for using this natural herb, suffice it to say that the whole situation has been the catalyst for having “The Conversation” about my deconversion with my wife. I have read several extimonials regarding the topic of revealing one’s change in belief system to a spouse, so now it’s my turn. As you can imagine, my wife (who has a Ph.D. in Psychology) was up in arms concerning my medicating. At first, she demanded that I leave our home, and she informed several people at church, including the pastor. She made stringent demands for me to follow in order to return home. But after I spent two nights at my mot...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ M y mother claims that when she was four years old, she floated down a staircase. Astonished by this feat, she ran to the neighborhood children to tell them about her amazing achievement. Some were skeptical, and demanded that she repeat the event in their presence. The crowd gathered in her house as she climbed to the top of the stairs. She stood there trying as hard as she could to launch into the super-human glide that she was certain occurred just minutes beforehand. But nothing happened. As the naysayers began to dispersed, she exclaimed, “You have to eat a lot of carrots!” “At the mouth of two or three witnesses shall the matter be established.” This biblical axiom is scattered through the Old and New Testaments. And why shouldn’t it be? It’s actually not a bad rule. Certainly, in modern courts of law, when more than one witness independently corroborate a story, the story is given credence and becomes believable. In the Bib...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering. I have a Master of Business Administration degree in Executive Management. I am highly skilled at performing on piano, guitar and saxophone. I am a certified Project Management Professional. My I.Q. is 132, qualifying for membership into Mensa. Yet, I have never felt so stupid and foolish as I do today. For 30 years, all my adult life, I have subscribed to the teaching that the creation story in the Book of Genesis literally occurred in six 24 hour days. To not believe, they said, is to deny the power of the Almighty God of the Universe. To not believe, they said, would render the entire Bible full of falsehoods. To not believe, they said, would set your soul on a slippery slope on which your faith would fail, putting you at risk of eternal damnation. Looking back, I see that believing in the 6x24 hour days of creation provided a foundation for believing that everything e...

By Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ I was in the 5th grade when I came to the realization that Santa Claus was not real. Even in 1973, eleven years old was ancient in terms of believing in Old Saint Nick. But why should I not believe? Every year I wrote a letter to Santa, and the presents appeared. Maybe not exactly what I asked for, but close enough to keep me believing. My mother taught me that Santa was a real person who knew who was naughty and who was nice. When I came home from school telling her that classmates had become unbelievers, she acted appalled, and assured me that those who stopped believing would no longer receive his gifts on Christmas morning. Believing that Santa Claus was real gave me a sense of joy - a magical being cared so much about me that he gave me gifts! So it came as quite a shock when my younger sister outed my parents for lying to me all the eleven years I had spent on this earth. I was played the fool. A seismic jolt had altered my worldv...

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 Daniel out of the Lion's Den ~ I ’m an engineer. A big part of my job is analyzing data. Data is known. A product has been tested and measured, creating the data. If you want to know how a product will perform, you simply look at the data. But what if you want to know how the product will perform beyond the confines of the existing data? No problem, you use numerical methods to extrapolate. Sure, it’s a fancy term for guessing, but with experience and proper tools, you get pretty good at it. Sometimes you have to extrapolate far beyond the confines of existing data. You know it’s a bigger guess, and the answer has increased uncertainty. But you convince yourself that you are an expert. You have the answer that no one else can come up with. You are right, and no one can tell you otherwise. In my last testimonial, Out of the Lion’s Den and Into the Fiery Furnac e, I introduced you to Brother Enrique. One of Brother Enrique’s teachings of faith was that God is th...