By Brian Kellogg ~ I recently had an online discussion with a fundamentalist Christian that encouraged me to think deeper about the below argument. This is the beautiful result of honest debate. It either further strengthens your reasoning or it shows that you may be wrong. Either result is good even when we find we are wrong. Life is about growing. I'd rather not live with my fingers forever metaphorically in my ears. English: Abraham embraces his son Isaac after receiving him back from God (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) This argument was one of the lynch pins as to why I had to leave Christianity. Christopher Hitchens was the one who initially caused me to honestly and critically analyze the story of Abraham 's attempted murder of his son Isaac with one of his often finely tuned and targeted retorts in a debate. For this I am indebted to him to do what little I can for the cause of free-thinking as well. Any Christians reading this please post your rebuttal(s) ...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ I read recently that the U.S. has roughly 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison inmates. This is a major burden on our society as prisoners are expensive to house. Across the country our prisons are overcrowded and more are being built all the time. We must be doing something wrong here. Now some would say that the “war on drugs” and mandatory sentences are largely to blame for this problem, and they may well have a point. Nevertheless, the political conservatives are adamant that punishment is the path to righteousness and the war must be continued. So, where should we look for a solution? Well, what if we were to take a solution from the Bible? When god found humans were doing wrongs left and right, he quickly found a solution; it’s called “scapegoating.” So that he could forgive all those wrongs against him, he found an innocent man, pinned all those wrongs on him, then tortured and executed him. Voilà, end of problem. ...

By Positivist ~ Important: I am not looking for sympathy here. Please don't dish that out, or empty platitudes. This is not a sob story but a point of discussion. Childless Millionaire and a Poor Woman Blessed with Children (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) R ecently a friend, upon learning of our ongoing struggle with infertility, gasped in horror, "I would DIE without my kids!" Realizing the moment she uttered those words that perhaps they were not helpful to my pain, she stopped short and looked at me strangely. The conversation changed direction abruptly at that point. This topic is not popular. Now, several friends have dealt with infertility by extracting from the clenched fist of God that which they feel is due them, with an equally wide range of methods as results. We are one of the few folks out there who believed in the sovereignty of God and his perfect, loving plan for our prayer-filled lives. We have finally concluded that God has nothing to do with fe...

By Carl S. ~ Kahlil Gibran : “The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply.” Hans Holbein- The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) P rior to modern scientific forensics, there was no acceptable way to prosecute a murder suspect without the actual physical body of the victim. This is no longer the case. Fiber analysis , DNA , footage of the suspect purchasing the murder weapon, or being absent from a place where the murderer claimed himself to be at the time of the killing, etc., are acceptable evidence in courts of law. Whenever enough evidence is amassed to show that the victim was killed by a particular person, a conviction follows. You can understand how in the past, being unable to prosecute without a body allowed murderers to get off Scott-free. Or how, even with an actual corpse, the innocent could be convicted solely on the testimonies of what presently can be proven to be hearsay and/or dubious “eyewitness” r...

By RaLeah ~ I t's getting trendy for conservatives and Christians now to speak out about the virtues of marrying young and starting a family early. In the church where I grew up, this was the norm rather than the exception. I thought it was probably because the church was very vocal about condemning sex before marriage, and so people got married to the first person who stirred their lustful thoughts. Now I'm not so sure. It was true that the people who didn't get married and start a family young were the most likely to leave the church. I thought at the time that they couldn't find any suitable mates left, so they were looking elsewhere. Maybe they felt bitter at God for not giving them a spouse, so they left in an act of rebellious discontent. I don't think that's the case either. I chose not to get married young, because I felt I still had a lot of growing to do. I had to get to know myself first before I brought someone else into the equation. I...

By Hellspeak ~ Y ou're a new Christian. You've been searching for meaning in life , and are convinced you have found it in Christ Jesus. You've said the sinner's prayer , been convicted for the crime of being human, and experienced the pang's of white hot guilt. But a new hope has welled up from inside you, you've had your conversion experience, and are now on fire for God. Now the testing will begin... the refining. You use to follow the dictates of your nature, your inner self, that used to guide you, but now you aspire to submit to a God/Man. A being, that you have never physically met in this life and never will. A man, that you will attempt to have a relationship with, and your only means of attaining this will be in your mind. How you will feel about him, will depend on how you think, as how you think, is how you feel. You will be taught, that to draw near to the thought ideal of who and what Christ is to you, you must lose yourself to find him. Yo...

By Valerie Tarico ~ W ant a special someone who will bring you to your knees? One who will be totally in charge? One who will tell you that you are really, really bad and threaten you with punishments? Maybe you have a little day dream about being a captive virgin. Or maybe you prefer to fantasize about a man who is helpless, who, say, has his arms secured to a crossbeam. Christianity has something for everyone. I’m not the first person to observe that religious and sexual ecstasy have a lot in common—or that the love songs Christians croon to Jesus sound remarkably like other love songs. Nor am I the first to point out that Christian ministers, musicians, and recruiters play with this blurry boundary deliberately. Tim Tebow posing as sexy Jesus-on-the-cross for GQ kind of says it all. As if there weren’t enough Christian girls and boys struggling with Jesus fantasies already. ( here , here , here ) Early pagan religions incorporated sexuality explicitly into religious prac...

By JC Wells ~ A s a recovering Christian-aholic, I must say that I am glad I stumbled onto this site. There are some great posts on here. As one who was wrapped up in Bible theology with no way out, I have found great freedom in studying the Bible and making well-informed and educated decisions about its lack of truth. Christianity is a very dizzy ride indeed. It is a ride that involves carrots on a stick, whips at your back, and future promises of blissful states that are never realized. The real addiction of Christianity is the "good" parts of the Bible that all churches cherry pick for their own self-aggrandizement. Lessons about love, peace, kindness, and gentleness can be gleamed from the Bible. But so too can it be gleamed from every religion or philosophy book on earth. But grabbing morsels of truth from the Bible is like trying to drink pure water out of a septic tank . It doesn't work. Here's why.(Don't worry; I will not explain why drinking water c...

By Doubting Thomas ~ I hope that somehow I will resist all religious lures and have courage to say what I truly believe in to all fundamentalist without any fear or insecurity, hiding behind my progressive/liberal religion. “You’ve got stuck in a moment, and now you can’t get out of it”. T hese lyrics from U2 song maybe describe what I feel like since I’ve started to think on my religious view in last couple of years. I have never been a religious person in real sense of that word. I have always looked upon religious claims as some kind of symbolic messages and metaphors. Despite the fact I love to say a prayer in a silent and empty church, I have never liked crowded Sunday services and to pious believers. By the way, I live in Croatia which in the last decade has passed through some kind of re-traditionalizing process thanks to strong Roman Catholic influences, empty nationalism and general aversion toward socialist secularism. Compared to number of inhabitants I think th...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ To: Professor Marjie Mead From: Referee Committee, “Journal of Earth Anthropology” Subject: Your article submission titled, “The Earth Bible as Foundation of an Influential Religion” W e have studied your article concerning your recent excavations on Earth with great interest, but we regret to inform you that we have found your evidence unconvincing, and cannot publish your manuscript at this time Surely you understand that to claim that the Bible was once a foundational document for one or more serious and influential Earth religions requires a very sizable body of compelling evidence. Since the first Bibles were dug up some 200 years ago, it has been widely understood that the contents were created as fiction, intended for instructional and entertainment purposes only. Yes, as you have noted, it appears to be one of the most numerous books yet found on the Earth, and, yes, it has been found in sizable quantities near the ruins of what som...

By Klym ~ A fter almost five years of deconverting from Christianity, I can now look back and recognize that this religion is totally based on a fear of death. I can remember as a young child being terrified of death---and all because of the doctrine of hell and salvation. Now that I can see it clearly for what it is, and think about it logically and without fear, the whole idea of needing to be "saved" from death just crumbles to dust. For ancient mankind, the world must have been a very scary place. It's still pretty dang scary today, as a matter of fact. I think that religions sprung up as an attempt to control the uncontrollable. The scariest thing in life IS death, because it takes our loved ones away from us and hurts so deeply that we scramble to make some sort of sense of it. The idea of an afterlife where everything is made right and just then becomes extremely appealing. This will sound strange to many of you, but it was a defining moment in my life, s...

By RaLeah ~ I t's hard to lose your support system. You can leave behind the church, leave behind the idea of God, but your family... they're always your family. One of the hardest parts about being an ex-Christian is that those who love you most are still fervently praying and hoping for your return to God. They're convinced you can't live a happy life without Jesus, and that hell will be your final destination if you don't come back into the fold. We each deal with that knowledge in different ways. Maybe we keep our lack of belief a secret. Or we hint at it gently. Perhaps we're brave enough to state it openly and suffer the consequences. Why does it have to be so hard? For me, I know my family is expecting that God is going to somehow either woo me back or send some terrible misfortune into my path that will send me running back. So they pray and they wait. Any day now something bad is sure to happen to me, something that will break my strong wil...

By Steve Dustcircle ~ I don't remember a time where we weren't going to church. My mother was very religious, and my dad seemed to tag along to keep her happy. I don't remember much about going to church, or Sunday School, or prayer services, or meetings (surprisingly). I do recall sometimes where at 7 or 8 years old, drawing Godzilla, or secretly peeling the varnish off the pew handrails. What I do remember--and cringed at when I became "born again" in my young adult years--is the doctrine we were taught. The stories were usually always happy. Noah and his smiling family, with smiling animals, and unsmiling drowning demon-looking sinners. I remember pastel painted, Caucasian Jesus passing out uncleaned fish to masses of smiling white people. I remember clean-clothed Jesus having various races of kids sitting on his lap, accepting even the Chinese and Native American in 25 AD Israel or Judea. But what I remember most is the LAW! The Ten Commandments! No on...

By Carl S. ~ W e mourn, knowing of the deaths and massive damage done to innocent people we can relate to; especially those as a result of the “senseless” use of bombs. In spite of those religious spokesmen who insist natural catastrophes are a result of human misbehaving, we realize that they are not personally directed at human beings. Christian Cross 11 (Photo credit: Waiting For The Word ) Days after the bombings in Boston , a neighbor lady pointed out something “horrible” she learned from the news. “The bombs were placed near children,” she said. As in the fresh memories of the Newtown massacres, children were murdered, which made me think of “positively biblical” as a way to describe them to someone. After each event, the public fumbles to understand, “Why?” Clergy offer their usual cliché solaces to comfort the grieving, one of them being the famous, “Your children are in heaven.” (Doesn‘t it cross their minds that if this is so, then their murderers ought to be rewa...

By SmashTheCMachine ~ P erhaps this is unusual, but that has been my past. Yahweh took precedence, was the only "true" God (of course), but there was always room in my family's fantasy for Zeus , Ra, Athena , and Ares. I suspect my deconversion was the consequence of many factors throughout my youth, I will attempt to portray the most relevant without bogging it down with excessive detail. To give some background how I wound up with such a bizarre mish-mash of faith, I was raised non-denominational. I was fortunate to some extent that I mostly missed out on church, but there's an expression: "tit for tat", and the cost was a peculiar brand of lunacy and paranoia that even had other churches in the Devil's pocket, deliberately so on their behalf. I should also add that while my immediate family were christian, my extended family were practitioners of ritual magic (Wiccan, Pagan, and similar practices of "spirituality"), which had c...