By Cecelia ~ N ow that I am free of religion and church, I look back and wonder why I allowed myself to be so controlled by both. I am definitely not a leader but neither am I a blind follower. I'm not a 'group person' who goes along with the crowd for the sake of it. I hate the mentality of 'everyone else is doing ... such and such so you should too.' I balk at that sort of faulty logic. I hate being manipulated and coerced. It makes me want to do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. For better or worse, I like to make my own decisions. I am my own person. When I found God in my twenties, I was still that person. I didn't turn into a total sheep, baaing away obediently to every command. In fact, there were many times when I felt that I was the only one who could see what an unhealthy little cult we all belonged to. Nevertheless, something had shifted in me. It's as though a big chunk of my personality had fallen off and got lo...

By Carl S ~ Y ou'd think that being yourself would be a simple thing to do. You'd expect others would gracefully accept you as yourself. You're not insane, bossy, or rude, and you're harmless. But sometimes you experience not some straight-ahead accommodation, but, as if you are a football player, people ready to tackle you at every move you make. If you're perceived as being "different” from the rest, or become so, be ready for opposition. If you become very true to yourself, this really throws others off psychologically. Watch out if you're in a religion-saturated culture and drop out! Sometimes you can be unfriended by being yourself. I remember an article about how some wives’ perceptions of their husbands changed over the course of their marriage. The women were initially attracted to those men for certain qualities. What started out as attraction for their "ambition" became negative because he has "no time for me," or that th...

By Steve Dustcircle ~ P eople are people, and events happen. There is nothing you change or prevent, within reason. You accept people how they are, and hope that they will choose on their own what you dislike about them.   I felt this way about others' musical and film choices. I felt this way about people's sexuality. I felt this way about other choices others would make, about not having children, about donating time and finances, about habits like smoking and drinking, and about other things that lie within the boundaries of “ethics” and “ morality .” It didn't matter what my view was. I was taught by my mentors to  love the sinner, hate the sin , and I wanted to practice that sort of accepting love. Sadly, however, I honestly didn't see much of this among my church or college peers. This idea of trying to be like Jesus, hanging out with sinners, was admired by some and detested by others within my church circles. Not that I was pure in thought, and...

By Ben Love ~ W hen, in my dialogues with Christians, they run out of ways to defend the Bible, their tactics will often switch to prayer. “I know God is real,” they will say, “because he answers prayer. I’ve seen it.” In fact, so many believers purport to have “seen it” that a dubious spectator like myself must wonder just what exactly have they seen? To that end, I went fishing on the Internet. My objective was to post an anonymous question on the Craigslist sites of six different major cities in America. I choose cities that represented the East, the Pacific Northwest , the West Coast, the Midwest, the Southwest, and the Bible Belt . The post was the same for each city: “I’m an atheist seeking evidence of answered prayer. Please send me your stories. I’m looking for Christian believers only, and I want you to remain anonymous. So tell me, how have you prayed, and how has God answered it?” I also made it clear in the posts that any responses I received might end up being u...

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~ This is written primarily for Christian visitors to this site. Its message will be old hat to most ex-Christians , but may be something of a surprise to those Christians who have not spent a lot of time thinking about what they have read in the Bible. And, for those Christians who have been accustomed to believing that their morality is based on the Bible… think again. T he Bible is NOT the word of a good god, and this is really all too obvious. If it were, then our modern ethical systems would closely reflect the values of the Bible. After all, humans can’t improve on the work of an all-knowing god. That makes no sense. Yet, this is exactly what appears to have happened. Modern Western morality contains a whole host of improvements over Biblical morality . Whatever was set down in the Bible for how humans should treat each other and the rest of the world has been massively rewritten by man over the past few hundred years, and man’s editing has va...

By Steve Dustcircle ~ G rowing up as a Christian in various worship forms and levels of dedication, leaving all that I know behind wasn't easy. It was not unlike going through a breakup, or even perhaps more similarly to experiencing the death of a loved one. All my life I have been taught about God, Jesus, the Bible, the Ten Commandments, the Holy Ghost , and the stories of the Apostles, Disciples, Prophets, and the Kings. No matter how the stories were told to me even as a child, I had a decent grasp of the Bible. Its textual understanding and personal application were a different matter, but as the mind develops and grows, there's only so much one can comprehend on such a thick subject matter. One cannot disagree that the stories usually had a morale—Jonah and the big fish, Jesus and the cross, David and the giant, Daniel and the lions, and the feeding of the multitudes. Each was selected for a reason, and could be applied by a Sunday school teacher to our young li...

Buy Kay ~ T here was a murder last night and I believe Christianity is responsible. As of this moment it's December 16th of 2015, and last night my mother told me a former student of hers was found dead in his car. She expressed that the police have ruled it a suicide, but I know it wasn't. Her former student's name was Mike and he was 18 years-old, in college, born and raised in a Christian family, and had just come out to his parents as gay. I've never met him, but there's an invisible string of experiences we both share. We both got our education from elementary school to high school in the same Christian private school. Both our childhood's were absolutely inundated with Christianity five days a week during the school year and undoubtedly attending church every Sunday. We both have deeply religious Christian parents. We both are not heterosexuals. I could be completely wrong about Mike's plight, I didn't know him personally, but I do kn...

By Carl S ~ L isten up ye rotten sinners; now hear the word of the Lord: The lesson for today is from Luke Ch. 18, v. 10-12. "Two men went up to the temple to pray, the one a priest and the other a publican. the priest stood and began to pray thus within himself: "Oh God I thank you that I am not like the rest of men, robbers, dishonest, adulterers, or even like this publican. l fast twice a week. I pay tithes of all that I possess." "But the publican, standing afar off, would not so much as lift up his eyes to heaven, but kept striking his breast, saying, "Oh God, be merciful to me the sinner!" I tell you, this man went back to his home justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and everyone who humbles himself shall be exalted." There are numerous examples of the "wonderfulness" of being a humble person, in all religious teachings. (Islam itself means "submission.") This is bec...

By Carl S. ~ F or eons, members of primitive, therefore superstitious societies, behaved like little children on a playground. Children can be cruel when they feel they're being treated unfairly. Their retaliation will express itself in the nastiest words. They might taunt each other with threats of "I hope your mom leaves you forever," or, “May you itch all over till you scratch your skin raw." “I hope your dog gets killed by another dog and you get blamed for it." They try to outdo one another in their inventions of nasty vengeances, which they might share with their siblings and parents with complete abandon. If you want to find ancient curses, go to the psalms. You'll be surprised at how many of them are pleas for revenge and punishment on those who are making life difficult for the pray-er, (apologists call those curses "imprecations”). And a lot of them reveal that the righteous ones are envious, jealous, and angry, because of the obvious good...

TheNandoLife ~ A few months ago I posted my coming-out video on YouTube and Facebook as both an Atheist and Gay. It was a very polarizing day for me. It was very stressful, to the point that I thought I would throw up my own bloody intestines from the strain and the uncertainty of what would follow. But it was also very freeing. They could accept me, or they could not, but the choice would no longer be in my hands. I am now who I am, and that ain’t changing. I was a state leader for the Foursquare Church in the State of Baja California, Mexico. Later a student, then staff and missionary of Azusa Pacific University, the second largest Christian university in the country. I traveled the world and mobilized thousands of people in Christian ministry. I then became head of youth and young adult programs for the California-Hawaii region of the United Methodist Church.Until finally the questions and the doubts broke through, and set me free. Away from religious indoctrination and bra...