2. January 2009 by Frank.

I just got a phone call from an old christian friend.  Everything was fine and friendly up until the moment she asked if I was going to church.  When I answered, No, her entire tone abruptly changed.  There was hostility and condemnation in her voice almost instantly.  What do you mean?  Did you give up on church or god?  Both, says I.  How could you?  God has a plan for you, you just have to have faith.  My faith is long gone.  So you don’t believe in god?  I’ll pray for you.  Don’t bother.  Idle chitchat, goodbye, click.

I’ve become a non-entity to her.

It’s not the first time and I’m sure it’s not the last.  The self righteous arrogance in her voice scraped my nerves raw.  Then I started feeling guilty for offending her.  Then I got mad at myself for feeling that way.  Just because I stopped believing in her god I’m suddenly no longer worth talking to.

Christians have done this to me before.

I’m sick of it.

I’m rapidly running out of bridges to burn.

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1. January 2009 by Frank.

Matthew 5:18 (KJV) For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

Or a little more clearly:

Matthew 5:18 (NIV) I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

According to the Bible those are the words of Jesus himself. He had just delivered what is known as the Beatitudes and had declared that he came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets but to fulfill them. He then went on to tell the people that just calling someone a fool would put them in danger of hell. And looking at a woman with lust in your heart made you an adulterer which would also send you to hell. He finished up with love your enemies.

There are all kinds of problems in this passage, things that make you stop and think if you actually pay attention to what it says.

Notice that Jesus believes in hell. Notice how sin will send you there. Notice how almost every heterosexual male on the planet is an adulterer essentially from the moment they hit puberty. Notice how Jesus wants you to love your enemies but how his enemies go to hell. Hell is obviously real, Jesus says it is. Fire and all. Sorry all you modern Christians that want to softsell the idea of hell. Your God created it and still believes in it.

As for all you folks who don’t think the Law applies anymore because you are under grace, guess again. The earth is still here (I assume heaven is too even though no one has ever found it it), it has not passed away. The Seventh Day Adventists are right, the Law is still in effect. You’re worshiping on the wrong day. I’ll bet some of you work on Saturday. Report to church immediately so we can stone you to death.

Tell me fathers out there do you follow this law? Deuteronomy 22:28-29 (NIV) If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and he rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.

So think about this; your virgin daughter whom you haven’t sold to someone to marry is out partying and gets raped and you find out about it. Do you kill the rapist or castrate him or at the very least beat him to a bloody pulp? No. According to the law of your most holy god you take 50 shekels of silver from the bastard and let him marry her. Permanently. No hope of divorce. The earth is still here, this law has not disappeared. Tell me ladies, if someone raped you would you want to be sold to him and then married to him for the rest of his life? This is the word of your “family values” god.

Speaking of adultery verse 22 tells us, If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die. We’re gonna need a lot of stones to take care of that.

Verse 23 tells us that if you live in town and have sex with a rapist and don’t scream loudly enough for help we have to stone both of you. Verse 24 tells us that rape in the country with plenty of screaming for help is somewhat different. Because no one could hear your cries and rescue you, we only have to stone the rapist himself. Lucky you.

Feeling disgusted yet? Take off your faith blinders and read what your god actually said to you. But this is old testament! So what? Jesus said not one word would pass away from the Law until heaven and earth were gone. The old testament isn’t some kind of intellectual exercise for you to learn from, it is the word your god handed down to rule your ancestors. Women were property in those days. They could even be sold to their rapists.

Is this really where your morals come from?

This is the first of a series of posts about things that drove me away from my religion once my eyes were opened. I knew this kind of thing was in the Bible but my beliefs required me to ignore them. Churches everywhere turn blind eyes to the ugliness at the core of their faith. My eyes were opened.

This is what I saw.

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28. December 2008 by Frank.

I get overly excited on those few occasions when I get any feedback. Therefore I am constantly trying to figure out what people want to read about here. I have pretty good traffic but commenters are few and far between.

So I’ll do what I always do when I get flustered with blogging, I’ll write about whatever is on my mind.

I’d have to say the primary atheistic thing on my mind the last few months has been how absurd my former religion seems to me now. I read a considerable amount of atheist blogs on one hand and a like amount of political oriented flotsam on the other. There’s a lot of religion mentioned and ranted about by both sources.

It disturbs me greatly when I see some bizarre religious statement and then I realize I actually used to believe exactly that.

But how do I blog about these things? Do I get all scholarly and lecture? Or should I stick with the illustrative anecdote from my past church experience? I tend to want to lecture but I have been informed by more than one person that my lectures are not welcomed. And my supply of clever anecdotes isn’t all that big.

My wife is all excited about a former pastor who has returned to the area. She’s beginning to push to go see him. This man gave me many opportunities to preach and teach, I filled in for him many times. But there’s really no real relationship there that would compel me. My memory is quite different from my wife’s.

The man preached guilt. Loads and loads of guilt. You could walk into one of his services with a huge smile on your face, a spring in your step, and enough joy in your heart to cheer up a dozen clinically depressed people; listen to his sermon; and then walk away guilty, condemned, and far lower than all those people you were trying to perk up before. The man had a huge load and he wanted to share it.

He once stated, “I think about death every day.” He was big on preaching that you must be crucified with Christ literally every day of your life. Somehow crucifying yourself on Sunday wasn’t good enough to get you through until Tuesday. Your supply of sin was so big that Jesus could only take a day’s worth away from you each day. The ever popular “You must die to self” teaching was his strong suit. I didn’t realize it at the time but the man must have had some major issues in his life. Issues he was frightfully guilty about.

This guy was determined to keep everyone feeling guilty and condemned as much as possible. Sin is far more important than redemption to most churches. Sin is more powerful than Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice. Why is it in churches like this you constantly are told, “You’re just a sinner saved by grace,” and “There but for the grace of God go I.” Even though you accept Jesus your salvation isn’t complete. Even though you’re saved you’re still full of sin. You’re constantly in danger of offending God and ruining your relationship with him. So you had to come to church every week to hear how bad you still were, so you could learn to cling to God tighter and tighter. And by inference and association, learn to cling to your clergyman.

When I finally broke away from church the one thing that stood out among all others was that I stopped feeling guilty. Without those weekly reminders I had no reason to feel guilty. I wasn’t violating my own morals so I had no guilt feelings on my own. At church that was true, too, except that I was accepting the pastor’s own guilt and condemnation as my own. I was feeling guilty for things he said I should feel guilty about. Not about things I was actually doing.

I don’t have a problem with guilt, religious guilt. Why on earth would I want to go back to that?

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15. December 2008 by Frank.

In the early years of living with a stroked out mind and body I was quite passionate about what happened to my faith. It was shocking how thoroughly it had failed me and how completely disconnected I felt from my former way of life. I wrote about it extensively but I could not find an audience to discuss any of it with. Atheist blogs were not common. I managed to find stroke survivors who understood the physical and mental problems I was facing but the vast majority of them were clinging to their faith since in many cases it was all they had left.

In contrast, my faith was completely absent, gone from my mind almost as if it were never there to begin with. In the years since I have found no explanation for this, only concepts similar enough to be somewhat helpful. Brain damage can cause religious experiences, so can electrical impulses. Drugs can do that as well; snort some high grade crystal meth and see how fast you become one with the universe. God is the universe and you are one with it therefore you are god. Oh yeah, I remember my days of drugged out delusions. Since I have experienced these things it is not difficult for me to imagine that just the right neural pathway being blocked could shut off that part of my mind that functioned in the realm of faith. After all, that’s the only explanation of all the pain in my right arm, there is no physical damage but I feel like someone has been beating me mercilessly with a sledgehammer for the last ten years.

I don’t want pity, I have no use for it. I have chosen to live in pain rather than be so drugged up I can’t function. I bring it up because people get on my case about not smiling and looking miserable. Or how slow I move. Or how tired I always am. Or why I frequently have no interest in doing anything. They have no idea what I’m fighting every hour of every day. Unfortunately my wife is one of the worst offenders, she thinks if I would just smile more everything would get better. I can’t get her to understand how hard it is to smile when half your face is numb.

She flips out if I try to talk about the death of my faith.

So I blog.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife dearly. But I need to talk about these things so I have to go elsewhere. A little compassion here, a little discussion there from total strangers online saved me from abject depression. Just writing these thoughts down makes me feel better. And if any of this helps someone else then that truly makes me happy.

Alienation. It’s something stroke survivors and atheists have in common. It’s something atheists have to deal with if they were former believers. That’s the one thing I feel churches provide most people, a sense of belonging to a group. I don’t see atheism offering that except online and maybe in bigger cities. Out here in Podunkville you don’t find organized groups of freethinkers roaming the farmlands and vineyards. I read enough atheist blogs to know this is a problem for quite a few of us.

That’s why I’m very grateful to everyone who ever leaves a comment here.

I’m not alone and neither are you.

Posted in communication, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 1 Comment »

29. November 2008 by Frank.

I hate Christmas and the entire holiday season for a number of reasons. So, in no particular order, here are my reasons:

• (1) I work in a large scale retail store so I have to take part in serving the crowds on Black Friday. The buying frenzy and outright greed on display amongst the customers is sickening. 300 people pour through the door in a matter of a few seconds acting like their lives depend on getting the bargain stuff. If you don’t think this behavior is disgusting try asking the man who was trampled to death at Wal-Mart (in New York). Find out what his co-workers must have felt like as the morons continued shopping. How in the world did people in this country allow themselves to be trained to participate in this bullshit year after year? And keep in mind that what I see is nothing compared to Best Buy and Wal-Mart across the street.

• (2) I’m sick to death of being forced to go to family holiday functions. These people don’t want anything to do with us for the rest of the year. My wife’s family all live right here in the same area so there’s no travel involved. They frequently do things with each other but they always leave my wife out and they ignore me entirely. My wife’s late mother used to enforce holiday gatherings with an iron fist. I think they continue it now because of that training. My sisters live in Louisiana so there’s nothing going on there either. None of us can afford that kind of travel. I would much rather spend time with friends. If I had any.

• (3) Apparently I missed the training sessions but this season does not give me the warm fuzzies. I don’t indulge in nostalgia. I don’t have fond childhood memories — most of my memories were wiped out by the stroke. And unlike all these oh so sincere celebrities who clearly remember their incredibly supportive parents who gave them their first dancing shoes, microphones, footballs, baseball gloves, etc. , I don’t recall my parents ever supporting anything I was interested in. Unfortunately, that isn’t because of my memory being totally screwed, my parents really didn’t support anything I ever tried to do. My late mother’s strongest words of support were, “That’s nice — if you like that sort of thing.” She used that for my acting, my painting, and my photography. My step-father never had anything to say and my natural father abandoned me when I was nine. Warm, fuzzy, childhood memories? I don’t think so.

• (4) Contrary to 20 years of Christianity, Jesus is not the reason for the season. Christianity usurping pagan holidays for its own needs is the reason Xmas is on December 25. You should really study church history. It’s amazing how many pagan gods were born or celebrated on December 25 long before Jesus ever showed up.

• (5) We are living on my wife’s Social Security Disability and my below poverty level income. We literally have not been able to afford Xmas for several years now. That’s alright, I understand that giving presents is fun. I enjoy that. But I have made the leap to realizing that only things I can give are things that I can make myself. My wife still thinks we HAVE TO BUY things. She has been trained thoroughly. This creates stress. There’s no more credit to be had, we used up our share long ago. Just like retail, everything has to be bigger and bigger and more and more expensive every year. Sorry, we reached the point of no return several years ago. Retail pins the entire year on what it can do in December. We need a new system. This one has destroyed us.

• (6) I am subjected to 36 hours a week of Xmas music. Non-religious, generic Xmas music. After hearing the same 25 songs 5 million times, you begin to hate Xmas music. I hate it with a passion.

• (7) There is no War! On! Christmas! Christians are not being persecuted in this country. Saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas” is in no way, shape, or form even remotely close to persecution. Let’s have the secret police break down your doors and haul you off to concentration camps before you start whining about persecution. Let’s burn you at the stake, torture, and abuse you before you wail about the evil atheists trying to ruin your (pagan) holiday.

So there you have it, 7 reasons I hate this whole Xmas season. I could have also mentioned the snow, ice, and bitter cold but that’s what you get when you live in Michigan.

“You can’t fool me. I know there is no Sanity Clause.”

Posted in communication, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 3 Comments »

23. November 2008 by Frank.

I just made a serious mistake in judgment; I went to the park.

We had a blizzard that dumped over a foot of snow on us yesterday. It was preceded last Monday by an ice storm. The entrance to the park is at the bottom of a steep hill. Which naturally meant the hill was covered with ice. I knew I had made a mistake as I passed a guy in a van on the wrong side of the road who had obviously slid over there while trying to go up the hill. To say that the roads in the park were a mess would be a gross understatement. But I have this thing about nature and beauty.

I also have a thing about not getting stuck if at all possible. So I did not stop or slow down anywhere in the park. By the time I got back to the entrance hill the guy had managed to get unstuck and had backed down the road. So I kept on going slowly up the hill carefully trying not to change speed. I was cursing myself for a fool all the way out but I made it without mishap.

When I related my story to my wife a few minutes later, I started to tell her what I said to myself. She interrupted and said/asked, “Lord, help me make it?”

“No,” I replied, I said, “You dummy! Don’t ever do anything this stupid again!”

Praying never occurs to me anymore. I have 35 years of Winter driving skills and my car has a brand new set of tires due to the aforementioned ice storm (my wife slid across a street and demolished the right front wheel on a curb – snapped the axle in half) and those reasons are why I drove out safely.

Back in the day I would’ve been praying/begging and then given god the praise even though it still would have been my driving ability to got me out of a bad situation.

I also would have had to contend with the nagging problem of why didn’t god warn me not to go in there in the first place.

My beliefs got me into conundrums like that frequently. The usual resolution was to determine I obviously wasn’t listening to his guidance. It never occurred to me to think there was no guidance being given. Whenever I prayed about what to teach or speak about in church I always got an answer. I was sure god was talking to me plain as day. But any other request seemed to fall on deaf ears. Financial guidance, emotional problems, health, all that sort of question never got answered in a way I could perceive.

It was not until later that I finally realized why I always got an answer about what to teach and speak about. It was really quite simple and completely non-supernatural. I was reading and studying constantly. I loved my bible and books about it. My head was quite literally filled with scripture. I could put together a talk with almost no effort since I was thinking about that sort of thing all the time. So it seemed as if god answered me without hesitation if I asked about his word.

Everything else, however, came under the heading of “Lean not on your own understanding.”

Christianity does not want its people to think for themselves. I could never see that. It was always a matter of god wanting me to depend on him more and more. When I first started letting myself read things to that effect I reacted very defensively, denying that such a concept was possible let alone accurate. But all you have to do is look at that one verse to understand the truth. “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God’s sight.”

I’m the type of person who follows these sorts of things all the way out to their logical (or illogical) conclusions. It’s not hard to find hundreds of verses which agree with and confirm this anti-intellectual bias in the bible. You can dig yourself a very deep hole with these words telling you not to think for yourself. All the while you’re doing it you’re telling yourself that you are seeking and acquiring the “true” wisdom that comes from god alone.

Not to bring up politics again but surely you cannot have missed all the religious ignorance on display during this election season, especially if you frequent atheist blogs. There were appalling videos all over the net. The vapid stupidity and ignorance was awe inspiring in a perverse sort of way. And atheist bloggers jumped all over every example of it. So this is a very real, very modern up to date problem. That these people were proud of their ignorance only serves to prove the point even further.

I couldn’t see it and even denied it while I was involved in it but the evidence is all over the place.

Religion deliberately breeds ignorance.

Since I joined the rational world praying no longer is part of my thinking. Giving god glory never crosses my mind. If I make a stupid decision, I make it on my own. And if I get out of it, I do that on my own as well. This is so much simpler and so much less stressful than my former religious behavior.

You go down an icy road there’s no one but yourself to get you back up it.

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9. November 2008 by Frank.

“Now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,
Liberal, fanatical, criminal.
Won’t you sign up your name, we’d like to feel you’re
Acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable!”

(Logical Song by Supertramp on Breakfast in America)

Maybe politics hasn’t changed in the last twenty years after all. No, I like the alternate reality explanation better. Somehow I crossed the barrier between the real world and the twilight zone without realizing it. Yeah that’s it. I did too much “LDS in the sixties” (shameless Star Trek quote) and now I’m having flashback hallucinations.

Either that or I live in a world that is batshit insane.

Welcome, comrades, to the Glorious People’s Republic of Americka! Yes, we’re all socialists, communists, and Marxists now. No, I’m not quoting religious right whackjobs! That’s what supposedly normal, intelligent, ordinary people I work with are saying! I was so excited about the results of Tuesday’s election and went to work eager to talk about how wonderful it was. Instead of getting to share the enthusiasm, I was greeted with a barrage of whining about socialism and the fall of democracy. The effective end of our way of life. No one in that damn store was happy about Obama.

Which surprised the daylights out of me.

Of course this part of Michigan is so heavily conservative Republican no Democrats ran for any of the local elections. The only choice was Republican, write in, or no vote. But I had the mistaken idea that hatred of Bush would tip some of these people the other way. Wrong.

Which is why I usually keep quiet about politics.

I confessed elsewhere that I was a die hard Republican for most of my life. I hated Clinton (but not because of his lack of morals – it was his lack of a spine that bothered me) and I came to loathe Bush after voting for him twice. When it became clear he had no regard for the law, the constitution, or even the people, I became convinced that conservatism had become a dirty word. As I told my co-workers, even the rats knew when it was time to abandon a sinking ship.

In order to keep myself balanced, I used all kinds of sources, right and left, extreme and mainstream, religious and non-religious. That’s much easier to do nowadays with the internet, you could actually be fully informed. Unfortunately, you can also be sucked into a parallel dimension full of the most vile, disgusting, drivel you’re ever likely to see. Ed Brayton calls it The World NUT Daily. It’s actual name is World NET daily but Ed is much closer to the truth. You can find it easy enough but I’m not going to dignify them with a link.

They don’t deserve it.

These people are so far right wing, Christian nutjobs, and bigots that they should be isolated from the rest of the world so they could live in their own hate and filth and bigotry until they become extinct. Tell me something, how can someone calling themselves Christian advocate pulling their children out of public schools because our government is training them to be liberal socialists? How can this same loving Jesus follower flat out state that you need to buy as many guns as you can and make sure you have as much ammunition as possible? Because the Marxists have taken over the White House?

How can good old Pat Boone (yes, the Pat Boone from back in the day) tell a young boy that the country got on the wrong bus on Tuesday and now we have to be driven around for four years by some unAmerican terrorist nutjob who’s going to destroy our wonderful way of life. And make us all be godless communists.

So again I ask what freaking parallel universe is this? And how did I get here?

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good alternate reality story as much as any other science fiction fan. But the key word there is “fiction”. This stuff is happening right now in the “real” world. I like my fiction to be on screen or in books not in my face.

Don’t even get me started on the fact that there are people out there right now who think that Sarah Palin is the next conservative savior for 2012.

Shudder.

I want my mommy.

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22. October 2008 by Frank.

I have been told that my stroke survivor story would be of great benefit and inspiration to suffering Christians the world over. All I have to do is give god the glory.

I can’t do that.

I did not survive the stroke with any help from god. I didn’t pray. I didn’t praise. I didn’t worship. I didn’t bow down. God did not deliver me from evil.

During the actual stroke event I was praying. I was very much god centered and oriented at that time. I knew something was horribly wrong with me but I didn’t panic because I had full trust in god to get me through it. There was no doubt in my mind that god was right there with me. You can see why Christians would think this is the beginning of a wonderful testimony.

I’ve mentioned before that I was planning to become a full time preacher. I was completely sold out to god. The thought of becoming an atheist had never occurred to me. I had absolutely no desire to leave my faith. I had no reason not to believe in god.

My blood pressure that morning should have been fatal. In a way it was. I know there are all kinds of scientific explanations for near death experiences. I understand that most such experiences happen in the mind and aren’t the least bit supernatural. But knowing that does not diminish the “realness” of the experience.

I left my body and was looking down at myself quite clearly while I was laying on the floor. That was just as real to me as it is sitting here typing and listening to music on Pandora. But I know that can be explained. It can also be explained that I felt I was drifting away to nothingness. Everything had gone black, sound was rapidly receding, there was no pain, there was no sensation. I thought I was almost dead and I was perfectly content with that. I wanted to keep going into the nothingness forever.

I thought I had entered the presence of god, it was perfect peace. But there was no one there. There was no light. There was no sense of another presence. There was no sense of anything. I was on a tour of a cave once in which they turned off the lights to show you what absolute darkness was like. I think everyone stopped breathing simultaneously. The complete absence of light is devastatingly shocking. We were each completely alone and isolated. My experience was like that. But it didn’t scare me.

Your HDTV would need a 10,000,000,000 to 1 contrast ratio to demonstrate that.

To say I was confused afterwards would be quite an understatement. I was confused and I also didn’t care. About anything. Nothing had any importance to me. I didn’t care what the nurses and doctors were doing to me. I didn’t care about myself, my family, my friends. But what was really surprising was that I didn’t care about my god either.

He was gone from my thoughts. It never occurred to me to pray. I didn’t want my bible. I wasn’t eager to get back to church and teaching the word. My attitude struck me as odd but didn’t really bother me any. I had made a complete 180 without the slightest bit of emotional reaction whatsoever.

A large part of my memory was gone. My personality was radically altered. I had no emotions except anger. The “I don’t care about anything” syndrome kicked in full force. Naturally, I was then diagnosed as being depressed. I was quite sure I wasn’t depressed, it was far deeper than that. My brain was no longer functioning in any manner approaching normal. I knew that deep down at my most fundamental level I was no longer the same person.

I did not get any support from friends or family and certainly none whatsoever from either of two churches I belonged to. People started acting like I had some kind of highly contagious plague (probably either the Rage Virus or the T-Virus), and while they weren’t actually running away from me, they sure weren’t drawing near. Neither was god even though he had promised to draw near to me if I drew near to him.

My faith wasn’t doing anything for me. It wasn’t long before I came to realize that the failure of my faith had caused the stroke in the first place. I really believed I could beat my high blood pressure just by believing. I hated the side effects I was getting from all the medicine I was taking. So I was highly motivated to believe in faith healing. I knew in my heart that faith in god could beat any medical problem. So I stopped taking the meds even though I had been warned that to do so could prove fatal. Oh yeah, I was a faith giant.

I was a fucking idiot.

Just a tiny little minute amount of blood got blocked from my brain and all the sudden I couldn’t control my body. My memories were wiped out. My personality, who I was – my identity, my “me” was eliminated. I embarked on a life of continual pain, filled with altered perceptions, without the comfort of god to fall back on. He was quite literally gone.

I couldn’t find him anywhere. His word which had been alive and vibrant to me was dead and lifeless. There was no hope or encouragement in it. Verses and phrases used to jump off the page but now sat there meaningless and uninspiring. I became aware that I wasn’t even praying anymore. I don’t recall making any conscious decision to stop. I gradually became aware that I didn’t want or need any help in the form of faith. Faith had utterly failed to keep me safe.

Instead I started reasoning things out. I started researching various aspects of the stroke online. I found scientific explanations for all the bizarre things that had happened to me. I started communicating with other survivors and I started seeing disturbing similarities in our experiences. I started seeing inexplicable things that had happened to my mother-in-law were happening to me. I came to the conclusion that the best thing I could do was to keep my mind active.

The spectacular failure of my faith led me to research church history which in turn led me to question church doctrines. That led to further bible study. When you study the bible with the faith blinders off you become aware how poorly written it actually is. There is no consistent eloquence in its words. There are literally hundreds of pages of the poorest written drivel you will ever read. There are contradictions of contradictions, errors, and flat out lies. The god depicted in the old testament is a monster, the behavior of his saints is atrocious. But that shouldn’t be surprising because they act just like him.

Or is it he acts just like the barbarians they are? I get confused.

Jesus is no better. He is exactly the same yesterday, today, and forever. That being the case, he must be just as much of a barbarian as his father. He said all of god’s promises were yes and amen in him, he said faith could move mountains, he said he would never fail nor forsake you, he said he was coming back in his follower’s lifetimes. He lied.

Then he said he would send you to hell for all of eternity for not believing him.

All this studying finally convinced me there is no god. Everything I believed was clearly contradicted by the very same book I used as a foundation. Faith requires you to make excuses when the words of that book fail to be true. Faith means choosing ignorance over reality, hopeful imagination over solid evidence.

But all I have to do is lie and praise god for bringing me through the crisis. I could inspire millions of Christians if I would just do that.

I would much rather tell the truth that religion and faith did absolutely nothing for me. Only by using my mind and its marvelous ability to reason was I able to survive. Millions of atheists would probably be inspired by that.

Posted in interpretation, emotion, religion, stroke | Print | 1 Comment »

21. September 2008 by Frank.

Why is it that we are supposed to respect the beliefs of the religious no matter how ridiculous they are and they in turn have absolutely no respect for our beliefs or lack thereof?

My best friend is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. I have been going over to his house on Friday nights and arguing religion with him for quite some time. It was fun but I got tired of it. He wasn’t trying to convert me very hard but he was attempting to draw me in slowly. SDA doctrine is very rigid and dogmatic and essentially excludes all the other branches of Christianity for not abiding by those doctrines. They are the exclusive club among exclusive clubs. Their intense study of the bible appeals to my former sensibilities, however, so I kept going along with him because I really did enjoy examining those doctrines up close and personal. But a few weeks ago when he brought out the Ellen G. White reasons we can’t have fun stuff, my interest flew out the window.

So I told him so.

He was fine with that. No reason to ruin a friendship.

BUT…………..

We cannot meet on Friday nights any longer because that is Sabbath preparation time. Despite our disagreements we were studying the bible and talking about the things of god so we were good for Friday behavior. But not now. Now any other night is acceptable. Friday is god’s night.

And now the absurdity of it all has hit me square in the face.

I have been bending over backwards to accommodate his religious beliefs in this relationship and he hasn’t given one tiny bit in return. When we have gone out to dinner it always has to be a place of his choosing because it has to be vegetarian. I have had dinner at his house many times but he has never come to my house because we don’t do vegetarian dishes. I do all sorts of things on Saturdays but the only thing he’s willing to do is go to church. No matter what I say he always finds a way to add god to it so even if I specifically deny god had anything to do with it, he turns it around so god gets praised anyway.

And I just keep going along with it.

Obviously, I am a glutton for punishment. No, what it really is is desperation. He was the last real friend I had left. I have friends at work but they are only friends while we’re there, never outside the store. There’s no real relationship other than work. This guy was the last person that actually wanted to spend any time with me. So I kept going along even though his religion was getting on my nerves more and more and more.

Even so, some things aren’t worth saving when they become so one sided you can’t tolerate them anymore. When you tell me that common ordinary things I do all the time are an abomination to your personal beliefs but you don’t expect anyone else to live by your beliefs, you’re still managing to condemn my behavior while still pretending you’re being nice by tolerating me.

Unfortunately, when I let you do that to me constantly, I’m pretending, too.

So it’s all over but the death rattle.

And that’s a shame. Religion divides people. Any religion. You’re either one of us or one of them. If you’re one of them, we can tolerate you if you behave a certain way and give us a certain amount of respect and lip service. If you don’t, well, who needs you?

I don’t have any friends. I’m going to have to change my name to Charlie Brown. But I think that’s copyrighted.

Rats!

Posted in communication, wild guesses, religion | Print | 7 Comments »

13. September 2008 by Frank.

Posted in wild guesses, interpretation, communication, listen, hearing, religion, emotion, education, Uncategorized | Print | 3 Comments »