Musings of an ex-Christian atheist

Here's another email I got from a guy I correspond with regularly. I always enjoy his messages. This time it is about the irritating nature of fundamentalist Christians, plus some right-on observations about the Bible.

Enjoy.

Hey Brian, how are you?

I’m… ok.

As always, I enjoyed your latest post. This part really stood out to me:

“Atheists like me have seen through the trickery. We're no longer willing to play the God Game. We have no patience with those who promise salvation after death. We recognize the con job being promulgated by religious leaders who lust after money and power while hypocritically preaching worldly detachment and humility.”

I have a friend who has offered me some free career counseling. She is very good at it so it sounds great, right? Right. 

She is a very devout, hardcore Christian. Shouldn’t be a problem right?  Right…

She is a woman that my wife prays with and does not know that I am an atheist. I can tell by some of the things she talks to me about that my wife has said something to her about certain changes in what I believe.  So instead of career counseling, most sessions so far turn into a Bible study of sorts. 

Yesterday’s session started out on the right track, talking about my resume and other opportunities in the field that I’m currently in. By the time I politely let her know that I had to go teach a self defense lesson, it had turned into her talking about us living in the last days and that there is a call on my life to teach and I need to seek God regarding that. Ugh.

I was surprised at the anger that came up in me later in the day. 

Seek God about the “call” on my life? Yeah, I did that for about 30 years. You know what God said to me about it? Nothing! Not a damn thing! Because he’s not there. And if he is, in the Christian sense, he’s an asshole.  Now that I’ve learned to use logic and reason and common sense, it’s amazing how glaringly obvious things about religion are to me now.

My wife could tell something was up, so she asked me. I watered it down a little, but I think I shocked her a bit.  LOL  Some things I threw out there…

Let’s assume, for just a minute, that the Bible is true/accurate. Isn’t it interesting that there are only a handful of people, all from the same small part of the world, who had spectacular encounters with God, and many of these folks tell the rest of “us” that we just have to believe by faith. 

If I told someone that I was abducted by aliens, but had no proof, they just have to believe because I said so, they’d probably think I’ve finally lost it. Yet, that is what religion is asking us to do. 

Preachers from the flavor of Christianity I came out of talk about how God wants to have this real and amazing relationship with humankind. But he is markedly silent and the amazing encounters we read about in the Bible cannot be proven and apparently, only happened during that time.

She said something about getting into the word of God more often, meaning the Bible. I should have just left it alone… but I did not. I basically said that I do not believe the Bible to be “the word of God”.  It’s a collection of books/stories, songs, poems, letters, etc. The book of John clearly states that Jesus is the Word of God. Not a book. Yeah, that went over well.

Anyway. Like you said about no longer being willing to play the God game, I’m not sure how much longer I can pretend that I’m not an atheist.  I’m pretty sure people close to me will start to figure it out.

Comments

[Spence Tepper]

Maybe it's time for your pen pal to get out his sharpie and helium balloon and say his goodbyes formally, honorably, respectively, deeply, to the old beliefs, and in front of his wife and family.

So that this isn't an act of anger or rejection, emotion or reaction, but of awakening ; so that we honor our childhood, but celebrate our passage into adulthood.

It's OK to have a little ceremony to say goodbye. It marks a point in history for us and those who witness it. Our lives are sacred, and nothing in our past is worthy of shame. Everything was a stepping stone. How could we know then what we know now? We grew, w learned new things. The point was to see things differently.

But the beauty is, once that, at some point, we let go. We release the balloon back into the creation. And letting go, it flies away, and we never touch it again.

[Jesse]

Christianity is nothing. Wait until Islam gets big. Death penalty for apostasy, jizya tax for non believers, blasphemy laws all enforced by governments around the world,and often locally enforced where governments can't or won't.

So I guess good on this guy for leaving a stupid religion, but society will eventually choose another religion of one kind or another, and the western world is not gonna be happy about what fills the void left where relatively benevolent Christians once dominated.