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Author Topic: The Christians Making Atheists  (Read 5299 times)

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The Christians Making Atheists
« on: October 16, 2017, 09:05:11 pm »
Quote
In record numbers, the American Church is consistently and surely making Atheists—or at the very least it is making former Christians; people who no longer consider organized religion an option because the Jesus they recognize is absent. With its sky-is-falling hand-wringing, its political bed-making, and its constant venom toward diversity, it is giving people no alternative but to conclude, that based on the evidence of people professing to be Godly—that God is of little use. In fact, this God may be toxic.

Read the entire article
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #1 on: October 16, 2017, 11:17:08 pm »
Read the entire article

Doesn't bother me any. In times like these we need to look to quality, not quantity. My God can do more with three hundred men who are called to purity than with a hundred times that number who are just going through the motions.
--------Eric H. Bowen
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2017, 03:40:38 am »
Doesn't bother me any. In times like these we need to look to quality, not quantity. My God can do more with three hundred men who are called to purity than with a hundred times that number who are just going through the motions.

So then where does that leave people like me who were seriously on fire for Jesus for years and years, up until the very final severance? Nothing that I ever did in church was going through the motions - I didn't just believe, I believed.

Yet I can't sit in church and smile when the stuff mentioned in the article is going on. "A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough," and the yeast in the church is the sort of bigotry the article discusses. I am exactly the person that article describes.

Please do not disdainfully sneer at people who left. Many of us tried very, very hard, and after consistently being told our ideas and theology and meditations were wrong, we were reading the Bible wrong, that God hates us and will spit us out, well... we figured we'd pack up find salvation elsewhere.

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #3 on: October 17, 2017, 05:57:55 am »
I am exactly the person that article describes.

And it's not just you. I was raised without any organized religion but was inculcated with the dominant Christian worldview through osmosis, like anybody else growing up in the U.S. circa the '70s; as a burgeoning queer kid I eventually found its various sects so appalling I ran screaming, and to this day--even though many Christian churches have made progress from their anti-gay roots--I have a reflexive antipathy towards Christianity.

I'm not pagan because of the toxic brand of Christianity, but it sure makes me glad I am.
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The last song echoes through the ages / to ask its question all night long / And close the circle on these pages / These, the metamythos songs

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #4 on: October 17, 2017, 08:58:34 am »
So then where does that leave people like me who were seriously on fire for Jesus for years and years, up until the very final severance? Nothing that I ever did in church was going through the motions - I didn't just believe, I believed.

...

Please do not disdainfully sneer at people who left. Many of us tried very, very hard, and after consistently being told our ideas and theology and meditations were wrong, we were reading the Bible wrong, that God hates us and will spit us out, well... we figured we'd pack up find salvation elsewhere.

I'm not sneering at you. I spent almost two years deeply involved in what today we call the "New Age" movement. Yes, at the time I was ten years old, but...I was serious about it at the time. But the same God who was willing to leave the 99 brought me back.

I'm getting ready to leave for work; I don't have time for a full reply. This is a gross oversimplification but, as when you examine a complex plaid under a microscope and find it boils down to two or three basic colors of threads, I see two basic reasons that people reject my God: 1) They reject Truth and prefer to embrace lies; or 2) They don't really know him (them).

Both types of rejection can and, IMHO, will be dealt with...the former much more painfully than the latter, as it requires confrontation with the fruits of their choices. My God has no tolerance for bullshitters. But the latter is much easier on everyone concerned, although in practice it becomes much more complex than in theory...you have to get past their "firewall", and if you don't really know and understand their Scriptures it's not likely to happen without a lot of help. But it sounds as if you have a good start. Perhaps I might be able to facilitate an introduction?
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2017, 10:44:34 am »
Read the entire article

I spent the majority of my life in church. This article hits the nail on the head. I've also noticed that the more godly someone professes they are, the least god-like they tend to be.

I've met a bunch of self-righteous Christians, but I've also met humble Christians, and I've yet to meet a Catholic who considers themself a "good Catholic." (Seriously, they say I'm Catholic...but I'm a bad Catholic. Every time!) I've studied the message of Jesus outside of the church, and honestly my faith has never been stronger. I'm not a Christian, but I realized the man talked some sense once I got away from his fan club.
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #6 on: October 17, 2017, 03:01:01 pm »
Read the entire article

I mean, I bang on Fred Clark's writing a lot, but he's written about this for a long time.  Maybe God Is A Better Person Than You Think is from 2012, with its followup Permission Granted Officially.  Lay Your Burden Down, God is Not A Jerk and When Conscience and "Obedience" Pull In Opposite Directions are 2013.  I'm sure there's more recent stuff, but I'm not getting the right keywords to pull it up, but I don't think I was reading Slacktivist regularly back then.  I mean, I know he's revisisted the topic of Why Worship without Justice Dishonors God.

There's a hashtag - #EmptyThePews - that I still see surfacing irregularly, which is I believe originating in evangelical circles, and is a mark for people who are leaving evangelical churches because of this problem of moral vacuity.  (I mean I found an article on it on Bilgrimage, which is a Catholic blog, so it's not necessarily limited there, but that post was an "Is there a Catholic equivalent for this?" rather than a joining in.)  This perception of divide between duitful adherence and justice is clearly a brutal one for the people going through it.

(I mean, I'm very much an outsider on this; the forms of Christianity I have personal experience with have been fairly aggressive about aligning justice and devotion rather than treating them as incompatible, so all I've got is the pop cultural influence of those forms, including their involvement in government particularly at the Federal level.  But I have a lot of sympathy for those people who are trying to figure out their way through the dawning realisation that either their god is good or their church teachings are true and both cannot be the case.)

Obviously it's not inevitable that the people who have that realisation will go atheist or even leave their church - Fred Clark remains a vehement Baptist after all - but there's a whole lot of tangle in there first.


Oh hey searching on Isaiah found me some of Fred's more recent writing, "Go and Learn What This Means: the bad-faith "Biblical" defense of injustice", Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.  I quote a bit from the end of Part 2:

Quote from: Fred Clark, the Slacktivist
And, as Douglass said, it’s a kind of blasphemy. By portraying every effort to promote greater justice as a rejection of the Bible, it equates “the Bible” with injustice, twisting the throng of religion into “a huge, horrible, repulsive form.”
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we shine like stars    - Covenant, "Bullet"

Jenett

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #7 on: October 17, 2017, 03:14:47 pm »
So then where does that leave people like me who were seriously on fire for Jesus for years and years, up until the very final severance? Nothing that I ever did in church was going through the motions - I didn't just believe, I believed.

For what it's worth, you're not alone in this at all.

I was originally raised Episcopalian, became Catholic at 11 when my parents returned to the Catholic Church (and went through the RCIA program, then religious education with my age peers, including a fairly charismatic Catholic summer camp program I got a lot out of.)

I was an active Catholic up through the end of college, when I came to the conclusion (after a lot of thought - and incidentally, also taking a non-trivial amount of New Testament Greek and doing my own translation of the St. Mark Passion so I could set the thing to music) that much as I loved parts of the Catholic Church, and even more specific people in it, it was not the place for me.

I spent a year and a half (there was a move involved) contemplating whether that was right, whether other forms of Christianity would work for me (I have a decided preference for explicit Ritual in my religious services, which leaves out a lot of demonminations.)

In the end, it came down to the decision that my worldview was fundamentally poly-many-things. (One of my first points of division was that my preferred relationship model is polyamorous, but I have basically always been polytheistic, just I was very good at my practice being henotheistic for a long time. Or at least henotheistic for values of 'Trinity gets counted weird')

I've since taken significantly more binding religious oaths to my particular religious witchcraft tradition than I ever did to Christianity (not surprising, since I have functional clergy status), and while it'd be possible to lay those to rest honourably, it would be decidedly complicated in a couple of places. So, really, not expecting that to change, though the specific deities I work with, and the form of many of my specific practices are up for negotiation, especially on a day to day sort of basis.
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #8 on: October 17, 2017, 07:35:53 pm »
Doesn't bother me any. In times like these we need to look to quality, not quantity. My God can do more with three hundred men who are called to purity than with a hundred times that number who are just going through the motions.

I absolutely agree.


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ehbowen

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #9 on: October 17, 2017, 10:43:24 pm »
I absolutely agree.

I'm actually understating the case. More times than I can count on my fingers, it has come down to one man. Anyone who comes along with him is gravy.

And that's just the cases we know about....
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Uneryx

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #10 on: October 17, 2017, 11:52:33 pm »
In the end, it came down to the decision that my worldview was fundamentally poly-many-things. (One of my first points of division was that my preferred relationship model is polyamorous, but I have basically always been polytheistic, just I was very good at my practice being henotheistic for a long time. Or at least henotheistic for values of 'Trinity gets counted weird')

If I may ask, what was this shift/decision like for you? How did you realize you'd basically always been polytheistic?

Jenett

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #11 on: October 18, 2017, 11:00:11 am »
If I may ask, what was this shift/decision like for you? How did you realize you'd basically always been polytheistic?

Very welcome to ask, but I'm not sure if the answer is very helpful to people who aren't me.

My father was a specialist in Ancient Greek Theatre, so I grew up on stories of the Greek myths (and their many nuances.) I fell madly in love with ancient Egypt as many people do, and dove into those myths too, and then other places.

I also come from a family that's had several different bits of personal religious history (my mother's father's family were highly assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Eastern Europe, her mother's side of the family were Catholic, and my father's family were Church of England, so I grew up with a general idea that no one method of religion probably had All the Truth.

So, basically, despite growing up Episcopalian and then Catholic, I grew up recognising that there were lots of different approaches to that, and that there were more deities out there than just the Trinity.
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #12 on: October 19, 2017, 08:52:30 pm »
Read the entire article

I will preface this comment with the statement that I have *nothing* against Christianity. I actually respect many of its ancient and beautiful traditions and rituals, especially the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic ones. HOWEVER:

I can attest to the truth of this article, from firsthand experience. I was raised Protestant, and by moderates no less, yet the toxic attitudes of American Christianity still drove me away from God. The hatred of Jews and Muslims, the rejection of science, and the constant pursuit of unconstitutional blue laws drove me to atheism.

From the time that I was 11, to the time that I was 18, I was an atheist. Not just an atheist, but a positive, Gnostic atheist, an anti-theist, and a nihilist, who was certain of the non-existance of God, magic, and the afterlife. I hated religion, and hated religious people.

This was all because some (IE: Not all) Christians kept telling me that I could not be (classically) Liberal and still be Christian. Believing in science, rather than fundamental Biblical liberalism, was sinful. Supporting freedom of religion for non-Christians, or endorsing Science and reason, would send me to hell, so I was frequently told.

At a certain point, I decided that God had no place in my life or my world.

The fact that I am theistic now STILL amazes me, after almost a decade. It happened by accident. I do know that it was the result of encountering ISKON missionaries, but I'm not sure exactly why their message, as opposed to all the others I had heard, was able to penetrate my anti-theistic defenses and get me back in touch with religion.
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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #13 on: October 19, 2017, 08:58:52 pm »
So then where does that leave people like me who were seriously on fire for Jesus for years and years, up until the very final severance? Nothing that I ever did in church was going through the motions - I didn't just believe, I believed.

Yet I can't sit in church and smile when the stuff mentioned in the article is going on. "A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough," and the yeast in the church is the sort of bigotry the article discusses. I am exactly the person that article describes.

Please do not disdainfully sneer at people who left. Many of us tried very, very hard, and after consistently being told our ideas and theology and meditations were wrong, we were reading the Bible wrong, that God hates us and will spit us out, well... we figured we'd pack up find salvation elsewhere.

Yeah. I remember spending literally *hours* on my hands and knees praying to Jesus to save my soul. I did not understand how my mind and my concision could be so *wrong* about science and about human rights. I begged God to make me "right" and to make me feel the way other Christians did, about Jews and Muslims, about evolution, about same sex relationships, but... he didn't. I loved Jesus, and I wanted to be his follower, but every other Christian I knew told me I was going to Hell because I was too tolerant and too liberal. Eventually, my heart just sort of broke. Jesus would NOT make me conform to the standards of his other followers, nor would he make them tolerate me and my views. It was "all or nothing" and I chose nothing. My faith was not false or fake.
"The worshippers of the gods go to them; to the manes go the ancestor-worshippers; to the Deities who preside over the elements go their worshippers; My devotees come to Me." ... "Whichever devotee desires to adore whatever such Deity with faith, in all such votaries I make that particular faith unshakable. Endowed with that faith, a votary performs the worship of that particular deity and obtains the fruits thereof, these being granted by Me alone." - Sri Krishna

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Re: The Christians Making Atheists
« Reply #14 on: October 19, 2017, 09:01:41 pm »
Yeah. I remember spending literally *hours* on my hands and knees praying to Jesus to save my soul. I did not understand how my mind and my concience could be so *wrong* about science and about human rights. I begged God to make me "right" and to make me feel the way other Christians did, about Jews and Muslims, about evolution, about same sex relationships, but... he didn't. I loved Jesus, and I wanted to be his follower, but every other Christian I knew told me I was going to Hell because I was too tolerant and too liberal. Eventually, my heart just sort of broke. Jesus would NOT make me conform to the standards of his other followers, nor would he make them tolerate me and my views. It was "all or nothing" and I chose nothing. My faith was not false or fake.
"The worshippers of the gods go to them; to the manes go the ancestor-worshippers; to the Deities who preside over the elements go their worshippers; My devotees come to Me." ... "Whichever devotee desires to adore whatever such Deity with faith, in all such votaries I make that particular faith unshakable. Endowed with that faith, a votary performs the worship of that particular deity and obtains the fruits thereof, these being granted by Me alone." - Sri Krishna

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