God created you and loves you. He sent Jesus Christ that you would have direct access to Him and salvation. No third parties, no pomp and circumstance. Seek Jesus and I believe you will find Him.

Praying for you.

champagnepapi said:

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Any Atheists on the board that care to share why they crossed over?

I haven't been to church in 4 years after years of being a devout Catholic. And frankly I don't miss or feel bad at all. Perhaps I was in the wrong house of God growing up and never fully understood my faith? I'm starting to question it all...

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I used to be a believer. I grew up in a very strong Christian household. I don't mean that in a negative sense and my parents weren't terribly strict or anything, but my father was a pastor and they raised me in a very indoctrinated world.

I started losing faith my senior year of high school. I didn't realize that's what it was at the time... I just thought I was focusing on other things and I would worry about being a good Christian at some later point in my life. All my friends were Christians and I'm not sure I had a single atheist influence until I was in my 20's.

For most of my 20's I was still a believer. I didn't make it a priority in my life, but I still went to church occasionally and my friends were still pretty much all Christians themselves. I did have one friend who stopped believing and started probing me with questions over time. I maintained belief in my later 20's for no reason other than Pascal's wager. I was willing to bet that if any religion was real that it would be Christianity, so I had far more upsiide than downside in continuing to have faith.

Over time I had one or two other friends who became atheists, and one became an extremely angry atheist for quite a while. I was upset at him for quite some time, but eventually I realized that I was defending something I didn't really believe in. I read a lot of C.S. Lewis and books like "The Case For Christ" and was left unsatisfied. I finally started trying to understand how other atheists might view the world and how they could believe that something came from nothing. I spent several years reading anything I could get my hands on from Christians, atheists, and deists. I contemplated suffering, hell, and the capriciousness of the universe. One day I simply realized I no longer believed in God. I didn't actively choose to reject him, I just realized I had stopped believing.

For several months I had a hard time with this. In my mind I was coming to terms with the fact that instead of living for eternity in paradise, I was going to die and then that will be the end of me. Eventually I learned to use this as motivation to live my life as fully as I can while I still have it.

Based on your first few threads I had assumed you were just trolling to be a dick. It sounds more like you are having trouble coming to terms with your newfound beliefs. All the best.

More or less the same story. Firm Christian upbringing. Started looking closer into my faith and apologetics in general and found that the defenses weren't satisfactory in the face of the arguments so often. As I looked deeper into the historicity of the bible, morality of the OT, and credibility issues with the NT, and the concept of Hell combined with narrow salvation and a hidden god I slowly found I didn't believe anymore. But I did consider the arguments for deism to be a good bit stronger than Christianity specifically, as I was losing faith in Christianity I often defended it to myself and others with arguments that were actually defenses of deism and were not Christian specific. More or less the teleological argument resonated with me and I still see it as the finest argument for god.

With deism life was little different than it is today. I may have thrown up a rare prayer in a "why not" sort of way, but I was well past church going. With further study I found myself agnostic on god's existence with a leaning toward atheism. I had a small period where I was uncomfortable with death being the end, but that's mostly passed and I like life and the freedom of thought and lack of guilt that I experience today.

I didn't consciously lose faith, and even fought it. It really is just something that happened.

I have slowly realized that religion just makes no sense. It requires a belief in the supernatural, and a denial of science. There are just too many questions that can only be answered by " just have faith." Various interpretations of ancient books by people who have no more knowledge than anyone else are not helpful. All religions claim revealed knowledge, but no one person on this earth has any more actual knowledge than any other. I believe in being honest and nice to people. No one has to tell me once a week how to do that.

Y'all's stories are all the exact same as mine, except I took a turn at a place y'all stopped. When I hit that point I was an atheist for about ten minutes before laughing at my own arrogance and deciding I was agnostic. I kept going to church for a while, and then I decided "if God was, He and I were on OK terms". But then I just started reading, and I found orthodoxy.

I feel like a lot of what y'all wrote about is part of the cultural zeitgeist (definitely has a tint of postmodernism in it). It's a little frustrating to me, because I feel like "rational empiricism" or "logical positivism" will always send you straight to where we all arrived. But Christianity has historically not made a claim to rational empiricism; the very concept of a pre-existent or transcendent being precludes empirical knowledge without divine condescension (immanence) or revelation, neither of which are under human control or subject to human understanding. (And, ironically logical positivism is basically a dead philosophical system, yet many are unconscious acolytes).

The poster above me is a great example of this postmodernist thinking. It's just wrong-headed to say that denial of science is a prerequisite for faith. Not that I've done anything amazing, but I'll wager I've published more peer reviewed papers than he has. And claiming that no one person has more actual knowledge than any other is either unknowable or demonstrably false.

It's ironic, in a way -- to have faith we have to become true empiricists, actually be willing to subject ourselves to experience. Of course, all true scientists do this anytime they find results that falsify their hypothesis. But you have to run the experiment to find out.

Right. What makes me bummed is that the tricky thing about experience is you have to have it. Every agnostic or atheist in this thread has been soured on a posit they've identified as either Christianity or Religion in general. This is, no doubt, based on adverse experience or possibly a poorly structured experiment / belief system (analogous to not controlling a variable or conflating observed phenomena). My personal belief is that my posits are correct, but this is not because I was told they were facts -- I rejected those earlier posits, just like you did. But my posits are correct, for me, because of affirming experience.

It's really difficult to share these affirming experiences. That's a sad difficulty.

My story is similar to Woody's, Astro's, and others on the board. I won't bore you with the details unless you want them.

I think that what I want to add to this thread, in light of your recent threads, is a piggy back on the last paragraph of Woody's post. These are just my thoughts and beliefs:

In 35 years, the only thing, as it relates to spiritualism or our understanding of reality, that I feel confident in claiming with certainty is that 'I don't know' . . . and neither does anyone else as far as I can tell. I don't think religion is the enemy. I don't think faith is the enemy. Given the characteristics of humanity, I'm not sure that religion (in a very broad sense) isn't something psychologically important and maybe vital to the species. The thing that I believe the religious and the non-religious can do without is some of our certainty. The biggest enemy of humanity today is something built into the psychology of humanity.

What is it about us that makes the feeling or moral superiority so attractive? Why do we all think we have moral superiority, cultural superiority, philosophical superiority, genetic superiority, or intellectual superiority - and in the very next breath point to the awesomeness of God or the mysteries of science that we don't understand as though this slight demonstration of humility excuses all of the rest of our self-righteousness? There is something culturally and psychologically important about standing in stubborn solidarity to the adherence to ideas or principles because they are the ideas and principles of 'our' people. We like to be right. We like when others are wrong. We think those that are wrong should be ridiculed or punished and we justify that ridicule or punishment by saying that they brought it upon themselves. We have no lack of imagination when it comes to justifying our own superiority or righteousness when we inflict harm or inflict our will. Humans do these things. Not Atheists. Not Christians. Not Muslims. Humans.

I see this in your posts the other day about religion being the root of all evil and superstition carried down through generations by brainwashing. I see this in K2s post which boils the experiences of the atheists on this thread down to being the result of submission to a self-indulgent, ignorance-based postmodern cultural whim. I see this in myself too, and I don't like it. Hell, to some extent, I may be guilty of it in this post. I hope I get called out for my hypocrisy and my bias when it shows up and I hope that I have the courage to accept it.

For me it all kind of unraveled when I realized that if I'd been born in a different place I'd very likely be a different religion, or at the very least a different form of the religion I was born into. I was always open to the idea of some sort of divine being, and I still am. Or at least some kind of being that would seem divine from our perspective. I just never understood how any one religion could claim to have the inside info on what that thing is like, what it's done, or what it wants.

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What does that have to do with faith? It's hardly an argument for it. It's an argument against the kind of atheism which explicitly rejects any possibility of God, sure, but nobody here believes that.

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Bit of a tangent, but I get a little irked when people equate religion and faith (especially blind faith). As if there is no evidence of any kind whatsoever, and people just sort of go along. There is plenty of evidence for God, but it is not physical evidence that can be verified through repeated experimentation. It's all somewhat subjective, but it is still evidence. The evidence can be a personal interaction with the divine, a similar experience in a loved one, seeing someone turn around a life after finding religion, or even just the existence of selfless love in the first place. You don't have to put weight in my subjective evidence or the narrative I use to give that evidence meaning, but it's sort of insulting to say that all religious people base their beliefs on nothing other than blind faith. /rant

Ok that's nice but it doesn't answer my question. Other religions could trot out scripture from their books too.