And what is it full of now? Thinking about what the Invisible Man in the Sky thinks of your every action?
**
I’m sure abdicating personal responsibility is uplifting.
**
So you had to give up things you found enjoyable in order to please the almighty. What if you’re wrong? (I’m tired of hearing that question directed at me.) All of that potential happiness was wasted.
**
Happiness, free will, my own moral code, non-judgemental friends, reason are a few things I don’t want to get rid of.
OH BOY, HAPPY HAPPY JOY JOY.
Yes, I went through a religious phase of my life. That Jesus high will turn into Jesus hangover likely in the not too distant future, then the true meddle of your faith will set in. Trying to stay the ostentatioulsy joyous will wear most people out. Better to be mellow happy to nuetral most of the time.
You have talked about this great joy, but nothing about tangible accomplishments since this conversion. This is where the meddle of your faith gets tested. I have known many people who have been overwhelmed by emotion upon a conversion, but over time they have mostly gone back to normal, looking beck at their “religious” phase with humor or embarassment.
The best Christians to me are not the ones with fake grins of their faces trying to put a Jesus reference into everything they say.
I_a_S: an addendum, my life has been rather happy. No more or worse than anyone else’s. I had my usual shares of ups and downs.
One point you need to consider is this, many of us have given up on the Xian Church, but not necessarily on the Xian God. As I’ve stated in another thread (Friend or God convert me) I left the Xian church for a variety of reasons, least of which was my homosexuality. But I also have problems with other aspects of the J/C/I God. I’m on good terms with him, but I simply don’t follow his path.
Here things might get a bit prickly:
IMHO, one of the worst things Xianity has ever done is hide or obliterate the ability to chose your own spiritual path. The other choices are there, but they’re damned hard to find.
If you did find one and try to follow it you’d be looked upon as odd, peculiar or even (ahem) queer (in the old sense of the word). 
Up until the past few decades, anyone practicing anything other than good ole Protestant Xianity was considered suspect. Even today, when the topic of religion is brought up, Xianity dominates it. Anything else is almost an afterthought.
The point of this is, many of us don’t practice Xianity for various reasons. We’ve put a lot of thought and effort into our choices. In the same way you don’t want to give up your relationship with the Nazarene, I don’t want to give up Wicca.
WEll wring, that was a very well thought out argument but unfortunately I already agreed with you. Some sort of automatic spell checker (I’m assuming) changed my “raison” to reason. I was actually trying to use the shortened version of the french phrase “raison d’etre”, or reason to be.
My point was just yours that humans have an inherent need to belong and that without some sort of “reason to be” they WILL feel empty and alone.
Ain’t modern’t technology grand?
Gawd I hope it doesn’t happen again because I don’t know how else to explain my true meaning without using the word that is being automatically wiped out. Hopefully the quotation marks will set things straight. If not you’ll have to live with being confused :).
Well that’s what I get for skimming. It didn’t do what I thought it did.
Anyway, my statement is still valid even if it’s explaination was wrong.
Scratch that, modern technology isn’t grand. Human error is.
No, your original post featured the term “raison”, but changed when I quoted you. I was proofreading my post and in a moment of analness corrected your “misspelling”. My bad.
im_a_squirrel said:
You see, squirrel, I don’t see the logic to believing Christianity or any other religion. This question is therefore doomed from the start, since we aren’t going to understand each other’s points of view.
Sorry, squirrel, but you miss the whole point. You make it sound like we (agnostics and atheists) are rejecting an offer, but the offer is for something we don’t believe exists. It is therefore an offer of nothing.
It’s all well and good that you are happy with your beliefs, and I wouldn’t try to take that away from you even if I could. But I don’t want what you’re giving out, any more than I want what the crack pushers sell. You will just have to be content with letting me muddle through in my own way.
Well, I found my life where I was being schooled in Christian thought to be opressing and it didn’t suit me. Christianity isn’t the religion for me, and right now I remain agnostic until I find a religion that matches my thoughts on life. If I don’t, I will remain an agnostic from then on. Every person has their own way that is suited for them, and this is why religion has been successful aside from the people who are forced to become whatever religion they are.
MysterEcks said:
Good point. I’d like to know where in Christianity Squirrel finds this “logic” to which he is referring.
It would seem to me that for Christianity to be “logical”, one would first have to believe that the Bible was the word of God and completely true. It also seems that if a person does not believe that the Bible is true, then Christianity, or any other religion, for that matter, is pointless, or not logical.
im a squirrel apparently believes that the Bible is 100% true and is the word of God, so therefore it is logical to him/her.
Tried it. Really, I did. I felt nothing at all like what you describe. In fact, I felt nothing period. No connection whatsoever. And a connection, not fullfilled joy, was what I was after. I called out for God and he wasn’t there.
I took this to mean either 1) God does not exist, or 2) God did not care to answer. Both amount to the same thing.
Whatever happened to the Invisible Pink Unicorn? Have we lost sight of the true faith?
I made this analogy on another, similar thread, but I think it’s worth repeating.
You’re walking down the street, when a mysterious-looking gentleman approaches you with a cashier’s check for a million dollars and a gun. He tells you that the million-dollar check can be yours, and all you have to do to receive this free gift is believe, absolutely and deep in your heart, that Regis Philbin is the President of the United States. If you refuse to believe that, he is going to shoot you through the head.
I concede that it is possible that Regis is the President. There could have been a coup within the last ten minutes during which the people installed Regis as the new leader. It’s possible that all the media are tied up in a vast conspiracy designed to hide the reality of President Philbin.
However, it is not bloody likely, and I don’t have any reason to believe such a thing other than your admonishment to do so. You could offer me all the money in the world, and I would never be able to convince myself, for sure and without any reason for thinking so, that Regis is the President.
Now why would I turn down that free gift?
Dr. J
Cheezit said:
Something is either logical or it is not. It cannot be logical to one person but not others. At least, not objectively. Squirrel may think it’s logical, but that does not make it so.
For example, if the word of the Bible is indeed 100% true, as you have said, then it is still missing logic because there is no way to logically explain why there is so much evidence that says the Bible is not 100% true.
Squirrel,
It’s simple
They don’t believe you.
I am a Christian, and I don’t believe you.
Your drive by witnessing has accomplished nothing but exposing your smug self-righteousness to everyone but yourself. Before doing it again, you might consider how much service you have accomplished for Our Lord by doing this.
You cannot be the Savior, you can only be the Saved Soul. That is a minor part in the drama of the world. It requires a humble man with a desire to take on the difficult task of living quietly in a way that honors the Lord. When someone asks you how you have become the man you are, then you witness.
You are probably the same person who started other threads under different names, and then never answered. You are a great comfort to Satan. (Not the poster, the Prince of Evil) You make Christ’s message sound selfish, trivial, and greedy. You display vanity and pride, and bigotry, and call them Christianity.
Pray more, talk less. Grow up a lot.
I ask the forgiveness of all those who are not of the Christian faith, for you, and for myself.
Tris
You know, it’s the decline of good old-fashioned IPU values in this country that are causing all of today’s problems. Heresies like the Righteous Goldfish are springing up right and left, luring young minds with their flashy toilets while a good honest IPUer can’t even eat the Holy Round Meal in a public school. All these other “religions” are simply attempts by the Purple Oyster of Doom to disguise the One True Way, and I hate to say it, but I think he’s been quite effective. You know, I met someone the other day who hadn’t even heard of the IPU! I guess I better start witnessing on public message boards; that’s the only thing that will halt the crime, poverty, cruelty and misery so prevalent in this modern world.
I’m sure it didn’t escape most people that the OP was im_a_squirrel’s first post ever. Maybe if this question wasn’t asked with increasing frequency by hit-and-run sock puppets who never stick around to see any answer’s, people wouldn’t get as pissed off about it. Same with the proliferation of “Why Are Christians So [insert derogatory adjective here]/” threads.
Frankly, it really doesn’t matter whether there is a god. If there is, then, as far as we know, it has not exerted an influence on the Universe since the Big Bang. Otherwise, we would see the laws of physics violated all over the place. We don’t.
With regard to Jesus. Whether he existed or not is open to question. We have only the New Testement’s word on that. Was he divine? There is no reason to think so. Did he promote justice? Well, according to the New Testement, yes. But then why do so many “Christians” support unjust political regimes all over the world? In this country( the US), the mass base of the extreme right lies precisely amoung the mass of born again Christians. They sing the praises of the vilest, slimeist, most hypocritical politicians in this country.
If “Christians” took the New Testement seriously, they would support the struggles of workers, women, gays,children, and the third world peoples. They would be against the militarists, money lenders, tyrants, wife beaters, and gay bashers. They aren’t. All the polls show that the “Christians” support an oppressive political agenda. Therefore, most them are hypocrites.
You will, of course, provide a source for such a slanderous assertion, correct?
David B said:
“Something is either logical or it is not. It cannot be logical to one person but not others. At least, not objectively.”
I’m sorry, but I don’t follow your, pardon me, logic. Why can something be logical to me but not logical to you? Or vise versa. Just as a wild, way out there, for instance. Suppose that you decided, after years of thought and planning, that you had come up with the perfect way to rob a bank. It was an infallible plan. It could not, in your mind, fail. Therefore it was logical to you. Now I, on the other hand, knowing that people that rob banks NEVER get away with it, and eventually get caught, know that robbing banks is NOT logical because you WILL get caught.
And then there is this… Why is MORE logical to believe in the “Invisible Pink Unicorn” than it is to believe in God?
I suppose that it is just up to each individual person to see things as they want to see them. The only thing that really concerns me, with the many varieties of beliefs, is that not everybody can be right. The real question, it seems to me, is, Who is right?