Make no mistake. If you are a Christian, or a member of any religious organization or pagan belief system, the path will not be an easy one. You have to decide if pursuing the truth really matters to you or not. Do you want to live your life based on a defective view of reality, or do you want to pursue the real truth? Do you think your God (or Gods, depending on your religion) honors people who base their beliefs on any old story they happen to have been brought up with, or do you think a God (or Gods) would be more impressed if you sought to have a mutual relationship based on truth and sincerity without recourse to threats and false dichotomies? Would you, as a human being, value the professed love of someone towards you when you know that the love is based on fear and the desire for some advantage or personal gain? Or would you appreciate more the unsolicited love offered by someone with absolutely nothing to gain?
Here are just a few steps to getting your life back and to stop being a Christian so that you can free yourself to begin looking for the real truth and live your life accordingly. I will briefly list the steps first, then elaborate upon them later.
1. Lose the fear.
2. Realize that you are not worthless and that your sense of human dignity, morality, empathy, and compassion are self-contained. You do not need anyone else to dictate those terms to you.
3. Learn how you gather and process information, because you do not know how. If you did know how, you would not be a victim of religion.
4. Learn critical thinking skills.
I want to remind you before we go on that I cannot prove (no one can) that God does not exist. You may still hold to the assumption or hope that maybe you will discover a God somewhere. But at least you will do so based on evidence and not on an emotional appeal. And you will know the difference between belief based on evidence and belief based on emotional appeals without evidence. One does not preclude the other. You can have evidence and be very emotional about it, but you can also be very emotional without evidence. It is the latter you must be aware of (beware of) because emotion, although a good and necessary part of our humanity, often leads to error when relied upon in decision making processes. Emotion is a moderating influence in making decisions in that although a logical decision may be correct in every way in terms of argument and logic, it may not be a good thing. For example, if you violate the law, logic dictates a punishment, but the moderating influence of emotion may choose to forgive instead.
And now to elaborate on my 4 steps to getting your life back:
1. The first thing you have to do is to lose the fear. You are trapped in your religion because of your fear. You cannot question your faith, because if you do, you start to wonder if the Devil is beginning to lead you gradually down the path towards disbelief and so you resist thinking about criticizing your beliefs. It is because you are full of fear. Fear that you will become apostate and end up burning in hell for all eternity. Fear that God will reject you if you question him. Your religion has brainwashed you to short circuit your critical thinking skills in this way. The Bible warns of the deceptive powers of Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44). There are many references in the Bible that warn you to not be deceived by “fine-sounding arguments.” (Colossians 2:4, NIV). See also John 2:22. These are all deliberately designed to invoke the fear response in you which has the desired effect of closing your mind to other possibilities. You cannot think clearly when you are afraid. To paraphrase from the science fiction series “Dune”, ‘fear is the mind killer ’ was the quote if I remember correctly. This is certainly true. Fear will kill your mind and enslave you until you conquer it.
Again, you have to stop being afraid of God’s threats of punishment. You will be told that you are questioning God himself and that is blasphemy. The truth is that you are not questioning God at all; you are questioning the documents purporting to represent what God has dictated to men who died a long time ago. These threats are not from God, they are from men who want to maintain their control over you. If you cannot lose your fear, how can you think? This is why losing your fear has to be the first step. You have to trust your God that he will not destroy you merely for trying to ascertain the veracity of your beliefs.
What harm can come from you questioning your beliefs? I would like to say that no harm can come of this questioning, but I would be wrong. The harm comes not from God’s revenge, but from other people. Friends, family, and acquaintances will reject you, and much harm can come from this. But the harm comes from the intolerance and inflexibility of the people with whom you were once acquainted. Of course, such rejection is not always present, but it is very common. I would also argue that much harm comes from not examining your beliefs.
If your beliefs are valid, then you will be reassured in your faith and you will be a better person with a stronger faith able to understand how we atheists think and why. Then you will be able to justify your belief. But if, in your fearless quest for truth, you find that your faith is not based on any rational evidence, then your faith is invalid and your former God can not threaten you with eternal destruction (because he does not exist and is therefore harmless) and so again you are free. Either way, if you investigate, you win, but only if you lose the fear.
In other words, you cannot lose the battle for truth, as long as you lose the fear and thereby reengage your brain.
2. Now that you have lost the fear, or at least you are working on that, what else should you be aware of? You should be aware that you have been manipulated in such a way that causes you to lose control of your thought processes. A very popular brainwashing technique begins by breaking down your defenses. This technique is designed to keep you subjugated and enslaved to the enslaving authority. This is more easily done if you pick younger victims, such as children who are very susceptible to suggestion and to brainwashing. Then, once the mind has been emptied of any self-worth, and looking for a replacement, the brain washers proceed to reprogram it to suit their purposes.
Note that the technique is almost always employed by religious proselytizers in spite of the fact that the proselytizers themselves are not aware of the technique they are employing, likely because they themselves are victims of the technique. The technique is self-propagating.
In the case of Christianity, the obvious conclusion is that while perhaps the original concepts may have been sincere, the faith was quickly owned by the insincere that saw it as a way to gain and retain political power over the people. The religion quickly evolved into a labyrinth of ritual, self-deprecation, and a promise that your sacrifices would all be worthwhile to you – just not quite in this lifetime – but in the next life. Thus, the people sacrificed their lives to support decadent rulers and leaders who enjoyed their reward in this life at the expense of your life.
Yes, these corrupt leaders were laughing all the way to the bank. They were laughing at the people they were enslaving. I am exaggerating, of course, but only a little. Many of them were sincere and just, but there were many who did take financial and political advantage of their positions until finally they began to dominate the movement which eventually evolved into the international and multi-denominational corporate beast we have today.
The next thing you have to realize is that you have been mistreated by your fake religion. The first thing done to a new Christian is to make him feel completely inadequate and unworthy. You are told that you were born a sinner and that you deserve to not only to die for your crime, but to be tortured in unimaginably hideous ways for all eternity, never really dying, just suffering forever with no relief. All this pain and suffering you deserve merely because you were born. Again, this immoral lie is most easily told to people who are in emotional distress and undergoing great personal hardship in their lives and who are looking for help. Once they have you feeling lost and without hope, they tell you how you can be saved from this fate.
The only way you can avoid burning in hell for all eternity is to confess your sins, repent and accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior. There is no in between in this obscene dichotomy. They offer you a very large carrot in that they promise you will have your every desire …when? Is it now? No, you can only have your reward in the next life. In Heaven, if you will. There, your every need and greed will be fulfilled.
They tell you that your worthlessness and your sinful nature is bad but it does not matter because all you have to do is repent at the last minute to be saved, thus saving you from the burden of responsibility for your actions. Of course the implication is that you must repent now because you may unexpectedly die in the next 30 seconds, who can say? The problem with this is that no one can ever stop “sinning”. So you have to repent every second of every day even while you are in the act of sinning. Just in case. How is this sinning to stop when you supposedly die and go to heaven? Is it because Jesus suddenly can make you not sin anymore? If so, why wait for death? Clearly, it is an absurd proposition. Certainly, you try to be good but those who have power over you force you to deny your human nature thus making it impossible for you to not “sin”
Christians do not have to take responsibility for their actions. This is a basic and fundamental fact central to Christian doctrine. You will have apologists who claim that if a person truly follows Christ, their actions will reflect that, making taking responsibility for your own actions a moot point. You cannot win if you are a Christian. If you do something good, it is God who has done it and you can take no credit. If you do something bad, it is completely because you are a bad person who sins a lot, but that is OK because all you have to do is say you are sorry and all is good once more. This is clearly bullshit.
A particularly vexing problem with this way of life is that no one has ever anywhere or at any time even remotely begun to present any evidence for life after death, or for the existence of Heaven or Hell, of the existence of a soul, or any of the myriad fables promulgated in the Bible. There is absolutely no difference between believing that and believing in an invisible, undetectable, spaghetti monster that lives in an invisible box which disappears every time you try to see it.
Another problem relates to the concept of repenting for one’s sins. If one can repent, one’s past actions can never be punished. There is no justice for those crimes, only forgiveness and mercy. Justice and mercy are incompatible elements. They are contradictory. Also, no amount of good deeds can get you into heaven, only a belief in and acceptance of Jesus. This is another proof of the contradictory nature of the Bible. To make matters worse, some promulgate the idea that although everyone is a sinner and deserves death (i.e.: everlasting life in the torturous fires of hell), and you cannot earn salvation by good deeds, you can earn brownie points by doing good deeds. So although everyone who believes will go to heaven, those who are better Christians will get more and better rewards than those who just barely squeak into the gates of heaven. There is a hierarchy of reward in heaven.
One very common assumption that Christians have about atheists, is that they are all miserable, that they have no morals or moral guidance, and that they have this unhappy void in their lives that they cannot fill because they have no belief in a God, or to be more precise, in your God. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the most fearful, intolerant and miserable people I know are Christians and the happiest most liberal and fulfilled people I know are atheists.
Christians are fond of conversion stories whereby someone was miserable and leading a life of drug use and other difficulties only to find salvation in Jesus who they claim turned their lives around. Rarely do any Christians take credit for their own determination, efforts, and for their own courage in changing their own lives for the better. But of course their lives were turned around. They were in deep trouble and miserable and they recognized they were in trouble and they decided to do something about it. Did their lives change because of Jesus? Of course not! Their lives changed because they began to make different and better choices. They began to act differently. Very few atheists are converted to Christianity because they are for the most part very happy people. There are exceptions of course, such as Alister McGrath whom I respect, who was once an atheist but is now an accomplished apologist for Christianity. Although I respect this man, I do not agree with most of his views. If you wish, you can view a fine debate between him and Richard Dawkins on You Tube.
You finally have to realize that you are not a sinner. Of course, you do bad things and make mistakes, we all do. But, you are a worthy intelligent human being who deserves better than the treatment you receive from the hand of religion. You are not responsible for the sins of your ancestors. You have the capacity within you to have great morals and to be a good person. You know that your sense of morality is infinitely greater than the morality assigned to the God of the Bible. In fact, morality is the hallmark of any intelligent species which survives. Evolution absolutely requires that any species intelligent enough to make tools and to manipulate the Universe as we do must also concurrently evolve a strong sense of not only good morals but of empathy as well. If an intelligent species does not also evolve morality and empathy, they will almost certainly drive themselves to extinction as soon as they have the capacity to create and use tools. It’s just that simple, folks! The claim by Christians that atheists can have no morality without a moral giver (i.e.: God) demonstrates two things: That Christians have no idea that morality actually comes from within, and the second is that Christians have no idea what kind of God they are worshiping. From my observations, almost everyone including Christians, exercise a vastly superior sense of morality than any morality demonstrated by the God of the Bible, who is, in fact, a sociopathic and psychotic monster. This is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact taken directly from the Bible.
3. So now that you have lost the fear and regained some measure of self-respect, what else should you do? Well probably the third thing you should do is examine what it is that makes you believe something. What criteria do you think will be the most effective? Previously you had no criteria. You believed in fairy tales. To be polite, you had faith. But faith is just what you have when you have no evidence. When you have evidence, faith becomes superfluous and unnecessary.
I really am not trying to convince you that there is no God, rather I am trying to convince you to examine your basis for belief. I personally do not believe there is a God, but that does not matter for the purposes of this exercise. What matters is evidence. Now, let us assume that your God exists. Why do you think God created you with the ability to hear, to see, to touch, to taste, and to smell? Furthermore, why do you think he made you intelligent and able to discern wisdom? It certainly was not so you could ignore or mistrust your own senses and dismiss everything in order to live a life of fear driven slavery. God gave you your senses so you could receive input from the outside world. He gave you senses so you could use them to interpret the world. God would have to be an extremely stupid God if he expected you to believe everything you hear. I should not have to tell you about all the made up fables people have invented and that people are still inventing today. Even the stupidest, most ignorant person on the planet knows they cannot all be correct. Therefore, it seems logical to say that God would want you to question everything and seek out truth as best you can. There is no way we can determine truth by believing that God spoke to someone or even spoke to you. The reason why is that we have absolutely no way to judge what comes from God and what is just bullshit told to you by self-proclaimed spiritual masters. So, thinking and challenging is a requirement, not a sin. These senses you have are the only reliable way to experience and judge reality.
Contrast this with what you erringly call evidence: You have a gut feeling that your religion is true. No! You are dead wrong! Feelings do not constitute evidence. Peer reviewed evidence constitutes evidence and not feelings. I emphasize peer reviewed evidence that stands the test of time and repeatability because even our vision cannot be trusted since we can hallucinate and are subject to optical illusions.
So how does one gather and process information in this life? Certainly, any rational human being should agree that merely believing any old story just because of its emotional appeal, and without any evidence whatsoever, is clearly wrong. And yet Christians do just that. So do Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, and any other religion based on faith and not reality. They fail to realize that their entire faith is based on believing whatever they are told, or whatever they read, by the society that raised them to believe the nonsense. I am not the first to say that you will likely adopt the beliefs of the society you were born and raised in. If you were born in Saudi Arabia, you would believe in Allah and the Koran, if in Canada, the Bible and Jesus. The point is that any reality has to be universal and not sectarian or geographical. Clearly, religions do not meet this criterion.
We gather information through our senses. We cannot gather evidence from within our own minds. We can only process the information that came into and was stored in our minds via our senses which are the only tools we have to interact and communicate with the outside world. You know what they are: Hearing, Seeing, Taste, Touch, and Smell. Unless God was monumentally stupid, he would actually expect us to employ the senses that he gave us in order to communicate with each other. Notice that I said ‘with each other’. I assume God could communicate with us using a means other than our senses, however he did not give us any other means to communicate with each other and no matter how much God babbles to any one of us in our heads, there is no way for us to share that information with other people other than through our own senses. If I seem to be belaboring this point it is because it is a very important one. Knowing that people can spout any old nonsense at each other how can we actually begin to find out who is telling the truth? The answer is that we cannot. That is why we invented science.
How stupid would you have to be as God to expect everyone to pick the correct revelation from amongst hundreds of thousands of other people with different ideas? It just makes absolutely no sense to think that God wants you to guess which one is correct. He either talks to us or he does not. He seems completely incapable of communicating with us in any way that makes sense. He stays invisible, untouchable, does not respond to prayer, in fact, God remains absolutely and totally unresponsive to any attempt to contact him. This is exactly the same response one would expect if God simply did not exist, or at least if God simply was totally uninterested in us. If God indeed wanted us to interact with him and to reveal him to us, he would find a way to do it. There would be absolutely no mistake and no doubt. Clearly, God has not done this.
God simply has to communicate with us via the senses he gave us if God has any hope of creating and maintaining a relationship with us at all. He absolutely cannot whisper in the mind of a select few people and then expect us to believe those people without any evidence whatsoever. There are only three possible solutions to this problem. The first is that God simply does not exist. The second is that God is totally uninterested in reacting or relating to us in any way. The third is that God is phenomenally incompetent when it comes to communicating his ideas. I prefer the first solution as the most simple and likely one.
You now know that you can only learn and process reliable information from the five senses of your body and that you should not rely on the imaginings of self-proclaimed spiritual masters. You also know that your senses can deceive you. All of your senses can be fooled and are subject to illusions. Optical illusions and other sensory aberrations are often easily recognized. We even have a lot of fun with them. We look at optical illusion books. We play with tasting weird combinations of flavors that fool us. We play touching games where we think we are touching one thing but it is something else and so on. For example, here is an optical illusion just for fun. The image was pulled from Facebook user “My Prozac Moment” without permission. It will be removed if I receive notice to do so:
This is really not moving at all.
But sometimes illusions are not so easily recognized, which is why peer reviewed evidence is critical to accepting any observation or set of observations. With repeatability and with the combined corrections inherent in a large group of observers it is possible to minimize error. This process is one we commonly perceive as science.
For example, we can make the observation that any object held up then released will fall to the ground. Many people can do this experiment and therefore there is no doubt or ambiguity. This is one form of observation that leads to the rational belief that there must be a force which causes things to fall to the ground when unsupported. It can be tested by anyone. What cannot be believed is the conclusion that magical flying pixies push all unsupported objects to the ground. One is an objective observation, ‘all unsupported objects fall to the ground ’, the other is an unsubstantiated speculation: ‘It is caused by invisible magic pixies ’. Religion invokes the magic pixies, but worse, they have no objective observations at all, such as the observation that unsupported objects fall to the ground which can be tested by anyone, anywhere.
4. You now know that you can and should shed the fear based control someone else has over you. You also know that you are a worthy and valuable human being. And you also know how you receive and process information. The last step is to develop critical thinking skills. Few people, if any are born with this ability. But it can be taught. You do not have to be a genius or even smart to learn at least some basics of what to believe and what not to believe. But you do have to do at least some work. First of all you have to know what constitutes reasonable evidence. In order to do that you must understand how to argue. I do not mean argue as is commonly used by people, that is, fighting with each other. That is not argument. Rather, an argument is a reasoned statement supporting your proposed conclusions and is based on logic and on facts. I will provide links later on and possibly also in the side bar which you can study and learn how to present a logical case.
I am not a logical person. I struggle a lot with logical thinking and I am still learning. I do not understand logic very well yet, especially certain logical fallacies that I am often guilty of committing. Recognizing and avoiding logical fallacies takes a lot of practice and for me, at least, is a lot of hard work. Often the learning process really hurts my brain. My understanding is that most scientists think that human brains are not very good at logic, but we are good at heuristic thinking which does use logic in a sense, but kind of takes shortcuts. These shortcuts are what often lead to logical fallacies and wrong conclusions.
Examples of logical fallacies include uncritically appealing to authority when one does not know for certain that the authority is correct. People like to play the “…he has a Ph.D. …” card regardless of whether the argument even relates to the field of study of the Ph.D. Then there is circular reasoning. There are many other logical fallacies, most of which have Latin names. For example, an attack on someone’s character rather than on the facts in question is called an Ad hominem logical fallacy.
Basically an argument is true if the premises are true. Thus if A = B and B = C, then A = C. The conclusion A = C stems from the fact that both premises are also true. If one of these premises is not true then A is not necessarily equal to C. Also, one of your A/B premises may be totally wrong, but in spite of that A = C could still be true. So in the world of human language, rather than mathematical language, a conclusion may be true even though you have got one of your premises wrong. So if you come to a conclusion that is incorrect but should be correct from your premises, then you have to re-examine your premises to see which one is not correct. I do not want to dwell on this topic because it is a difficult one and requires a commitment to study it. Rather, you really should educate yourself on how to argue. It is critically important in fact that you do so. Do it now. It should be your highest priority.
The web site Introduction to Logic and Arguments is an excellent introduction and teaches you right from the start that:
“…without correct reasoning, we don’t have a viable means for knowing the truth or arriving at sound beliefs. Logic is not a matter of opinion…”
The web site Logical Fallacies is also helpful. You may also use Google for examples of the various logical fallacies to help you understand them better. A good understanding of them will help you avoid them in your own work, and also to recognize them in the work of others:
Of course, no list of links would be complete without:
You now have the tools to begin living a truly ‘purpose driven life’ rather than a ‘bullshit driven one.’ It is only a beginning. So, how does it feel to know that you are now responsible for your actions? You and you alone are responsible for your future. Please make damn sure you do not waste this golden opportunity to make the best of your short life.
Last words: From personal experience I found a lot of dishonesty in the Christian world. To be fair there is also a lot of dishonesty in the secular world as well but I am referring here to the intellectual dishonesty of Christians. I remember attending an “extracurricular” meeting at a Pentecostal church where a group of worshipers including the pastor were doing typically Pentecostal things. Various people were speaking in tongues, lying on the floor face down before the altar and dancing around in an emotional state. I remember being appalled. I remember trying very hard to think what possible reason could there be for God wanting us to do such things. I remember one of the elders dance toward me and he tried repeatedly to push me down by pushing on my forehead “slaying me in the spirit”. I remember looking at him in astonishment and confusion. I was quite paralyzed, being wholly occupied with trying to wrap my brain around this amazing assault (for I felt assaulted). I was also amazed to see that realizing he was failing to invoke the spirit to knock me to the ground, he attempted to force me to the ground by deliberately stepping on my feet with his feet so that when he pushed me I would be more likely to fall over backwards. As soon as he stepped on my feet, however, I snapped out of my shock, and merely stood my ground. He looked at me with glazed and disappointed eyes and he melted back into the crowd. I never went back. I found this extremely intellectually and physically dishonest. I state it hear because I want to illustrate the point that this group was not at all interested in finding the truth, they just wanted their emotional high to make them feel better about themselves. The same can be stated with just about any Christian activity, although not so dramatically.
Many Christians are not interested in truth. They are only interested in what gives them a good feeling, an emotional high. Here is a quote from one such Christian when I compared a Christian to an Atheist and commented that one of them needed counseling. When I was asked which one I refused to answer and I said he had to figure it out for himself. Here is his reply:
Must be the atheist. I look at the world around me and know there must be a God. I look at the sky and do not question if but know why, there is a God. I look at all the life around me and know it could be have been a bunch of coincidences that came together. It has to have been created which means a God. I look at all the different churches and, being a member of a country which is a Republic, loosely based on democracy, know there must be a God. I read history by people like Josephus and know that there was an historical person named Jesus. I read the New Testament and learn more about this Jesus.
Of course, none of his arguments make any sense at all and he is being completely ignorant and emotional. The statement, “…and (I) do not question…” says it all. He does not understand that merely saying “…there must be a God…” does not mean that there is one. Clearly, he is not at all interested in either reality or the truth. Like most Christians, he believes he is special and better than other people in that he is getting some sort of direct revelation from God that we are not getting. And it is not the sense of awe and joy and wonder at the natural world I am referring to here, since even we atheists feel these wonderful emotions too. We just do not pretend they are evidence for anything. When asked how he knows what he knows, the reply is always, “I just know”, or “I feel it in my heart so it has to be true…” and so on. Not a shred of evidence whatsoever. Somehow, they cannot see how wrong that is. Allow me to stress that it is not the emotion that is wrong or that I object to. What I object to is the conclusion that because I feel all goody goody inside, that is proof that God exists. I hope you do not make the same mistake and that you lose the fear and begin to pursue the real truth rather than believe someone else who told you that the truth has already been found so you no longer have to look. I can tell you without compunction that all of these people unhesitatingly dismiss and ignore their faith and pay attention to the immediate reality when the situation calls for it. If they can dispose of their beliefs in order to respond to real situations when the situation calls for it, why can they not do so all the time? Christians are all too happy to pick and choose whatever they want to believe in from the Bible depending on their immediate needs. There is no consistency and no agreement. There is only chaos and a free-for all inconsistent interpretive melange. If you disagree with me, you must explain why there are over 38,000 denominations. Is God so incompetent that he cannot find the wit to communicate his ideas effectively?
Lastly, if you are a Christian, please read your Bible. I cannot believe how many of you so called Christians out there just spout off your nonsense and you do not even know what you are talking about. Just do not parrot the canned responses you absorb while watching your evangelical programs on TV. Open your own Bible and read it. If you come to me and demonstrate an ignorance of your own Bible, you will just demonstrate that you are a complete ass. How disrespectful of your own God are you being when you do not even read the Bible you claim he wrote!
Even if you are not a Christian, read it anyway because you are drowning in a sea of illogical Christians and you need to know more than they do about their own book. Besides, it is an important part of our heritage and of our literature and is worthy of study just as the works of Shakespeare, Tolkien, and Plato are worthy of study. Read also the Islamic Koran, the four Hindu Vedas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and as many others as you can. I strongly suggest you continue to learn and grow, because I am convinced that the only unforgivable sin is that of stasis, of a mindful and willful ignorance.
Final Warning: Belief in a God who cares for you and wants to guide you out of your current difficulties can be an important and stabilizing influence in someone’s life. It may even save their lives. Please do not destroy that influence with your logic if you are trying to help someone. Have some compassion, and wait until the person has stabilized before you offer to “enlighten” them, and then only if they ask questions. Never force your views on others. I can post my views because no one has to read them, as the title says it all. To them, I’m just a stupid atheist going to hell. But if they read it, it is because they are at the stage where they can handle it. I have spoken mostly from a Christian perspective, however many of the points I have made also apply to other religions. And although I have thought about these things and speak from direct personal experience, none of the ideas I have put forth are new. All of them have been put forth by innumerable thinking persons before. But it is good in my eyes to know that the conclusions I have come to about religion are not new. It is, in a sense, encouraging to me to find that ideas I thought were my own, ideas that I so laboriously constructed through experience in my life, were also thought of by others who wrote before me. It is a kind of confirmation that at least I am on the correct path.
Peace and may your journey be a good one.
