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Please refrain from personal attacks. If you can't address what a poster says without attacking his/her "ego," you are no longer addressing the topic but the poster. The poster is not the topic. Telling people to button their lip is bullying and won't be tolerated. Posts flagged for moderator review and possible reinstatement. Hidden but not deleted until such review is complete.

I can't say I knew what motivated you to do so, but I respect the end result of your thought process in forming the reply to chockful. Also, I've read at least one book by author Sebastian Junger and respect his insight on life individually and with other humans. I watched this (non-comedic) interview this evening and thought it might appropriately fit in this thread.

I repeat that wierwille's teaching on Abraham and Isaac was a way to put the focus and blame on Abraham and take it off of God's hideous command (IMO).

An atheist who does Gods work. Ok. With your lack of blame towards God for relatives sickness and realization there is no instantaneous healing on the way that is no different than how I view the world. I had a relative die of MS. Just saw his widow. He was supposedly healed of MS by someone praying years ago. Did that happen? Or did it just go into remission for 20 years? I don’t know. I don’t know why I never thought to blame God or pray for miracles. I’m mostly conditioned I guess to pray but keep your own gunpowder dry and your gun clean.

Okay it's me. One momento.

Liberty Stands Still Linda Fiorentino Unforgettable

What was the first U.S. state to designate Labor Day as a holiday? or. What is least populated capital city is the U.S.? I thought I had already posted last night? Apparently I forgot to hit submit reply.

Wow, maybe you were around in the late 60's George like I was. More lyrics are "making love in the afternoon with [song title], up in my bedroom", making love,' I got up to wash my face when I come back to bed someone's taken my place".

Correctomundo WordWolf.

P.S. I was not GSC's first atheist, or best. George Aar and Sudo beat me by more than a decade. I may be the noisiest.

Well, I love her But I love to fish I spend all day out on this lake And hell is all I catch But today she met me at the door Said I would have to choose If I hit that fishin hole today She'd be packin all her things And she'd be gone by noon. Well,...

I try to discourage turning against God for emotional reasons, as much as I sympathize. A faith that is lost in emotion can be regained in emotion. That's not to invalidate your journey. And I'm proud of you for thinking it through instead of just being angry at or disappointed in God. When it came to my autistic son, I realized "it's not God's fault." God is not to blame for my son's autism, my sister's ALS, my brother's lethal drug abuse, my other sister's cancer. And he's not going to heal or deliver them for the same reason. Non-existent people tend not to accomplish much. My wife and I foster kids in need. Last year we adopted one. She's a delight. People keep telling us we're doing God's work. My response is always the same: Who else is going to do it? It's an inside joke based on something Penn Jillette once said: We have to do God's work, because God knows He won't. I'm honored to have helped you realize you're not alone.

Correct. I was getting ready to put a different song by the same artist, instead. I was, however, going to skip "Psycho-killer" as an option. Personally, I think this is a nice little song that is under-estimated. Then again, the same might be said of the Talking Heads as a whole.

When I came onboard GSC, learning about the "Absent Christ" doctrine and practice that I had grown up spiritually with while in twi changed my life. That was in late 2022. For months, I experienced a new closeness with God and Christ and during that time, I rested in trusting that God would help my grandson to gradually become verbal. I wasn't doing the Law of Believing crap but simply keeping my eyes on God's goodness, love and grace. There was steady improvement in his development in other areas of his life and I was so thankful for this. During that time, I also spent a lot of time in the Word and was repeatedly "blessed" by what I was seeing. Then, the seizures began. I kept asking God for revelation as to what I should do so that He could heal my grandson. Whatever I thought He was showing me and whatever I knew from the word didn't work, and the seizures became more frequent and of a kind that caused him to injure himself. He was missing a lot of school and we didn't feel it was safe to take him swimming anymore. After one horrible experience when my daughter and I took him to the ER because he had been crying for most of the day, I prayed about every obstacle we faced and for God to please calm him of the terror he had of being there and having the tests done. I knew by the time we left 6 hours later that I no longer believed god was real. But I did go back to the word to study what it had to say about prayer. I shared about this at the beginning of this thread. What it boiled down to, apparently, is that it's all according to God's will and timing which he conveniently keeps to himself. Some called that needing to have faith, but I called it a f*cking guessing game and I didn't want to play anymore. You wrote, "I followed the footsteps of people who walked the path long before I did." That's why I came on this forum because I knew you were an atheist. I also began learning from others as well through the internet. The god I thought was real in my first paragraph is not the god I see in the bible anymore because I stopped ignoring the passages I had always found difficult to accept. Doing this opened the floodgate.

Ok fine. "And She Was" By Talking Heads

I have to say that I was THE anti-"evolutionist" in my high school, and today I am really embarrassed about it. I remember submitting a science project asking why horses and cows have different kinds of teeth when they eat the same kinds of grass. Or something like that. It was 40 years ago. I used to blame evolution and its doctrine of survival of the fittest for the rise of Hitler. Hitler, who, by the way, was not an atheist. And not a proper Christian. An evil SOB whose "God" was a hateful corruption of the Christian God. But not an atheist. Anyway, as I educated myself, I realized certain truths that, to be honest, quite surprised me. 1. Evolution does not have an endgame. It's not headed somewhere. 2. No species is more "advanced" than any other. We are where we are, when we are. Gorillas are just as advanced as man... it's a matter of their suitability to survive in their environment. 3. "Survival of the fittest" isn't about who's strongest. It's about who lives long enough to reproduce.

Our experiences are not mutually exclusive. The recognition that one has lost face does indeed open a floodgate that forces you to re-evaluate EVERYTHING. And that did happen to me. Some of it, I worked out by myself. Some of it, I followed the footsteps of people who walked the path long before I did. But I found that a lot of it was retracing my steps and realizing it was there all along, that I was suppressing doubts instead of recognizing their role as protectors of my conscience against self-deception. Even as a Christian, I knew the story of Job could not be true. Seen in its most pro-faith light, it makes God out to be a gigantic anus. A friend of mine once got angry because his cat died, and someone else in the family replaced him with an identical looking cat. Now, that family member wasn't actually responsible, directly or indirectly, for the first cat dying. But still, the palliative for a dead cat is empathy, not a new cat to replace the old one. But we're supposed to believe God did right by Job because he gave him a new wife and kids!?!?!?!? Only if it didn't happen and real people didn't die horrific, unnecessary deaths so that God could win a BET he KNEW he would win in the first place is such a morally bankrupt story even remotely justifiable. And this has NOTHING to do with how VPW butchered this story.

Our experiences are not mutually exclusive. The recognition that one has lost face does indeed open a floodgate that forces you to re-evaluate EVERYTHING. And that did happen to me. Some of it, I worked out by myself. Some of it, I followed the footsteps of people who walked the path long before I did. But I found that a lot of it was retracing my steps and realizing it was there all along, that I was suppressing doubts instead of recognizing their role as protectors of my conscience against self-deception. Even as a Christian, I knew the story of Job could not be true. Seen in its most pro-faith light, it makes God out to be a gigantic anus. A friend of mine once got angry because his cat died, and someone else in the family replaced him with an identical looking cat. Now, that family member wasn't actually responsible, directly or indirectly, for the first cat dying. But still, the palliative for a dead cat is empathy, not a new cat to replace the old one. But we're supposed to believe God did right by Job because he gave him a new wife and kids!?!?!?!? And there was a LOT of that. Only if it didn't happen and real people didn't die horrific, unnecessary deaths so that God could win a BET he KNEW he would win in the first place is such a morally bankrupt story even remotely justifiable. And this has NOTHING to do with how VPW butchered this story.

Thanks Raf for answering an older question. I'd define your experience as being an "evolution" where it took time for the result to become obvious - a reality. Mine has been more like a "flood" in that I have taken on so much information in a short period of time from books and the internet. A big reason behind this flood is simply due to my personality type - a mixture of perfectionism and OCD. My intellectual binging for the past few weeks has taken up at least 75% of my life. This is a lot considering I'm retired . This morning, I remembered that the number one reason I stopped believing in god a while back ago was because of his undeniably deplorable character (as shown in Revelation) and his habit of going on vacation when I truly needed him. Learning how the bible contains myths, fictional stories, contradictions, etc. has been fascinating but largely academic to this. So today I am putting on some CD's and tackling my long to-do list.

That the Bible says something is proof that the Bible says it. It is sufficient evidence to base a doctrine on. It proves that somewhere along the line, believers accepted this as a fact. It does NOT prove they were correct in doing so, or that the incidents relayed ever really took place. You can say "I believe this happened because the Bible says so." You cannot say, "Because the Bible says this happened, it therefore did, and how do you respond to it?" I mean, you can SAY that. But the answer might come in the form of giggles.

Re-reading the thread from the beginning and I don't recall answering this question. I don't think I ever had those worries. Maybe the route of my journey was a detour around that location. See, I WAS right. There is a God and his son is Christ and I'm born again and I'm going to heaven and the Bible is God's Word and and and... And whenever I encountered a piece that didn't fit [why don't we know Noah's wife's name when she like Eve is the mother of all living? How did so many civilizations survive the Biblical flood without interruption? If the Exodus took place as described, why didn't they name the Pharoah?] I put that piece aside. After a few years, I noticed that the pieces I put aside not only outnumbered the pieces that were positive or constructive, but the pieces set aside, for the reasons set aside, actually fit together like a shoe in a sock. So by the time I was in a position to consider the "consequences" of atheism, I had already rejected Christianity as inconsistent with reality. Fearing hell would mean accepting as truth something I was increasingly recognizing as a lie. By now you'll have heard of Pascal's Wager, which was presented in a simplified form in PFAL. Briefly summarized, it says: "You might as well believe. If you're wrong, you lose nothing, but if you're right, you gain everything. Unbelief gives you nothing to gain if you're right and everything to lose if you're wrong." Pascal's Wager is not only stupid: it posits a stupid God who can't tell a sincere believer from a poser afraid of punishment. It also presumes only two choices: unbelief or Christianity. There are THOUSANDS of other choices. Heck, there are thousands of options in Christianity alone. A God who has to threaten hell to gain worship is not a God worth worshipping. True, not all Christianities teach a literal hell, but so what? Many do. And those that don't have other issues. So to answer the question concisely: never worried about being wrong.

So, was this correct???

Maybe, but it's definitely one of them.

Sean Connery Rising Sun Wesley Snipes George