Confession of a former christian

For me it was a combination of many factors.Growing up, I was taught about Christian beliefs and read bits of the Bible almost daily. My grandfather was the principal of a midwestern Christian school that my parents both attended. Instead of Dr. Seuss, I was read Bible stories at bedtime. I went to Bible camp every summer (thankfully not as bad as the documentary "Jesus Camp" or anything like that). I attended a Christian preschool and kindergarten. I went to public elementary school, but it was conservative enough that pocket-New Testament Bibles were handed out every year, even though I learned later that this was obviously illegal.So I always took my faith for granted, and I never even once questioned anything. It never even occurred to me to see if reality reflected the stories like the Flood, or to think about how to reconcile a "good" deity with the slaughter of the Egyptian firstborn in Exodus. Most of the Bible was glossed over, and I never questioned what might be in the passages that were never mentioned in sermons.Even after High School, I somehow maintained a compeltely contradictory belief in both evolution and 6-day Creation. I simply never even considered that the two might not be compatible. For me, my faith was literally a no-brainer: rational thought never intruded on my religious beliefs.My family was not outwardly judgmental; we and our church never specifically said anything like "homosexuality is a sin," or anything like that. I had always been taught that all people were equal becasue we were all created by God. So, when I first heard Christians who did speak out against homosexuality or non-Christians, I was appalled and simply thought they they were "bad Christians." I remember my first experience with ne of these, in fact. I was in Boston on a class trip, and some friends and I had just purchased a book on Buddhism from a man on the street because we were all interested in religions and mythology. A Christian came over, shoved Jack Chick tracts into our hands, and said "you know you boys are wasting your time with that garbage, right?" Such outright hostility towards a different faith was horribly offensive to me, becasue I had always been taught to be accepting of other people's beliefs.A few years ago, I finally noticed the disparity between Creationism and the scientific models of the age of the Universe, the age of the Earth, and evolution. I concluded that the Flood could never have happened, Exodus could never have happened as portrayed, 6-day Creationism was false, etc. Immediately, I determined that the Biblical stories must have been allegorical - I could have no faith in something that contradicted reality, and like many other Christians I decided that the "message" could remain intact even if the story was not literally true.Not long after, I found several websites, including this one, that encouraged me to actually think critically about my beliefs for the first time in my life (older members may remember that when I first joined here, I was still a non-literalist Christian). It's embarrassing to admit that I had never really done so before, but that's the way my faith worked - I had always been taught that questioning God was wrong.I began to read the parts of the Bible that had never been taught in Sunday School or brought up in sermons. I read the parts condemning homosexuality. For the first time, I read many of the stories containing atrocities and actually considered how this related to my view of a "good" God. I determined that a "good" God would not do evil things...but right there in the Bible I read of many instances where God indiscriminately killed people by the thousands, where God's "chosen people" raped, murdered, or enslaved entire nations, and I considered the full meaning of Revelations and Hell.I concluded that there was a great deal of ethically repulsive content in the Bible, most of it committed directly by God, and most of the rest in his name. This did not fit with my conception of a loving, benevolent deity. At all. This was very difficult for me to deal with, so I once again determined that many of the stories must have been allegorical and not literally true, I concluded that some of the others must have been the result of history being "spun," where the offenders claimed God "told them to do it." After all, we have people even today who drown their children and claim "God told me to do it."Then I looked into the actual history of the text, reading books like "Misquoting Jesus." I saw direct evidence of the Biblical text being purposefully altered, passages changed or deleted or added. I learned about the vast time difference between the oldest versions of the Gospels and the events they supposedly describe, and I read more about the differences between each of the sotries. I concluded that they were not the "same story from different perspectives" as I was always taught, but rather they were written for entirely different audiences and different purposes, portray Jesus in completely different ways, and directly contradict each other at several points. I read about the texts that were not included in the KJV Bible, and about the various early Churches and their varying beliefs, and how changes were actually made to the Biblical texts specifically to eliminate competing views, which is akin to planting evidence on an innocent victim.I finally asked myself why I believed at all. The answer came out to be pretty pathetic - I had faith not becasue I was convinced by any form of evidence, but rather because my parents raised me to believe, and becasue of vague emotional "feelings." My "answered prayers" consisted of the most trivial matters, and I noted that prayers for anything of consequence were almost never answered - the incidence of answered prayers was identical to random chance.My final conclusion was that, sicen I no longer had any reason to beleive, I could no longer believe. Some people may be able to have faith and believe something despite a complete lack of evidence or even in spite of contradictory evidence. I determined that I could no longer be one of them. Giving up my faith was one of the hardest things that's ever happened to me. My entire world-view was turned upside-down, I now face discrimination at work (my boss has quoted the Bible at me in performance reviews), and my family will disown me if I ever let them know that I no longer believe in God. But I feel better about myself, I value life much more now that I accept that this one is the only one we get, and I actually treat people far better than I ever did as a Christian.

I didn't make a post to be preached at, iano. I know where to go to hear that.I'm not going to give you a full reply, because actually discussing the theological issues is not the topic of this thread.Suffice it to say that I find your moral system repugnant. You determine morality based on the Authority, and whatever the Authority says is "good," even if the same act from anyone else would be "evil." It's literally might makes right - whoever has the bigger stick is "good," regardless of what he does.You equivocate with legal definitions when the discussion is one of morality. Ethics is != laws, and only in primitive legal systems are the lawmakers exempt from their own rules.Your attempts to refute my interpretation of the Bible are moot. If you are correct, your God is one that I would actively refuse to worship, as I find him to be a despicable cosmic psychopath.But if you had really read my post, you would realize that my final conclusion was due not to moral concerns, but evidence. My moral compass prevents me from ever worshiping the same god you do, iano, but it's the lack of evidence for any deity that prevents me from believing in one. It is not in me to have faith. The problem with yours, iano, is that it can be dismissed easily with two very simple words:Prove it.I have no reason whatsoever to believe anything you say, because the only thing you can back up your beliefs with is a musty old collection of books that is contradicted by reality at every turn.Your faith, and your words, are meaningless to me until you can back them up with some sort of objective evidence. That is the reason for my Atheism.

If a man promises to kill another man, and then kills him, is he acting "righteously" by following through with his promise? If not, why not?If I own a puppy, and drown it because my son refuses to do a chore, am I justified in drowning the puppy because I owned it? If not, why not?You give your deity a literal free pass. Any act he does is considered "good" with no rational thought involved whatsoever. He could submit a person to the worst tortures imaginable for all eternity for no reason whatsoever, and you would still define his actions as "good" becaue you define "good" by what your deity says.People like you scare me. If you heard a voice one day and believed it to be God, and that voice told you to blow up a shopping mall, you'd do it, and think you were doing the right thing.So, just to cover out bases here:If I kill a baby, that's evil. If God kills a baby, or if I kill a baby on God's command, it's not evil.Meaning you ascribe to a moral relativism even less objective than most. Human empathy and reason seem to be sufficient. But I do look down on your choice. I respect your right to believe whatever you wish, iano, but I have no respect for your actual beliefs, or for your moral system. The mere fact that when questioning moral judgment, you use legal definitions rather than any sort of rational argument over the ethics of those laws demonstrates that something's not quite right here.You accept as unlimited authority an entity you can't even prove exists. You can't even provide objective evidence suggesting it might exist. I may as well assign Superman as my source of "authority." After all, there are books featuring him as well, and some of them feature real places. Clearly, Superman must be real as well. This assumes that God does own everything. Hard to own things when you don't exist.Even if he did exist, let's go through a brief thought exercise:If I create the world's first Artificial Intelligence, what would be an ethical way to treat the new being? Assume that the AI has the full range of thought and emotion of a human being. Technically, I own it, becasue I created it, correct? Would it be ethical for me to subject it to torture on a whim? To "kill" it by erasing its programming for no reason?Technically, I'm the "final Authority" on its existence, becasue I created it, right? I should be able to do whatever I want to it, make whatever rules for its existence I decide, and feel free to take away the artificial life I gave it at any time. Right?I'd find such things to be morally repugnant, even if legally correct. Laws often do not reflect a reasonable system of ethics - that's why we've had to repeal such disgusting laws as those that made slavery legal. Death involves a great deal more than simply "moving to a destination." You could take the same stance with a murderer - all he's doing is moving people to their "final destinations," so what's the problem? And who cares if he does it in horrible ways, or to children?And what about one of those "Afterlife outcomes" being Hell? Eternal torture in a lake of fire? How disgusting!To paraphrase a signature line from another board,"Hitler burned Anne Frank once, and for this we call him evil. God burned Anne Frank forever, and for this theists call him 'good.'" Your position trivializes death. While I understand that your basic premise is that this life is relatively meaningless, I strongly disagree with that assertion. Even if you were correct and this life served no further purpose than to determine the destination fo a "soul," it would still be morally repugnant to take away the life of a sentient being on a whim, or to torture that being for eternity based on a finite lifetime of "sins." Ah, the well-worn "No True Scotsman" fallacy. If I turned away from Christianity, well, I must never have been a real Christian in the first place!I had faith at one point, iano. I beleived with my whole heart, and thought I could honestly feel "God's" presence in my life, filling my spirit. I was certain of God's existence, had accepted Jesus as my personal savior, etc etc. I most certainly did have "Christian faith," by any way a rational observer could determine it.I only lost that faith when I examined my reasons for having it. All of those feelings were nothing more than vague emotional self-delusions. I had no objective evidence, meaning I was basically trusting to tradition and subjective personal experiences with nothing objective to back it up. Once I determined that faith in God was objectively identical to a belief in an imaginary friend, belief in Santa Claus, or even a psychotic delusion, I determined that I could no longer accept tradition and subjective emotional "feelings" as reasons for believing in anything. It wouldn't take much. The fact that he has chosen not to demonstrate his existence in any meaningful way speaks volumes. The silence is deafening. Sure he could. But a belief on my part that such a thing has happened, and taking that belief to be "proof" that God exists (literally taking others' belief in God to be evidence that God exists) would not lony be circular reasoning, it would be identical to believing that the voices a schitzophrenic hears are real. Threats of an imaginary eternal torture chamber do nothing, iano. It makes me beleive you less. Reasonable? Doesn't sound very reasonable to me. Requiring people to set aside rational thought, depending entirely on subjective, unprovable, unsupportable positions upon which to base belief, and the threat of eternal punishment for a very finite period of disbelief, does not sound like anything approaching reason to me, iano. Then again, the fact that he has not demonstrated his existence, and in fact seems to have specifically covered it up becasue the Bible contradicts reality to such a degree, means that either your God is incompetant, a cruel trickster like Loki, or simply nonexistent. I'm a big fan of parsimony, so I pick "nonexistent." You mean like the parts that say the whole world was flooded, when it very obviously never was? The brainwashing techniques of Christianity are the reason I was a believer for over 20 years, and I know them well. Your silly quotes from your collection of edited old books don't work any more, iano. I don't accept the Bible as having any sort of authority, any more than the Illiad or the Koran or any other old text regarding the supernatural. Unless and until you provide objective evidence to support your beliefs, you may as well be talking to yourself.

As has been noted by Stile, you depend on two false premeses for such a decision to be rational:1) god must exist
2) you must have proven that god is a better moral judge than human reason and empathy can provideNeither of these has been shown to be true. In fact, the second seems to be disproven. Hm. I see what you mean, iano. I believe that a greater good would be served if I were to kill every single human being who agrees with yuor disgusting religion. If I am correct, then I would be justified in killing you, right? Assume for the sake of argument that a greater good would be served. Would slaughtering all Christians be justified?It's the exact same argument as your "killing babies is justified" verbal vomit. If you really thing the ends justify the means, even in such cases as mass-murder or child murder, you really are a disgusting sonofabitch, and a greater good would be served by removing you and all those like you from the human population. It's a good thing I'm not Hitler. It's unfortunate that your arguments follow the same lines as the rationale behind the extermination of the Jews.Authoritarian morality and an "ends justify the means" philosophy are what resulted in the Holocaust, and what are causing Islamic terrorism today. Glad we agree that your moral system is an abhorrent example of idiotic filth. So killing babies is justified if it brings their parents to god. Yep, you're insane. Suddenly the whole "lying for Jesus" thing doesn't seem so bad! I'd much rather tolerate a liar than someone who advocated killing babies because the horrific pain the parents feel might "save" them!You make me sick. You're a perfect poster child for "Why I wouldn't be a Christian even if I believed in a deity." A world where the vast majority of human reason and empathy is overridden by religious dogma. Why are the religious right building megachirches insteaad of feeding the hungry with that money, iano? Why is the Catholic Church even now telling AIDS-ridden Africans that condoms cause HIV rather than prevent it?You serious dare to place the blame for overconsumption of resources and underfunded relief efforts on human empathy and reason, when both these things scream against it while your churches wallow in wealth and hypocracy?Human empathy and reason are perfectly adequate for forming a moral system, which is why every society has some system of morality. They may be different, but the Christian moral system has shown to be at best inadequate, and at worst horrific, as you yourself show when you say in all seriousness that killing a child could be a "good" act if it brings the parents to god. You buy into the reasonign that brought us the Inquisition and make claims about other moral systems?I think there's a passage in that book you're so fond of about a plank in someone's eye. Even a broken clock can be right twice a day, I suppose. If you can't prove his existence to anyone else, what differenciates you from a schitzophrenic suffering delusions and hallucinations? Popularity of the delusion? You didn't answer the question, iano. Would it be ethical for me to hurt or kill my creation?Complaining about the size of the AI is irrelevant - the AI is sentient, and that is all that matters. I don't care if it's the size of a squirrel or a battleship. Besides, aren't we supposed to have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, becoming like god, according to your silly mythology book? Are you an idiot? A human lifetime on Earth is a finite term. Any "sin" or crime committed during a human lifetime is temporal. How can rejecting god for a single lifetime justify punishment for eternity? How can disagreement with a philosophy, or simply not acknowledging the existence of an entity that apparently has tried damned hard to cover up any evidence of itself, ever justify any punishmnet at all, let alone eternal torture?You don't agree with me. If I had authority, would it be ethical for me to subject you to torture?Once again, this is the philosophy that led to the Inquisition. People like you are a threat to the entire world. That would, in fact, be "downplaying the horrendous pain and suffering that can be experienced." Why did the firstborn of Egypt deserve to die, iano? They did nothing. Amusing how you take some aspects of the Bible to be literally true, and not others, even outside of obvious parables.Of course, your interpretation only serves to make your position worse off. ...yes there is. I didn't agree to pay any price. I didn't agree to incur any debt. I signed no contract, made no compact, consented to no covenant. Your claims of gods authority all boil down to "god has a bigger stick, and might makes right." Irrelevant. You have to show why sin justifies eternal torture of any sort. "God hates it, a lot" is irrelevant, becasue it still relies on "god has a bigger stick, and might makes right."I hate your moral philosophy with a "furious hatred" as well. Does that mean I have the right to torture you? What if I was infinitely powerful, or all-knowing? Does that make it any more right for me to torture you, just becasue I disagree with you strongly? Fair, if not entirely accurate. I made a conscious decision to compare my beliefs to those of known-fictional entities, or to schitsophrenics. If I had no more real evidence for my beleifs than a guy in a straight jacket has for his voices, it's likely my beliefs are delusional in nature. 1) I had a great deal of the Christian Faith you are implying I did not posess. You are mistaken, and are leaning heavily on your No True Scotsman fallacy. Have fun with your irrational arguments.2) You're right, empiricism is quite good at dispelling fairytales. Like your deity, the imaginary sky pixie who cares a whole lot about whether little boys touch themselves. The deity who sacrificed himself to himself over a rule he made up in the first place. Fairytales just like that. Or the one about the global Flood that never happened. Or the Exodus that never happened. Or the whole Creation story. And I'm saying that a sufficiently powerful entity could do that, but my belief would be identical to a schitzophrenic who believes his voices are real. I actively avoid believing in things I have no evidence for for exactly that reason - if my belief holds as much water as a crazy person's belief, perhaps my belief is also crazy. Absence of evidence is evidence of a likelihood of absence, iano. I don't believe in god for exactly the same reason you don't believe in an invisible pink unicorn.To repeat an often used Atheist argument, you and I are both Atheists with regard to innumerable religions. I simply believe in one fewer deity than you do. When you understand why you do not believe in those deities, you will understand why I do not believe in yours.

ooooh! An expert rebuttal!Go spend some time talking to your imaginary friend. It gets lonely, being nonexistent.

I'm not Taz, but I was a protestant before losing my faith. Presbyterian/Congregationalist/Christian Reformed depending on where we lived - honestly, most denominations are so similar it's silly to call them by different names. Then you haven't looked very hard. I don't have children, but I'll note that among parents who do have children, the punishment for disobedience is never torture. particularly eternal torture. In fact, none of those punishments from the Bible for children (execute rebellious children, execute children who strike their parents, execute children who dishonor their parents) are considered appropriate today, either. Personal incredulity is a logical fallacy. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. 10 imaginary dollars says you don't even know what the Theory of Evolution states. The Protestants changed the Bible, too. And it had been changed many times (well...each of its individual component books had been altered, anyway) long before Catholicism or Protestantism ever even existed. Again, you apparently haven't looked into this very hard.Then you drop Pascal's Wager? What if you're wrong, and the Muslims are right, genius? Then you go to their Hell. Same applies to literally every religion out there - Pascal's Wager assumes that the only choices are (Christian) and (not Christian), but the choice is not binary - it's a false dilemma, and the worst of all Christian arguments.You want to convert an Atheist to Christianity? Give us a reason to believe. Any objective reason. Some bit of real objective evidence that even suggests your deity might exist. So far, all I've ever heard, including in my years as a Christian, are subjective personal experiences, "faith-healing" conmen and their ilk, and an old collection of mistranslated and edited texts based on the mythology of middle-eastern stone-age nomads.Threatening an Atheist with Hell, or offering Heaven, will only get you laughed at - you can't prove either exists, so why should we believe you?

How? What gives you this certainty? Don't give me any garbage about the "holy spirit" filling you - countless religions say nearly the exact same thing regarding different gods, so I could hardly choose based on something so subjective.What is your evidence? I'm not asking questions, I'm simply telling you that, as Bart Ehrman says in Misquoting Jesus, "There are more errors and changes in the New Testament than there are words."I can't accept as infallible a book that has been so obviously modified and whose basic meanings have been so fundamentally changed by human hands - theres no objective way to tell which text is the "correct" version. And yet that's what your Bible says to do. Have you not read it? You're supposed to stone rebellious children to death. And you attempted to make an anolgy in saying that God needs to punish his children to instruct them (a position I wouldn't have a problem with, necessarily), except that God's version of punishment involves eternal torture in a lake of fire. And you don't even need to do anything particularly bad to earn this torture. For the sake of my sanity, please stop using spellings appropriate for a 12-year-old text messaging her "BFF."I haven't labeled you at all, you labeled yourself as a fundamentalist.As for my belief, I believe in objectivity. All this means is that I require evidence before I will beleive that something exists. This means that I don't believe in things for which there is no evidence. I don't believe in the Tooth Fairy, I don't believe in Santa Claus, and I don't believe in any deities. I do not insist that any of these entities do not or cannot exist, I simply say that I have no reason to believe any of them do exist.This includes the Christian God. If you'd like to know why I no longer believe in that particular entity, my first post in this thread explains the loss of my faith in detail. I now reject faith (defined as any belief not based on objective evidence) as a method of determining what is or is not real, as beliefs based on faith tend to have little or no accuracy in representing the observable world.

If you mean "do you accept that the Theory of Evolution is a highly accurate model of the observed physical world, and that specifically random mutation guided by natural selection are responsible for the changes in allele frequency over generations in bilogical populations, and these changes in allele frequency over many generations are responsible for the diversity of life observed today," then yes, I am an "evolutionist." I used to believe the same thing, until I eventually noticed that the Bible has been altered repeatedly, and the stories of the bible do not match up with what we can test and observe.For instance, the Earth is not 6,000 - 10,000 years old. It's not even in the same ballpark. Observable evidence, including but not limited to geology, astronomy, physics, radiology, biology, and very simple logic prove objectively beyond any reasonable doubt that the Earth is billions of years old. There was never any global FLood - the Ark story was a myth. There is insufficient water on the planet to cause a global Flood, even taking all of the subterranean water, water trapped in rock, moisture in the atmosphere, and the polar ice caps - you cannot Flood the Earth with the amount of water we have. The geological and fossil evidence also does not match up with the Flood story.The difference between us is this: if the Bible told you the sky was made of cheese, you'd believe the Bible even after flying in an airplane and observing for yourself that there is no cheese. I would be skeptical of the bible's claim until and unless supporting objective evidence was produced - like a peice of the cheese that composes the sky. False. Various passages, such as the "let he who is without sin cast the first stone" bit, were added long after the "original" test was written. The passage is compeltely absent from all of our oldest, best docuemnts, and then suddenly appears in another set much later, a derivative of which was eventually used in the King James translations. It was a very clear and obvious addition. It certainly wasn't written that way. It was written as a set of laws intended to be followed to the letter.But seriously, DwarfishSquints, all of your Biblical itnerpretation is irrelevant. I honestly no longer care what the Bible says until objective supporting evidence verifies any of its claims. I would believe the Biblical Flood story if the physical evidence matched, for example. The problem is, the evidence does not match. It even directly contradicts.I will believe in the existence of a deity the moment that objective evidence is provided. Until that time, I will not believe in your deity for the exact same reasons you do not believe in Zeus, or fairies, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. The moral arguments are irrelevant (I might refuse to worship a deity I had moral issues with, but that has nothing to do with believing the deity exists). The Biblical arguments are irrelevant without supporting evidence.I will not believe you, the Bible, or anyone else with any statement (regarding deities or anything else) until and unless their statement is logically sound and backed up by objective evidence.

You're missing the point. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is an amusing parody of religion, nothing more. Fairies, however, were seriously believed in. They weren't just a story - people thought they existed with as much conviction as you have in your faith.The point, DwarfishSquints, is that you and I are both Atheists regarding all manner of gods that people used to believe in - Zeus, Thor, Odin, Jupiter, Ra, Anubis, Krishna, and thousands of others. You do not believe in them becasue you have no reason to believe in them - there is no evidence suggesting they exist.I simply believe in one fewer deity than you do, for exactly the same reason that you do not believe in any of the others.I'm not asking you for your explanations as to why people used to beleive in such things. I'm simply telling you why I do not believe in your god, as per the topic of this thread. And yet you haven't thought this through, either.There isn't enough water on the planet to Flood even the normal continents, excluding the mountains, to a level that would cause a global Flood. There isn't enough water.Geological evidence contradicts your rationalization of "the Earth was completely changed." You have no idea what the effects of billions of years of geological activity being squeezed into the year-long Flood would be. The water would be the least of the world's problems, and Noah in his little boat would never survive. Not to mention, we have millions of years worth of annually-deposited sediment layers in the geological record that require millions of years to form. We can see them forming today, each year, with deposits of plant matter, sometimes volcanic ash from nearby eruptions and all manner of other things that conclusively show that a global Flood could never result int he patterns observed, and there are millions of them, with no global layer of sediment as would be the case if there was a global Flood.You're using very simply Creationist arguments that we've solidly refuted here hundreds of times from many different individuals. The evidence disagrees with you - so why should I believe you, or your book? I don't, for the exact same reasons I don't believe the Earth is made from the flesh and bones of Ymir, the great giant of Norse mythology. Evolution does not claim that you will get a cat from a dog. What the Theory of Evolution states and what you think it states are very likely two compeltely different things. It's almost universal among Creationists - evolution is not taught very well in public school in America, its treatment is the media is grossly exaggerated and twisted for dramatic effect (nothing you see on television referring to evolution has anything to do with the actual Theory of Evolution), and Creationist websites deliberately distort and twist evolution so as to attack a strawman of the theory.If you'd like to know what the Theory of Evolution does state, feel free to ask. This is just a hobby for me, but we actually have some rea-life biologists who not only know evolution inside and out but observe and use it in the lab literally every single day. If you've never heard of it, then you haven't done much research into the Bible. It's a well-known issue amongst Biblical scholars.If you don't mind, how old are you? I'm sorry, you really think there was what? Please, for the sake of all of us, make the attempt to use complete sentences and punctuation. It will make your posts much easier to read. This is another popular Creationist argument - but "chance" had very little to do with the formation of the Earth. We see stellar nebulae all the time through our telescopes, and we know with a pretty high degree of accuracy how planets and stars form. Essentially, planets are the leftovers from the giant cloud of gas that forms the star - leftovers that happened to be moving at the correct speed. It's not random - any objects moving at the correct speed for a given distance from the star to maintain a stable orbit will, in fact, maintain a stable orbit.If you're referring to life, well, that's a different consideration. Abiogenesis is a promising but as yet incompelete area of research. We simply don't know yet with any degree of certainty how life originated on Earth. We do know that life forms were simple in the past, and gained complexity over time. This is due to random mutation and natural selection. While random mutation contains a random component, it is still restricted to workign within the laws of chemistry, and natural selection is not random at all."Chance" has very little to do with anything, and your argument rests entirely on your personal incredulity - a logical fallacy.But again, the topic of this thread is "confessions of a former Christian." We're talking about the reasons some of us have lost our faith. If you'd like to discuss any of these tangential topics in depth, feel free to submit a new topic request regarding one of them.

I assure you, Ive thought it through a lot better than you have, I quote from the Bible itself:

quote:

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7:17 And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bare up the ark, and it was lift up above the earth.
7:18 And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
7:19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
7:20 Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.
7:21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
7:22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
7:23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

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The rain lasted 40 days. The water remained for 150. I was being generous in giving the Flood a year for your supposed geological changes to occur; the problems worsen if you decrease the time involved.But oh, look! The Bible itself also says, very clearly, that "Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered." The mountains had to have already existed, and we know the depth of the water...and there is not enough water on the planet to Flood the Earth to that depth, even without the mountains.It would appear you haven't even read the Bible. That doesn't demonstrate that you have "thought it through."As for your ludicrous claims regarding water getting to soace after the Flood...you've seriosuly entered the realm of fantasy. Water does not leave Earth. What mechanism do you propose ejects water from the planet at escape velocity?!A miracle? Those are nonsense. Show me evidence, or I have no reason to believe your absurd claim. But you don't get the same fossils everywhere on Earth. Many species are very localized - almost all of them, in fact. And they are sorted by age, not by buoyancy, as would be the case if they all died in a great Flood. Now you not only briefly question astronomy, you suggest a global conspiracy.I'm a member of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy, and I'm here to teach your children about science! Boogedyboogedy!You do realise that there are Chirstian evolutionists, right?Oh, wait. They aren't real Christians. mmm hmm.Your "NWO" idiocy is a ridiculous fantasy.Did you read my first post in this thread? Did you read about any of the stories we've posted about losing our faith? We didn't turn away from God because we didn't like him, DwarfishSquints. We stopped believing in God because we had no reason to believe in him. it's very difficult to dislike something you don't believe exists. Your appeal to motive is yet another logical fallacy - your argument is bullshit. ...what? This does not make sense. Ah, Irreducible Complexity, the idiotic bastard child of the ID movement, completely unable to stand up to real scientific scrutiny, wholly annihilated in real scientific circles, and reliant entirely on swaying the opinions of the uneducated and gullible layperson who already believes "evilution" is a lie.*sigh*Feel free to go to the Proposed New Topics forum under the "Forums Summary" link at the top of the page, and click "Propose New Topic." Give it a relevant title, make your argument supported by whatever evidence you can muster, and await a moderator to promote the topic or make suggestions.

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Isaiah 45:7 I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.

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Looks like even God admits he creates evil, iano.So is the Bible not literally true, or does God create evil?Before you say that God must not have actually said this, here's the beginning of Isaiah 45:

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45:1 Thus saith the LORD to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden, to subdue nations before him; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open before him the two leaved gates; and the gates shall not be shut;

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This is supposed to be what God said directly to Cyrus.God said that God creates evil.

Sorry, iano. A complete and total lack of objective evidence is evidence for a likelihood of absence.I can't prove, positively, that there is no invisible unicorn looking over your shoulder, or that your deity doesn't exist. It's impossible to prove a negative, except indirectly by positively proving a contradictory position.But there's no reason to believe they do exist. Your beliefs are exactly the same as any child who believes in unicorns and fairies. Have fun with your delusions - I stopped talking to imaginary friends a long time ago.

This is the most ridiculously absurd thing I've read since...well, since you insisted that the surface of a sphere has a center.You utter imbecile - do you really think that the entire legal code of every nation comes from the Old Testament?! I suppose the election of teh President and Congress comes from the OT, right? Or legislation regarding the internet?Idiot.

IamJoseph is the biggest one I know.I'm pretty sure his IQ is below this stellar example of genius: I have never witnessed as much concentrated stupidity as I have in the past week of IaJ's posting.