re is it good that jesus died jasons atlastele com jason smith writes bskendig netcom com brian kendig writes and i felt torn when i began to disagree with a lot of what the bible and my priests told me did it start getting a little uncomfortable did your style start feeling a bit cramped yes that s exactly what i felt my heart just felt that what i was being taught was wrong a basically good message but framed in errors i could not with a clear conscience accept that women were somehow not equal to men that homosexuals are guilty of their lifestyle that pride in one s work is a bad thing that jesus died for me i don t want anybody to die for me especially as an impersonal act where the person can t possibly even know me well enough to really know if i m worth dying for or not i was never able to accept the bit about jesus s death being a good thing if that means that i m just not comprehending a basic message of christianity then so be it maybe i m just not compatible with christianity i just refuse to follow rules blindly and since i can t even convince myself that your god even exists in the way you describe it i ve got to just follow my own conscience in these matters i know how that goes knowing i couldn t and didn t want to live up to those impossibleand rather incovenient rules are what kept me outside too don t think that my morals are shoddy or nonexistent just because i don t believe in your god i will not steal and i will not murder not because i fear divine repudiation but because these just aren t in my character you may think there s nothing keeping me from just running around on a murdering spree stealing things when i m able insulting people for the heck of it because i m not answerable to anyone but you d be wrong i m answerable to myself a life like that would be a cheap life i happen to want to earn respect in myself till i met the man that is my initial break with christianity came after a lot of soul searching and a lot of wondering why i could no longer feel the presence of god with me i finally decided that i had once felt this presence just as i had felt my mighty teddy bear beside me when i was a little tyke protecting me from the monsters under the bed that i had believed in god just as i had believed in the teddy bear as something of an emotional crutch to protect me from perceived dangers since then i ve never abandoned the possibility that maybe your supernatural trinity does exist but there are a few times when in my darkened room by my bed i have set aside everything i believe for a moment and called out to whatever s out there because i want to know the truth even if it means abandoning everything i know and i have not yet received an answer only when i truly listened to myself body and soul did i realize that i could no longer honestly keep up the charade of being christian there is a higher truth in the universe and christianity just ain t it any suggestions on what or who or where it might be and why nope it may well be unknowable scientists have suggested that the universe may be finite and wrap around on itself the three dimensional universe may be mapped onto a four dimensional supersphere in the same way you can map a two dimensional plane onto a three dimensional sphere see sphereland the sequel to flatland for more thoughts on this our entire universe might just be an electron in a four dimensional universe which in turn may only be an insignificant speck in a universe above that and so on and so forth until the variables become too much for us to even speculate on that is there s no possible way for us to know exactly how we came to be so there s no reason at all to believe that your god exists nor had anything to do with it ok you may say so now if i m just being good am i doing good enough that s for you to answer if you feel you re doing fine then go ahead and ignore us foolish little christians we can present what we ve seen and experienced providing our witness but it isn t up to us to make that seed sprout christians have provided me with nothing except quotes from your holy book and all sorts of tactics to try to get me to believe guilt trips insinuations that i m without morals arguments from disbelief how can you possibly believe that god doesn t exist and so forth all i m asking is for you to convince me i want to be convinced but it s not going to be easy so much as you don t like what we re selling there just may be someone out there that can identify with it methinks you could give us all a lesson in tolerance and back off having had years upon years of contact with your religion from both the inside and the outside i view it as harmful in many ways it preys on people who want to find meaning in their lives and once it s got these people it teaches them to have pity and sometimes starkly intolerant of others who do not share these views maybe you ll say that your religion doesn t teach that but i ve got to judge christianity from the christians i know i feel that it is entirely possible and good to have faith in one s self and to be a positive influence on society for no better reason than that so i hope that my words in this newsgroup will at least make some people think i want christians to realize that there are perfectly valid lifestyles and opinions that have nothing to do with their deity whatsoever and i want people who are considering christianity to realize that christianity does not hold the sole key to a happy fulfilled life i have known some very nice christians who have done some very nice things i think what sets these people apart from the general masses is that they recognize that their religious beliefs may be wrong and they know the weaknesses of their religion yet they still decide to believe but they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not think any less of people who don t agree with them obviously the debate on the veracity and reliability of the source of the christian s faith is far from conclusive notwithstanding how vehemently we propose otherwise precisely my point you ve still not given me a reason to be a christian instead of a buddhist or a moslem the nice thing about religion if you lose yourself deeply enough in it is that eventually you ll be able to feel justified in most anything you want to do y know your right fortunately for everyone around me i m not religious i m a christian just as the moslems aren t religious and the buddhists aren t religious who is religious then brian kendig je ne suis fait comme aucun bskendig netcom com de ceux que j ai vus j ose croire n etre fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent the meaning of life si je ne vaux pas mieux au moins je suis autre is that it ends rousseau
