Religion based on discussion

So, what’s going on, Terry?
Most of the people I know are family (which is quite extensive, mostly some sort of evangelical but not all), coworkers, and and folks from church. (We hardly know any neighbors after 22 years. We had zero expectation of that. Dumb city kids.)

Generally, religion or not hasn’t really influenced my relationships too deeply until the last few years. I am honestly horrified at the (largely fabricated) trust issues I’m feeling in myself As little media as I take in, it’s still a bad influence on my overall feel for Christians, people I’ve known for years. I hate this suspicion I feel, like “Gee, I never really knew you.” When that isn’t necessarily true. That’s on me. I’ve never had to deal with real abuse from other Christians. So, it’s frustrating to have this underlying suspicion that is not founded even on my own gut, but someone else’s .

What issues are you seeing, Terry?

  • I’m un-churched, … which makes me about as typical a Christian as the average baptized-in-infancy Hispanic in my neighborhood. [Please note: that doesn’t entitle me to bragging rights.] Unlike the majority of my neighbors, I was baptized just before my 9th birthday, the good ol’ Southern Baptist way. :laughing: My wife-to-be tried to dispel her mother’s doubts about my eligibility for marriage by assuring her that, although my father was a Lutheran preacher, I came from Christian stock, which was kind of like Catholic. But it was only after I promised to jump the hurdle into the “Catholic” column, that I got the “Well, we’ll see what the priest says.”

  • I arranged to undergo Paulist “re-education and upgrade classes” in San Francisco, several months before scheduling a marriage date in Los Angeles, in 1980. The aged priest that my father-in-law arranged to interview me cast a jaundiced eye over my eccleciastical record and suggested trial-by-fire, whereupon my wife’s oldest brother-in-law arranged another interview with his family’s priest, who cleared me and deemed me fit for a bona fide Catholic wedding following my Catholic Rite of Confirmation.

  • The fact that my wife and I were married by a priest in the priest’s chapel made me the only one of my brothers and sisters whose wedding was not officiated by my father. My father never expressed an opinion on the matter, to me, but my Mother wore her sentiments on her sleeve as she made the rounds among the Deaf and Hearing congregants to explain that we were getting married by a priest in another city far away. So it would be a small wedding, immediate family only…

  • Our Catholic wedding satisfied my Catholic mother-in-law, and with that I could have gotten out of Hell, skipped Purgatory, and ended up in Heaven.

  • I’ve run “the rapids”. The cost of course, was discouragement from ever suggesting that I might have anything constructive to say about what Jesus wants in this world. My mother- and father-in-law are dead, and my wife and I are quite happy to be free of the yoke of her siblings who–but one–did what they could to remind my wife that she was a woman, and not even the oldest, and to remind me that, as an in-law, and white, to boot, I was a Gringo in-law and allowed to share meals, but never allowed to have an opinion.

  • So, I’m un-churched, I carry a light pack, and would be comfortable eating broken crackers and drinking grape juice with Baptists, or partaking of consecrated Hosts and sipping mercy from a common cup. No one stands between me and the Sacrament of Holy Communion.

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Terry, this is quite a history and situation!
So, what causes you to be un-churched, particularly now? Or do you mean, rather dis-churched?

Currently, although my history is entirely different from yours, I find the homelessness (rather, 8 month long term guest status) hard. As my husband and I begin serious consideration of becoming members of this church, I keep warning myself that that urge to belong to a church community has to take a back seat to other considerations that we couldn’t live with at our old church any more. Exactly the kinds of thing that make community not community.

That was my experience among online atheists. Many enjoyed showing off their Bible knowledge. I assume anyone who deconstructs has to work extra hard to convince themselves they were doing the right thing.

“Stump-the-Christians” abound, but the ones that entertain me the most are the most dedicated ones that revisit the same forum(s), week after week, or even every few days with another “stump the Christians” question. In my experience, they’re typically ex-Christians, extremely good at proper scripture citations. I begged the one who impressed me the most to tell me what book he got all of his questions from, because I’m convinced that every question that is asked has been asked before and is logged in somewhere, with or without answers, and has been assigned a kind of “difficulty” rating of some sort.

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Of course they’re trying to ‘save you’ … just in the other direction. Some habits die harder than others.

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Maybe, … but I don’t really think my “favorite” was. It was more like a chess game, or “counting coups”. I never played on the battlefield with him. So I managed to make it clear that I wasn’t out to arm-wrestle him down and make him holler “uncle”. Likewise, he never tried to save me. We even did a “show and tell” for each other, sharing brief non-threatening accounts of how we ended up where we were on the day we shared. The end result? Both of us had to take down our cards: the ones that say “All atheists …” and “All Christians …” and say: “Go in peace.”

It was kinda neat.

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He knew exactly where I was coming from, even with regard to the Pericope Adulterae, which moved him to tears when he preached on it. He was still able to make the leap of faith.

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You’ve mentioned her before. Why is/was that account so important for you? (I understand about it’s later addition.) I think my churches have just never put great significance on it.

Itks good to be understood by someone who has a clue, isn’t it? Really, deeply good.
Thank you.

It was the greatest demonstration of divine emotional intelligence for 30 A.D. But not for four hundred years later.

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Many of us atheists grew up in the church which meant we went to VBS, church camp, youth groups, and the rest of it. As I approached college age we even had a smaller group led by older college kids where we discussed some of the C.S Lewis’ ideas on morality and theology. Just before I left the church in my late college years I was part of a more “progressive” Sunday school group that delved into more serious issues. On top of that, I took a semester of New Testament class that was part of the requirements at the Presbyterian liberal arts college I attended. Chapel used to be required 2 days a week, but that requirement was severely softened to one semester of a religious class by the time I attended.

It is interesting that atheists score the highest on quizzes about Christianity. I’m not sure why that would be, to be quite honest. Is there a higher deconversion rate among Christians who delve deeper into theology than your average Christian? I wouldn’t think so . . . but maybe? Perhaps deconversion is higher amongst Christians who are seeking a deeper intellectual level to Christianity instead of the emotional ties to a church and the Christian faith?

Of the atheists I know who weren’t brought up in the church, I doubt very highly that they would score well on any quiz on Christianity. They would probably give you a strange look if they were asked how many Synpotic gospels there are. Some probably couldn’t even name all of the gospels.

Long story short, I wouldn’t get bent out of shape because some atheists know a lot about the Bible. If nothing else, we were at least listening when we were in church.

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That works both ways. There are a lot of atheists who left the church just because the emotional ties or something similar weren’t there. And there were others which had a combination of both.

But generally Christians leaving the church have more knowledge about Christianity because in my eyes they were real Christians and actually interested in their religion ,rather than some other ex Christians which only went because of traditional purposes and got no clue what exactly they even believed in.

Now a lot of times there’s hatred to the lost brethrens from the Christians at least here in my country.
Apostasy is a big deal . Although few people care because again lukewarm Christianity is dominant in countries where religion interwined with tradition and politics for centuries,but even those who do truly believe have a bitter stance once you get out.

Neither would I; however, … wait for it: …

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