xxdaggerxx said:
what made you hate Christianity?
Well I don't want to go into it too much now, because I'm still waiting for this proof I've been promised but I don't
hate Christianity as such. I hate some things within Christianity but not Christianity as a whole. I think it has some good teachings.
A lot of things in my life contributed to the fact that I'm no longer a Christian.
Alot was to do with the behavior of the older Christians at my church, I was younger then and looked to them for example and advice. They would teach me what to do alright but never do it themselves. For example I was of course told that sex before marriage was out of the question, so I stuck to that. If I was at a club and someone made it clear to me that they wanted me to "go back for a nightcap *wink wink*" I would refuse. And as many of you will know it's not an easy thing to do, not only do you do yourself out of some "lovin" but you have to deal with your non-christian friends giving you grief about it.
However after getting to know people better I would hear more of what was going on, and everyone was at it like rabbits by all accounts. (Keeping things short) basically none of the people I looked up to followed their own teachings. Not all sex related I'm just using this as an example but so much backstabbing, gossiping, sleeping around etc all within one church.
All amongst talk of who's a better Christian than who, this person needs more faith, and my favorite phrase which I'm sure many of you will have heard before "I'm not judging you,
but..."
This seemed to be the way with many of the Christians I met from church to church, they would just talk about doing good or tell other people to do it but never really pay as much attention to what
they were doing as what other people were. Or they were too busy trying to "save" people.
So in the end I thought "what makes these people any different to anyone else?" and aside from Jesus (or the get out of hell free card he was used as) absolutely nothing.
For all their talk of "knowing God" and being "filled with the holy spirit" they were just the same as the sinners they were so bothered about, only difference being they would do whatever they liked but once or twice a week go and blub to Jesus about it for an hour before doing exactly the same thing the following week.
So I gave up on churches, where else could I look? The bible? I read enough of it to know that there are too many contradictions or just complete lies in it to take seriously, at least for me anyway. Apologetics are fine as long as your willing to swallow the explanations, I personally am not. And anyway why the bible? why not the Quran or the Bhagavad Gita?
The final nail in the coffin was when one of the Christians I used to hang around with became gay, the other Christians had known him all their lives but now turned their back on him. I heard it off one of the senior members of the church who saw himself as one of the "better" Christians there, his words were "oh did you hear about ****** he's one of "those" now *mincey hand gesture* I'm not speaking to him anymore"
He was a good guy but purely because of his sexual prefference he was shunned by the people he saw as his closest friends.
Like I say this is abridged but in the end I realized that Christianity was no different to any other faith. There was no power of Christ, no holy spirit, just as far as I could see a bunch of self-righteous hypocritical people convinced of their own superiority and a useless book of myths and dubious teachings.
This was all a long time ago, that was my mind set back then - I don't want to offend any Christians on here as I no longer think in such black and white terms. There are many
good Christians around and the bible does have it's merits.
But it still makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck when I hear people belittle other people's faiths or tell them they're going to hell purely on the strength of "the bible says so" as I know that argument carries little weight. It just sometimes seems that the ones that get on my nerves are the most vocal.
But this is the same when I hear someone of any faith saying that theirs is the only way.
I now have my own Ideas on the nature of the afterlife etc, it's what to me seems the most likely to be true from my personal experience and research. But I would never try and force it down someone's throat, and I'm prepared to accept the possibility that I could be wrong. After all the only people that know
for sure are the dead. You can have a strong belief but nobody can be 100% certain.
I said I'd keep it short but the floodgates opened
Edit: Oh yeah... And there was a Catholic teacher at my primary school that used to pull our hair and sometimes even bash our faces on the desk, and tell us that if we didn't do our homework then the devil would get us... I suppose that might subconciously have some bearing on it
