What de-conversion feels like

[Grizzly]

awesome post!

Wow. Nice work Lokmer!

 

[radorth]

Slander and innuendo in one sentence, how efficient of you. I state an (admittedly strong) opinion about the pointlessness about doctrinal disputes, and am greeted in return with this. Very sporting of you.

You were honest enough to admit the problems in your church. How am I slandering you?

Well, in order to be a fair challenge, you should probably let us know what counts for good points in a testimony, in your book.

Let's see one to compare with Finney's, a simple request.

Universalist Christianity (a subspecies of Christianity that's been around since the second century at least).

Based on the atonement of course.

Jainism

Buddhism

Most pagan mystery cults from the 5th c. BCE to the 4th c. CE

Hermeticism

Neo-paganism

Really? They guarantee heaven without good works, meditation, working off karma? Any stories like that of the thief on the cross being saved? Any verses like "the just shall live by faith"? Any mention of imputed righteousness? Chapter and verse please

Although it's hardly humanism, a competing religious philosophy has done so: Communism (in China and Russia).

I was talking about private hospitals built by religions, not state hospitals. BTW, did you know your poster boy Ingersoll predicted the humanists would out do the Christians in building private hospitals? Of course that was over 120 years ago and you haven't begun to fill his hot-air prophecy.

The philosophy of humanism itself (religious and non-religious, since humanism isn't incompatible with Christianity) is what enabled modern medicine to push its way past Christian objections and benefit humanity. The Germ Theory of Disease, anathema to 16th and 17th century Christians of all stripes, enabled the development of both vaccines and antibiotics.

All stripes except Pasteur's Franciscan stripe. heh.

The study of anatomy by dissection of cadavers, a practiced opposed and banned by Catholics and Protestants alike throughout Europe for centuries, was carried out by radically liberal Christian, diest, and atheist humanists. All of modern medicine rests upon the secularization of government and the desacrilization of the body. Genetic engineering and biotech, which is the current state of the art, likewise continues to find its major opposition only in

Heh. Yeah only Christians opposed their work.

R two camps: Religious conservatives

Funny they graduatd the first women from an American college, both white and black, but were against germ theory.

I can't. But I can show you a secular country (the United States) led by a Masonic President (FDR) with the support and encouragement of his bisexual occultist wife (Elaenor) who did defend Britain against the onslaught of the predominantly God-fearing, Christian armies of Nazi Germany headed by a lifelong Catholic and Luther devotee named Adolf (Hitler, not Eichman).

Ooh let's slander the leaders of the time and try the guilt by association tactic.

Geepers, man, any good concert can do that. Even villians and theives like Peter Poppoff and Benny Hinn manage to pull that off while picking people's pockets. I hardly think this is a good epistemic qualification for the truth of a proposition.

They sing hymns on the streets together after concerts, and deists like Ben Franklin say things like "it was wonderful to see. The whole world seemed to be turning religious." ?????

Well, since "born again" Christians only started appearing in the mid 19th century after the 2nd Great Awakening (something you should know if you're such a Charles Finney devotee), this shouldn't be too hard.

Fine then your complete failure to show anything but slander and generalize instead of providing specific examples/ facts is quite a mystery. Any luck finding an example to match the early Christians freeing their slaves 1900 years before Ingersoll started talking? (Which is about all he ever did)

Yes, let's. And let's then continue with the Christians who instituted a far worse form of slavery

I clearly said born again, NT savvy Christians. I don't blame the ignorant for not knowing what Jesus said and did.

than was known in Roman times and carried the shameful institution on, in the name of God and with VERY explicit biblical justification, for 300 years, and who then did all they could to keep the freed slaves in economic survitude for a further 100 years after that. Let's talk about the agnostics like Robert Ingersol, agitated for social justice and abolition, of Unitarians who made up the bulk of the abolitionist movement and ALL of its major thinkers,

HAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA! What self-serving nonsense that is. The Methodists and Quakers did all the work of actually hiding slaves and getting them north.

and who explicitly denied the doctrine of the trinity and did not believe in the diety of Christ,

Hardly an unbeliever. OK you found one, although even your assertion about his beliefs is tenuous.

I challenged or of atheists like Fredrick Douglass who pushed northern Christian abolitionists to put their money where their mouths were. Let's talk about the explicitly Christian doctrines of manifest destiny and the divine right of kings, of Jesus' and Paul's words about slaves submitting to their masters. Let's talk about Thomas Paine, who made the American Revolution possible and then was ostracized because he has the temerity to criticize his slaveholding colleagues

Yada yada yada. Adams and Franklin, hardly slave holders, denounced him and not just for those reasons. You should step out of the skeptics.org library and listen to the whole story some time.

Let's also talk about the Christian theocratic apartheid state of South
Africa.

Prove they were born again or even claimed to be, and yo might have an argument. My premise was quite clear and you pitiful slander and guilt by association tactics in lieu of facts aren't fooling anybody but cynics I'm sure.

But, when we do, we should also point out that this is the same religion that opposed women's right to vote in both the U.S. and Britain,

Oh sorry man. Wrong again The Stantons were converts of Charles Finney, the best known evangelist of his time, who supported suffrage with more thna his mouth.

We can play games like this all day.

You mean you can. I just asked you for some facts and all you can fiind is one example of one single Christian who didn't believe in the divinity of Christ. Big deal.

No religion has. Norman Bourlog, a freethinker, bears that honor, having saved more than a billion lives with his work, at his own expense, in poor countries.

He fed a billion people himself at his own expense? Let's see an independent link to back that up and show he alone deserves the honor. My guess is that Christian missionaries are doing far more teaching people how to grow food. I personally know one who is doing just that.

The Unitarians and the Quakers, the former is a non-Christian splinter sect and the second was a persecuted non-orthodox sect of Christianity (and is now basically Unitarian Universalist in persuasion).

That's not true either. The Quakers were devout, literal, fundamentalist believers in the NT at that time, as were the Methodists. (They both later became more "liberal." Not) It was all the Methodists and Quakers at the time I am talking about- over a hundred years before Jefferson. However if you can give me a noteworthy example of a "unitarian" decrying slavery as the Quakers and Methodists did, please provide it.

The orthodox Chrisitans were the slavery establishment in the country

I never said "orthodox" Christians did anything right, did I?

Done. Are you going to make good on your commitment and convert to Unitarianism or Diesm or Agnosticism now?

Well all you found was Douglas, a Christian who did not believe in the trinity (you claim). Can you prove he would have been so inspired without Christian teaching?

So sad, yet so common: Triumphalist bluster made up of rehtorical flourishes, deamagoguerey, and half-truths.

Yes I agree. Fred Douglas and wild claims about one man feeding a billion people at his own expense- vs Finney, the Stantons, Oberlin College, The Red Cross, the Christian Commission, twenty major Christian chatities, a thouand self-less missionaries, the YMCA, 500 private hospitals, the Quakers and the Methodists. (For starters)

Well, if that's the case, somebody had to do it.

The church had 15 centuries of control over the western world and certainly didn't do much with the "fat" that Jesus left behind. If these are the fruits of Christ, then it is freethinkers, unitarians, diests, and humanists who are the true Christians - as Jesus said: "By their fruits shall you know them

I go by relative amounts of hot air.

Rad

 

[gladiatrix]

Great post, Lokmer! Have some reputation points....

Radorth, you've advanced all these arguments before in your thread Are Christians the Salt of the Earth Thread. They are no more convincing now than then.

My responses to Radorth's "Are Christians the Salth of the Earth" OP
Part 1/Post #56-Response to Radorth's OP

Part 2/Post #57-Response to Radorth's OP

Part 3/Post #59-Response to Radorth's OP

Part 1 of My Counter Rebuttal to Radorth's Counter-Arguments

Part 2 of My Counter Rebuttal to Radorth's Counter Arguments

My personal favorite is his example of Oberlin College as some kind of Christian beacon for women's rights, but that pure bunk. What he never gets around to mentioning is thatthe women were admitted to Oberlin on the condition that they cook and clean for the men and their courses were restricted to "educating" them to being better missionaries/homemakers

HERE

Originally a male school, the idea of the university is that men would pay for their schooling with work and chores on the campus and surrounding land. Shortly after the inception of this the board of the college realized there was no one to perform the traditional duties of a house. Therefore the first female students were accepted into a formal university. More often than not this milestone is misrepresented as liberation of the female student who finally received her validation. In actuality these women were viewed as a “domestic workforce” necessary for the school’s survival.30 Regardless, these women were grateful for the opportunity of education and therefore took care of the household duties.

The average week of the ladies was set up to facilitate these chores. Mondays were set aside for laundry and mending of the men’s clothes. The rest of the week was spent cooking, cleaning after the men and studying in their spare time. The education of ladies always came secondary to the duties of maintaining the school. Not surprisingly, even secondary institutions like Oberlin followed the decisive academic gender split so common of the day. Oberlin’s ladies were separated in a department that specialized in religion, French, and literature, and shut out from the men’s studies, which included Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Oberlin College was not shy to admit that their goal was to train the women to serve as “discrete, genteel, pious, and frugal wives for ministers."31 Throughout the entire Oberlin experience there was never a comment recorded about the quality of the learning environment of the female. This omission further justifies the motives of the men when allowing the coeducation of their institution.

“…a tremendous untapped resource for national development, and one that men had not permitted to flower." -Horace Mann32

Arguments were made that the presence of women assured the mental tranquility of the male students and provided an environment conducive to male learning

Somehow, rad, you never seem to get around to mentioning things like this....

 

[Cat59]

Rad
Earlier on, you posted this: (not to me, I know, but it doesn't matter who the recipient is, it's the principle that counts)

I merely opined that one cannot revert to an old nature if they have a new one as the Bible says.

{snip}

Is it possible you were not truly born again as Jesus meant it? Prove you were born again as he meant it, and I will retract my opinion.

Rad

What would prove to you that someone was born again as Jesus meant it?

 

[radorth]

Somehow, rad, you never seem to get around to mentioning things like this....

We discussed this before.

"My favorite website says the women (and men) had to work for their tuition, therefore Oberlin did nothing to liberate and educate women."

How pathetic. These women graduates went on to do a lot more than missionary and housework. Maybe some free-thinkers would like to read some other reports before swallowing your selected propaganda whole. I'll post a history of their actual accomplishments.

I'll let the readers judge the rest of your fact-free "arguments" against my "Salt of the Earth" thread. Perhaps you'd like to comment on one of the few fact-based atheist replies, by David Gould who had the free-thinking temerity to agree with me.

I wonder why Oberlin started graduating black women? Did they need them to marry all the black ministers they were graduating?

Rad

 

[radorth]

"All Oberlin women did was cook, clean and marry ministers."

Not.

http://womhist.binghamton.edu/oberlin/doclist.htm

Rad

 

[radorth]

Wow. Nice work Lokmer!

The true believers are relieved to hear that a humanist fed a billion people all by himself at his own expense and Douglas wasn't a "real" Christian. (Source: Universalist website)

Whatever happened to the No True Scotsman fallacy BTW?

Rad

 

[radorth]

You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. - Anne Lamott

Actually he loves all the people I would hate if it wasn't for him.

Rad​

 

[radorth]

Rad
Earlier on, you posted this: (not to me, I know, but it doesn't matter who the recipient is, it's the principle that counts)

What would prove to you that someone was born again as Jesus meant it?

You can't prove it, especially when you doubt it yourself. That's the point.

Rad

 

[radorth]

All of modern medicine rests upon the secularization of government and the desacrilization of the body.

Wrong

http://www.rae.org/influsci.html

 

[numberprophet]

Wrong

http://www.rae.org/influsci.html

do you ever site organizations that don't make me want to expatriate?

 

[radorth]

do you ever site organizations that don't make me want to expatriate?

Any facts you want to dispute, such as who first put Pasteur's theories to the test in an operating room? You really didn't read it did you? It was quite lengthy, so you just made a reactionary judgement. Correct?

What's hilarious is that I never mentioned advances in science or medicine in my challenge, but rather social and charitable causes. Lokmer quite transparently made it about that because he couldn't find anything else to compare. And then he simply quoted or made up wild claims which are now repudiated.

Rad

 

[numberprophet]

Any facts you want to dispute, such as who first put Pasteur's theories to the test in an operating room? You really didn't read it did you? It was quite lengthy, so you just made a reactionary judgement. Correct?

my point is that you have never furnished an unbiased source. i don't need to read it, because when i see it's from the "Revolution Against Evolution" website i know the author has other puropses in mind than pure scholarship. it's always "start at point B, and fudge your way back to point A".

 

[radorth]

my point is that you have never furnished an unbiased source.

He gave sources. Did you read them all as well?

Not.

Rad

 

[Cat59]

You can't prove it, especially when you doubt it yourself. That's the point.

Rad

If it can't be proved, it can't be proved, doubt can have nothing to do with it.
Thank you for your answer.

 

[radorth]

or of atheists like Fredrick Douglass

Pure unadulterated, unsupported nonsense refuted by Douglas himself, who recommends Christian worship, says the NT is anti-slavery and even quotes the OT here.

http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/frederickdouglas_hypocrisy.html

Bad choice to claim as an "atheist." Sad actually.

Rad

 

[radorth]

If it can't be proved, it can't be proved, doubt can have nothing to do with it.
Thank you for your answer.

But you were claiming I should take your word for what you cannot prove!

Rad

 

[radorth]

No religion has. Norman Bourlog, a freethinker, bears that honor, having saved more than a billion lives with his work, at his own expense, in poor countries. He won the nobel prize in the mid '70s and **invented** (by bioengineering and hybridization) most of the food you and other people around the world eat today.

Um, the Nobel Prize website says nothing about him inventing anything, feeding billions or spending his own money, in it's biography of him

http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/1970/borlaug-bio.html

Not that Numberprophet has any doubts about your reading material.

Criminy. What a bunch of nonsense. Well I learned a lot reading all these sites you failed to find in your favorite "freethinkers" library.

Rad

 

[Cat59]

I'm obviously doing a really bad job of explaining to you exactly what I am asking, as I think you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
The OP (and subsequent posters) spoke about about past beliefs and experiences that to them were very real but which some people have characterised as not being real conversion experiences. Because, the argument goes, if these people were really born again, they could not fall away. So they were never truly born again or converted or whatever word you want to use, in the first place.
What I am asking is not about me, or anyone else on the thread.
I just want to know what you believe characterises someone who has been born again, so that you can say "This person will never fall away" "This person has a new nature" or whether that statement is impossible for anyone to say, even about themselves.

 

[LibertyChic]

I'm obviously doing a really bad job of explaining to you exactly what I am asking, as I think you have got hold of the wrong end of the stick.
The OP (and subsequent posters) spoke about about past beliefs and experiences that to them were very real but which some people have characterised as not being real conversion experiences. Because, the argument goes, if these people were really born again, they could not fall away. So they were never truly born again or converted or whatever word you want to use, in the first place.
What I am asking is not about me, or anyone else on the thread.
I just want to know what you believe characterises someone who has been born again, so that you can say "This person will never fall away" "This person has a new nature" or whether that statement is impossible for anyone to say, even about themselves.

Good question Cat.

Rad....can you say with complete certainty that you are born again, renewed of the spirit, saved or whatever other semantic jargon you use to proclaim yourself a True Christian[sup]TM[/sup]? If you can, how?