Recovering from Presupposintationalism

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ProLifeSkeptic
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Recovering from Presupposintationalism

Post #1

Post by ProLifeSkeptic »

I'm former Christian, used to be really big into presupposintational apologetics, until I de-converted. For three years, I've been trying to get past the OCD and cognitive dissonance. Some scriptures still keep popping into my head like Romans 1:18-21, Jeremiah 17:9, and countless others. I mean, I know they're just words in a book, but still, it's real hard to get passed it all.[/quote]

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Divine Insight
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Post #2

Post by Divine Insight »

I think every Christian who ultimately leaves this religion is necessarily going to have doubts, second thoughts, and quite a bit of retrospection in the process. And the degree to which this will affect a given person may depend on precisely why they left the religion and what types of questions they continue to have. So while other former Christians may be able to share there stories those may or may not be helpful to your situation.

I personally had very little emotional problems with this. This was mainly due to the fact that my rejection of this religion was based almost entirely on intellectual evidence. In fact, I never associated hostile feelings toward the "God" of this religion. Many Christian who here me describe the Biblical God as an insane immoral monster will no doubt think otherwise, but this actually isn't an emotional description, it's a purely intellectual description that I came to hold only after I was totally convinced that the God of the Bible is indeed a work of total fiction.

One thing I would suggest is reading Paul's words in Romans 1:21-32 and simply asking yourself if this describes you. If it doesn't then you can at least be certain that Paul had no clue what he was talking about. I am absolutely certain that Paul's words do not apply to me even remotely.

Another thing that helped me personally is that I discovered the fallacies of the Bible whilst sincerely dedicating myself to the ideal of serving God. When I read the story of Biblical characters I always identified with the righteous character, and never with the villains. When I read the story of Moses, I identified with being Moses. When I read the story of Noah I identified with being Noah. When I read the story of Jesus I identified with being Jesus. These are the characters in the Biblical fables that best portray who I am. Never once did I identify with people who were doing ignorant, immoral, or stupid things. So for someone like Paul to suggest that because I no longer believe in this religion I have been given over to probate mind and now I do nothing but but lust for evil and I'm a hateful "backbiter" is absolute nonsense. The accusations made by Paul are the least of my concerns. I know those accusations are false, and this only leads to more proof that the Biblical Scriptures contain obvious falsehoods.

For someone who might not be so sure of their own decency this may not apply. But it applies to me with no room for doubt on my behalf.

Another thing that may have helped me to be easily freed from the fear-mongering tactics of this religious cult is that when I realized that Christianity is clearly false as written in the Biblical Scripture I didn't suddenly become an "atheist". To the contrary, I still intuitively believed in "God", I just realized that the Bible cannot be the correct or true description of God. So for me leaving Christianity was not even remotely about "rejecting God", I just realized that Christianity is a false religion.

With this worldview I then continued to look at other world religions. Not in an effort to "Seek God", as far as I was concerned if there exists a God I was already in totally harmony with God. Religion became a totally separate issue for me entirely.

It might be informative to realize that when I discovered "Christianity" was false, I simultaneously realized that all of the Abrahamic religions were equally false. In other words, I had already considered all forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as part of my search to find "truth" in the Biblical Narrative of God. I found them all to be more than just extremely unlikely. I found them to be outright self-contradictory to a degree beyond repair.

So with this in mind I looked at other world religions. My main concern was to simply discover whether any other humans on planet earth might view "God" in the same way that I intuitively felt that God might exist. I found this to be the case in various Eastern Mystical religions, mainly some versions of Buddhism and similar type of religions.

At that point I did not then become a devout Buddhist because I realized by then that religion is totally separate from "God". Religion is simply man's way of trying to imagine what God might be like. Of course the Ancient Hebrews who wrote the Bible went far beyond that. Instead of just imagining what God might be like they decided to create their own God in their image. And this is precisely why the God of the Bible is just as ignorant and barbaric as the men who made him up.

~~~~~~~

Speaking to the issue of your concern of cognitive dissonance, and/or OCD, I too have periodically gone back to the Bible repeatedly for several decades after having originally rejected the religion. My purpose was to continue to give it another chance, especially when I would be offered new apologetic arguments for it. However, every time I returned to give the Bible another chance I always found the same results. It's simply too self-contradictory to be repaired in any rational way. Every time I go back to the Bible all I get is even more confirmation that it can't possibly be true.

In fact, I don't even bother anymore. After having done that repeatedly for a few decades I finally came to the realization that it could never be resurrected. And far more importantly I've finally realized that it's not even worthy of resurrection in any case.

I mean, think about it, why should we even want a story of a God to be true where the God has to have his only begotten Son crucified to pay for our sins because we aren't worthy of redemption on our own merit.

Is that a reality we should even want to believe in as a matter of faith?

Certainly not me. I would rather pure secular atheists were true, to be perfectly honest about it.

And of course, a religion like Buddhism is even far superior to that.

~~~~~

Today I chose a life of PURE HONESTY.

I am agnostic on the question of the true nature of reality. I have NO CLUE whether there exists a God or not.

Think about that for a moment. That is the TRUTH. Therefore if I were to go around preaching to people that there exists a God who had to have his Son crucified to pay for our sins I could only be lying.

What kind of a God would want that I should go around telling people lies?

I have to be TRUTHFUL, if only for my own sanity. And my truth is that I've studied the Bible inside and out, and I can't see how it can possibly be true. It's filled with extreme self-contradictions and utter nonsense. Not to mention that the God within it is portrayed as a homophobic male-chauvinist who hates everyone who doesn't obey his every command, and who has even condoned slavery, the beating of slaves, and the taking of virgin girls as sex slaves and/or concubines during wars.

That would be a pretty pathetic God, IMHO anyway. Certainly not a God that I could respect, much less worship.

This is the part where many Christians will then just say, "Oh but you just hate God, that's all". But I say baloney. There is no God behind this immoral dogma. That's all there is to it. I'm just pointing out why this dogma can't be about any God.

~~~~~

In any case, I don't know if anything I've shared with you above will help you with your OCD or psychological oppression this religion may have left you with. The only thing I can say with certainty is that this religion was DESIGNED to be psychologically oppressing in this way. That's how this religion was used to control people and keep them under its authority. And it's not just Christianity, Islam does the same thing. In fact, the original Judaism did the same thing as well, as you can see in the Old Testament. Ironically the modern day Jews tend to reject the very idea that their original dogma even came from any God. They refuse to refer to it as the "Word of God" (even though the authors of the text claim to be speaking for God). Christianity and Islam are the two offshoots of Judaism that really took the authoritative psychological oppression idea and ran with it. The Jews themselves don't seem to be so dogmatic about their view of the religion.
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Spiritual Growth - A person's continual assessment
of how well they believe they are doing
relative to what they believe a personal God expects of them.
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