kinda makes you wonder….

an interesting take on a fun topic….

I must thank everyone for their replies, and thank people for reading my post. It is a difficult and harsh message, but I hope that sensitive readers will understand the very real frustration which lies beneath it. (Insensitive readers can smeg off.) I am in agreement with barbarag, that the world would be much improved if humans could learn to really listen to one another. Robin and others, thank you for your kind words, as well.

Loveissimple, though your answer is polite (and I would hope, well-intentioned), it is also ignorant. I do not mean that your post demonstrates any lack of intelligence on your part, but your final paragraph betrays a lack of knowledge and understanding of why people do indeed leave their churches. Now, granted, I did not reveal in my initial post why I actually left Christianity, so of course you would be ignorant of my reasons. But in the interest of fostering a greater understanding between current and former believers, I feel motivated to enlighten you.

It is a common Christian misconception that one of the reasons why people leave the church is because they have confused Christ with Christianity. More often than not, this is not, in fact, the case. Ex-believers are smart enough to understand the difference between the person of Christ, vs. the religion which has grown up around the worship of and devotion to him.

And yet I do feel moved to point out that every Christian is a representative of Christ on earth. If Christians act reprehensibly, how does that reflect on their supposed master?

What the faults in Christians (and the church) indicated to me, however, was not so much that their master (that is, Christ) was reprehensible himself, but that he simply did not exist to rein in his wayward followers. A little in-depth research indicated that my initial suspicions were most likely correct: the church certainly exists, but Jesus Christ probably never did. And I, for one, find it difficult to blame a nonexistent person for the faults of those who believe he exists.

I hope that sheds a little light on the topic. Thank you, again, for your replies, one and all.

1. For something which is supposed to be the word of God this is a book which has been edited, added to, and subtracted from thousands of times over the years. The men attributed to be the writers for the most part did not write the books with their names on them either.

2. There is no such place as HELL. This was an idea of pagan origin added to this book by the early church to scare the hell out of people and make them want to convert. It is an idea which was never in the original writings.

3. Moses did not write the Pentateuch.

4. God as presented in the Old Testament is bi-polar, angry and vindictive one day, loving the next, and then destroying all of mankind except Noah and family the next.

5. Women in the Bible are property, like cattle.

6. Other humans in the Bible could also be property, (slaves), and this was OK with the Bible writers.

7. Jesus never saw fit to write a single word, nor have anything written down while he was on earth.

8. The scriptures in use during Christ’s time on earth contained books of the Bible which the Protestant churches do not recognize as scripture, yet the Catholic Church does.

9. The New Testament was only begun as letters to other churches, 40 years after Christ’s death, and none of the first writers thought they were writing new scriptures. They had no idea.

10. It took almost 300 years to come to a compromise about which of these writings would make up what we call the New Testament and which ones would not.

11. There are many Bible prophecies which never came to pass.

12. There are many things called Bible prophecies which are not prophecies at all.

13. Luke has the date of the Birth of Christ under the wrong ruler.

14. Matthew quotes the wrong Old Testament book when he quotes a prophecy fulfilled, which is not really even a prophecy in the book it actually is in.

15. The details surrounding the resurrection day events at the tomb are different from one book to another.

16. How did Judas die?

17. There never was a worldwide flood.

18. Bible cosmology does not match the observed universe. Stars are not just small lights hung on some outer firmament.

19. The Bible taught a flat circular earth, not a sphere.

I can keep going, and going and going, and going, but I will stop with those. The Bible is full, and I mean full, of errors in science and in math and contradictions and outright moral problems.

It is a book by men, about men, and the God they made up. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a God up there somewhere. Who knows? It just means that if he is there, he had nothing to do with this book, or Christianity.

for robin, regardless of what people think or believe in.. there is a reality to life, its not possible to have one truth for each person, then there is no one truth, and the reality of truth is destroyed. Truth can not be based on opinion or feelings, regardless of which “truth” you choose to believe in.

Noogatiger: what are the topics which get ignored? im just curious as to the specifics which you have found? and i wonder if the church itself, which many people know has a lack of solid understanding at times, might be unable to answer the questions you have, but what about scholars? or theologians? im just wondering if you have had a chance to speak to them concerning your concerns.

I believe that the church has a lot of problems, dont get me wrong, by no means is it a perfect place, but to look at a place that is supposed to represent Christ, and which fails more often than not. and then to say that Christ is that way… there seems to be a problem.

Christians, (a lot of them anyway), are taught that the first tenant of the faith is acceptance of “the fact” that the Bible is the word of God, that it is “the truth”.

If you have doubts about that basic principle then they simply have no mechanisms to deal with you or help you through. There are no proofs which they can show you. There is no archeology to back it up. There are no ancient official records which back up the stories. There simply is no corroborating evidence. So, they simply don’t know where to go from there, except to read the Bible to you. It is because the faith is a blind faith in something which cannot be proven or verified. To start having doubts about it now, is to start down the road to hell, so they have been taught. Therefore they are not ever going to listen, ever, ever, ever, never.