“I quit [going to church] because I came to believe that what is preached in the churches is mainly untrue and unimportant, tiresome, hostile to genuine progress, and in general not worth while. As for the necessity of paying homage to the deity, I began to feel that I did not know enough about God to pay him set compliments on set days. As for the God who is preached in the churches, I ceased to worship him because I could no longer believe in him or respect what is alleged of him. I cannot respect a deity who would want or even endure the hideous monotony and mechanism of most of the worship paid him by hired men, hired prayer-makers and their supporters.”
“As for those who protest that I am robbing people of the great comfort and consolation they gain from Christianity, I can only say that Christianity includes hell, eternal torture for the vast majority of humanity, for most of your relatives and friends. Christianity includes a devil who is really more powerful than God, and who keeps gathering into his furnaces most of the creatures whom God turns out and for whom he sent his son to the cross in vain. If I could feel that I had robbed anybody of his faith in hell, I should not be ashamed or regretful.”
~ Rupert Hughes, “Why I Quit Going to Church,” 1924
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
I went to church until I was 18 yrs old. I remember being nausious every Sunday morning. Once I left home, I didn't usually go to church. However, when I would visit mom and dad for the weekend, I would still get MAJOR pressure to go. So I usually did. Gradually, I started to notice that I was almost literally sickened by the things I heard. About 2 years ago, I went to church with them; I looked around me and was horrified with myself. I felt like I was an alien land; I was suddenly struck by the fact that everyone in that room believed that Jesus was the perfect son of god; that he had died for our sins; and that we would go to hell if we did not "accept Jesus into our heart as lord and saviour". More than that, everybody there assumed I believed it too, because i was there! It was too much for me. I vowed I would NEVER put myself in that situation again. It was crazy-making. I marveled at the fact that I had gone to church for so many years without this strong visceral reaction; funny what happens when we discover that Sant really isn't magic.
This is a copy and paste job from
http://www.geocities.com/fuzzyquark/weakarguments.html - again, I would like to hear responses from christians. It's called "weak christian arguments":
Here are some of the weak arguments that Christians have sometimes made in favour of Christianity; some of these come from friends and family, others from newgroup/messageboard debates or even from Christian evangelists who have stopped me at random in the street.
1. You can't prove Christianity isn't true.
I don't have to. If you are the one making the claim, the burden of proof rests with you. If I claim that I am a descendant of King Henry VIII, or claim that Elvis is alive and well and working in my local supermarket, or that world events are manipulated by the Illuminati, it is not your job to prove me wrong, it is my job to prove my claims are true.
2. You can't disprove the existence of God/Yahweh.
You can't disprove the existence of fairies, dragons or the Easter Bunny. Nor can you disprove the existence of Zeus, Mithras, Thor or any of the other gods that humans have believed in. As Carl Sagan once said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". If you tell me you have a rabbit in your garden I would probably believe you. If however you tell me that you have a unicorn in your garden, you had better come up with some extremely convincing proof.
3. The Earth is exactly the right distance from the Sun; a few miles nearer and it would be too hot, a few miles further out and it would be too cold (I was told this by a preacher on London's Underground network).
For some reason this very poor argument is given as proof that the Christian god Yahweh exists. Of course, if the Earth was in a different orbit around the sun, we wouldn't be here. Maybe if it were on a very slightly different orbit, different creatures would have evolved and lizard-type creatures or very hairy creatures would be wondering why the Earth was at an orbit perfect for them. In any case, there are countless planets with an orbit totally unsuitable for life - and there is nobody on those planets to notice it, Mars and Venus for a start. In fact, the vast majority of planets in the universe appear to have an orbit unsuitable for life, which makes the creator extremely wasteful! Logically, any creatures who find themselves calculating their planet's orbit around its star must by definition find that their planet has an orbit suitable for life. Doh!
4. The universe is so finely tuned, it must have been created.
Fine, Zeus created it. Seriously, just because the universe is complex and we have no idea why it exists, it does not therefore mean that the Hebrew war-deity Yahweh created it. It could just as well have been Zeus, Posiedon, Thor or some unknown deity, or even extremely advanced beings from another dimension.
5. Millions of people believe in Jesus, so Christianity *must* be true.
Millions of people also believe in astrology, that doesn't make it true. The number of people who believe in something has absolutely no relation to whether it is true or not.
6. Historical evidence for such-and-such a city mentioned in the Bible proves the Bible is true
Nonsense. Just because an archaeologist finds evidence that a city existed, this doesn't prove all the supernatural stuff is also correct. Does the existence of Baghdad prove that flying carpets, magic lamps and genies exist?
7. Hitler and Stalin were atheists.
We are *all* atheists abouts the majority of gods that humans have ever believed in. You are an atheist with respect to Zeus, Baal, Thor, Wodan, Isis & Osiris, Bacchus, Horus, Dionysus, Mithras, etc. Your definition of "atheist" is "somebody who doesn't believe in Yahweh".
8. Evolution is "only a theory".
People making this statement clearly have no idea what the word "theory" actually means. Hardly anything is known with absolute certainty, even your own existence is open to some doubt - for example, you might not actually be sitting in that chair reading this, you could simply be a brain in a vat somewhere with all your senses wired up to inputs controlled by a mad scientist. A theory is a hypothesis about the world/universe that can be backed up with evidence, but is also open to being disproved. Virtually all of science is comprised of theories - with the exception of some mathematical proofs such as Pythagoras theorem, there is hardly anything that is 100% proven beyond any possible doubt. Even Einstein's theories of relativity are not proven beyond any doubt, although they are heavily supported by evidence. I recommend Simon Singh's book "Fermat's Last Theorem" if you want to get a better idea about the difference between a theory/conjecture and a proof. Evolution is a theory about how species change and adapt and is backed up by evidence from geology and biology, as well as being the only explanation by which something complex can arise from simple beginnings (unlike so-called "Intelligent Design"). Read "The Blind Watchmaker" or "Climbing Mount Improbable" by Richard Dawkins to get a better idea of how evolution works. Evolution, like any theory, could very easily be disproven by a single piece of evidence. The scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, "Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian". Nothing like this has ever been found.
9. Your position is just as much a faith/belief as Christianity
No, my position is an absence of belief in supernatural beings. If this is a faith, then "not playing football" is a sport.
10. You just take verses from the Bible out of context.
That tired old argument, the last resort of a desperate christian who can't think of a better response. Taking something out of context means that you change the apparent meaning of a piece of text by removing it from its surrounding text. For example, suppose I was quoted as having said the following:
"hate all black people"
This is an awful thing to say, but see what happens when I put it in it's original context, because what I actually said was:
"I think it is terrible that there are racists who hate all black people just because they are different"
Now that is taking something out of context - totally changing its meaning by removing it from the surrounding text. Ok, so now tell me how I am taking these verses from Ezekial 9:4-6 out of context:
And the LORD said unto him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof. And to the others he said in mine hearing, Go ye after him through the city, and smite: let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity: Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women: but come not near any man upon whom is the mark; and begin at my sanctuary. Then they began at the ancient men which were before the house.
Christian reader, please tell me how to interpret the bold text above in context, so I can understand how a loving deity can order the murder of little children.
Janet, Thanks for the great posts—as always!
Post a Comment