exchristian

I found Bart Ehrman some 20 years into deconstructing. I wish I'd had his perspective when I was younger. I first started deconstructing during and after my first cover to cover read of the Bible in my teens (late 80s early 90s). The inconsistency, incoherence, and clear ulterior motives throughout are what first made me start doubting the Southern Baptist, Christian faith I was raised in (indoctrinated into). I knew that much of it did not make sense objectively, nor did different parts of the bible work with each other at all. Rather, the book is a patchwork that can be easily cherry picked based on bias.

For the uninitiated, Bart Ehrman is a Biblical scholar who began his career as a serious Christian and deconstructed in the process of study. I already considered myself an atheist by the time I found Ehrman, and I relate to him because reading the bible was the catalyst to my deconstruction.

Ehrman has helped put meaning to the seemingly meaningless parts of the bible for me.

Revelation for example is incoherent, even with careful reading at first. But Ehrman sheds great light on this subject. Here is a newer Ehrman talk on the subject.

I also enjoyed this lecture (also on Revelation). If you are interested and new to the subject start here. He dives deeper and starts from the beginning on this one but it is long.

No new Exchristian community is whole without some links to Bart, imo.

Just a rant I wrote to read to myself during my deconstruction that I've added to with time. Sharing it here to help whoever might find it useful. Feedback or discussion is always welcome.

We're not going to burn in hell. There is no hell. The idea is ridiculous on it's face, its just so scary that most religious folks don't dare think to hard on it but when you do, it totally unravels.

The length of your life on earth is minuscule compared to eternity and your human life happens at the very beginning of this infinitely long span of time.

Some omnipotent, all knowing god came along and decided it was fair to make your fate for eternity dependent on this blink of an eye we call human life? And that god is supposedly loving and fair? How does that make any sense at all? It's crazy anyone believes it.

In reality, a loving god would never put us in such a situation. Only some truly evil entity would devise a system whereby a soul would be tortured for hundreds of millions more years than the person's life. Picture yourself as god. Would any of that be ok with you?

Also a loving god would make him or herself known. No reasonable god would rely on the corrupt mouthpieces that are everywhere. Joel Osteen - Kenneth Copeland, et al. God with power would have a clear voice. These people say whatever will keep the most followers. A God that cared would smack them with lightning on live TV.

No reasonable god with power would allow so many different religions to exist that didn't believe in him. God would know that just being born to parents of the wrong religion would make it near impossible for that person to leave theirs to go find the "one true religion." If Christianity were real, god would be dooming 99% of the Muslim children that are born each day, just by letting them be born into the wrong religion/family/region.

Hell and Heaven are constructs created specifically to keep people having doubt from leaving the fold or voicing their ideas. Fear works well. But we have reason to see through the lies.

It is time to be free from the fear of hell. It is just a boogeyman story. Some of the most moral people I know are atheists. We know there is nothing more precious than right now and our current world.

Hug your children. Fix your issues or start toward the fix at least. Worry about today, and tomorrow, but don't worry about hell. It doesn't exist.

I would love it if we didn't get any more reminders that Christianity is a literal death cult.

For some reason this site isn't friendly to mobile users, so I linked directly to the image. Here's the link to the source: https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/dread2/

Dave Warnock is a former evangelical preacher who was diagnosed with a terminal case of ALS (aka "Lou Gehrig's Disease") in 2019. He was given three to five years to live, and he's chosen to spend that time focusing on life rather than ruminating about his impending death. Based on a web search, he's been actively speaking about his experience as recently as April of this year.

Christians generally have some pretty specific (and generally inaccurate) ideas of what it means to say I'm an atheist. The idea of agnosticism and atheism not being contradictory is still a controversial one, but I find the that "I don't know" complements rather than contradicts "I don't believe." So with that in mind, here's my position:

Atheism does not mean I'm a scientist. I am not an expert on biology, chemistry, cosmology, geology, physics or anything else that people care to invoke as proof that their god is real. I am a science enthusiast, meaning that scientific discoveries fascinate me and I try to keep abreast of current trends and discoveries made by the scientific community but that doesn't make me a scientist. I am at best a layman on scientific matters and am necessarily limited in my understanding. I don't have the answers to every question in the universe, but I do understand one thing about human knowledge: the fewer assumptions we hold as default the less likely we are to mislead ourselves about what we know. Consequently, if you demand to know what started the universe or how life arose from nonliving matter the only answer I can give is "I don't know." "God did it" is not the automatic default just because that's the traditional answer from religion, it still must be validated as true before it can be accepted. It will be held to the same standards of evidence as any other claim, and if it can't meet that standard I will not accept excuses for why that standard should not apply.

Atheism does not mean I'm a philosopher. In truth I'm less impressed by philosophy than I probably should be, but I've seen some really bad rationalizations trying to justify belief without looking like they're justifying belief. The near-universal admiration of Thomas Aquinas' Five Ways springs immediately to mind. The thing is that religion isn't philosophy, and belief in gods isn't founded in rational thought. It's not taught through rational discourse but an emotional one. People don't wait for their children to learn critical thinking skills before they drill religious beliefs into their heads, and for a very good reason. They're teaching their children to accept religious teachings as a default assumption before they can examine the validity of those assumptions, and most children live their lives without ever considering why they should question them. You can't tell me this isn't deliberate. So I don't need to be a philosopher to be an atheist and I don't pretend to be one.

Atheism doesn't mean I'm automatically a better person. Atheism isn't a magic spell that makes me smarter, stronger, faster, more moral or ethical than someone who believes in a god. Atheism challenges me to reconsider questions that I used to consider sufficiently answered by religion such as science, morality and ethics but that doesn't guarantee I'm going to do a good job with it. I am still the same person I was when I was standing behind the podium leading the church congregation in singing religious hymns, I just no longer believe what religions claim about reality and I don't participate in church any longer. Nor have I become a thieving, raping, murdering monster because I no longer fear divine retribution because my morality is not and never was based on fear. My morality has always been based on doing what I understand to be right, not about avoiding punishment.

Atheism doesn't mean I know there are no gods. I suspect there aren't, because religious claims about gods and reality don't stand up to scrutiny. The more excuses you have to make for why reality doesn't work the way you insist it should, the less inclined I am to believe you know what you're talking about. Arguing for a prime mover or appealing to consequences doesn't convince me either. I'm intellectually honest enough to say that I don't have concrete knowledge that there are no gods the way I know there's no money in my wallet, but not being able to prove there are no gods isn't enough for me to believe that there are. Wanting to believe there are gods is no more useful than wanting there to be money in my wallet. It's still a claim that requires validation, not a default assumption.

Atheism doesn't mean I worship the devil. I shouldn't even have to say this, but it's still a popular thing to say. If I don't believe in your god, why would I take your devil seriously?

Atheists can be liberal or conservative, intelligent or ignorant, friendly or hostile, moral or immoral. We can be good people or bad people just like everyone else. When you learn that someone is an atheist, the only thing you can safely assume from this is that they don't believe in any gods. If you want to know why they don't believe, what kind of person they are and what they know (or think they know) you'll have to dig a little deeper and ask them. Nothing else is implied from atheism but that one thing.

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Adam Lee examines the increasing extremism of Christian conservatives trying to hold back the changing tide of culture and inclusion.

In a perverse way, this is a good sign. It’s a herald of the religious right’s dwindling cultural power.

Update: They're back.

It's only for 48 hours, but the subreddit was set to private last night. A link to this community was added to the subreddit description, but we'll see if people are interested. I hope we can build a thriving support community here to rival the one there.

This discord server is being managed by one of the current mods in the original exchristian subreddit and is not officially affiliated with reddit. It serves as a fine place for exchristians to gather and talk in real time.

Brilliant satire. I don't normally go to tik tok or recommend videos from there, but this one is brilliant.

Finally! The founder and host of the 700 Club who scammed my family out of thousands of dollars and grifted hours way through life did far more damage to our society than your average televangelist. I don't normally celebrate anyone's death, but the world is a better place without him.

Hopefully a little humor now and then is welcome.

Andra Watkins is an author who shares her experience growing up in the toxic religious purity culture of South Carolina and how it impacted her life. It's a powerful read.

Our gracious host @JonahAragorn asks that we sign up on a server on join-lemmy.org or sign up on kbin.social instead of directing everybody to use the lemmy.one server specifically, in order to distribute the load.

Thank you!

We're experimenting with different alternatives to reddit in anticipation of their impending apocalypse in which they force third party app developers to shut down the products some of us have been using for decades.

No one knows better than an ex-Christian how scary change can be, but it's also an opportunity for growth. Let's see what we can do together.