as a youngster/xtian that makes you cringe now…
This got me thinking:
and a thousand little incidents started flooding my mind.
So, share your moments, we all have some, nobody is wise in their youth!!!
one moment in particular that made my hackles rise, was one sermon that the dominee said something in line of ‘the wife must be like a happy slave to her husband’. and i was like, nigger what?!
allso, being bookish beyond words, and having discovered a plethora of opinions not in keeping with the church, the little spark of uncertainty was fired into a blazing fire.
allso having discoverd metal music, made me opinionated and had me questioning everything, just for the sake of being rebellious.
i think, the true starting point to it all, was the whole ‘aliens’ debate. the church says we are the only intelligent life in the universe, but my logical mind told me, noddafuck. and one episode in which carl sagan did a calculation about the possibilities of alien life on other planets, made me kick back against the good 'ol book.
downhill from there really.
Great, now atheists have confession too?!
My general failure was being so wrapped up in religion and being extremely adept (I thought) at defending it. Dear FSM, to just think of all the non-arguments I’ve espoused over the years… only to discover much later a nice, succinct, logical counter-argument that could’ve sunk me had I ever come up against a worthy opponent. My failure was being smart, smarter than anyone I came up against, which meant I was obviously right … and falling for the whole thing for much too long. I was a youth leader yes, I attended an older “young person” group after I left school too, and the dominee thought I was just the beez kneez, a truly “enlightened” little Christian thinker. To this day I’m sure there are a lot of people in my home town who think I’m gods perfect creation.
… And that, leaves a whooooole lot of people to disappoint.
Its good for the soul 0:)
seriously though, no, not confession, because we dont intend forgiving your sins, instead we will laugh at you and make sure you never forget the idiocy you came up with. We’re evil remember?
if we’re talking about stupid, faith-affirming shit. i had a habit of lying on the grass at night, looking for ufo’s. i then said to god, if you are real, show me a sign. and hey presto! a meteorite came flying overhead, and split in two.
it was awesome. and yet, i still don’t believe.
It’s almost a dead certainty that it wouldn’t have mattered at that time anyway because you wouldn’t have properly recognised a “worthy opponent” as one who is actually worthy. You’d’ve just composed more counterarguments on the fly to rationalise away the argument(s) presented to you. This habit is known as the “intelligence trap.” It boils down to the eminent fact that intelligent people generally need to persuade themselves of the truth or falsity of a given proposition by doing their own investigations, rather than being persuaded by someone else’s views that disagree with their own.
As for my own retrospectively cringeworthy beliefs, perhaps the magnitude 10+ on the discomfiture scale was to think that it genuinely was an argumentational virtue that the god I believed in could do literally anything and was therefore in effect ineffable to us mere mortals. It was the unbeatable trump card that would defeat any claim about how this god would/should be or behave. It was only later when I realised that this is not only a serious case of begging the question, it also is a complete subversion of logic and consequent reasoning, masquerading as logic and consequent reasoning. By this simple device any and all viewpoints instantly attain equal validity, and it is the craftiest con in the theologian/apologist’s toolkit.
'Luthon64