ExChristianDotNet - encouraging ex-Christians (former Christians): 07.04

Amazon.com Widgets

Charismatic complications
.: posted Friday, July 30, 2004 :::

sent in by Ben Milligan

First of all, I want to thank the webmaster for putting a site together like this one where I can vent my story. Five years ago I would have shuddered if I came across a site such as this, and rightfully so considering what my upbringing initially instilled in me. Anything that isn't Christian, is of the "world", and therefore, of the devil. Fear was the most influential instrument convincing me as a child that there is no other whole truth except 'gods word' and christianity. That said, I'll draw the background...

(Click Here to read more)

How Religion Almost Ruined My Life
.: posted Sunday, July 25, 2004 :::

sent in by Frank Henry Pecenka

How 14 years of religion almost destroyed my life.
Testimony of Frank Pecenka, Canada

Hi my name is Frank Pecenka and I have a testimony that 14 years within organized religion almost destroyed my life and my family. My wife and I started out with a sincere desire to know and to please God but something went terribly wrong over the years and in the end I turned my back on God, The Church and Organized Religion.

I finally came to that place where I found that I was emotionally, spiritually and financially bankrupt having exhausted all of my resources trying to make my skewed faith work.

(Click Here to read more)

I love Jesus (and Athena, and Ishtar, and Cerridwen, and Pan...)
.: posted Sunday, July 25, 2004 :::

sent in by Jordan Hill

I come from rational-minded, Pennsylvania protestants. My mother's father was an Episcopalean priest who happened to be homosexual. He integrated his church and was leading the push to allow women to join the clergy. We also suspect he was a Mason. My father's father was a brilliant Presbyterian preacher with a pHd in Middle Eastern religion. He deliberately sought out fundamentalist leaning congregations in an attempt to pull Christianity out of the fringes of lunacy. He is retired and now he spends his time working with congregations in Columbia trying to help the people who have been affected by the (US sponsered) guerrillas.

(Click Here to read more)

Religion ruined my child hood, it almost set me back in life
.: posted Sunday, July 25, 2004 :::

sent in by Eric

How religion ruined my childhood and what I did about it

I stated out living on the north end of town in Huntsville Al. This was not the good end to say the least. I went to a mostly black public school. I was the only white kid in class and did not learn much there. It was a very bad environment or you would think. I guess my parents got sick of me getting beat up and not learning anything. My parents decided to enroll me into a private Baptists school when I was in the 2nd grade. That was the worst thing that they did for my.

(Click Here to read more)

Humanism Posters
.: posted Saturday, July 24, 2004 :::

A. Uiet Bhor, one of the regular members of this site, has provided us with some images and posters celebrating Humanism.

Check them out in the gallery by clicking HERE

Any comments may be left in the gallery under each poster, and unless I misunderstood, the images are free to copy and distribute.

Only in America!
.: posted Friday, July 23, 2004 :::

Usually I try to refrain from inserting political statements or opinions into this site.

Being Ex-Christian is already controversial enough! LOL!

However, today, I'm making an exception.

Let the comments roll...

(Click Here to read more)

Thanks for reading.
.: posted Thursday, July 22, 2004 :::

sent in by anonymous

Spent most of my life as an agnostic, irreligious, or one who thinks maybe there is a God but had the Deist way of looking at it. I for one should had known better than to get involved with with any church but I found myself doing just that.

My odessey began when I read on the importance of Christianity in Western philosophy and even some virulent atheists will admit it. The conservative philosopher George Santayana was both a practicing Catholic and an avowed atheist for instance. At the time I was into reading alot of Dostoevsky and was struck by his argument that to believe that God exists is essential because the fabric of society cannot hold without it. Gradually my mindset became that of a *cultural Christian apologist* though retained my skepticism. Then I decided to find a church and go through the motions...

(Click Here to read more)

Debunking the Arguments of Christian Fundamentalists, Evangelicals, and Apologists
.: posted Sunday, July 18, 2004 :::

One of the visitors of this site, Winston, has just posted an article debunking a whole article full of fallacious arguments regularly touted by Christian apologists.

Click the link to read the article, and post any comments in the forum by clicking HERE

Click Here to read the article.

Click HERE to leave a comment.

(Click Here to read more)

My personal Exodus
.: posted Saturday, July 17, 2004 :::

sent in by anonymous

I've devoured the information and the de-conversion stories on this website.

I was born and raised an Evangelical Presbyterian. I was taught that the Bible was the inerrant rule and faith for our belief (that's how my last Presbyterian pastor began every sermon). I remember one morning in Sunday school when I was a little girl that our elderly Sunday School teacher, after relating the story of Adam and Eve, looked around at all of us and said "You girls need to be ashamed of what Eve did."

I really did feel ashamed too!

(Click Here to read more)

Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story (2000)
.: posted Saturday, July 17, 2004 :::

Richard Carrier

What follows is a half-hour lecture I gave at Yale on 26 October 2000 at the request of the Yale College Humanists and Secularists. It was followed by a Q & A session that actually lasted nearly two hours. I have subsequently been asked to give this lecture elsewhere on other occasions, so I am reproducing it here, with hyperlinked footnotes in brackets giving more detail than I am able to give in the lecture itself. Though it shares the same title as the much-longer essay here, it is not the same paper, but actually a synthesis of several papers I have published here, and including entirely new arguments and information. It is worth reading on its own, in addition to or even in lieu of the much lengthier essay also called Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story.

(Click Here to read more)

Lost Comments
.: posted Sunday, July 11, 2004 :::

A tragic error has deleted all the comments on the main pages for the past month and a half or longer from the articles and testimonies where they were posted. The comments can still be read on the Recent Comments page, and if the link in each comment is clicked, you are still brought to the article where the comment was posted.

Those interested in having their posts re-instated where they were originally posted may do so one-by-one, using the somewhat tedious procedure described above. Unfortunately there is no other way to accomplish the task.

Nothing in the forums was affected.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

From Christian to Pagan to Christian and back to Pagan again
.: posted Monday, July 05, 2004 :::

sent in by Cierra

-Christianity-

I was raised a Baptist Christian, and at the age of 9, I was baptised(completely by choice). I was sincerly excited, and I truly did want to pursue a relationship with "Jesus Christ", and I wanted to receive the "Holy Spirit". And so that was my goal. I did eventually "receive the Holy Spirit", ...but a lot more things have happened before, AND after the experience...

I wanted so much to receive the Holy Spirit...but my first attempt failed. I went to church, and prayed in a room with other young beleivers who had wanted to receive the "Holy Spirit" as well. A woman was here in the room with all of us, and told us to pray "Thank you Jesus", over and over and over. It's what I was doing, but nothing happened.

(Click Here to read more)

Happy Fourth Everyone!
.: posted Sunday, July 04, 2004 :::

My Rise to Christianity and Transcendence From It
.: posted Saturday, July 03, 2004 :::

by Winston

Dear All,
Here is my story about how I became a Christian, what I went through later and how I finally got through and transcended my beliefs. I have shared a lot of personal things in this that I've never shared with anyone before. Originally I had not meant for it to be this long, so I apologize for that. But while I was writing it, I felt like I was reliving all those suppressed memories again and so lots of details came out of my mind that I had to write. Several times I had to stop and pause for a moment because those memories brought back a lot of overwhelming emotions and I felt on the verge of tears. But I'm glad that I finally wrote it all out cause I have been meaning to for a long time. It also felt therapeutic to me to write this all out too. I stayed up almost all night for 2 nights writing this. I hope maybe you the reader may be able to get some kind of lesson out of it, whatever it may be.

(Click Here to read more)

STOP In The Name of God...You Have The Right to Remain Christian
.: posted Thursday, July 01, 2004 :::

by Matt Scheeren (mattisdx at hotmail dot com)

Today I was walking downtown in the streets of Pittsburgh, when I came across a nice older gentleman handing out Christian End of the World Apocalyptic literature. While at the time I didn’t think this was so out of place, later I got to thinking, what if this man had been Muslim? And what if the literature he had been handing out cited passages from the Koran and talked about “The End Times”. BAM! This guy would have automatically been labeled a terrorist, arrested, and thrown in some rudimentary prison cell while being harassed and harangued by armed guards and police dogs.

Why is it that in today’s society it seems so taboo to be anything but Christian ? Could it be because our founding fathers were Christian ?

(Click Here to read more)

Add this page to: