By Neal Stone Image by Sir_Robin12 via Flickr Y ou have two children. A son and a daughter. You place a bowl of candy in front of them and tell them not to touch it. You leave the room. They give in and eat the candy, you come in and not only punish them but their children as well who weren't even involved. Does this make sense to you? It makes sense to Christians! Your children now have a large family and many of them disagree with you and refuse to live by your rules. You get angry and dig a series of large pits and throw many of these children into the pits and bury them alive. Does this make sense to you? It makes sense to Christians! You have an enemy who challenges one of your children's belief in you. To prove yourself and your child's belief you kill all the child's offspring, destroy his property and make him sick with boils and suffer great agony all to prove a bet. On top of that this enemy can talk to you face to face, but your own creation can no...

By Stephen F. Uhl, Ph.D. Image by Stitch via Flickr I am overly fed up with the use of the term, atheism , as a negative epithet. And I am now just about as fed up with how we tolerate eminent humanist writers saying atheism is a negative concept; it may look like a negative word; it is not a negative concept; it is a nonnegative concept. Now my (mostly forgotten) Greek is probably a lot better than average, so hold on regarding the Greek prefix, alpha, being negative. As for the actual concept of a-theism being negative, I will unswervingly go for the two negatives making a positive here. We atheists are non-believers, non-bullshitters! Are you going to try to tell me that the second term is negative! If something is nonscientific, that sounds negative; if something is nonfalse, that is positive; so is nontheism, atheism. So it is time for all of us atheists to 'quit hiding our light under a bushel.' The term, secular humanism , is not generally as positively clear in its u...

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Image via Wikipedia By James C J esus, being God in the Trinity and therefore all-knowing, all powerful, merciful and loving, can be called to task for questionable actions in both the Old and New Testaments. For instance… When he instructed Adam to not eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil… he KNEW that would be violated because he knew the future. So why didn’t he simply put a guard of cherubims and flaming sword to protect it, as he did later to keep A&E out of the Garden? Thus saving the world’s population from the guilt of original sin , in which they had no personal guilt! And in deciding to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah , he had to know that in the near future Lot’s wife would succumb to simple curiosity and that Lot himself would be guilty of drunken incestuous sex, TWICE, impregnating both of his (non-virgin) daughters. Shouldn’t he have been a bit more merciful on the wife, and less glorifying in inspiring Peter, in Peter2, to call Lot “just.” And...

By John L Image via Wikipedia J esus tells us in the New Testament that if a person has the faith equivalent to that of a mustard seed , we could move a mountain. Fair enough. Given that Jesus himself provides that there is a quantifiable AND unconditional aspect to faith, here is an interesting question for Christians. Let us say that there are two people praying for a given event. One of them has enough faith, while the second does not have enough. My question is "Which prayer will be honored?" Will god ignore the person who has enough faith and thus violate the unconditional aspect of the mustard see promise? Or will god ignore the requirement for the right amount of faith and violate the quantity aspect of the promise? Given the number of unanswered prayer requests, I find the later highly unlikely. God is clearly not one to grant anything based on my observations. All I've ever seen is "no", especially from those who need him the most. This line of t...

By Valerie Tarico Image by J. Mark Bertrand via Flickr R eal Christians are going to disappear abruptly someday soon. The world is going to descend into a bloodbath while someone known as the antichrist attempts to seize control of the planet. That is what some of your neighbors think—and some of your politicians. Many of them even relish the thought. Is Revelation, the last book in the Bible, a set of prophecies or a set of hallucinations? Neither, says Reverend Rich Lang of Trinity United Methodist in Ballard, Washington. If the Book of Revelation isn’t a blueprint that tells us what is coming in the End Times , what the heck is it? Like any book in the Bible, Revelation was written from the perspective of faith for the purpose of giving faith. It was written in the early days of the Jesus movement to a persecuted minority that was fearing worse persecution. As the Jesus movement started in Jerusalem and Jesus was crucified, and there was this experience of resurrection, at th...

By Fuego I 've been trying to figure out why it is so difficult to get believers to even listen to why we left Christianity. Even though some of us experienced decades of solid Christian belief, we are dismissed as having never believed, or never "truly" believed. No matter what evidence we bring, no matter if we are aggressive or kind, there always seems to be an invisible wall of condescending resistance to any criticism or evidence against Christianity. This may not be a new concept to some of you, but it all fell together for me today. The pattern so clearly fits with another relationship pattern among humans that it startled me. Christianity is a form of abuser/victim codependency . I know the word codependent seems way overused, but hear me out. Codependency is the perpetuation of an abusive relationship by two or more people, each of whom derives enough emotional support from the relationship that it outweighs the strife. In fact the strife itself fuels the emot...

Sent in by Colin Image via Wikipedia I used to believe not only in Christianity, but in Calvinism . Now on the rare occasion I come across passages like the following, I want to puke my balls out. "The condemnation of the non-elect is designed primarily to furnish an eternal exhibition, before men and angels, of God's hatred for sin, or, in other words, it is to be an eternal manifestation of the justice of God.. This decree displays one of the divine attributes which apart from it could never have been adequately appreciated. The salvation of some through a redeemer is designed to display the attributes of love, mercy, and holiness. The attributes of wisdom, power, and sovereignty are displayed in the treatment of both groups. Hence the truth of the Scripture statement that, "Jehovah hath made everything for its own end; Yea, even the wicked for the day of evil," Prov. 16:4... This decree of reprobation also serves subordinate purposes in regard to the elect; fo...

By Bill J I read some of the emails allegedly written by the Governor Sanford and his girlfriend from Argentina. A few sentences stood out to me as I read thru them. Gov. Sanford speaks of an emotional bank account full of love. I remember someone else who used this term back when I was a Christian. It got me thinking, is there such thing as a bank account of love? What is love in this context? Is love a feeling? Is love a commitment? Is love grace, mercy, empathy or unconditional acceptance? Love in the English language simply means a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person. Among other definitions it means sexual affection and intercourse or simply a term of endearment never implying any sex or physical attraction . Love is a complex issue and one that seems unique to the individual because it is based on their motivations. When we do anything, even love someone, we draw from whatever is stored in our minds and what is stored in our mind is a catalog of informat...

By Neal Stone Image via Wikipedia Y ou've probably have heard the term “Crying Wolf” before. Here is the origin of that term. It is an old Aesop fable. One of my favorites. “A bored Shepard boy who entertained himself by calling out “Wolf!". Nearby villagers who came to his rescue found that the alarms were false and that they had wasted their time. When the boy was actually confronted by a wolf, the villagers did not believe his cries for help and the wolf ate the flock.” I have met Christians who have claimed how things will change or we are going to make changes and then swing back to the old ways. I have also met some who always proclaim some prophecy only to have it not come true over and over. I one had a room-mate who was always bragging about himself around the church regarding his supposedly high IQ , or he would come across some new way to change your life, he being right and you being wrong. If you disagreed with him (which he couldn't handle) he'd a...

By E Chamberlain MD, San Diego CA W ell, it's finally happened, after praying for it for so long. God has revealed to me ways to tell if he exists. (I guess he wants me back.) Here's one way to tell if god is real-- If god died tomorrow, how would you know? How could you tell? Would you just wonder why he hadn't shown up for work? Would you look around in church and wonder, 'Where is he?' Would you begin to be concerned because he hadn't returned your call? Would Christian Science Monitor newspapers begin to pile up somewhere? Or would we notice after a season that tornadoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes oddly didn't happen this year? Or would they increase? Would the reports of miracle healings and speaking in tongues die down? Would those able to speak in tongues no longer be able to read and write in tongues? Would people keep sneezing incessantly even after we said ' God bless you '? Would food taste funny after we said grace? Woul...

By E Chamberlain MD, San Diego CA A fter posting " Paul's And Jesus' Moral Fallacies " (June 22), I've been encouraged to elaborate more. I wanted that earlier essay to be brief enough to not seem preachy and to accommodate any attention span and be read during commercial breaks between, say, ESPN's Pardon The Interruption and Outside The Lines. This follow-up post won't do that. I apologize in advance, then, to those without a DVR and with other important things to do. Much of this post here below is plagiarized, excised, or revised from my own earlier review of the movie "Jesus Camp," (posted in the forums section here at exchristian.net, a movie that was nominated for the 2006 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature), but I thought it worth it to get it to a broader audience than those who would read a movie review. And there are also some important additions, not presented in that movie review. So, if some of it sounds familiar to any...