The Atheist - Agnostic - Non religious thread

Iván and Robert, please don't take offense but I really don't think you guys should be part of this thread.  From what I gather you both are very devout christians and personally I feel there's nothing that can be said by an atheist that could change your mind. So anything you post will be argumentative.   Your mind has been made up and you have "faith."  You have a very nice thread with very few interruptions, so personally I'd like to see the same here.

 

It's rather difficult to talk about atheism as it is, because of the pressure of society and its history.  And I feel I understand the need to reach out to those you feel have lost their way and bring them back if you can.  It has been taught to you since childhood. 

 

If you truly respect what others believe then you won't post here.

Yes and no. Those people were not dicks, they were intently serious earnest people - the church they were a part of was similarly set up for all the right reasons and never went "off-message" like so many of the brainwash cults did. As I said more than once, it was not an epiphany, nor was it a bad experience. I just did not see myself fitting in to their rules-set (I could have returned to my old church and still kept my record collection ) - I wanted my religion to complement my life, not rule it, I wanted to question and discuss without receiving scripted answers or being fobbed off with "god made it so". My issue was not with them specifically, but with the whole Charismatic Movement which had swung to the opposite extreme of High Church and had effectively become just as constrained and restrictive, may be even more so. I also grew to realise that perhaps much of it was self-perpetuating and in some cases even a pretence in order to belong. I remained a christian for almost twenty years after that, but never again as a member of any organised religion. My personal view now is that man created god in his image, that the scriptures are the word of man and the holy trinity (something that occurs in several non-Abrahamic religions as well) is a projection of man trying to explain consciousness and free will as separate from, but a still part of, the corporeal body.