Finding Love after Your Faith is Gone ~ ExChristian.Net

This is an updated version of my second post, enjoy !
Finding Love after Your Faith is Gone ~ ExChristian.Net

Sex, Sacrifice, and Male Virgins

It seems like Christianity is obsessed with human sacrifices and virginity. It is more specifically concerned with virgin male sacrifices. Allow me to first discuss a few major examples of human sacrifices. In the book of Genesis, Cain sacrifices an offering of crops and God rejects it. Abel offers a virgin lamb and God accepts his offering. So Cain decides to offer his brother's life as an offering to God. Then something strange happens. Instead of God ending Cain's life for sacrificing his brother, he allows Cain to live and build cities. The descendants of Cain were the originators of metallurgy, music, and herding livestock. Looking at the story from this vantage point allows one to see Abel as the first human virgin sacrifice. (Genesis 4)

Later on in Genesis, God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his virgin son Isaac, but God changed his mind allowing Isaac to live. One can also think of Joseph being thrown in the pit by his brothers as a figurative virgin sacrifice.(Genesis 22, Gen. 37)

Those tales were the set-up for the ultimate virgin sacrifice in Christianity. In order to appease an angry divinity, Jesus the unblemished(read virgin) lamb of God had to be sacrificed. Once the offering was accepted, Yahweh was pleased.

When one considers that the focal point of Christianity is a male virgin god, how can someone strive to be Christlike if they already have a sexual encounter? How can Christ be acquainted with the human condition if he never had a one night stand? Even Mary the mother of Jesus conceived the messiah through non sexual means in order for the virgin birth to occur.

Here is the takeaway, according to Paul: (1 Cor. 7)

1. Virgin(abstinent, most Christlike) (1 Cor 7:1, 25-28)
2. Marriage between one man and one woman( permitted but not "god's best") (1 Cor7:1-6)
3. Unmarried and sexually active(worst place, not permitted, shunned with harsh words and penalties) (1 Thess 4:3-8) (1 Cor 6:12-20)

Modern Christianity recognizes that the virgin position is untenable in today's society, so it pushes hard for the next best thing: heterosexual marriage. This is one of the motivations behind the purity pledges, the abstinence only sex education, and the push for traditional marriage.

This focus on sexual purity before marriage can stifle people from having honest conversations about sex and sexuality, especially in the church.

I have tried to show a link between virginity, sex, and human sacrifices that exist with Christianity. I hope you enjoyed the brief essay.

Biblical fantasy

I was always a lover of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror. I knew that ancient mythology was full of stories about heroes slaying monsters, fantastic creatures, forbidden love, and the like. Little did I realize that these types of stories were also rooted in the bible. If you asked a rational christian of any stripe, if the Lord of the Rings was a true story, they would probably say, "It's a good piece of fiction, but it's not real." Riddle me this,why do people believe that the stories in the bible are real? In case you missed it, the bible also is a collection of books set in a fantasy world. Here is a list of fantasy elements in the scriptures.(this is by no means a comprehensive list)
1. a fully grown human male made out of dust without a mother
2. a fully grown human female made from the rib of the aforementioned male
3. all sorts of animals made from nothing
4. a talking serpent, who unlike modern snakes has legs
5. a story to explain the current social order that people dwell in, i.e. why women have pain in childbirth, or why men have to plant crops
6. a man who lives for 1,000 years
7. a man who walk with god and vanishes never to be seen again
8. male demi gods mating with human females and creating a race of giants( I guess no female demi gods were available to mate with and I figure the female demi gods didn't want to mate with human males anyway)
9. a giant ark with a male and female of every animal in the world, predator and prey, great and small...from aardvark to zebra and everything else including koalas, pandas, south american pythons, tree sloths, tigers, polar bears, and penguins
10. six people repopulate the entire planet, including the most remote places where humans dwell
11. a magical battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil
12. magical talismans to protect people from the death god
13. magical weapons that can transform to animals and back
14. magical power to control the outcome of a battle based on arm position
15. a magical object that causes the waters of a sea to split apart
16. people having the ability to make a golden calf statue in the middle of the desert, taking the time to dig a pit to refine, heat the gold, melt the gold, cast it into a form, cool it off and have time to worship it, all in a matter of moments
17. If the lord kept striking the israelites with plagues, how did any of them make it out of the desert alive?
18. A talking donkey
19. Giant people and giant fruit
20. a super powered trumpet that can destroy fortified walls
21. the sun standing still because a man told it to do so
22.a superpowered strong man whose strength lies in his hair.
23. This same strong man also killed a lion with his bare hands
24. a king seeking a medium to talk to a dead wise man
25. This dead wise man come back as a ghost and talks to the king
26. Virgin birth
27. Virgin sacrifices(virgin animals and virgin humans) to appease god
28. gods wagering over the life a human
29. reanimated zombie corpses coming back from the dead with magical words
30. demons battling demi-gods over human souls
30. a final battle pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil

I know I left out many more bizarre, macabre, unbelievable elements from the good book, but this is just a start to get you thinking...enjoy !

Zombies and Ritualized Cannibalism in the "Good Book"

The further away I get from christianity, the more I realize how sick and twisted it is. The belief system is based off of a reanimated corpse returning to the land of the living and how you need to eat his reanimated flesh in order to have a place with him. This article points out the zombie references in the so-called "good book".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-gilmour/biblical-zombie-scenes_b_1643970.html?utm_hp_ref=religion

Christianity Does Not Care About Truth

I just read this article on exchristian.net and I would like to share it...

http://new.exchristian.net/2012/06/christianity-does-not-care-about-truth.html

Trapped in the Closet Pt. 1-Telling my Parents

I have followed the path of reason now for about eighteen months. However I have only shared my deconversion with a few close family members. I have felt, to quote an R. Kelly song, "Trapped in the Closet." I come from a strong, close knit,christian family where I have many relatives who are pastors, evangelists, and church leaders. My parents are also ministry leaders. My mom is a preacher(who says she hasn't been called yet) and my father is a deacon. My parents are well respected in the baptist church community here in the Motor City.

So out of respect for my parents' notoriety, I have kept silent. Keeping silent has proven to be most difficult. When I would visit them, they would talk about god and how he sits on the throne. I would just nod my head. However, I would really want to say, "No he isn't because he does not exist in reality outside of your thoughts!" But I don't want any trouble or be accused of disrespecting the faith of my ancestors who trusted god.
My sister(who is a non-christian deist) advised me against telling my parents. She said the devastation could potentially send them to an early grave.

Let me give a bit of context. My parents reared and trained me to be a church leader, i.e. a pastor. I was giving speeches(mini sermons) at the age of five. By the time I reached eight, I was teaching bible lessons to adults and children. I was being prepped for church greatness. In my early twenties, I was chosen to go to Zimbabwe and perform christian rap at the World Baptist Alliance Youth Conference. Until 2007, I worked in church as a ministry leader, sunday school teacher, and director of the music ministry. My parents know that I no longer attend church, but they think it's just a phase...So for me to tell my parents, that I no longer believe would be difficult at best. What is even more difficult is sharing that I no longer believe any gods, christian or otherwise.

In my community(the African-American community) like in many other communities, folks don't attend church on a regular basis, but they believe in jesus and pray often. At a minimum, they believe in some type of higher intelligence that designed the universe and everything in it. christianity in the black community is tied to the legacy of slavery as well as the hope for freedom. To step away from that emotional baggage takes lots of courage. I am free from faith, but I fear; like many others who have similar stories, that I will lose the respect of my parents,, family, and loved ones. I know they will love me, but what good is love without respect?

Using a Dating Website as a Black Male Atheist

After ending a long term relationship in 2008, I started toying with the idea of getting on a dating website. After many months of having a basic profile, I decided to upgrade to the paid subscription. The first thing I noticed was that there were very few females who identified as atheist, and none of them were black. This didn't surprise me because I am the only black atheist I know. Many black women identified themselves as Christian who were looking for other Christians. I also ran into this phrase while reading their profiles, "He must believe in God or don't contact me..." The market for successful Black Men who are atheists is quite slim. Not surprisingly, my profile did not get a lot of hits. So I tried a different approach. I changed my "faith status" from atheist to spiritual not religious( I don't even know what that really means, but I think it is a catch all phrase to make some people feel good about no longer going to church) Once I made that change, my profile started blowing up, I was getting all types of winks, emails, and IM's from all over the place. Inevitably once I told them that I was faith-free, the conversation would go no further. I enjoyed getting all of the attention, but I wasn't being true to myself. So I put my status back to atheist and my page has become a barren wasteland.
I made a bet with a close relative(who is an ex christian, but more of a deist), that I would not be able to get a date due to my freedom from faith. She believes that women just want a good man, regardless of their beliefs. So far, we both are correct. If it is a person from my past, my faith-free lifestyle really doesn't matter. However, if it's a new person, then it's a BIG deal...often they will give me the polite cold shoulder. I usually don't bring up my humanistic values unless I see potential. It seem like it would be easier for me to say that I have a criminal record than it is for me to say, I just don't believe in your god, or any god for that matter.
I wonder have any of my fellow free thinkers have run into these challenges. I will talk more about dating in future blogs...

Introduction

Greetings, I have finally decided to create my blog. I will be talking about the struggles of being an atheist in a very religious community among other things. At some point, I will share my deconversion story, but parts of it will always come out in my blogs. I hope you enjoy reading it.