That church marquee reminds me of a Baptist church near my home; every week they’ve got another scary saying on it.
One week it was: Your Sins are due on judgment day/and there will be hell to pay.
Another week it was: What if God doesn’t think of you as good as you think you are? [bad syntax, I know]
And recently it was this: Not preaching about hell doesn’t make it go away.

I can’t fathom why anyone would attend church or return to it because of this fearmongering—but that’s me.

OH, sure! We hung on every word in the news that touched on either country, and interpreted every flutter in the breeze as a harbinger of this apocryphal invasion. Gog and Magog, and battlefields running with blood, the seven years of tribulation, the Antichrist taking the throne of an international government, the Mark of the Beast, and on and on.

Of course, we’d all have been raptured by that time, so it was pretty much armchair entertainment for us. As Dave Dickerson says in the radio segment I mentioned on the other thread, conservative evangelicalism is appealing in part because it’s scary. And exciting. And scary and exciting all rolled up together!

I will also have my own personal 9/11 story up some time this week.

I am anxious to hear it, Stacy. But you should know that every time I click on your website, my computer freezes. It just comes to a crashing halt. Just so you know…

StaCy sez:

Impossible Syncronicity (God) answered me “randomly” out of hundreds of pages in the bible… only to show me 9/11CLEARLY in the book of daniel…

Stacy, just so you know, that was random. Have you ever heard of Jack VanImpe? That man is truly amazing. He has memorized an enormous part of the Bible, and has this amazing talent for taking any newspaper headline and matching at least 5 scriptures to it to show how the Bible ‘predicted’ it. After reading so much Hal Lindsay in the 1970′s (Remember when the Soviet Union was going to invade Israel, anyone?), I think I have gotten pretty good at that skill myself.

I am interested to read your story Stacy, but the Bible has no more prophetic or fortelling power then your local newspaper horoscope. You know how you can fit any horoscope reading to fit nearly any personality? Same with the Bible. Really.

I hope you keep us updated with the pastor’s response!

Karen, LaShawn, thanks for asking. No reply from Pastor Warmath, and no indication from the WordPress stats that the link I sent him has been clicked on. Ah Well, that is no biggie – I was not really expecting any reply back, and he probably has much better things to do with his time.

And I am not that upset anymore after I had a chance to vent here, and to my wife.

I really think I am onto something here though. I think that sometimes the faithful acts like nuts the way they do because they are so damn afraid of their own god. I can just see so much neurosis that stems from that because I sure felt the pain of it for so many years. HA – I guess in a way I am still feeling that pain, otherwise I would not have been compelled to write this article, huh?

Karen suggests:

Perhaps a book: “Journey of an Apostate” ?

Oh dear!! No, No, thanks for the compliment, but these are just my own rants and raves that are among a growing number on the internet. I am content to leave them here, and hopefully in the future some Christian who is really hurting from the pain of having to believe their unsaved relatives will burn in Hell will Google something like “Doubting Christianity” and find some use and comfort in what we have written. Honestly, that is what I hope for, because that is part of my own story.

Karen:

Sam Harris makes the point (I think it’s Sam) that the reason Christianity can (mostly) today be called a religion of peace has nothing much to do with its actual theology and everything to do with the influence of secularism that came about following the Enlightenment.

That is because people gain their morality from outside, secular influences and interpret the Bible to fit that morality. And as I see more young Christians embrace worldly values, like going to the movies and listening to pop music (things that were absolutely forbidden to us Christians when I was young), I am more convinced that I am correct about that. But I think before the Enlightenment, back when the church had political power, people really were driven stark raving mad for fear of Hell, and for fear of their god.

Robert Ingersoll made this point better than I ever could back in 1874:
“Give any orthodox church the power, and to-day they would punish heresy with whip, and chain, and fire. As long as a church deems a certain belief essential to salvation, just so long it will kill and burn if it has the power. Why should the church pity a man whom her God hates? Why should she show mercy to a kind and noble heretic whom her God will burn in eternal fire?”

Another terrific post, by the way. I hope you’re keeping these together – they’d make a wonderful compilation at some point. Perhaps a book: “Journey of an Apostate” ? Seriously – not very many books out there for deconverters, and the market for such is definitely growing!

And so far in my readings, I get the impression that Islam is nothing more then a violent rejoinder to Judaism and Christianity. Over and over again, the Qu’ran commands the faithful Muslim to kill the ‘people of the book’, or at the very least to make their lives so miserable that they have no choice but to convert. And what is the ultimate incentive? Eternal damnation promised by Allah. It seems every third verse of the Qu’ran contains threats of eternal Fire, not only for the infidel, but the wavering Muslim who dares leave the faith.

Interesting. I just finished “Infidel” by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an apostate from Islam (she made a film with Theo Van Gogh, who was killed by a radical Muslim in Holland). Fascinating book. She makes the same conclusion that you do, above, and her take on Islam is awfully dreary – particularly for women!

Of course, just as with Christianity, there are those who take the Koran literally and precisely, and those moderates and liberals who don’t. Unfortunately, just as with Christianity, the “fundies” are far louder are more dangerous than are the moderates.

Christianity had its dark and violent days, and thankfully those are mostly days of the past. However, Christianity is in no way a ‘Religion of Peace’, and placing it in such stark contrast to Islam only exacerbates the problem, in my humble view.

Sam Harris makes the point (I think it’s Sam) that the reason Christianity can (mostly) today be called a religion of peace has nothing much to do with its actual theology and everything to do with the influence of secularism that came about following the Enlightenment. It’s the nonreligious thinking that helped transform the religious thinking into something less barbaric, and allowed Christianity to adapt and evolve.

But for hundreds of years Christianity engaged in horrific, bloody purges of apostates and violence between Protestant and Catholic and other minor sects, just as Islam is engaged now in the Sunni – Shiite conflict. It’s just that Christianity was in Europe and thus influenced by the Enlightenment over the last 400-500 years and the spread of secularism that started with philosophers like Hagel. Islam, physically distant and culturally separated from Europe, never had that exposure to secular thinking.

I don’t know how valid that theory is, but it makes sense to me. I’m sure Salahudin will correct us if we’re off base here.