Posts filed under 'LeoPardus'
The death of a pet (and how it relates to religion)
07/02/09 [A draft written in some haste, so bear with me if it's not polished.]
Why is the death of a pet so hard on us animal lovers?
Today, in my home, we are facing the death of my daughter’s much beloved, 8-year-old calico cat Chip. She was my daughter’s 8th birthday present. Of course she’s much too young to die. We expected many more years with her sweet, purry, nature. Now this beautiful creature will pass from our lives before sunset. For whatever reason her kidneys have failed, and there is nothing that can be done. It quite took us by surprise. We have a photo of her walking about in the yard less than a week ago and she seemed OK then.
Today Chip is here. She’s so lethargic. We’ll take her to be put down once the summer school day is over and everyone is home. Right now we are so quiet. At various times we sit down and pet the little sweetheart and tell her how sorry we are for this, and tell her how much she is loved and always has been. We think how shocked we feel that one who so recently was wrestling with her fellow cat could now be so obviously ill and dying.
How and why does all this hurt so?…
Continue Reading 11 comments July 2, 2009
My steps out of Christianity
[This post has been sitting in my files for a while. Finally pulled it out and "finished" it. Writing never really seems finished, does it?]
Noting that my journey out of Christianity is different from most (in fact, unique in my experience so far*), I took some time to try to recall the steps I took over the years. I list them here in no particular order (though they are roughly chronological). *For any who don’t know, my path was, very briefly: “saved” at 19; evy/fundy for many years; converted to Eastern Orthodoxy for about 3 years; left the faith entirely.
- I sought to base my morality, politics, and behaviors in more than just, “the Bible or my church says so”. After all, if something is right, it ought to be right for everyone, Bible or no Bible. I mean isn’t that what’s really meant by, “the absolute truth of God”?
Funny thing is that I did this right from the beginning of my Christian life. So maybe I was just doomed from the outset eh?
- I got sick of the shallowness. Those damn praise choruses [“Jesus I luuuuv yew. Jesus I neeeeed yew. Jesus I luuuuv yew. Yes I doooo.”] are just drivel. So is the “Jesus, my buddy” flatulence. There’s just gotta be more to a faith than lousy songs and Forest Gump level theology. This garbage was/is growing by leaps and bounds throughout Protestant churches, and was even making headway in some Catholic parishes.
- I got it through my head that young-earth creationism was WRONG. I.e. that evolution did happen, that the fossils were really old, that the flood of Noah was not global, that dinosaurs and humans never lived together, that the speed of light is in fact a constant, and so on. (I can’t tell you how humiliating it is to admit that I was idiotic enough to ever believe that crap.)…
Continue Reading 56 comments June 16, 2009
Now the kids know (about my de-Conversion)
So last week I was talking with my daughter. The conversation just kind of meandered in a way that my de-conversion came out fairly easily and naturally. She seemed to take it pretty well at the time (brought up some friends who were atheists). She was upset though, as I found out a couple days later when my wife asked me about it. Apparently daughter did some crying later.
My middle son also knows because he was in ear shot when mom and daughter were talking. He apparently just said that he liked church and his friends, and there better not be any talk of not continuing to go to church. (Of course I have no problem with this, as I’ve said around here before.)
Oldest son (in military) does not know still, and as always I’m in no hurry to tell anyone, his sibs may be the ones to tell him; who knows?
My wife did have some concern that I would now make it my project to de-convert the family. [Apparently evangelism is only OK for Christians.] To say that she does not at all comprehend where I’m at would be a severe understatement.
Anyway, it’s out now. The kids seem to be taking a ‘wait and see’ approach. Basically, if Dad is still just Dad, I guess they’ll judge everything to be OK. Not sure if they will try asking any questions directly. But at least there was no big hullaballoo.
64 comments June 5, 2009
Resurrection Challenge results
OK. As I promised, I tried the Resurrection Challenge. That’s an effort to harmonize the accounts of the resurrection of Jesus as depicted in the four Gospels, the beginning of Acts, and a short passage in I Cor 15. Of course it’s impossible to harmonize them, so what I’ve done is list each event in the order they occurred and given them numbers to show that order. Where more than one thing happened at one time, or where I couldn’t tell what happened, I added a letter to the number. So for events 1,2,3 the accounts accord OK. Then you hit 4a-d where more than one story comes out of the different accounts. As you’ll see, these differing accounts are usually mutually exclusive. Really and truly these contradictions cannot be reconciled.
Resurrection rectification effort:
1- Some women went to the tomb early Sunday morning. (Mary, Mary, Salome, more?)
2- Before the women got to the tomb, the stone was rolled away. This involved an angel descending, an earthquake happening, and guards being stunned. The guards recovered and ran off.
3- The women arrived at the tomb.
4a – (Matt) The women saw an angel outside the tomb and he told them to go in a see that it was empty…
Continue Reading 25 comments May 14, 2009
Lord Of The Rings’ Heretics
RL Wemm recently posted this analogy here on de-conversion.com in response to an anonymous theist. It seemed worthy of being its own article, so with a few touch-ups (including two italicized additions of my own), here it is. (Thanks RL.)
Then imagine that your community has deified Bilbo as the Real Son of Gandalf, and Frodo as the Real Son of Bilbo. Imagine that Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf, and Sauron have been imbued with a whole lot of magical and personal characteristics that are at variance with the descriptions of these characters provided in many sections of the Holy Books of the Rings. Imagine that your community tells you that it is the Evil Mind of Sauron that makes you aware of these inconsistencies and that dwelling on them is a sin that will result in eternal torture for you in the furnace of Mt. Doom along with the Unholy Ring…
Continue Reading 60 comments May 12, 2009
Two “miracles”
So this Sunday we had a guest priest do a sermon. [For those who don’t know, I go to church because my family believes, and because there are good people there whom I count my friends.] The priest rambles a little, then gets to what he really wants to tell us about. Two “miracles” that he has seen in the last few months.
“Miracle” 1: A ten-year-old girl had a stroke and was comatose. The priest went to see her in the hospital a day or two after the stroke. While he was praying, he gets to a point in the prayer where any Orthodox knows to cross oneself. The little girl, though still comatose, crosses herself. At the end of the prayer she does so again. (This is labeled “a miracle”.) Over the next days and weeks the “miracle” continues as she wakes up, sits up, and begins to regain control of her body.
“Miracle” 2: The priest is at a shopping center and is in his car. He puts the car in gear and pulls out of his parking spot to go across the lot to pick up his son, who he believes is playing in the snow at the far end of the lot. The priest feels his front and back wheels bump over something and jumps out to see what it is. Unbeknownst to him, the boy was right next to the car and was knocked down and run over by the wheels (at <5 MPH obviously). The priest panics and yanks the boy off the ground into a big hug and cries out. The boy gives a gasp and opens his eyes; he is apparently unharmed. They go to the hospital and doctors confirm that the boy has suffered to harm.
Now I’ve had emergency medical training and have been a biomed researcher for years. So out of curiosity, do those of you without benefit of such background see some problems with labeling these two events as “miracles”?…
Continue Reading 51 comments April 6, 2009
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