The de-Convert « de-conversion

Posts filed under 'The de-Convert'

The myth of the virgin birth of Jesus

We have spent a considerable time on this blog, addressing Biblical myths. HeIsSailing wrote on several myths of the Bible including the Leviathan, the creation story, the tower of Babel, the origins of languages, and the Crucifixion story. I compiled an entry on the Exodus and wrote a short blog on the myth of the devil. Richard most recently wrote on the Apocalypse.

An interesting myth that is widely embraced by the Christian church today is the story of the impregnation of a young Jewish woman by YHWH 2000 years ago. The Apostles Creed includes the lines:

Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary

There are several issues with the story of the virgin birth. The first, of course, is the parallel of this story with many other such conceptions of “gods” over the course of history. I read one Christian’s rebuttal this argument which stated that this is in fact more of a declaration of its truth since the devil always tries to counterfeit truth. Well, he had quite a head start on this one.

The second is the genesis of the virgin birth story itself. The first person to write about an individual named Jesus was Paul, the Apostle. In his letters, there is no mention of the virgin birth of Jesus. One would think if this was such an important doctrine to be embraced as a core belief of Christianity, it would be trumpeted by Christianity’s greatest evangelist…

Continue Reading 48 comments November 1, 2009

“No God” #1 trending topic on Twitter

In a classic case of irony, Christians tried to get the statement “No God, No Peace. Know God, Know Peace” to trend today on Twitter.

The result of this effort was the phrase “No God” became the #1 trending topic.

Please understand that atheists have been trying for months to get an atheist related topic to trend and this one was gifted to us.

“God” must be looking out for us Of course, I should note that the phrase really should be “Know God. No Peace. No God. Know Peace.”

- The de-Convert

Updates:

The originator of the initial tweet is reported to be @RevRunWisdom. Thanks Rev Run!!!!!

We are officially declaring Oct 20th as “No God Day!” We’ll celebrate again next year.

In an apparent attempt to slow the increase traffic to Twitter (lots of the “fail whale” page today). after trending all day as #1, the “No God” hashtag was removed from the trending topic list even though my tests show that it’s still the #1 trending topic. Then as a part of the cover-up, Twitter listed “no god” as being synonymous with “Know God” and displayed it as “Know God.” Of course, this is backfiring as there are now new cries of “CENSORSHIP!!!!”

We were quoted in the Washington Post

85 comments October 20, 2009

My surgery: A test of my non-faith

On Monday, 12 October, a few days after my 44th birthday, I had surgery on my cervical spine to replace two degenerative discs. This could almost be classed as an emergency surgery since I started having severe pain three weeks prior when my left C7 nerve root became impacted. There were two large left paracentral disc protrusions which caused impingement of the spinal cord. From my initial visits to my doctor, there it was an MRI on the 2nd, consultation w/my doctor on the 5th, consultation with a Neurosurgeon on the 6th, pre-op on the 7th, and surgery on the 12th. Bottom line, it all happened pretty quickly for me. I should note that I have not been in a hospital since birth and have enjoyed a relatively healthy life that has never included this type of pain (I don’t even get headaches).

This is my first crisis since de-conversion and I must say it was a good, solid test of my non-faith. In this blog, we have discussed the fact that dealing with crisis is one of the major reasons humanity has created gods and developed religious beliefs. I was faced with my first challenge of dealing with crisis without having my imaginary deity to run to for security, comfort and the general “it’s going to be alright.”

The other issue I faced was my response to my Christian family and friends. Even though it was difficult at times, I was respectful and said “amen” and “thank you” to the many prayers I received. I realized early on that they needed to say those prayers not to necessarily make me feel better but to allow them to feel secure about my surgery and that I’d be ok. Initially, their prayers were for my healing (I come from a Pentecostal/Charismatic background). I wanted to explain to them that God doesn’t perform these types of miracles (where degenerative discs are regenerated) but I did not. I wanted to explain to them that the only miracles God performs are the once that are scientifically possible (like cancer going into remission, etc.) but, of course, I kept those thoughts to myself. I wanted to challenge them to find ONE instance where an arm or a leg was grown back via a miracle knowing that there are no such cases…

Continue Reading 19 comments October 17, 2009

Do YOU believe the Bible is true?

7 comments August 3, 2009

Walking away from Christianity gaining in popularity

theBEattitude recently posted a post on his blog entitled “Losing my religion. Why I recently walked away from Christianity.“ For the past few days the post has been one of WordPress’ top posts. According to the author on his Twitter account, he’s had over 50,000 hits in a two day period. The post has generated over 900 comments as of this writing.

Our humble blog has seen over 1,000,000 hits in our first 2 years of existence and almost 30,000 hits in the past week alone. We’ve had almost 25,000 comments since our inception. Other similar sites such as Debunking Christianity and ExChristianDotNet continue to also be very popular sites.

Due to this phenomenon, we are in the process of relaunching our community site to be more of a social networking site where we can in essence build a community of apostates, de-converts, ex-Christians, or whatever label you wish to wear.

Here’s to this new trend! Why do you think this is becoming such a popular decision?

- The de-Convert

69 comments June 1, 2009

Happy 2nd Anniversary d-C!

To celebrate our 2nd Anniversary, 1,000,000 page views, and 22,000+ comments, I’d like to highlight a few of the images posted on this blog by our contributors. These images give a great summary of the general topics of our posts for the past 2 years:

Redemption
[Art by Jim Huger from Dead To Rights, a parody of Jack T. Chick's tract]