I personally am a Christian. I think you need to state more so WHAT sort of topic you want to debate about. I remember once I popped on to IRC and someone proposed the question, "Do islams and Christians have the same god?", and a debate came out of that.
You have a point. I didn't have any particular direction in mind when making this thread. And to be honest, i don't really have any ideas for a particular direction right now. Just whatever comes up, I guess.
Why arn't you a Christian anymore?
It's a really long story, so I'll try to give the short version.
Gold Coast Christian Camp was a camp I attended almost every summer. It was great, and I always felt like I was getting closer to Jesus and building a personal relationship with him when I was there. Not to mention, the people were really cool and I made a lot of friends. The counselors were great too. But let me back up a bit. From time to time, while I was a Christian, I was taught to 'question my faith', to test it, to ask God to show himself to me, to let me know that he really is there and really does care about me. And I did, and I felt like he was talking to me or like I felt his presence at least. Anyway, I think the real turning point was after I read Dante's Inferno and some of Dante's Purgatorio. Epic poems, but mythology. Around the same time, I decided I was going to start reading my Bible (because I felt like I didn't do that often enough). And I just flipped to a random book, which turned out to be Ezekiel. And I started reading it. And what I was reading sounded like mythology, like something I would read in The Odyssey or The Vedas, or some other Epic poem or mythology story. That's when it first hit me. 'maybe the Bible isn't meant to be taken completely literally. Maybe just some stuff is historical and some is just supposed to be metaphor, like the mythology parts are metaphorical. After this, I got to thinking more about it. I started watching atheist deconversion stories on YouTube (I don't remember why I did this in the first place), and I found them extremely interesting. It was like what they were saying was so new to me, these ideas were so different. So I started questioning my faith even more. I started to ask God to show me that he exists, to give me a sign to let me know that he was with me. And he never did. This is when I first thought 'Maybe god doesn't exist'. And for about...6 months, I think, I changed my views to strictly agnostic. I didn't know if there was a god or not, and I didn't think it was fair to myself to claim there was one when I really wasn't sure anymore. During this time I started to study flaws and contradictions in the Bible, and one concept I remember thinking about was 'God doesn't follow his own rules' (I'm not gonna elaborate). This got me kind of thinking about things like 'is God a sinner, then?' and stuff like that. Just critically thinking about ideas and principles of my faith. That year, at camp my counselor was a guy named Steven, who was also the pastors son at my friends church. And he was seriously the coolest counselor I ever had. I told my cabin mates that I was agnostic, and my counselor was just incredibly supportive. He told me he knew what I was going through and that I had to like figure things out for myself and stuff. Not long after camp I started thinking more and more. And I don't remember when it happened exactly, but I spoke out loud "I am an atheist". And it made sense. It was weird, and it felt extremely awkward, but it was the truth, and I realized it at that moment. I was an atheist, and there was nothing I could do about it. It was simply what made sense at that time.
I should clarify, I was never taught that the Bible was 100% literal, but I was taught that it was 100% true. I knew that some story's were only meant as parables, but I never thought of it as mythology before that point.
That's the short version, I probably could have written pages on everything that happened.
Pantheism is essentially the ideology that god is the natural world. Now, I don't want to speak for NeedReality, so I will let him make any clarifications he needs to.
I'm a Muslim.
I agree that a discussion about religion over the internet is a really, really bad idea. There was some threads like this, and it was closed, why start it again?
Sorry, I'm new here, I wasn't aware.
