Hi Jeanie

I used to pray all the time but I came to realize that I was talking to myself so I stopped. Sounds trite but it’s true. They say talking to yourself is a sign of madness unless you claim to be praying.

If you really believed that saying few really cool words over a slice of week old Pizza would turn it into the body of Elvis I think most people would agree that you’re crazy but if you believe pretty much the same thing on a Sunday in church you’re probably just catholic. It’s all about perspective.

The short answer to what happened to my faith was that I was into science, it was really cool that it could show us so much about the world and that it was based on evidence that anyone could examine for themselves if they wanted to. I love stretching my mind, getting into and trying to understand complex and difficult fields of science, trying to nut out what makes the world tick, it’s just the most amazing buzz. I also read the bible, cover to cover (twice so far) and as I did this I started to notice more and more that the bible contradicted things that I had really strong evidence to believe were true. I asked myself how could this be, I asked other people, no one could come up with good answers. I got so many answers like Russ T’s avoidance or blathering but nothing based on good reason and evidence to show why the bible should be believed when it contradicted so much really solid evidence. I couldn’t accept the idea that it was just allegory, that the bible was carrying an important message even if the details were wrong so I lost my faith. I’ve been an atheist since.

Did I really believe is a question I get asked a lot and the simple answer is yes, with all my heart I believed the bible was The Truth, that God was real and that he cared deeply about me etc.

Anger is a very common answer to atheism and I’ve met angry atheists though anger seems far more prevalent among religious people at least on these discussion boards. I think Margret Thatcher of all people said it best. “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.” I think it’s more general than just resorting to Add Homonym but that’s the most obvious part of it, when people here ridicule my ideas without answering them with evidence, when they appeal to other people’s speeches and video’s without putting their own thoughts into the discussion then I realize that they don’t really have a well founded position to stand on, they are grasping at straws to try to support a failed position and the anger, the derision, the ridicule etc is all just part of that desperation.

Is it laziness that prevents some people from getting into the evidence in any depth and formulating their own ideas? Is it ignorance that has them presenting the same arguments over and over even when the flaws in them have been pointed out and what is the source of the anger and derision we see in posts here?

All the best Jeanie

Russell