Comments | thenarrow: God Grant Me A Full House

thenarrow

God Grant Me A Full House

May 04, 2010 00:46

So my journey from devout Christian faith to liberal Christian faith to wishy washy Christian-ish faith to agnosticism to borderline atheism hasn't been as documented here as perhaps it should have been, but if anyone is wondering why, here's a Class A example. The way Christians (and people of other religions, to be fair) conceive of the world ( Read more... )

Comments 13

lostvirtue May 4 2010, 12:25:46 UTC

Welcome to my world. Er, our world. There's lots of us agnostic atheists about.

If you still want the community I highly recommend Unitarian Universalism.

thenarrow May 6 2010, 05:23:20 UTC

I went to a UU church and just couldn't get into it. Maybe it was the just the one here and others are different, but to me it seemed like everything I didn't like about Protestant Christian churches, minus the Jesus stuff. It looked just like a Protestant church inside and out, the hymns and readings were entirely too Baptist for my likings, even the sermon or whatever they called it was like a self help version of a Christian sermon with the spiritual references much more vague. I had a friend here who was a Buddhist and went to this church, for the life of me I can't understand what she could possibly get out of it. Oh well, different strokes right?

lostvirtue May 6 2010, 12:33:23 UTC

Yeah, the UU churches are ALL really different from each other. It's because each congregation votes on everything. I live in Madison and we actually have a larger secular humanist/atheist population than most areas. Our services are extremely diverse and take from a really wide range of traditions.

http://www.fusmadison.org/

s that the only one near you? Sometimes even ones on the opposite side of town can be pretty different.

thenarrow May 7 2010, 05:00:51 UTC

I'm pretty sure it's the only UU church around here. This is a relatively small city, and the surrounding area is uber country. It's weird though, we have such a diverse population, so many artists and musicians and hippies, such a hotbed of liberal views... yet travel 5 miles outside of city limits and it's like a scene from Deliverance. I guess maybe the UU church here is so similar to a Protestant Christian church so the people who go there can try to convince their neighbors that they're really not godless liberal atheist hippies and they're really just like them! lol

equustel May 4 2010, 16:50:14 UTC

I kind of love that you end that list of terrors with Justin Beiber ( ... )

thenarrow May 6 2010, 05:35:19 UTC

I think that if things really did "come back around to bite them in the ass" then I would find Christianity a lot more believable. My experience has been that in pretty much every circumstance imaginable, the bad guy wins every single time. This raises more questions for me than it answers, and makes me think that there could possibly be a god or gods who created the world and everything in it, but there's absolutely no way any god is actively involved in things. The stock Christian response is that God's ways are not our ways and some things are a mystery and when we get to heaven everything will make sense and the righteous will be rewarded and yada yada yada. I just can't buy that anymore. If a god allows all the injustice in this world to occur (or depending on how Calvinistic your theology is, causes it to occur), that terrifies me. I don't want to wait until some magical pie-in-the-sky for this all to make sense, and I don't want to take the easy way out and call it a mystery and stop thinking about it all. I find it much more ( ... )

equustel May 6 2010, 16:56:23 UTC

thenarrow May 7 2010, 05:37:21 UTC

What does the bad guy win? Pretty much anything and everything he wants. Piece of mind doesn't pay the bills. A great example is the current oil spill. BP fucked up an ecosystem, they're paying pennies of their record profits to clean it up... but what happens to the animals who die? What happens to the coastline that we may never have back again? What happens to the fishermen who lose their entire livelihood? The bad guy who caused all this gets a slap on the wrist and it's business as usual, the good guy who did nothing gets his entire life flipped upside down. Sure it's great to think that there's a BP chairman or two roasting in hell while a poor fisherman is having a banquet in heaven, but to me that's the real grasping at the air. All we can measure this life by is the here and now, regardless of your beliefs about what happens afterward. And in the here and now, the good guy gets fucked and the bad guy gets away with anything he wants ( ... )

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