(January 1, 2017 at 11:54 am)Astonished Wrote: This struck me as significant after I heard AronRa on youtube saying that for him, his faith vanished after hearing a preacher being disingenuous, with what amounted to a sentence fragment. I wonder how many people were able to be hoisted out of faith by a single spoken sentence by a theist who had no idea what they were doing?
For me it was my uncle. We were on our way out of a grocery store walking to his car to head home when I was about 10 or maybe a little younger. Somehow the conversation went in the direction of the world being dangerous, and I agreed that the world had a lot of evil people. My uncle managed to kill my faith brutally with what he said next: "We're all evil." Okay, first of all, you don't say that to a child, EVER. For any reason. That anyone, let alone an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving god would view a child in such a way, was impossible even for my preadolescent brain. I spent a lot of years pretending and going through the motions but my addled zealot uncle knew not what he wrought.
Anyone else experience anything like this, where a single fraction of a paragraph was just so appalling, or shocking, or hurtful that there was no need for further reflection to reject their faith entirely?
Nothing in my past was hurtful enough to leave Catholicism at 13. A priest did get belligerent with me once but that was not as hurt. It was a challenge. One sentence did inspire me though :
"Imagine there's no heaven" of course the rest - "It's easy if you try , no hell below us, above us only sky".
God thinks it's fun to confuse primates. Larsen's God!
