(March 29, 2012 at 12:57 pm)ch3131 Wrote: Hello all, I am excited to say that I am now an atheist after being a baptist for my entire life. A brief intro about me. I am 23 years old and finishing up at University of California Riverside. In a sense I had always felt skeptical about religion but the support structure of my church was well designed to confront my disbelief with solidarity to keep me from questioning further. My deconversion happened ironically at a church retreat. On the last night everyone is usually pumped up with fervor and energy. There is singing, jumping, crying, etc. Usually I am part of it but I decided to just observe this time. I watched as the people held out their hands with tears in their eyes and shouting and yelping praise and I said to myself this looks just like North Korea. It didn't help that I went to a Korean church and everyone there was Korean. However not every deconversion is a single event. I went online and decided to research and like a lot of you here, Christopher Hitchens came up. That man changed my life. I started questioning god (I don't capitalize god anymore) and studying. I still have so much to learn and I hope you guys can help me along. Thank you.
Welcome to the forum. If you have any questions, or have any wisdom you'd like to share, don't hesitate to speak up.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
