Sure, Haig, I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Just to clear some stuff that may bother some people, when I said "famous" I didn't mean to single them out because they're famous but because they write books and get mentioned in articles or TV or DVD extras and so on and I happen to hear/ read it
Here's another moving one by not very famous person, Timothy Michael Short, who wrote about losing his faith why he was in Liberty University:
Just to clear some stuff that may bother some people, when I said "famous" I didn't mean to single them out because they're famous but because they write books and get mentioned in articles or TV or DVD extras and so on and I happen to hear/ read it
Here's another moving one by not very famous person, Timothy Michael Short, who wrote about losing his faith why he was in Liberty University:
Quote:The Koran was like a piñata we could beat all day long and it would drop isolated, embarrassing passages to the ground below. But couldn’t someone do the same thing to the Old Testament Yahweh? There were dozens if not hundreds of passages that seemed to paint the same or similar picture. Murder, slavery, cruelty. Seemingly arbitrary and random behavior. There had to be an explanation where God came out smelling like roses.
Foreman went on to give the Christian answers but more than ever, I felt disappointed with them. Dr. Foreman was now giving me the same excuses for God’s “terrorism” that I expected from the students. “It was a very different time, Class. Very different. Words like genocide are serious words. Was the intent to wipe out a people group? Did the intent matter? What was God doing there? One could excuse their behavior on account of how primitive they were…but isn’t God perfect? Would God tell primitive people do behave at the level of their heathen peers? Isn’t God supposed to bring people to higher standards of living rather than let them wallow in evil or worse yet—command evil? Why would God stoop so low and command barbaric and tribal violence instead of bequeathing some of that counter-intuitive love dogma that Jesus teaches later on? Did forgiveness and humility become good traits? Are things like genocide really wrong or only when God doesn’t command them? If God had done even one thing that was objectively wrong, then he wouldn’t be God. It would disqualify Jesus’ perfection. It was a major deal. The extreme wing of the Muslim world had stayed true to the character of their God and his violent whims while Christianity had become watered down and diluted over the years by societal progress and science. I knew that thinking questions like these would lead me to entertaining blasphemous ideas in my mind. This is where the brave Christian goes in his struggle for faith.
The Holy Spirit was bearing witness in my heart that God was real, but what did that mean? The title of Dawkins book included the word delusion for a reason. It is possible that sane and rational person can draw a terribly wrong conclusion if given enough supporting evidence. Maybe I had some religion drilled so deeply into my brain that I was just confused and deluded? Jehovah’s Witnesses and Muslims and Scientologists can all feel internal peace and confirmation when they listen to their own celebrities preach…they couldn’t all be right! Maybe my warm fuzzies and guilty feelings were not from the Holy Spirit. Maybe I was a nice guy with a conscience. The rest could be explained by the strictness of my upbringing.
I didn’t have a minor crisis of faith. It was significant. God did evil things—things objectively wrong regardless of culture or chronology—then how could I choose to love and worship him? All of the defenses given for Yahweh were the same ones current Muslims could give for Allah. And we never listen to those guys!
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
