RE: Stuck
April 17, 2012 at 1:11 am
(This post was last modified: April 17, 2012 at 1:21 am by orogenicman.)
Quote:Yeah I've been meaning to just let it all out because I'm not comfortable at the moment. I just can't really predict what the consequences of that will be and this is what's stopping me from letting it all out.
No one is saying that it will be easy. Life is rarely simple, and never easy. Most likely, it will be very hard at first. But if your family and friends truly care about you, they will accept you for who you are not for what you believe. If not, then they probably weren't worth the trouble to begin with.
Quote:What I fear the most about this happening is that I will most likely damage their faith more than what they will influence me. I already saw this happen when I decided to test a theist friend by letting out a miniscule amount of what I think is truth. We were discussing something to do with the Gospels and I half intentionally blurted out that church tradition gave the nameless authors labels. He looked at me funny and said 'read the top of every page. it tells us who wrote it!'. Immediately I had to put the brakes because already I could tell that conversation wasn't going to end well. They're all so fragile and any conversation about what I think will most likely destroy them.
If they truly believe, then nothing you can say will change that. If they don't, then it could influence their beliefs in unpredictable ways. But I have to ask you this: If you no longer believe, and coming out destroys their faith, why is that a bad thing for them but not for you? Ridding oneself of one's delusions is only a bad thing if one does not have the motional stability to deal with it. Bt my own experience tells me that losing faith does not happen overnight. It tok me years to confront the fact that I don't believe. It took even longer to get the nerve to tell others that I don't believe. It was only when I realized that I never truly believed and was only going through the motions to satisfy the wishes and desires of others did I finally break the cycle. And make no mistake, they are trying to control what you believe. I don't believe they have a right to do that. It is your inailienable right to hold to your own beliefs. After all, as Thomas Paine once said:
"It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving, it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe."
'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
