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(May 9, 2015 at 1:22 pm)Rhondazvous Wrote: My soul looks back and wonders how I could have believed all that craziness.
"Believe that you receive it and ye shall have it," the man said. It was written. so when the prophet Kenneth Hagin came to my church, I went up for prayer, fully expecting that when he laid his hands on me, the power of god would flow through his hands and my ears would pop open and I'd be able to hear a gnat piss on cotton. I expected my eye sight to be so clear I could see the boogers up an ant's nose.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened, so I made excuses. My faith was the problem. Maybe what I thought was faith wasn't really. Maybe there'll be a delayed effect. Maybe I'm doing something to hinder my faith. Maybe I put my faith in the man instead of in god. Maybe everything except this stuff is a bunch of crap.
I was indoctrinated in the Word of Faith movement. Then I went to a Christian university with heavy Calvinist leanings. Trying to reconcile the teachings of these two divergent denominations nearly drove me insane. I became afraid of death. Not my death, but the death of those around me. I didn't trust god to keep people alive unless I prayed for them with faith.I didn't have enough faith for a routine healing. How was I going to have enough faith to stay the hand of the Grim Reaper? Besides I didn't know what to pray for. I prayed for one uncle and another one died.
If what I experienced weren't clinical panic attacks, they might as well have been. After a while, I got tired of putting myself through so many emotional changes. It would still be decades before I gave my "personal relationship with Jesus" the deep six, but all this laid the foundation for me to question a religion that promised the world but delivered explanations.
You got colonized by an organism that has had thousands of years to hone its infective techniques.
The religions that weren't any good at this died off.
There's no reason to take personal blame for this any more than there is to apologize for bleeding after being mauled by a bear.
I was fortunate to be raised in a protected environment and largely emerged immune.
Studying religion is a hobby like bug collecting: Similar to insect parasites, the creepy reproductive strategems of religions are entertaining to watch. Just don't let one lay its eggs in your brain.
Good luck staying in remission.
So how, exactly, does God know that She's NOT a brain in a vat?
