Thanks to a blog I follow routinely, Defaithed, I just stumbled on a new blog, Adams' Naked Truth. There are only two posts total, but boy howdy!
The first is a long letter written by Adam Vigansky to friends and family explaining why and how he was able to cast aside a lifetime of dedication to Jesus, God, the Holy Ghost Spirit and Christian Fundamentalism.
It's called "An Open Letter to my Christian Friends" and it pulls no punches.
Excerpts:
In Genesis 9, Noah gets drunk and passed out naked and God said nothing about it. But his son Ham tells his brothers about it and as a result Noah curses all Ham’s descendants with being slaves. Talk about over doing it! “Righteous” Lot (2 Pet. 2:7) offers his daughters to the men of the town to be raped, and then later they each commit incest with their drunken father. Yet there was not a word from God about these sins, and yet Lot’s wife looks over her shoulder while fleeing Sodom’s destruction and is punished by God and turned into a pillar of salt (Gen.19). Which is worse – lying, drunkenness, offering your daughters to be gang raped by strangers, incest, or looking over your shoulder? It is human curiosity to look when something unusual is happening – such as an accident on the side of the road. Lot’s wife is punished with death by salt (?) simply for being inquisitive. Again, the woman in the story gets the worst of it.Okay, that's the God of the Old Testament, back when he was being kind of dick. But surely the God of the New Testament is not like that. He's all light and ponies and kittens and love your neighbor stuff, right?
The God of Revelation has the worst traits of Hitler, Kim ll Sung, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin and Osama Bin Laden all rolled into one. Hitler’s ovens burned the dead bodies and were finite, but God’s fiery ovens burn His living victims for eternity. According to Christian beliefs, both Hitler and his ‘unsaved’ Jewish victims will be roasting together in the endless torments of Hell! Think about it. Is that a good God? Is this justice? No.There's a lot more to it, and even though it is rather lengthy, it's worth reading. The description of his journey from Fundamentalist Believer to Freethinker is fascinating. Also worth reading are the comments, wherein a number of True Believers try to take him to task and bring him back to Jesus. Unsuccessfully, I might add.
Posts
3 Comments:
I will have to add those blogs to my roll.
There is a lot of really ugly stuff in the Bible. Rapes galore, especially once you get past the early, well-known parts of the Old Testament. The slavery thing gets ugly (as long as the slave you beat doesn't die right away, you'rte okay, as it turns out...).
I know a lot of people have found great comfort and love from it. And it was probably incredibly loving and progressive for people in the bronze Age. But holding your morality strictly to that today wouldn't seem to make one quite as morally elevated as people tend to believe.
Thanks for the attention. I appreciate it.
Glad to do it, Adam!
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