I’ve always felt that it’s important to thank those that help you become the person you are. My parents for taking care of me as a child and instilling my sense of ethics and morals. My friends for allowing me to learn about myself as I grew older. And my wife for accepting me for what I am and not expecting me to become something I’m not nor will ever be.
But there is a group of people on a forum that I need to thank publicly. Almost two years ago I joined ChristianForums.com because I was beginning to doubt Christianity. At the same time I also joined some other forums; some Christian, some not; to try and get as wide a range of thoughts as possible. I believe what I experienced at ChristianForums.com had more to do with my deconversion from Christianity than any other forum or anything else I read. And there’s no way that I can thank the members at CF enough for treating me in such a way that my mind is now free of Christianity.
First I want to thank the administrators at CF for setting up such a restrictive environment so that anything I said with my Agnostic icon attached to was automatically discounted as incorrect. Thank you for setting up the rules so that I cannot post answers in the “Questions by non-Christians” board, even though you allow Christians to start threads which is also against the rules. The hypocrisy in your enforcement of rules fit in perfectly with the way most Christians I have met act.
Next I want to thank the moderators that deleted any post that didn’t follow the censoring rules. Sure, I understand the need for a forum to have terms of service and weed out spam, pornography, and other junk. But I had a message deleted that was in response to someone having serious problems. My response was something along the lines of “I asked my pastor the same question and he told me…” I didn’t say anything about me disagreeing with the answer, although I did disagree with it. I answered exactly as I would have 2 months earlier when I was still sitting in a Baptist Church every Sunday morning. But because I had an Agnostic icon, my response was automatically discounted and deleted.
And last I want to thank the members at ChristianForums.com. Thank you for answering my questions with cliches and the standard Christian garbage that I heard while sitting in the pews. Thank you for giving me predictable answers to questions that I wasn’t even asking instead of looking at the problems I was having with Christianity and actually posting something that would help. And thank you for spouting homophobic, racist, and sexist comments at every opportunity. Those are three traits I certainly don’t want to be associated with and unfortunately was during my time as a Christian. Thank you for making me see that I was homophobic, racist, and sexist so that I could break free of that.
And I’m sure I’ll get some comments here defending CF, or Christianity in general. I’ve found that Christians tend to swarm when there’s something they don’t agree with. If you want to have an intelligent conversation, by all means leave a comment. But if all you want to do is spout the same junk that I read over at CF, save us both the time and don’t bother – I’ve heard it all before. There’s no cliche you can send, no Bible verse you can quote, no story from your life that you can tell that will convince me that Christianity is “the Truth”. I’ve read too much, learned to much, and looked into myself too much to ever be again able to swallow the lie that is Christianity.
