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Confessions of a former atheist


Nadjeschda

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Confessions of a former atheist

When I was still an atheist, I would go into the forums of religious people (muslims) and "educate" them by attacking their – often but not always – bizarre interpretations what the theory of evolution is. This mostly gave easy victories because I have a B.S. in environmental sciences and evolution is part of that education. The problem is, that I thought when I beat them in this one area of their knowledge I DEFEATED THEIR BELIEVE. And that without even knowing what believe is (or better having forgotten what it is, because as a small child I could be very spiritual without being a member of any religion. This is why children can very propably be saved without babtisation, they already talk automatically to god and admire him, it's called a bit degoratively "the magic phase" by science). Believe is a feeling and if you do not know it or have forgotten what it really exactly is you are in no position to criticise it. (Forgetting it is easily possible because feelings are difficult to remember when you are not in the same state -try to imagine pain when you are not in a state of pain for example. Remember that problem of "incomplete memory of feelings" if atheistic doubts about the nature of your believe should ever rise in you. Y0u are than by definition already in a state where you can not remember spirituality correctly and should hence not judge the moments when your believe was strong).

Without truly knowing and feeling believe you are like a colorblind attacking the concept of colour as form of madness. Spirituality can in my eyes be achieved through many religions, and this is where I deny absolutist interpretations of religions and propably anger many people here: Everything in this universe was created for diversity so it is unlikely that god wants to simplify that diversity and complexity now by boiling it down to a single set of rules contained in one religion. But if religions are languages that god can use to teach us spirituality and goodness there are edfinitively religious languages through which this is much harder to achieve that aim than through the words of Jesus.

Whatever your point on syncretism is the idea to outright deny the existence of the feeling of believe and spirituality as forms of self deception, seff-poisoning or madness is as psychopathic as it can get!!!!! I cannot put enough exclamation marks behind that. Outside of religion previously only psychopaths felt the need to devalue feelings of other as faible, useless and something that weakens the mind.

The problem is that people with a very low IQ can be highly spiritual and this might have to do with the fact that the mind specializes - and they have specialized in spirituality and mysticism and not in logic or in other words in saving their souls. A very worthy endeavour. I say it clearly: if seen through the lense of evolution people with mental disabilities are inferior errors of nature and useless because spirituality is claimed to be useless and they are not really very useful in other areas of life. Who instead is clearly the most useful in that mind frame is a person with a high logic IQ, good income but no spirituality at all - like Dawkins – what coincidence, that he is promoting the exact ideology that donates him such an importance over others so fanatically...

The modern world often looks more compassionate to us than the christian middle ages because through scientific progress incredible wealth has been created and illness could be defeated. But we do distribute this wealth in the most disgusting and unequal and social darwinist way possible I can imagine - possible at least as long as the world is not fully ruled by psychopaths. If compared to the poverty of other people and other times and the limitations to real aid that poverty poses we are greedy, selfish, and brute - brute in our very modern way of white and hidden violence (letting people starve while watching them from our multi-million dollar cruise ship as holiday attraction for example – if I had the choice between a medieval beheading and starving I would choose beheading as a more honest, quick and human form of killing, so much for ethical progress in "the age of reason").

I believe that religion must modernize to stay alive so not every atheistic critique should be discarded as valueless. But in an atheist mind frame we have no value for people we cannot use and exploit in some form or another. Atheist would claim: oh but we have the golden rule... But which one? If you combine the positive and negative interpretation of the golden rule as any libertarian would tell you they create logical paradoxes, paradoxes that can only be solved by a non-logic form of thinking. This emotional appraoch to ethics (which is nevery enetirely devoid of logic because we use some form of logic in every thought) is the instinct for ethics that god gave us and that not everyone is listening too sadly. The devaluation of humans is the logical consequence of denying the truth that the soul of every human is holy. In the atheist mind frame it is an object of nature and objects are there for being used - or thrown away if broken. I do not care (!) what other people think atheism does to them ethically but at least me it made a misantroph and it numbed my empathy. I was not noticing how my hybris about being able to "know" the true motives and origins of the human soul was poisoing and destroying my mind - just like drugs would destroy your ability to see that they are harming you. Yes I know atheist think that religion is a poison, I think it vice versa.

I was only able to gain the insight of the destructive effects of my ideology when god called me back. It is hybris to think to be able to reduce a human soul to a simple predictive set of logic rules dervived from the rules of evolution itself - this is propably the reason why the story about the tree of knowlegde was positioned right at the start of the bible as a warning - it is the warning that we can know and manipulate other beeings like humans and sadly god. Because why the heck do we feel the need and motivation to reduce the complex perceptions (like believe) and even entire souls to simple explanations of logic and science?! In science we want to use such reductive approaches to reduce the complexity of a situation, make it more understandable and than use this newly gained understanding to CONTROLL it for our needs and purposes. Similarly if we reduce the human mind to the simple purely logic rules of evolution, biologism and ultimatively social darwinism all we subonciously or consciously want is to gain controll over that said mind by said knowlegde (OMG! How could I not have seen this great danger bevorehand. Please forgive me Jesus, sometimes high IQ people like me are realy the most stupid folks around...). The true emotional driver here for such a shady undertaking could be either fear of the unknown in the best case or the need for true psychopathic manipulation in the worst case. Fear of the unknown - the optimistic interpretation - will be always with us. But it conflicts with the idea that atheists are supercool and lack of fear is the true reason why they do not need a god and we over-emotive believers need one ... Here you have your anwser to Dawkins and his film age of reasib: "Logic reductionism if applied to people and not to physical process is always motivated by the evil aims of wanting to have controll over such people. If you Dawkins, cannot understand that simple emotional and ethical truth there is a reason why your soul can propably not be saved - and it has nothing to do with not praying or not joining a church or whatever."

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Sorry, but there is only one God, and only one way to Him. 

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but by Me.

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1 hour ago, Nadjeschda said:

I believe that religion must modernize to stay alive....

They tried that. Now look at us. What a disaster!!

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Shalom @Nadjeschda

I can see that you are a smart person, and I feel you will be an asset to the forum going forward.

I'm glad you could see through the folly of atheism and had the will to rise above it.  But I feel there are even higher heights for you to reach as well, the more you discard your analytical mind.  I also had  highly analytical and critical mind which can be incredibly useful.  However, the negative side of it is that we are effectively "imprisoned" with bars of human intelligence.  That is to say, there is an ceiling or threshold we cannot breach.

I feel you have a mind that will be incredibly useful if fully immersed in Scripture, as I'm sure your sharpness will make intuitive connections and read meta-messages throughout.  

We are told to accept the Kingdom of God as a child.  Obviously this means with innocence but also with a simple naivety.  Practically speaking, this means a Paradigm Shift - to move our pillars of understanding and ignore the "cognitive framework" that we take for granted.    Now, I don't think this will be easy for you as you seem very smart - and the smarter you are, the bigger the challenge.   However, if you are able to restrain your natural gift, I think it will pull away some veils between you and the Bible.  Excitingly, this will give you a completely new cognitive framework to dive into!  Not one designed by men, but one designed by Elohim (God).  One that is factual, conceptual, prophetic, and mystical - all at the same time.  No other religious text can match that, only the Bible.   Again, to do a Paradigm Shift is harder to do the smarter you are, but it's certainly not impossible.   

So then, if you can forget all that man has taught you (which is still useful) and take a Paradigm Shift to put you back on Level 0... I think you'll flourish more this new framework, than in the old framework of man.  And we need you on this battlefield.

I hope some of that at least makes sense!

Love & Shalom

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I feel that you are absolutely right Tzephanyahu; I soon should really switch to a more mysthic and child like approach to religion because it was my analytical mind that let me into the ultimate trap the last time. There will be many "intelectually disabled" people (whatever that in reality is supposed to mean) that are already much fare progressed in saving my soul than me! And as Lessing said, the process of continously seeking knowlegde (and mysticism unlike science * is a good way to seek knowlegde continously) is much more interesting than having knowlegde. What do you do afterwards? Go shopping or engage in any other of the meaningless and character destroying "divertissments" of modern society? Because we ultimately live and think by seeking knowledge, not by knowing (this is maybe the real reason why children have so much live force and joy in themselves, they engage by necessity much stronger in the process of seeking knowledge). I am hence not sure if a human can even in theory attain real and ultimate knowledge about god without beeing destroyed in the same instant. Human minds are seekers of knowledge by definition (this activity of seeking is what we call consciousness, if it stops human consciouness stops) and they hence can not survive the same thinking method and knowledge that an all knowing creature can survive. After all an all knowing creature is the exact opposite of a seeking creature. In contrast to my old atheist self I feel like god gave me a great gift by not revealing me everything. As an atheist I would have considered it as a form of mockery and not necessity to be withold ultimate knowledge about god. How ungratefull and distrustfull I was! God please forgive me - for fooling myself even about my own (!) true needs and not just the needs of other as it's usual custom.

But still I am to angry to give the up the analytical mind set in the moment when it comes to atheism. Really: The scientific method was originally meant to controll feelingless processes and objects, it was apparently Freud who first wanted to apply it to living beeings and Freud frankly was evil in many respects. This method should never (!) have been used in that way. Because: What we think about us (our paradigmas about our soul) shapes said soul and hence may destroy our character and our capability to think and feel properly. In environmental studies there is something called the precautionary principle: If you have found evidence of a potentially harmfull process you do not wait to counter it until the harm is already done, the harm is irreversible and the harm proofes your original hypothesis (see climate science as an example, here we act too without final confirmation that it is necessary). Maybe the atheists are right and an allpowerfull beeing is really unconcerned about us mentally denying and attacking it - if that really would be all the harm atheism does. However the harm to the human soul which can come from perceiving itself and others as "biological robots" should not be watched until it is irreversible. Because when the mind of all humanity is destroyed to a psychopath like state by the nutty application of the scientific method to maleable non-objects (otherwise called subjects)- how shall it safe itself from that completely mentally disabled position? What kind of dangerous foolery is that...God has a solution for everything but in that state of mental destruction the only solution could be the apocalypse and I appreciate it. A mercifull empathic god will automatically be harmed whenever we harm each other and not because he is vain and jugmental anyway. It's a question of ethics and not just of "cool and feelingless" logic if we want to attack and disect the human soul in such a manner.

* In science there is an ultimate limit to knowledge and hence finding knowledge, defined by all natural laws and possible interactions between them. In short science is a destructive process and it's ultimate aim is to destroy itself by perfecting itself. We are maybe approaching this form of mind-death, because we discover more and more details, but nothing truly big. Physics for example has stalled in the last 30 years. With a god as creator of the universe there is no such limit or self-destructivness in seeking knowledge. Because he can -just as an example - change the laws of nature and our memory if it gets boring. Mysticism anyway and independent of that insight is a mind skill and hence better pictured as an infinite scale like the capability to love. Means: you can train and train it as long and as fare as you want, it never gets boring. In summary we can say that only a living mind is able to create a true infinity of knowledge, experience-and hence existence. This cannot be achieved by a liveless and abstract method like the scientific method. As a consequence the minds of the more and more rational humans might already be dying bit by bit in a form of dementia limited to emotions. After all a person with true all encompassing dementia is not noticing what it is loosing so why should you notice that you are loosing emotions and richnes of experience in general? Could it be this what is meant by hell, beeing alive and dead in the same moment ...

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I see a lot of potential in you @Nadjeschda, for apologetics and Bible studies.

It seems we agree on the limitations, and temptations, of the the scientific method.  By itself, it is simply a method of analysis, comprehension and taxonomy.  But man has shaped the course of "science" with vendetta, seeking money, accolade and denying the existence of Elohim - to free their consciences, with a twisted logic.

Indeed, the tree of the knowledge and tree of life in the Garden of Eden is still the same temptation lying before man today.   Do we seek to build up our knowledge and be "like a god", or seek life under the authority of the true Elohim, Yahweh.  One is a path of pride, the other is the path of humility.  You seem very sober to this, which is great.

Ultimately, science can only observe, test and codify.  But it cannot grasp certain principles perfectly, such as love, hate, joy, spirit and God.  Such principles can only be described with another discipline, such as philosophy, poetry and mysticism.   Yes, those limited by the discipline of science ONLY will mock.  But how foolish they are to do so.   In this we agree as you write...

27 minutes ago, Nadjeschda said:

This cannot be achieved by a liveless and abstract method like the scientific method.

... how true.  Yet it is venerated above Elohim Himself!  The Tree of knowledge is just too tempting to man.

Now, knowledge itself is not a bad thing.  The knowledge of the Bible is a very worthy thing (even though some get prideful in that too).  But I rather seek wisdom from Yahweh and His word, which is far beyond knowledge. 

Wisdom is alive, contextual, fluid, eternal and life giving.  Knowledge is digital, fixed, absolute (depending on context), and deadly - in the hands of the evil.  Wisdom we can take into our next lives.  Knowledge (especially from this world) will be counted as worthless in the world to come.

I spent many years studying psychology and learned a lot of fascinating things.  But I count it all as worthless compared to beautiful wisdom of the Word.  I'd rather be a very simple man in the Paradigm of Yahweh's world, than an intelligent, successful doctor in the Paradigm of man's world.  The former brings life, love and peace.  The latter brings emptiness, envy and pride.  Different paradigms, different endings.

Okay, I'll stop rambling!

Love & Shalom

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1 hour ago, Tzephanyahu said:

Wisdom is alive, contextual, fluid, eternal and life giving.  Knowledge is digital, fixed, absolute (depending on context), and deadly - in the hands of the evil.  Wisdom we can take into our next lives.  Knowledge (especially from this world) will be counted as worthless in the world to come.

I can not agree more, thanks for discussing this subject and god bless you!

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I came from agnostic roots. I like to use this one with "smart" atheists or "religously" evolution adherents:

I see us as a sort of "God's ant farm". You may be a really smart ant. You may be the smartest ant. But everything is relative and, at the end of the day, you'r just an ant. You are only impressing ants.

I love this from an old Genesis song:

"They're trying to find themselves an audience. Their deductions need applause."

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I feel that I have always believed in my heart and mind that there was a God. I was not brought up in a Christian home. I had a very different perspective of God than I do now. I was in control of my life and believe me I did a horrible job of it :(

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Some really excellent comments and ideas on this post. Man is/was formed in God's image for a very good reason. We share some of God's attributes and character. As His 'imagers' He knows there is much we can learn and He is very generous with what he has given us to discover for ourselves. The 'plan' of what He has designed down thru the ages is there for us to discover - and it is indeed a grand plan.

He can't really reduce Himself to think inside our box, yet He can draw us into His. What He has prepared for us is not really something we can grasp because at present we are finite beings with finite habits on a finite plane of existence. But we do get glimpses of this 'other-worldly' place from time to time; and when we do everything we think we know pales into monochrome monotony and insignificance.

So it is the glorious hope of being reunited in Eden with the Lord and all his various spiritual beings, His nations and His creations that keeps us yearning for a 'far better place'.

That is His plan A. There is no plan B.
He is totally committed to us and we become increasingly committed to Him as we learn more about Him and His Love and Character.

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