LOL!

Now, being forced to drive through Alice Tx and their speed traps for an eternity would certainly be a good substitute for the christian hell!

People are spiritual, it has to be faced. It is why we fall for religious mumbo jumbo in the first place - its easier than thinking for ourselves!

Short answer - I don’t know. At times, I can see how there just isn’t anything there - others, well, if ghosts were just hoaxes, they’d be easy to disprove, wouldn’t they? I’ve seen people debunk specific ghostly hoaxes, but never an overall proof that there are NO ghosts.

And if there ARE ghosts, then, obviously, there IS some sort of afterlife, huh?

No, I don’t necessarily believe in ghosts, but like I said, I’ve never seen them completely debunked, either.

I do think that there is some sort of afterlife. Why or what is something I have speculated about since my de-conversion without much success. I do NOT believe in a god of any sort, so the thought that some afterlife has some bureaucratic organization running it is ridiculous, of course, as I reject any biblical notions completely.

But could there be some natural higher plane of existence? Sure there could. But until we invent some kind of sensor that can tell us something about it, or even that it exists, that is just speculation, based upon centuries of stories, myth and pure guess about ghosts, mediums, hauntings and mostly wishful thinking.

Me? I want proof before I lay any money out on anything, much less allow someone else to try to rule my life based upon a con job.

Yes, I was raised in the First Christian Church, which is an offshoot of the First Church of Christ. I don’t know the differences, something about music and communion, I think. Never understood it and never cared.

Yes, I too had the thought that the name was kind of presumptuous! And from a young age, too!

I never had these kinds of thoughts until after I became an atheist and was able to look at christianity with open eyes no longer clouded by the twisted outlook of my childhood. And that was just in the last couple of years.

My sister and her side of the family do not know how I feel, tho my wife and kids do. That could be an issue someday, as my sister’s side are all fundies. Southern Baptist fundies, no less.

Your question seems to betray a feeling that the liberals aren’t too bad, and in some ways, by some measures, perhaps they aren’t. Many of them accept gays, reject some very literal interpretations of the bible, and so forth.

But think about it for a moment.

I know slippery slopes are intellectually suspect, but if one begins to question things that one reads in the bible as being not quite right, or just plain wrong enough to dump from one’s theology, then what the hell makes one think that ANYTHING written therein is right? Once the source comes into question through suspect information, ALL of that source’s information is automatically suspect, or should be.

Liberal christians are what I would equate to fellow travelers. They may think that they are intellectually superior to the fundies, but in reality, their acceptance of the basis for the entire religion gives aid and comfort to that movement by swelling the numbers the fundies can call christian. This gives the fundies the comfort of numbers, and the courage that comes with that comfort. It is as damaging to society as if they were fundies too.

And my opposition to religion comes from the consequences of that damage, which is wholly preventable.

I don’t hate religion. I hate what it has done, and continues to do, to our society and our civilization.

It starts out at childhood and teaches us to lie, cheat and steal.

As an organization, it was designed to oppress the masses by controlling them from birth to the grave, and in their minds, beyond the grave. It has, in that role, stolen untold amounts of money, property and labor through the extortion of the promise and threat of heaven and hell from the mass numbers of past and current generations that were and are uneducated enough to accept their mumbo jumbo at face value.

It has built itself (in the person of the RCC, but there are others as well) an empire of wealthy proportions, rich lifestyles, and political influence using that extorted money, and has not given back more than a token in return.

Through its teachings, the christian religion (but no, it wasn’t alone in this) has opposed science and its advantages, technical progress and the real life advantages it offers, up to and including contraceptives, condoms and vaccines that would improve the lives of people in third world countries across the globe.

The Judaic religions, all three of them, foster hatred, intolerance and violence that persists to this day. The entire “Middle East” problem is at its roots, religious in nature, as that territory is claimed in some form or another as holy to all three. All three have fostered terrorism through the killings of innocent lives for political reasons.

All this through the evil of a form of child abuse, which is the insidiousness of indoctrinating their children to believe their twisted clap trap before they have the ability to think on their own.

Any thinking, able adult with the native ability to examine the evidence, which wholly consists of each religions’ holy writings, should be able to see through the superstitious nonsense to the confidence game it really is.

Do I need to go on?

I don’t hate god - how can I hate something that doesn’t exist?

I don’t hate religion, but I hate everything it has done and is doing to people that are crippled from birth by their parents’ indoctrination, going all the way back to probably Constantine, and from that to the Jewish priesthood that almost literally enslaved those people.

Is that enough reason?

“Religion is the opiate of the people” is what he is quoted as saying, but that was not an attack on religion. It was part of an analysis that it was religion’s rules and promises that kept the people calm and under control!

Instead of persecuting religion, they should have subverted it for their own purposes, but they instead saw religion as a rival for the loyalty of the people, which Stalin could not abide. In later years, both the Soviets and the Chinese Communists did use religion as a sort of opiate, controlling it for their own use.