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I was saved today, i am now born again... free from superstitious beliefs. I am now a fully fledged agnostic / atheist.

Ive been through a long battle with religion and belief systems for years, debating with others and running ideas through my mind just about every day, trying to find the truth.

During this time ive been many things... a born again christian, a new age style free thinker, a muslim etc... etc... oh and back to christian, then back to muslim.

Atheism is always something which irritated me. It made me think and question everything i have believed or experienced. I got so fed up with having to justify beliefs to myself time and time again and almost became fearful of atheist material. Just to avoid having to think about it.

I even feared Derren Brown... hated him, really hated him.

"A stupid magician who uses old magic tricks combined with presentation which implies some kind of psychological control or feat over his audience. A guy who makes all kinds of claims on his tv shows but never has to justify them to anybody. As long as people watch the TV executives dont care, hes just an entertainer, a homosexual with his own agenda."



Anyway yeah, im free of that now and have fallen in love with the mystery of the universe and the scientific method to try and understand it. I still hold some spiritual beliefs or opinions, but nothing is fixed in my life, not dogmatic.

Has anyone else here been born again?

I in the past few years have gone from an athiest to a raging, fire and brimstone anti-theist.

I was brought up in quite a religious family of Methodist christians but never really bought the concept one bit as far as I can remember.

greedoniz wrote:I in the past few years have gone from an athiest to a raging, fire and brimstone anti-theist.

I was brought up in quite a religious family of Methodist christians but never really bought the concept one bit as far as I can remember.

lol

This is what i now fear. Having spent so long thinking about religion and truth. To then discover that the only things that really matter are living a happy life and discovering truth which nobody can deny, truth with evidence, and accept some things can never be known.

I fear that i will become like the atheists (like u) i used to hate who are not religious but spend so much time debating and getting mad... religiously been non-religious.

One of my favourite books on the subject of spirituality is Stephen Batchelor's Buddhism Without Beliefs. And as much as I hate labels per se, he did coin one that I'm more than happy to wear when the subject of religion is raised: 'proudly agnostic'.

In short, the idea is that the name (or existance) of your God, how you worship and if you worship has absolutely nothing to do with the job in hand of being a decent human being in the here and now. Batchelor contests that you can quite proudly state that you don't know what happens next - and it's very unimportant so long as you take some responsibility for what happens now...

I can relate to that very well.

Pete

Hi ! I'm french and had about the same journey as you had, with the exact same ending. I have the advantage to be a science teacher and to have learned amazing things many years ago about the universe and so on, so it was easy to 'quit' the non atheist attitude... Sorry if this isn't clear, my english isn't perfect...

I hope you never come back from this...

^^

I have always been interested in science, ive loved science and have never really rejected anything that is proven to be scientific, for example evolution of species.

I just always said "god is outside of the universe, outside of space and time, what ever way god created the universe, we can learn by science"

And i guess what i said above is still correct. I just accept there is no way to prove of any force outside of our universe.

Science also has plenty of theories which cannot be proved either. Parrelel universes been once of those theories... or string theory.

In 100 years, if the world still remains. We will have a total different understanding and may even return to a more spiritual path. A spiritual path founded in science and proof.

alter28 wrote:"A stupid magician who uses old magic tricks combined with presentation which implies some kind of psychological control or feat over his audience. A guy who makes all kinds of claims on his tv shows but never has to justify them to anybody. As long as people watch the TV executives dont care, hes just an entertainer, a homosexual with his own agenda."

Alter the above paragraph you put in quotation marks in your initial post. Whose words are they originally?

In fact, unless those remarks can be substantiated, they'll be removed as they are quite insulting to a cherished performer.

If TM has taught me one thing, once Psychics, Tarot, Palm reading and most of all Religion gets thrown into the mix, very very nasty things get said. I have probably said some of them and like everyone else, have my own opinion, but this is not the place. Mandrake does a brilliant job of locking threads, deleting posts, banning those who have an IQ less than 4 and I think we should all respect the views of everyone else!

I could name at least 5 members who are walking talking contradictions of my beliefs but I respect each of them, they do what they do, and they do it well.

I was raised a Christian and was always very fearful of God. It's really only in the last 5 or 6 years i've realiesd the fear is there for a reason; so you dont ask questions.

Blind faith is a brilliant thing for some people, for me it stinks of ignorance. I read about physics a lot, String Theory, the Many Worlds theory, Einstein's Spacetime and Relativity Theories and Quantum Mechanics ( Any ladies aroused yet? ), and i love it all. Its far more fascinating to me than any Bible story, and yet more exciting because it has the possibility of being proved real. The Catholic Church only recently forgave Galileo for saying the Earth revolved around the sun rather than the other way round for Big Bang's sake. Its this kind of blinkered bullplop that puts any sane person off the church.

I could go on and on about this, it gets me riled up, but its Xmas soon.

Anyways, im now agnostic much to my Mother's chagrin, and its very liberating.

Mandrake wrote:In fact, unless those remarks can be substantiated, they'll be removed as they are quite insulting to a cherished performer.

M'thinks this is what his thoughts were before he was 'born again'?

*steps away from the thread*

I'm glad that you've had some kind of positive epiphany Alter28, but I have to agree with Lenoir - these threads seldom end in a wonderful place. This is indeed the part of the forum to discuss "anything", but I'm not quite sure what you intended or expected in starting a thread to advertise the fact that you feel free from beliefs which, though to you may now seem oppressive or unreasonable, may be highly valued by others - people like me.

I'm not offended by anything you've written, but please understand it puts me in a difficult position. Whether you realise it or not, in your post you've made several associations/points/whatever you want to call them (for instance, that you have to be "free" of beliefs to enjoy the mystery of the universe, or that "religious thinking" equals hating Derren Brown along the lines of your own quoted thoughts).

And then you've asked people who agree with you to join in, and of course, they're more than willing.

All of this means I have two choices: to sit and watch people belittle and insult something that is more important to me than anything else (which, by the way, I have no problem with them doing) but without adding my disagreement - not fun - or, I start to disagree and reply to people, and soon it becomes a debate, which someone will then deem too heated to continue, it'll get locked/shut down etc. and despite trying to respond peacefully I will probably shoulder some of the blame for "sticking my oar in". Again, not fun.

Put it this way: if I start a thread titled "I think Jay Sankey is a load of old ****, who agrees with me?" on a site certain to have at least one or two staunch Sankey fans... well, would you think that's a good idea?

kolm wrote:

Mandrake wrote:In fact, unless those remarks can be substantiated, they'll be removed as they are quite insulting to a cherished performer.

M'thinks this is what his thoughts were before he was 'born again'?

*steps away from the thread*

I think so too - he's quoting himself from the past, surely?

I hope as well as a conversion to atheism he's also converted away from bigotry.

I've not had much to say recently, however i shall add this. I've read the bible(s) and if ever you wish to read something that, in lots of ways, makes you despair of humanity and what we are capable of doing to one another. Then the bible and all the other holy-handbooks are very good examples.

I do not wish to upset anyone who is religious. For the main, i think religious people are just nice people, and follow a belief due to where and who they are born into. For example, you may not find many Buddhists in Africa. I believe it's Catholicism that's the main religion over there.

When i realised that what religion (for the main) that you follow is largely a random thing, almost as large as the randomness involved behind the Big Bang; i found i do not wish to be told who to be nice to via a booklet.

Just as much i do not believe that we should hunt down all religion either. It gives a lot of people a lot of hope. I sometimes wonder if Dawkins would creep into a hospital ward, rather like an evil hypnotist and whisper in dying people's ears "there's no God y'know..."

We are both complex, yet utterly inane creatures us humans. We invented how time should be constructed. Imagine if someone thought time should be measured in "double-time"? We'd have 48 hour days, 120 minutes in an hour. Maybe we'd even call it something else?

We invent money to stop us carrying around chickens. Who thought that through? I'd love to carry around chickens if i wish to buy, rather ironically - a chicken curry.

Enough's enough - but let's have less of the "that dreadful homosexual" (i know you didn't type that, but that's how i imagine those sorts of people to sneer out) - and let's all agree that science is often wrong too. Freud was wrong fequently about a fair few things, and a little bit loopy too. Yet he'd happily trawl through other people's problems again and again and again - until....We'll let's save that for another bedtime story shall we?

I found it funny that magicians are probably the most skeptical people on earth.

I think I'm the only person on this forum who believes in God.