What one church did to me is make me finally think for myself after years of mindless slavery.
You have to try to free your mind from all things that you have been indoctrinated with and try to start from scratch. Not with the Bible. Start with “is there a God?” and go from there. God should be provable without a Bible. Then do your research “ON” the Bible, not “IN” the Bible. When you do it honestly, you will see that there is no way that it is God’s word. It is fallible, God has to be infallible. If God wanted to write a book that was necessary for our salvation, don’t you think He would have written it so that all people could read it and that it wouldn’t be subject to so many interpretations? Religion is so irrational.
If you can’t believe the Bible, Jesus does not fit in. You cannot find him anywhere significant in history, other than the Bible. If the Bible falls, so does he. Yes, that is shocking and there are a lot of people that try to rationalize the two but you can’t. Its either both or neither. The Bible stands on Christianity supporting it. Christianity stands on the Bible supporting it. They hold each other up, if you can imagine that. Its like the cartoons where a character runs off the edge of a cliff and just stands there in mid-air until it looks down and then falls. As long as no one looks down, religion stay up in the air. But the only thing holding it up are the delusional beliefs of its members. Only a religion that promises eternal life or eternal punishment could put over such a scam on gullible followers. They play on people’s fear of death and the knowledge that people are too lazy to research their own beliefs. It is just so much easier to let someone else do the thinking for you.
There are many people trapped in the throes of Bible fundamentalism who with help can find their way out of it. As long as this is so, we will continue to put our philosophical views into the free market of ideas and let the shoppers decide if they want to buy them. Our contention is that we have a better product than the shoddy commodity being peddled by Bible fundamentalists.