Why I no longer believe the Bible is "God's Word" and I no longer believe in "God" (page 2)

DagothUr

Welcome to deism. One more step to freedom.

Terry

Shocking summary:)

Here is our problem.

What do we have that replaces the Bible and yet calms our nerves about dying?

What substitute for the Bible is acceptable by society at large?

What will we say when somebody sneezes?

Being an individual and taking responsibility for your own life is a solitary process IF WE GIVE VOICE TO SKEPTICISM about what every

other person HOLDS DEAR.

You can't take away the most satisfying part of a person's belief system without REPLACING THE EMPTINESS with.....something EQUALLY USEFUL.

Everybody has doubts who owns a mind. But, this doesn't help them break free from GROUP approved SUPERSTITION.

It also takes courage and a willingness to be alone, anathema and apostate.

Congratulations to you, lifeisgood. You read the Bible on your own and saw through it for exactly what it is. I needed another decade of delusion after being df'd, and another 3 years of researching the Bible's redactions, interpolations and revisions, thinking that it must have originally been inerrant. How utterly idiotic of me to think that God would inspire the Bible and then fail to preserve it. Like you, I started intensely studying the Bible at the age of 8. In total, 36 years of being a total believer before I realized the Bible is not what it was advertised to be, with a lot of help from others on the Internet. It's the most deceptive and vile cruel joke that has ever been perpetrated upon mankind, and the single biggest hindrance to human evolution in our history.

As Terry said, it's incredibly painful, and shocking, to have your belief system shattered without a replacement. But once the Bible blinders were off, it wasn't very long at all before I entered a comfort zone that my Orthodox beliefs never did provide.

OnTheWayOut

Don't have the time to read, so I am marking this for this evening.
I love the name:

Mad Sweeney

I still can't decide whether I'm more of a pantheist or panentheist but I am certain I'm not a theist.

Morbidzbaby

Beautifully put! I really have a hard time reading long threads (I have the attention span of...OOH SHINY!!!), but I found this flowed very naturally and was quite interesting. You put into words the sentiments I have felt for quite awhile now.

I have 2 copies of the bible so far. One is the NWT reference edition. The other is the NIV. I pull them both out once in awhile to make comparisons, but that's about the only use I have for them. Once in awhile, my BF will give me a passage to look up and read...and it's fun debating scripture with him. He's not a Christian, he's not anything, but he believes the bible as well as other "holy books" are worth reading because they may all be different in a lot of ways, not all 100% true or correct, but the truth lies in a combination of all of them. Not the whole "religion" thing, but the principles that lie within their pages. I tend to agree in some aspects. While the OT was bloody and violent and the Jews are known to be ridiculously superstitious, the NT teachings of Jesus are worth reading...even if he didn't exist. Like Aesop's fables. They aren't TRUE, but they have a good deal of value to them.

My problem is getting the WBTS interpretations out of my head and just reading the bible as a regular book. I find that watching documentaries on it's history and also on the history of the times that are written about in it's pages really helps with that. One I watched on Jesus was quite the eye-opener. It laid to rest the myth of the stable, the "no room at the inn" part, the misinterpretation of Joseph being a carpenter, etc. It was really fascinating.

im stuck in

How true lifeisgood. Recently I have been doing research on the bible. I have been reading about myths. It is easilly seen that in any of the other religious writings that they all have the same stories to be told almost word for word. That and the fact that the Catholic church chose the New Testament books. Therefore how can it be as 2 Tim 3:16 says, they are not all inspired by God. Maybe there are other books of the bible that historians , more like the catholics didn't want us to have for that would change their religion and perhaps identify who Jehovah really is? stuck in

poopsiecakes

rebel8

When you open your mind to the possibilities, you can see it for what it is. And then it seems so clear, and you wonder how in the world it took you so long to figure it out!

Learning about history, other cultures and other belief systems, you can put the Bible in the context of yet another set of beliefs invented in order to explain nature/life and to justify rules/crimes/behavior. As far as I can tell the Bible is no more or less valid than any of the others. I mean, even Scientology is not more crazy than the Bible.

lifeisgood

I'mStuckIn,

Something that really startled me when I started reading the Bible's different versions. And, then I started reading other methology. Assyrian, Egyptian, Medo Persian, Babylonian, etc.

The same stories appear in all of them.

And the writer's voice seems to be the same. This really startled me. When you read a book you can see the writer, the writer comes through in the writer's voice. You would think that you would see many different writers across the mythologies of many cultures. But you do not. You read the same voice.

It is as if, all of our mythology was written at once by a small group. I found this to be very very strange. I have no idea what it means.

Why I no longer believe the Bible is "God's Word" and I no longer believe in "God"