A Dilemma

[Jin]

Hi everyone! New guy here. 

First off I must apologize for any misspellings or faulty grammar as I am not fluent in english.

I stumbled upon godisimaginary.com the other day and it reaffirmed basically everything I've been going around thinking for the past 5 years.

Now, I was born and raised a Christian. My father worked (to some degree still works) as a preacher/pastor and my mother also has a very strong faith. I've spent ALOT of time in various churches during my youth. I guess as far back I can remember and I never did 'feel at home' there. Somewhere deep inside me there was something that told me this just doesn't make any sense. But since I was raised that way it didn't feel natural to question it. Actually I didn't want to question it at the time. I only attended 'hardcore' Christian schools.

I just went along. As the years went on I really did my best 'to find God' or rather this "feeling" the people were talking about. They said that "you will know you have met God once you feel it". To be honest I really wanted this feeling and I did what most people do when they don't feel like they're in the right place but want to be, I lied to myself and to people around me. I pretended. Looking back at this now I know I was just fooling myself, but I don't think I had much of a choice at the time.

By the time I was 12 my family moved to a new country and I entered a 'unchristian' school for the first time and it didn't take me long to drift away from God. That actually felt more natural than anything before!
By this time I was allowed to make my own decision and decided not to go to church anymore. By now my father was the pastor of a church so you must understand how strange it must have been for me and my parents when I didn't want come to along. But they also believed in me forming my own opinion and accepted my own decisions and for that I respect them deeply.

Up until I was around 18 years old when people asked me if I believed in God I always answered something along the lines of "I don't know...maybe?". For the past few years I have been doing alot of thinking and now I'm calling myself an Atheist, as I don't believe in any God whatsoever. I now consider religion nonsense. BUT religion apparently are as real to believers as science is for me.
That peculiar thing has puzzled me for a long long time. How can the mind portray God as real even though he isn't?

I want to live my own life, not bound to a book. I believe I can be a good and probably a better person without religion. I don't want to live a life in fear of going to hell. That would be a waste of time when you instead can enjoy life to the fullest. It will only last so long.

Now to the dilemma. I don't know how to react when seeing or hearing my parents (and sometime my childhood friends who still believe) pray or speaking of Jesus. One part of me wants to tell them how I feel and one part of me wants to keep quiet. I love my parents very much and I seriously don't know how they would react If I told them the conclusions I've made about the world and life. It would probably break their hearts since they are so deeply religious (and have been for countless of years) and I would never want that. I honestly don't think anything would make them give up their faith, they are happy with it. They have accepted it. Maybe I should accept their faith wholeheartedly too?

I just don't know. I clearly remember my fathers expression when I told him I had gotten a perfect score on an Evolution course in college, but he never said anything. I just got the feeling what he wanted to say, you know.
I'm on my way to a degree in Earth Science which basically says alot about my choice in life.

I just don't know how to approach this one. I want to stay close to my parents. I feel like that's never going to happen if I tell them this. But keeping quiet as I have always done around them when it comes to this topic, I really don't like the idea of that either. To some degree they deserve to hear my opinion, right?

Sorry for the long post but I REALLY needed to get this off my chest and I would love to hear what everyone thinks. Good or bad.

Thank you for your time. 

[HerrAxel]

I want to live my own life, not bound to a book. I believe I can be a good and probably a better person without religion. I don't want to live a life in fear of going to hell. That would be a waste of time when you instead can enjoy life to the fullest. It will only last so long.

What a novel concept, to want to be free, to be able to think for yourself, to believe you are a good person all by yourself, to want to live life without fear, to want to live life to the fullest...Imagine the responsibility you would have to assume. 

Hey, I'm just messing with ya.   

I just don't know how to approach this one. I want to stay close to my parents. I feel like that's never going to happen if I tell them this. But keeping quiet as I have always done around them when it comes to this topic, I really don't like the idea of that either. To some degree they deserve to hear my opinion, right?

Seriously, this is a very delicate matter.  Please go slow.  I'm not emotionally mature enough to give good advice but if you don't get a lot of responses here you may want to consider checking out the Secular Lifestyle Forum here:

http://www.freeratio.org/vbb/index.php

Like here they also have some very smart people who have gone through these very situations and can provide their experiences to consider.

 -

[Micah643]

Hey, Jin.  Thanks for the honest post.  I am sympathetic with your dilemma with your parents, and I am trying to be empathetic as well.  As a Christian, I hope you will come back to Christ, so I won't be any help with your dilemma.

I just wanted to ask you a question.  You said:

I want to live my own life, not bound to a book. I believe I can be a good and probably a better person without religion. I don't want to live a life in fear of going to hell. That would be a waste of time when you instead can enjoy life to the fullest. It will only last so long.

Were you raised in a legalistic Christian setting?  I was just curious b/c of the way you say "bound to a book."  You talk as if it is a shackle.  The Bible is not about scaring people into heaven (some may approach it that way, but the Bible doesn't teach that), but the Bible reveals a way that we can come to have peace through Christ. 

You say that Christianity would be a waste of time when you could just step back and enjoy life to the fullest, but Christ says that he came to give life to the fullest.  His claim is that through him you have true life.  I have found this to be true.  Why have you found Christ's words to be untrue?

You also seem to imply that you can't be a Christian if you are a scientist or if you believe in evolution.  Do you think that?  If so, why?

Thanks again for your honest post.  I look forward to your responses and to chatting with you further.

Peace - Micah

[Hermes]

Welcome Jin!

Much of what you say rings true to me on many levels.  I deconverted when I was 8 ... maybe 12 ... it was a non-issue at the time.  If someone wants to say I was never religious let alone Christian, that's fine by me though for quite a few years up into College I considered myself a 'cultural Catholic' though that's not the case any more.

As for how to deal with family, I've found that it can be quite difficult because on top of any issue you have the relationship as well. 

For example, a friend of mine is very insistent on his opinions on various issues.  I've decided that when I talk with him on specific issues that I don't go into details.  Instead, I boil down my point of view into the basics.  For example, he thinks that global warming is not happening and that it is a scam pushed by greedy scientists.  He can go on for hours -- forcefully -- on why his opinion is correct.  For that one issue, I've decided that I am willing to wait and see what he thinks in a few years -- and I've told him that.

As for my father, he did not understand why Intelligent Design creationism should not be studied in grade school.  To him, that's not fair.  To address that, I said that it would be fine to discuss it in a religion or philosophy class, but that it is not science .. and that it would not be fair to promote it as science till it has been shown to pass scientific rigor.  That worked for him.

As for how to react to family praying, I treat it like a visit to a voodoo or tribal branch of the family.  It is no different to me from someone praying to Zeus.  In summary; I treat these events as field studies in anthropology.  They aren't from my culture; they are from an alien culture that I happen to be observing 'in the wild'.  It doesn't matter much that I know the people with these strange supernatural and superstitious ideas.  They could be reading tea leaves or animal entrails.

[enlightened]

Jin,

Good for you making your own decisions about your beliefs or lack thereof and still having morality that Theists say you shouldn't have. A site that helped me greatly as I was going through my de-conversion is:

http://exchristian.net/

There is a forum there and ex-testimonies that I still find encouraging, though I made my decision a couple years ago, I still go there for support.

Best of luck

[Ambassador Pony]

Micha,

Perhaps it will help your interaction with Jin, if you be intellectually honest, and admit that you could be completely wrong, and that it's possible your god doesn't exist.

Pony