Faith

God's works

Children dying in Haiti, victims of food crisis

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – The 5-year-old teetered on broomstick legs — he weighed less than 20 pounds, even after days of drinking enriched milk. Nearby, a 4-year-old girl hung from a strap attached to a scale, her wide eyes lifeless, her emaciated arms dangling weakly.
In pockets of Haiti accessible only by donkey or foot, children are dying of malnutrition — their already meager food supply cut by a series of devastating storms that destroyed crops, wiped out livestock and sent food prices spiraling.
At least 26 severely malnourished children have died in the past four weeks in the remote region of Baie d'Orange in Haiti's southeast, aid workers said Thursday, and there are fears the toll will rise much higher if help does not come quickly to the impoverished Caribbean nation.

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Sincerely reading the Bible broke my faith

Excerpt - It wasn't until I was about 17 that I started to have many doubts about Christianity and ultimately my entire belief system. I found myself entering debates with friends and losing. I had always been openly Christian and therefore people liked to question me. I got to the point where we would be debating and someone would come up with an excellent point about evolution, or sex before marriage, etc. I also found myself arguing mindlessly and saying what I had been taught to say rather than because it was what I believed.

http://exchristian.net/testimonies/2008/11/sincerely-reading-bible-broke-my-faith.html

But He loves you...

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do..And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time! ...But He loves you.

George Carlin

Prayer

The Bible

Have you ever noticed why reason and evidence get you nowhere with religionists?

The reason they believe in God is that they, as very young children, were repeatedly abused with the false dichotomy that either they believe (and, seeing no gods, their senses lie to them), or they disbelieve and everyone but them is insane. This abuse is coupled with:

1) The explicit notion that if they disbelieve, they are perverse -- conversely, if they believe, they are good. No one wants to be bad. At least not when you're 2 years old.

2) The implicit or explicit threat of violence or abandonment.

So what's a child to do? Believe its own eyes and ears, or believe their parents' lies, under what must appear to the child as a sure penalty of death?

And so their parents' lunacy is irrevocably grafted in a child's unconscious, while at the same time severely damaging the natural rational machinery of the child. The child learns, in effect, that rationality and evidence is only to be used in certain circumstances, while it is to be explicitly discarded in other matters (like religiousity).

And that very same child, as parent, will repeat this treatment with their children. This is how the circle of perversion perpetuates itself.

In most individuals, this conditioning is so powerful that the individuals will feel genuinely tormented by anything that is at odds with the conditioning. Yes, even reality, since the child was taught that reality was not to be trusted in matters of religion.

So it's no wonder that logic and evidence are usually met with resistance, dissociation, projection, ex post facto rationalizations... and violence.

Rudd-O from reddit