NNS - If a child was sick, wouldn't you pray to aid her/his delivery from what is ailing her. Knowing someone is praying for you does have a good effect on someone, as they mean well.

The opposite can also be sensed, I know that I once felt unease as if someone was walking on my grave, yes an ex wife of my ex husband. I put my pentagram on around my neck, and I felt instantly better.

If anyone was sending a hex my way, I had felt it in my mind, most probably self induced anyway, but placing the pentagram around my neck is supposed to protect you. It worked.

According to Wiccan tradition, if you send a black hex towards anyone then it will bounce back three times as bad on you.

So there is some sense in this as we find out. One causation gets an reaction. It might take years, but the saying, "What goes around, comes around'. I have seen it in life. I have no control over it, but those that have done the wrong thing, generally get their desserts in the end.

What you are unsure about, right now you are unsure if our opinion about the bible, has some sense? I am not Jewish but definitely they believe that Jesus was not a Messiah. Nor like King David. And the only thing that believers could come up, was the resurrection and a second coming to fulfill the prophesy, of saving the Jews.

He didn't save them, they were overcome by the Romans, killed or slaves and their second temple was destroyed. The Jews hated their Christian faction. In Rome the free Jews were in a ghetto, and they would not let the new faction near them. They had been blamed for damaging a pagan temple, and had suffered the consequences.

continued.

NNS. Don't waste your breath on people who are educated and possibly have no belief in Jesus or even if he ever lived. Nor Moses either. Too much harm has been done to people in the name of religion. As a historian I can tell you right now, most conflicts create one side who is determined to prove their God or belief is better than the opposition. But they use religion to better their alternative agendas, resources, women, and male domination over other males expanding their territory. Christians have done it too, the crusades etc.

If you want the Holy Bible to give you strength and guidance then do it, but I think a free thinker who believes in behaving properly and morally, doesn't need a 2,500 year book, written in barbaric times universally, needs to teach you anything. A good record of how people behaved and lived. And how this was recorded for posterity. Whether for Jews or Christians alike, religion was beginning to take a control over Christian's lives.

After Constantine the 1st, changed to live in Istanbul or Byzantine, the Western Roman society eventually split with the Orthodox Christian Church and still is. How can there be so much difference in opinion? One believed Jesus was 100% Divine, the other that he was human but had divine qualities. One believed the only way to find Jesus or God, was through a priest who could cut you off too. The other believed you could find a path yourself maybe through holy icons. The priest was incidental. Necessary but not divine himself.

Anyway, enjoy your Mother's Day Sunday. I am being waited on by my son.

It must be tough for the religious amongst us to read the truths from three different angles and that their whole belief structure and spirituality is piffle..

They are wrong from an historical perspective, they are wrong from a biblical perspective and they are wrong from a psychological and philosophical perspective.

The simple fact is that if they had actually studied correctly from the beginning they may have actually avoided there plunge to the depths they have fallen now.

It's all there in plain sight, but alas they were too locked into believing in talking snakes that their brains were shut down by religion. Their crutch is shattered and useless and yet they still lean on it...lmao

Fancy coming to a site like this and being proven wrong so many times in every area!

I have shown you this before but alas no believer really follows Jesus. The religions certainly don't!

Mark 7:7-9 Their worship is a farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.

For you ignore God’s law and substitute your own tradition.”

Then he said, “You skilfully sidestep God’s law in order to hold on to your own tradition.

Jesus is wrong on one thing though... You aren't skilful you are unknowing.

How are the healings going?...lmao

Not_Now.Soon,

Thanks for the sentiment. Yes, there are all sorts of church attendees and differing levels of devoutness. However, I’ve been through how evangelical and how deeply involved with my church I was, so I would have thought it was safe to assume that my deconversion took a long time.

From my observations, deconversion for people who were as devout as I was is necessarily a lengthy process. People don’t choose what they believe, and deconversion certainly isn’t something that an individual does deliberately. On the contrary, it is something that a person of devout faith will always try desperately to stop. I know I did.

But once the ball starts rolling, it can be the beginning of the end. For me, certain realisations started to bug me; realisations that most theists either never have or somehow manage to push out of their heads. Personally, I could only push them out of my head for so long. Some realisations that led me to start to seriously question were:

- The fact that my religion was an accident of birth.
- It seemed a little too co-incidental that the more educated we became, the more obscure and rationally-explainable God’s communication with us became. Why can’t He speak directly to us now? Why did He only speak directly to people in more superstitious times.
- The fact that I believed that plagues and disasters were the direct acts of God in Biblical times but had rational explanations now.
- Despite trying to reconcile the two for a while, I came to realise Christian theology and evolution were utterly incompatible on multiple levels.
- The fact that we know the Genesis flood never happened.

Regarding those last two, the idea that scientists were all lying, conspiring against God, or that they had just got everything so terrible wrong became increasingly unrealistic scenarios of which I could no longer convince myself.

When the historical problems in the Bible got to the point of glaring, the horrible, petty, and schizophrenic character of Yahweh became obvious. So, too, did the problem of evil.

Continued…

…Continued

After a while, the curiosity got the better of me and I decided to research the origins of Christianity and the Bible (always a faith-killer) and it was all over red rover for me. For a while there, I called myself a pantheist. Then I took on the useless and widely-misunderstood label of ‘agnostic’. But once I started reading the thoughts of great atheist thinkers like Bertrand Russell, everything became so clear and eventually I thought, “Frig it, I’m an atheist.”

<<Confirmation bias to give credit to something that does not need it in my opinion is on the same boat as a skeptical bias, where no proof is ever really proof.>>

Have you ever considered that the supernatural, by definition, is impossible to prove? That it may not be a bias on my part that is responsible for the frustration you experience when I explain away your evidence?

<<Saying that you hold this doubting bias is in my opinion no more slanderous then your calling me indoctrinated …>>

I’ve never complained of slander. I'm sorry it's come across that way.

<<… or removing my experiences and arguments with a wave of the hand "I've been there and I was exactly like you" argument.>>

My argument does not rely on the fact that my faith and experiences were seemingly much like yours. My argument is simply that there are other, more rational explanations for what you experience. I only tell you that your beliefs and experiences were on par with mine when you try to differentiate your beliefs in an attempt to suggest that I wouldn’t understand. Going by what you’ve said on OLO alone, I understand perfectly.

<<But it seems you've taken this as an insult ...>>

Not really. I do get irritated by ultimately useless diversions like that, but my point is more that you cannot gauge the extent of my bias until you can provide some reliable and objective evidence for a god, and witness my response to it.

Continued…

…Continued

<<Unless you really want to see where I'm drawing this conclusion of doubting bias from in your words, I'll leave the point alone.>>

I think I understand where it’s coming from. I’ve had 9/11 Truthers get frustrated and accuse me of bias, too, when I explain away all their supposedly unanswered questions.

<<In return though I ask that you refrain from calling me indoctrinated, or that you were exactly like me.>>

Actually, if you read what I’ve said carefully, you’ll note that at no point have I said that you were indoctrinated. My arguments don’t rely on such assumptions.

As you point out, I don’t know about your life. You could be a born-again whose life hit rock bottom, for all I know. The most you have said about your upbringing is that both your parents belonged to different religions, but you never told me what they were (I’m assuming one of them mas Christianity).

What I do know, however, is that you look a lot like Chuck Norris, going by your picture. And that's badass.