I’m not an atheist.
I was forced to go to church up until I was 13. When I reached that age I was allowed to make my own decision on whether I continued. Although being made to go for that long really sucked, it was considerate of my parents to give me the decision when I was older. I made the decision to stop going.
The reason I made this choice was solely out of boredom. My time at church was spent building paper planes and “helping” my dad with the sound system. It definitely wasn’t a bad experience, just an unnecessary one. There was so many fun things I could have been doing instead. I could have been playing sport, hanging out with friends, playing with matches, etc.
In the time I went to church I, in some way, had a belief in the God I was told existed. This loose belief continued for a while after I stopped attending church. The part that took me the longest to overcome was prayer. I prayed when I was feeling depressed, which was extremely selfish wishes and nothing more. That was without a doubt the hardest thing to get over; the talking to an imaginary friend in my head. My first world problems would start to get to me and I would ask the magical man in the sky to grant me my wishes of being the most awesome basketball player ever, but alas, this never came to pass. DAMN YOU, MAGIC SKY MAN! Why can’t I jump high?
I would never have classed myself as a believer even though I was told there was a God and accepted that based on the authority of my parents. I never experienced anything to make it seem real. Nothing I was told at church resonated with me, it all just seemed silly. I was only there because I had to be and I did like the tea and biscuits after.
Once I disassociated myself from the church I didn’t go looking to discover whether what I had been told was the truth. At this stage I had no interest or need to know the truth. I was too busy enjoying life and being a teenager.
I did started calling myself an atheist when I was in high school but only because I had no grasp of what it meant. At that stage, to me, it was only the rejection of my parents faith (that my dad no longer holds either).
When I started to understand what atheist meant and looked into the silliness of religion I became a full-blown atheist. I was adamant that there were definitely no gods, I read books and articles that backed up this idea. The stories that confirmed the existence of gods weren’t even close to evidence. They were completely nonsense. I don’t understand how someone who has read the Bible cover to cover can continue to believe it’s stories hold any value at all.
I continue to believe all of these things except I no longer call myself an atheist. I found that to be scientifically accurate you can not call yourself an atheist. You cannot prove that something doesn’t exist and in being an atheist you are claiming you believe something does not exist. This means you are making a positive claim that cannot be verified in any way and that is scientifically dishonest.
If I were required to label myself in terms of belief in gods I will label myself agnostic atheist; I hate these labels. This means I do not believe there are any gods but I am open to good testable evidence to change that position. Even though I believe it to be highly unlikely there would ever be good evidence to believe in any god, from Apollo to Zeus.
I accept Jesus existed.
I have decided that it is far simpler to accept that the man, Jesus, existed. I won’t ever bother arguing with any Christian apologist that Jesus did not exist ever again. Do you hear that Christians? I accept that Jesus was a historical person.
In accepting this I do nothing but move myself away from a currently controversial (in historical academia) view that Jesus is a complete myth. They can no longer call me a Christ-myther and compare me to holocaust deniers (a very very illogical comparison).
Now with all of that argument out of the way, I can move onto a more simple argument where the Christian apologists have absolutely no leg to stand on. The whole point that Jesus was nothing but an ordinary man, who tricked people into believing he was a man-deity.
I accept, against my critical thinking, that Jesus existed. I in no way at all accept any of the ridiculous stories about him. I don’t accept that he healed people miraculously, walked on water, turned water to wine, created large amounts of food from a small amount of food, cursed a fig tree, or was raised from the dead. These are all completely moronic things to believe and I would be completely giving up on my critical thinking to accept that he did any of these things.
The man Jesus performed zero miracles in his lifetime. He was a plain man who managed to make himself exceptionally famous. That is it. Even in accepting that Jesus was a historical figure I can still point out that Christianity, like every other religion, is complete nonsense. This is simply because of the above. None of those acts performed by Jesus are historically accurate and to argue that they are just makes you completely fucking deluded.
Admitting that Jesus was an historical person makes no changes to my life or belief. A Christian admitting that the above acts performed by Jesus are false makes them no longer a Christian. If they admit that Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the whole point of that religious story is destroyed. That is why they can’t do it. The reason I can’t accept those miracles is because they are outright irrational.
I was wrong. Jesus is a lich.
It turns out that I was wrong about Jesus returning as Zombie Jesus. He in fact becomes a Lich.
A lich is a person who has attached their consciousness to their corpse. This means the corpse is baring the damage prior to death. They also command hordes of undead and raise people from death. These all fit perfectly with the Jesus character.
A Zombie is a brain dead animated corpe that attacks the living. This is nothing like Jesus.
This has been a retraction and that is all. Here is the image that prompted this:
