Deconversion stories from The Skeptical Review
Wayne VanWeerthuizen
Please send me a year's subscription. If possible, I'd also love to see whatever back issues are available. I have enclosed a check to cover costs.
I am 24 years old, and I was raised in the Assemblies of God. Several years ago, I debated Messianic prophecy with a Jewish friend (handle=Svee) whom I met over a computer network called Q-link (for Commodore users). It lasted months and drew quite an audience. Besides arguing for the fulfillment of prophecy, I also tried to demonstrate how the OT required the Messiah to be the divine son of God in a trinitarian sense.
Well, four years ago, I progressed to being a Unitarian in the classical sense--Bible believing but asserting Jesus was a man and did not preexist. I still believe this is the proper way to understand the NT.
Two years ago, I dropped Christianity entirely to become an atheist, secular-humanist, and libertarian. Every day that passes makes me more confident my decision was correct. Evolution is true; God is not necessary for the world to exist; the idea of God is absurd; religion is itself a sociological phenomenon; Genesis is a compilation of stories with divergent points to make; the gospels contain historical mistakes, scientific errors, and contradictions.
I won that Q-link debate, because I was willing to learn from my opponent and learn I was wrong. Through that debate, I got the foolish to realize the truth- -even if it took years to sink in. If I knew where Svee was now, I'd congratulate him too.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Need I say how much we enjoy receiving letters like this? The way that Mr. VanWeerthuizen learned the truth about the Bible points to what I have said many times in the past. The internet is bad news for Christianity. So much discussion is taking place on the various newsgroups that it is bound to have long-term effects on traditional religious beliefs, not just here but all over the world, and the nice thing about it is that the free exchange of information is something that the religious establishments can no longer suppress. Any government that keeps personal computers from its citizens will be plunged so far back into a dark-age mentality that it will not be able to survive in the modern world. So Christians who have computers will now have access to information that was kept from the sheep in the past.
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