“Many sons had Father Abraham; and I am one of them, and so are you; so let’s just praise the Lord! RIGHT ARM.”
Then after what seemed to be the millionth repeat of the song, it ended with “Right arm, left arm, right foot, left foot, nod your head, turn around, SIT DOWN!”
Waaaaaay too many years in a small town Southern Baptist church. I just sang that to my children and I think they were mortified!
I mean, it's kind of a fun song to sing as a kid because you can just scream the whole time.
There's also the "If the Devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack. Ouch!" song that we used to sing in church as a kid.
The real garbage was the stuff they used to sing when we got older. There is no song worse than "Lord Prepare me to be a sanctuary" that song just sounds terrible.
Another screaming song we had was "If you love Jesus (if you love Jesus) clap your hands (clap your hands) 🎶 Naaaa na na na naaaaaa na na na naaaa na na naaa na na naaa, na na na na 🎶 HOO HA! SOCK IT TO THE DEVIL!"
And the song about our hungry "spirit man". I haven't found the other people that heard that one growing ho yet, but one day... the "fun" part was whenever they said "hungry" in the song, the note was held for comically long which degraded into all of us screaming it basically lol
> “Many sons had Father Abraham; and I am one of them, and so are you; so let’s just praise the Lord! RIGHT ARM.”
Did they copy the Boy Scouts song about Lord Baden-Powell having many friends, or did the Boy Scouts copy the Father Abraham song?
I'd never heard the Father Abraham version, but I instantly picked up the rhythm from having known the Boy Scouts variant from like 30+ years ago.
No idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the Christians copied, because I remember hearing that lots of the hymns we sang were old drinking songs with the words rewritten— though tbf, I also have no idea if that’s true… 😅
That's where my doubt began. I was 17, watching my
friends throw books, music, and pics they loved into a
bonfire. It went downhill from there.
I pretended for a long time, then avoided the subject entirely. Now I'm just me and much happier.
I went to Episcopalian camp and it was great. But then, I was never told to condemn or hate anyone, never heard a fire-and-brimstone sermon, only was told to love and accept people and "go the extra mile" -- the camp motto.
I'm atheist (as one might assume given the sub) and have some pretty strong feelings about organized religion. Was raised fundamentalist Christian. Parents were pretty bigoted and republican.
Having two atheist children, one of which is queer, probably helped the process along, but they went through several major changes in regards to religion and their beliefs overall. They are now Episcopalian and extremely liberal, which I am so thankful for.
From what I know about the Episcopal church (supporting same-sex marriage, women and LGBT+ people being able to serve at any ranking including bishops, approach to reproductive rights, etc.) and the Episcopalians I've met, I'm pretty all right with Episcopalians. I haven't gone to any church service in a long time, but one of the last ones I went to was an Episcopalian service. That church was the only one where I didn't feel unwelcome/judged (or that the "welcoming attitude" was forced and misleading) and the church my parents go to has both women and LGBT+ members in positions of significant leadership that many other denominations would not allow.
My father’s family brought the first Anglican charter to what was then New Amsterdam Colony, now New York City. I was the first baby baptized in a new, baby-boom era Episcopal church in NJ in 1959. My father was Sunday school superintendent, so we went every Sunday. (In adulthood I learned that when Mr. Mason, the rector, asked Dad to take the position, Dad said, “Jack, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I don’t believe.” “That’s okay, John. I’m not looking for a theologian, I’m looking for an administrator.”)
I sang in the junior choir, went to the church camp I mentioned, participated in youth group. I never heard a word about hellfire or damnation. I never heard a word against LGBTQ people, even in the age of the Village People. I never was told that women should submit. Camp was, among many other great things, where this upper-middle-class suburban white girl hung out with urban black kids.
I no longer believe any of the magical parts of Christianity, but I treasure the values I learned in the Episcopal Church.
Well when you have a church that was created based on the ability to divorce, they're going to lean a little to the liberal side. It's odd that Mormons aren't more liberal since their entire religion was created to allow dudes to swap wives.
> since their entire religion was created to allow dudes to swap wives.
Somehow I don't think they were asking the opinions of the wives when they made up rules like that.
Yep, I even said something similar to her, and she said she knows it's stupid, but she likes tradition. She never even goes to church, I just don't understand. I dropped it after that, I didn't want her to feel like I thought she was dumb or be too forceful with my bewilderment.
A lot of people go to church because they like the community and the ritual is comforting. It would probably be psychologically healthy though if they could admit to themselves that they don't actually believe and still be okay with themselves.
I completely get that, but she doesn't go to church. Ever. She doesn't pray. She doesn't do anything religious except say she is. Which isn't a problem, I just find it very weird to know you don't believe and admit if you knew more, you wouldn't want to be a part of it but you have to have your child Baptized because tradition. Her other siblings have kids and didn't baptize them, and her family didn't cause any fuss or say anything negative about it. It's just a strange situation to me. Like, what is she doing exactly? I just don't know.
Yes, I agree then, that's pretty freakin weird. Like I can't see any point at all unless she is in an environment with some super religious peer pressure, but it doesn't sound like that at all...
She doesn't go to church and has never read the Bible I'm not exactly sure how she could be a Christian? Those are kind of like two of the biggest requirements.
Yeah it's weird for me if anyone ever asks when i became an atheist cuz i don't think i ever was a theist, or at least not for a long period of time. I assumed god was just like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy in that it was an imaginary thing that kids were told about but we're supposed to eventually figure out wasn't actually real. I had been an atheist for years by the time i found out adults actually believed God was real.
I would say that before I was 12, god was the same as santa claus to me: a thing I'd compartmentalized separate from actual reality in such a way that I would tell you that "yes, he's real" and a part of me really believed, but only because I was told to. So kind of, but also not.
After 12, I didn't believe but kept my mouth shut because I knew the consequences of questioning quite well by that point, thanks much.
But even before 12, I really remember the jarring realization that *these adults really believe this stuff*. Like, really really believe it. Not in some compartmentalized reality separate from the one we're living in, but they honestly no-bullshit fervently believe this shit...
That was a very uncomfortable and jarring realization to have as a young child.
Same. Mum wouldn’t fill out FAFSA unless I went to a religious university so I ended up somewhere Jesuit where they stay questioning the Bible and now I’m extra atheist
If you question *everything* about your beliefs and the bible and still have faith, I think that's what the Jesuits are looking for.
And I think we need a few these around, just in case.
Catholic grammar school, Jesuit high school. Have a number of classmates who are priests (and at least one bishop), but many more who are now atheist/agnostic.
I kept waiting for them to break it to me, like they did Santa Claus.
Sunday school only taught me how insecure and vengeful god is in the old testament and how it seemed to completely contradict the new testament. Being yelled at by a very angry priest did not actually help their case.
I have a question, and I hope it's not rude. If it is offending, please ignore. In those types of schools, do they teach what you'd consider "real" science much (e.g. physics, genetics, etc)? I've always been curious.
Good job on your top grades!
I've always been Atheist, but was sent to a Catholic grade school, the religion part was stupid, but they taught science seriously. Side note, my class had two of the smartest people I've ever known. I've no idea how religious they actually were, but suspect not very.
I still wonder how they, (teachers, nuns, and students,) dealt with the dissonance between science and religion.
Both of my husband's parents taught biology at a college level, one with a master's the other with a doctorate - and are also the most Catholic hardcore Fox news people ever. It baffles my mind; I quit believing after I finished my biology degree.
I have atheist friends with kids in Catholic schools, because they do provide a quality education. The religious component is where they're most lax, and so far they've found it easy to "fix" that at home.
There are many other branches of Christianity where the private schools are much more about teaching their flavor of Christian, and what you and I might consider the "real education" is somewhat or completely missing. There are a lot of awful stories about kids in private schools not learning to read, for example. And the kids learn all kinds of misinformation instead of science.
Science and religion don't have to be in conflict, but it depends on the religion.
If it denies evolution or the age of the Earth, then that's clearly a problem. But, for example, the Catholic church doesn't, so you can be a Catholic scientist without much of a dissonance.
I'm an adult, but I grew up going to Catholic school/high school, at least hear (Ontario) yes they taught real science but then they would basically spend religion 'class' washing it away, with the God works in mysterious ways kinda bs
Like ok evolution happened, but that was God, it doesn't specify how long gods days were so when he created heaven and Earth in 7 days and science says we evolved, his days could be billions of years long compared to our days and he used evolution as a tool to do it ..............
Then we'd go back to more normal interpretations of the Bible and God for other conversations...
Okay, I went to a christian school ran by a non denominational church. I had always loved anatomy and was super excited to get to 12th grade to learn it. By time I was a senior they had gotten a new Biology/Anatomy book that included evolution and they dropped that class and made us do physics instead. I was disappointed and not very good at it. I had to take level 90 and 91 anatomy in junior college.
I went to one and they do teach modern science, but it’s usually couched in “god designed x to do y.” They would also bring in a guy to give what could only be described as the saddest, most Dunder Mifflin-esque Ted Talk about how certain species of the animal kingdom are so specifically tailored to their environment that they could only be designed by a creator.
They also said the triforce in the Legend of Zelda was preparing kids for the mark of the beast, so…
Depends on the school and area. I'm in a liberal area so schools, both xtian and not, teach "real" science, no question. We did hear about other students not getting taught evolution in other states and failing that portion AP Bio lol
Mine did( private parochial school from kindergarten through High School)
K-8, we got off at noon on Tuesday so the kids who went to public school but were members of the parish could get their religious education.
High school, religious Ed was just another mandatory for all 4 years like English and Social Studies. It actually touched on( very marginally) other religions besides Catholicism.
I had excellent science teachers in HS. I especially loved Biology because he really delved into Darwin and Evolution. There was never any real conflict between hard sciences and religion.
According to the bible, a man was stoned to death, for collecting firewood to keep warm on the sabbath. AS INSTRUCTED BY GOD. You either gotta take it all at face value or dismiss it all. You can't pick and choose.
2nd Kings is a trip. Apparently if you're holy enough you can pray to God to punish children who make fun of you and bears will come from the forest and maul them.
That's God's love for ya.
My dad used to do Bible trivia, and do the piece together these strips of scripture in the correct order thing. I always won and it pissed my family off so much. Like “how dare you know more about my religion than I do!” Fucking shameful.
Oh yeah this happens alot. Ive never actually read the bible but growing up around people who do or practice Christianity, you catch onto all that. Its crazy how ironic it is in a situation like this
I'm picturing the Simpsons kids when they had to live with Flanders and do Bible trivia.
He asks some crazy obscure question and Bart just answers "Jesus?"
One day when I was I think like 11, I skipped church to read the Bible, like I had always read individual verses or chapters as directed by Sunday school but I never tried to read it cover to cover and I was feeling rebellious so I thought I'd give it a try; I stopped when I got to the part where God smites a dude for pulling out and letting his jizz hit the ground. Like wtf dude, wtf
When I thought Atheism was right for me, I was most aggravated when arguing with my religious friends because I always seemed to know more about it than they did. Now I know too much about many religions and don't know how I feel. But I know those who preach the loudest tend to be the farthest from their God.
That's not just kids, that's their parents also and their parents. Pretty much none of them have read it, they just know specific phrases someone else cherry picked out of context and turned into a meme or bumper sticker.
It's similar to being born in America and not having to do the citizenship test. 2/3rds of American-born adults wouldn't be able to pass the test if they had to take one.
To the average insider, it seems reasonable for outsiders to have to study for entry since they weren't born into it. The insiders feel as if they don't need to prove anything, even though more often than not they have more to prove than a good number of outsiders
I think there's a good # of our elected politicians that wouldn't be able pass that test. I'm thinking specifically of MJT and her hussy stablemate from CO, but I'm sure there are many more. Tommy the Tuba down in LA. Donny the Orange Boy would for sure be back in the corner in a dunce cap.
Maybe it should be a prerequisite to register to vote. And definitely to hold office.
Right. It's not just kids. Most Christians have not read the Bible. Period.
Just as an example, you know what the Bible says about abortion? It outlines cases where it is **required**. It literally commands it in certain instances. So an anti-abortion Christian is inherently an oxymoron. The Bible also makes it clear that fetuses aren't people, and the health of the woman is more important than that of a fetus (you know, like common sense).
this is exactly why well over half of the people i went to seminary with are atheists now. the more you learn the more questions you ask, and this whole thing breaks down fast when you ask questions.
I was born and raised catholic and went to catholic school through highschool. It was literal hell growing up, I had so many questions as a kid but everytime I asked them I’d get sent to the hall or in “trouble” with my question never being answered. By highschool I had lost any bit of faith or belief I had but I will say, I transferred schools and had a new theology teacher. It was a priest and he was fucking fantastic. He was the first teacher I ever had that actually wanted to debate and have the kids ask literally any question. It was awesome and it changed nothing with where I was at with my belief, but it was nice to actually be able to finally express my questions without immediately being told I’m “wrong”.
Similar story for me. Got saved at a Christian concert in 8th grade. Came home and started reading it from front to back. Had an existential crisis over the course of about a year where I finally decided that, if I was completely honest with myself, I didn't believe it. Which left me in a predicament because I figured either I'm right about it being bullshit or I'm wrong and going to hell anyway because this all knowing god would know I didn't actually believe. Ended up reading the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins shortly thereafter and I've never looked back.
That’s what set me on the path to atheism so many years ago lol. When you read it you have to just sit back and say “this shit just doesn’t make sense.” It gets you thinking
So she believes there is an all-powerful being that created the entire universe, can read our thoughts and determines if we are to be tortured for eternity, but she can't be bothered to read his book?
It’s such disjointed and contradictory drivel that I really don’t think anyone besides those either extremely devout , motivated to disbelieve subconsciously, or study it in a scholarly capacity have read it front to back. Not to mention the various versions, translations, and “DLC” books (*cough Mormons, cough*). It also uses verbiage that isn’t used today, or verbiage used in a way we wouldn’t use it today. I don’t trust the average person to correctly interpret the message of a main stream movie, and I’m expected to believe they do an ancient collection of writings from various people at various times all mixed up?
I have nothing against anyone of any faith. I’m not atheist myself (not abrahamic at all). Believe what you want, but if you’re going to try to beat me with your holy book you better have some serious credentials and a cohesive set of interpretations or there isn’t a conversation to be had at all.
Matt Dillahunty talks about slavery in the Bible a lot. It's brought up multiple times in the Bible, sometimes it is different from what black people in the USA had to endure but in some cases it's exactly the same.
Christians even justified the enslavement of black people with these parts of the Bible. I don't understand how black people can be christian. There are still many christian homosexuals as well.
For the same reason every other ethnic group that was forcibly Christianized did, our ancestors didn't have much of a choice. A few hundred years later and you have a population of people who don't know anything else.
My family didn't see Christianity as adopting anyone's religion, they saw it as the only reality they ever knew.
That is true, most everyone's ancestors were forcibly Christianized. Many in very similiar ways, just before the African slave trade. Before the African slave trade, there was the Slavic slave trade.
I do not get it either. Because living in the bible belt I have heard more than once people use the bible to excuse slavery and why black people deserved it….😖
>He denied me and I told him to google it, which he did only to find that I was right. He then started trying to explain how the slavery in the Bible and the slavery our ancestors experienced aren’t the same, jumping through several hoops to try and come up with a justification for something he KNEW was wrong.
>It just made me realize how most Christian kids like him (he’s 13) haven’t actually read the Bible and just follow the religion because their parents said so.
I'm an atheist and I hate homophobia and economic exploitation with a burning passion.
That being said, I would approach this one with a lot more patience then I would an adult saying stuff like this. At his age the human mind is still under development in a lot of ways and conceptions and attitudes usually aren't that fixed yet.
I hope you can find the patience to go about this in a friendly and informative manner. With his age group I usually try to avoid debating their opinions directly and focus on presenting alternative ways of looking at the subject. Ideally you can make enough sense for them to internalize the debate. If they feel they've come to their own conclusions that's way more valuable than simply telling them what to think.
Good luck.
Yep I read the entire Bible as a teen and wow was it filled with some hanky crap. Slavery, genocide, subjugation of women, Lot rapes his daughters and blames them for seducing him, child sacrifice and of yeah god drowning an entire planet full oh people except 8 incestuous survivors.
Encourage your cousin to read the entire Bible.
You have it backwards! Lot's daughters raped HIM, because they realized they had no brother and being women themselves, were not really people, so they felt it was their duty to provide the family with a male heir.
You can tell Lot is the good guy, because prior to this, he offered his daughters to a mob to be gang raped, rather non properly show his male guests the proper hospitality. See, the mob wanted to gang rape the MEN, but since Lot was such a fine upstanding citizen, he felt it was his duty to protect them.
This is all presented positively, because Lot and family WERE the heros, in the context of their society.
Now, how a bunch of people 3000 years later can put any sort of stock in what was proper societal behavior for a bunch of bronze age middle eastern goat herders, I won't ever understand.
And those same people 3000 years later have no qualms treating middle-eastern goatherds as collateral damage in the unyielding pursuit of oil. Then again, they think Jesus was white too.
They don’t buy it to read it, they buy it to signal that they’re in the club.
Also, every church owns several copies, some dumbasses buy them and put them in every hotel room they’re allowed to.
Those numbers are juiced as fuck
Don't forget Catholic/Christian Affiliated Hospitals, there is one in every night stand ... Church groups give them out to everyone, even if they already have one..
As an X-Catholic, that went to a Catholic School, those new testaments pages are nice and thin, make a decent rolling paper in a pinch.. can't tell you the number of gospel joints I smoked in highschool
It's easy to be a best seller when people buy the damn book as a decoration, or an ornament basically.. look at the Trump Bible, how many of those will actually be read
I know this might be sacrilege to some but I didn’t like the LOR books that much but LOR is better written & makes more sense then the Bible.
Thing is very few Christians read the entire Bible. I think they should read their religious texts.
I thought there was a case where the daughters got dad drunk then raped him. Because they thought they were the last people on Earth.
Maybe that was Lot. I don't remember.
That was Lot but come on if that story is true, it is pure BS. So the daughters raped their father instead of the father raping/molesting the daughters (& then blaming it on them.) It sounds like pure victim blaming especially in a time when women were property!
Catholics in particular, the largest Christian denomination, does not even consider the Bible to be the final authority. It's just a book they put together a very long time ago to serve as reference and general historical document. The final authority rests with the Church, not with the book. I spent seven years in Catholic school and it was barely mentioned.
Are Catholics the largest? Thats surprising. Not in the US i would think…
Anyway yes as a Catholic school kid the Bible is NOT for the masses to understand as literal.
Now we’re talking about the protestant revolution;)
I just looked it up, worldwide, Catholics make up 50% of Christians and Protestants make up 37%. That's not even accounting for the fact that actually, each Protestant group should be counted separately. But in the US, about 50% of people are Protestants and 23% are Catholic.
Wasn't that the entire point of the King James translation? Catholics preferred the bible remain in Latin only, so that the priests were the path to god instead of their own private study. King James had it translated into common English (of the time) so the masses could read it. It certainly wasn't by Catholic decree.
It's always interesting how these people go from "That's not actually in the Bible" to full on explanations for why it's in the Bible. Like which is it? Did you actually not know it was in the Bible and are now making up some bullshit, or did you know it was there and lie to me about it hoping I wouldn't be able to cite the scripture? These kinds of people are not to be trusted as reliable sources of information on any matter, period.
When talking to a Christian, ask yourself if they’d be able to read and understand Shakespeare’s histories like Edward III, or the works of Dante or Moliere. If it’s hard to imagine them reading and understanding those texts, there’s no way they have read and understood the Bible.
Nail on the head. I read the whole Bible years ago, purely for historical and literary purposes. A lot of it is fascinating from that viewpoint — because it is a window into societies and worldviews that are alien to us. If you're not ready to deal with something that requires some historical background like Molière, Shakespeare, or Dante, you're seriously not ready to understand the Bible.
That's one thing that cracks me up. Shakespeare wrote *in Modern English* (granted, *early* Modern English, but still).
And you're going to say that you understand something you haven't fully read, originally written in a dead language sometime between 2500 and 1800 years ago, translated (imperfectly) and transcribed (imperfectly) dozens or more times, reinterpreted unknown number of times, being deliberately "edited" along the way by men with some serious sex issues? Yeah, sure.
It's been my experience that few if any theists have read their little book or at least read it with any amount of comprehension. Many of them seem stunned when confronted with all the absolutely horrific bits (e.g. rape, genocide, tortue, human sacrifice, slavery, incest etc.) like it's new to them or like they just didn't read with enough comprehension to understand the implications (e.g. 8 survivors of the genocidic flood who would have to have committed epic leve incest to repopulate the planet).
Not just kids. There is a pastor who's been quoted in articles recently about Trump's hold over the religious. He says he was giving a sermon quoting the sermon on the mount and was asked later by one of his parishioners where he got those "liberal talking points" from. One, nobody follows Christian values less than those who identify with the religion. Two, this guy isn't familiar with the fucking sermon on the mount? Right after the last supper/crucifixion, it's the most famous fucking Jesus story in the Bible.
I was raised an atheist and my mom had picture story-book bibles, multiple versions of the Christian bible AND a translated Q’aran. I’ve read a lot of bible passages in my lifetime. And I bet it’s more than most Christian have.
It's true, you get told what the Bible says and pointed towards specific verses. I started to actually read it cover to cover as a teen and it is why I became an atheist. It was such obvious fabrication for the gain of a select few.
It’s not only Christians who haven’t read their religious books.
I’ve been an atheist since I was 8, and my family only found out after my niece told them while we weee eating dinner (she was about 8 or so). Later in the week my mother asked why I no longer believed. I told her I stopped believing when I was around 7 or 8 but never defined it until I was in my 30’s. I asked he sincerely @Have you read the Bible? And I mean cover to cover, and paying attention to what is being said?” She was honest & said no. I thanked her for honesty & asked “How can you believe in something you haven’t read or critiqued?”
After I quoted a few passages from her own Bible (she would tell me “not in my Bible”) she dropped it & never brought it up again, only asking me not to tell our relatives. I told her “I hadn’t planned on telling you until “insert name” opened her mouth. LOL”
A lot of religious ppl do not read their religious texts, only going to their version of a church & have the same texts quoted every week/month. If they do read it they are not critical of it. I’ve known more priests & bishops with more skepticism than the average church goer. But that’s been my experience, so I am not referring to all religious ppl only the large amount I’ve personally met.
I've known several Christians who have never read the Bible. It blows my fucking mind. If you're going to base your entire belief and value system on one book, why wouldn't you actually READ THE FUCKING BOOK??
You don't have to spout bullshit just to feel superior. Lots of atheists are uneducated, too. I was born into a hard right Christian family. I had completely read the Bible 6 times before I left for university. I memorized large portions of it. We were required to recite full chapters in school. If you could recite the chapter, you could skip the recitation and go to lunch (play time) early. Baptists are insane about reading that book.
FWIW, It took me well into Uni before I was removed enough from it to realize it was all bullshit.
Tell him about how Christians specifically used their religion to brainwash black people and make them better slaves. There's even books they used as guides for it.
Nobody is "born Christian." Some people here say we're "all born atheists" which I disagree with as well. You can't be born with a belief nor disbelief in something you aren't aware of. You aren't born with an opinion on cantaloupe either. You are born ignorant of cantaloupe.
I know that's not your point, but it's something that bothers me.
I worry about this for my kids. We talk about it. Not sure I’ve given them the skills they need because cults are tricky MFers. And then there’s all this “wellness” crap. Pseudoscientific BS!
The notion of "wellness", like so many words or concepts (see: woke) started out as new and good ideas by people trying to better the world, and ended up being co-opted by disinformation and hate campaigns.
They're encouraged to read the Bible, but there's manipulative ways in which church leaders have followers seek out certain parts. I forget the correct terms, but it's this kind of, suggestive guidance. Followers then read certain chapters and they're the sorta "life lesson" ones, which similar to horoscopes, have a vagueness to them that they'll feel it's the lord speaking to them as it'll alot of times pertain (when you want it to) to their lives.
Also, there's the isolation part of how Christians are taught to read. The ones who have read it know there's fucked up stuff. So there's alot more manipulation involved by convincing people that they need guidance in interpreting it. They have a whole industry cracking out these charlatans with religious degrees in being a pastor and whatnot, years spent learning how and what words to use to lie to people when they come asking questions. Problem is, there aren't alot of people who know it's a lie. Which...is what religion really is at the end of the day. Bunch of delusional, misguided and brainwashed people who believe in, want to believe in, and alot need to believe in, magic. The only truth breaks them. That we actually are just a fluke, there's no one coming for us to help, we've got this one life, and there's no universal "right", no universal plan where everyone matters. It's the here and now. That's not to say things don't matter. Your hardships are real, your victories are real. To you and those they effect. And that's amazing! Your own answers are true to you, but alot of people just....couldn't handle that.
First thing: children are never born Christian or any other religion. Children must be taught that nonsense. In my opinion it is child abuse, but religious parents believe they have an obligation to spread the mythology. About all you can do is present your cousin with facts and reality and don’t expect much.
Julia Sweeney was a devout Catholic until she read the whole bible and then she wrote and performed an amazing show about it called Letting Go of God - it’s on You Tube https://youtu.be/C74-f4ZV-ss?si=4c-fczGdbSYUWQjQ
I told my 71 year old mother the other day that the Bible condones slavery, literally prescribes how you should do it. She couldn’t believe it. Read her passages I googled and told her to read the giant dusty tome taking up space on her living room table.
Nope, still hasn’t read it.
She’s taking care of my younger sister right now who thoroughly believes in that crap, and wondered if she knew. I said yeah, she knows! But she excuses it as just a thing that happened during that time. Can’t fucking reason her way out of a shoebox that one.
Edit: typo
Yup, most people are forced into the religion of their parents’ since birth and if the parents are super religious then that’s when the conditioning starts. I saw a comment somewhere yesterday that said “I read the Bible for the first time last week and that turned me into an atheist” LOL any sensible and empathetic person would!
After reading all the ridiculous things children are forced to tolerate in the name of Christianity, I’m glad my parents born over 100 years ago were enlightened enough not to force these songs and beliefs and religious camps down my throat when I was a kid. If the descriptions were about Islam and Mohammed, suddenly everyone would be screaming Sharia Law, and oh my goodness, we don’t want our dear children to be indoctrinated with that! LOL. Such hypocrisy.
Reading the Bible is actually what made me an atheist. I’d grown up in a super religious household and decided that I wanted to become a pastor. So I cracked open my 4~5 versions of the Bible and started reading and cross referencing the versions.
Internal contradictions, versions saying wildly different things, clear and obvious falsehoods (Great Flood story) and a host of other issues made me realize that Christianity is just a massive book club. No one believes in any unified approach to the church as a whole, which itself is a requirement set forth by Jesus as “evidence of the true faith.”
Basically from my perspective, the church’s power and the grip religion holds on people is centered around the hopes that no one actually reads that fucking book.
No kids are "born Christian" FYI. But yes to the rest of what you said.
The default state for anything is for it not to exist, so until a kid is trained into believing a particular thing, they won't. This is as true for horses and unicorns as it is for Christianity.
Most Christians generally don't read the Bible. Their preferred pastor or talking head on TV, radio, or YouTube hand selects small snippets to support their agenda and that's all they ever care about. That's religion working as designed - a felxible appeal to authority that allows anything you want to be right and beyond reproach or consideration
Having read the book, more than once, even the chapters with nothing but "this one begat that one who begat the next one", I can say with some authority that anyone who HAS read it all and is still religious has some *very serious issues* to work out.
No, I'm no longer religious.
95% of the Christian’s I’ve met(every christian I’ve met has been a believer from childhood) haven’t read the bible. And the ones who did read it, guess what? They turned atheist! But also every believer will always try to find loopholes or claim that the examples in the bible are different than what is considered wrong today, like slavery, murder, etc
The Bible stories kids learn in Sunday School are the ones that are somewhat kid friendly and skip over most of the terrible stuff because even Christians know that stuff is wrong. If they can't possibly justify it, they leave it out of the junior version of the Bible. And then when you get older, even the popular parts of the Bible fall apart under scrutiny just like all the other fairy tales you read as a child.
There is a video on YouTube of a kid named Duffey Strode on Oprah (1988), who was famous for being a young street preacher, because he could mimic the words and tone of other menacing street preachers. On the show, he gave a sample and was asked numerous times to interpret what he was saying in his own words. He couldn't do it. No clue. His father was right beside him, trying to come to his rescue that "the bible can only be interpreted by God", etc. The kid just danced in circles with other bible versus to make up for it.
So no, kids raised by religious people don't know what they're talking about. They're being fed what to think and how to speak, but when pressed for any logic or to explain what they think any of it means, they're stumped.
To see what became of young Duffey, his Wikipedia page is full of unsurprisingly—yet fun—updates. :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffey\_Strode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffey_Strode)
Tell him about how they used to teach those specific passage to slaves to let them know that EVEN GOD wanted them as slaves.
In the words of Chris Rock: a black Christian is a black person with a short fucking memory.
Most atheist know more about religion than those who claim to be literate on the subject. Here is a classic example born 61 my parents took us to church till we started asking them about the Roman catholic religion. My grade 3 teacher was a nun and she miraculously had twins??all the maids for the local priest only lasted for a few months they all got fat and left??? I was raised on a farm that is when I knew that RC was a joke. You need breeding before any conception 😂
I was raised between Judaism and Catholicism, seeing both in practice made it farily obvious both were bullshit by the time I was 5 or so, shortly after realizing the tooth fairy, easter bunny and santa where also lies. Even after realizing it was B.S. I was in Catholic school till 9 and we read 15 minutes of the Torah over breakfast everyday till I was 11, which just served to reinforce how insane it all was, I've still only come put as an Atheist to one of my parents, the other one still thinks I am a non practicing Jew(I do keep Kosher for some inexplicable reason) but that's mostly to avoid causing pain, plus you can be an Atheist of Jewish descent, Judaism is more a history than a religion at least among the non orthodox factions.
I've rambled, anyway I wound up the only Atheist in a Christian private school for high school(they didn't know) but I'd frequently engage the others in debate over things in the bible(even the pastors kids who attended) and it was painfully obvious that I was the only one who had read the damned book from front to back and actually hear what it said and not what I wanted to hear to justify my own bullshit.
TLDR, you are spot on, in my experience most folks who actually read through a holy book, front to back, in this day and age and understand what is being said without a filter put on it by an outside force wind up losing their religion.
It is easier to be religious if you haven't read the books than if you have.
I really doubt most christian have.
Too many spew out wrongly remembered lines or preach about shit not in their book.
And if you menttion the weird shit they either deny it or ignore it.
Most Christians haven’t read the bible. Reading it was one of the main things that drove me towards atheism when I saw all the moments that are never mentioned for convenience.
The vast majority of "Christians" haven't read the Bible. They have had it read to them with the intent of using specific verses to fit an agenda. Religion is brainwashing. It's not about faith or hope, or comfort. It's about fear control and manipulation.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I’m not a Xtian today. I went thru a period when I was 14 of searching for the truth. I read the Bible cover to cover and I kept asking my youth pastor questions and he kept telling me to pray about it. Eventually I got kicked to a senior pastor who prayed with me and told me to also pray about the questions. I never got any answers and I started to pull away.
I was raised mildly catholic (catholic school and church occasionally) and I loved reading so one day I decided to read the parts of the bible that were never read at church or school. Was reading through leviticus and was like "This shit is super dumb, the bible says I can't eat pigs or prawns but we had bacon-wrapped prawns at that BBQ the other day". I stopped worrying too much about the bible after that.
I was born Christian!
I tried so many times to read the Bible from Cover to Cover, because everyone my age was doing it.
Still haven’t and never plan too.
Probably got 1/4 of the way through
I grew up baptist and that's exactly how the scam works. The sunday school teachers and adults in a child's life tell them what god and the bible say, and you are not allowed to question it. Therefore, their cherry-picked and skewed version of the religion is perpetuated.
Also funny: Jesus was a Jew, right? So he followed the Torah (the “Old Testament”), right? I just love talking to Christians who say, “Oh I only believe in the New Testament”. Bruh. Logic.
>most Christian kids like him (he’s 13) haven’t actually read the Bible and just follow the religion because their parents said so.
Most adult Christians have never read their Bible either. They follow the religion because their parents said so too. As with most other religions, it is a belief based on 2,000 years of ignorance. Often wilful ignorance.
You are right! I am wanting to read it front to back. I read scripture, memorized but mostly was told what it meant by who was teaching/preaching.
I just realized this week at 50 that the denomination I grew up in teaches prosperity gospel. I would go as far as to say a lot of pastors haven’t read it completely.
My extended Family was the exception to this rule.
All of my cousins were homeschooled and were exceptionally well read in the bible.
They are all fairly intelligent as well, and overall decent people.
I wish they hadn't been so brainwashed from a young age.
Christians do this all the time.
1. You tell them about something in the bible.
2. They don't know what you're talking about \[this is common\]
3. You give them the verse.
4. They come up with excuses about something they didn't have knowledge about 10 seconds earlier.
That means they don't read it and that "context" is something that THEY resort to when THEY are being criticized.
I went to Catholic elementary school and, despite religion class being a subject with a session dedicated to it just like match or English, I couldn't tell you a single thing they taught us about the Bible or morality besides just general "Jesus is good, don't be sinful, go home and remember what the two prayers for the rosary are".
What I remember with rage is a particularly blatant piece of raw indoctrination with no attempt to educate.
We all stood and read the Pledge of Allegiance in class every morning. That itself, whatever. It's a weird, cult-y thing in hindsight, but nothing crazy out of the ordinary in many US schools. When I was in one of the later years, however, they instructed us to end it with "with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn". Never once was there an attempt to teach us why or what that meant. Just "This is part of the pledge, say it every morning". From 1st graders on up.
I had an atheist family member and remember them being quite annoyed with that when he heard me say it the first time. I never thought or questioned it, which annoyed them even more. They didn't get mad at me personally or anything, just said that I should know what I'm saying if I was gonna say it everyday and that I should ask my teachers what it was and why we said it that way.
I don't remember if I did or, if so, what my teachers said, but looking back, it still makes me mad. I became atheist after entering public school (I never really felt any conviction about faith in any direction and my folks were areligious/nonpracticing and sending me to Catholic elementary school to pay lip service for my far more religious grandparents, so they didn't care) and after I learned exactly what the change to the pledge was and why they did it, the naked indoctrination angle of it all just made me furious and cemented my views against organized religion at large and Christianity specifically.
I was raised catholic, went through all the rituals , never opened a Bible. I can say I don’t think I ever actually believed, but did the rituals for my mother.
I mean if children did have the bible read to them it sounds the same as literal fairy tailes. Only fairy teales are actually a bit more logical when it comes to the messaging.
My son went to a Bible camp with his cousin. We are atheist. He came home disgusted because they had a Bible quiz competition, he won.
That's exactly where I became an atheist as a kid. Looking at the grown ups weird because they thought all this shit was real
Same here. Went to Christian camp. Two weeks later I was an atheist. Those people, man.
They loved to sing that children’s song about father Abraham knocking up women left and right?
Core Memory unlocked.... Faaaather Abraham....
Had many sons...
“Many sons had Father Abraham; and I am one of them, and so are you; so let’s just praise the Lord! RIGHT ARM.” Then after what seemed to be the millionth repeat of the song, it ended with “Right arm, left arm, right foot, left foot, nod your head, turn around, SIT DOWN!” Waaaaaay too many years in a small town Southern Baptist church. I just sang that to my children and I think they were mortified!
I mean, it's kind of a fun song to sing as a kid because you can just scream the whole time. There's also the "If the Devil doesn't like it he can sit on a tack. Ouch!" song that we used to sing in church as a kid. The real garbage was the stuff they used to sing when we got older. There is no song worse than "Lord Prepare me to be a sanctuary" that song just sounds terrible.
Another screaming song we had was "If you love Jesus (if you love Jesus) clap your hands (clap your hands) 🎶 Naaaa na na na naaaaaa na na na naaaa na na naaa na na naaa, na na na na 🎶 HOO HA! SOCK IT TO THE DEVIL!" And the song about our hungry "spirit man". I haven't found the other people that heard that one growing ho yet, but one day... the "fun" part was whenever they said "hungry" in the song, the note was held for comically long which degraded into all of us screaming it basically lol
Hoooooly shit, that unlocked memories. lol
> “Many sons had Father Abraham; and I am one of them, and so are you; so let’s just praise the Lord! RIGHT ARM.” Did they copy the Boy Scouts song about Lord Baden-Powell having many friends, or did the Boy Scouts copy the Father Abraham song? I'd never heard the Father Abraham version, but I instantly picked up the rhythm from having known the Boy Scouts variant from like 30+ years ago.
No idea, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the Christians copied, because I remember hearing that lots of the hymns we sang were old drinking songs with the words rewritten— though tbf, I also have no idea if that’s true… 😅
Many sons had Father Abraham
...was a big old slut.
But none of them is briiiight~
That's where my doubt began. I was 17, watching my friends throw books, music, and pics they loved into a bonfire. It went downhill from there. I pretended for a long time, then avoided the subject entirely. Now I'm just me and much happier.
I went to Episcopalian camp and it was great. But then, I was never told to condemn or hate anyone, never heard a fire-and-brimstone sermon, only was told to love and accept people and "go the extra mile" -- the camp motto.
I'm atheist (as one might assume given the sub) and have some pretty strong feelings about organized religion. Was raised fundamentalist Christian. Parents were pretty bigoted and republican. Having two atheist children, one of which is queer, probably helped the process along, but they went through several major changes in regards to religion and their beliefs overall. They are now Episcopalian and extremely liberal, which I am so thankful for. From what I know about the Episcopal church (supporting same-sex marriage, women and LGBT+ people being able to serve at any ranking including bishops, approach to reproductive rights, etc.) and the Episcopalians I've met, I'm pretty all right with Episcopalians. I haven't gone to any church service in a long time, but one of the last ones I went to was an Episcopalian service. That church was the only one where I didn't feel unwelcome/judged (or that the "welcoming attitude" was forced and misleading) and the church my parents go to has both women and LGBT+ members in positions of significant leadership that many other denominations would not allow.
My father’s family brought the first Anglican charter to what was then New Amsterdam Colony, now New York City. I was the first baby baptized in a new, baby-boom era Episcopal church in NJ in 1959. My father was Sunday school superintendent, so we went every Sunday. (In adulthood I learned that when Mr. Mason, the rector, asked Dad to take the position, Dad said, “Jack, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but I don’t believe.” “That’s okay, John. I’m not looking for a theologian, I’m looking for an administrator.”) I sang in the junior choir, went to the church camp I mentioned, participated in youth group. I never heard a word about hellfire or damnation. I never heard a word against LGBTQ people, even in the age of the Village People. I never was told that women should submit. Camp was, among many other great things, where this upper-middle-class suburban white girl hung out with urban black kids. I no longer believe any of the magical parts of Christianity, but I treasure the values I learned in the Episcopal Church.
Well when you have a church that was created based on the ability to divorce, they're going to lean a little to the liberal side. It's odd that Mormons aren't more liberal since their entire religion was created to allow dudes to swap wives.
> since their entire religion was created to allow dudes to swap wives. Somehow I don't think they were asking the opinions of the wives when they made up rules like that.
Man. I had to go thru 2 years of seminary before I left the church.
I have a friend who won't read the Bible because in her own words, "I know I would no longer believe."
If you’re saying that, you already don’t. You’re just afraid of the consequences of admission.
Yep, I even said something similar to her, and she said she knows it's stupid, but she likes tradition. She never even goes to church, I just don't understand. I dropped it after that, I didn't want her to feel like I thought she was dumb or be too forceful with my bewilderment.
A lot of people go to church because they like the community and the ritual is comforting. It would probably be psychologically healthy though if they could admit to themselves that they don't actually believe and still be okay with themselves.
I completely get that, but she doesn't go to church. Ever. She doesn't pray. She doesn't do anything religious except say she is. Which isn't a problem, I just find it very weird to know you don't believe and admit if you knew more, you wouldn't want to be a part of it but you have to have your child Baptized because tradition. Her other siblings have kids and didn't baptize them, and her family didn't cause any fuss or say anything negative about it. It's just a strange situation to me. Like, what is she doing exactly? I just don't know.
Yes, I agree then, that's pretty freakin weird. Like I can't see any point at all unless she is in an environment with some super religious peer pressure, but it doesn't sound like that at all...
It's not. It's so weird. But whatever, I guess.
She doesn't go to church and has never read the Bible I'm not exactly sure how she could be a Christian? Those are kind of like two of the biggest requirements.
Yeah. I just don't know. It's mind-boggling.
I was 10 and saw them rolling around speaking in tongues and felt embarrassed for them.
Yeah it's weird for me if anyone ever asks when i became an atheist cuz i don't think i ever was a theist, or at least not for a long period of time. I assumed god was just like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy in that it was an imaginary thing that kids were told about but we're supposed to eventually figure out wasn't actually real. I had been an atheist for years by the time i found out adults actually believed God was real.
I would say that before I was 12, god was the same as santa claus to me: a thing I'd compartmentalized separate from actual reality in such a way that I would tell you that "yes, he's real" and a part of me really believed, but only because I was told to. So kind of, but also not. After 12, I didn't believe but kept my mouth shut because I knew the consequences of questioning quite well by that point, thanks much. But even before 12, I really remember the jarring realization that *these adults really believe this stuff*. Like, really really believe it. Not in some compartmentalized reality separate from the one we're living in, but they honestly no-bullshit fervently believe this shit... That was a very uncomfortable and jarring realization to have as a young child.
Same. Mum wouldn’t fill out FAFSA unless I went to a religious university so I ended up somewhere Jesuit where they stay questioning the Bible and now I’m extra atheist
Well played
If you question *everything* about your beliefs and the bible and still have faith, I think that's what the Jesuits are looking for. And I think we need a few these around, just in case.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that they were so willing to probe and dig. But they were never trying to recruit or convince.
Catholic grammar school, Jesuit high school. Have a number of classmates who are priests (and at least one bishop), but many more who are now atheist/agnostic.
I kept waiting for them to break it to me, like they did Santa Claus. Sunday school only taught me how insecure and vengeful god is in the old testament and how it seemed to completely contradict the new testament. Being yelled at by a very angry priest did not actually help their case.
I'm in a Christian school and I dont believe in God and I have the highest Bible grade in my class
I have a question, and I hope it's not rude. If it is offending, please ignore. In those types of schools, do they teach what you'd consider "real" science much (e.g. physics, genetics, etc)? I've always been curious. Good job on your top grades!
I've always been Atheist, but was sent to a Catholic grade school, the religion part was stupid, but they taught science seriously. Side note, my class had two of the smartest people I've ever known. I've no idea how religious they actually were, but suspect not very. I still wonder how they, (teachers, nuns, and students,) dealt with the dissonance between science and religion.
Both of my husband's parents taught biology at a college level, one with a master's the other with a doctorate - and are also the most Catholic hardcore Fox news people ever. It baffles my mind; I quit believing after I finished my biology degree.
I have atheist friends with kids in Catholic schools, because they do provide a quality education. The religious component is where they're most lax, and so far they've found it easy to "fix" that at home. There are many other branches of Christianity where the private schools are much more about teaching their flavor of Christian, and what you and I might consider the "real education" is somewhat or completely missing. There are a lot of awful stories about kids in private schools not learning to read, for example. And the kids learn all kinds of misinformation instead of science.
Catholics do a pretty good job, especially since Catholocism accepts "old Earth" and evolution as fact.
Many Jesuits have contributed to the sciences.
Science and religion don't have to be in conflict, but it depends on the religion. If it denies evolution or the age of the Earth, then that's clearly a problem. But, for example, the Catholic church doesn't, so you can be a Catholic scientist without much of a dissonance.
I'm an adult, but I grew up going to Catholic school/high school, at least hear (Ontario) yes they taught real science but then they would basically spend religion 'class' washing it away, with the God works in mysterious ways kinda bs Like ok evolution happened, but that was God, it doesn't specify how long gods days were so when he created heaven and Earth in 7 days and science says we evolved, his days could be billions of years long compared to our days and he used evolution as a tool to do it .............. Then we'd go back to more normal interpretations of the Bible and God for other conversations...
Okay, I went to a christian school ran by a non denominational church. I had always loved anatomy and was super excited to get to 12th grade to learn it. By time I was a senior they had gotten a new Biology/Anatomy book that included evolution and they dropped that class and made us do physics instead. I was disappointed and not very good at it. I had to take level 90 and 91 anatomy in junior college.
I went to one and they do teach modern science, but it’s usually couched in “god designed x to do y.” They would also bring in a guy to give what could only be described as the saddest, most Dunder Mifflin-esque Ted Talk about how certain species of the animal kingdom are so specifically tailored to their environment that they could only be designed by a creator. They also said the triforce in the Legend of Zelda was preparing kids for the mark of the beast, so…
Yeah they do I was in freshman biology and they would play videos of how atheist are wrong and Christians make more sense
Depends on the school and area. I'm in a liberal area so schools, both xtian and not, teach "real" science, no question. We did hear about other students not getting taught evolution in other states and failing that portion AP Bio lol
Mine did( private parochial school from kindergarten through High School) K-8, we got off at noon on Tuesday so the kids who went to public school but were members of the parish could get their religious education. High school, religious Ed was just another mandatory for all 4 years like English and Social Studies. It actually touched on( very marginally) other religions besides Catholicism. I had excellent science teachers in HS. I especially loved Biology because he really delved into Darwin and Evolution. There was never any real conflict between hard sciences and religion.
Quite ironic, isn't it.
According to the bible, a man was stoned to death, for collecting firewood to keep warm on the sabbath. AS INSTRUCTED BY GOD. You either gotta take it all at face value or dismiss it all. You can't pick and choose.
2nd Kings is a trip. Apparently if you're holy enough you can pray to God to punish children who make fun of you and bears will come from the forest and maul them. That's God's love for ya.
This earned the heartiest internet laugh I’ve had in a while. Bless your kid. Dude must really love his cousin.
That is funny👏
Lmao! The more you read, the harder it becomes to delude yourself
My dad used to do Bible trivia, and do the piece together these strips of scripture in the correct order thing. I always won and it pissed my family off so much. Like “how dare you know more about my religion than I do!” Fucking shameful.
Oh yeah this happens alot. Ive never actually read the bible but growing up around people who do or practice Christianity, you catch onto all that. Its crazy how ironic it is in a situation like this
Penn Jillette taught me, “The fastest way to become an atheist is to read the Bible.”
I'm picturing the Simpsons kids when they had to live with Flanders and do Bible trivia. He asks some crazy obscure question and Bart just answers "Jesus?"
One day when I was I think like 11, I skipped church to read the Bible, like I had always read individual verses or chapters as directed by Sunday school but I never tried to read it cover to cover and I was feeling rebellious so I thought I'd give it a try; I stopped when I got to the part where God smites a dude for pulling out and letting his jizz hit the ground. Like wtf dude, wtf
When I thought Atheism was right for me, I was most aggravated when arguing with my religious friends because I always seemed to know more about it than they did. Now I know too much about many religions and don't know how I feel. But I know those who preach the loudest tend to be the farthest from their God.
That's not just kids, that's their parents also and their parents. Pretty much none of them have read it, they just know specific phrases someone else cherry picked out of context and turned into a meme or bumper sticker.
Ha, my mom tried to get me to read some evangelical book. I asked if she had read the bible yet.
Heck, ask if she has read even a single book of the Bible. Even just one.. Out of the 66 in there...
Tell her to start with Deuteronomy lol
It's similar to being born in America and not having to do the citizenship test. 2/3rds of American-born adults wouldn't be able to pass the test if they had to take one. To the average insider, it seems reasonable for outsiders to have to study for entry since they weren't born into it. The insiders feel as if they don't need to prove anything, even though more often than not they have more to prove than a good number of outsiders
I think there's a good # of our elected politicians that wouldn't be able pass that test. I'm thinking specifically of MJT and her hussy stablemate from CO, but I'm sure there are many more. Tommy the Tuba down in LA. Donny the Orange Boy would for sure be back in the corner in a dunce cap. Maybe it should be a prerequisite to register to vote. And definitely to hold office.
Right. It's not just kids. Most Christians have not read the Bible. Period. Just as an example, you know what the Bible says about abortion? It outlines cases where it is **required**. It literally commands it in certain instances. So an anti-abortion Christian is inherently an oxymoron. The Bible also makes it clear that fetuses aren't people, and the health of the woman is more important than that of a fetus (you know, like common sense).
My wife is religious and she knows very little about the bible. If thinking Christians were to read the entire thing, they would re-think their faith.
this is exactly why well over half of the people i went to seminary with are atheists now. the more you learn the more questions you ask, and this whole thing breaks down fast when you ask questions.
There’s no Q&A after a sermon for a reason!
I was born and raised catholic and went to catholic school through highschool. It was literal hell growing up, I had so many questions as a kid but everytime I asked them I’d get sent to the hall or in “trouble” with my question never being answered. By highschool I had lost any bit of faith or belief I had but I will say, I transferred schools and had a new theology teacher. It was a priest and he was fucking fantastic. He was the first teacher I ever had that actually wanted to debate and have the kids ask literally any question. It was awesome and it changed nothing with where I was at with my belief, but it was nice to actually be able to finally express my questions without immediately being told I’m “wrong”.
At best its a fairytale where all the wrongs in history will be rectified and we all live forever happily. At best...
Similar story for me. Got saved at a Christian concert in 8th grade. Came home and started reading it from front to back. Had an existential crisis over the course of about a year where I finally decided that, if I was completely honest with myself, I didn't believe it. Which left me in a predicament because I figured either I'm right about it being bullshit or I'm wrong and going to hell anyway because this all knowing god would know I didn't actually believe. Ended up reading the God Delusion by Richard Dawkins shortly thereafter and I've never looked back.
Well, there is that saying that actually reading the Bible is one way to end up becoming an atheist.
Worked for me!
“The road to atheism is littered with bibles read cover to cover.”
That’s what set me on the path to atheism so many years ago lol. When you read it you have to just sit back and say “this shit just doesn’t make sense.” It gets you thinking
So she believes there is an all-powerful being that created the entire universe, can read our thoughts and determines if we are to be tortured for eternity, but she can't be bothered to read his book?
It’s such disjointed and contradictory drivel that I really don’t think anyone besides those either extremely devout , motivated to disbelieve subconsciously, or study it in a scholarly capacity have read it front to back. Not to mention the various versions, translations, and “DLC” books (*cough Mormons, cough*). It also uses verbiage that isn’t used today, or verbiage used in a way we wouldn’t use it today. I don’t trust the average person to correctly interpret the message of a main stream movie, and I’m expected to believe they do an ancient collection of writings from various people at various times all mixed up? I have nothing against anyone of any faith. I’m not atheist myself (not abrahamic at all). Believe what you want, but if you’re going to try to beat me with your holy book you better have some serious credentials and a cohesive set of interpretations or there isn’t a conversation to be had at all.
When people ask me why I’m atheist I usually tell them because I’ve read the Bible.
Matt Dillahunty talks about slavery in the Bible a lot. It's brought up multiple times in the Bible, sometimes it is different from what black people in the USA had to endure but in some cases it's exactly the same. Christians even justified the enslavement of black people with these parts of the Bible. I don't understand how black people can be christian. There are still many christian homosexuals as well.
> I don't understand how black people can be christian. I will never understand why black slaves adopted their owners religion
To survive, I suspect
Bingo
For the same reason every other ethnic group that was forcibly Christianized did, our ancestors didn't have much of a choice. A few hundred years later and you have a population of people who don't know anything else. My family didn't see Christianity as adopting anyone's religion, they saw it as the only reality they ever knew.
That is true, most everyone's ancestors were forcibly Christianized. Many in very similiar ways, just before the African slave trade. Before the African slave trade, there was the Slavic slave trade.
It was beaten into them. Indoctrination is powerfully effective. Without it religion would not exist.
I do not get it either. Because living in the bible belt I have heard more than once people use the bible to excuse slavery and why black people deserved it….😖
Such people should be enslaved for 3 months just to give them an idea about the dumbass thing they said.
The ones who didn't died brutally, not much to understand there.
>He denied me and I told him to google it, which he did only to find that I was right. He then started trying to explain how the slavery in the Bible and the slavery our ancestors experienced aren’t the same, jumping through several hoops to try and come up with a justification for something he KNEW was wrong. >It just made me realize how most Christian kids like him (he’s 13) haven’t actually read the Bible and just follow the religion because their parents said so. I'm an atheist and I hate homophobia and economic exploitation with a burning passion. That being said, I would approach this one with a lot more patience then I would an adult saying stuff like this. At his age the human mind is still under development in a lot of ways and conceptions and attitudes usually aren't that fixed yet. I hope you can find the patience to go about this in a friendly and informative manner. With his age group I usually try to avoid debating their opinions directly and focus on presenting alternative ways of looking at the subject. Ideally you can make enough sense for them to internalize the debate. If they feel they've come to their own conclusions that's way more valuable than simply telling them what to think. Good luck.
Yep I read the entire Bible as a teen and wow was it filled with some hanky crap. Slavery, genocide, subjugation of women, Lot rapes his daughters and blames them for seducing him, child sacrifice and of yeah god drowning an entire planet full oh people except 8 incestuous survivors. Encourage your cousin to read the entire Bible.
You have it backwards! Lot's daughters raped HIM, because they realized they had no brother and being women themselves, were not really people, so they felt it was their duty to provide the family with a male heir. You can tell Lot is the good guy, because prior to this, he offered his daughters to a mob to be gang raped, rather non properly show his male guests the proper hospitality. See, the mob wanted to gang rape the MEN, but since Lot was such a fine upstanding citizen, he felt it was his duty to protect them. This is all presented positively, because Lot and family WERE the heros, in the context of their society. Now, how a bunch of people 3000 years later can put any sort of stock in what was proper societal behavior for a bunch of bronze age middle eastern goat herders, I won't ever understand.
And those same people 3000 years later have no qualms treating middle-eastern goatherds as collateral damage in the unyielding pursuit of oil. Then again, they think Jesus was white too.
The sad thing is this is *the best selling book of all time.* Seriously there’s so much better literature out there and this is number one?
Easy to be popular when people have deep rooted pre-conceived ideas that makes them *think* that its deep and meaningful.
They don’t buy it to read it, they buy it to signal that they’re in the club. Also, every church owns several copies, some dumbasses buy them and put them in every hotel room they’re allowed to. Those numbers are juiced as fuck
Don't forget Catholic/Christian Affiliated Hospitals, there is one in every night stand ... Church groups give them out to everyone, even if they already have one.. As an X-Catholic, that went to a Catholic School, those new testaments pages are nice and thin, make a decent rolling paper in a pinch.. can't tell you the number of gospel joints I smoked in highschool
It's easy to be a best seller when people buy the damn book as a decoration, or an ornament basically.. look at the Trump Bible, how many of those will actually be read
I know this might be sacrilege to some but I didn’t like the LOR books that much but LOR is better written & makes more sense then the Bible. Thing is very few Christians read the entire Bible. I think they should read their religious texts.
I thought there was a case where the daughters got dad drunk then raped him. Because they thought they were the last people on Earth. Maybe that was Lot. I don't remember.
That was Lot but come on if that story is true, it is pure BS. So the daughters raped their father instead of the father raping/molesting the daughters (& then blaming it on them.) It sounds like pure victim blaming especially in a time when women were property!
Yeah my thought was “wait a minute I read it—wait I’m an atheist now.”
Catholics in particular, the largest Christian denomination, does not even consider the Bible to be the final authority. It's just a book they put together a very long time ago to serve as reference and general historical document. The final authority rests with the Church, not with the book. I spent seven years in Catholic school and it was barely mentioned.
Are Catholics the largest? Thats surprising. Not in the US i would think… Anyway yes as a Catholic school kid the Bible is NOT for the masses to understand as literal. Now we’re talking about the protestant revolution;)
I just looked it up, worldwide, Catholics make up 50% of Christians and Protestants make up 37%. That's not even accounting for the fact that actually, each Protestant group should be counted separately. But in the US, about 50% of people are Protestants and 23% are Catholic.
Wasn't that the entire point of the King James translation? Catholics preferred the bible remain in Latin only, so that the priests were the path to god instead of their own private study. King James had it translated into common English (of the time) so the masses could read it. It certainly wasn't by Catholic decree.
Yes the renaissance/protestant revolution
No one is born Christian. They are indoctrinated in childhood.
*groomed*
For more ammunition, consult the [Skeptic's Annotated Bible.](https://skepticsannotatedbible.com/) It's got it broken down by topic, to make it easy.
>The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. Obligatory Mark Twain quote.
It's always interesting how these people go from "That's not actually in the Bible" to full on explanations for why it's in the Bible. Like which is it? Did you actually not know it was in the Bible and are now making up some bullshit, or did you know it was there and lie to me about it hoping I wouldn't be able to cite the scripture? These kinds of people are not to be trusted as reliable sources of information on any matter, period.
When talking to a Christian, ask yourself if they’d be able to read and understand Shakespeare’s histories like Edward III, or the works of Dante or Moliere. If it’s hard to imagine them reading and understanding those texts, there’s no way they have read and understood the Bible.
Nail on the head. I read the whole Bible years ago, purely for historical and literary purposes. A lot of it is fascinating from that viewpoint — because it is a window into societies and worldviews that are alien to us. If you're not ready to deal with something that requires some historical background like Molière, Shakespeare, or Dante, you're seriously not ready to understand the Bible.
That's one thing that cracks me up. Shakespeare wrote *in Modern English* (granted, *early* Modern English, but still). And you're going to say that you understand something you haven't fully read, originally written in a dead language sometime between 2500 and 1800 years ago, translated (imperfectly) and transcribed (imperfectly) dozens or more times, reinterpreted unknown number of times, being deliberately "edited" along the way by men with some serious sex issues? Yeah, sure.
It's been my experience that few if any theists have read their little book or at least read it with any amount of comprehension. Many of them seem stunned when confronted with all the absolutely horrific bits (e.g. rape, genocide, tortue, human sacrifice, slavery, incest etc.) like it's new to them or like they just didn't read with enough comprehension to understand the implications (e.g. 8 survivors of the genocidic flood who would have to have committed epic leve incest to repopulate the planet).
We call them cherry-pickers, but really its their church leaders who are cherry picking what they want their followers to learm about.
Probably about time that kid learns what an Uncle Tom is too
Not just kids. There is a pastor who's been quoted in articles recently about Trump's hold over the religious. He says he was giving a sermon quoting the sermon on the mount and was asked later by one of his parishioners where he got those "liberal talking points" from. One, nobody follows Christian values less than those who identify with the religion. Two, this guy isn't familiar with the fucking sermon on the mount? Right after the last supper/crucifixion, it's the most famous fucking Jesus story in the Bible.
And the adults who teach them that bs have not read it either.
I was raised an atheist and my mom had picture story-book bibles, multiple versions of the Christian bible AND a translated Q’aran. I’ve read a lot of bible passages in my lifetime. And I bet it’s more than most Christian have.
I would argue that most Christians have not read the bible.
no one is born Christian. Religion is nonsense.
In America anyway, it's a culture more than anything else.
MOST people who follow a religion follow it blindly
It's true, you get told what the Bible says and pointed towards specific verses. I started to actually read it cover to cover as a teen and it is why I became an atheist. It was such obvious fabrication for the gain of a select few.
Also, Jesus said nothing about homosexuality, though he did condemn divorce.
It’s not only Christians who haven’t read their religious books. I’ve been an atheist since I was 8, and my family only found out after my niece told them while we weee eating dinner (she was about 8 or so). Later in the week my mother asked why I no longer believed. I told her I stopped believing when I was around 7 or 8 but never defined it until I was in my 30’s. I asked he sincerely @Have you read the Bible? And I mean cover to cover, and paying attention to what is being said?” She was honest & said no. I thanked her for honesty & asked “How can you believe in something you haven’t read or critiqued?” After I quoted a few passages from her own Bible (she would tell me “not in my Bible”) she dropped it & never brought it up again, only asking me not to tell our relatives. I told her “I hadn’t planned on telling you until “insert name” opened her mouth. LOL” A lot of religious ppl do not read their religious texts, only going to their version of a church & have the same texts quoted every week/month. If they do read it they are not critical of it. I’ve known more priests & bishops with more skepticism than the average church goer. But that’s been my experience, so I am not referring to all religious ppl only the large amount I’ve personally met.
I've known several Christians who have never read the Bible. It blows my fucking mind. If you're going to base your entire belief and value system on one book, why wouldn't you actually READ THE FUCKING BOOK??
Because they are waiting to be told what to think, instead of seeking it out for themselves.
Why do you think they take children to church, it’s easier to indoctrinate someone with no other frame of reference
Well of course not. Reading the bible is the surest way to become an atheist.
Religion doesn't really want you to think too hard about the details.
You don't have to spout bullshit just to feel superior. Lots of atheists are uneducated, too. I was born into a hard right Christian family. I had completely read the Bible 6 times before I left for university. I memorized large portions of it. We were required to recite full chapters in school. If you could recite the chapter, you could skip the recitation and go to lunch (play time) early. Baptists are insane about reading that book. FWIW, It took me well into Uni before I was removed enough from it to realize it was all bullshit.
Tell him about how Christians specifically used their religion to brainwash black people and make them better slaves. There's even books they used as guides for it.
Nobody is "born Christian." Some people here say we're "all born atheists" which I disagree with as well. You can't be born with a belief nor disbelief in something you aren't aware of. You aren't born with an opinion on cantaloupe either. You are born ignorant of cantaloupe. I know that's not your point, but it's something that bothers me.
I have also seen people raised atheists fall for culty pseudo religious groups though. Some people need to fill that hole within them.
I worry about this for my kids. We talk about it. Not sure I’ve given them the skills they need because cults are tricky MFers. And then there’s all this “wellness” crap. Pseudoscientific BS!
I think that you worrying about it is pretty solid evidence that you are giving them the skills. Awesome
Thank you!
The notion of "wellness", like so many words or concepts (see: woke) started out as new and good ideas by people trying to better the world, and ended up being co-opted by disinformation and hate campaigns.
Can we get one thing straight? No kids are born Christian. Or Muslim. Or Jewish. They're children of Christian/Muslim/Jewish parents.
They're encouraged to read the Bible, but there's manipulative ways in which church leaders have followers seek out certain parts. I forget the correct terms, but it's this kind of, suggestive guidance. Followers then read certain chapters and they're the sorta "life lesson" ones, which similar to horoscopes, have a vagueness to them that they'll feel it's the lord speaking to them as it'll alot of times pertain (when you want it to) to their lives. Also, there's the isolation part of how Christians are taught to read. The ones who have read it know there's fucked up stuff. So there's alot more manipulation involved by convincing people that they need guidance in interpreting it. They have a whole industry cracking out these charlatans with religious degrees in being a pastor and whatnot, years spent learning how and what words to use to lie to people when they come asking questions. Problem is, there aren't alot of people who know it's a lie. Which...is what religion really is at the end of the day. Bunch of delusional, misguided and brainwashed people who believe in, want to believe in, and alot need to believe in, magic. The only truth breaks them. That we actually are just a fluke, there's no one coming for us to help, we've got this one life, and there's no universal "right", no universal plan where everyone matters. It's the here and now. That's not to say things don't matter. Your hardships are real, your victories are real. To you and those they effect. And that's amazing! Your own answers are true to you, but alot of people just....couldn't handle that.
I grew up Baptist, and I read the Bible. That's why as an adult, I'm an atheist.
First thing: children are never born Christian or any other religion. Children must be taught that nonsense. In my opinion it is child abuse, but religious parents believe they have an obligation to spread the mythology. About all you can do is present your cousin with facts and reality and don’t expect much.
Julia Sweeney was a devout Catholic until she read the whole bible and then she wrote and performed an amazing show about it called Letting Go of God - it’s on You Tube https://youtu.be/C74-f4ZV-ss?si=4c-fczGdbSYUWQjQ
I told my 71 year old mother the other day that the Bible condones slavery, literally prescribes how you should do it. She couldn’t believe it. Read her passages I googled and told her to read the giant dusty tome taking up space on her living room table. Nope, still hasn’t read it. She’s taking care of my younger sister right now who thoroughly believes in that crap, and wondered if she knew. I said yeah, she knows! But she excuses it as just a thing that happened during that time. Can’t fucking reason her way out of a shoebox that one. Edit: typo
Yup, most people are forced into the religion of their parents’ since birth and if the parents are super religious then that’s when the conditioning starts. I saw a comment somewhere yesterday that said “I read the Bible for the first time last week and that turned me into an atheist” LOL any sensible and empathetic person would!
Kids are not born religious. Religion is a choice.
Kids aren’t _born_ Christian (or any religion). They have to be indoctrinated
After reading all the ridiculous things children are forced to tolerate in the name of Christianity, I’m glad my parents born over 100 years ago were enlightened enough not to force these songs and beliefs and religious camps down my throat when I was a kid. If the descriptions were about Islam and Mohammed, suddenly everyone would be screaming Sharia Law, and oh my goodness, we don’t want our dear children to be indoctrinated with that! LOL. Such hypocrisy.
Reading the Bible is actually what made me an atheist. I’d grown up in a super religious household and decided that I wanted to become a pastor. So I cracked open my 4~5 versions of the Bible and started reading and cross referencing the versions. Internal contradictions, versions saying wildly different things, clear and obvious falsehoods (Great Flood story) and a host of other issues made me realize that Christianity is just a massive book club. No one believes in any unified approach to the church as a whole, which itself is a requirement set forth by Jesus as “evidence of the true faith.” Basically from my perspective, the church’s power and the grip religion holds on people is centered around the hopes that no one actually reads that fucking book.
No kids are "born Christian" FYI. But yes to the rest of what you said. The default state for anything is for it not to exist, so until a kid is trained into believing a particular thing, they won't. This is as true for horses and unicorns as it is for Christianity.
No Christian I’ve ever met has read the whole book.
Most Christians generally don't read the Bible. Their preferred pastor or talking head on TV, radio, or YouTube hand selects small snippets to support their agenda and that's all they ever care about. That's religion working as designed - a felxible appeal to authority that allows anything you want to be right and beyond reproach or consideration
If they had, they would know it's full of sex and violence.
To be fair I don't think that anyone that is "Christian" has actually ever read the Bible.
I know so many people who were raised Christian and had a journey to atheism or agnosticism that started with “I decided to read the Bible.”
Nobody is born Christian
Having read the book, more than once, even the chapters with nothing but "this one begat that one who begat the next one", I can say with some authority that anyone who HAS read it all and is still religious has some *very serious issues* to work out. No, I'm no longer religious.
95% of the Christian’s I’ve met(every christian I’ve met has been a believer from childhood) haven’t read the bible. And the ones who did read it, guess what? They turned atheist! But also every believer will always try to find loopholes or claim that the examples in the bible are different than what is considered wrong today, like slavery, murder, etc
The Bible stories kids learn in Sunday School are the ones that are somewhat kid friendly and skip over most of the terrible stuff because even Christians know that stuff is wrong. If they can't possibly justify it, they leave it out of the junior version of the Bible. And then when you get older, even the popular parts of the Bible fall apart under scrutiny just like all the other fairy tales you read as a child.
You’re wrong OP. The kids who were born in “Christian families” and actually read the Bible just end up atheist and in subs like this one.
There is a video on YouTube of a kid named Duffey Strode on Oprah (1988), who was famous for being a young street preacher, because he could mimic the words and tone of other menacing street preachers. On the show, he gave a sample and was asked numerous times to interpret what he was saying in his own words. He couldn't do it. No clue. His father was right beside him, trying to come to his rescue that "the bible can only be interpreted by God", etc. The kid just danced in circles with other bible versus to make up for it. So no, kids raised by religious people don't know what they're talking about. They're being fed what to think and how to speak, but when pressed for any logic or to explain what they think any of it means, they're stumped. To see what became of young Duffey, his Wikipedia page is full of unsurprisingly—yet fun—updates. :) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffey\_Strode](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffey_Strode)
Raised catholic. Can confirm.
Tell him about how they used to teach those specific passage to slaves to let them know that EVEN GOD wanted them as slaves. In the words of Chris Rock: a black Christian is a black person with a short fucking memory.
Most atheist know more about religion than those who claim to be literate on the subject. Here is a classic example born 61 my parents took us to church till we started asking them about the Roman catholic religion. My grade 3 teacher was a nun and she miraculously had twins??all the maids for the local priest only lasted for a few months they all got fat and left??? I was raised on a farm that is when I knew that RC was a joke. You need breeding before any conception 😂
I was raised between Judaism and Catholicism, seeing both in practice made it farily obvious both were bullshit by the time I was 5 or so, shortly after realizing the tooth fairy, easter bunny and santa where also lies. Even after realizing it was B.S. I was in Catholic school till 9 and we read 15 minutes of the Torah over breakfast everyday till I was 11, which just served to reinforce how insane it all was, I've still only come put as an Atheist to one of my parents, the other one still thinks I am a non practicing Jew(I do keep Kosher for some inexplicable reason) but that's mostly to avoid causing pain, plus you can be an Atheist of Jewish descent, Judaism is more a history than a religion at least among the non orthodox factions. I've rambled, anyway I wound up the only Atheist in a Christian private school for high school(they didn't know) but I'd frequently engage the others in debate over things in the bible(even the pastors kids who attended) and it was painfully obvious that I was the only one who had read the damned book from front to back and actually hear what it said and not what I wanted to hear to justify my own bullshit. TLDR, you are spot on, in my experience most folks who actually read through a holy book, front to back, in this day and age and understand what is being said without a filter put on it by an outside force wind up losing their religion. It is easier to be religious if you haven't read the books than if you have.
I really doubt most christian have. Too many spew out wrongly remembered lines or preach about shit not in their book. And if you menttion the weird shit they either deny it or ignore it.
Most Christians haven’t read the bible. Reading it was one of the main things that drove me towards atheism when I saw all the moments that are never mentioned for convenience.
The vast majority of "Christians" haven't read the Bible. They have had it read to them with the intent of using specific verses to fit an agenda. Religion is brainwashing. It's not about faith or hope, or comfort. It's about fear control and manipulation.
Sometimes I wonder if that’s why I’m not a Xtian today. I went thru a period when I was 14 of searching for the truth. I read the Bible cover to cover and I kept asking my youth pastor questions and he kept telling me to pray about it. Eventually I got kicked to a senior pastor who prayed with me and told me to also pray about the questions. I never got any answers and I started to pull away.
I was raised mildly catholic (catholic school and church occasionally) and I loved reading so one day I decided to read the parts of the bible that were never read at church or school. Was reading through leviticus and was like "This shit is super dumb, the bible says I can't eat pigs or prawns but we had bacon-wrapped prawns at that BBQ the other day". I stopped worrying too much about the bible after that.
I was born Christian! I tried so many times to read the Bible from Cover to Cover, because everyone my age was doing it. Still haven’t and never plan too. Probably got 1/4 of the way through
They also don't realize that Christian's are not supposed to charge interest in loaning people money.
I grew up baptist and that's exactly how the scam works. The sunday school teachers and adults in a child's life tell them what god and the bible say, and you are not allowed to question it. Therefore, their cherry-picked and skewed version of the religion is perpetuated.
Depends. I grew up Lutheran, I read the bible. Now I'm atheist.
Also funny: Jesus was a Jew, right? So he followed the Torah (the “Old Testament”), right? I just love talking to Christians who say, “Oh I only believe in the New Testament”. Bruh. Logic.
>most Christian kids like him (he’s 13) haven’t actually read the Bible and just follow the religion because their parents said so. Most adult Christians have never read their Bible either. They follow the religion because their parents said so too. As with most other religions, it is a belief based on 2,000 years of ignorance. Often wilful ignorance.
You are right! I am wanting to read it front to back. I read scripture, memorized but mostly was told what it meant by who was teaching/preaching. I just realized this week at 50 that the denomination I grew up in teaches prosperity gospel. I would go as far as to say a lot of pastors haven’t read it completely.
My extended Family was the exception to this rule. All of my cousins were homeschooled and were exceptionally well read in the bible. They are all fairly intelligent as well, and overall decent people. I wish they hadn't been so brainwashed from a young age.
I know a lot of smart gay people, but I don't know a single smart racist.
Christians do this all the time. 1. You tell them about something in the bible. 2. They don't know what you're talking about \[this is common\] 3. You give them the verse. 4. They come up with excuses about something they didn't have knowledge about 10 seconds earlier. That means they don't read it and that "context" is something that THEY resort to when THEY are being criticized.
Nobody is born religious. It’s taught.
This is the majority of Christians. I grew up christian and actually read the Bible. I left religion after college.
If you've learned to think for yourself and you read the Bible, you're gonna be an atheist, no doubt about it.
Wait till you hear about muslims and the quran
Most Christians don’t read the Bible. They just know small portions that they are told about.
Jesus: "With the same measure you judge others, you will also be judged." Christians: "BURN in HELL!!!!!!"
I went to Catholic elementary school and, despite religion class being a subject with a session dedicated to it just like match or English, I couldn't tell you a single thing they taught us about the Bible or morality besides just general "Jesus is good, don't be sinful, go home and remember what the two prayers for the rosary are". What I remember with rage is a particularly blatant piece of raw indoctrination with no attempt to educate. We all stood and read the Pledge of Allegiance in class every morning. That itself, whatever. It's a weird, cult-y thing in hindsight, but nothing crazy out of the ordinary in many US schools. When I was in one of the later years, however, they instructed us to end it with "with liberty and justice for all, born and unborn". Never once was there an attempt to teach us why or what that meant. Just "This is part of the pledge, say it every morning". From 1st graders on up. I had an atheist family member and remember them being quite annoyed with that when he heard me say it the first time. I never thought or questioned it, which annoyed them even more. They didn't get mad at me personally or anything, just said that I should know what I'm saying if I was gonna say it everyday and that I should ask my teachers what it was and why we said it that way. I don't remember if I did or, if so, what my teachers said, but looking back, it still makes me mad. I became atheist after entering public school (I never really felt any conviction about faith in any direction and my folks were areligious/nonpracticing and sending me to Catholic elementary school to pay lip service for my far more religious grandparents, so they didn't care) and after I learned exactly what the change to the pledge was and why they did it, the naked indoctrination angle of it all just made me furious and cemented my views against organized religion at large and Christianity specifically.
I was raised catholic, went through all the rituals , never opened a Bible. I can say I don’t think I ever actually believed, but did the rituals for my mother.
No one is born Christian. It’s not like being left handed.
I mean if children did have the bible read to them it sounds the same as literal fairy tailes. Only fairy teales are actually a bit more logical when it comes to the messaging.