I am not angry at God!

One of the most annoying accusations that theists make against atheists is that we  are "angry at God", I personally find this accusation to be the most idiotic of any of the many senseless accusations they make. In this post I will try to articulate in words why I am an atheist and why I fight theism as I do in the simplest way possible. As many of you know I used to be a Pentecostal evangelist and as a result of my religious beliefs I was an extreme fundamentalist as well. I prayed for hours at a time, I fasted before every preaching engagement for three days, I laid hands on the sick and cast out so called demons from many. At the time I believed that I was able to do all these things through the power of the Holy Spirit which I was sure lived within me and worked through me. The people I ministered to testified of their supposed miracles that they received through my ministry and many were "saved".

When I met my current wife I was still in the ministry and I had met her through another friend from my church, she was his sister. We started a nice, simple, romantic relationship  with no sex involved. Later into the relationship I left my church and began visiting her church but faced alot of discrimination on the part of her pastor who did not believe in the charismatic aspects of the Pentecostals. His church believed that the age of miracles had passed and that they were only used to establish the early church but that once that was accomplished they were no longer needed. He kept me from the pulpit and never let me preach and the one time that he did was when the church was going out to visit another church. He left me to preach to the youth group of the church and left about two elders behind, I preached and prayed for them and we all had a good time. But this discrimination was slowly dwindling my faith as well, it even spilled out into the relationship because at the same time I was in a battle with my wife's meddling mother who was always interrupting every aspect of our relationship. Before all of this I had already read the bible in its entirety and had a million questions on my mind as to why the God of the O.T. was so evil and vicious.

I have never bowed down nor backed down to anyone and have always been defiant, I don't take kindly to dictatorships nor authorities that would try to impose themselves on my way of life. I personally feel that everyone can live a happy and fruitful life as long as what we do does not harm anyone nor anything, I am pro-choice because I believe that a woman has the right to do with her body as she wishes. I am for gay marriage because I don't think anyone has a right to tell you who you should love and go to bed with as long as they are both of legal age and not a relative. I hate drugs but hey if that is what you want to do with you life then have at it, everyone chooses and makes his own path in this life and no one has the right to tell you what you should or shouldn't do. In some cases I do shun drug use, for instance when it leads the user to commit crimes in order to support his/her drug habit, in those cases they are harming thier fellow man and society as a whole.

When I began to rebel against God and began to shun my personal beliefs my main motives were because I did not like what I read in the scriptures when I read the book in its entirety, and I was literally ashamed of the history of the church whose beliefs I at that time espoused wholeheartedly.  Then I began reading books on comparative religion and realized that Christianity is nothing more than a conglomeration of plagiarized pre-christian myths. The first thing I did was to burn my bible as a sign of rebellion and to cut myself off from God and Christianity. I admit that I was angry at God when I first left the religion but those motives changes when I officially declared myself an atheist, this happened about three years after I left the church. I still had "the fear of the Lord" to deal with and it took me that long to get pass that.

It's been fifteen years since then and I now have lost all the remnants of religious belief and fear purged from me. I see religion for what it one of many myths that have existed throughout many cultures and since the dawn of mankind. I am not angry at God but rather at his followers who have since the foundation of the church tried to impede the progress of man on many fronts. The growth of scientific discovery was stunted due to the death penalty imposed by the church to any and all who opposed their teachings and beliefs.  The church was not founded by God or the Holy Spirit but rather by the blood of the many lives they have taken through many years of tyranny and terror that they imposed upon the societies that they have encountered. I fight against Christianity when its followers try to force themselves on our society as a whole through the influencing of politics, politicians and legislators. They try to make their dogma state and federal laws in our country through their own brand of dirty politics. God does not exist therefore I am not angry at him and to fight against him would be to fight against nothing.