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My surgery: A test of my non-faith
On Monday, 12 October, a few days after my 44th birthday, I had surgery on my cervical spine to replace two degenerative discs. This could almost be classed as an emergency surgery since I started having severe pain three weeks prior when my left C7 nerve root became impacted. There were two large left paracentral disc protrusions which caused impingement of the spinal cord. From my initial visits to my doctor, there it was an MRI on the 2nd, consultation w/my doctor on the 5th, consultation with a Neurosurgeon on the 6th, pre-op on the 7th, and surgery on the 12th. Bottom line, it all happened pretty quickly for me. I should note that I have not been in a hospital since birth and have enjoyed a relatively healthy life that has never included this type of pain (I don’t even get headaches).
This is my first crisis since de-conversion and I must say it was a good, solid test of my non-faith. In this blog, we have discussed the fact that dealing with crisis is one of the major reasons humanity has created gods and developed religious beliefs. I was faced with my first challenge of dealing with crisis without having my imaginary deity to run to for security, comfort and the general “it’s going to be alright.”
The other issue I faced was my response to my Christian family and friends. Even though it was difficult at times, I was respectful and said “amen” and “thank you” to the many prayers I received. I realized early on that they needed to say those prayers not to necessarily make me feel better but to allow them to feel secure about my surgery and that I’d be ok. Initially, their prayers were for my healing (I come from a Pentecostal/Charismatic background). I wanted to explain to them that God doesn’t perform these types of miracles (where degenerative discs are regenerated) but I did not. I wanted to explain to them that the only miracles God performs are the once that are scientifically possible (like cancer going into remission, etc.) but, of course, I kept those thoughts to myself. I wanted to challenge them to find ONE instance where an arm or a leg was grown back via a miracle knowing that there are no such cases…
Walking away from Christianity gaining in popularity
theBEattitude recently posted a post on his blog entitled “Losing my religion. Why I recently walked away from Christianity.” For the past few days the post has been one of WordPress’ top posts. According to the author on his Twitter account, he’s had over 50,000 hits in a two day period. The post has generated over 900 comments as of this writing.
Our humble blog has seen over 1,000,000 hits in our first 2 years of existence and almost 30,000 hits in the past week alone. We’ve had almost 25,000 comments since our inception. Other similar sites such as Debunking Christianity and ExChristianDotNet continue to also be very popular sites.
Due to this phenomenon, we are in the process of relaunching our community site to be more of a social networking site where we can in essence build a community of apostates, de-converts, ex-Christians, or whatever label you wish to wear.
Here’s to this new trend! Why do you think this is becoming such a popular decision?
– The de-Convert
Happy 2nd Anniversary d-C!
To celebrate our 2nd Anniversary, 1,000,000 page views, and 22,000+ comments, I’d like to highlight a few of the images posted on this blog by our contributors. These images give a great summary of the general topics of our posts for the past 2 years:
[Art by Jim Huger from Dead To Rights, a parody of Jack T. Chick’s tract]
d-C hits 1,000,000 views
Well team, it looks like we’ll hit the million mark sometime this weekend ahead of our 2nd Anniversary in March. This is being achieved without counting the page views of our many contributors since WordPress does not accumulate those views in their statistics.
Of course, we could not have accomplished this without our many visitors who came to d-C via StumbleUpon.
On our busiest day, we saw 13,834 views and it’s an honor to be ranked in Alexa.
Congrats!!!
– The de-Convert
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