Passing Thoughts...

I really tried for years to hold onto my faith.  I am sure that my religious friends and family are exceedingly disappointed with me.  They should not be.  This blog is just a collection of the various thoughts, niggles, quandaries, and conundrums that eventually led me away from faith.  I never believed in Santa Claus, and I had the Tooth Fairy thing figured out by my 7th birthday (though I kept up the charade until all of my baby teeth had fallen out--didn't want to lose that gravy train).  I had nagging doubts that persisted well into adolescence, but puberty was a pretty compelling distraction that kept me from thinking about these issues until the flood of reproductive hormones abated somewhat.  Even after puberty, I remained firmly ensconced in Christianity because that was the demographic I had grown comfortable with.  This is not to say that I did not try to believe; I wanted to be just like those of the faith for whom faith came so easily.  I wanted to be able to say "look what God has done for me, isn't He great?" with the same level of sincerity as those I most admired, respected, and loved.  I felt both hypocritical and guilty; the latter because I knew I didn't believe the words escaping my lips, and the former because I knew I was lying.

Christians who read this blog will probably casually dismiss me as having never "truly" been "saved."  Setting aside for a moment that I don't believe that such a thing exists, and that Christianity is nothing more than a masquerade of piety, I wanted more than almost anything (except to find my soulmate, which was my #1 priority) to be just like them.  I wanted to have the faith that "moves mountains."  I sincerely wanted it.  I went through the motions in the hopes that (in the words of my father) I could "fake it until I made it." I memorized Bible verses, volunteered at my church, tried to "witness" to people, and (at least in my adulthood) pursued friendships with others of my faith.  This is not to say that I did not have lapses or that I was a perfect Christian or that I steadfastly pursued Christian ideals, by any means; my adolescence and religious adulthood were marked with vacillations between periods of faith pursuit and apathy, the latter usually due to frustration with not having found "my place in God's plan."  The point is that I really wanted what I thought God wanted from me.  I really wanted to plot my course in accordance with God's plan, and I envied those Christians for whom this act came so easily.

I was raised in an exceedingly religious home, thus I was never given a chance to discover "truth"--whatever that may be--for myself.  Religious faith was mandatory in my father's home.  We were made to go to church every Sunday, regardless of what else was going on.  I was "saved" when I was about five or so.  My mother more or less coaxed me through the prayer of salvation after explaining to me why I didn't want to go to hell.  I ended up repeating this prayer about three more times in my childhood, the last of which was around 18, after which I elected to get baptized.  I'd love to say that I believed there was no God even back then, but so strong was my father's faith that I can no more imagine a childhood not believing in God than a childhood without peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. Belief in God was a given in my household.  I had reservations and issues (many of which I am addressing in this blog), but voicing them was usually met with BS explanations or can-kicking ("you'll understand when you're older").  My father's circle of Christian friends was also a very strong incentive to remain "in the flock."  The people my father surrounded himself with were such that I had no desire to not be among them.  Intentional or not, the environment of my childhood was very conducive to the brainwashing I received.  I cannot imagine how much more difficult my childhood would have been if I had expressed disbelief; as it was, the questions I occasionally raised were oft met with frustration bordering on irritation.  

Calvinism, which is the theology underlying my father's Christian--thus, my former--beliefs, relies exclusively upon the sovereignty of God with regards to salvation.  In short, I grew up in the "once saved, always saved" school of eschatological thought.  This meant that who was "saved" was ultimately up to God, best expressed in the verse "Jacob have I loved, and Esau have I hated."  The alternative school, "earn your way to heaven," I believed was less consistent with the teachings within the Bible.  This may be because I was brought up in the competing theology, but in Calvinism's defense, the theological "sovereignty of God" perspective sets Calvinist Christianity apart from not only Arminian (the "earn your way" camp) Christianity, but all other religious faiths (almost all religions are religions of works: Catholicism--confession, confirmation, etc.; Buddhism--chant, burn incense; islam--kill infidels in jihad).  I believed my religious beliefs set me apart from other faiths because I believed that it was totally up to God whether or not I got to go to heaven.  The problem was that I never felt "saved."  Even as an innocent child, I felt that I was destined for the Lake of Fire.  I thought that being "saved" should confer some sort of certitude upon me, yet it never did, ultimately leading me to believe that I was hell-bound anyway.

Being consigned to the furnace of hell left me free to explore the boundaries of my faith.  This ultimately led to me seeking for answers to the questions that had plagued me for so long.  I did read the  "Case for..." series by Lee Stroebel, and this enabled me to remain in faith a little bit longer, but these books were exposed as being little more than sophistry (thanks to Dawkins and Harris), albeit well-crafted and sincere sophistry.  I remained sort-of Christian for about two years after my faith really began to slide.  Being the type of person to challenge the thoughts and beliefs of others just for the fun of it, I decided--in the hopes that I might rejuvenate my faith--that it was high time I read what antagonist authors might have to say about my beliefs.  So I rounded up the usual suspects (Hitchens, Dawkins, and Harris) and read what secular thinkers had to say about faith--Christianity in particular.  I figured that if my faith were "true," then I would easily be able to demolish the arguments presented in any of those books, just as I had frequently demolished the arguments of the various Mormon and Jehovah's Witness missionaries that had been unfortunate enough to find my doorstep (somewhat ironically, I believed that my tearing down of other faiths strengthened mine).  Besides, I had been arguing faith with my good atheist friend (he's a biophysicist now) for years, and we'd usually fought to a draw (only because I refused to accede to his points).  I had also smashed up a rather petulant atheist recently, so I figured my faith could take the onslaught.  

I first watched "Religulous," by Bill Maher.  To this day I do not agree with much of Maher's politics, but I respect the treatment he gave the people in his movie.  It was easy enough to calmly refute some of the points he made, since much of what he was saying was misrepresentation, but many of the people in the film made rather asinine statements.  I remember feeling embarrassed that I shared these peoples' beliefs.  I had grown embarrassed to tell people that I was Christian or express Christian beliefs, and I hadn't even noticed it happening.  The beliefs I was supposed to hold sounded ridiculous to me coming out of the mouths of my fellow believers.  Still, I wanted to rebuild my faith, so I tried to tear it down so God could rebuild it.  I found that all three secular authors expressed the same concerns I'd had with my faith, if only considerably more vociferously.  How could God expect mankind to "find" him if every clue he had supposedly left behind for us led us away from him?  It makes no sense that God would give us a universe to explore and a mind to comprehend that universe, yet the more we use the latter to comprehend the former, the more we move away.  Needless to say, I tore down my beliefs and was sorely disappointed to find that there was no God to rebuild them for me.  

Negative Imagery

Intelligent Design.  The idea almost sounds plausible--that God used the process of evolution to “design” nature.  That is, if you set aside that it is a negative theory, it almost makes sense.  The problem with it is that ID does not seek to ascertain the how regarding, for example, evolutionary divergences (e.g. how lizards became birds); ID simply seeks to fill the holes between each presently inexplicable transition with God.  God becomes the glue in the places where science has not yet ascertained an answer.  It’s sort of like describing how the Taj Mahal was built by describing what didn’t happen: “Ha, the evolutionists were wrong about this theory, so ---GOD!”  “Piltdown Man, so ---GOD!”  “Missing ‘missing links,’ so ---GOD!”.

Mankind was created in God’s image supposedly, but if so, why is this body riddled with so many flaws?  Christians like to say that it’s because of the sin introduced to the world by Adam eating fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (setting aside that it’s pretty cruel for a supposedly loving God to tempt his creation in such a fashion; “Hey, you can play in the garage, just don’t touch the jigsaw that I am going to leave running;” what “loving” parent does that?).  So, did Adam immediately sprout an appendix and tailbone (A perplexed Adam: “Damn, where’d this almost tail come from?  Shit!  I shouldn’t have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; of course, I didn’t know that doing so was ‘evil’ until after I ate it.  Who, by the way, is Joseph Heller?”)?  Additionally, if you’re going to create a being, why not create that being to the utmost?  Humans have good eyesight, but a falcon’s is about 10x more acute (actually eyesight itself is curious, since the messages are actually delivered upside-down, then rearranged within the brain to match reality).  Our hearing is a fraction as sensitive as that of a cat or deer.  How hard would it be for our “designer” to give us the hearing of a cat, on top of the vision of a hawk?  Why can’t we fly?  He’s God, after all, he’s all-powerful.  So we got the best brains the designer had to offer; why not go all out?  Why shortchange us?  Why not give everyone brains capable of comprehending the space-time continuum?  If I am God, and the universe I have created inevitably leads back to me, then why would I prevent my creation from discovering this fact?  No, instead I only bestow my most beloved creation with a mid-grade intellect, only capable of digesting the most rudimentary truths (a few lucky ones bestowed with better minds get to peel the onion back a little further).  

Then again, maybe God didn’t want us to think too highly of ourselves and try to become like God, because he made that mistake once before (Oh, wait, God doesn’t make mistakes).

Perfectly Flawed

Christianity likes to posit that the Bible is the “inerrant, inspired Word of God.”  For starters, I would just like to ask simply, “which Bible?”  There are several denominations of Christianity which only recognize the King James Version of the Protestant Bible.  The Catholics use one Bible, the Orthodox Churches use another--except for Ethiopian Orthodox, which uses yet another version.  The Catholics believe that the Protestant exclusion of the so-called “Apocrypha” is heretical, and the Protestants view the inclusion of these books the same way.  Setting aside the different versions of the Bible, there are about twenty English translations alone, and the different translations themselves can be problematic, as subtleties and nuances often get lost in translation, often changing context or meaning sufficiently to dilute the intended message.  I digress; which version and translation is the Word of God?  They clearly cannot all be, if only because of the “heresy” of including certain books and excluding others.  

When Pope Damascus convened the Council of Rome, God himself didn’t show up to guide the assembly process to determine which books were canon and which weren’t.  The assemblers used simple scholarly and logical criteria to arrange the books into the Bible (e.g., which of the books seemed to agree).  There was no “divine inspiration” at work, otherwise, presumably--giving God the benefit of the doubt, we’d have ended up with one complete, congruent text; but what we got instead was a collection of tales and fables intermixed with a little history, most with questionable and ambiguous lessons in subjective morality.  How do we know that the books in the Bible are those that God wanted in the Bible?  The Christian’s answer is “because the Bible says so.”  Hunh?!  So, once again we find that the rules of logic do not apply to God, because this is brazen question-begging, and of the worst sort because it is a self-sustaining (i.e. circular) argument (to be fair though, the muslims are much worse, “The qur’an says that muhammad was the perfect example for mankind, and the qur’an is perfect.”  Who wrote (dictated, revealed, whatever) the qur’an?  “Muhammad.”  Duh...).  Also, to borrow from Sam Harris, it is strange that God would create both the Bible and writers, yet make many of those writers better than himself.  If such a book as Dante’s Inferno, or a play such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream cannot claim “perfection,” then how can the linguistically and logically flawed Bible?

Setting aside for a second that any book claiming perfection cannot, by definition, have multiple versions, there are numerous flaws in the Bible.  The greatest flaw in the Bible is the so-called “virgin” birth of Christ.  The virgin birth is usually called up on to lend credence to Christ’s claim to fulfillment of prophecy, thus his claim to deity.  However, when the original Greek is examined, the virgin birth never happened; either by haphazard translation or deliberate mistranslation, the Greek word for “young woman” was altered in translation to “virgin.”  The word used is never translated as “virgin,” except as it is used in the book of Mark (which is believed to be the basis for both Matthew and Luke).  It is puzzling that the author of Mark chose to use “young woman,” if “virgin” was what he intended to convey.  It seems that the use of  the wrong word (calling back the previous paragraph) would tend to challenge the notion of the Bible’s perfection, at the very least, at most, the deliberate mistranslation of the word should go down as one of the greatest hoaxes in human history.  Corollary to this point, the Bible traces the genealogy of Jesus through Joseph; if Jesus is “virgin-born,” then how is Joseph’s bloodline relevant?  The short answer: in order for Jesus to fulfill the messiah prophecies, he had to come from the “House of David.”  So, Jesus can either be from the line of David, or virgin-born, but not both.  Again, the Bible fails in its alleged “perfection.”

Next, we talk about errors in "creation."

Getting to the Heart of the Matter

One of my favorite questions has always been, “what happens to those who never know Christ or the story of the Bible?”  Even in the innocence of my youth I think I would have appreciated an honest answer.  Parents tend to find themselves overwhelmed when their children ask questions that they are not equipped to answer.  Instead of the intellectually honest “I don’t know,” Christian parents like to bullshit their children.  Any answer is a good one, as long as it leads the child to accepting the “truth” of the Bible and Christianity.  The answer I was given was “God knows the heart.”  This is totally unsupported by scripture; it is simply a “feel-good” bromide, usually fed casually to the children of believers in order to placate their curiosity.  For the truly curious child though, this is a recurring question, as this answer makes no sense and is not found in the Bible (For it is with the heart that we believe and are justified, but it is with the mouth that we confess and are saved--not much room for flexibility there).  

The fact of the matter is that anyone born into any faith has no chance, because faith, by its very nature, is mutually exclusive.  If I had been born in Saudi Arabia, I would have been born a muslim, thus rendering my apostasy from faith punishable by death--not just my acceptance of atheism, but any change of religion is punishable by death.  This makes the proposition “God knows the heart” problematic for muslims who never hear the message of Christ’s salvation, since the “heart” tends to value its own self-preservation.  So, in order to make this proposition work, we have to modify it to say, “God knows the heart, so if they weren’t under the threat of death and were exposed to the message of salvation, God knows whether or not they would accept the message of Christ.”  Each religious faith poses its own unique set of parameters that must be overcome for us to apply the “God knows the heart” metric.  Hindus must overcome their fear of being reincarnated as a mushroom in order to accept Christianity, Buddhists must overcome a fear of not finding enlightenment or attaining nirvana, and Shinto Japanese must overcome the possibility of pissing off their ancestors.  

Granted, I am being a bit disingenuous by not including the typical scenario posed by the astute young child: “What about those people in the Amazon or in deepest, darkest Africa who’ve never been and will never be exposed to the message of Christ?”.  Setting aside for a second that I cannot find any direct reference in scripture carrying an exception for those people, what about them?  The “God knows the heart” metric must be carried to ridiculous levels to make sense.  First, these people must surpass illiteracy, ignorance, and often bizarre tribal practices before this metric can be applied.  In other words, many of these tribes’ practices are so alien (animism, human sacrifice, polygamy, polyamory, etc.) to modern Christianity that overcoming those practices would involve a rejection of their entire lifestyle.  So what Christians really mean is “God knows the heart and what these people would do regarding the message of salvation if they were exposed to the pristine conditions available in Western civilization,” which, as I said, is completely unsupported by scripture.  It’s a feelgood assumption Christians make because they do not like the idea that--by default--the Bible excludes people who do not know salvation.

Old Testament God vs. New Testament God

Today’s item of discussion is the paradoxical nature of God as he is presented within the Christian church.  

One of the most egregious fallacies in Christianity is the presentation of God, in which he is shown to be this loving, caring deity, yet also as a jealous, angry deity.  These characteristics could not be more disparate. 

The God of the Old Testament (OT) was clearly a vengeful deity, more interested in fulfilling the interests of his “chosen” people than in demonstrating the love attributed to him by modern Christianity.  This is a deity who either destroyed directly, or gave license to his people to destroy, large swathes of people whose only shortcoming was not being of the Hebrew tribes.  Would a loving God destroy two entire cities full of people by raining fire upon them?  Alright, fine, they were a disgusting lot of brutes who did horrible things to one another.  What about the children?  What about the infants?  Slaves who were not there of their own volition?  What about the people of Jericho?  Why were they so bad?  It’s difficult to believe that a people sophisticated enough to  build a city with insurmountable walls could be so barbaric as to deserve annihilation.  I think it is far more likely that the Hebrews just wanted the land (assuming the story isn’t a fabrication), and killing its occupants was the quickest means to that end. What about the Passover?  How could God kill an entire generation of firstborn children and still claim the moniker “loving?”  What had those children done, besides being born Egyptian (not to mention that this is likely another fabrication)?

Now in the New Testament we learn that God is a loving God.  The love of God is demonstrated in the person, Jesus Christ.  Now what really makes this confusing is that a recurring theme within the Bible is that God is unchanging.  If God is unchanging, then why the departure from the OT God of fury, fire, and brimstone?  “It’s the transcendence of the divine.”  Oh, that old canard again.  So God, who supposedly created logic as a means by which we can learn about him and his nature, is immune to the laws of the logic he created?  How are we supposed to learn about God and get closer to him if we cannot use the laws he created for us because those laws take us away from him?   

This is another of the reasons why I can no longer believe.  A paradox this powerful could only be the work of a human mind.  A perfect deity without flaw would not commit such a blatantly obvious fallacy.  Any deity claiming the worst of human nature, e.g. jealousy, anger, hatred, cannot--by definition--be “love.”  There is no way to reconcile this.  

"Mom, dad, heaven is boring...can we go to the movies instead?"

If I had to think of one item from my former faith that irked me the most, it was the concept of heaven.  The very premise of heaven always struck me as manufactured.  What is heaven according to Christianity?  Well, it's where Christians (and presumably pre-Christian Jews) will spend eternity praising God.  I'm sorry, but who in the hell wants to spend eternity "praising" someone else?  I can think of a thousand things I would rather be doing than waxing some deity's ego, a million things, for starters: having sex with my wife, playing with my kids, learning to play the piano and guitar, playing video games, driving cool cars, riding motorcycles, eating good food and ice cream, philosophizing with the greats of old, playing baseball with Babe Ruth, having a Q & A with both Hawkins and Einstein.  Any one of these things would pique my interest more than walking on golden streets and "basking in God's glory." At least the muslims came up with an afterlife that sounds sort of interesting (minus the doe-eyed boys bit--yeah, I can pass on that), though unless I had an industrial-strength prostate, I think I would get tired of banging out virgins (not to mention that my wife would not be pleased with me), and there are far more interesting things to eat than grapes (I wonder if muhammad would have said "chocolate ice cream" instead of friggen' grapes, we already know he wasn't smart enough to include bacon).  

I just came up with way more interesting things I would have included in my heaven had I been the author of the Bible.  No, instead, Christians have to languish under a vague and restrictive set of rules in the hopes that they're on God's "nice" list just for the dubious honor of spending eternity in worship. Oh.  Joy. Of course, this begs the question: what happens to those on God's "naughty" list?  Oh, they go to hell.  Yeah, your loved ones who rejected God, no matter how "good" they were as people, get to spend eternity separated from God...and you.  So while you're waltzing around heaven on golden roads, everyone you care about (at least those who reject Christianity) is roasting in hell with the devil and his minions.  It makes no sense that a person who lives a good life and serves others, yet rejects Christianity, would burn in hell, but an evil, selfish person (like my father’s wife) who accepts Christianity would go to heaven.  

I know, I know, "the transcendence of the divine."  I'm sure any Christians reading this is screaming "How arrogant, to think you know better than God.  The Bible says that the reward in heaven will be greater than we can imagine."  Well, if you must know, I think that the authors of the Bible simply lacked the imagination to come up with a better afterlife, so they kicked the can down the road in the hopes that someone else would come up with a more compelling carrot.  Moreover, if I am arrogant--and I accepted your notion of God--he made me this way, he made me with an inquisitive mind.  

"If I am wrong, then I die, but if you're wrong, you go to hell."  Ah, Pascal's wager.  Let me turn that upside-down on you.  You had one chance, and if you're wrong, when you die you will have wasted your life.  I'm not talking about any good you may have done in the name of your faith; I am talking about living your life in service of something nonexistent, paying for a church to continue to exist solely as a vehicle to propagate your fallacious beliefs, and holding yourself to artificially high standards of morality--for nothing.  Here’s the kicker too: there is far more evidence for my point-of-view than yours; I have hundreds of years of scientific research to corroborate my POV, you have a ~2000 year-old book written largely during the Bronze Age by men with less learning than my 1st grade daughter.  

Oh, while you’re singing praises to God and enjoying your vague unimagined treasures, your friends and family are wood chips in God’s big furnace o'fury, but you’re not supposed to care.

Introduction

Just an introduction.  I am a recent atheist.  I grew up in a very religious family, one where departure from my father’s orthodoxy was not permitted, thus my progression from religious to non-religious took many years.  I needed time to deprogram before I could rationally evaluate the tenets of the beliefs I grew up with.  It was not easy for me to give up religion, simply because it meant giving up assumptions that I had held to be true since my childhood.  The next blog post will likely be the rather long story of my journey away from faith, but today I am reaching out to the world to see who else might have similar experiences or might be grappling with their own beliefs.  

The intent of this blog is to provide a forum for those of non-belief or wavering belief to discuss contemporary topics related to the atheistic purview.  All are welcome regardless of belief status, but trolls will be blocked.  If a poster can rationally support a position, then that poster will be welcome.  Posters who cannot discuss amiably and respectfully will be banned.