Proselytizing with the ‘Good News?’

Atheists and agnostics can go too far in trying to disseminate their philosophy to the world, and I think it’s safe to say Peter Boghossian, author of “A Manuel for Creating Atheists,” has reached that point, and unfortunately, the book has received endorsements from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Dan Barker and Michael Shermer, the latter of whom even provides the foreward.

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It’s one thing to post atheism-related videos, quotes or memes on Facebook or in other forums, hoping something might hit a nerve. Believers certainly take liberties to post their own faith-infused, logically bankrupt messages to the world; why should we not follow suit and bring reason back to the public discourse? It’s one thing to be open about your nonbelief and willing to discuss it with believers if asked. It’s one thing to want to meet up with like-minded nonbelievers to create a sense of community and belonging. I understand all of those positions.

But it’s quite another to actively proselytize to believers as “street epistemologists,” as Boghossian calls it, approach strangers and engage in “clinical interventions designed to disabuse them of their faith,” which, forgive me for saying it, but sounds oddly similar to “auditing” in Scientology.

As one example, Boghossian said that when he goes to the bank, he tries to pick out a teller wearing a cross and then strike up a conversation about religion:

… Every time I see her I go out of my way to wait in her line, and I immediately begin the intervention.

And Barker had this to say in support of the book:

Since atheism is truly Good News, it should not be hidden under a bushel.

First off, atheism has no core message or doctrine or creed other than the assertion that there are no gods, and it definitely has no message to the world in the same way that the New Testament and Christian theology purports a worldview and a pattern for living based on scripture, so what exactly can atheists hope to achieve by asserting their nonbelief on unsuspecting believers other than lending support to the argument — most recently portrayed in that noxious movie, “God Is Not Dead,” — that all nonbelievers are arrogant and rabid gadflys who think they know everything?

About the closest thing to a “message” atheists might hope to convey is that truth can be found in logic and reason and a person can indeed lead a happy and fulfilling life without religion. The difference here is that Christianity at its core claims to provide fulfillment in life as a direct result of believing in Jesus. Atheism claims no such thing for itself. Many nonbelievers are perfectly happy and would probably describe their lives as exceeding rich and fulfilling, while some atheists may be completely miserable, but that may or may not have anything to do with their lack of belief in god. Christianity attempts to describe a direct correlation between happiness and belief. Of course, for an “evangelical” atheist attempting to reach believers with their own brand of “good news,” an appeal to reason and rationality will be all but lost on most Christians unless the believer still has some logical embers glowing somewhere deep in the recesses of their brain. The entire branch of apologetics from Thomas Aquinus to C.S. Lewis on down the line is built on a tower of unfounded assumptions heaped on more assumptions that are, in turn, proliferated ceaselessly in church, so few evangelical Christians are even going to have the tools necessary to reason themselves out of faith. Thus, even the best efforts of people like Boghossian to lead believers away from faith will, more times than not, end in lots of frustration and head-banging.

Further, I’m sure this rather obvious next point has not been lost on other nonbelievers, but actively proselytizing to the public makes us no better than fanatical Christians or Mormons. What’s next? Passing out copies of “The God Delusion” at college campuses and shouting from street corners like religious zealots? I don’t want to associate myself with zealots, religious or otherwise.

The beauty about freethought, agnosticism or atheism is that there is no higher calling, and thus, no reason or purpose other than our own sense of self-satisfaction to evangelize to believers. What would be the goal of the atheist who wants to proselytize to evangelical Christians? Will he single-handedly eradicate faith? Certainly not. Will he convince a person or two? Maybe. But like it or not, as long as people are afraid of the death, the dark and uncertainty about the afterlife, religion in some form is going to be around a long, long time, possibly until the end of the species itself.

If nonbelievers want to do something other than just ignoring Christians altogether, why not encourage friendly and respectful discussions about religion and freethought with believers, so long as both parties consent to talk about the subject in this way? While many Christians are simply unable to handle criticisms of their core beliefs, I have found that some actually enjoy having a dialogue about religion and questions of faith, even if it makes them think critically about why they believe. Why not point people toward resources like scholarly works on the historicity of Jesus, contradictions and errors in the Bible and the evidence for evolution? But don’t misunderstand me: If it is the atheist who is approached by a believer wanting to proselytize, then it’s open season.

Personally, I don’t talk about religious or nonreligion in person unless I’m asked about it, and even then, I don’t go out of my way to convince someone to turn away from their faith. I freely offer my thoughts on religion on this site and sometimes on Facebook and Twitter, and people are free to read it or ignore it. In addition, for believers with a genuine desire to know the truth — Many, I have found don’t have a genuine desire for the truth. They are happy to live and die without having to challenge their core beliefs. — Amazon has hundreds of books available, some for free, that explore the claims of the New Testament and Christian theology, the inadequacies of biblical science versus real science and fallacies of an all-loving, all-powerful god who is all things immoral, inconsistent, petty, brazenly violent and decidedly unjust.

The onus is on believers to provide arguments and evidence for their claims, and I just don’t see what nonbelievers have to gain from actively turning into the very proselytizing Bible thumpers we rail against. Rather than publicly flaunting atheism and catering to the bad stereotypes, why not disseminate the message that although we might live without a divine purpose —  rendering the act of proselytizing to believers not only a pointless but meaningless exercise — we do live with the truth and beauty we find in art, literature, poetry, music, love and life itself? I disagree with the methodology of street epistemology, but if we can utilize less off-putting ways to engage with believers that focuses on human solidarity and the human experience that exists across all faiths and ideologies, that might be a message worth sharing.

On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 3b

This is the continuation of a series on “The Case for Christ.” If you missed them, here are the other parts in the series: Part 1Part 2Part 3a.

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Next we move to the substantive “tests” to which Strobel subjects the gospel accounts. The first he calls the “intention” test to try to surmise whether the gospel writers actually intended to present an accurate account of the events. Blomberg mentions the passage in Luke in which the writer says his purpose was to “write an orderly account” of what he had heard from people who were eyewitnesses to the events portrayed in the book. Luke claims he has “carefully” investigated the stories.

The Case for Christ

Strobel then questions why Matthew and Mark don’t contain similar declarations. Blomberg makes this rather large assumption based on no evidence whatsoever:

They are close to Luke in terms if genre, and it seems reasonable that Luke’s historical intent would closely mirror theirs.

Blomberg has no idea what Matthew and Mark’s “historical intent” was; he just takes it, as it were, on faith that Matthew and Mark are not propagandists pushing a certain agenda about the claims of Christ. Strobel also asks about the gospel of John, to which Blomberg points out verse 20:31. The passage states that John was writing “that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”

So, here is a clear declaration that John is writing with the purpose of advocating the authenticity of Christ as divine, or in other words, he has a clear motive and is far from unbiased. Strobel responded: “That sounds more like a theological statement than a historical one.” Blomberg concedes that point but notes that if a person is going to believe in Christ, the “theology has to flow from accurate history:”

… Consider the way the gospels are written — in a sober and responsible fashion, with accurate incidental details, with obvious care and exactitude. You don’t find the outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologies that you see in a lot of other ancient writings.”

If by “sober” he means drab, I’ll concede that point. Again, Blomberg would help his case by presenting some of the “incidental details” that apologists like to claim give the Bible validity. Of course, just the mere presence of incidental details in a text does not prove anything about the historicity of the stories themselves. Thomas Hardy’s novels include many “incidental” and real elements of what pastoral English life was like in the 19th century, but the characters and the plots were not real. Hell, even comic books and many video games often contain lots of authentic details about places like New York, Los Angeles or the Middle East. Just because a novel or other work has incidental details does not make its basic story true as far as history is considered.

As for his claim that readers don’t find “outlandish flourishes and blatant mythologies” in the gospels, I have to ask: are we reading the same books? Here I’ll argue not only with Blomberg’s claim but with this writer, who states outright that

… there are no “mythological elements.” Those who talk about mythological elements are clearly ignorant not only of the gospels themselves, but of what mythology actually consists of. What they usually mean by ‘mythological elements’ is the supernatural.

Well, no. That is not what is meant, and the writer seems to be putting words in the mouths of critics. What is meant by mythological is just that: elements in the New Testament accounts (not to mention the Old Testament) that appear eerily similar to other myths that were circulated throughout antiquity, namely and most prominently, redemption mythology, which forms the entire foundation of the biblical narrative.

Rudolf Bultmann in “The Mythological Element in the Message of the New Testament and the Problem of its Re-interpretation Part I” outlines this framework:

The mythology of the New Testament is in essence that of Jewish apocalyptic and the Gnostic redemption myths. A common feature of them both is their basic dualism, according to which the present world and its human inhabitants are under the control of demonic, satanic powers, and stand in need of redemption. Man cannot achieve this redemption by his own efforts; it must come as a gift through a divine intervention. Both types of mythology speak of such an intervention: Jewish apocalyptic of an imminent world crisis in which this present aeon will be brought to an end and the new aeon ushered in by the coming of the Messiah, and Gnosticism of a Son of God sent down from the realm of light, entering into this world in the guise of a man, and by his fate and teaching delivering the elect and opening up the way for their return to their heavenly home.

Indeed, elements of Gnosticism itself pre-date Christianity, and one could make the case that the basic premise of Gnosticism, attaining individual salvation of the soul from the carnal world through knowledge — replacing esoteric or intuitive knowledge with the knowledge of Christ — was borrowed by Christianity and adopted with its own twist centered on the divinity and saving power of Christ.

Of course, one needs only take a short trek through the “Dying  god” entry on Wikipedia to research and identify the numerous life-death-rebirth myths that have inundated antiquity, Osiris in Egypt being one of the earliest and clearest examples to draw parallels. So much for the absence of “blatant mythologies.” As for the “outlandish flourishes” in the gospels, I won’t even get into the possessed pig, Christ’s temptation in the desert or the earthquake that supposed happened, depending on which account you read, when Christ died (with dead people springing up from the ground to boot) and again when an angel appeared at Christ’s tomb, which are “incidental details” that no historian outside of the Bible thought worthy to mention.

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I am attempting to make this series more digestible by breaking it up into smaller parts. Since this section only covered one page of the book (p. 40), this may shape up to be a long series indeed (only 230 pages to go!). I’m sure there will be opportunities to move more quickly at the expense of repeating myself, and I will attempt to do so when it’s warranted. But given that the opening section of this book is so steeped in vague and unsupported claims, I feel it’s important to slow down and highlight as many of them as possible. I didn’t even know there would be a Part 3c, but that seems to be the case. Stay tuned as I plod through the rest of Chapter 2.

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On trial: ‘The Case for Christ,’ part 3a

This is the continuation of a series on Lee Strobel‘s, “The Case for Christ.” If you missed them, you can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

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In Chapter 2, Strobel continues his interview with Craig Blomberg on the biblical evidence from eyewitness testimony. Strobel begins by identifying eight tests in which people can subject the gospels to get closer to understanding of whether they are trustworthy and credible. I won’t go through every single one because at least three of them, “character,” “bias” and “corroboration” are only given a few paragraphs each, which basically amount to Blomberg’s opinions on whether the gospel writers were of good character, recorded the events with integrity and used other sources to verify various places and events that they reference. I’ll only mention the five paragraphs Strobel calls “The Corroboration Test.”

Strobel asks:

When the gospels mention people, places, and events, do they check out to be correct in cases in which they can be independently verified? Often such corroboration is invaluable in assessing whether a writer has a commitment to accuracy.

Blomberg responds:

Yes, they do, and the longer people explore this, the more the details get confirmed. Within the last hundred years archaeology has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references to the gospels, particularly the gospel of John — ironically, the one that supposedly so suspect!

Now, yes, there are still some unresolved issues, and there have been times when archaeology has created new problems, but those are a tiny minority compared with the number of examples of corroboration.

In addition, we can learn through non-Christian sources a lot of facts about Jesus that corroborate key teachings and events in his life.

Here, Strobel offers no notes that back up Blomberg’s claim about archaeological evidence, and Blomberg mentions no examples to support his claim either. Here’s a list of some of the Christian archaeological finds, none of which lends any credibility to Jesus or his miracles, just that select elements of the gospels, for instance, the pool of Bethesda and the historicity of Caiaphas, may have reflected actual people and places.

Further, Blomberg contends that non-Christian sources lend credibility to the gospels, but let me make this very clear: there is no contemporary source or bit of evidence that confirms the existence of Jesus. Not one. Here is a list, and here is former pastor Dan Barker on the subject:

There is not a single contemporary historical mention of Jesus, not by Romans or by Jews, not by believers or by unbelievers, not during his entire lifetime. This does not disprove his existence, but it certainly casts great doubt on the historicity of a man who was supposedly widely known to have made a great impact on the world. Someone should have noticed.

Christians sometimes like to claim that Josephus 37-100 A.D. was a believable non-Christian who wrote about Jesus, although he was not contemporary. This is the relevant passage:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law …

While this passage may be authentic, two problems exist. First, it’s hard to believe that an historian would mention the Messiah almost as an after thought and buried in a long section of text. Second, why would Josephus, an observant Jew or possibly a priest at one time, would admit that Jesus was the Christ? I wrote more about this here: Josephus and the historical Jesus. Here’s another explanation of Josephus.

Strobel, ever the “unbiased” journalist said Blomberg answer was “concise and helpful.” While it may have been concise, it was lacking on detail. Of course, I can’t blame Blomberg since he knows full well that there are no credible details that he could have presented to support the authenticity of the gospels, much less of the life and miracles of Jesus. Ever the go-getter, Strobel tells us at the end of this short section on corroboration that he is jotting down a note to himself:

Get expert opinions from archaeologist and historian.

I guess we’ll get to that in Chapter 5 when Strobel speaks with John McRay, one of his “experts” who also happens to be an apologist.

So these don’t run too long, I’ll address the rest of this chapter in the next post.

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Response to Apologetics II: faith and reason

A couple days ago I began adding some thoughts on whether faith and reason are compatible in light of my recent reading of “Handbook of Christian Apologetics.” In my previous post, I outlined three different kinds of truths that are presented in the book: faith without reason, faith married to reason and reason without faith.

As the authors state, precepts that fall into the faith without reason category are the trinity, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection of Lazarus, etc. These ideas can’t be proven because they violate the laws of nature (i.e., no one so far as we know is divine nor do people come back to life). But it’s here the authors claim that they can present a cumulative argument for these doctrinal concepts by answering all objections to them. And they proceed with the following:

For example, suppose a Unitarian objects to the Trinity because “it splits God into triplets.” We can show that this is a misunderstanding: it does not mean three Gods, but one God in three Persons. Or suppose a logician says it is a contradiction to call anything both one and three. We can reply that God is one nature, not three, and three persons, not one.  This is not a contradiction, any more than we are: we are two natures (spirit and animal, mind and matter, soul and body) but one person.

My inclination is that many of the arguments presented in this book will claim that thinkers down through the ages, in their rebuttals of faith, have simply misunderstood doctrine on these key points. To take up the notion of the trinity briefly, in the first place, the idea that we ourselves consist of even two natures is wildly uncertain, much less that any being can have three, and science and psychology have long-since shown that the thing that some call “the soul” is contained solely within the mind, which makes us who we are. Shut off the brain, and the body is no more. We certainly have very distinct personalities, and we have feelings and memories. But so do dogs and cats. They have a certain and specific essence just like we do; ours is just more complex because our brains are more complex.

Back to the trinity and the business about three persons. From the quote above, we learn that God is both “one nature, not three, and three persons.” But the authors also attempt to substantiate this by saying that, likewise, we have two natures. But God, as they said, just has one. I don’t see how comparing “natures” and “persons” proves anything or answers any objections. There is no getting around the claim that believers still say God consists of three persons. In psychology, we call this dissociative identity disorder.

After addressing the polytheism of Hindus, which, as he said, isn’t really polytheism, but “just different manifestations or incarnations of the one god,” Richard Dawkins, in his “The God Delusion,” at length addressed the perils of the trinity doctrine in characteristic wittiness:

Christians should warm to such sophistry (masking actual polytheism in a cloak of monotheism). Rivers of medieval ink, not to mention blood, have been squandered over the ‘mystery’ of the trinity, and in suppressing deviations such as the Arian heresy. Arius of Alexandria, in the fourth century AD, denied that Jesus was consubstantial (i.e. of the same substance or essence) with God. What on earth could that possibly mean, you are probably asking? Substance? What ‘substance’? What exactly do you mean by ‘essence’? ‘Very little’ seems the only reasonable reply. Yet the controversy split Christendom down the middle for a century, and the Emperor Constantine ordered that all copies of Arius’s book should be burned. Splitting Christendom by splitting hairs – such has ever been the way of theology.

Do we have one God in three parts, or three Gods in one? The Catholic Encyclopedia clears up the matter for us, in a masterpiece of theological close reasoning: “In the unity of the Godhead there are three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, these Three Persons being truly distinct one from another. Thus, in the words of the Athanasian Creed: ‘the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there are not three Gods but one God.'”

As if that were not clear enough, the Encyclopedia quotes the third-century theologian St Gregory the Miracle Worker: There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same trinity is immutable and unalterable forever. Whatever miracles may have earned St Gregory his nickname, they were not miracles of honest lucidity. His words convey the characteristically obscurantist flavour of theology, which – unlike science or most other branches of human scholarship – has not moved on in eighteen centuries.

Plus, merely saying God is three persons doesn’t even make it so, and evidence from the Bible is scant on this point as well.

Former pastor Dan Barker addressed biblical accounts in his book, “Godless,” namely 1 John 5:7, which says:

And there are three that bear witness in heaven, the Father, the Word (Jesus) and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one.

Barker noted on page 234 of the paperback edition that

invoking the trinity solves nothing because such an idea is more contradictory than the problem is attempts to solve (and I would add, more complex and reference Occam’s razor, as if an all-powerful, all-knowing being weren’t complex enough!).  (By the way, the text of 1 John 5:7 does not appear in any ancient Greek manuscript. It was added much later by the Catholic Church into the Latin Vulgate. See Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman for documentation of this fraudulent tampering of the bible.)

Here are some more details of the later insertion of the only biblical passage that explicitly links the three entities. Other passages, of source, make reference to them.

Elsewhere, Barker brings to light other problems with trinity, and more generally, the gospel itself. On page 265, he had this to say about Paul’s account of various teachings versus Jesus’:

Paul rarely quotes Jesus, and this is odd since he used many other devices of persuasion to make his points. There are numerous places in the teachings of Paul where he could have and should have invoked the teachings of Jesus, but he ignores them. He contradicts Jesus’ teachings on divorce (1 Corinthians 7:10), allowing for none while Jesus permitted exceptions. Jesus taught a trinitarian baptism (“in the name of the Father, the Son and Holy Ghost), but Paul and his disciples baptized in Jesus’ name only — which makes perfect sense if the concept of the trinity was developed later (emphasis mine). Paul never claims to have met the pre-resurrected Jesus. In fact, one of the most glaring contradictions of the bible appears in two difference accounts of how Paul supposedly met the disembodied Christ for the first time (see Chapter 14).

Thus, through all of this, the authors of the apologetics book have a lot of work ahead of them if they are to adequately, or even minutely, answer all of the objections of the trinity and many other issues of faith. Reason, indeed, would not lead us to assume a trinity, much less a god, at all because both violate the laws of nature, and to begin on the assumption that God exists, as the authors do in Chapter 2, before we even get to the business of answering objections to faith, is begging the question, and not at all reasonable or logical. This is peculiar since earlier in the book, the authors warn of the dangers of question-begging, but appear to commit that very fallaciousness throughout the opening of their book.

The God question: My testimony

The debate on the god question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar postings of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

  • “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
  • “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
  • “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
  • “Godless” by Dan Barker
  • “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
  • “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
  • “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
  • “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
  • This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.'” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.