The Christian Atheist?

I came across a book on Amazon the other day with an intriguing title: The Christian Atheist.  While I haven’t read the book, I did check out the website and I believe the main idea can be summed up in the following challenge made to fellow Christians by author, Craig Groeschel:

You say you believe in God. Do you really?
Do you live your life as if God is in the room, or do you assume He’s not paying attention?
You call yourself a Christian. Are you who you say you are?

These are really good questions for any Christian to ask him or herself.  Really good.

When I was still a believer, I can remember asking myself these sorts of things all the time. But whereas Mr. Groeschel likely poses them in order to help Christians “have more faith” (or to stop being “Christian Atheists”, as he puts it), I would ask that Christians really think long an hard about them rather than simply using them as an impetus to try harder.

You say you believe in God.  Do you really?

Does your frequent “lack of faith” mean that you simply need to “have more faith” or that perhaps you need to explore why it is that you feel a need to believe in the first place?  Have you examined evidence for his existence presented by people who used to believe but don’t anymore?

Do you live your life as if God is in the room, or do you assume He’s not paying attention?

Is it important for you to feel like God is watching in order for you to behave morally?  If you felt like God wasn’t watching, what would keep you from doing the wrong thing?  Do you know any people who don’t believe in God yet seem to be good, moral people?

You call yourself a Christian. Are you who you say you are?

What does it mean to be a Christian?  How do you define this?  Is there one standard definition that all Christians can agree on?  If not, which one should you follow?

Religionless Ethics and Values

Well, my attempt at parenting advice now seems incredibly feeble and incomplete compared with the below suggestions made by Elizebeth Joy:

Be Kind and Gentle to everyone and everything.  Treat others the way you want to be treated.  Have love for humanity and the universe.

Enjoy this life as much as you can.  Assume this is all you are going to get (there may not be an afterlife).

Search for beauty and good in everything.  Everything has a positive side.  If you don’t see it, create it.

Test yourself, your ideas and beliefs.  Trust what your senses and intuition tell you.  The more extraordinary the claim, the more convincing the evidence must be to support it.

Use Reason and Creativity to solve problems, and don’t count on anyone else solving them for you. You are empowered.

…

Live without fear.  Most fear is unhealthy and unhelpful.  Use your gut instinct to choose how to respond the best way in a situation where you may be in danger, but do not live in that state.

I might take issue with a few small things on the list–like everything having a positive side–but on the whole it is very similar to how we are trying to raise our kids.  I especially like the part about trusting your instincts but not living from them.  I think our instincts can tip us off to when something may not be right, but in the end we should attempt to follow through and find the facts rather than just continuing to trust our gut.

Check out the rest of the items on her list and let me know if you have some of your own.  Thank you, Elizebeth, for posting them and thanks to Hemant Mehta of  Friendly Athiest for the link.

Seeking Truth

If I ever decided to write a book about my time in Christianity (and eventual de-conversion), I would title it  Afraid Of the Truth because of the fact that I spent so many years avoiding anything and everything that could possibly have upset my particular version of reality.

The ironic thing is that for most of my years as a Christian I thought I was genuinely seeking the Truth, when what I was really seeking was what I wanted to be true rather than what was actually true.

This reminds me of a quote from Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind:

People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they’re afraid it might be true.

Now while I wouldn’t go so far as to say that people are generally stupid, the sentiment of the quote has always stuck with me.  Even as a Christian I quoted it whenever I would see someone believing something for no better reason than they wanted it to be true or were afraid it might be, completely blind to the fact that the rule was simultaneously affecting me, namely in the area of my religious belief.  For most of my Christian life up until a few years ago, the only authors I would read (or people I would listen to) were those who generally agreed with my worldview.  It made me feel safe to do so.  I was afraid to explore outside the boundaries of what I believed.

One day, however, I began to stretch my sphere of influence and started reading authors who, although Christian, were a little more “progressive,” such as Donald Miller or Brian McClaren. For several years this was as far as I would foray towards the edges of belief. I didn’t fully begin to expand those borders until sometime later when I finally left church.

I won’t go into the details of what happened in the months immediately following my departure as you can read about it here, but suffice it to say, over time I began to realize that whenever I felt a sense of fear in exploring a new concept that challenged one I currently held, it was usually a good sign that the concept might be true or, at the very least, worth investigating.

It was when I finally learned to embrace this fear that I de-converted from Christianity.  I didn’t replace my Christian faith with some new belief called Atheism; I simply came to realize that when I freely and openly investigated all the evidence, I could no longer support a belief in a god.

It was scary but freeing at the same time.

I certainly have not yet “arrived,” whatever that means.  I’ll be the first to admit I’m a ninety-eight pound weakling when it comes to facing certain fears and I’m sure there are things I still hold to that are untrue.  But I know I can overcome those fears by simply keeping my mind open to new ideas and investigating them, especially if they challenge what I currently believe.  As someone once said, question everything, even the answers to your questions.

Nonreligious Parenting

The following excerpt is from an email conversation I recently had with a friend of mine, Karen (not her real name).  Like me, she only recently became a non-believer after having been raised as a Christian.

No kids yet for me but when they do come along I am uneasy about how to handle the whole religion thing.  What I came to hate about my upbringing is that there was never any choice to being Christian it was just assumed.  No alternative was presented, I never knew there was another option.  To their credit, they don’t believe there IS another option so they think they did the best for me but I don’t want to do that even with non-belief.  I don’t want to present non-belief like it is the only option even if that is how I choose to believe.  I plan to be very open and present all religions to them from a research stand point.  Science will be ever-present in our house as well, something else that was never mentioned in my childhood home.  How do you and your wife handle that?  Do the kids ask you about what you believe?  If they wanted to continue being religious, what would you do?

I certainly don’t have all the answers and am stumbling along like the rest of us, but I think this is a huge issue for many people in situations similar to ours, which is why I asked her permission to post it here, along with the gist of my reply:

Karen,

That’s a great question.

They really don’t ask, or at least they haven’t yet; and we haven’t gone to church in 18 months, so if the questions were gonna come, I figure they would have come by now.  I could probably be better at being proactive and occasionally encouraging them to talk about where they are with all of this.  I will say that my wife and I haven’t been all that secretive in our conversations about church and such, so maybe the kids already pretty much know how we feel, but that’s no excuse for not bringing it up ourselves.

Our main concern as parents is that our children grow up to be rational and compassionate adults.  As such we always encourage them to think through things that don’t make sense to them rather than simply providing them with cut-and-dry answers.  We also try to promote empathy in any situation where one of them may have either hurt someone else’s feelings or may be in danger of doing so.  If they exercise these traits, then we are confident that whatever decisions they arrive at as far as belief or non-belief are concerned will be the best ones for them and for those around them.

Also, this site may help when the time comes: http://parentingbeyondbelief.com/  There is one video in particular where he discusses influence versus indoctrination, which I think does a better job of explaining what I just said in the previous paragraph.

Overall, the biggest word of parenting advice that I can give to new or prospective parents is don’t parent from fear. Sure, we worry about our kids, but when fear is our motivator in decision-making, it almost always leads us to want to control rather than guide, which in turn leads to unhealthy dependence instead of freedom when the time comes for them to finally leave the nest.

Hope that helps.

Roadblocks To De-conversion

I am sharing the following video for the same reason I share everything else on this blog:  it is simply my attempt to help others understand the psychology and reasoning behind my de-conversion. For what it’s worth, “hate” is probably too strong a word to describe how I used to feel towards atheists, but otherwise this is an accurate portrayal of the negative feelings I had right up until the time that I de-converted.  I think it also does a fantastic job of explaining the psychological reasons I avoided accepting the truth for so long.  Thanks to DarkMatter2525 for producing it.

Head Thinking Versus Heart Thinking

Oftentimes, otherwise well-meaning Christians  have a habit creating a false dichotomy known as “Head Thinking versus Heart Thinking” when it comes to accepting certain religious beliefs; Head Thinking being the thing that allegedly keeps one from believing in God (or certain ideas about God), and Heart Thinking  being what allows one to continue in faith.   I think this is one of the things that continued to bother me during the last few years of my Christianity and eventually lead to my atheism.  Even though I had adopted the “grace message”– involving a kinder, gentler version of God–whenever questions would arise that still couldn’t be adequately answered by this “better” construct, others would simply answer my concerns by telling me I needed to learn to trust my heart more.

Excuse me?

At worst, that’s like saying, “Shut the fuck up.  You don’t get it,”  and at best, “We don’t have an answer either and we’d rather not talk about it.”

To quote a good friend, I think part of the problem is that, to many Christians, resorting to Reason is like “reducing life to mere numbers and lines and angles and sucking out the awe and wonder of life.”  Put more succinctly, Reason is a heartless bitch.  I know that’s pretty much how I felt.

When I first left the church but hadn’t yet left Christianity, I wanted answers to “heart issues,” and all I could see in atheism was answers to “head issues.”   I assumed that the only thing atheists had to offer anyone (in a pejorative sense) was a scientific explanation for everything , so when I would peruse atheist websites and come across a person discussing “heart issues,” I would either dismiss it as an aberration or supernaturally credit it to the “Heart of God” still acting within that person (whatever that meant).

How ironic that now that I am an atheist (i.e. a Head Thinker, apparently), not only am I more in touch with my heart than ever, I can recognize acts of love and compassion within others for what they really are: acts of humanity.  These days, if someone were to credit a loving act to the “Heart of God” within someone, I would view it as an insult, both to that person and to humanity as a whole.

In light of this, if the question is ever posed to me as to why I no longer believe, I think I’ll default to, “Simply ‘listening to my heart’ was not enough reason for me to sustain a belief in a god.”

Quote for the day

My sense of self is improved when I love other people, when I live graciously and redemptively in the world. It is expanded when I learn, grow, work, struggle, and achieve. It is diminished when people think me selfish or greedy or craven. I lose my sense of self when I sacrifice principle for convenience, when I lie out of fear, when I take advantage of the powerless, or when I fail to do what is obviously right out of sheer laziness. I used to believe that what I believed about sky gods made me the kind of person I am, but it turns out I’m already this person, and beliefs don’t ultimately matter; what I do matters.   –Greg Horton

 

My deconversion story

There is no definitive moment that I can point to and say, “This is when I started on the road to deconversion.”  There were certainly rumblings that began four or five years ago when I began reading authors such as Brian McLaren and Donald Miller, but (at most) those writings simply challenged me to begin moving away from my more conservative, Evangelical roots to a more liberal, progressive Christianity.  I wasn’t even considering any form of unbelief at that point.  Yet if someone were to put my feet to the fire and ask me to point to a particular event or moment where the first serious doubts about my faith began to creep in and perhaps deal the first of many damaging blows to it, I suppose it would be when my family and I quit attending church almost two years ago.  As such, that’s where I’ll begin this story, in the days, weeks and months immediately following our departure.

Our main reason for leaving at the time was that we, like many these days, had become disillusioned and discontented with the institutional church (hereafter “IC”).  But despite this disillusionment, I still held hope for Christianity as a whole.  So when I stumbled across some Christian websites and books where people were sharing stories similar to mine yet had still managed to hold onto their faith–a faith outside the walls of the church–my heart leaped.  I didn’t have to be alone.  The message they shared of God’s love and grace sounded beautiful.  So beautiful, in fact, that I continued to listen to the podcasts and revisit the books regularly for well over a year.

Yet as time progressed, I realized that something still didn’t sit quite right.  Those ideas only seemed to sound cogent when I shared them with others who believed the same as me, but less so when I tried to explain them to someone else.  A prime example of this is when I was explaining to an atheist friend of mine why I still believed in a loving God.  My basic argument was that I had decided to assume that God loved me, then live life from that presupposition.   In a way I was testing my own version of Pascal’s Wager: either God loved me, and by believing it I could somehow prove it to be true, or he didn’t and I would find out anyway.

After a couple more months of investigation and introspection, I “found out anyway.”

One day I finally grasped the notion that, although this particular version of Christianity seemed in many ways to be better than the previous one, it still had the same fatal flaw as all others: it was based on faith.  There was no way to know for sure if this new, improved version of God was real other than “living from the heart” as if it were so.  I could find no reason to continue to hold onto any form of Christianity other than for the sake of ritual or tradition, neither of which held any sway with me in the first place.  I no longer believed.

Fortress mentality

Although it has been almost two years since my family and I quit attending church, I can still remember how we (and our fellow members) used to view the “outside world.”  The best thing I can compare it to is living inside a fortress.  Going “out into the world” was a necessary but dangerous thing.  We were encouraged to “love” those outside the walls (more on this in a minute), but never get too involved with them for fear that they might somehow corrupt us.  Our ultimate goal was to entice them into our particular fortress, or, failing that, at least get them into another similar fortress somewhere else.  And if we managed to lure them in, keeping them was critical.  Everything within the church was designed to make people feel “comfortable,” from the fancy coffee maker, to the nice banners, to the layout of the Sunday school rooms.  As my pastor once put it when I questioned the necessity of these things, “It’s Church Building 101.”

The mission statement of the church was ”Love God and Love Others” (real original, eh?), but loving others basically began and ended with trying to get them to come to our church.  That’s the problem with living inside a fortress: no matter how much you try to love someone outside the walls, you can never really love them in any deep sort of way so long as you maintain an Us versus Them view of the world.  Everyone is seen as the enemy or, at best, someone you shouldn’t be too involved with unless there is a possibility you can get them to come to church with you.

This fact became all too real when we decided to leave.

Never mind our two-and-a-half years of membership and loyal service within the church (kids’ ministry, Small Group attendance, running the sound board, etc.); after we left, all communication with us effectively ceased.  Our alleged friends, many of whom we had shared good times and intimate moments with, basically disappeared.

We lived outside the walls now.  We had become Them.

My wife and I made a few attempts in the following months to get together with those we had had relationships with, but every meeting basically started with, “So, where do you go to church now?” and ended with, “Let’s keep in touch.”  The middle was mostly a feeling-out session to see if we planned to come back.  Once they realized we weren’t, we were back to being persona non grata.

As I mention in other posts here on this blog, I have since become an atheist.  But I tell this story for two reasons:

(1) Despite what some may think, I didn’t become an atheist because I was somehow hurt by the church.  Sure, it’s sad that things ended the way they did, but our departure was actually very amicable.  Yet the way we were treated after we did leave helped me to realize something: if the members of a supposed grace-filled church such as this could so quickly disassociate with us, what did that say about the rest of Evangelical Christianity?  And what did it say about my Christianity that I was such a willing participant in it up until the time that we left?

(2) Hopefully anyone reading this who still attends a church and thinks they are simply “loving others” by trying to get them to attend their church will stop and realize what they are actually doing.  It’s not really love if there is an agenda behind it.  If you think your particular church is somehow above that sort of mentality, ask yourself how members who have left in the past were treated.  Are you still in touch with any of them?  Is anyone?  And to what end?

Jack Chick would be proud

So yesterday my daughter (who is a freshman in high school) comes home from school and pulls three little booklets out of the bottom of her backpack, explaining that three different girls each gave one to her throughout the day.  Suspicious, I head over to where she is so I can get a closer look, knowing before I even get there what I am likely to find: glorified gospel tracts.

Before I can get going on a long diatribe about the ills of dive bombing people with stuff like this, I stop and remind myself that, when I was in high school, it would have been me giving this sort of thing out to my “unsaved friends.”  And, upon closer inspection, I have to admit: they are a far cry better than, say,  Jack Chick tracts; they are very well-written and have a good layout.  But that’s about the extent of the praise I can give to them.   It still doesn’t erase the fact that I’m miffed about the whole thing.

Out of curiosity, I use my phone to scan the matrix code on the back of one of the books to see what other devilry one of these little apologistic bombs may contain.  Ah, here we go: a web page where I can share my story.

Hmmm.  I’m tempted.  Oh…so tempted.  Would it be a complete waste of time? Would anyone actually read it? 

In the end I decide to send a message, even though I know it will likely fall on deaf ears.

Here is what I said:

This story isn’t about me, but about my daughter.  She was handed three of these books (by three different girls) today.  I’m sure they feel as if they meant well in giving them to her, but all my daughter could think was, “Really? What do they think is so wrong with me that I would get three of them?”

In general I disagree with the whole premise of this type of campaign, but when it directly affects one of my children, I really have a problem with it.  For whatever good you think you may be doing in “Leading people to Christ,” you are essentially helping to create an entire generation of kids who will only view others as some sort of project in need of fixing, not as human beings in need of love.  How about instead of a campaign to hand out booklets, you start a campaign that teaches kids to simply befriend others, with no agenda whatsoever?

Is “saving” a few souls at the cost of damaging the self-worth of countless others really worth it?  And what about people who already ARE Christians who get handed one of these?  How do you think that makes them feel?