deilands

[deilands]

Moving

Hi all -

I have relocated my blog to http://www.deilands.com. I hope you will follow me there as I continue to write and process and grow.

Best -

Daniel

[deilands]

Institutionalization and Relationship Anarchy

I’ve been listening to a new podcast lately called “The Airing of Grief” produced by singer and songwriter Derek Webb. For those who don’t remember him - he was the lead singer of Caedmon’s Call before going solo and over the years has been one of my favorite artists to follow because of his rawness and willingness to provide commentation on his journey through his music.

His podcast involves having ten minute Skype Conversations with people about his latest album, “Fingers Crossed”, subtitled loosely A Tale of Two Divorces - one from his wife and the other from his faith. The podcast is beautifully produced and can, at times, be difficult to listen to because of the various challenges that I find in it.

You can find the Podcast here: https://www.theairingofgrief.com/where-to-listen/

One thing that I’ve been struggling with lately has been the concept of institutionalization. I have a tendency to want to put up walls and borders and lines and levels to demarcate who I am. I find the vanguards of my positions, begin to quote their words, read their books, consume their identities and make them my own. So long as I let them set the lines for my exploration I was not in danger of wandering too far afield. I find this an easy trap to fall into because it makes identifying myself to others and to myself so much easier.

I’ve done this throughout my life. When I was a Christian, I found people to make as the lighthouse to mark my way. Jesus Christ is all fine and good but he was difficult to see and the Bible was confusing and often difficult to apply to current life situations. More than this, I found myself setting up camp in identifiable terms. Baptist, Charismatic, Universalist, Pre-Post-Mid Trib - so many identifying labels, so many institutions to fashion myself after.

It’s a safe space being in walls, but like most places, once I move in I begin to see the cracks and end up moving on.

I’m trying very hard not to make this same mistake in my de-construction and reconstruction of my belief system. I don’t want to stake a flag in any territory. I don’t want to lay claim to that which I don’t really know. I don’t want to make Hitchens or Harris or anyone else the vanguards that I look to protect my new set of beliefs. In many ways, I want to be my own vanguard and explore my own borders. I’ve set labels on myself - atheist, secular humanist, poetic humanist, agnostic atheist - but when I stop and really try and define my place I’m really none of these in their pure form. They are merely containers for parts of my identity.

I was talking to a new friend recently about relationships and she brought up the concept of something I’d never heard of called relationship anarchy. According to the source of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, relationship anarchy. . .

“Is the belief that relationships should not be bound by rules aside from what the people involved mutually agree upon. . . Relationship anarchists look at each relationship (romantic or otherwise) individually, as opposed to categorizing them according to societal norms such as 'just friends', 'in a relationship', or 'in an open relationship'.”

While I haven’t quite wrapped my head around this in terms of my own relationships, I can definitely see the appeal of removing identifying labels. Still - I can also see that we, as humankind, tend to find safety in labels and identifying marks. We identify things to set their borders and establish where they start and they end.

This concept of identity is fascinating and something I’ve been reading about in a more existential way in Sean Carrols’ book, The Big Picture. How and why we choose to identify things is important. Am I me simply because of the atoms and molecules that make me who I am. If I were to make a copy of myself what would I find?

This is also how I feel in spiritual terms. How do I identify myself? Who am I? And does it really matter in the most important of terms?

I don’t know. But whether it is relationally, spiritually, or in a dozen of other ways I don’t want to be institutionalized and bounded. So I want to apologize in advance if I come across as a bit less than defined. If I write something one day and something different the next day, it’s not that I am trying to become all things to all people.

I’m not trying to find myself. I’m trying to journey with myself and that’s a very movement centered experience.

[deilands]

I think. Therefore I am many.

“He had very few doubts, and when the facts contradicted his views on life, he shut his eyes in disapproval.” –Herman Hesse

I follow a Facebook Page whose sole purpose is to inspire its followers to write. One bit of advice? Write even when you don’t have something specific to write about. I am working to make Sundays my writing space. While I may write more often, I am going to try to write at least once a week.

I’ve developed sort of an addiction to stories. I’ve always been a lover of good audiobooks. I don’t have a lot of time to read but I do have a decent amount of time spent in the car and other places where I can listen. Now, with my deconversion, I have also fallen in love with many podcasts that include the stories of others who have gone through this experience.

One of the overriding concepts that seem to run through every deconversion experience is the eventual inability of someone to deal with the balance necessary to maintain Christian faith. Being able to logic out the rightness of  eternal damnation with a belief in a loving and compassionate God tends to war against even the best evangelical Christian. Watching people in less developed countries suffer the ills of impure water or children dying in obscene fashion can test the limits of even the best minister’s need for free will.

Even reading the Bible can present its own challenges. How do you balance the Old Testament God who sanctioned genocide and horrific abuses with the New Testament God who suddenly wanted to convert these people groups He once wished only death for? How can you allow for the few answered prayers amongst the millions upon millions of unanswered ones?

Cognitive dissonance is the mental strain that comes from trying to balance inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes. It is an effect of trying to deal with a world that is not black and white. It is what can happen when we have to ignore authenticity for acceptance or we engage in things that go against our own feelings.

Christians as a whole become masters at dealing with these dissonances. After all, some of the most important scriptures instruct the believer that their heart cannot be trusted. Their feelings are suspect to intervention by dark forces and their very flesh warns against them doing the right thing. As a result, they have to question everything they desire in order to put it in check with what God desires for them.

This dissonance isn’t just the purview of the religious however. It affects all of us in some way. Think of a person who subsumes their own identity in order to be accepted by a surrounding community. Or when a significant other sacrifices their own beliefs to remain in their relationship. It’s the feeling that you get when you have to do something at work that you don’t agree with but have to do anyway.  At it’s worst case, this dissonance can fracture a personality - leading to PTSD and a whole myriad of other issues. At it’s most benign it becomes the simple stress that we deal with on a day to day basis.

People deal with this dissonance in a number of ways. For some, they compartmentalize their lives. We contain our various feelings in different containers - only bringing each out when it is most advantageous. Think of a person who is one way at work and another way at home. For others, they give over their own beliefs to the beliefs of the group or a higher power.

And while many of us would love to eradicate these cognitive dissonances in our lives, I don’t know if it’s possible. It arises in so many different places and we fight to know what it means to be truly authentic.

I think because I have been listening to stories of people’s battle with religious dissonance that I have felt it more intensely when it exists in my life. I’ve been trying lately to decide how best to approach it – when I have these conflicting thoughts that run amuck through my head and I’ve come to a few tactics that I am trying to use.

First – I recognize that the dissonance exists. It is so very easy to deny these incompatible thoughts. We compartmentalize them deeper in our subconscious or we tweak our logic to somehow balance the thoughts that war against one another. We move them around a bit. We avoid the thought that we aren’t unified beings but fragmented parts of what sometimes seems to be even more than one whole person.

It’s when I recognize these disparate parts of myself that I can see them for what they are and deal with them in the light. It doesn’t mean that I can escape living with them. I may decide that the sensation of inequality in my soul is worth the price of maintaining my current status quo but at least in this, I have given myself a choice.

Secondly – I find opportunities, to be honest about the divisions that exist. Sometimes this is to myself and many times, due to my extroverted nature, it tends to be out there in the open. I admit to not knowing the black and white answers to everything. This is part of the reason for my last post. I want to be clear that I don’t even remotely have all the answers but I have found that humanism provides a better balance to these unbalancing questions that can arise in my life. By talking about it with you, I better form a framework for those questions and can examine them in a better light.

Next – I allow myself to be present in all of my emotions and feelings. There is a Scripture that I used to focus on that says “A double minded man is unstable in all of his ways.” The problem is that we are all double minded in some way or another. We will all have cognitive dissonances that plague our lives but perhaps as we recognize them we can be better equipped to manage them. Further, as we recognize them we can find ways to unify them. For me – this was leaving Christianity. It has been admitting that I am both logical and emotional. I am both mystical and naturalist. I see people as individuals and as pieces on a board at times. I love and am loved by many people and love and am loved for many different reasons.

Finally, and most importantly, I allow myself to find opportunities for authenticity. I ignore the naysayers and those that would judge me and look for the path on which I am meant to walk.

What I am trying to do now is two-fold. I am trying to find those things which I can unify – those cognitive dissonances that I can bring into oneness by either admitting to myself the truth or by examining what I considered to be true and see how well it stands under the light. I am also trying to become ok with existing in other forms of dissonance. Perhaps I am mostly learning how to be authentic.

Of course, even in my search for authenticity, I’m not being as open, even here, as I’d like to be. But I think in the end what I’m trying to say is that we shouldn’t ignore the fact that we are all broken. We are all divided in our own nature – and it’s not a bad thing. We feel anger and love in the same breath and we find hope and despair between seconds of time. Together I believe we can continue to become more authentic and in our authenticity perhaps we can also be whole.

[deilands]

Authenticity in Transition

“Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.” – W.H. Auden

I’ve written a lot over the past month or so. Some of it has been fiery and some of it has been contemplative. Recently I’ve been called to task by someone important to me about a few things. The best way I can summarize these things seems to be wrapped up in the questions of authenticity.  

“Tone: Think of all the ways you strived for being better and more and higher and devout-er as a Christian… you seem to be doing all of those same behaviors, same stilted language. For whom?” –anon

I have this problem. I’ve described it before as transitional fire. Whenever I am moving away from one thing to another or whenever I am changing from someone to someone else I tend to blaze away. I become like the incredible (or not-so-incredible) hulk and I write in language and patterns that suggest anger and rage and disgust.

I can go back to my old journals and blogs and find my transitionary phases. I can find the places when I change from one thing to another – whether by logical choice or by emotional movement – and I can find in those places some of this same fire. Seventeen or so years ago, I was in one of these places. My Christianity was firmly intact and I was for the time angry at what I viewed as the overall hypocrisy of the church. I find it amusing now, looking back, how close I was and how far I was from who I am today.

I will never claim to be a poet – really. Sometimes I write poetry. Most of the time it’s horrible stuff with a rhyme and meter that’s not even remotely fun. In this previous of time, I was expressing myself in blogs and poetry aplenty and I want to post one that got me into trouble back then. It’s not long and it may give proof to what I mean by this transitory problem that I have.

Tattered Dresses - 3/25/2003

All the bells were silent Except the one to toll the funeral Of the murdered Sons of I The bloody corpse of Am The bridesmaid's dresses a tattered remnant Of her casket gleaming brown Never let it be said that she, the bride, While losing breath to putrid kisses Should breathe the rotting stench of life Holding in air of the earth The flower-girl hanging from the tree of life Her dress ripped from her body's smiling face There were ten virgins met by rapists Ended that line bitter quick Taking their oil with slapstick faces While the former asked for more And found their flasks then broken The Maid of Honor against the wall Beauty's dress a remnant of lingerie from prying eyes Can it be said that the steeple Of our churches reveal our nude form While praying piously from the pews of bitter wood We call ourselves the bride of I The lover's call of Am goes forth But we still mend our dress before the marriage Of the man we've engaged then lost to earth When will life return?

See what I mean? I have other stuff that is much more contemplative much like this entry is interspersed with this odd disgust or rage at where perhaps I viewed myself being mere months before. And so I come to the point of this post.

I’m not sure what authenticity looks like. A very dear friend of mine used to say to me that I tend to make excuses for my own feelings. I still find myself doing this. I say how I feel and then I create the reasons that I feel that way instead of letting the feelings simply be what they are. I get hurt or angry or sad or depressed and if it is due to someone else I look for ways to absolve them even while I at times work against them.

This transition for me is different than others. In the past, I always had this concept of Jesus the Christ who wanted things to be right but was looking for mankind to get their shit together. Here – in this place – it’s almost like I’ve realized that it is God who never got his shit together. Worse – he vacated the premises a long time ago. The great I am simply never was. And all of my railing and anger and desire and hope and feeling of chosen-ness was simply my own internal stuff.

I was listening to a podcast today and something was mentioned that did strike home. We don’t suddenly change when we lose faith. We stay the same people. We care the same. We love the same. We value the same things. I still show a lot of angst when it comes to the things that I believe or stop believing in. I still use harsh language while I’m processing because in some ways I’m still convincing myself.

It would be a lie if I said that I don’t pray anymore or don’t somehow get the feeling that there is a grander narrative to my life. Sometimes I still get that feeling like I’m being watched over my shoulder and wonder if I turn around fast enough will I see Him there – divine hiddenness and all. I’m like a smoker who is sticking things in my mouth because of the habit. I grasp onto mystical straws at times because I don’t want to lose the mysticism that formed my entire life.

So to those of you who think that I’m covering my eyes and ears and eyes and not seeing that I’m railing against the things that I say I don’t believe in. . . I see it. And for those who think that all of this is cerebral – it is. . . and it isn’t.

I had to give the eulogy beside the casket of a student once. Draped in his robotics attire and with students and adults alike – his parents and younger brother and all of my team. I didn’t cry. I gave a speech with all of the gravitas that I could muster. I looked at his parents and stayed strong not because I was hiding my emotions but because I process them differently.

God died. Or – my belief in him did. And I’m still writing his eulogy and doing so in front of a crowd of people of my own making. Because it seems fit that I shouldn’t let this thing that made up so much of my life to go without eulogizing it’s worth and worthlessness.

I don’t know if I’m being authentic in my transition or not. I do know that I’m trying. I apologize for those times that I come across as overly angry or snarky or ridiculous. Maybe that’s just processing. Regardless, I don’t ever want to become the person that spends his time hanging onto old relationships that have died.

I hope this brings a bit of clarity to the reader.

Goodnight.  

[deilands]

Is there a reason why in all of your angry, philosophically unstable, relativistic and potentially immoral ranting that you only ever attack the Christian faith? I find it ironic that it’s the freedoms offered to you in a nation fundamentally built on Judeo-Christian values that give you the freedom to hate God. I would invite you to do the same in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

So,

I want to break this down as I answer. I hope you don’t mind.

#1 Yes. I am angry. I think I set that out already. I’m angry at myself, at the religion I found myself in, I’m angry about the stories of abuse and destruction that can be contributed to the Christian faith, and about a lot of different things. I’m not an angry person really. Most of the time I’m quite content in my life. In this particular thing, I’m not.

The good thing? I have a right as a human being to be angry and to process my anger. Especially considering I’m not angry at any particular person.

#2 Philosophically unstable? I think you may have to better define this statement.

#3 Relativistic? Yes. Hell yeah. Sorry, man (or woman), but there is zero absolute truth. Ok - that’s a lie. There is mathematical proofs and concepts and all that good stuff but in regards to morality and purpose and knowing? Nah. I know. It sucks. There is zero meaning to the universe. I know. That’s hard. However - I do believe that we can bring meaning in the universe. Fortunately, it seems that evolution does seem to work and from what I can tell - at least insofar as I can - living a life that promotes unity and loving-kindness and all of those cool things seems to promote the betterment of mankind. Is that any less valid than believing in some absolute truth? I don’t think so.

#4 Potentially immoral? See #3 - based on who’s determination?

#5 Why do I only attack the Christian faith? Because it’s my wheelhouse. I mean - I don’t believe in any of this stuff. Islam, Hindu, Krishna. . . none of it. But what I know about is Christianity. And what my family encounters? Christianity. And what I am surrounded by? Christianity. More simply: Because I can.

#6 Let’s not get confused. These wonderful Judeo-Christian values that you speak of also valued slavery, the oppression of women, the oppression of people with non-heterosexual feelings, etcetera, etcetera. Oh - wait - stoning of witches. Ahh yes. Oh - wait - the raping of virgins. I know, I know. That’s Old Testament but God said it was cool in the law..so, I mean.

In the end, it’s late. I’m sorry for being trite but if you want to ask trite questions you need to expect trite answers.

Anything else?

[deilands]

The (Gas)Light of God

Before I begin writing this entry, I want to make it clear of my reasoning for composing a post of this sort. My audience is varied and some are people of faith and some are not. Some are questioning their faith and some have already walked away. I would not feign to call myself a spiritual scholar or philosopher but at times I have thoughts that run through my head that need to be put on paper. For some this may express thoughts that you’ve had before but haven’t really been able to properly attack them. For others, this may be offensive. In either case, understand that I am not attacking any individual personally. I am not trying to take anyone’s religion away from them. I am simply placing my own thoughts out into the ether. Also – one last note – I may edit this as time goes on to add to the length. But I wanted to get started at least.

Part 1: What is Gas-Lighting?

In 1944, a movie called Gaslight debuted. It starred Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. In this story, a woman named Paula (played by Bergman) marries a man named Gregory Anton (played by Boyer) after a whirlwind romance. They are in love and they are happy and Gregory persuaded Paula to leave her home and move with him far away from her community to London where she knows no one.

Things quickly take a turn for the worse as strange things begin to happen to Paula. Things begin vanishing from around her. Paintings that were on the wall disappear, a personal broach that she had kept in a particular place vanishes, and all the while Gregory tries to convince her that she is the one causing the disappearances. She also notices that the gas lights in the house seem to be dimmer each day – except when she asks her husband about these things, he convinces her that she is just seeing things. Slowly, but surely, unable to trust her own senses – she begins to go crazy. Gregory’s end goal? To have her institutionalized so he can steal her family jewels.

Gas-lighting is now known as a number of behaviors used to control a victim by making them doubt their own reality. According to “Turning up the lights on Gaslighting” by Kate Abramson, gaslighting “is a form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not) to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds—paradigmatically, so unfounded as to qualify as crazy.”

It’s important to note that this is not usually done consciously by the abuser but as part of a grander unknown scheme that exists within their head.

I want to posit in this journal that the Christian god can, if not constrained, become an amazing element of gas-lighting and as a result can damage people in a way much more profound than from a traditional relationship.

Part 2 – It’s YOUR Fault

Instead of building from the minor examples of how the Christian narrative tends to gaslight believers, I want to start from my largest supposition and work down.

According to Christianity, the reason that the world is corrupt - that sin and death exist, that children die by the millions each year, and that enumerable atrocities both man-made and natural happen is due to one thing. You.

You are the cause in some way of this insidious destruction which leaves so many to mourn. You are the reason that God sent his only son to die on a cross. Every time you think of someone lustfully you nail again Jesus to the cross. Every time you are angry without cause at your brother, you stab another nail into his hand. After all – if mankind wouldn’t have sinned in the first place, none of this would have ever happened.

But that’s ok. God forgives you. He loves you. Just don’t do it ever again.

I want to pause and post a few of the traits of a person who is feeling the effects of gaslighting:

1)  You feel the need to apologize all the time for what you do or who you are.

2)  You never quite feel “good enough” and try to live up to the expectations and demands of others, even if they are unreasonable or harm you in some way.

3)  You feel like there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, e.g. you’re neurotic or are “losing it.”

Most importantly, a person who is being gas-lit is being convinced that their own mental faculties and their own beliefs and their own story is somehow tainted and incorrect. They are convinced that they are the one in the wrong – that they can’t even trust their own choices or their own minds.

We were taught as Christians from a young age that we can’t trust our own hearts. They are, after all corrupted by sin. Our own decision making is flawed. I’ve sung many songs about Jesus being more and me being less because when it came to who was better, the person I was wasn’t good enough and could never be good enough no matter what I did.

It was all filthy rags.

But let me ask you a question. Who is more powerful here? If the Christian God existed, wouldn’t he be?  If God is unable to create a perfect being who lives perfectly and does perfectly then doesn’t the blame fall not on man but on God? If I place a chocolate cake in front of a two-year-old and walk away after telling them not to eat it and they do it anyway – who is really to blame? Is it me or is it the two-year-old?

If God were to be the creator of the universe and were to give mankind all of the traits that express themselves as what Christians call sin and then expect them not to fall prey to those devices and THEN when they do – blame them for HIS mistakes… is this not gas-lighting?

Part 3 – Who are you to question?

Even as a Christian, the most disturbing story that I ever read in Scripture has to have been the story of Job. Imagine this – God and the Devil are hanging out up in heaven and the Devil says, “Hey, God, I betcha I can make Job curse you.”

Of course, God being all-knowing says, “Uh, I don’t take bets. Especially when I know what happens in the end.”

No. No. No. I’m sorry. That’s the way it would have happened with a compassionate God.

Sorry. God, sometimes having a penchant for gambling, tells the devil, “Sure. Go ahead. Take your best shot.”

So, the devil does. He kills and he maims and he disenfranchises Job among his friends. He destroys the life of this guy so that he and God can settle a bet that God (according to Christian doctrine) already knew the answer to.

And in the end? When Job deigns to question what the crap happened?

The perfect response from a Gas-Lighting Creator. “Who are you to question me?”

Imagine telling this to your kids. You take away everything they hold dear. I’m not talking about grounding them to their room. I’m talking about killing their favorite kitten, shredding their beloved teddy-bear, burning all of their clothes, and destroying every last thing that they hold dear. Why? Oh – because the neighbor bet that if that stuff happened your kid would hate you.

And when your child – who has been better-behaved than any child could be, asks you why? You tell him, “Who are you to question me. I’m your father. I give and I take away.”

You’d be arrested for child abuse. How many people have questioned God when their child got sick or their job got lost only to be told by well-meaning individuals, “It must just be part of God’s plan. He knows.”

That, my friends, is gas-lighting.

Part 4 – A glass of cognitive-dissonance anyone?

I think the most difficult part to recognize in all of this is that it happens slowly and methodically. We are taught by the church that we are horrible people and only believing in the God of the Scriptures will save us. We feel accepted because the words sound nice on the surface and we are hurting so much. A person doesn’t get into a relationship with a narcissist because they are mean. They get involved because that person shows all of the best things.

I can heal your hurt. I can take away the pain. I can help you lose the guilt and the shame. I can bring you joy and happiness. I can show you love.

If. And this is the truth that reveals the lie. If you will follow my commands. If you will become a slave to me. If you will let me invade your life and change your friends and isolate you from all of those people that aren’t like us. If you will give up everything – your mother, your father, your sister, your brother – to follow me. Then, I will do these things for you.

What is even more insidious is this. I don’t believe that there ever was a Christ that was crucified. I don’t believe that there is a Jehova Jireh waiting to provide if I do all of the right things and pray the right prayers. What I do believe is that a group of people, searching for answers – and eventually for power – created an amazingly powerful institution that convinced people that they were inherently evil in and of themselves.

It convinced them that they couldn’t trust their own hearts.

It convinced them that their conscience was seared as with an iron and their faculties were controlled by desires that were not proper. It told them not to question because questioning was pride. It told them to accept that all things happened for the better. “I’m only doing this for your good.”

And even more so it had a potion for all of this. Eat of this body, drink of this blood and all will be well. But is it well? Has he lived up to his bargain? Or does he simply ask for more. And more. Do you feel confused as children continue to die while prayers are lifted when the God of Mark says that you can heal the sick? Do you feel hurt while you have to explain why God was ok with the Israelites raping women?

I can’t.

It doesn’t really seem to have gotten any better to me and I want to tell you something important.

YOU ARE GOOD IN YOURSELF. You don’t need to be justified or sanctified because, let’s be honest – If God needed to let us commit atrocities so that he could send his son to die to appease himself. . . if he needed to create mankind on this little blip of a planet in this tiny solar system in a galaxy that is only one of millions of others just so that he could be worshiped? Damn. That’s the greatest gas-lighter I’ve ever heard of.

I’m sorry if this post seemed hard. I’ve heard stories tonight and they break my heart and in that I am angry.

[deilands]

I’m not angry with God. I’m f*ing pissed.

Last night, I was listening to episode 049 of “Life After God” where Adam Stanley was being interviewed. There is something fascinating to me about listening to two thoughtful individuals from two separate paths discussing their thoughts and values with one another.

Adam Stanley is, you see, the pastor of one of the largest churches in America and he is being interviewed by a former pastor who deconverted from his Christian faith. The interview was fairly amazing as I got to listen to two people who legitimately wanted to understand one another and ended up having a conversation about truth and error and the willingness to both be wrong and admit you are wrong.

I have to be honest – life would be much easier if people could be housed in ideological containers.

“Now if you will just step this way in our exhibit of ontology, you will see the perfect specimen of a fundamentalist who believes. . .”

Or

“And here is the first ever atheist to ever walk the planet. Notice his pronounced critical thinking skills and lack of mystic desire. . .”

Of course, we know that this is not the case. I attended an evangelical church, led worship each week, spoke in tongues, had prophetic songs while denying the existence of hell and eternal damnation and arguing against the infallibility of Scripture. Stereotypes only exist on the largest of canvases. Once we move in closer, we begin to see the fine lines of paint that were used. When we do, they are often at odds with what we expected.

While there are definitely bad versions of people of faith, there are also many good ones. While there are definitely asshole atheists, there are many who are more compassionate and giving than many you will find in any church. This is why I always find it amusing when people suggest that I left the church for any other reason than I simply lost the ability to believe in a personal and invested Creator. There are just too many people that I like that are still believers for that to be true.

So I’ve had to ask myself – who am I angry with?

If I were a lifelong atheist this would be much easier. I wouldn’t have grown up underneath the guiding hand of the church or the principles of a faith whose primary basis is that I am ALWAYS the one at fault in the relationship. Instead, I am left with this underlying need to rail against that which I used to believe. I did this same thing when I first transitioned from a person who believed in an eternal hell to one who did not.

I had to be careful not to attack the people who believed what I used to – because in the end – I used to be there too and had plenty of reasons for my belief. I had to find a place to house my anger and my disgust. Much of this anger was at me.

How could I have believed something so horrendous for such a long time of my life? How could I have used it as an excuse to witness to people or to leave tracts or to pray for people’s souls? The very idea that we would willingly believe that anyone could have warranted such abuse is disgusting and I wonder sometimes if it doesn’t explain the horrors inflicted by Christianity through the centuries. Once you dehumanize a person to the point that you believe that they are going to be screaming in unendurable pain for even a second – much less for a boundless length of time – any form of torture is possible. After all – remember – it is a GOOD God who tortures the non-believer.

So here I am, still wanting to aim my anger at someone or something. Being angry at God doesn’t make any sense, right? It would be like being angry at Santa Clause for not getting a present that I wanted. It doesn’t work. Still, though, I find myself wanting to shake my fist up at the sky enraged that I would have followed this path for such a long time.

So when someone says to me – you just left the faith because you are angry at God – I want to say to them a profanity-laden “Yes!”

I am pissed off at God. But what’s even worse is that it’s like being pissed off at a parent who died suddenly or at a person that ghosted you online or at a being that was never there in the first place. It’s like being mad at your ventriloquist dummy because it said bad things. It just doesn’t work very well.

So instead, I am working on relinquishing this anger because I can’t be angry at those who believe simply BECAUSE of their belief. We are all still in a society where there is more out there that is unknown than is known and as long as the unknown exists, people will flock to easy explanations and I can’t blame them for that.

I can be angry at the actions that the belief manifests. I can be outraged at the abuses that those that believe sometimes commit against their fellow person. I can be angry at the stupidity of those who somehow think that my unbelief is simply a sham so that I can ‘do what I want’. I can even be angry at the religion that would bind people to lives imprisoned by false precepts and concepts and token moralities developed by other fallible people many generations ago.

But people overall? Nah. It doesn’t track.

So for now, consider me part of that group. “Hello, my name is Daniel, and I am angry with God.”

And because he does not exist, in the end, I am angry with myself. What does forgiveness look like? It is me forgiving myself for believing. It is me forgiving myself for all of the times that I silenced my desires and my wants and my vision and my plans and my hopes and my dreams simply because I didn’t think that they tracked with this great invisible sky-man who laid down impossible standards, expected us to follow them, and then punished us when we couldn’t?

I am pissed off at my abuser. People created him. The systems they designed enabled him. And I helped him abuse others in my ignorance. Please forgive me when that anger comes across at individuals. While we are all guilty of being dogmatic – I am hoping that as I forgive myself for being that way, I will become more compassionate with others.

[deilands]

My time on Everyone’s Agnostic

So -

I had the privileged of being interviewed on Everyone’s Agnostic two weeks ago or so and it became live this weekend. I wanted to share it with my Tumblr community. As usual, I’ll answer any questions that you might have.

http://bit.ly/eadanielpodcast

-Daniel

[deilands]

Seems legit

[deilands]

Certainty Vs Uncertainty

Certainty Vs Uncertainty – 

There is something comforting about ‘knowing’ things. Security and stability are some of the most relaxing elixirs out there – even for those that thrive on the unknown. Having a ‘safe space’ to fall often offers the strength for someone to go out and try those crazy things that would make others quake in fear.

What do you do, then, when you learn that much of what you thought was true was a well-constructed myth; when Santa Clause is no longer the one to bring you presents? When your parents aren’t perfect? When marriages dissolve or careers fall apart?  

My rejection of Christianity and has been – in some ways – like finding many of those things out at once. Things that I once knew for a fact, I now cannot. I knew that ‘all things would work out for the good’ and I knew that if I died tomorrow I’d spend eternity living in heaven. I knew about the end of the world and that there were miracles. I knew that there was a God who – according to my prior paradigm - was not a jerk - especially once I gave up the belief in eternal damnation. He heard my prayers – even if they weren’t answered. He knew the hairs on my head and the number of heartbeats I would have. He KNEW me. This certainty battled against the tide of impotence that I often felt when dealing with the terrors and the horrors that can beset us in this life. I believed that prophetic words over my life would come to pass. I believed so many things – and now?

Now, things are different. Let me be clear. I do believe that – at least as far as we can know – there are knowable things. I know the planets are revolving around the sun. I know if I jump into the air, I will fall back to earth. When I cross the Mississippi River bridge, I know that it will hold me up. Hell, I know that the chair I am sitting on now will hold my weight. These things and a million other things are knowable and have been demonstrated true by way of defined and visible evidence and given power by the theory and time.

I am referring more to the things that I was once certain about. I once KNEW that there was a God and somehow I had won the amazing religious lottery of being born in the right place, in the right century, with the right family, with the right brain to believe in him. I surrounded myself with all the proof that I needed and I found a way to ignore the evidence that suggested that I was wrong.

Eventually, over several years, I had to conclude that these things that I was certain about weren’t like believing in the bridge that was holding me or the pull of atoms. My certainty in the Judeo-Christian God waned and I began to see the myths for what they were. They couldn’t be substantiated in any real way. I became an atheist to Christianity – as I am to every other defined god that currently exists in the lexicon of human religion.

Beyond that though – I just don’t know. Is there a god? Perhaps. Though I doubt that it would be best to describe anything that exists in that form.  Perhaps this quote from Kaveh Mousavi says it best:

“I’m not 100% certain that there is no god. I AM certain that there is no god, but not 100%. However, I’m 100% that Yahweh, Allah, or the historic gods such as Amon Ra don’t exist.” Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/marginoferr/2014/03/02/atheism-and-certainty/#G1rQ226yp0sWfqWz.99

Could we be living in a small microcosm from among thousands of microcosms existing in a snow-globe universe on the shelf of some much greater intelligence? Perhaps. As of right now, I just don’t know and really – even if we are – does it matter in the big scheme of things? This uncertainty, then, spreads to so many other items. How many of our cultural ideas and concepts are simply holdovers from the mythos of the systems that surround us? Is there an afterlife? I’d like there to be – to be honest – but as of right now I just can’t know.

What does this mean then? It means that this journey of discovery is done not with a certain destination in mind but with the unknown staring at me in the face. It is more than just jumping out of a plane in a skydive. It’s jumping out of a plane in the dark not sure if you’re wearing a parachute or not. The fall will be exhilarating, I’m sure, but where does it end?

[deilands]

The Things I’ve Learned – My Own Map

I’ve been looking to write a post all day and haven’t found the right topic or words to say. I hope you will all bear with me then as I look to put words to a few feelings that I’ve been having and more importantly to the things that I’ve learned over the past six months or so as I’ve tried to understand what it really means to be an humanist, atheist, or whatever you’d like to describe me as. I want to warn everyone that these posts may be, as they say, ‘triggering’. This is mainly true of my Christian friends as I am going to be quite frank.

Much like I did when I was a Christian, I’ve spent a lot of time listening to the perspectives of others who have left their Christianity before me. It is a unique experience. Many people who have been agnostic or at least unreligious for most of their lives will look at this stuff and wonder why I’m making such a big deal about it. At first, I didn’t think it was that big of a deal – leaving ones faith. This is especially true if it were all a sham in the first place. Why should a historical fallacy create so much dissonance in me? As I’ve listened and hopefully grown, I’ve realized that I am having to deal with a lot of transitions between one thing to another – between a this and a that. Some of it is easier to do as I’ve already been in process even before I determined that I was truly an atheist. Others – I’m still growing.

This will probably be a few parts worth of writing as I’m realizing that I have a lot to say about this stuff.

A Divine Plan vs. My Own Map

My first year coaching our robotics team was the first year that it really hit me that I had crossed the line into adulthood. This might sound strange. I was a grown man with a job, two kids, and a wife. I had done a lot of adulting. Still, it was all within my family and the consequences usually would only affect my small crew of friends and family. When we arrived in St. Louis after a fourteen hour bus ride in the early hours of the morning, I learned that our hotel booking had been changed because the hotel we had originally planned on staying at was overbooked.

This wasn’t a bad thing. I had prepared for there to be some randomness in this – my first out of state fieldtrip with 30+ kids. What I did not prepare for was to find out that there was zero parking for our bus. It was around 1 AM and I didn’t have anyone to call. Our principal couldn’t help. The hotel gave us a few suggestions but in the end it was up to me to fix the problem. I had a lot of anxiety realizing how much hinged on my own decision. Of course, looking back after taking nearly a dozen other field trips with a lot of different random things that I’ve had to work around, I feel much more capable.

Leaving Christianity is a lot like that but not just for one aspect of my life. For 30 years, I’ve believed that I was in a boat and Jesus was my captain. In general, he would point the direction and I’d travel where he pointed. If I screwed up or if a storm arose that seemed would take my ship down, he would of course be there to calm the waters or at least help me navigate to the shore. When I took great leaps of faith in my own life, he was there to grab my hand when I started to sink and whether or not there really was someone in my boat or not – I felt like there was. And feelings are amazingly powerful. I’ve had prophetic words pronounced over my life and I’ve even ‘heard’ the voice of God betimes and there is nothing that can make a person feel more special than believing that there is someone out there that took special interested in their life – especially when this being is the Creator of the Universe.

Now – I’ve seen the puppetry and the lights and the glamor that was what I thought was God and I’ve found it to be the show that it really was. I am – in many ways – upset with myself. If a divine plan existed, then it was in this plan that had that millions and millions of children die each year. It was in this divine plan that had millions destroyed by the very people who claimed to serve His name. It was in this plan that every atrocity that ever happened would occur because He was the divine author. And for me to believe that somehow – I in my place of comfort was ‘special and unique’ among all of these others was at best prideful.

Now – it’s me. In my boat. Navigating my life. Alone. Yes – I have friends and family and the ability to access wisdom from hundreds of different sources but in the end, it’s my boat. And in the end, when I look at everyone else around me – they are all managing their own boats. My kids get sick? My career takes a turn? My marriage gets rough? There is no one to pray to. There is no one listening in the great ether. A storm develops? I have people to talk to but no one can come onto my ship and calm my waters. All I have is myself and those that surround me that love me. And all of them are also dealing with their own stuff.

On the one hand – it’s scary. There is no divine plan for my life – because there is no divinity that is in control. On the other hand – it’s terrifying. There is no reason that I should be successful or that my kids should survive to adulthood or that my next step outside tomorrow won’t leave me broken and alone and without hope. But – and this is the big one here – it is amazing as well. My life is my own. I live it. When I screw up, and I have done so and will do so quite often, I can own it. When I am successful, I can revel in that success. I don’t have to look at my successes and think of them as ‘filthy rags’ in comparison to some greater power. I can look at my children and know that when they do amazing things, I can see them as amazing people who are controlling their own ship with forthrightness and strength.

I am in control of my life in as much any of us are in control. I choose. I am making my own map and walking my own road and forging my own path. That’s an amazing thought process and one that can be a bit humbling. The path of Christianity is largely a path of giving up your agency. It is about enslaving yourself to another. It’s passing both blame and success.

That divine plan sucks. Fortunately, it’s not really there at all. And so, in conclusion, there is this: I don’t have a map to go by any longer. I don’t have a divine plan or mandate. I don’t have a GPS or even a promise that what I’m doing right now is the RIGHT thing for me - but - because there is no plan, there is no right thing. And because I am still alive, I can still journey.

[deilands]

Perfection

“But I'm a believer in the perfectibility of human beings. I think we can be better. I think we can be perfect or near to it. And when we become our best selves, the possibilities are endless. We can solve any problem." - The Circle

I've been watching the movie "The Circle" and this quote stuck out to me. At first, I liked it. The idea that humanity is perfectible is - at its core - something that keeps us striving forward. If we didn't believe that we had the ability to cure disease or solve world hunger or reach the edges of our solar system we would have never tried to do so. If we didn't see the inequities of heterosexism, sexism, racism and the other 'isms' that plague our society, we would never try to reverse them.

This, perhaps, is why I find humanism such an appealing ideology. It does not rely on something external to solve our problems. Instead, it looks to us - and in us - to provide solutions to the horrors and gross inequities that surround us. It looks to us to comfort those who mourn and to lift those who are suffering.

I don't know if I believe that we will ever reach a point where we will cease needing to strive for more. It is, perhaps, this striving that continues to give us reason to grow. Also, it is very hard to nail down what perfectibility looks like. Our moral and cultural values change so often that this concept seems elusive - at least on a deeper scale.

Still, this doesn't invalidate our need to pursue it. I've always said that I'd love to be immortal - not because I'm afraid of death - but because I would love to see where humanity will go.

[deilands]

Updates and Growth

I have not written here in a long while.

There have been several reasons but the most important one is that I began to feel like I was doing exactly what I didn’t want to do. I’m not an apologist for humanism. I don’t believe that it is necessary for me to defend my views. More importantly, I don’t believe that I need to become an apostle for my lack of faith in a supreme being.

What then, is this place for?

I wanted this blog to be a place to discuss my own journey away from religious belief – specifically away from Christianity since it has been my primary belief system for over 30 years. There are some of you who are asking the same questions that I asked along this path. You are either considering leaving your faith or have recently left your faith. There are some of you who merely want to understand more about where I’m coming from. There are others who are still strong in your religious beliefs who simply want to gawk. All of this is ok. You can ask questions but I would caution you. Unless you can provide visible direct proof of a Supreme Being, please don’t try to apologize me into believing again. It won’t work. I don’t say that to be harsh. I’m simply stating where I’m at now.

Instead of a long multi-part post, I wanted to discuss something simple that has been resonating with me over the last bit. When I was a Christian, I was taught a number of important things – nothing more important than a statement that is best described through a song that I used to lead others in during worship:

It’s you not me. It’s you not me. Without you, I’m so hollow. It’s you not me.

Or

More of you and less of me. More of you and less of me. More of you sweet Jesus.

For most Christians, these lyrics will pass muster in regards to Biblical correctness and will appeal to a concept that Christians are taught from a young age. In order follow God, we must give up our agency. The most Christian among us are often those that successfully give up the most agency to God. The logic train for this is simple.

I am inherently not good without the saving grace of Jesus. My heart is deceitful, my choices bound to sin, and my nature enslaved to the flesh. Therefore, as a Christian, I must learn to accept that my way is not correct and His way is.

Depending on what type of church you attend, this can take a ton of different and very scary directions. For some, it means believing that the pastor of the church knows better for you than you do. For a woman, it can often mean that you have very little agency as your father and then your husband is over you as a “head”. For many, this lack of belief in the ability of our own choices to be good allows them to succumb to cultic belief systems with a mask of Christianity. Children have been abused, wives subjugated, and entire churches led to ruin based on this simple fact that someone knew better because they were higher on this Spiritual Hierarchy.

I was fortunate. I never had to live under the bondage of oppressive church regimes or dictatorial rulers in pastors clothing. For the most part, the people that were my Spiritual advisors meant well and led a life that was well deserving of the title of Shepherd

In my life, this lack of agency was subtler. It meant that I couldn’t be trusted. I remember praying for hours on end listening and searching for the answer to major life choices. Should I move to a place? Should I get this degree? How should I raise my children? How can I find peace? Because God never deigned to speak to me with a still small voice, burning bush, roaring ocean, supernatural speaking donkey, etcetera, I was often left either choosing what I felt “right” to choose or going to my Pastor because surely he heard God better than me.

Again, this is not a slight against anyone that was my pastor. In truth, age often brings wisdom even without a deity in the mix and I often got great (though not divinely inspired) insight. Unfortunately, this often left me with a feeling of being “less than”. I was unable to hear a divine word for myself. I must not be good enough. I must not be praying enough or fasting enough or singing enough songs or reading enough Word and while many can argue that this is something that most Christians go through, it just never fit.

Why would God create the entire human race flawed from the beginning? Evil from the outset? Doomed to suffer in a fallen world because of one man’s decision long ago. No. I see now that really, the only person I can blame for both my bad and good choices are myself. Hence the concept of Agency. I don’t do good because some Deity requires it of me. I do good because I want to. I choose to. I make the effort to do what I can to make other people’s lives better because I choose.

When I screw up and do things that are unhealthy for me or for others I do so because I choose. It’s not because I was born evil OR good because really these are all value judgments. I was born human in a world of chaos where even the BEST of choices can result in the WORST outcomes sometimes. Even the most sincere of prayers can go unheard for thousands and thousands of people and one prayer of a terrorist can seem to be answered as he destroys the lives of thousands of others who are praying to their God for protection.

I choose. When I have to make a decision I ask advice of people who have been there before and listen – because I choose to. When I make a choice and see amazing results it wasn’t because some deity decided to bless my endeavors – it’s because I made a choice and sometimes those choices bring about amazing things. I know I seem to be belaboring the point here so let me say what I believe now:

I was not born good or evil. I am not a slave to anything.

My flesh – my body – is not evil. Its desires are not evil. There are things that I want that aren’t healthy for me because we all crave things but it’s not because my body needs to be subjected to anyone else’s will including a deity. I practice discipline not to attain to some higher Spiritual virtue but because being healthy is – in my opinion – better than being unhealthy.

No one should be subjected to anyone or anything else. My wife is not subjected to me. I am not the head of her or our household. We are two people who both agree and disagree on things who have chosen to live together and raise two amazing kids while balancing both of our desires, hopes, and dreams. We each have our own agency and can choose to live that as we see fit.

This sounds so simple but as a person being steeped in the morality of the Church for years, I was taught that so many things that were morally wrong or right that simply just weren’t either way. In excess, many things can be unhealthy. And as I look back I can see how often both condemnation and conviction were the same things even though the church teaches differently. There is no God to judge me or my actions and the only one who can choose is me. My children choose to obey or disobey not because they are good or evil. They are just human and I work to help raise them to live as healthy adults.

And while yes, none of us have complete agency – while we are bound to our cultural dogmas, societal expectations, and overall ideologies – I can choose not to give control to a non-existent deity or a book written many years ago by dozens of individuals in completely different times.

I can choose to live life and to grow through my mistakes and my foibles without worry that I’m missing the mark in some larger spiritual passion play in which I am merely a pawn.

And if none of this really made sense – it’s kinda the best I can do right now. I’m still trying to figure out all of this stuff.

[deilands]

A Leave of Absence

Hi everyone.

I’m sorry that I have not posted in a bit. There have been a lot of things going on in life that kept me from being in the mood to write, quite honestly. Coming through it, though, I have had a lot of time to think.

Before I write an actual post, I do want to answer this question submitted by an anonymous reader:

Sin is a terrible thing and has brought thousands of years of suffering upon humanity. If morality is relative and a result of evolution, how do we build a stable, free society without something firm to build upon? 

First, I am a very big proponent of calling things as they are in one regard: Lay blame to whom blame is due. Sin is not the reason that the earth experiences suffering. No - if the Christian God exists, then He is to blame. Whenceforth comes evil? Either God is the creator of everything or He is not. Either he created the ability for evil or He did not. Either He ‘planted the tree’ as it were in the garden, or He did not.

And if He did, then He is to blame for all of human suffering. Remember - if God operates as omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient then nothing that has or ever will happen will ever surprise him. He knew from the moment that He created that He was creating flawed designs and He did it on purpose. Nothing happens by accident, right? Everything that happens bad in the world must be laid at the feet for the originator of all evil and if God exists in the manner in which the Christian church suggests, then he is that author.

Christians can philosophically dither about the idea that He “had” to do things this way in order to satisfy some internal system of justice but you are forgetting - God was not created according to Christian philosophy. He’s existed outside of time for all of eternity. If that is the case then He is the creator of everything INCLUDING his methods of divine justice. 

Ok - now that this idea is out of the way:

We have yet to see - in any real way - a religion that provides any evidence of a standard and non-variable system of morality. Read through both the Old and New Testament and show me any consistency of moral thought. Provide one example of one moral absolute that God has held people to or better that He has held to himself. Killing unborn infants immoral? God had entire nations destroyed - and mind you - considering the high birth rates of the time there were bound to be pregnant women. Love conquers all? Until it doesn’t and the abused is killed by the abuser while honestly loving them. 

This is the problem with the whole concept of an established pure foundation of morality. Morality is relative. It always has been. And what I find amusing is that it’s not the God of the Bible that has brought us to a better free society. As people escape the bonds of moral absolutism established in religious scriptures that included if I might list; slavery is ok, homosexuals should be killed, justice is visited upon the families and generations of those who committed certain acts, we actually see an increase of what many would consider positive human traits. 

The truth is that we have been doing just fine with relative morality. Look at the path that the human race has taken throughout history and it is getting LESS evil, not more. It is getting more educated, not less. We are doing more to support the less fortunate and accept those who need our help in a greater way than ever. 

Is morality relative? Sure. Does that mean that it changes every day like the temperature does? No. Does that mean that it changes slowly over time? Yes. If you don’t believe that, try and marry your cousin or a 14-year-old girl. Try killing someone in a dual who disagrees with you. It’s amazing to me - the farther we get in our history the BETTER things get. The more a society sticks to antiquity, the farther we lag behind the rest of those who do not. 

So how do we establish a free society? We work at it. We learn that things such as bigotry and racism are evil - which the God of the Bible was always fine with. Moral ideals that become outdated fade into the background and when we realize that wait..we really needed that.. it resurges.

We evolve. We change. We grow. 

There’s no map to progress, no magic book to tell us how to lead our lives. We have only the wisdom of both mistakes and successes from the past and a growing base of knowledge formed by hundreds of thousands of years of human history. 

[deilands]

Eye of the Beholder

This is more of a personal post but I wanted to write it.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been taking time to watch a lot of great debates between people who believe in God and people who do not. I’ve been reading articles and digging into questions that I’ve always had but never had the time or perhaps courage to really explore for myself. One of the things that I tend to do while listening to a YouTube Video or reading a blog is to look at all of the comments that come afterward. As you can imagine, there are tons them. What fascinates me is how two people can look at the same debate and see two separate end results.

Often the Atheists will talk about how the proponent of their position just wiped the floor with the opponent. They see the video as more proof of the idiocy of faith and the ineptitude of the faithful. On the flipside, the Christian – as most of these debates are between Christians and Atheists – see the stalwart apologist as the supreme victor in promoting their God. Both sides declare the ludicrous nature of their opponent’s belief system and can’t believe that anyone could be so stupid as to believe or not believe as they do.

It’s hard to see from the other side. It’s even more strange when you choose to flip sides in the middle. Whereas I used to read a lot of the apologist websites and agree point by point with what they said, I recognize now how often my vision was clouded by my belief. Now, I am having to be careful again. Billions of people have believed in God – specifically the Judeo-Christian God. These have been brilliant scientists and philosophers. These have been invested missionaries and loving mothers and fathers. These have been stalwart defenders of the weak and weary and have often looked to change the world not for numbers of converts or because of a fear of an eternal damnation but because they believe that their God is the best hope for humanity.

If I ever forget this, then I have failed in remaining compassionate. I’ve failed in promoting cultural diversity. I’ve failed in showing love and graciousness.

To my fellow non-believers, I wish only this; Make not the mistake of those who only see the evil in a thing. Make not the mistake of viewing all Christians as stupid. Philosophy and belief and emotion and hope are all intense liquors. They woo us both with their taste and security. Having answers to questions that are giant and small is a heady thing and helps many to deal with the darkness and the unknown. I believed for 30 years. I can still remember the passion and the faith that would drive me to stay awake into the many hours of the night playing music and singing worship with my friends to a God that I truly believed was there. I can’t fault anyone for continuing to believe.

To my once brothers and sisters in a faith I once followed: Your positions are not iron-clad. Your apologetic arguments are often lacking to those who see the flip-side of the coin. We do not simply walk away from belief because you can see something that we don’t. Rather, like the man after seeing the old lady instead of the beautiful woman, we cannot unsee what once was hidden to us due to our own denial. When you find out that the man behind the curtain is just a man, you cannot once again close the curtain.

I can’t convince anyone to disbelieve their chosen God. I can explain how I arrived but I cannot cause you to see what I do. We are seeing through different eyes. When you look at the conflict between faith and science you see things differently than I do. When you see inconsistencies in your Scripture, you see different things than I do. I know what you see. I saw it too.

--Ok a bit more personal here—

Can I explain how hard it is to remember the feelings of belief and not be able to rekindle that belief? I know I have a lot of people angry at me. I guess it’s part of the process. I want to be clear that I’m not evoking some sort of martyr complex. It’s expected. In many ways, I broke faith with people. There are people that I ministered to, people who chose to follow based on what they saw in me and now I’m telling them that I was dead wrong.

I’ve been thinking lately about the one worship song that I wrote a few years ago. It was called You Endure. It was a song that I wrote when I felt I was the closest to losing everything the first time around. I got tired of feeling like God was so disgusted with us that He had to send His ‘true’ son to fix it all. I got tired of feeling like the bastard child of a God who created us, left us to fail, showed his ‘unending love’ for thousands of years to only one small solitary group of people, and then expected us to run and jump in his lap because he sent us a Christmas present – and if we didn’t –

“When I rise, you are singing over me, words of mercy You are Good When I sleep, you cover me, whisper love to me You are Good

You are Great, You are Good, You Endure In my success, You are Proud of Me, Your life shows through me You are Good.”

That’s not all of it. I just don’t think I want to type any more of it. For anyone who tells you that de-conversion is easy – that it’s a selfish maneuver to be able to do what you want and sin all you want – they are insane. There are parts of me that want to forget and close my eyes. There are parts of me that want to be ruled by my emotions and my feelings.

Losing friends suck. Losing people sucks. Hell, losing belief sucks.

[deilands]

Will the Real Omniscient Deity Please Stand Up?

I’ve been talking over the past few entries about the various ‘Pillars’ of my faith and the process in which they fell. Why did I, in the end, walk away from my 30 years of Christianity?

Every Christian from the most inspired pastor to the newest convert; every believer of every religion, in fact, must approach their God through one vehicle – faith. It is the pivotal ingredient to every religious belief because no matter how many prooftexts one reads, no matter how many books on apologetics one studies, there has to eventually be a leap to cover the distance between your arguments about why a God SHOULD exist to the idea that God DOES exist.

For some, this leap is emotional. They ‘feel’ that their God exists so he exists. For others, it is some miracle that happened in their life. Perhaps they survived a harrowing event or got well from a horrible malady. Many use spiritual experiences such as speaking in tongues or seeing demonic possessions. For some, it’s the Bible itself or the church.

Experiences are very powerful. In fact, many pastors use this as a way of conversion:

They may deny your logic, but they cannot deny your testimony.

These testimonies all rely on something similar though. They rely on circumstantial reasoning. I have yet to hear of anyone who has seen God. I’ve yet to hear of anyone who has had Jesus walk through the door of their living room and heal their affliction. I’ve yet to hear of any specific and concrete evidence that can directly connect anyone’s story to a God. In all of these stories, there eventually has to be a cognitive leap between what happened to you and what caused it.

For example - we know that if we jump up in the air we will unless acted upon by another force, fall back to the ground. This is, of course, explained by the Law of Gravity. The problem is that while we understand the EFFECTS of gravity, we really don’t know the CAUSE of gravity. Personally, I choose to believe that millions of tiny invisible fairies push me to the ground when I jump. The more mass I have, the more fairies show up because fairies are attracted by mass. In space – fairies can’t breathe so it’s hard for them to survive. I have faith in these fairies because I can see how they affect the world around me.  

Faith, in many ways, is the great gap filler. It exists to bridge the divide between action and causation. It can ignore inconsistencies and jump over inadequacies with ease. Faith allows the parent of the child who died INSTEAD of getting healed to continue to believe even though the evidence stands against them. Faith can gloss over gross impossibilities in Scriptures, ignore the horrors promoted by a deity, and can insulate believers against scientific evidence itself.

I really don’t have a problem with faith as a concept. I don’t understand a lot of things in life. I make cognitive leaps all the time about hundreds of tiny things – sometimes even against the odds. The problem that I developed was that the more I studied and recognized the inadequacies of any scripture to account for modern-day scientific evidence the more gaps that my faith had to fill. The more humanity began to look more compassionate and evolved than the creator that was promoted through the Bible, the farther I had to reach to maintain that connection.

In the end, my faith failed because it was challenged by too much reality. I’m not upset by this. While I don’t think that the Bible is remotely the word of any God, I do believe that wisdom can be found in many places. Truth sets people free. Every time that scientific research finds new cures for disease or demonstrates how black-holes react when they collide I am left breathless with the truth. Every time that we learn about cognitive processes that help us better understand ourselves, I get excited.

When you consider how many times that we THOUGHT something was God operating supernaturally throughout history and found out later that it was, instead, natural process, it’s quite mind-boggling. When superstition is laid waste through the persistent pursuit of verifiable scientific evidence, humankind has benefited in drastic ways.

At some point, EVERY argument for the existence of God is required to take a leap of faith. For every person that you can say that God healed through miracles, I can show you millions who prayed the same prayers and laid on the same hands and God did nothing. For every city spared a storm I can show you ten that were not and while this may seem like me railing against God for not living up to his – well – Godhead, I’m more using it as a prooftext to say that your miracle does not verify the existence of your God. It only verifies it to you – by faith that it wasn’t something else entirely. Any scientist worth their salt would say to you that scientific evidence – to be valid – has to be reproducible when demonstrated using the same variables.

Secondly, if all gods COULD exist, how could I choose to believe that my God is the actual right God? At best that’s ignorance. At worst, it’s arrogance. Many believers think that it is the ultimate proof of arrogance that man says that there is no God. The fool says in his heart that there is no God, right? I think it is just the opposite: I admit that I don’t know and in my ignorance, I choose to stand aside.

Might there be a god out there? Sure. There might also be tiny fairies creating gravity. There have been more gods created and destroyed throughout human existence than we will ever know. We might, one day, demonstrate through the scientific method that life couldn’t have started without some intelligence. Unfortunately for faith, today is not that day. Yes – order can come from disorder. Yes, randomness can create functional processes. Yes – just because science hasn’t yet learned something doesn’t mean that they won’t or can’t.

And what makes more sense in the end? Does it make sense to believe in something until someone proves it DOESN’T exist or to not believe until someone proves that it does?

As soon as the real omniscient deity stands up, I’ll be the first to believe – because I really do crave truth like a starving man a loaf of bread. Until then – I’ll wait by the bakery and see what cooks up.

[deilands]

The Good Guys and The Bad Guys

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. - Martin Luther King Jr. 

Have you ever taken a moment and looked back on your life when you were much younger? Perhaps you look through the lens of memory to when you were a high-school student or when you were still running around your house wearing a superman cape or in my case Thunder-Cat Underwear (Don’t you dare judge me, He-Man supporters.)

I’ve always been fortunate to have a great long-term memory. I can remember playing with my best friend when I was three or sweeping the dirt-floor of my barn-like clubhouse when I was seven. I can remember being bullied in fifth grade and I can remember the struggle of wanting to hold hands with my sixth-grade girlfriend. One thing that I can’t do, though, is place myself in the head-space of that young child those many years ago. All my analysis comes from where I am currently residing.

I’ve mentioned already that during high-school I co-founded a club called the Christian Highschool Movement. We were what you would call militantly inspired Christians. We wore fatigues one day a week, did prayer walks around the school grounds to set up ‘hedges of protection’ around the school, we had morning prayer every morning and we even set up a ten to fifteen-page charter with such rules as no dating, or no chewing gum (because that would break the school rules and God wouldn’t agree with such things).

Here I am in our club attire with my sister who might just kill me when she realizes I used this picture. To her credit, she thought we were weird. 

One of the things that I can remember about my thoughts were this: Everyone that was not a Christian was, by their very nature, less than us. I don’t mean that I felt superior in an overall way but that they were still ‘in sin’ and therefore dead. They had no moral compass, were doomed to be slaves to their sin, and were, in general, going to find themselves lonely and lacking for the rest of their lives unless we managed – through the help of God – to save them from themselves.

We would put ourselves out there every day – we’d leave Chic Tracts on desks, harass the girl who wore the “Recovering Christian” shirt by telling her that she may be a recovering Christian but God still loved her, walked out of classrooms because they played a movie that had a curse word in it. . . all with the idea that our job was to reclaim territory from an enemy – Satan himself – who is, if most Christians are being honest, more successful at taking territory than they are at reclaiming it.

As I got older, I learned something pivotal that would later act to destroy another pillar of my Christian faith. I found that as I met more and more people that charity and compassion, love and forgiveness, peace and wholeness, and these other facets of life that are claimed by most religions to be found only in the purview of their faith are found everywhere in the world.

Many of you have seen the bumper sticker, “No God, No Peace, Know God, Know Peace”. It’s a trite but telling statement about what many believe about their faith. I can remember conversations with others through high-school and into college discussing how even though these people look ok on the outside, on the inside they are really sad, depressed, and without hope.

They have a “God-Shaped Hole” in their heart and they try to fill it with everything they can but nothing works.

Sound familiar?

Let me ask you though. Have you ever talked to an atheist or an agnostic or a Buddhist monk or a myriad of other people who have their life together WITHOUT your God in the middle of it? I promise you they exist.

It’s a hard pill to swallow, isn’t it?

Morality doesn’t need God. Someone asked a question anonymously earlier and I thought it fit in well with this post.

“Can justice exist in the absence of moral law?”

To answer this question, we should examine a few things. First – what is justice? I think, in the context of the question, that justice is best described as receiving appropriate punishment or reward based on your actions. Personified, justice is often shown as a blindfolded woman holding scales. She has no say in the matter, it’s about balance.

Perfect justice, then, doesn’t care about the why it cares about the what. It doesn’t see that you stole a loaf of bread to feed your family or you stole that loaf of bread to sell on the market to buy drugs. It just looks to balance scales.

Many people who engage in apologetics (reasoned arguments for belief in something) use this as a way of proving the existence of God. How would we know right and wrong if someone didn’t teach it to us first? There must have been some supreme ‘moral law’ established by someone. Otherwise, we’d all just run around committing genocide and murder and raping people all the time.  

Wait. . .

That is what God did.

1)     He did order more genocides for more reasons than one can count – often accompanying the rape of whatever virgins were left. I must wonder at times how that happened. Did the babies get killed first or did they let the kids watch their mom and dad get slaughtered? Maybe they killed them at the same time. Did they start the rape before or after the rest of them were killed? Sorry – I digress.

2)     He did establish the system of blood sacrifice and self-mutilation to appease himself when men did stuff that he considered wrong. Remember in all of this – if God is all-powerful, all creative, all knowing, all everything, then everything that is created (including moral law and the concepts of justice) is created by him. We talk about his great love in sending his only son. The problem is that he is the one who made that system up – remember?

I want to stop here because if I keep listing then it ends up being a rant.

The point is that for most of human history, morality and justice were based on the perceptions of what God wanted people to do. When the Catholics and the Protestants were at their worst, they maimed and killed all in the name of their God and before you rail that God never told them to do that – how do you know? At what point in the Scripture does God back away from his divine right of slaughter, torture, and rape? And if he does – what caused the never-changing God to change? You can claim it was the death of Jesus but that’s never posited within Scripture at all. Actually – if you read the Revelation of Jesus Christ – it looks like it is quite the opposite.

My point is, if you look through history, the one thing that I see overall is that it is the growth and evolution of humanity that has brought about the most peace, justice, and moral law. It wasn’t the Christian God who promoted equality. No – through most of the Scripture there is a severe lack of equality both between men and women and between races as well. It wasn’t God who promoted the cessation of horrible violence and war. He gave the ten commandments and then broke them as often as he wanted to. It wasn’t God who healed the masses and brought food to the starving. It was the innovations of men and women – many of which had moved away from belief in a deity. In contrast, the Church has consistently fought against the growth of scientific and medical knowledge – especially when that knowledge seems to go against some Scriptural precept.

So where then does our moral law come from? I believe – and yes this is a belief and I might be wrong – that it has come from the same evolutionary process that has brought us to where we are now. It’s no accident that countries who begin to educate women in equal measure as much as men see a significant drop in the death rate and the birth rate. It’s no accident that the countries who label themselves as the least religious see the most peace. It’s no accident that as education and equality rise so does the increase of what most of humanity would consider morality.

Does this make any sense? If knowing God is knowing peace; if knowing God is knowing love; if knowing God is knowing fulfillment, then why is it that underneath His morality we see the most destruction of these same tenants?

The world is much more complicated than Christians and Non-Christians. It is much more complicated than the good guys and the bad guys. Morality isn’t simply the purview of the Christian church and moral goodness and justice exist outside of the precepts established by any religion. When I realized this, I was able to take off my fatigues. I was able to realize that – at least as far as the visible evidence demonstrates – morality is as much an evolution as is skin-color and eye-color and how tall or how short people are. I don’t need a God to tell me what is right and wrong because I’m learning that by living and by attempting to act with as much empathy as I can, I am growing as a moral person.

And perhaps it is this change of morality that best demonstrates that humanity isn’t growing more evil. Yes, morality changes – like all things are changing. Let us not forget that it was moral – according to God – to have slaves. Until it wasn’t. It was moral to beat your wife for disobedience. It was moral to stone your children when they didn’t behave. It was moral to do a lot of things that now we look at in horror. Perhaps this is the biggest argument for why I walked away from the Christian faith. When mankind can operate with more compassion than God can – why should I follow?

And for those of you who would say that he’s God – he can do what he wants. . .

I don’t really have anything I can say to that.

Thank you for reading.