by Larry Hallock Page 1 2 3 4 5
Seems a little odd, non-believers having to explain why they don’t embrace the super-natural. After all, we’re the ones living in reality—that is, strictly within the real, discernible world. But that world is so permeated by the trappings of the supernatural, and of Christianity in particular, that those who don’t get caught up in it are the outsiders. A non-theist is considered the worst thing a person can be. Christians would rather their children be gay or drug addicts than not to revere a supernatural deity.
Most of my family and many of my friends are Christian. So it is with sensitivity that I share my spiritual journey, which has taken a different direction from theirs. My purpose is to explain why I left Christianity and to support others who are also in search of something better. Sadly the fundamentalist mind is unfamiliar with sharing as a two-way street, so it is easy to offend without meaning to.
Some have said, “You must have really been hurt by the church to feel so strongly about this!”—as if the church could perhaps err in its behavior, but never in its fundamentals, or as if strong feelings about it are somehow inappropriate unless the result of some kind of painful mistreatment. Believers have their own incessant agenda to conquer the world for Jesus—and even our government—yet they often don’t seem to understand how others could have a similarly deep interest in sharing a more reasoned spiritual paradigm.
I can only hope any Christians wishing to understand my spiritual journey will make an effort simply to hear it with the same graciousness with which they always expect others to listen to theirs.
Others have explained it more cogently than I, but here is my own perspective. I do offer a few thoughts I’ve not seen others cover, and I include some discussion specific to Seventh-day Adventism. Otherwise, for a comprehensive and more articulate study, one really should read the scholarship that’s out there—some of which I’ll briefly quote, link to, or recommend at the end. Dozens of books on the subject can easily be found without ever leaving the discomfort of one’s own carpal tunnel syndrome. Just keyboard over to Amazon.com.
Most non-believers have no agenda to convert believers to non-belief, per se. Non-belief is not a religion. But merely explaining ourselves means showing how Christianity fails. And shouldn’t everyone have a burden to expose and put an end to anything that divides people, foments war and fosters prejudices instead of promoting the opposite? Even Christians acknowledge their religion has hurt people; we only differ in opinion as to the degree.
Another reason we explain ourselves is because of the patently absurd notions fundamentalist Christians have about non-believers. There are many (like the one that suggests people can’t be moral without Christianity), but I’ll focus on just one. In a video sermon made for non-believers, a pastors asks, “Why do you not want to find God?” This absurd notion that non-believers don’t want to find God because they “have too much pride” or don’t want to obey God only reveals their ignorance of how others think and what they believe. There is not a soul on earth who wouldn’t turn Christian in a heartbeat and claim the many fantastical promises, if there were any evidence that it’s all true and really works. (Imagine what we’d see across the Bible Belt, if it worked!) The notion of fundamentalist Christians is that if you haven’t found God yet, you will—just keep looking, and look a little harder. The thought that maybe the reason people “can’t find God” is because he doesn’t exist, or exists but hasn’t offered any evidence of it, simply isn’t even allowed to be entertained! Non-believers would be delighted to discover he exists—based on evidence more credible than mere mental impressions. Well, maybe we wouldn’t be delighted to encounter the Old Testament God, since most of us reject God’s implementation of slavery, his notion of women as the property of men, his capital punishment for unruly children, etc. So let me just say we’d all be delighted to discover a nice God.
Bashing?
Anyone who challenges the notion of supernatural beings or, in particular, the existence of a biblical-style deity said to play a hand in the daily affairs of humans, is inevitably accused of disrespect. “Bashing.” Indeed our current culture has conditioned us to think we should treat all opinions as if they were equal, as if any notion, no matter how far-fetched or lacking in evidence, deserves equal protection. “I have a right to my opinion,” some announce, as if having a right to hold it makes it valid or worthy of respect.
All fantastical notions may be equal to each other, but they are not equal to reality, and fantasy must not be allowed to masquerade as reality. For example, if a law that would hurt others, or curtail their right to pursue happiness, is based on anything but realities, then we must oppose it in the public forum, not respect it. We must respect a person’s right to believe anything under the sun. But we are not obliged to respect the belief itself; that respect must be earned, based on the belief’s own viability.
It is amazing how taken aback some Christians seem to be, when others aren’t willing to let them transform their private religious notions into the public law of the land. They have come to equate the supernatural with reality, and they assume everyone else does too—or if not, should. No doubt many do think it’s real in their own minds, but we must sometimes remind them that in the real world, the only reality is reality. The supernatural, by definition, is not reality. The founders of the USA, while typically not Christian, did typically encourage religion and spirituality. But they were emphatic about keeping church and state separate. People are welcome to embrace the supernatural, but government is required to stick to reality.
What I wondered about
From an early age, I had questions about what didn't seem to make sense in Christianity, and the answers were never satisfactory. But I trusted those who gave them. Surely they couldn’t be wrong. I went through 17 years of religious schools thinking this way, and even got my degree in religion thinking this way.
Eventually I found the courage to “step away from the box,” think honestly for myself and re-ask those same troubling questions, in the hope of something more than empty reassurances. Not that I need all the answers, but I have to have enough for the whole thing to generally make sense.
I always wondered, for example, especially at Wednesday night prayer service, why it was important to get as many people as possible to pray for something. Is God persuaded by intense and sustained coaxing or flattery?
Why isn’t it obvious that believers fare better than non-believers? The Bible is loaded with countless unambiguous promises that they will, so why is it that
Truth
If God himself appeared in person and announced it was all a hoax, most humans would keep right on believing. That’s just the way we are. Most of us don’t really care as much about Truth as we do comfort, no matter what we tell ourselves. (Honesty to self is the hardest form of honesty.) If it is more convenient or less painful to ignore a truth, then that is exactly what most of us will usually do—especially Christians, as I will show.
Usually our discomfort comes in the form of new information—new truth—that signifi-cantly alters the reality of what we had previously come to believe about something. Since changing our beliefs can be a very painful process, our comfort is in dismissing the new information, with whatever rationale we can manage, so that we don’t have to make the painful adjustments. We do this even as we go on telling ourselves truth is of utmost importance to us. Ironically, those who most loudly claim to follow “the Truth,” are often its most flagrant violators.
This phenomenon permeates our lives. Religion and politics are hugely subject to it. Take a hundred Fox News watchers and show them the studies that prove it’s the least fair and balanced news source, and that its listeners score poorest in understanding current events.... How many of them will seek a different news source richer in Vitamin T? Precious few. Truth isn’t that important.
While truth (reality) gets a lot of lip service, it’s well documented that human beings avoid it like the plague when we think it could step on our toes. Persons aligned with the George W. Bush administration openly mock “the reality-based community,” when their agenda is on a collision course with reality. They just assert up front that reality simply isn’t important; they’ll just “create our own realities.”
In The Road Less Traveled, philosopher-psychiatrist M. Scott Peck covered this well, thirty years ago, when he talked about “dedication to reality,” calling it the third tool of discipline, or technique, for problem solving. The more accurate our view of the world, the better equipped we are to deal with it. When mapping out the world as we see it, the biggest problem is “not that we have to start from scratch, but that, if our maps are to be accurate, we have to continually revise them.... The process of making revisions, particularly major revisions, is painful, sometimes excruciatingly painful....”
He speaks in general, not particularly about religion:
What we do more often than not, and usually unconsciously, is to ignore the
new information. Often this act of ignoring is much more than passive. We
may denounce the new information as false, dangerous, heretical, the work of
the devil. We may actually crusade against it, and even attempt to manipulate
the world so as to make it conform to our view of reality. Rather than try to
change the map, an individual may try to destroy the new reality. Sadly, such
a person may expend much more energy ultimately in defending an
outmoded view of the world than would have been required to revise and
correct it in the first place. (p. 44-46)
You can see where this is going
A very small number of humans really are dedicated to truth, no matter where it leads—even if it means a painful journey out of the religion we grew up in. It is ironic, given that religion is supposed to be about ultimate truth, that most people are uninterested in giving up their religion upon discovering it is false. They don’t even want to know whether it’s false; and to protect themselves against finding out, they declare it a sin even to consider it! As a Christian friend said to me in an email, “That’s the difference between us common folk, and you who do too much analyzing.” In other words, it may be broken, but who cares? Why bother? Studying the best route for a road trip to Arizona is worthwhile, but carefully studying the map to heaven or hell is too much analyzing. Oddly, it’s never too much analyzing for those determined to stick to their beliefs in spite of reason. It’s only “too much analyzing” for those of us dedicated to adjusting our beliefs to fit reality, when required, rather than the other way around.
Let me illustrate. Let’s imagine we’re in a fictitious land where all the people are of one religion, and quite satisfied with the god they worship. He is kind and loving, the source of all things good. He endorses the lesson of the Golden Rule, teaches pristine values and ethics, and promises immortality. Then let us suppose one day some scrolls are discovered in a cave, and soon authenticated as a long-lost part of the true, sacred text. (In our hypothetical, that part will not be in dispute.)
In those scrolls, much to the shock of the people, it is discovered that the god they are so loyal to, and worship, has a bad side. On a distant planet he had once experimented with evil. As dictator, he had his minions carry out massive genocidal atrocities so heinous that any person doing it on our own planet would be hanged as a war criminal.
The people are shocked to learn this. They further discover that when their god was going through this phase, he so enjoyed pitting people against people (not unlike the Roman gladiators) that he often had one group enslave and control another. Whoever flattered him the most got to be on the giving end; those who didn’t, found themselves on the receiving end. Sometimes he mercilessly commanded the mass killing of every living creature in an entire area, even the children, and even their pets! Once during these royal war games, he allowed that during the slaughter, any virgins they found among the enemy could be spared for their own personal pleasure.
Hitler move over! The people are absolutely mortified! And what really troubles them is that they don’t really think a person changes all that much over time—and certainly not a god. Especially not this particular god, who had cryptically emphasized several times that he never changes, leading some to wonder if there was some kind of hidden message in there—something they should maybe be concerned about.
You’d think the people would lose faith in this god and go in search of a better one, or just cut him loose in any case. But they don’t! Mysteriously, they worship this god even more, after finding out his past! Who can understand why? Maybe it’s because they are afraid of what he might do to them, if they stopped flattering him. Maybe they're just used to doing what they've always done and keeping up the rote routine is the easiest option.
Of course this is not a hypothetical scenario. It is Christianity. God actually did all those things, if the Bible is true (but on our planet, not a distant one). The Bible says he did those things. It’s all in there.
Yet the masses are exactly as Peck described. Show Christians where the Bible says God instructed people to take slaves—in his own words with his own mouth, no less—and most of them won’t care! As human nature predicts, most of them will go to any lengths, no matter how fanciful or ridiculous, to explain away the obvious contradiction of a deity who is the very essence of love and goodness sending people on massive genocidal rape-and-pillage raids.
Instead of questioning the nature or existence of God, or even the veracity of the messenger, they question the reality. There can't be something wrong with the god they’ve always worshipped.... It must be that slavery really is a good thing! Or used to be.
Only a tiny few, once they recognize something wrong with that picture, will be concerned enough to study deeper and discover this god and this religion are no different from the other gods of the day, which they wouldn’t dream of taking
