Interview with the skeptic

Hey everyone.

If you're interested, Wineskins, a Christian e-zine, just published an interview with me.

The interviewee was very respectful throughout the process, and I hope that the interview will help interpersonal relationships between theists and skeptics.

Spinning my wheels

In the last month or so, I haven't felt like my spiritual journey is getting anywhere. Or -- it's getting ME anywhere. I've fulfilled some desire for myself in writing, and in some form of therapy, and I've met some members of the blogging community that I hope to continue discussions with--but I feel like I personally am no closer to anything than when I began.

Although perhaps my disappointment is with the fact that I remain unconvinced in the Christian God. My beliefs in recent years have drifted closer to Taoism than anything else. Part of me wants to resist Taoism and embrace Christianity, there is really nothing that pulls me closer to the Christian God. Couple that with the enormous hypocrisy of those who call themselves Christian every day--whether it's a national Christian leader or a neighbor or co-worker who says one thing and does another--and I find myself more disillusioned with the Christian community in general, and less and less willing to want to identify myself as Christian.

The Christians who I've met who I think aren't hypocrites have often had bad experiences with the church themselves. Many of them have turned in on themselves and made their religion extremely personal. I guess I've been doing that myself the last few years.

That makes me sad, but it makes me more angry when I attempt to commune with my local Christian communities and feel their hatred towards gays and non-Christians and their willingness to overlook blatent and horrible things their fellow Christians do. It even extends to an unwillingness they have to have a conversation that challenges any of their pre-conceived ideas. (Just try having a conversation on the notion of slavery in the NT with a churchgoer. A local pastor told me the book of Philemon shouldn't really be in NT.)

I find myself smiling and nodding in conversations with them and then wanting to get the hell away from them and go take a shower. Ick.

We all create our own truths, I guess.

Creating your own reality

One of the things I've realized is that we all make our own realities.

If you're married, you know that every marriage has its challenges. I'm realizing that every time there is something that my wife does that pisses me off, I can ask myself a helpful question, or an unhelpful question.

Unhelpful:
"Why is she trying to piss me off?"

Helpful:
"I know my wife loves me, and she's not trying to piss me off. So what was she trying to accomplish?"

This was very helpful a couple of days ago. We took the kids to a local pumpkin patch where they have all kinds of animals and games and mazes and hayrides--but it was late. I didn't want to go because I thought was too late, and I had to leave on a business trip the next day and wanted to pack. My wife insisted, though, saying we could have dinner there to save time, so we went.

We got there, and it was too late. The barbecue shack that has pretty good food had just closed, and the crappy snack bar was the only thing that was open. We had awful food, my two-year old didn't eat anything, and the sun had set, so we couldn't go on a hayride, or go through and see the farm animals, or have the kids play on any of the rides. Now we were getting the kids to bed late, and I was getting pissed off.

Unhelpful:
"Why doesn't she ever listen to me? She knew it was too late, we had a crappy time, and now we've wasted the whole night."

That was my first thought, but then I thought it through a little, and decided to instead ask myself:

Helpful:
"I know she loves me, so what was she trying to accomplish?"

That was easy to answer. She wanted to spend time as a family together before I left. We go to this pumpkin patch every year, and we've always had fun before, and she wanted to keep our tradition going since Halloween is a week away.

And you know what I realized? We didn't have a crappy time. The kids had a great time. They played on a pumpkin truck, they ran around a little wooden school bus, and they jumped on a big pile of hay for 15 minutes while we were waiting for our crappy food. It didn't matter to them that we didn't get Tri-tip sandwiches at the BBQ shack, or that we didn't get to pick out pumpkins, or that we only spent an hour there.

I was no longer pissed off. I was a little disappointed that we had gotten there so late, but there was nothing at all to be angry about. In fact, I think it may have strengthened our relationship, since I realized that she put a lot of effort into getting us to the pumpkin patch that night.

If I had continued with my Unhelpful Question, I could have found all kinds of evidence to back it up as well. That one time last week when blah blah blah. It's not the evidence that supports the proposition; it's the proposition that supports the evidence.

And then I realized that this is how Bad Things Can Happen and people don't lose their faith. "I know Jesus loves me, so what was He trying to accomplish when my six-year old child died?" We all create our own reality.

Whether or not you are a Christian, it's important to realize that people of all faiths do this. And when they can answer that question, it can even strengthen their faith. "God killed my child so that I could understand the pain He went through when Jesus was on the cross." (For example.) I also suppose this is how people can stay with spouses who abuse them. "My husband hit me because he wants to protect me."

And I suppose that whether or not your religion is the Truth, this can be very Helpful. Are we interested in the Truth, or are we interested in a Helpful life? I am interested in having a healthy marriage with good communication. So I am going to continue asking my Helpful Questions instead of getting angry in my relationship. I suppose there's an argument to be made about the validity of the proposition ("How do you know she loves you and she's not trying to piss you off?"). Well, I don't have all the answers--I don't know why it's important for me to do this with my wife and not with God. (In fact, if I did this with God I'd think I was a bit delusional.)

This kind of thinking, however, is leading me to realize that "evidence" might not be that valid in spiritual matters. Evidence is everywhere if we choose to interpret it in different ways. We all want certainty in spiritual matters, and usually what we've chosen (at that moment, anyway) is what we've convinced ourselves that the evidence supports.

It's our own reality.

Bang, bang, bang

There are an awful lot of people getting senselessly shot and killed lately. This morning, 4 people, including a 4-year-old and a 6-year-old, were found shot near Port St. Lucie, FL. This is in addition to the Colorado school shooting, and the Amish shooting, and all the newborns dumped in trash cans, and Mark Foley.

On the plus side, Apple will donate $10 of every $199 red iPod nano to an AIDS charity.

God may exist, but He's either 1) not all-powerful, 2) not all-benevolent, or 3) owns a lot of Apple stock.

The slippery slope

I know many people talk about a "slippery slope" in all kinds of contexts. For me, the slippery slope went like this:

- I went to Bible to find answers to troubling questions.
- Instead of finding answers, I found contradictions, both internally and with the physical world.
- This led to more troubling questions.
- I concluded that the Bible could not logically be 100% accurate.

OK, most liberal Christians admit to this; and most conservative Christians reject much of the teaching and the historical accounts in the Bible even if they don't admit this. But:

- How are we supposed to figure out which parts are true and which ones aren't?
- If God is supposed to inspire us to know, why do so many groups view different parts of the Bible differently? This leads to completely different worship systems and bitterly divides Christians internally.
- If God is supposed to inspire us to know, why do so many parts of the Bible seem to contradict each other?
- I can't answer these questions in any way that makes sense, so I concluded that maybe God isn't supposed to inspire us to know.
- Well, if God isn't supposed to inspire us, how do we know he inspired the writings to begin with?
- Why did God inspire writings with apparent contradictions? If he is all-powerful, how could he allow this to happen? (Forget natural disasters and evil in the world -- why didn't any original documents survive? Why do the earliest and best writings conflict with each other in ways that totally change the Christian worldview? (e.g., the earliest writings leave out the verses that the Trinity is based on).
- I can't answer these questions in any way that makes sense. Natural disasters and evil might be part of God's plan, but creating such chaos around The Word of God makes no sense and there is no reasonable explanation that I have found. So I concluded that maybe God isn't omnipotent.
- If God isn't omnipotent, and he didn't inspire the Bible, then what, exactly, does the real God have to do with the God in the Bible?

There's nothing that proves any of this conjecture, of course, but the physical evidence (including the words of the Bible itself) support the idea that the Bible is not infallible. And if the Bible is erroneous in places, how can anyone conclude that God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent? How can anyone conclude that God is revealed to us accurately in the Bible? How can anyone conclude that the Real God is the same God of the Bible?

I could have stronger faith, I guess, but that would be ignoring evidence of the physical world. Ignoring evidence of the physical world, in my opinion, is admitting that God is trying to trick us. (Kind of like he did with Job.) I guess that could be the case, but if that is so, then God is mean and unjust and not loving. (Well, that would be the OT God, I guess.)

And whether or not God is real, I have no interest in following an unjust, cruel, unloving God, just to get to heaven. A God that delights in pain and suffering does not have morals that line up with what I believe is right. I don't know how I have determined what I think is right, but delighting in pain and suffering ain't it.

The thing that really makes me mad is that many Christians call me "misled" or "ignorant" or "stupid" for thinking like this. "Read the Bible," they'll say. Uh--yeah, that's what got me into this mess in the first place.

Now I know why the old Catholic church said that laymen weren't allowed to read the Bible -- that only clerics could. Yeah: all it takes is an open mind to realize that the Bible is conflicting and inconsistent. It takes a very intelligent person with a gift for persuasion and rhetoric to resolve those conflicts and inconsistencies in any way that makes sense. (And often these intelligent people use fallicious reasoning and circular arguments to reach their conclusions.)

In this context, how can I be Christian?

And: Are any of these questions and problems even important, or do they attempt to put the concept of God into a box that can never fit? Does spirituality exist outside the realm of reason and logic? If so, how does anyone ever be confident in a spiritual path?

Oy. My brain hurts.

Like the time I ran away...

I just read an interview on the Christianity Today site with Mike Yaconelli, author of Messy Spirituality.

He talks about his relationship with God as having to deal with "annoying love," where God grabs on, and just won't let go. Much like my 4-year-old who must give me a hug and tell me that he'll love me forever, especially when I'm in a bad mood and don't want to talk to anyone.

Actually, the interviewer, Dick Staub, does a lot of good interviews--John Loftus (Debunking Christianity) even talks about one of Stuab's latest interviewees, Dr. Ruth Tucker, on the DC blog.

A lot of the interviewees have the same points:
- Yep, it's messy.
- Yep, there's suffering.
- Nope, it doesn't make sense.
- Yep, I believe in Jesus anyway.

Yaconelli talks about apologists and others putting God in a neat little box that conforms to 10 Points About God. Tucker talks about the fact that the Bible was written by fallible people who were wrong a lot of the time. They agree that God doesn't make sense. Suffering doesn't make sense. And the Bible is probably wrong in a lot of places.

But they believe anyway.

I know that, in my recent conversations with Sandalstraps (and others), he's made a similar point. God is too big for rationality. God is too big for human understanding. So learning about God with your heart or your soul or your emotions is more important than learning with reason and logic. (I'm paraphrasing, and probably oversimplifying his message to me...)

After my last series of posts, I felt like I was drifting way into AtheismLand. But I believe there are many things we don't know, and I don't think our current understanding of the physical world can explain everything. (Not even most things.)

My favorite song is an 18 minute tune by Yes called Awaken. It is a song that I have an emotional reaction to every time I listen to it. And the last line is:

"Like the time I ran away/Turned around and you were standing close to me"

Yes isn't a Christian band by any stretch of the imagination, but there may be something to this. I'd say it was food for thought, but it's food for something different than thought.

Spiritual questions: Part 4

On the Dar Alluding blog, Tichius commented: "Science cannot and will never answer the larger questions of life, such as: Why are we here? Where are we going? How did we get here?" Part 1 discussed underlying assumptions of that statement; Part 2 outlined the scientific answers; Part 3 discussed Christian answers.

When comparing the scientific answers to the Christian answers, many things start bubbling to the top, and I find it very revealing to my struggle with faith.

1) Christianity's answers are much simpler and much more comforting. Science's current answers--at least the way I understand them--hold very little comfort. No one is taking care of me. No one is looking out for me. I am it. I am totally responsible for not only me, not only the human race, but for this planet. And there's no Omnipotent Being with a Master Plan to help me. Global warming? I'm responsible for doing something about it. Hate my life? I'm responsible for doing something about it. Those problems are complicated. I'm not sure I'm that smart or that powerful. Those problems are really, really scary.

2) Christianity's answers make it easy to turn off your brain and to abdicate responsibility. Don't want to worry about global warming? It's in God's plan; let's go buy a Hummer H2. Why are we here? Just serve God and everything will fall into place. Hate your life? Don't worry, you'll go to Heaven if you believe. Push the anger down. Squash the hurt feelings. Put it on Jesus. There ya go. Doesn't that feel better? (And yes, having done that before--it does feel better.)

Oh, how I (sometimes) wish I could just turn my brain off and believe. But it's not that simple. And all the contradictions in religious texts, and all the physical evidence against the "facts" of the Bible, and all the weird ways everything needs to be interpreted in order to not contradict itself -- it's not that simple. In fact, if the Bible were rewritten so that it was simple, I'd find it much easier to believe. Many people tell me that I think too much in the physical world and not enough in the spiritual world. But I don't even know what that means. In fact, I don't even know where to start.

One thing I've done, therefore, is to live my life in a way that I believe is moral. I want to do everything I can to save our fellow humans and help my brothers and sisters. That means solarizing my house. That means donating to Heifer International and the One Campaign. I need to live right now as if there is no reward for me at the end, that there is no meaning to this life beyond what I have and what I am and what I can do.

Perhaps I will find God at the end of that tunnel. As always, I have my doubts.