So what am I?

So if I want to follow many of the philosophical teachings of Jesus (minus the Gospel of John) but don't believe in heaven, hell, or salvation, what does that make me? A Christian? An athiest? Both?

I have a feeling that if it weren't for my need to be accepted by my parents, I'd probably be a secular humanist. Right now, though, the term "Christian athiest" appeals to me. And might even get me killed. ;-)

The New Testament and the U.S. Constitution

Before I get into the details of my latest de-conversion, I want to give some more details about my views as a liberal Christian.

When I came back to Christianity a few years ago, I studied it a lot. I decided that the evidence wasn't contradictory for about 60 to 80% of the Gnostic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke). I put more credence in many of the quotes that are given to Jesus, rather than the stuff about him fulfilling prophecies. Because of the hundreds of inconsistencies in John, I rejected that Gospel pretty much in its entirety (as well as Revelation).

The rest of the New Testament I view as literary criticism. Much of it has interesting philosophical points, and contain useful information about how one can positively influence society. Some of it is the product of its time and it has, I believe, human errors (the stuff about slavery, etc). And some of it is not worth following or appears contradictory.

I became convinced of the idea that Jesus was talking about the Kingdom of God as a philosophical place we can experience on Earth, by doing good for the sake of doing good. (As Jesus was a rabbi, he probably subscribed to the concept of Sheol as an afterlife instead of Heaven or Hell--at least if one doesn't read John.)

One thing is for certain -- many of the words attributed to Jesus in the first 3 Gospels have a lot of value to me in how to live my life. The parable about The Good Samaritan, the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule, etc. This way of thinking has led me on a path where I'm looking at the New Testament more like the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution (um, if you couldn't tell, I live in the U.S.). They are both great but flawed documents about how we should treat each other. The U.S. founding documents have pro-slavery stuff in it too, just like the N.T. But it also has the "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal." Even though many of those documents' authors owned slaves, I believe their words to be morally correct (especially if by 'men' one uses the definition meaning 'humankind').

I'm sure many Christians (even the legalistic and evangelicals) would agree with me that the Gospels have a lot of value. However, that's pretty much where I part ways with most Christians. The most imporatant thing about the Bible for most Christians is salvation. The idea that there really isn't a heaven means rejecting a lot of NT text. Rejecting the concept of salvation requires rejecting more NT text. Reading the letters as mere literary criticism (as if they were the writings of Thomas Aquinas or Marcus Borg) requires a sea-change in one's thinking, and certainly the rejection of the notion that the letter-writers were inspired by God.

But the more I studied the NT text, the more several points became clear to me.
1) The Gospels present four vastly different pictures of Jesus; even without direct textual contradictions, it is strongly indicated that at least 3 of the 4 are somewhat (if not mostly) unreliable.
2) The letter-writers think differently than each other about many aspects of the church and of Jesus. These points might have value, but should not be taken as divine inspiration.

And here was the biggie: I could follow the examples of Christ presented in the NT (at least the portions of the NT that I believed to be true) without needing to be "saved" in the John 3:16 sense. I called myself a Christian--one who follows Christ--without believing in the Resurrection, the Second Coming, or Biblical inerrancy.

That's where I was for a few years. And then, as I said in my last post, I moved.

Regaining my faith

Read the last post if you haven't yet...

So in losing my faith the first time, I pretty much threw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. I spent my college years and my early twenties considering myself an athiest. I learned a little about eastern religions/philosophies in college, and I was particularly interested in Taoism and its view of the world. Ultimately, I decided that Taoism was an interesting way of looking at the world, and while it also spoke to me on an emotional level, I didn't "believe" in it the way I was used to believing in Christianity.

When I was 22, I went through a really nasty breakup with a girl I was living with. I moved back in with my parents for about six months and started to rebuild my relationship with them. They were pushing really hard for Christianity to come back into my life, and I kind of half-heartedly said I'd give church another chance. But I would get really irritated during the service when the sermon or the hymns would get judgmental or espouse something I didn't agree with. Two things in particular I disagree with: one cannot have morals without God; and one needs to "spread the word" about the Christian faith.

It was this last point that kept me away for years. I'm all for freedom of religion. I didn't (and don't) think Christians (or any other thiests) are stupid or misinformed just because they believe in God and I didn't. I realize that some people need to believe in a higher power to feel secure, and I respect that. But that same respect was not afforded to me, and no Christian ever even asked me why I no longer believed; instead, they'd just rail at me why I was misguided and going to hell.

This was also a major problem with me trying to rebuild my relationship with my parents. Whenever I thought things were going well, they'd bring up Christian salvation again and that would push me away.

But when I was 25, my landlord recommended the church that she went to, which was a five minute walk from my house. It was a United Church of Christ. There, I met a pastor who believed that the book of John should be thrown away, an associate pastor who was openly gay and in a committed relationship, and another associate pastor who didn't believe in the concept of heaven. I was floored. I never even realized there was a Christian community that was welcoming to homosexuals and didn't want to "cure" them--nevermind that this UCC was also OK with doubt, that was OK with the concept of biblical errancy, and that they felt it was important to *think* about one's relationship with God, instead of the mindless "I love you Lord I love you Lord Praise Jesus" rote-memorization, turn-your-brain-off, you-think-too-much attitudes I had seen at other Christian churches.

So I started going pretty regularly, and my girlfriend (who became my fiancee then my wife) started going too. We really liked it. We enjoyed the after-church study group--the first time I had ever enjoyed anything like that. I started calling myself Christian again, and sort of became an apologist to all my friends who only saw the hellfire-and-damnation side of Christianity, the Christianity that wants you to follow God without engaging your mind. I was starting to feel like I belonged again.

And then we moved.

Losing my religion, part 1

I was raised in California in a family that was very Christian. We went to a church that called itself non-denominational, but was really evangelical. The minister -- let's call him Dr. P -- was very educated (and was British besides, which made him sound even more learned). He had very intellectual approaches to everything. The church taught Biblical inerrancy. I went to this church from the time I was 4 until I graduated high school. My parents taught Sunday School there, I did summer camp through this church -- it was a big part of my life.

Or -- it should have been a big part of my life. I made very few friends there. Actually, I made *no* friends there. None of the kids wanted to hang out with me. I realized later that it was because I followed the stuff they taught in Sunday school. The boys at camp were sneaking over to the girls' camp and getting to third base.

In high school, I actually went to the adults' service instead of the high school service because I enjoyed it more. Dr. P analyzed and compared and worked the text over, which I really liked. The high school service was a bunch of "I love you Lord"s spoken by teenagers who didn't like turning their brains to the on position.

And then one Saturday during my senior year of high school, a really good friend of mine, let's call her A, came out to me. I freaked out when it happened and made up an excuse about having to leave--and left. (Part of it was that I had a thing for A.)

The following day, Dr. P's sermon was on a refocusing of the church to solve "the homosexual problem." He actually called all homosexuals "pederasts." I remember thinking, "I'm mad at A, but she's not a pederast." Right then I had a huge moral dilemma. I thought it was immoral to be disrespecting homosexuals like that--and it was sactioned in the Bible.

When I brought it up to an older Christian family friend (who had a Masters of Divinity), he basically said, "the Bible is right; if you reject that homosexuality is a sin, you're not a true Christian. Plus, God didn't make Adam and Bruce, he made Adam and Eve."

But I still thought it wasn't right to view homosexuality like that. So I just completely rejected Christianity, and slowly, slowly, slowly, rebuilt my friendship with A. (She ended being "Best Man" at my wedding.)

Next, how I came back to Christianity.

Oof.

So, one good thing and one bad thing.

Good: Kevin Parry, from the Memoirs of an Ex-Christian site, asked about my story of how I lost my faith twice. I guess I've never thought of my life as that interesting, and it's a pretty long story, but I'll share it in my next post.

Bad: My mom babysits for my two kids (ages 2 and 4) two days a week. And this morning, she starts getting on me about the fact that we're not exposing the kids to God. (My mom is a Christian, and you'll find out more about the church I grew up in and her beliefs in future posts.) I got really angry and really upset, and she touched a nerve as only a parent can. So: oof.

It has occurred to me it's possible that the only reason haven't completely rejected Christianity is that I don't want to disappoint my parents. That is not an easy thing to admit to myself, especially since I'm in my thirties, but there you have it.

Moral argument for thiesm

There's a debate on The Secular Web on thiesm vs. naturalism.

Wanchick, the thiest, argues in his opening statement:
"But what makes us obliged not to mistreat humans? After all, if naturalism is true, "a human being is a biological animal," as naturalist Julian Baggini admits. But unless humans have unique moral worth not had by beasts, it seems objective moral truth wouldn't exist. It wouldn't, for instance, be immoral to rape or kill, for animals do so to each other regularly with no moral significance."

There are some major flaws in this argument.

First, Wanchick makes the incorrect assumption that animals who rape/kill each other do so with no moral significance. We can't possibly know what moral significance there is in the animal world. Some animals groups shun a killer. Other animal groups may simply don't have the capability to punish the killer. This is not to state definitively that animals have morals, it is simply that we cannot blindly assume that they do not simply because it's not obvious to us.

Second, humans have developed rules for the good of our species over time. It used to be considered moral to own slaves. Now it is not. It used to be considered moral for a husband to rape his wife. Now it is not. To imply that there has always been a moral significance to these actions (and others) just because humans are human is not backed up by historical evidence. History also undercuts the assumption that objective moral truth exists.

Third, humans have always (and continue to) rape and kill each other. Sometimes society punishes the offenders (murder) and sometimes not (war, execution). Again, this undercuts the concepts of objective moral truth and an anthrocentric moral significance.

Biblical inerrancy and metaphorical truth

Regarding inerrancy: After reading Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman (among other things), I don't think the Bible is inerrant. The Bible was written down by humans, and copied by other humans hundreds, if not thousands, of times. We have lost the original manuscripts in all cases, and there are more differences in the surviving manuscript than there are words in the NT. It is reasonable to conclude that versions of the Bible that exist today are not inerrant.

However, it has been pointed out by Marcus Borg (Reading the Bible Again for the First Time) and others that the audience for both the OT and the NT did not necessarily take things at face value. It has been postulated that the intent of the authors was not historical record but rather teaching through analogy, just like Jesus did with the parables.

For instance, no one believes that The Good Samaritan was supposed to historically represent a real person, but that doesn't mean that the story isn't "true"--on the contrary, I think it's one of the fundamental points of the "New Covenant." It just isn't historical fact.

Therefore, although I'm still a skeptic, I read Genesis 1 as metaphorical, not literal. Assume for a moment that God set The Big Bang in motion. Would an ancient people understand how The Big Bang Theory works? I doubt it. So does it matter how the world came into being, or is what matters the fact that God made it, and wants humans to understand that He made it? (And if you argue that times have changed, and why would God put in an inaccurate version of history, all I have to say is that modern people have the ability to understand metaphor just as well as ancients.)

I read the account of the Deluge the same way. There are a ton of problems, scientific and chronological, with the Deluge. But it doesn't need to have actually happened for it to be "true." The lesson of the Deluge is that the farther away we get from God, the more destructive our lives can become. Even today, we see how people clean up their lives after finding God. While I don't believe in the actual cause that losing one's faith leads to destruction in one's life, I certainly see that the point is valid in many cases, and that finding God is one way (though certainly not the only way) people can straighten out their lives.

Reconciling "Biblical inerrancy" in the light of "metaphorical truth" solves some of the problems I see, but raises many other questions. For instance, I now heavily doubt the omnipotence of God. After a much more critical reading of the NT, I now doubt that Jesus was talking about salvation, as I see major accuracy problems with the Gospel of John. I see that many of the letters (often attributed to Paul) contradict each other greatly (1 Corinthians and 2 Timothy about the role of women in the church in particular). I'm inclined to view everything after the Gospels as theological criticism, to be given no more weight than the writings of Aquinas, Spong, or Dobson.

Much of this post was included in a comment I left on the Debunking Christianity blog, as a response to other comments left here.

Christians: convince me.

Listen up, you blogging Christians: you are being ridiculous with your circular arguments about the existence of God.
I've been following a line of discussion about the transcendental argument of God's existence (often shortened to TAG) on the Debunking Christianity and Pressing the Antithesis blogs, as well as published discussion between Michael Martin and John Frame. You can argue all you like about "If Knowledge Then God," but it comes down to the fact that you have decided to believe in God without physical proof.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. The bad thing is that you attempt to prove it using faulty logic. The argument can be (over)simplified to this: "If laws of logic are possible then God exists, because God is the necessary precondition for logic. Laws of logic are possible. Therefore, God exists." However, there is no agreement (except perhaps among transcendentalists) that God is the necessary precondition for logic. There is no way to demonstrate to an atheist that the Christian God is the necessary precondition for logic--any more than a Muslim could make *you* believe that Allah is a necessary precondition for logic.
One interesting thing that many Christian bloggers have pointed out is that many atheists use science and logic as their absolute truth, much like legalistic Christians use the Bible as the absolute truth.

To point out the possibilities, however, is a good first step for both parties. Certainly one can admit *possibilities* without accepting them as fact. See the argument below for an example.

I think it would do Christians a lot of good if they stopped acting superior to atheists, though. The insulting, condesending tones some of these discussions take push athiests further away from God, which is the opposite of what Christians want. Right?

Atheists: convince me.

Listen up, you blogging atheists: you are being ridiculous when you tell Christians and other theists to prove the existence of God using the scientific method.

It makes no logical sense to attempt to prove the existence of something on a plane we can't (supposedly) see using only the things we can see.

If you can imagine for a moment a world that lives in one dimension--a line--and a point on that line asking another point to prove the existence of a cube, what would that proof look like? When the cube in question intersects the line, it only affects it in one dimension -- and there's nothing in that one-dimensional world to prove that it's a 3-D object. In fact, I think it's doubtful that those living in 1-D could even comprehend what a cube means. (Einstein postulated this first.)

Well, if a supreme being exists, there is no reason to think that the supreme being is confined to a dimensional world that we can understand. The powers and reasons of that supreme being possibly defy what we understand as science and logic. It's possible that we cannot even begin to concieve of what this being (if it's even a being) is like.
If you insist on demanding scientific proof, you must believe the following:

1) All that we perceive and can measure is all that there is.
2) We can measure and perceive everything there is.

Well, as for #1, I think that's pretty shortsighted, considering that technology continues to allow us to perceive and measure more every year. (Microscopes and telescopes come to mind.) And as for #2 -- well, we still can't know at any given time where an electron is and its velocity.

I think it would do atheists a lot of good if they stopped acting superior to thiests just because their highest authority is the findings of scientists. Yes, it's frustrating to try to prove a negative ("God doesn't exist"), and theists pull the Faith card when cornered. But that doesn't make you right and them wrong.