I was raised in Sydney, Australia. Mum is still a pentecostal christian, Dad was only a nominal christian. I suppose I was a fundamentalist, but there is a bit of a culture gap here. In so far that fundamentalist means "believes the bible is literally true", I was a fundamentalist, but that does not nessesarily mean that I had the baggage that American fundamentalists hook onto their faith. Christianity is not so pervasive a social force here as it seems to be over there so be careful what you assume.
I grew up into christianity. Born again young (8ish) and recommited myself at intervals - privately and voluntarily - through adolescence & adulthood. I was never pressured. I have a history of drifting away and back but not of actually rejecting the faith, which is what I am in the process of doing now.
I got a job and moved to another city in '86 and found the church where I still am a member now. I believed in God as late as, say, a couple of months ago. I no longer do. I still attend and play guitar at church. This of course makes me a hypocrite. Hipocrisy is however a victimless crime, and I don't feel too badly about it. All my friends are there, and I lack the social skills to make more. Besides, Christans are nice people.
Perhaps my posting here is premature. However, I definitely came out as an infidel in an email I sent to the church 29-mar-99, a week ago. Funny. I can't name the date I was saved, as most fundies can, but I can name the date I ceased to believe. The letters I sent are here.
My unbelief has been building up for a while. I'll mention a couple of the issues that have been bothering me, but I won't get them all.
Some time ago, I gave a lecture to my fellow students at the church bible study about the accuracy of the scripture. I preached that the inspiration of the bible was plenary, that is, each word in the original text was there because God wanted it put there. My reason was that the Bible is nothing but the words that are in it - if they are not inspired, how can it be trusted? Since God would certainly furnish us with a fully trustworthy bible, it must be fully inspired. Later I came to retract this position. If the absolute accuracy of the bible is so important, how is it that the vast bulk of christendom manages perfectly well with a translation? In any case, how might word-for-word inspiration work form the point of view of the writer? Are we talking automatic writing or something? It might not seem important to you, but it was one of the first signs of weakness in christianity for me.
Next question. How the hell did Moses know what went on before the flood - or even at the time of the patriarchs? I don't think that God dictated the book of Genesis to him. Especially with the differing accounts of Creation which just _dont_ resolve properly Particularly the bit where vegetation gets created before the sun does. Quite clearly Moses collected the folk stories of the jewish people and attempted to wring some coherent sense out of them. If not for the fact that christianity, to make any sense, requires original sin which requires an original Adam and Eve, I could happily have dismissed the garden of Eden story as the ledgend it quite obviously is. Talking snakes indeed.
It bothered me that the christian life that we late 20th century people live is very different indeed from that which the NT describes. How can we claim to be christians, when it is doubtful that Peter, Paul or Jesus would recognise us as such? 6 days a week we live like everone else. The NT pattern for christian life is communes run by apostles. What point saying christianity is true, if we are not really christan in the sense that the original christians would understand?
It bothered me that - I can't explain this well - the feeling I get from the NT of what things are important is very different to the things that are important to us late 20th century churchgoers. We use their words, but not to accomplish the things which they would have meant them for. There is a chasmic culture gap between us and them, and christians who think they knew what St Paul was really gpoing on about are fooling themselves.
So my - our - entire belief system was essentially a syntheic made-up thing loosely draped around the skeleton of the things that the original church fathers wrote. And not all their writings mind you, but a selection supervised (I suppose) be the emporor Constantine or similar. Many of our important doctrines - esp the trinity - were made up by Catholics for no doubt political reason. Many of our beliefs are wildly complicated constructs which are only there to make sense of odd things in the bible. They are only nessesary if you start from the position that the bible must be true.
Of all things in the world for God to accomplish, you would think that keeping christans (who each have god the holy spirit living inside them) informed about doctine would be one of the easier ones. Why are there so many heresies, and how is it possible that some of them could be so basic and fundamental (pelagianism, arianism)? How could a segment of christians possibly get it that wrong, if they have the holy spirit (aka: God-3) for a teacher?
The defenses I am being given for chrisianity are weak. 1 in 7 people in the world is now christian, as opposed to 1 in 500 at the turn of the century. Maybe so. But most of those 1 in 7 are ignorant illiterates. Why should I take their word for anything? While I'm at it, why should I take the word of the bronze age (OT) or iron age (NT) savages who wrote the bible? These people just dont think the way I do - all this vengance and blood and agricultural stuff. As someone from outside their culture, I can plainly see that the bible just reflects their cultural slant. For instance: from my point of view weeds & thorns are just part of the ecosystem. Cultivated plants are an anomaly - unnatural things bred by man. But from the bible's point of view, weeds are the unnatural results of the fall. God couldn't have created them, because the are bad for the crops. This is not an eternal god given truth - it's just the way a farmer looks at the world.
Thats the "word" side of the faith. The other side is the "spirit" side. Here are just one or two issues in no particular order:
Look - dammit - if there was a God such as christianity describes then he would do a much better job of telling christians what he wants them to do than he does. Why is it that any course of events can be justified retrospectively as being intended by God? "Oh, they weren't moving in faith - they were moving in presumtion." Well it sure would be nice if you could tell which was which before smacking into the consequences of your actions.
It irritates the heck out of me when people stand up the front thank God for finding a $10 note on the street, or for taking away a minor ailment that would have dissapeared by itself. It's downright embarrassing. Absolutely anything can be taken to be some sort of sign of the favour of god - and who's to say it isn't? Since there is no possible way to falsify "god provided it", we can't be sure it's true.
Likewise, bad things are tests or trials sent by God, or if not God then Satan. Either will do. Several months ago it occoured to me that what was really going on was that christians put up with random good shit and random bad shit happenning in their lives exacty the same as nonchristians do. The re-labeling explains nothing - it's just a way of bringing the events of your life into line with christianity so as to make christianity encompas your whole life. [28/12/2000 - IOW: the christian explanantion for events in a christain's life lacks explanitory power, it lacks predictive power, and it is unnessesarily complex]
It bugs me when quite a bit of what passes for spirituality is quite plainly sublimated sexuality. Particularly among young unmarried women - sorry to sound sexist. Guys generally know exactly when their feelings are sexual in nature - penises are unambiguous things. The rapturous cloying way these women go on about how wonderful Jesus is, how he's so gentle and kind and loving. Euuugh! Are they any further along that girls who faint when their favorite rock stars accidently touch them? Even old women are prone to describe jesus as having all the attributes of an ideal lover.
One of the main turning points for me as a pentecostal toungue talkin' christian was reading some NLP literature - particularly "The hypnotic techniques of Milton Erickson" and "Trance Formations". After reading these and related material, it is perfectly plain that most of the ecsatic spiritual stuff that goes on (falling over, healings) is hypnosis in disguise. Not that the people doing understand that that is what they are doing - I'm not impling that it's deliberate. The leaders are the most taken in of them all. The states that I have experienced when I have felt close to God can be adequately explained by psych without positing a God to cause them. They are just mental states. My feelings of the reality of god are just plain and simple untrustworthy and don't mean a thing.
Lets face it. Buddhist holy men heal people all the time. Practitioners of Voodo speak in toungues. Hinduism is full of miracles every bit as incredible as the ones in the bible. Every religion on earth gives its practitioners the same feelings that christianity does. An idol worshipper in darkest africa (if any are left after the AIDS pandemic) will tell you his god is real, and will mean it every bit as much as I ever did. More maybe. Can I be sure that christianity (and the particular variety of christianity we practise) is the right thing?
Sure! Because of the historical reality of the resurrection of Jesus!
Yeah, right.
The thing that happened a few weeks ago that definitely flicked my switch was the easter challenge for christians. Sorry - I don't have the URL. It works like this: take the resurrection & post resurrection accounts of the 4 gospels and acts and write a harmony. Try to do it in the form of a play: where the scene it, who is there, what happened, who said what. There are only 8 or so chapters. But the important thing is: do it without leaving out a single one of those god inspired inerrant details.
You can't do it. The accounts contradict and it's as simple as that. I tried to do it with just the scene at the tomb. I emailed my opinions on the matter to my church. The message I sent is here. Basically, John's gospel is the only eyewitness account we have. [28/12/2000 - NB: I wrote this back when I thought that the bible was genuine] Mary Magdaline went to the tomb. The body was gone - probably stolen by Joseph of Arimathea's wife (rich married woman with time on her hands) who buried it under the rosebushes in her garden so that she would have Jesus all to herself. MaryM calls Peter & John to the tomb. They find nothing. After they leave she hallucinates or just plain makes up a story involving angels & jesus. Jesus, by the way, is incorporeal. The other 3 gospels are just Matthew, Mark & Luke trying to make sense of all the stories that grew up after this.
Why would some wife steal his body? Well... how did he get a bunch of rich married women supporting his ministry financially? Jesus had charisma. I have not quite gotten to the point that I can stand up in church and say that if Jesus were alive today, he'd be running a free love commune & poisoning the Kool-Aid, but I'm getting there. I did state in my other letter to my church that St Paul invented christianity in its current form to assuage his Jewish guilt about being an active homosexual.
This is not the first indication I have had that the bible is not accurate as reportage. My first hint came with CS Lewis, who points out that in Acts 24:2-6 that Luke (who wrote acts) tries to report on the trial before Felix word-for-word. He gets as far as verse 4 and then just gives up and notes the points. This would not bother a liberal christian, but it bothered me to see the bible to be so plainly a document written by a human who was just trying to get it as right as he could. Luke 1:3 should have tipped me off years ago.
I sent the rants off to church. The pastoral staff now know I am having some sort of problem. So does my best friend. He found it difficult not to take my attack on his faith personally. Haven't told mum. Probably won't. It's odd. I don't feel fear for rejecting my faith. There is nothing to be a afraid of. There is simply no God, no heaven to gain, no hell to shun. I don't plan to out myself as an atheist publicly, because I like being part of church society. If the other dudes in church get benefit from believing christianity, why should I make a nuisance of myself? Because it's morally right and I ought? Says who?
So that's where I am now. Christian practise, the bible, and church history just make a whole lot more sense if you take the view that there is no god. As CS Lewis said (approx): I know the difference between dreaming and waking because when I dreaming I do not understand being awake, but when I am awake I understand both.
Perhaps I will repent in a month, but I don't think so. Even if I return to supernaturalism and even theism, I will no longer be able to accept christianity in particular as being exclusively true. Long term, I'm not sure what's going to happen.
Well, it's been eight or nine months. I'll describe how my beliefs have changed, and then maybe get onto some more "whats been happenning" things.
One of the experiences that many exchristians share is that feeling you get when you solve a difficult puzzle, whose solution becomes obvious after you have done it. Christianity is a maze of conflicting requirements. You should pray and read the bible to get close to God and get answers to prayer, but God is sovereign and does as he wishes. The Christian walk is supposed to be effortless and yet also full of constant effort. Praying is communication with God, and yet what is communication when it's a requirement? Praying always felt like a visit to a distant and aging relative, who you are supposed to talk to and cheer up even though you really have nothing in common. You are supposed to read the bible, and yet it's boring and badly written. See my rant on Romans. If you pay attention to the flow of the passage, rather than trying to pick out good bits for a sermon or just letting the words wash over you, you are constanly going "Huh? How does that follow?". There's tithing and giving, doing good works (cup of water etc), witnessing, living in faith; and yet if the Holy Spirit lives within you surely you should be in constant touch with God without any further effort. I continually struggled with the question: "What, exactly, am I supposed to do?".
But now, I look back and go "Duh! Duh! Now it all makes sense!". There never was any God. The requirements of christianity seem contradictory because they are, and possibly deliberately so in order to keep the aforementioned plebs and slaves continually off balance and preoccupied with their internal state. The whole corpus of the faith can be adequately accounted for by history, and the internal states and struggles by psychology. Christianity is a nasty and dangerous mind-control cult, whose goal is to so wrap you up in thoughts about what you are thinking and feeling and whether those thoughts and feelings are "right" that you become insulated from the real world. A full-on christian spends their lives in a light hypnotic trance - constantly monitoring their own thoughts for truth and holiness. This is why when you deal with one they seem to be not quite there. They aren't. A huge chunk of themselves is facing inward rather than outward, and they are knotting themselves into an ever-tightening mental knot.
If you have not read it, please allow me to recommend "The Mind of the Bible Beleiver" - Edmund D Cohen. A scary book.
Now I understand why I could never make it as a christian. To be one, you have to pull the wool over your own eyes (in the words of Dr "Bob" Dobbs), and I am a little too sane. I could never believe even though I didn't, which is something you have to do - fake it till you make it. I could never lie to myself in that particular way for long. This is what E Cohen calls "integrity" - which he means in a similar sense as does the phrase "structural integrity". To be a christian, you have to hide parts of your mind from other parts
Since deconverting, I've been doing a fair bit of reading, both on the web and in books. On my top bookshelf, my concordances and interlinear and study bibles sit next to "Losing faith in faith", "Arguing for Atheism" and "The dark side of Christian history". I am now certain that Christianity is false. To my experiene "from the inside", I have added experience "from the outside". Christanity has gone from being an encompasing world view that I was breaking out of, to being a thing that I know about within my current world view.
When I was a christian, I never witnessed, because I knew that I could not account for my belief. I lacked reasons for beleiving as I did, and I knew it (there's that gosh darned integrity thing again). Now I am happier. I don't believe, and I know exactly why I don't believe.
I don't believe because the idea of God makes no sense. The divine attributes of, for instance, omniscience and freedom are incompatible. But more importantly, there are actually several diffent mental pictures of God in Christianity. There is the philosophical, intellectual God - omniscient, omnipotent, eternal etc. There is the loving father image. And there is the vengeful Jehovah of the OT. The trick is to use whatever mental image of God suits your current purpose. When a christian defends the idea of "God", the idea that they are defending is not the anthropomorphic thing that they actually pray to or try to have a relationship with. Neither is it the fearsom monster who is going to send them to burn forever if they let a doubt slip past mental defenses.
I don't believe because christian doctines are inconsistent, fuzzy, and unfaslifiable. There is no way to tell the diffence between God really being there and not. If you pray and it happens, then God answered. If not, then there are a thousand good reasons why you didn't get it. It's a con job.
I don't believe because I just don't believe. According to the bible, reasons and arguments ultimately don't matter. Christianity understands itself well enough, and knows to demand not understanding, but acceptance. The sin that sends you to hell is not immoral actions (any of which can be forgiven), but rejection of the gospel. At bottom, Christianity's claim is simply "belive this or be damned". Well, I don't.
Of course, I have been lead astray by my mind. Well - why shouldn't I be? I am an I.T. contractor - my mind feeds, clothes and houses me. Where do you get off, pal, asking me to believe some iron age document for no good reason except that it makes some very nasty threats if I don't? If you are asking me to simply "accept and beleive" that Christianity is "the truth", why ought I not instead "accept and belive" Hinduism, or Scientology, or Voodo? The only thing that makes Christianity special is that you believe it, and that is not good enough grounds for me.
Anyway ...
I am still attending church, and playing in the church band, which I find rewarding. God hasn't told anyone yet that I am an atheist. Back in April I was concerned with coming out - how, when, to whom. I felt that I should maybe make a stand regarding my atheism, be open and honest.
Now I really don't care. The only people who would be bothered by such a thing are christians, and I just don't share their world view anymore where what you believe is an incredibly important thing. Christianity bothers me not because it is false, but because it is often harmful, and because Paul Osborne in the ACT legislative assembly is attempting to make laws based on what some ancient (and modern!) romans think is right. It's not that I disagree with those romans (although I do), but that I think laws should have better justification.
As to what's going to happen long term, well, I will work at my job, accumulate money for my retirement, and eventually grow old and die. I don't feel that I need a plan, purpose and direction for my life - God's or my own. I'd like a woman to share my life with, and if I hadn't been stuck in church all these years patiently waiting for God to move then I might have one. But that's just too bad. I'm 33, and slowing down a little so it's not the issue it once was.
I have adopted Atheism as a hobby of sorts, and am enjoying it more than I did Christianity. If you have come by this page by some other means, feel free to visit www.exchristian.org.
Well. I finally have come out to my church and my family. The letter I sent to my church is here.
Just thinking about my deconversion (again).
You know those pictures that look like a rabbit or like a duck, depending on how you think of them? I find that you can flip between "rabbit" and "duck" fairly easily. When you view the picture and say to yourself "this is a rabbit", then it really is a picture of a rabbit. Then you rearrange your mind breifly and wow! It really is a picture of a duck.
I found in my deconversion process that I could do this with my beliefs. I could view them as a christian or as an atheist. When I flipped my "christian mind" on, it all made sense and formed a pattern - a way of looking at the world. God and Jesus, sin and salvation. Heaven and Hell. It all made sense. But I could also flip on the atheist mind and it was all perfectly clear that it was a load of nonsense - psychological events, coincidences mistaken for answers to prayer, cultural conditioning.
So either way could work. But the thing is, they didn't work equally well. The "christian mind" POV has all sorts of internal problems. The doctrines and mental map are all ok so long as you don't look closely at them. The moment you start doing that, they just explode with complexity. Every statement has layers and layers of meaning, every declaration of fact has a thousand escape hatches.
The most obvious example is the promises that you will get whatever you pray for. Now every christian knows that these verses do not work as advertised, as a plain reading of the text would lead you to suppose. But there's always an excuse. Another obvious example is Jesus' repeated declarations that the second coming would be "soon".
Someone once said "A fact will fit every other fact in the Universe, because it is the product of all other facts. A lie will fit nothing except another lie made for the express purpose of fitting it." And if you tell a second lie to fit the first, you must soon tell a third and a fourth, until you wind up with a towering structure of them. More and more, christianity began to look like just such a construct.
By contrast, the atheist point of view was solid when I whacked it. No loose bits dangling off it, no ad-hoc justifications for things. In particular, the atheist POV could explain the christian in detail, but the christian view's only explanation for the atheist view was "the atheist is deceived by the world, the flesh, or the devil", which just sounds like an excuse. In particular, the christian view could not explain why, if the atheist is deceived, the atheist/materialist view explains the world (which is unquestionably real) so well.
Eventually, the whole christian ball of wax became discredited for me.