Category Archives: Uncategorized

Make Your Very Own Prophecy (That Actually Comes True!)

Posted on by

Christian apologists sometimes claim that the Bible records hundreds of prophecies and their fulfillment. Impressive, aside from the small problem that these claims don’t hold up.

For example, Micah’s prediction of a Bethlehem birthplace doesn’t fit the details of the life of Jesus. Zechariah’s prediction of a king entering Jerusalem on a donkey is likewise talking about someone besides Jesus. Zechariah’s anecdote of the payment of 30 pieces of silver has nothing to do with betrayal as in the Judas story.

But let’s not worry about that. Instead, imagine a Bible prophecy that came true. Let’s say that the Jews returning to Israel is a fulfilled prophecy. As evidence, apologists might cite verses such as these.

I will bring you from the nations and gather you from the countries where you have been scattered—with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with outpoured wrath. (Ezekiel 20:34)

[In that day, the Lord] will raise a banner for the nations and gather the exiles of Israel; he will assemble the scattered people of Judah from the four quarters of the earth. (Isaiah 11:12)

I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them and will bring them back to their pasture, where they will be fruitful and increase in number. (Jeremiah 23:3)

The first question, of course, is the context of these verses. Conquest, exile, and repatriation are important topics in the Old Testament because they’re part of Israel’s history. The ten tribes in the northern kingdom of Israel were conquered by Assyria in 722 BCE and their inhabitants scattered. The southern kingdom of Judea was conquered by Babylon, and Jews were taken there as captives beginning in 605 BCE. After Babylon was conquered by Persia, exiled Jews returned home beginning in 538 BCE. Is this the re-gathering that these Old Testament books are talking about?

Some Christians don’t think so. They imagine instead that the Old Testament said that Jews will return to Israel and, sure enough, Israel once again became a Jewish state in 1948. Let’s ignore that the objection that the predictions listed above weren’t satisfied by the return from exile. How plausible is modern Israel as the fulfillment?

Not very. The “prediction” is vague—no time is mentioned. It’s also mundane—exiles have scattered and returned in many other situations, including the nation of Judea itself. It was also potentially self-fulfilling when Passover Seders within the Jewish diaspora worldwide concluded with the wish, “Next year in Jerusalem!”

See also: 8 Tests for Accurate Prophecy and Why Bible Prophecies Fail

But if National Enquirer-caliber predictions are all we’re looking for, they’re not hard to make.

You, too, can be a prophet!

To see how to create a record of correct prophecies, imagine a commodities broker who wants to attract new wealthy clients. He buys a mailing list of 1000 candidates who live in the rich part of town, and he makes up a fancy name for his proprietary technique of predicting the swing in commodity prices. To half of his candidates, he mails an introductory letter saying that he is able to take on a few select new clients. To prove his capability, he gives a free prediction: the price of gold will rise in the next month. To the other half, he predicts that the price will fall.

A month later, gold has either gone up in price or gone down, and he’s lost credibility with half his audience. No matter—to the other half, he mails another letter to remind them of his accurate prediction and gives another free prediction, this time about sugar (or natural gas or soybeans or pork bellies). To half, he says the price will rise, and to the rest, that it will fall.

And so on with a few more commodities. He discards the failures along the way. At the end of this process, he has 50 to 100 wealthy individual to whom he can say, correctly, that he has given them three or four accurate commodity swings in a row using his special method.

He has “predicted” the future by predicting in hindsight. The unskeptical potential clients don’t see the big picture.

You see the same thing in the days before a presidential election. There’s always the news story about the U.S. county with the longest streak of picking the winning president. Obviously, some county will be the most accurate, just like some path through a tree of random commodities predictions will be the most accurate.

With low standards like those that satisfy many Christian apologists, some of the many prediction-like verses in the Bible are bound to satisfy them.

And they wonder why the rest of us aren’t convinced.

A visitor to the home of 
Nobel-winning physicist Niels Bohr
noticed a horseshoe on the wall. 
“Can you, of all people, 
believe it will bring good luck?”
“Of course not,” said Bohr,
“but I understand it brings luck 
whether you believe it or not.”

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/22/14.)

Image credit: Chris Gladis, flickr, CC

 

Does Christianity Lead to a Better Society?

Posted on by

field of yellow flowersStudies have compared believers and atheists on lots of issues—compassion, mental health, happiness, intelligence, quality of marriages, and even antidepressant consumption. I have little interest in the game where the Christian and atheist each present studies to show how their group is superior in this or that social category. My interest lies more in which worldview is more accurate.

Nevertheless, we often hear that Christianity leads to a better society—or, perhaps more often, that the loss of Christianity leads to a worse society. In this scenario, God is furious about our acceptance of homosexuals or abortion or whatever, so he allows the 9/11 attack or Hurricane Katrina or the latest school shootings.

But this is a claim that we can test.

Researcher Gregory Paul used public records of social metrics such as suicide, lifespan, divorce, alcohol consumption, and life satisfaction to compare 17 Western countries (the U.S., Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and 12 European countries). He concluded:

Of the 25 socioeconomic and environmental indicators, the most theistic and procreationist western nation, the U.S., scores the worst in 14 and by a very large margin in 8, very poorly in 2, average in 4, well or very well in 4, and the best in 1. . . .

Because the U.S. performs so poorly in so many respects, its cumulative score on the [Successful Societies Scale is lowest,] placing it as an outlier so dysfunctional relative to the other advanced democracies that some researchers have described it as “sick.” (p. 416)

The metrics in which the U.S. ranks worst out of the 17 countries are homicides, incarceration, under-5 mortality, gonorrhea, syphilis, abortions, teen births, marriage duration, income inequality, poverty, and hours worked.

But it’s #1 in God belief, prayer, belief in heaven and hell, and in rejection of evolution! That’s not much consolation to the Christian, however, because this study destroys the notion that religious belief is correlated with societal health.

What causes what?

Why do we find this correlation of secularism with social health? And in what direction should a society move to improve social health?

Conditions in America are decent in spite of the strong influence of Christianity, not because of it. From a related article by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, here are the secrets to making a secular society:

It is to be expected that in 2nd and 3rd world nations where wealth is concentrated among an elite few and the masses are impoverished that the great majority cling to the reassurance of faith.

Nor is it all that surprising that faith has imploded in most of the west. Every single 1st world nation that is irreligious shares a set of distinctive attributes. These include handgun control, anti-corporal punishment and anti-bullying policies, rehabilitative rather than punitive incarceration, intensive sex education that emphasizes condom use, reduced socio-economic disparity via tax and welfare systems combined with comprehensive health care, increased leisure time that can be dedicated to family needs and stress reduction, and so forth.

As a result the great majority enjoy long, safe, comfortable, middle class lives that they can be confident will not be lost due to factors beyond their control. It is hard to lose one’s middle class status in Europe, Canada and so forth, and modern medicine is always accessible regardless of income. Nor do these egalitarian cultures emphasize the attainment of immense wealth and luxury, so most folks are reasonably satisfied with what they have got. Such circumstances dramatically reduces peoples’ need to believe in supernatural forces that protect them from life’s calamities, help them get what they don’t have, or at least make up for them with the ultimate Club Med of heaven.

The U.S. is the anomaly among its peers. Why does its large, educated, comfortable middle class cling to belief in a supernatural creator? Paul and Zuckerman say that it’s because they are insecure: salaries and jobs are under pressure from companies eager to cut costs, health insurance is uncertain, social pressure to keep up with the Jones increases debt, and so on. A single extended illness can bankrupt a family.

They also reject the popular hypothesis that America’s separation of church and state has encouraged a vibrant mix of Christian denominations that have had to fight for market share, making a stronger Christianity. They cite Australia and New Zealand who both have a strong separation of church and state but far less religiosity.

What use is faith?

They conclude that a healthy society eliminates the need for faith.

Every time a nation becomes truly advanced in terms of democratic, egalitarian education and prosperity it loses the faith. It’s guaranteed. That is why perceptive theists are justifiably scared. In practical terms their only . . . hope is for nations to continue to suffer from socio-economic disparity, poverty and maleducation. That strategy is, of course, neither credible nor desirable. And that is why the secular community should be more encouraged. . . .

The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.

So perhaps many of us have it backwards. This is not a contest between religion and secularism that will determine the quality of society. Rather, the quality of society will determine whether religion or secularism will thrive. In a dysfunctional society, religion helps pick up the pieces, but in a society where life is secure, religion is unnecessary and withers away.

Do you want a religious society or a healthy one? You can’t have both.

Incredibly, I’m sure many American Christian leaders would happily choose a religious society over a healthy one.

Celebrate life: live better, help often, wonder more.
— Motto of the Sunday Assembly

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 1/6/14.)

Image credit: Peter Mooney, flickr, CC

Oral Tradition and the Game of Telephone: A. N. Sherwin-White’s Famous Quote

Posted on by

WhisperThe time from the death of Jesus to the writing of the first gospel was about forty years. An exciting story being passed along orally in a world full of the supernatural seems bound to be “improved,” deliberately or inadvertently, as it moves from person to person.

While some epistles were written earlier, the details Paul gives about the life of Jesus can be summarized in one short paragraph (more here). How can we dismiss the possibility that any actual history of Jesus is lost through a decades-long game of telephone?

Christian rebuttal

Christian apologist William Lane Craig says that forty years is too short a period for legend to develop. He points to a claim made by A.N. Sherwin-White in Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament (1963).

According to Sherwin-White, the writings of Herodotus enable us to determine the rate at which legend accumulates, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states that for the gospels to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be “unbelievable.” More generations would be needed. (Source)

Craig’s summary has been quoted widely and was popularized in Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ (2008), and it sounds like a thorough slap down of the legend claim. However, when we see what Sherwin-White actually said, we find that Craig’s confidence is unwarranted.

(From this point forward, I’ll use “SW” to refer to historian A.N. Sherwin-White.)

SW never said “unbelievable”

Incredibly, the word “unbelievable,” which Craig puts into the mouth of SW, is not used by him in the relevant chapter in this book. If the word comes from another source, Craig doesn’t cite it. Craig also quotes the word in his essay in Jesus Under Fire (1995).

We all make mistakes, but it’s been twenty years. Where is Craig’s correction?

What did SW actually say?

From his Roman Society and Roman Law in the New Testament:

Herodotus enables us to test the tempo of myth-making, and the tests suggest that even two generations are too short a span to allow the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core of the oral tradition. (RSRL, 190)

SW proposes an interesting experiment. If we can find examples in history where legend has crept into oral history and we have more reliable sources that let us compare that with what actually happened, we can measure how fast legendary material accumulates.

Notice the limitations in what SW is saying.

  • He cites several examples where historians have (tentatively) sifted truth from myth, but Herodotus is the only example used to put a rate on the loss of historic truth. This isn’t a survey of, say, a dozen random historic accounts that each validates a two-generation limit.
  • He isn’t saying that myth doesn’t accumulate, and he’s not proposing a rate at which it does. He’s writing instead about the loss of accurate history (“the mythical tendency to prevail over the hard historic core”).
  • He is careful to use the word “suggest” above. William Lane Craig isn’t as careful and imagines an immutable law that SW clearly isn’t proposing.

What is SW’s point?

Here is more of what SW is saying.

All this suggests that, however strong the myth-forming tendency, the falsification does not automatically and absolutely prevail. (RSRL, 191)

The point of my argument is not to suggest the literal accuracy of ancient sources, secular or ecclesiastical, but to offset the extreme skepticism with which the New Testament narratives are treated in some quarters. (RSRL, 193)

Craig imagines that myth never overtakes historic truth in two generations. By contrast, SW says that myth doesn’t always overtake historic truth.

Consider Craig’s difficulty. He proposes what may be the most incredible story possible: that a supernatural being created the universe and came to earth as a human and that this was recorded in history. We have a well-populated bin labeled “Mythology” for stories like this. If Craig is to argue that, no, this one is actually history, SW’s statement is useless. “Well, myth might not have overtaken historic truth in this case” does very little to keep Craig’s religion from the Mythology bin.

More limitations in SW’s statement

  • SW gives no procedure for reliably winnowing the myth out of the history.
  • It’s been more than fifty years since his book, which is plenty of time for scholars to weigh in. If they’ve said nothing, that gives us little reason to think that SW is onto something useful. But if a consensus response has emerged, that is what we should be considering, not SW’s original proposal.
  • The examples that SW considers—Tiberius Caesar, Alexander the Great, and others—are all important public figures. Jesus was not. Legendary drift is slow when everyone experienced the impact of the figure directly and might correct a story themselves. By contrast, only a handful of people could rein in an errant Jesus story (more here).
  • SW’s examples are all secular leaders. Is Herodotus a relevant example when we’re concerned about the growth of a religious tale? Consider Sathya Sai Baba, an Indian guru who died in 2011 with millions of followers. Supernatural tales grew up around him in his own lifetime. (More on the growth of legends here and here.)

SW proves too much!

Craig must walk a fine line since he can’t completely reject mythological development. Myth is his enemy when it comes to the New Testament books written forty to seventy years after the death of Jesus. He must downplay myth to label these as history. But myth is his friend when it comes to the noncanonical books of the second century—the Gospel of Thomas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and so on. Here he imagines the mists of time separating the authors of those books from the actual history.

Worse, the Bible itself documents legendary accretion in just months or a few years. When Jesus asked the disciples who people said he was, “They told him, ‘John the Baptist; and others say, Elijah; and others, one of the prophets’ ” (Mark 8:27–8). According to the gospels themselves, there was legendary accretion during Jesus’s own lifetime!

This observation cuts twice. First, it argues for much quicker development of legend than Craig wants. Second, it defeats the Naysayer Hypothesis, the claim that no false statement about the gospel story would last while the eyewitnesses were alive to stamp it out. Apparently not, if Jesus himself can’t stop the flawed rumors. (h/t Robert M. Price)

And incredibly, Craig’s own quote supports the skeptics’ concern about legend creeping into the gospels! Apologists don’t read SW’s chapter directly; they prefer Craig’s quote. It’s a much better data point with which to argue that the gospels are accurate—if you can get past that small issue of it being completely inaccurate.

Sticky, not accurate, is what gets passed along. This is true for Craig as it is for the gospel story.

In the beginning, God created man in his own image. 
Man, being a gentleman, returned the favor.
— Rousseau

References: These sources provided much valuable material for this post.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/30/13.)

Image credit: Jamin Gray, flickr, CC

 

The World Will End Soon! Again! (2 of 2)

Posted on by

hagee blood moons atheismWe’re looking at pastor John Hagee’s breathless new book, Four Blood Moons. For the introduction and a summary of the three terrifying instances of “blood moons” that Hagee claims have already happened in history, see part 1.

What does Hagee see in our future?

The focus of Hagee’s book is the four blood moons beginning with Passover 2014 (April 14) and ending with Sukkot 2015 (September 28). Yes, the date for this prediction has come and gone, but I’d like to revisit this ludicrous “prophecy” to hold Hagee’s feet to the fire as well as see what a modern prophecy looks like.

Let’s see if Hagee’s frantic warning is worthy of concern.

Problem 1

Hagee’s claim that “a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015” was a pretty safe bet. The same is true for his ominously nonspecific subtitle, “Something is about to change.” Find any 18-month period in the last century where you couldn’t cobble together some argument for a “world-shaking event” somewhere. The time period is too wide and the claimed event too imprecise for this to be an interesting prophecy. It’s amazing that the omniscient and omnipotent creator of the universe who Hagee says is “literally screaming at the world” can’t be more specific.

Maybe instead of his prophet hat, Hagee grabbed a dunce cap.

Given enough vague predictions of unspecified terrible things, eventually something will stick. Another Chernobyl or Fukushima disaster? Another Banda Ache or Haiti earthquake? Another 9/11 attack or influenza pandemic or world war? Sure, those are possible. But applying Christian mysticism obviously doesn’t help show the future if Hagee’s argument is an example.

Problem 2

Wouldn’t the eclipses need to be visible in the Promised Land? The four coming up beginning in 2014 won’t be (though there may be a glimpse of the last one). The same was true for previous instances—few of the “blood moons” were visible in Israel.

What good is a blood moon if God’s chosen can’t see it?

Problem 3

Did anyone notice these celestial fireworks in the past? God was screaming, after all. Did anyone in Israel notice that it was spooky to have had blood moons in other parts of the world (though not Israel) after the Six-Day War was already over? Did they conclude that God was speaking?

If these earlier blood moon events happened without notice, God’s screaming is pretty feeble.

Problem 4

I challenge Hagee to go back further in time. There are four additional tetrads (instances of four consecutive lunar eclipses) that lined up with Jewish festivals since the birth of Jesus. Tell us, Dr. Hagee, what monumental events in the history of the Jewish people do those coincide with?

Many Christians know of the First Jewish-Roman War (66–74 CE), during which the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed. 1.1 million Jews were killed, according to Josephus. Two other lesser-known wars, the Kitos War (115–117 CE) and the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136 CE) were also fought with the Romans. Surely one or all of these are represented in God’s prior tetrads?

Of course not. The dates of the four tetrads that Hagee doesn’t want you to know about are 162, 795, 842, and 860. Like the Holocaust, God apparently didn’t think that these wars merited a magical light show.

Problem 5

What could God possibly be saying with this? What could the message be to the Jews exiled from Spain? “Something bad already happened”? Yeah, I bet that was helpful. How could you possibly get any useful information from such a nonspecific and tardy message? And how does the independence of Israel fit in, since this is clearly a good thing?

Apparently, blood moons mean, “Something bad will happen! Or is happening! Or maybe it’s something good. Or maybe it’s already happened. Or something.”

Tell God I said thanks.

Hagee delights in taking a pre-scientific view of nature, like the Normans who interpreted Halley’s comet to presage the death of English King Harold and the success of William of Normandy. How is Hagee’s thinking useful? How can anyone in the twenty-first century take it seriously?

The world will end!

In Hagee’s brief video introduction, he has yet more nutty stuff to say. He quotes Mark 13:24–6 as somehow relevant to what we’re going to see during the upcoming four blood moons phase:

But in those days, “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light.” At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory.

He wants to say that the world will end and Jesus will return, but not in any measurable way—y’know, just in case. He tap dances away from any accountability by omitting an important part. Actually, the quoted bit in Mark goes like this:

“the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.”

Stars falling from the sky? That’s something you wouldn’t miss. I can see why Hagee would delete mention of anything specific that will hang around to embarrass him in 2015.

Hagee finds another verse relevant. Luke 21:28 says, “your redemption draws near.” Of course, four verses later, Jesus says, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.” Oops—that didn’t happen! At least Hagee will be in good company if his own prophecy fails.

Hagee also says, “the sun and the moon will eclipse at the same time.” This isn’t possible in our reality, and Hagee doesn’t say how this is supposed to happen (no, I’m not going to buy the book to try and find out).

Other prophets

Eager followers can be pretty lenient, and many Christians seem determined to avoid learning from past failures.

Other failed prophets have been able to bounce back, from Christians like Harold Camping and Hal Lindsay, to psychics Jeanne Dixon, Edgar Cayce, and Sylvia Browne. Browne was way off even in her prediction about her own age at death.

I wrote my first novel about the Azusa Street Revival in 1906 in Los Angeles. This was in the early years of the Pentecostal movement. A nutty church was creating waves, and a reporter went to check it out. Someone in the church predicted terrible destruction, and that story appeared on the front page of the LA Times on the very day of the Great San Francisco earthquake and fire.

Given enough tries, a few random predictions will stick.

If a god is screaming at the world and no one hears it,
is he really making any sound at all?
— commenter wtfwjtd

If John Hagee is mooning the world and we call him out on it,
does he still make a ton of money?

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/7/13.)

Image credit: Stiller Beobachter, flickr, CC

 

The World Will End Soon! Again!

Posted on by

end of the world hageeI enjoy writing books, but the marketing part isn’t my strength. I sit at the feet of the master when I marvel at the work of John Hagee. He declared in 2013 that the world would soon end and that only his book Four Blood Moons had the details. (Why didn’t I think of that?)

Of course, that didn’t happen. I’m sure he knew it wouldn’t happen. But why let that stop you? The Bible makes predictions that didn’t come true, so Hagee was applying a proven formula. If I could just get past my darned compulsion for honesty, who knows what I might accomplish?

In his book trailer, Hagee said:

I believe that the heavens are God’s billboard. That he has been sending signals to planet earth, and we just haven’t been picking them up. . . . God is literally screaming at the world, “I’m coming soon.” The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.

What the hell is he talking about?

The phrase “blood moons” is taken from Joel 2:30–31: “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.” Hagee interprets “blood moons” simply as lunar eclipses, since the moon in total eclipse usually looks dark red.

Hagee’s four blood moons refer to eclipses at the start of the Jewish festivals of Passover and Sukkot (also called the Feast of Tabernacles), twice each, all in a row.

You might think that this is an incredible coincidence, but remember that these two holidays start on the day of a full moon by definition, and lunar eclipses can only happen during full moons. There are 2.3 lunar eclipses per year out of 12.4 full moons per year. (If more than two lunar eclipses per year sounds high, remember that they don’t last long. If the eclipse is happening during the day in your part of the world, you obviously won’t see it.)

That any particular Passover or Sukkot begins with a lunar eclipse isn’t surprising, though four of these eclipsed holidays in a row is much less common.

Hagee puts on his prophet hat to interpret. He says that in the past five centuries, there have been three such coincidences, and each has happened during an important event in the life of Israel. He said, “This is something that just is beyond coincidental.”

Time for audience participation

See if you can guess what three events are most important in the life of Israel since the fifteenth century. Guess what God rearranged the heavens to tell us.

Got your answer? Let’s see how you did.

And the first instance of a blood moon is . . .

We start in Spain in 1492. For this date, Christian history typically points to the end of the eight-century-long expulsion of the Muslims from Christian Spain. This “Reconquista” ended with the fall of Granada on January 2, 1492.

But no, Hagee says that God was focusing on the expulsion of Jews from Spain. The Edict of Expulsion was issued on March 31, 1492, and it gave Jews four months to leave. An estimated 100,000 Jews or more were forced to leave.

One small problem is that Hagee’s first blood moon didn’t happen until almost a year later (Passover, on April 2, 1493).

Remember that the “four blood moons” take about 18 months to play out (starting with a Passover and ending two Sukkots later). So God’s celestial exclamation point took place in slow motion after the problem had already come and gone.

Example two

Next up is the establishment of Israel on May 14, 1948. Okay, that sounds like a big development.

However, we have yet again the small problem that Hagee’s first blood moon didn’t happen until almost a year later (Passover, on April 14, 1949).

Example three

The last one was the Six-Day War, June 5–10, 1967. God must’ve been paying attention this time, because the first blood moon had already happened (on Passover, April 25, 1967).

But why this war? Since independence, Israel has had lots of conflicts. In particular, why not the Yom Kippur War in 1973? That war was a surprise, and there were more Israeli casualties.

And what about the Holocaust? How does this not make the list?! Israel lost less than 1000 dead and 4500 wounded during the Six-Day War. In the Holocaust, six million Jews were killed.

God was apparently also unmoved by any of the anti-Jewish pogroms. In Ukraine, for example, as many as a quarter million Jews were killed after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Let’s be clear, too, that the idea of “blood moon” = natural eclipse is Hagee’s invention. More importantly, the idea that eclipses occurring on Jewish holy days is meaningful in a cosmic sense is an invention. As is the idea of four in a row (instead of two or seven, say). The Bible mentions the moon turning to blood; it says nothing about four of them. “Four blood moons” is a marketing concept, not a biblical concept.

But we’ve just begun to laugh at Hagee’s expense, and there’s too much nutty stuff for one post.

To be continued.

When you get the urge to predict the future, 
better lie down until the feeling goes away.
— Forbes magazine (1978)

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/6/13.)

Image credit: Lene Melendez, flickr, CC

 

Guest Post: Thinking My Way Out of Religion

Posted on by

This is a guest post by Lewis Vaughn, a former child preacher and author of the recently published memoir Star Map: A Journey of Faith, Doubt, and Meaning. In it he tells how as a boy he fell deeply into dogma and blind faith but as a young man climbed out of the abyss to find solid ground in science and reasonable doubt. But his deconversion is only half the tale. After leaving the faith, he set out to discover whether without God there could be such a thing as moral truth and meaning in life. After a long and anguished search, he unexpectedly found both. 

Guest PostStar Map is about my ten-year odyssey through the upside down world of Christian fundamentalism. I try not only to tell the strange, half-mad tale of my religious conversion and deconversion, but also to document my bruising confrontation with the philosophical and theological implications of my religious (and irreligious) beliefs. My faith shattered because my religious beliefs self-destructed. When I took them at face value and accepted them without question, they undermined themselves, their inconsistencies cracking my faith like an egg. Then science and reason punched holes in the pieces that were left.

This is how I described to a friend the pivotal moment of doubt:

“When the Holy Spirit spoke,” I said, “I was always sure it was the Holy Spirit. When the Holy Spirit told me something, I was always certain it was true. But when I was most certain, when I was most sure, the Holy Spirit spoke—and the Holy Spirit spoke falsely. It looks like I had been speaking to myself all along. Anything I took on faith before is—”

“Is what?”

“Unknown. I now know nothing.”

“Are you telling me you’re a damn agnostic?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Simon stared at me for a long time, and when he spoke, he spoke softly. I was surprised not to be getting the full Billy Sunday treatment.

“Do you think you’re the only Christian who has ever felt this way?”

I wasn’t about to tell him I felt hopeless and alone, like the last person left on a dying planet. “No,” I said, “I think every devotee of every religion of faith is in the same boat with me. I don’t see how they can know anything based on their inner experience.”

This crushing revelation came after years of my trying to abandon the concerns of this world and focus every thought and action on the other world, the spiritual realm that bred a disregard for anything human, natural, and real. The two worlds pulled at me so hard I thought I might split in two. Much later I would identify other-worldliness as a critical flaw in nearly every religion.

This is how I viewed my cosmic tug-of-war:

Inside me began another battle in the war of the two worlds: the spiritual, or heavenly, world, and the earthly world. I had been trying to give myself over to the world where every coin in life is spent for the sake of the spiritual or the heavenly, where faith and scripture hold sway and earthly concerns wane. In this ethereal other world, the first commandment is believe, the second is obey, and the last resort is evidence and reason. In that sphere I was supposed to have the faith of Abraham, the biblical hero who believed God had commanded him to sacrifice his firstborn son and who raised the knife to do what human morality forbade. Abraham’s hand was stayed at the last moment because he proved that he would murder the human race if God asked him to. Most Christians saw this story as a vindication of Abraham’s faith. That’s what I wanted to believe too. But I couldn’t help viewing it sometimes as evidence that faith and obedience can lead a good man to commit horrific acts.

Some of me was still in this world, the sphere of the finite and earthly and secular. The prime commandments here are live, think, and feel. In this sphere, Abraham is a moral monster willing to drown common decency in the blood of his own child. Here Abraham is ready to do the unthinkable without thinking. Why? Because a voice from a burning bush commanded him?

Bewildered and traumatized by the loss of my God and my pious absolutes, I wondered what all godless seekers must wonder at one time or another: If there is no God, is there any such thing as right or wrong? If God is dead, is everything permitted? Without religion, is earthly life bereft of all meaning?

Trying to answer these jagged questions dropped me into intellectual and spiritual agony but also pulled me slowly down a path to enlightenment. I turned to the only truth-detector I had left—reason:

I had already lost faith in faith, and I decided that, contrary to the true believer’s creed, reason was a wiser bet. After all, it was through reason that I had uncovered the failures of faith, the fallibility of the church, and the phoniness of my miracles. On these issues, faith had gone dark, and I had gone dark with it.

I figured reason could not be the bugaboo that believers made it out to be. First, they used reason themselves every day in all sorts of ways. Second, from their perspective, reason was a gift from God, just as the senses of smell and touch were. Did they presume that God gave them this light and forbade them to shine it on the world?

Ultimately I found there really were objective moral truths and objective sources of meaning—and God had nothing to do with it. I was driven to this conclusion not by dogma or scripture but by philosophical reflection on the goods and evils of the real world. In an odd, painful way, I had come round to secular views on morality and meaning that philosophers and other thinkers had articulated hundreds of years before and after Christ. Now, at age sixty-six and after authoring or coauthoring almost twenty books on philosophy, ethics, and religion, I still think those views are essentially correct—except that now they are, I hope, more solidly backed by science and reason.

Most deeply committed believers don’t respond to critiques of their religion from external sources like philosophers and biblical scholars. What is more likely to turn their heads is internal critiques, those that arise from the contradictions and conflicts in their own beliefs. When religious beliefs themselves lead to rational doubt, a grain of honest skepticism is born, and that can lead to personal transformation. This is why religions work so hard to douse even the smallest flames of doubt. But for people who aren’t afraid to think critically, doubt is the way to wisdom.

Atheism isn’t a religion,
it’s a personal relationship with reality.
— seen on the internet