Powder, on 05 January 2010 - 09:35 PM, said:
Terez you sound like the average person who grows up in the western church. It is not secret that she is dieing. Currently 70% of youths who grow up in the church in America leave and never return. It is a story that breaks my heart. If I had to guess, Christianity was given to you like this: Here are a bunch of rules to keep God happy. Make sure you go to church often, give them some of your money, and if you aren't so bad at keeping these rules someday you get into heaven. If you are bad and do not, you go to hell. Now lets sing that next hymn. It did'nt take you long to figure out that the second you do not hold these same presuppositions (you may not have called them that at the time) like Heaven and hells existence, you no longer needed to abide by the rules which were always so restrictive anyway. So you stopped.
This is not exactly how it went.
Interestingly, I have an aunt who made a similar assumption recently. I have a few friends on Facebook from my dad's side of the family (the extremely religious side), but nevertheless they have different circles on Facebook. There was a poll going around, 'Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins?' I took the poll, and posted it with the simple question, 'Why should I believe?' Surprisingly, both my stepmom and my aunt replied on the thread. My stepmom took the in-and-out route, posting why she felt I should believe, and not coming back, but my aunt made a few comments. It was surprising to me because she is a very sweet and seemingly non-confrontational women (this is based on my limited experience of her - she has lived in New Jersey almost my whole life, but her husband is a commercial pilot out of JFK, so she has the opportunity to visit often), and there was already a bit of heat in the debate when she stepped in.
Anyway, she mentioned that she felt the Church was dying because there was too much emphasis on rules, and not enough emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus.
The church I was raised in (by her brother, my dad) was a large-ish conservative, non-charismatic Southern Baptist church. From my earliest memories, I remember being told that Good Works™ do not get anyone into heaven. It was a fact emblazoned upon my brain. Faith in Jesus was the only thing that would get me into heaven, faith that Jesus died for my sins, and that if I only accepted his sacrifice, then I would spend eternity with Jesus. And of course, the acceptance must be
sincere. If my acceptance was sincere, then the proof of it would be a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ™. So long as I continued to have faith, then Jesus would
hold my hand through the ups and downs of life, and I would see the evidence of his hand in my life, up to and including tithing and Good Works™. If I prayed (in the right way, of course - plenty of advice on that in the Bible), I would see the answers to my questions in some way (always indirect - no one I knew claimed to actually hear the Voice of God), and my needs provided for. The best way to develop a Personal Relationship with Jesus™ was to read my Bible, and to surround myself with Christian fellowship, to pray, and to make God a factor in every aspect of my life, all the while opening myself up to the will of God.
Does any of that sound familiar? Most of it is straight out of Luther, and hasn't changed much at its core since then. It is the staple of most 'serious' Protestants' doctrine diet, and even Catholics have adopted the approach over the years, though they maintain the Sacraments in the same category as the Good Works™, but somewhat higher-placed - if you are a Real Christian™ possessing a Personal Relationship with Jesus Christ™, then of course you will want to do the Sacraments (which is not that different from what Catholic doctrine has always been).
I was also taught from a young age that there were churches like you describe, where Christianity was casual, and where the Good News™ was downplayed for more mundane aspects of religion. Now that I am an atheist, I believe that this assumption is largely a myth. There are certainly 'casual' Christians, but most of them do not go to church at all, or at least very rarely. There are a good number who go to church for some non-faith reasons, but most of these people have faith as well, or at least believe that they do every bit as much as the 'serious' Christians, and many believe (with good reason) they actually understand the true message of Jesus better than the zealots. I believe now that most churches are just as serious about the Good News™ as any other; the church staff and elders have come to accept that they depend on many 'casual' Christians for tithes, but they do not like it.
Make no mistake: I believed this every bit as much as you do now. In retrospect, I can see that I suppressed the questions that caused me to question my faith, but I believed wholeheartedly. I was aware of those questions to the point of having justifications for them, but I knew that some of these justifications were weak, and it was this that I tended to suppress.
My church typically did not allow the baptism of young children, following the philosophy that children would not be held accountable on Judgment Day, and that the decision to Get Saved™ should be a conscious one made by a mature mind. There was no specific age limit, but the pastor always interviewed the children who wanted to get baptized to make sure that they were ready, and the ones who were deemed ready were usually no younger than 12 (which is, of course, the age at which Jesus became a man, when he went
rogue to church without his parents' permission).
I don't remember exactly how old I was when I first got baptized, but I remember being indoctrinated enough to start immediately looking for evidence in my life of what I had done, and I remember finding it. The experience itself was charged with emotion to the point of rapture, which I of course saw as evidence of God touching me. I can't recall now exactly what evidence I found beyond that, but I can remember from later years the sort of thing that I typically saw as evidence of God working in my life. At the top of the list were coincidences, of any kind. If a coincidence was fortunate, then it was God's hand helping me. If a coincidence was neutral or unfortunate, then I would look for some kind of message in it, and try to figure out what God was trying to tell me.
Of course, there were also several of these otherworldly emotional experiences over the years, where I felt God was touching me or speaking to me in some way. My church had a number of events for the youth of the church, especially for the teenagers who were all by then expected to be saved. We did mission work in various places, and went to revival conferences where there was always much renewal of faith for everyone. We had Sunday School for 2 hours before the service - the first hour was intensive Bible study for small groups, sorted by age and gender, and the second hour was a collective meeting of the entire teenage group. We were expected to take notes during the pastor's sermon. We were encouraged to disagree with church elders on points of doctrine, and certainly encouraged to discuss things. We were discouraged from taking a hard line on questions of doctrine unless there was some sort of obvious moral choice.
Also, since I am a musician, I was very sensitive to the emotional aspect of church music. Some of it is very well-written in terms of how it works to stimulate certain emotions. I was in the choir from my earliest memories, and began singing in the adult choir some years before everyone else because I had the ear to sing alto. I played trumpet in a praise band. I took piano lessons briefly from the church pianist, and sometimes snuck into the church's smaller chapel to experiment with the organ. I was in the handbell choir, playing both with the youth and the adults. Our Minister of Music was an extremely talented musician with whom I am still in touch.
I saw all of these things - the emotional experiences, whether in revival or music or random, the coincidences, etc. - along with my ideas about the perfection of creation and the incomprehension of a finite existence - as proof of God. I couldn't provide any evidence for his existence, but I
knew he was real. It frustrated me that I couldn't properly convey that
knowledge to other people.
I stopped going to church for one reason above all others: despite the doctrine that encourages the believer to focus on the Personal Relationship™ rather than on deeds, the church fellowship inevitably becomes a continual display of hypocrisy, due to the human weakness that is well-documented in the Bible. No one is perfect, but inevitably it becomes clear that some Christians are less perfect than others, and that some might not be Christians at all. Despite the doctrinal justifications for ignoring this hypocrisy, supporting each other rather than accusing, after a while it became clear to me that it was impossible to avoid.
I actually tried going to other churches for a while, working on the assumption that my church was flawed because it was big and affluent. I tried going to smaller churches with friends, most of them not Baptist, and found the same thing there - people whose lives were ruled by measuring themselves against each other, and against the rest of the world. They were bound together by the latter, and divided by the former. I think it is inevitable because the line between what makes a Real Christian™ and what makes a poser is so unclear. It matters to the individual because they need some sort of indicator of where
they stand with God. Most Christians will tell you that they
know where they stand with God, and believe it, but the truth is that it is difficult to gauge how much of our own failings can be explained by human weakness, and how much is an indicator of a lack of faith. The 'evidence' of our Relationship™ is tenuous at best - very few will claim to have actually seen an angel or anything like that, or to have heard the Voice of God; our 'evidence' is normally more subtle than that - so we look for the seemingly more solid indicator of our faith in our behavior, whether consciously or unconsciously.
The Bible suggests that there is
much in the lives of the vast majority of individuals that would indicate a lack of faith. Supposedly, if you have enough faith in God, you should be able to heal people. A old friend of mine posted on the same Facebook thread that my aunt jumped in (he was part of why the debate was heated when she arrived, along with another friend who is an atheist). His answer to the question, 'Why should I believe?', included an assertion that he had seen faith healing done with his own eyes, by his father (a pastor). He claimed that the media was not interested in documenting this, or investigating it at all. Having watched several documentaries on faith healing and the like, I of course disagreed with him.
When I was 17, some of the last churches I tried before giving up on church altogether were charismatic churches. I had read the Paul and Jerusalem Church bits of the New Testament enough to know what their doctrine stemmed from, and I thought that perhaps they were on to something. I found that the charismatic churches (I went to several) were in general a bit rougher than the non-charismatic. There were a lot more poor folk, and many more members with colorful pasts, including drug use and general debauchery, children out of wedlock, etc. At first I thought this was really nifty and non-judgmental, and I thought that it jived a lot better with Jesus's healing the sick philosophy.
I approached the charismatic aspect of the service with an open mind at first. A pastor made his way down a line of the church youth, touching them on the forehead and proclaiming something about being slain in the spirit or whatever it was. Each one of them collapsed at his touch. I was not indoctrinated in this belief, but I knew that they believed that these youth were collapsing because they were touched by God (otherwise, it would be incredibly silly). When he got to me, I opened my mind to the experience, and collapsed at his touch. But I realized as I did it that there was nothing truly special about it; I opened my mind to collapsing, and my muscles obeyed. I also realized how easy it would be for someone who was indoctrinated in this Truth™ to believe that God was taking control in a situation like that.
I went to a few tent revival type things, and saw a lot, but after a while I learned how to avoid being made to participate in the charismatic elements of the service. I saw people 'speaking in tongues', but it didn't seem to me to be anything like how it was done in the early days of the Holy Spirit, where the point was that each person would hear the speaker in his own language (a sort of reverse Babel effect). I saw several 'slain in the spirit' type things. I saw a lot of hand-raising and swaying and crying. I never saw anything close to a convincing faith healing. As I got to know several charismatics, I realized that many of them lived perpetual cycles of their colorful pasts, having periods of lack of faith and drug use or drinking, and periods of being good and going to church. Some of them lived both at the same time. And I didn't really feel all that judgmental toward the drug-users, either - I was abstemious at the time, but many of my friends were not - but I questioned whether the drug use might in some cases contribute to the ability of these people to believe so strongly in these apparently fake rituals.
So I stopped going to church altogether when I first went to college in 1996, with the exception of the occasional visit to my dad's new church (a small country-type church even though it is in the city) and performances with the university handbell choir, which I did for two years. I continued to believe for about ten more years, though. I had just become convinced that church was detrimental to faith. I didn't acknowledge at the time that church was also largely necessary to
maintain faith.
The 'rules' were largely irrelevant in all of this. Most of the moral rules of Christianity, I still keep to this day; the religious rules are even murkier than the moral ones, and they are only relevant if you believe, and only really onerous if you do not.
My loss of faith came because I decided that my 'evidence' for God's existence was arbitrary, and in fact no different from the evidence that one finds to support the belief in the daily horoscope. The particulars of the belief system are complicated and murky enough to be near-infinitely manipulable, and the search for evidence for God's existence is, in fact, a contradiction of faith itself.
I used to love reading stories about people who had an experience with something like a guardian angel, or a faith healing, things like that (the story of M is a good example of that sort of thing), but after a while I began to question why things like this never happened to me. There is the obvious answer, that I did not have enough faith. But I didn't believe that was true at all - I had plenty of faith, as much as anyone else and probably more than most in my teenage years. I knew that the point of faith was that there were not going to be any miracles to prove God's existence for me - he would always leave some measure of doubt. There is always a more mundane explanation for something that appears to be supernatural.
Once I realized that my evidence was arbitrary, I also had to face the fact that my faith was inherently selfish. This meshed with the knowledge that I had accumulated over the years. I had come to know several non-Christians, and had come to the conclusion that Christians did not seem any better served by their faith, in general, than people of other religions. I came to see Christianity as just another means of man placing himself above other men, down to the most selfless detail. The morals of Western culture are difficult to separate from Christianity simply because Christianity has ruled the roost for nearly two thousand years, but non-Christian cultures have developed similar moral codes, in some cases more strict, in some cases less but still quite effective. What did Christianity have to offer that other belief systems did not? Well, I had always assumed that Christianity had something special to offer, obviously, but I had no evidence upon which to base those beliefs, nothing clear to show that Christians had something that other people did not. The only argument for the Truth of Christianity was the fact that it was the largest religion in the world, but what I knew of history did not indicate that this dominance was gained by any particular
virtue of Christianity. There was also the fact that democracy ostensibly came out of Christianity - and indeed, there is good support of this with Jesus's 'give unto Caesar' philosophy - but not only did the age of revolution coincide with a time when religious was questioned more rigorously than it ever had been: it also has become somewhat of a false dichotomy in Western culture, especially in the US, where other ideas are pitted against democracy unnecessarily. There is a great deal more to support communism in the gospels than there is to support democracy. This is, of course, a false dichotomy, as communism and democracy are not opposites, but in US culture the two are pitted against one another quite religiously. Which leads me to this:
Quote
This question is for anyone(who is athiest) to answer: "On what grounds do you base human rights?"
Human rights are most certainly a social construct. The moral codes of the various ancient religions all seem to have been derived from the same basic sentiments, that men should not harm one another (unless gods will it), that the rights and freedoms of the individual should not be a detriment to the rights and freedoms of society as a whole. There is a great deal of room for subjectivity in those sentiments, and there always has been, hence the difference between cultures and the evolution of cultures over time, and their efforts to manipulate, dominate, and even eradicate other cultures to their own benefit. And yet, in all cultures, there is evidence for those who sought to understand other cultures, sought to make peace rather to subjugate.
The grounds upon which we should base human rights should, above all, be logic. It's not a perfect tool, and it is still subjective to a large extent, but in my opinion, it is the best tool that we have. In my opinion, religion only serves to complicate the moral code. I can agree with Christians on the vast majority of their moral codes, insofar as they relate to society as a whole, but there are certain places at which I will butt heads with most Christians, and people of other religions as well. I won't assume that any particular religious person reading this is a promulgator of these views; they are merely examples of places where I feel religion complicates moral code in a negative way.
The designation of homosexuality as a sin, for example. Now, I know a lot of Christians who adopt this philosophy: that Jesus said that one sin is much the same as the next, and all men, even Christians, are sinners in one way or another, and have no right to judge each other. I think that the spirit behind that philosophy is probably a good spirit, but it nevertheless has a dangerous edge to it, where a true crime might be seen as equal with a minor offense - not that I think that any of these people are really in danger of making that mistake (they are mostly good people); it just creates an inconsistency - but if the issue is approached from a perspective of pure logic, then this dangerous justification is not necessary. There are other justifications from Christians who have chosen to be non-judgmental on this issue: some believe it is not a sin at all, because Jesus never mentioned it (that calls a large percentage of the New Testament into question, but I have heard it said, 'I am a Christian, not a Paulian', and this ranges to things such as the expected behavior of women in church). It can probably be determined with a fair amount of confidence whether or not homosexuality is harmful to society, and it should probably not be assumed to be harmful to society without a great deal of evidence.
There is some evidence that anal sex can be harmful to a person's health, for instance. But the phenomenon is hardly limited to homosexuality, and fails to represent half of homosexuals at all. Logically, rather than approaching the issue from the angle of 'sin', it seems best to approach the issue from a technical perspective, informing kids in sex education classes exactly why it isn't healthy, how some of those adverse effects might be avoided, and which ones can't be avoided. The introduction of the religious argument into the picture complicates the issue because it is a religious taboo. Most Christians in the US believe it is sinful to introduce teenagers to the details of anal sex in order to inform them of its dangers; at least partly because of this belief, the phenomenon remains widespread among those who are unaware of the risks beyond HIV, which everyone knows about (if not how widespread it has become).
Then, there is some argument that homosexuality is a detriment to society because it endangers the necessary cultural building block, the so-called traditional family. But there is actually a great deal of evidence that the 'traditional family' is tied up with a great number of social injustices, and isn't necessarily as beneficial as it is purported to be. There is argument against allowing homosexual couples to marry and adopt children, based on religious tradition and nothing else, beyond an outdated notion that it is our moral duty to personally populate the world, when there are so many children in the world that need homes. The idea that we own our children is deeply rooted; in terms of adoption, and laws where children can be taken away from their parents, to a degree we already compete for the right to have children. But it is unthinkable that we should also compete for the right to
give birth to children. Technology is being developed that might make it possible for homosexual couples to conceive their own children - who are we to say that they do not have the right?
I know that a lot of people believe that their faith is the source of their morality, and I don't necessarily have a problem with that, even though I think that religion and morality grew together as social constructs in the widespread and multifaceted attempt to cultivate a society that survives and thrives. I only have a problem when an action is condemned for no real reason other than religion. In the case of homosexuality, I can see a number of reasons why it came to be outlawed in certain societies, some with good intentions and some with selfish intentions, but I don't think that these reasons have stood up to the test of time.
Another example that is not so black-and-white for me is the issue of abortion. It would definitely be considered murder to kill a baby as soon as it is born, so there is a question of where that line should be drawn. I believe that Christians would have much better success in this area if they would approach it from a preventative angle rather than from a legal angle, but approaching it from a preventative angle requires once again that the Christian sex taboo be put aside, which so many Christians seem unwilling to do.
So, aside from the question of where our morals
come from, I suspect that most Christians believe that religion is a necessary motivator for men to abide by a moral code, whether by an institution of enforcement, or by a Personal Relationship with Jesus™. Again, I think religion only complicates the issue, because it necessitates the belief that the path we have chosen is somehow superior to other paths, based on things that have little to do with the actual merit of an action. If the religious person acknowledges that other paths can be equal, then religion is therefore irrelevant to motivation, and the code of morality is independent of religion.
Since it cannot be established that there is an afterlife, then I believe that we have no choice but to behave as though the years we have in this life are the only ones we will ever have, and there is no better goal to aspire toward than the betterment of life for all people. It is honest to acknowledge that there will always be selfish motivations lurking beneath benevolent acts; I believe it is even healthy to acknowledge that. I find it difficult to separate religious piety from vanity of the worst kind. No offense to the Christians reading; that is how I came to see myself when I finally lost my faith, and Solomon's philosophical rants might have had a great deal to do with that loss of faith. I can still relate to Ecclesiastes; he asks the right questions, though in some cases I disagree with the conclusions that he supposedly came to.
Help
, of course you may have once been believers and have a very similar edge on me. If any of you were believers and have since stopped believing I would treasure an ongoing conversation with you to see just how the 'faith went wrong'. That is not to say that I do not enjoy and admire the discussion we have going on at present of course.
Anyway...back to my belated response:
Well...who knows? But back to the point at hand, God in his omnipotent all loving self knows that I need proof for me to believe, to prove to me that he exists would cost him nothing (omnipotence is handy), he has failed, thus far, to do so...Therefore, for the time being, he does not exist. That's pretty much the logic behind my disbelief.
