The Expatriate Act

Onward!

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:00:00 +0000

I've been exceptionally busy lately on projects that are more mentally taxing than usual. Thus, I haven't been able to give much time to the practice of writing and upsetting the mothers of my friends. My most humble apologies.

I've had a lot to say, but little of it keeps with the tone of this blog when I began it, and I've been wondering why this is. I think that, deep down, it is because I've come to terms with my loss of faith and it isn't a big deal anymore. I've moved on a bit in the past 6 months, which is the healthy thing to do. I still want to write, but it has less to do with "Here's why I don't believe that God exists" and more to do with "Here's what I think now, here is what is important to me now that I don't believe that God exists". I want to write about what I've learned, what I think, and how my views have to adapt to a world in which the whole world isn't resting in some father figure's hands.

For a few months there I was having friendly little debates with people, in person and in writing. Most of that has dropped off either because they were entirely supportive, they have lost interest or their arguments, honestly, weren't very developed. I'm not saying that to erect some monument to my own cleverness - I have held very firmly to the idea that these concepts have existed long before me, and that one doesn't need any special mental prowess to grasp them. It is simply that faith, for many people, is a garden wall that stunts their ability to see beyond their yard. A good example might be a teacher holding a conference with a parent.

Teacher : Steve isn't performing well in math or history.
Parent : Well, Steve is extremely bright for his age.
Teacher : That may be so, but he is failing both subjects and is in danger of being held back.
Parent : I don't understand. Steve is an incredibly intelligent boy. Perhaps his style of learning simply doesn't gel with your teaching style.
Teacher : Well, Steve may be incredibly intelligent, but the fact remains that he is failing and something must be done.
Parent : Listen, I love my child and I'm not going to sit here and listen to you tell me he's not intelligent.
Teacher : I'm just saying he is failing both subjects. Perhaps your inability to accept that he might be under-performing is making it difficult to see that he is under-performing.
Parent : Maybe the problem is you.

Note that the teacher here could actually be wrong in some way, but the conversation cannot continue because the parent cannot progress past their null hypothesis, that their child is so intelligent that an under-performance must be the fault of the teacher. I know that I fell into this for many years. Established facts and accepted consensus were as up for debate as the interpretation of scripture. When you are taught to doubt what you see and implicitly trust the subjective experiences that fall in line with a particular theology, it doesn't seem too bizarre to treat all reality as one would treat the interpretation of a dream. This worship of mystery creates a virtue of obstinate ignorance. I love mystery. I love unanswered questions. They drive me to explore, to think, to understand, and to know what I do and don't know. I appreciate the world through learning, and that learning can only come from recognizing and loving mystery. Many people, however, see mystery as something precious in itself, something that is holy and untouchable. For them, there is such a thing as learning too much. For them, there are border checks at which one must suspend critical thought. This is precisely why someone like me could spend most of his life ignoring evidence and logic, while still seeing myself as a thoughtful, logical guy. I could do so because above all, my allegiance was to my faith, instead of what reasoning capabilities I possessed. What an impoverished view. It is a tiny window looking out into the vastness of the universe, covered in decals, with curtains and window blinds obscuring the edges. Coming out of it has been exhilarating and well worth it.

I say all that to again reiterate that I haven't found the conversations lacking because of any inherent intelligence on my part or lack of intelligence on the part of those with whom I've conversed. But when you come to a point where you're receiving emails from different people with lines like "Well, you're obviously very full of yourself for thinking that you could even figure God out. If He's as great as He says He is there's NO way you could ever understand Him", you realize that you're hitting a brick wall. Well, maybe not a brick wall so much as an electrified fence. Such a quote is laden with at least two terrible bits of reasoning, and the person writing it is doing so with enough emotion that it becomes clear that we're not talking about Steve's performance anymore - we're talking about Steve's parents' emotions. I can really relate to this, as mentioned above and in other entries. I think I knew God was a myth long before I accepted that God was a myth. I still really needed it to be true for my entire worldview to hold together. In order for the world to work the way I wanted it to, I had to keep large portions of it behind curtains, and then swear that no one could possibly see behind them. I had to elevate mystery to a good in and of itself. It was no longer the fuel of progress - it was the thing around which I circled my wagons. It reduced the world to a hazy mist of "truths" instead of demonstrably true statements. It replaced knowledge with intuition. It replaced curiosity with defensiveness. And more than any other baggage I picked up during my nearly three decades of dedicated faith, that is the thing that irks me the most.

So enough with that. You can go back and read and watch my transitioning, my process of reasoning, and my emotions through the first few months of posts. At this point I want to make more positive statements (that is, not "positive" in the sense of "happy", but in the sense of "building"). I want to write about what is important to me now, in light of these changes. That means I'll probably write less long-form atheoogical essays, and more about other subjects that tie in with my changed experience and understanding of the world. My continued education marches onward, and just as I live-blogged my dealing with rejecting theism (with all the emotional messiness it entailed), I want to live-blog my moving on. That may never end, which is comforting to me.

So stay tuned and let's see what happens. Thanks so much for reading. I'll try to make it worth your while.

Be Well,
-scott

Accidentally Thinking Critically

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 08:21:00 +0000

Oh, you're kidding me! Alchemy doesn't even work? What the heck have I been doing? Geez!

Last time I recounted a religious experience I had at a concert the Saturday on September 15th, 2001. That experience changed my life and informed much of who I was then and who I have come to be now. But something else happened on September 16th which perhaps affected my life even more.

Arriving at the Baptist church some of my family were attending, I noticed for the first time that there was a large American flag draped over the doorway. In the lobby, someone was giving out little American flags to attach to your car antenna. While this became a common sight in the first few years after 9/11, it was a jarring change at first. The service was an informal one, and people just really wanted to talk about the events of the previous Tuesday. My area of Northern New Jersey was about 30 minutes outside of Manhattan, and people I had known growing up had died in the World Trade Center. Coworkers of my dad had been in the area that morning. Seemingly everyone was only 1 or 2 degrees of separation from the attack. I was living with my parents at the time, and so when I woke that Tuesday morning to get ready to go to work, I noticed that the answering machine light on the living room phone was blinking. It was a message from my dad telling us to turn on the tv as soon as we got up. I turned on the tv and well, you know the rest. The WTC fell to the ground along with thousands of people. My mom drove me to work (I was one of those kids who didn't drive until he was 22) and along the way, we stopped to join the dozens of others who had parked on a local hill to see the smoke pouring into the sky from Manhattan.

That week at the cell phone store was a chaotic. Everyone's signal was messed up, as many providers had towers on top of the WTC, and the huge swell of cellular communication was wreaking havoc with calls. Ambulance sirens were omnipresent as were police cars. Everyone who came into the store was buying a cell phone for a loved one or a prepaid card for someone they feared would be going to war. We also sold satellite tv and kept it on in the front room all day, so most of the time I was sitting at the store alone, watching the endlessly repeating shots of people trying to figure out what happened, how it happened, and what to do next. People were asking me, like I would know just because I had specific info on how and why their cell signal was effected. Things quickly went from dark and helpless to dark and angry.

The arab-looking man at the 7/11 next door was pulled into the parking lot and beaten. A few days after the attack, a young man who might have been 24 stormed in and bought a stack of phone cards. He told me that we were indeed going to war. He looked at the tv and saw images of villagers in Afghanistan in a report on the feared civilian casualties of an all-out strike, especially since the location and even culpability of Bin Laden were hazy in those early days. He pointed at the screen and shouted "I'm coming for you! I'm going to fucking kill all of you and all of your fucking women and all of your filthy fucking children!".

As a disclaimer: I feel that I have to mention that I have known many other soldiers who were lovely people who didn't want to kill anyone's filthy fucking children and that this guy was just full of emotion and that this incident does not speak for the armed forces in general. The point of this post isn't even political.

Then I heard that the US was immediately flying over to Afghanistan and would be adopting what I understood to be a relative "take no prisoners show of force" policy in overthrowing the Taliban government there. Now, I was raised a cultural, religious and political conservative. I had voted for George W Bush a couple of months after I turned 18 because the voters guide I had been given at church described him as Pro-Life and Pro-God, and described Al Gore as being for "Abortion On Demand" and for putting US troops under the command of the UN, which was obviously just the kickoff to the new world order spoken of so clearly in Revelation. I was very much for wars that punished the bad guys. But through all of this, I never thought that the US had any special claim to being inherently correct or virtuous, I never thought of the US as a Christian nation or having some Bat-phone to God, and like anyone who paid attention in history class I was aware that my country was as prone to bad decision-making as anyone. So when I first heard about the coming airstrikes and then ground-invasion into Afghanistan, I was skeptical. I was also skeptical about how so many people I knew were suddenly buying and hanging American flags everywhere.

This brings us back to church on that Sunday. The informal talk, lead by the very nice pastor Steve, centered on those who had lost friends or loved ones, how to deal with tragedy, and how to weather the stress and uncertainty that was sure to mark the coming months and years. Quickly, the discussion turned to whether or not God was trying to tell America something. Several people expressed that several talk-radio hosts had been saying that God was going to strike America because of abortion, feminism and the gay agenda. One guy simply yelled "Damned Ecumenicals!" Now, this was a middle-class, suburban, VERY moderate church. The sermons were light and funny. The atmosphere was about what you'd get at any mainline protestant denomination. But this Sunday, understandably, people were not at their best. We were all afraid and angry, and having something to cling onto (even if that something was just ill-defined rage) was still something. In my heart I wondered if this was not some sort of divine retribution for Bush's recent speech on the whole stem-cell research thing, which stunned those of us who were involved with the pro-life movement. I had been at the March For Life that year and there was much consternation as to why the president hadn't come out to the march and endorse it, as many expected him to do.

I was in the car when an older friend stopped at a local lawn and garden store to buy one of the innumerable American flags that were suddenly on sale. When he got back in the car, he looked at my face and remarked that he could tell I didn't like it. It wasn't the fact that it was an American flag, I said, it just seemed weird that suddenly Americans were going out of their way to advertise their allegiance to America. I mean, we all lived here. Most of us weren't flying flags before. Why did this suddenly change it? My friend responded that it was to show support.
Support for who or what?
Support for our troops and their mission.
Should we ever show unwavering support for any institution? At this point, less than a week from the attacks, did we even know who to punish and where they were located? Wouldn't thousands of innocent civilians potentially die as a result of the rush into military action?
My friend replied that such a thing may happen, but someone had to be punished.
Even if we punished the wrong people, I asked?
My friend reiterated - no matter what, even if it's not precisely who did it, someone had to be held responsible. Someone had to die for this.

Now, of course that wasn't the reasoning of everyone at the time and my friend was simply being emotional, but that conversation in the car flicked some switch in my head. Suddenly it seemed that the people I had voted for, had trusted, whose opinions on politics and God I had taken as gospel - they were baying for blood and revenge, even if thousands of innocent people who had nothing to do with the attack on the World Trade Center were killed. That evening my family sat in the living room and watched a commentator describing the many reasons why Afghanistan needed to be bombed even if they weren't directly involved. As he went on, I did something I'd never done before. I walked over to the computer in the corner, turned it on, and read everything I could find about Afghanistan. Then I read all that I could find on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. I found that the more I read, the more I noticed a disconnect between what most other sources said and what the commentators on tv and talk radio were saying. In the months that followed I noticed that the church culture in which I had been raised was falling over themselves to brand this as a holy war, one in which God used his city on a hill to destroy the evildoers. And suddenly I felt like I had been wrong - not because I had actually thought out my ideals, but because I never had.

And that was probably the birth of my adult experience with critical thinking. I was beginning to hold a mirror up to my own views and see if they gelled with the observable facts. I was starting to question authorities, not out of straight rebellion, but out of a desire to verify what they said. After all, if people in church and I myself had been so eager to blame the attacks on whatever personally offended us, who was to say that the people we trusted to lead us were not doing the same? Of course, you know the answer to that. Why did the earthquake happen in Haiti? Because of a deal with the devil. Why did Hurricane Katrina strike? Because of - you guessed it - abortion, feminism and the gay agenda. Why did that terrible tsunami hit Indonesia? Because of their pagan ways. And this was the first time I had really recognized this type of reasoning, and why it was wrong. We were all just afraid and angry. That lead us to make statements that we could never actually back up. And this was not only wrong, but it lead to actual results in our lives and in our world.

A lot has changed in the past 10 years. As I've grown, my views have changed in radical ways from where I was that Sunday night. I would soon be in prolonged situations where people would question my beliefs and ideas quite openly and sometimes antagonistically. The only antidote for this was to read and think more, to be as sure as I could about what I knew and how I knew it. After having been raised on essentially christian conspiracy theories, it took a long while for me to not simply fall into their opposite number. I think many people do this - they become disillusioned with a particular group and make the completely emotional and identity-driven leap to identifying with the opposite side. It takes a while to understand that the truth is rarely 100% within someone's ideological platform. When I worked for a year in an office full of gun-happy Christian secessionists, I was asked about my political beliefs and then had them relentlessly challenged by people far older and far more zealous. It forced me to read more and think more, if I actually wanted to hold on to my beliefs and defend them. A few years later, I would meet the opposite of these men. Some staunch lefty anarchists I knew online were discussing Loose Change and urged me to watch it. At the time, this film chilled me pretty much to the bone. I remember Bethany and I watched it in our office while working one night. When it was done, Bethany just said "Well that was... something". I was rattled. It all made sense and the proof was right there on the screen: Bush had planned 9/11 and carried it out as a pretext for the War On Terror. There was nothing in this that didn't somehow gel with my own ideas about the then-current administration and their endless war mandate. So I stayed up the entire night hunting down the sources from the documentary. I spent the next few days reading. I have to say, the movie's theories really hold up as long as you don't read much about them. It was a succession of bitter pills for me. First, it was a bitter pill to accept that our own government was really behind the 9/11 attacks. Secondly, it was a bitter pill to realize that I had accepted that claim uncritically simply because it fit with some of my political philosophies. The claims made in the movie have been disproved and addressed time and time again, but it takes time to read all of that. I learned that day to take extra time to fact-check claims and theories that appeal to you personally, as they are often your biggest blind spot.

At the time I was also a believer in the one conspiracy to which I actually gave credence - the claim that the moon landing was faked. I am still somewhat embarrassed about that. I don't have space to go into why I thought this made sense, but a Google search will provide you with all the information you may need, should you be curious. I saw that there was a documentary on the subject called Dark Side Of The Moon that featured actual heads of state and family members of Stanley Kubrick, who was purported to have helmed the filming of the fake moon landing in a warehouse. I watched it, mouth agape, as the interviews with powerful players confirmed everything I suspected. There was Henry Kissinger, openly admitting that it was all a fake! And Kubrick's widow speaking openly about the hoax! Once again, I was both chilled and enthralled. I had been right all along! And then, in the closing credits, an outtakes reel began to play showing that this was, indeed, a mockumentary. It was all a joke to show first how insane the hoax was, and also how credulous people can be. And I was just that credulous. I felt stupid. And so I spent some time doing some actual research on the subject, putting the specific conspiracy claims up against the explanations of scientists and historians. Needless to say, the claims of the conspiracy were far more incredible and included far less evidence and logic than the "official story" that we had, in fact, put a man on the moon. Why had I believed the conspiracy in the first place? What part of me found such a massive cover-up more likely than a long-in-the-works scientific breakthrough? Like Loose Change, it caused me to do some serious soul-searching.

A few years later, some friends of mine got their hands on that never-ending cornucopia of poorly-researched paranoia and misinformation, Zeitgeist. By this time I was well ready to tackle such a roiling cauldron of hokum.

During these years I was also hanging out in a community of people who gave a huge amount of credence to supernatural claims. When my old band was practicing in the basement of a local church, we'd often hear strange noises and see things out of the corners of our eyes when we were there late at night. It was a truly spooky place, mainly because of how the basement was laid out. We began to speak of the place being haunted and even gave a name to the ghost - Denzel. It was a joke among some spooked kids, but we talked about it so much that I wonder if a few of my bandmates didn't start believing there was an actual spirit haunting the church. A sister in law of one of my bandmates had a vision where she saw the ghost and God revealed to her the ghost's nature. By those who knew her, this claim was taken uncritically. After all, there was as much evidence for that happening as anything they believed. This family was regularly seeing demons and angels wherever they looked. Their father wanted to move his house church to Brazil, because he had foreseen that in 2008, Hillary Clinton would win the presidency and become the antichrist, and the only place safe from God's wrath would be Brazil. One of them tried to convince me that miners had drilled down so far at one point that they broke through into hell itself, a real place at the actual center of the earth. I was actually ready for this one, as this had been taught to me in school and I had years later fact checked it. I had believed it when I was a kid, but were these adults honestly so willing to be taken for a ride?

I knew Christians who believed that if you were to speak something, your very words would have an effect on reality quite apart from how we normally mean it. You could speak good health or ill health, poverty or riches, peace or violence. If you "confess" anything, it will cause it to have a better chance of happening. It was a Christian version of the law of attraction, and it had been popular with many Christians I had known over the years. A bee flew into a car in which I was riding once. Being in a bad mood and having an allergy to bees, I said "Oh watch, this thing is totally going to sting me to death". A friend in the car quickly warned me, "Don't confess that". I walked into work back at the crazy right-wing web company one day in 2004. I was feeling under the weather. The CFO asked how I was doing. I responded that I was probably coming down with my yearly bout of bronchitis. He scolded me not to "confess" that. I quipped back that he shouldn't worry, as I was about to go to the grocery store and "confess" some over-the-counter-expectorant. Right before The Secret came out, I was actually approached by a guy doing the website for the book to do some little motion-comic thing about the pseudo-history contained in it's pages. True story. I was almost in on the ground floor of The Secret. But I read the synopsis and didn't feel it was ethical for me to participate in promoting such a transparently false set of ideas. Oddly enough, the right-wing web company guys DID get involved, though it clashed violently with their staunch faith. I suppose the law of attraction was a close enough analogue to their own beliefs that they thought it was a good idea. These were things I would have either blindly accepted or rejected out of hand in my youth, but now I was actually taking the time to understand why they were true or false.

Critical thinking isn't simply something that happens to you one day because you are intelligent. All of us know very intelligent people who believe things about which they should know better. But being critical of the ideas you encounter and really understanding why they are correct or incorrect is a practice. Most everyone can flat out agree or disagree with a statement, but being able to show your work is a skill that is sadly not often taught or praised, and it leads to people being overly willing to accept any theory that fits with their worldview, regardless of how it interacts with reality. To many people, the concept of God is just a game. They don't seriously want to think about whether or not their conception of God maps onto reality at all. They simply find the concept useful in their lives, and have an emotional attachment to it. I didn't plan on becoming a critical guy. It happened by accident and by necessity. I'm no smarter or wiser than anyone else. Anyone can become better at it if they are simply willing to follow the evidence even when it runs right over one of their sacred cows. Dogma is a word that is thrown around a lot, but it's an important one. Dogma isn't supported by evidence. It is supported by rhetoric, emotion, laziness and fear. Some dogmatic marxists I have known swear that all wealthy people deserve to be killed. Some dogmatic capitalists I have known actually like Ayn Rand. But our knowledge is never increased by dogmatic means, but rather by simply following the trail of evidence, of things we can observe, prove and argue out. You probably won't find yourself ending up where you thought you might, but you'll certainly end up in a truer, more useful, more fascinating place than you began. Skeptical people are often called cranks, ready to burst the bubble of anyone wanting to escape this mundane world. But being unskeptical and uncritical actually leaves you in a far smaller box. My skepticism has opened my eyes to a universe far larger, more beautiful, more improbable and more hopeful than the one I left. The actual breakthroughs in medical science are far more interesting and amazing than the anti-vaccination conspiracies. The fact that we have been to the moon is far more immense and wonderful than the notion that it was all a public relations sham. The fact that we live in a world full of independent agents all interacting with one another with what appear to us to be free will is far crazier than what The Secret or Astrology would have you believe. The fact of evolution is far more fascinating than young-earth-creationism. Being a creature in a universe that came about by natural processes is so utterly mystifying. Having some faith and optimism in humanity in the face of what many humans actually do, is so much braver than Christianity's view - that everyone is a hopeless, guilty sinner who needs a fantastical external being to both diagnose the problem and fix it, and that things will never be right again until that being destroys the world and most of the people in it. Thinking is always braver than not thinking.

It's funny that what got me in the habit of being critical were theories on why God would do certain things. I never questioned whether it would be ethical for God to send 9/11 as a sign, I just wondered what the sign meant. We know what it meant. The people that caused it made that abundantly clear. But many people have this same internal process when they come upon a natural disaster. They wonder what it means, if it is simply a sign that God is about the drop the curtain on humanity, or whether by changing ourselves we may avoid another disaster. Is God going to release a grainy video tape, recorded in a cave, gloating over the wreckage of Manhattan? The interesting thing is that we are far more immune to natural disasters than we have ever been. There are levies that, while they sometimes fail, more often than not do protect people. There are lightening rods, tornado shelters, life preservers, cell-phones, and earthquake-resistant buildings. There are vaccines against diseases that once wiped out millions. How many "signs from God" are thwarted by these products of thought and ingenuity? How much fear has been thwarted by simply looking at a problem and being critical? We'll never be completely out of danger, both from one another and the universe itself, but we are always making progress.

There are reasons to be optimistic about humanity, and one of the best reasons is critical thinking.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - Can't wait to see what emails I get about this one, as I dismissed 9/11 conspiracies, anti-vax hysteria, Zeitgeist and the moon landing hoax. Come and get me, Alex Jones!

PPS - As a side note about conspiracy theories - they have a common threads with theistic worldviews. Both provide the comfort that an overarching system of control is possible. Both make the world seem so manageable - one by an evil cabal and the other by a supernatural being. Both make sense of the difficult, unexpected and uncontrollable circumstances in which we find ourselves by constructing a worldview in which someone has a plan somewhere that is unfolding as we speak. Both flatter the believer. Both are subject to statements such as "No amount of evidence to the contrary could ever convince me".

Several Salvations

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 01:07:00 +0000

Oh God of Isreal, deliver me. These instructions are all in Japanese.

It was recess time in the first grade. I bowed my head and prayed that Christ come into my heart. I was afraid that I was going to die at recess and go to hell. My family, from my birth to that time, had been regular attendees first of the baptist church in Azle, Texas and now in Streetsboro, Ohio. Beyond the immediate concerns over eternal destinations, being born-again just seemed the thing to do. Most everyone I knew was a Christian, and the pastor kept talking about it as being the best thing you could do. It was purely mercenary, in retrospect, but I think that's all you can hope for at that age. There wasn't a lot of complicated ideas going on. Jesus died for me so I could go to heaven and be with Him. He did this because He loved me. God's wrath is poured out on the wicked and all that, so it's a prudent decision to go with the person who first loved you and second died for you so you should not perish. I also really wanted to see my family after I died. I was somewhat obsessed with death at that age. I was more fascinated than afraid, and I think I blame both the ghost stories I was reading and the relentless focus on the supernatural that Sunday School provides. Either way, it didn't do any harm. When I lifted my head from my desk I followed the rest of the kids outside to wait in line for the cyclone slide. There was other playground equipment, but the slide was the main attraction. Things felt different in a way I hadn't experienced before - kind of a funny, vibrating feeling in my stomach. I was different. Things were different. The slide was still awesome.

Life for one growing up in the church is full of rededication. I can't count how many times I consecrated myself to God in junior high and high school. In fact, revival services and almost anything targeted at youth was laser-focused on making a decision for Christ. Countless times I heard this same speech at an altar call.

"With every head bowed and every eye closed... If you don't know Christ, if you haven't let Him into your life, if you don't know where you would be if - God forbid - you were to die this very night... Maybe you're saying 'I ain't ever been loved before'... Christ will love you. Jesus said "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any one hears my voice, and will open the door, I will enter". Maybe you're feeling scared, maybe you're feeling like there's no hope. Christ says "I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly"... He's just waiting for you to open that door, the door to your heart. If you've decided to make that decision, I want you to just raise your hand. Everyone else's eyes are closed. Just me and the Lord are going to see it."

At this point there would be a moment of silence and everyone not raising their hands would listen intently for clothing rustling. Sometimes you'd have a thrill as someone beside you raised their hand. Sometimes there would be just silence. But no matter what, the speech would always continue the same way:

"Yes. I see you back there. Good.. good... yes, I see you. God bless you. You are not alone. Yes... I see you there."

Another moment of silence.

"I see your hands, but more importantly GOD sees them. The Bible says that when one soul comes to Jesus, the angels rejoice. Oh, how much rejoicing must be happening there right now. You may put your hands down."

We'd listen again for rustling. Sometimes people were less worried about being quiet now. But many times it was just more silence. I have, and I know many other people have as well, peeked during these decision moments. Sometimes it's a room with a few hands raised. Sometimes it's a room with every hand down. The speaker would always, always, always acknowledge hands being raised, even if none were.

"Maybe you've come here tonight, and maybe you've already given your life to Christ. Maybe you were raised in the Church and gave your life to Christ when you were little. Maybe as the years have gone by, maybe you've forgotten your first love. Maybe that fire has cooled. Maybe you have become lukewarm. The Bible says of the lukewarm that God will spit them out of His mouth. But right now, He is here, and He is saying that He is as near as your own heart, and ready to renew that passion within you. If you've backslidden and want to rededicate your life to Christ, with every head bowed and every eye closed, just raise your hand to join with those who have this night given their lives to Christ."

This would usually get a much better turn out. Most kids going to youth camps or events were, in fact, Christians from church-going families. Most of us were already in the fold and probably knew the passages the speaker was going to speak from after the usual youth-camp hijinks - the activities, the skits, the songs, etc. At a youth function, the goals are manifold. You must break down the defenses of the youth, though it would be referred to more as "breaking down the walls these kids have" or "softening their hearts". I'm not saying this was cynical on the part of the ministry team. Many are very interested in the well-being of the kids, have a strong love for them and feel they themselves are somehow adept at reaching them (usually this is all shorthanded as having a "calling" or a "passion" for youth ministry). But strip away the spiritual layer and you have something that still works. You exhaust kids, emotionally and (increasingly) sensually, then you give them a message that starts funny, becomes heart-wrenching (and sometimes a bit scary), and then you offer them affirmation and way out of their problems. As an adult, you learn not to trust mountain-top experiences but as a kid they are presented to you regularly by the church. Few speakers tell children that they are assenting to a large melange of tradition, cultural norms and an unproven cosmology that few churches can actually agree upon and flies in the face of a few hundred years of science. Instead, Christ is peddled like the cure to all of your youthful insecurities and fears. Are you afraid of a scary and uncertain future? Christ will take care of you. Are you full of self-loathing? Well, you should have a healthy level of self-loathing because of your inherent sinfulness that causes you to bear the curse for the actions of humans that reportedly lived and died thousands of years ago... but Christ forgives you and will offer you meaning and confidence. You start the evening with a band, or some hilarious skits, or with an ice-breaker activity. It's an odd time of life. You're just done with being a child and are still so naive, but you are starting to feel the deep emotions and drives that come with adulthood. You're not mature enough to be skeptical, but you're old enough to want to make big decisions. You're young enough to blindly trust authority figures, and old enough to feel deep moves in your soul. Successful speakers to this age group ingratiate themselves with jokes, with pop-culture references and some anecdotes of being that age. They'll often tell a story, as they wind up for the altar call, of some teen-drama-related story. Maybe it'll be about a girl who became pregnant. Maybe a kid who tried drugs. Maybe someone got into drugs or (gasp!) the occult. Either way, Jesus is the answer. And He is calling you RIGHT THIS VERY MOMENT.

And so some of us who were already Christians would raise our hands. We'd pray, we'd ask God to renew our fire, to keep us from masturbating or whatever, and then we'd all join in a song afterward, bringing the emotions down a peg into a blissful state of community. We were together. We were a city on a hill. We'd go back to our homes with our literature or maybe a souvenir from the event. We'd tell our families about how great it was, but they'd never understand. How could anyone understand who wasn't there, who didn't feel what we felt that night?

As I said before, I couldn't count how many nights like that I had between the ages of 12 and 18. When I graduated from high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. My Christianity had matured and I spoke to God regularly, and often heard answers. I'd hear the answers directly in my head, or see answers and omens in the world around me. It's amusing the amount of superstition that takes hold when one is looking for God to reveal His will. How many times have you, or someone you know, said something like "I prayed to God that He show me which college to go to, and right there on the Discovery Channel was a documentary about gophers, and that is totally the mascot of my first choice college. And I just felt this peace in my heart that couldn't have come from anywhere else. I knew that God had shown me His will for my life". You may laugh, but when you are looking hard enough for the supernatural, you will find it. Sometimes God answers with yes, sometimes with no, and sometimes with wait. If the prayer pays off, it is yes. If the exact opposite happens, it's no. And if nothing happens, well it's just the wisdom of God that we wait. Waiting on the Lord produces perseverance. How often have you or someone you know prayed for patience and help waiting on the Lord? Such is faith as it matures.

In 2001, my faith was shaken terribly. I had spent some miserable years in my early 20s trying to fit in with other Christians, denying my problems with much of the church, and just trying to be a better Christian. But that summer I was afraid that my girlfriend was pregnant. This is like a double-shame for a young, committed Christian man. First, I had caved to lust and sinned against myself, my girlfriend and most importantly- GOD. Secondly, I had caved such that a baby might come out of this sin. It was one of the worst times of my life and I did not find much support around me. I mean, every time I sinned, I was just pounding the nails into Christ again! I was choosing to worship myself instead of God. I was a dog returning to it's own vomit. I was nothing. I was scum. My good works were as dirty rags. But at night, when I was afraid, I would feel God comforting me. I would pray for peace, and peace would come. I didn't understand why, but it would happen and I was grateful for it. Of course, my girlfriend wasn't pregnant. But by the time I knew that, I had told my family and dealt with the resulting fallout there. And after years of being in ministry and trying my hardest to be the best Christian I could be, I was flat on the ground and unable to get up. I had failed. How could God love me?

The week after September 11th I went with a friend to see a christian band whose songs had meant a great deal to me. They had one song in particular that spoke of the eternal, boundless love of God. The idea that the originator of all things, from my puny self to the greatest supernova, was mind-boggling. I wanted so much to be loved and accepted. I was so full of guilt, shame and helplessness that I needed to be saved from all of it. And in that moment, at that concert, I had what might be called a religious experience. I felt an almost-physical sensation of God reaching out and holding me. In my head, I heard Him say that He loved me regardless of my failures. He had taken my sins and weaknesses upon Himself, and I needed desperately for that to happen. I broke down crying. My friend was alarmed. I rambled somewhat incoherently about this all the way home. I had been keeping a journal that year and I have the entry for that day open on the desk in front of me. The writing is quick and sloppy and I'm just pouring out my emotions onto the page. There are smudges where tears were hitting the paper. And my life was notably different after this.

I discovered Brennan Manning's "The Ragamuffin Gospel", which was all about the concept that would come to define my life for many years - grace. I had received the unmerited favor from God and I had to extend it to others. I had spent so many years coasting from mountaintop experience to mountaintop experience, trying to be a Godly person, trying so hard to get it right. But what I really needed to do was throw myself upon God's grace. I felt the presence of God all over my life. I got into doing a ton of reading about my faith, theology, and philosophy. I got very into Jay Bakker's weekly talks at Revolution Church. I didn't always agree with everything he said (his Christianity was far more liberal than mine at the time), but his love for others and his complete and utter reliance on the love of Christ changed my life and brought me through some tough times that were to come. I started a band with some friends, and I wrote many of the songs. The lyrics, while often about criticisms of culture and politics, were also all about this concept of grace. I was the guitar player at a weekly worship service and I poured myself into it when I was there. One night as my friend Mike gave a talk on the prodigal son, I wept openly nearly the entire time. I was so moved, and often. My example was infectious to some people around me, and that made me all the more interested in ministry. My life wasn't always easy or fun, and at times God would seem farther away than usual, but overall I had a daily, close, meaningful relationship with God.

I've gone over, in many posts thus far, what happened after this. Over the next decade, things just fell apart. It's hard to trace a completely direct line because life just isn't like that, especially with topics this complex. Grace, as a concept, changed my life. As a personal philosophy and virtue, I cannot deny it's effectiveness. But the rest of it, over time, as documented in other posts, fell apart.

I bring these stories up for a few reasons. Firstly, I know that the Bible (according to many, including my former self), doesn't teach multiple salvations. You tend to be either in or out, and some people don't even think you have much of a choice in the matter. But almost every Christian I've ever met has stories like these - moments where everything changes and the faith they had before doesn't even seem like real faith. It was just a stage, a silly thing before they REALLY figured it out/God revealed Himself to them. Looking back, I can see how it mirrored what I needed at the time. Looking back, and especially looking at my life now, I realize that the numinous experiences of my early 20s up to today were simply me, being happy, feeling connected and ecstatic. That happens. Back then I expected God and He came. Now I don't believe in God, and the emotions and subjective experiences are still there. I still see positive changes in my life that simply come from me, responding to ideas from within myself and from the world around me. I see a sunset now and feel just as warm and full of awe... now I'm just in awe of life and the universe instead of some hypothetical being who purportedly invented them. Christians are so obsessed with and accustomed to the notion of "worship" that many can't understand that you can live a life that doesn't worship anything. I don't worship nature, or humanity, or science, or reason. I simply appreciate them and find a great deal of meaning in them. No God is needed to explain the experiences I had, or continue to have. The calls were coming from inside the house.

Second, I wanted to point out that I was indeed, by any definition you can conjure, a real Christian in good standing. I prayed, I wept, I understood and accepted my place as a sinner and God's gift of salvation. I felt a great desire to reach others. I tried to follow Christ wherever He led me. I immersed myself in the Bible and the writings of other, influential Christians. I received intuitions and regularly felt the presence of God. If I wasn't a Christian, I don't know how one defines a Christian. I certainly lived up to the Bible's (admittedly vague) definition. Since coming out as an unbeliever, I've received many messages from friends lamenting that perhaps I wasn't really a Christian all along (seeing as how much stock I put in reading and reasoning and all of that smarty-pants stuff), or that I just didn't receive the right magic experiences from God that I could never, ever say weren't divinely inspired. Sure, I may have thought I was a Christian, but I wasn't a REAL Christian. This is a well-known logical fallacy and it even has a cute name - The No True Scotsman Fallacy. You know it's a bad move when it's already been accounted for in a taxonomy of bad arguments. It's also kinda bums me out personally. I mean, is it that easy to not weight arguments based upon merit, but rather upon membership to a secret club whose special handshake is only given to members who never quit? How in the world does a notion of special, often contradictory experiences trump logic, evidence and honest skepticism? And furthermore, on a more personal note, I understand that I am arguing that all religious experience is in the head. What these people are arguing is that religious experience is real, except for those who disagree, in which case they are the only ones whose experiences were all in their head. Doesn't that just reek of dishonesty? And doesn't it conveniently draw a little circle around their own idea of God and identity as a follower of that God?

Just saying.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - It should be mentioned that, as I have been a-blogging since 2001, I've written about some of these topics before, but as a Christian. If you're interested, check out this 2004 telling of the whole pregnancy/concert story.

A Question For You

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 07:36:00 +0000

This has nothing to do with this post. I just have a soft spot for Christian editorial cartoons. And that octopus looks too well-meaning to be frightening.

I was recently having a discussion with a young woman (actually, I think she was my same age or older) and she asked me why I keep writing, when most people simply either already agree with me or just aren't going to accept actual arguments against their firmly-held beliefs. She was worried that what she considered my "blind optimism in the reasoning ability of people" would lead me to endless frustration and eventually, sad burnout. She cares about me and was worried. I appreciated that. I thought for a minute and responded, and I think it's a response I should also give you, the reader.

There's this scene in The Departed where one character somewhat pessimistically and dismissively asks a police psychologist why she does what she does. She replies "Because some people get better". I think that's a decent way to describe it. I've come out of this thing called Christianity, and then out of this thing called theism, and it didn't happen overnight. I argued against, dismissed and flat-out ignored the mountain of evidence against my faith for most of my life. It caused me no end of misery in the later years. But gradually, over time, I let myself admit what I was thinking. It wasn't because I was particularly brilliant or brave, it was just that I took God seriously and couldn't lie to myself. Where evidence existed, I couldn't simply ignore it. And God came up massively wanting. But this wasn't because I was special. It was simply a product of honesty and a small amount of legwork anyone could do.

There were little pin-holes pricked in my faith over the years, moments that stick out to me. For example, in 2007 I read Richard Dawkins (who I still find dreadfully condescending and unschooled in the myriad varieties of Christendom) asking "What exactly does theology actually study?" At first I thought that was an incredibly silly question, but it stayed there, like a rock in my shoe. I'm not the hugest fan of Dawkins (particularly on religion, although he's dynamite on evolution) but I own him some thanks for that one little virus-like thought. His observation obviously wasn't the only little pin-prick, but it's one I remember still. I want to do that for someone. I want to be the rock in someone's shoe. Some people do think critically, if only a little a day. If they can honestly, thoughtfully address the arguments against their faith and know that they are not simply protecting God from questions, then they will be stronger in the faith for it. If they are currently struggling with some of these issues, they can read about them here and know that other people have walked that road before and it's okay to side with your reason over what makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Oddly enough, it's the choice to give up what let me sleep at night that now lets me sleep at night, better than I ever have. I want to give you a push in that direction. I also want to let others know that they are not alone. If they are losing their faith or have lost it, there is a life after it. So don't be afraid. I'm not doing anything revolutionary here, this is all well-trodden ground. But I'm doing what I can, and that's all anyone can do. It's the same thing that drove me through ministry all of those years. I want to help, and like it. It's a win/win.

I originally started this blog to hash out my loss of faith, and how I came to it. Over the past few months I've hit many of the big topics, with a lot left to write in the future. But you can go back and see what my big issues are. I am now (somewhat) comfortable calling myself an atheist, though it still feels weird. I'm starting to rebuild my outlook on the world in places where the absence of a Christian worldview has left vacancies. I'm starting to rethink certain ideas that relied upon the existence of God for their validity. As I said way back in the first post (I think... I might have been the fourth post), I am all about being proactive, and this whole thing doesn't stop simply because I've settled into something new.

So that brings me to my question for you : What do YOU want to read about? Do you want to hear more anecdotes? Do you want to hear about those small pin-pricks that helped me to leave my faith? Do you want more criticism of the Bible and/or theology? Do you want me to address some widely-held apologetic? Do you want more reasonably-dense philosophical musings? If you made it through the (difficult from what I hear) series on morality, are you interested in going further into that? Do you want to hear about life after God? Are you just curious about something specific?

I can obviously just go on writing whenever I feel like it (and I will), but I want to know what would interest/serve you in some capacity. So drop me a line! If you want to be anonymous, that's totally cool as well, so no worries about awkwardness or giving offense. Just leave a comment below. If you'd like to email me personally, those who have written will tell you that I am not unresponsive. It's a new year, and I plan on doing this for a long time. So let's do it together.

Be Well,
-scott

Axial Tilt

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 09:22:00 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen - the yuletide magic of William Howard Taft!

When the earth spins, it spin on an axis. In the winter, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, causing darkness and cold that increases as you move away from the equator. Since we can't adjust the tilt of the earth, we compensate with a mid-winter holiday.

I'm sitting in the basement of the tattoo shop on a hot Monday night in the mid summer. I am giving the talk tonight. It is about Job. In the book of Job, God accepts a challenge from Satan (or some other accusatory entity, depending on your reading of it). The challenge is to find out whether or not Job, a faithful and blessed servant of God, would turn away from God if his blessings were stripped away and he was cursed with ill health, deaths in the family, and a very unhelpful wife. His friends show up and try to offer advice and help him puzzle out the situation. Job endures admirably as he tries to both make sense of and navigate the philosophical ramifications of his circumstances. About 3 dozen chapters in, God shows up. He rebukes those who would question his purposes. He reminds Job that He created the world. He knows and controls the vast, hidden minutia of reality. Who is Job to question God's actions? Job would not understand. He is simply a man. God is God, and His answer to the terrible suffering of Job is "You just wouldn't understand."

Job 42

¹ Then Job replied to the LORD:

² “I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
³ You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.

Of course, we know exactly why Job has been made to suffer. It's right there at the beginning of the book. It was a bet between God and the accuser. Apparently this cosmic wager was just "too wonderful to know".

As I'm giving this talk I'm trying very hard to come up with an encouraging end to it. I know that this is going to be my last talk. After this, I'm going to wait until everyone leaves and then talk to the other two leaders of the bible study. I'm going to tell them that I can't speak anymore. I'm going to tell them that I'm leaving, and it's breaking my heart. I love this group, these people, this place. It is small, but to some people it is vital. I'm one of those people. I love speaking and communicating. But at the moment I'm trying to wrap up what will most likely be my last talk ever. And I can't do it. The best I can do is settle on the idea that some things just don't make sense, and some questions don't get answered. But we should keep asking. We should keep questioning. And it is a cop out to answer with "You wouldn't understand". Try me. We've got time. The worst I can do is prove you right.

It is a warm Monday afternoon in September. I've just posted the first entry on this blog. To most of the people who know me, this will be their first knowledge of my loss of faith. To some it will be a shock. To some, it will be a confirmation of a long-held suspicion. It will cause pain for some friends. Others will just be intrigued. Most, however, will say nothing. But I don't know this yet. I'm walking to my first hair cut appointment in 8 years. I've been mostly shaving my head for the last decade but this year Bethany wondered what it would look like if I grew it out a bit and had a proper hair cut. I indulged her, growing it throughout the late summer till it was short but shaggy. And now I have a haircut appointment. I sit in the chair and make small talk. It's an awkward experience for me, having this strange woman wash my hair and then snip it. It feels odd and uncomfortably familiar. We finish up, I pay and leave a tip, and then walk the two blocks back to our apartment. It feels weird. Some part of me wonders what friends who haven't seen me in awhile will think when they see how different I look. I feel self-conscious - not because I think I look bad, but because I feel over-primped. For the first time in a decade I'm taking time in the mirror to comb my hair into a shape. I feel as though my vanity is on display for all to see. I feel self-indulgent and insecure. When I arrive home, my inbox is filled with messages from people who saw the blog post. I sit down to read and don't get up for hours. For the next couple of months I'll do little else than read, think and write.

It is late September. Bethany and I are in St. Louis, standing on the banks of the Mississippi. Above us stretches the bright reflective curve of The Arch. We are ecstatic to be here. We see logs floating down the river. They were chopped down in an unknown forest somewhere upstream. If they somehow continue unobstructed, they will meet with the Gulf of Mexico, and the ocean. It's almost too massive a journey to think about. Inside the The Arch we browse the museum dedicated to westward expansion as we await our turn to ascend to the top of the monument. Some of the ramifications of losing one's faith come later rather than sooner. In this museum, looking at a wall dedicated to portraits of explorers, I am suddenly incredibly impressed with our species, with these frail beings picking their way into the unknown. We watch a short video about the nearby bridge that spans the wide Mississippi. We climb into tiny cars and are hoisted up in a zig-zag pattern to the top of the bend, hundreds of feet above Missouri. I am overwhelmed with the ingenuity and industriousness of humans who, unaided by divine intervention and intuitions, have accomplished so much. Surely some of these accomplishments have been terrible, but so many have been incredible, impossible, great things. I was taught that mankind was utterly depraved and beyond doing good on our own, and that any statements to the contrary were just flattery designed to take our eyes from God. Like a battered woman who believes she deserves no better, like an abused child who believes no one could ever love them, you learn to shut out the idea of growing beyond being a worthless failure, only worthwhile because the stronger party took an interest in you. You are only what God says you are. But today I feel brave, strong and smart, in the company of a species that is also brave, strong and smart. And looking down at the brown, churning waters below I am struck by the immensity of the universe and our little planet, whose surface I am privileged to crawl around on. As we pile into the car and point eastward, more than anything I feel incredibly fortunate.

It is a cold Halloween. As is our wont, Bethany and I take a walk to watch the trick-or-treaters. Bethany, having been brought up in the geographical center of nowhere, did not have this ritual. To me, it was second only to Christmas morning as the most important few hours of the year. Kids scream and run along the sidewalks all over the neighborhood, accompanied by chatting parents. The costumes lay bare the distinctions between the poor and wealthy families, but all are grabbing at the same free candy. The candy is voluntarily offered by adults, bought with money from their own pockets. All of this happens for no reason other than fun and merriment. Children run around after dark, accepting treats from strangers. For that one night, people actually see their neighbors and place some small bit of trust in them. Children and adults have constructed a holiday based upon community and facing/celebrating our greatest fears. It is beautiful, and it works. It works because people want it to work. Who can possibly despair in an uncaring universe when it is so clear that the inhabitants of that universe care so deeply? The evening closes in around us, and the children laugh and sprint from doorstep to doorstep, hearts pounding in the cold darkness, dead leaves crunching beneath their feet.

It is cold early this year. I am acutely aware of the dwindling light. I suffer from a mild form of seasonal depression. It is just enough to interrupt my life and causes just enough problems to be annoying. I sleep longer. I eat more. I find it harder to be inspired, to be positive about the future, to be confident in my abilities as an artist. I counteract this with exercise, with projects, with reading new things and being present in the moment, aware of what my brain chemicals are doing. But I can't help the feelings of heaviness, the need to sleep it off, and the pit in my stomach when I wake up. It feels like things will never be as good or warm as they were before. I'll wager that hundreds of years ago, in the long nights at the end of each year, people wondered if it was the end of everything. Their fields were frozen. Game was scarce. Sickness was rampant. The howling wind outside, if precautions were not taken, brought death with it. Your chances of survival were only as good as your preparations. And so they huddled together, and so we do today. We plug in wires and run energy around the only trees that seem unchanged, and with them we do our best to soldier on. In a time of freezing, deadly temperatures, we light fires and heat up drinks. In a time marked by scarcity and isolation, we give gifts and remind one another of our importance to one another - of our belonging. We reaffirm the value of one another and our connections. For some of us, it is a time of reflecting upon those who have less than we do, and we endeavor to give what we can to causes we believe in, and make plans to keep it up all year. It is also a time to appreciate simple things we can thankfully take for granted in the current age - heat, food, relative safety and predictability. In the darkest, coldest time of the year we come together to celebrate one another, our connections, our traditions and our fortunate circumstances.

Would it be any more wonderful if God existed? I say no. In fact, a time like Christmas in a universe without a god is all the more important and meaningful. It shows that such things are possible. It disproves the silly, small idea that a godless universe is one in which our idea of good cannot exist. Why are our imaginations so limited? Why are we so ignorant of the evidence before us? Why are we so loathe to accept that things are actually good sometimes? Certainly, things are not good for everyone, and our continued task is to tighten that gap. But looking at the world, looking at humanity, looking at history, we've certainly made some progress. The work isn't finished, it never will be. But our choices still ring out and create purpose. Like children running through the autumn night, like an arch rising from the prairie, like a river pushing toward the ocean, like a tree wrapped in energy, like an afflicted man daring to reason and question, we endure. In the howling winds, we come together, light the darkness, and share with one another.

Be Well,

-scott

PS - I'm out for the next week, though I'll be answering emails and comments. Have a great Christmas!

Yuletide Turmoil - Myths, Squids and Billboards.

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:06:00 +0000

For obvious reasons, Thomas Kinkade paintings are linked to

higher suicide rates during the Christmas season.

Note: Suicides are not more common at Christmas. That is a myth, one of many that predictably crop up around this time of year.

I don't really even need to tell you that it is a myth that all atheists don't like the holidays. Some do, I'm sure. Some have significant pet peeves or even strong philosophical issues with the overtly Christian imagery and verbage thrown around from late November through late December. I can't speak for them, as I love this time of year and the crazy mix of imagery and traditions it brings.

I also don't need to tell you that the "War On Christmas" is another myth. Granted, there are disagreements between different cultural groups about the best way to mark the season and the holiday itself, but little is being done to erase the day or even the nativity story from culture. Similar to the "War on Marriage", the conflict stems more from a question of exclusivity, rights and ownership than some battle to destroy it. But then, it's hard to fit that in the ticker at the bottom of a cable news channel. Nuance is also a harder sell for under-informed and over-emotional voters.

Growing up, I was inundated with tales of the oncoming death of Christmas. Actually, it was less a death than a straight-up MURDER. In every storefront, the blasphemous X-mas could be seen. It was a not-so-subtle message that while our decadent, secular western society was all fine with over-commercialization and consumption, they simply couldn't handle spelling out C-h-r-i-s-t. Of course, Christians and non-Christians alike had been using X as an abbreviation for Christ since forever, but I didn't know that at the time. Soon we were listening to Focus On The Family episodes about the fight to "Keep Christ In Christmas". "Happy Holidays", once a familiar and cheerful greeting and wish became a subliminal message against Christ, diluting his primacy in a base of egg-noggy holiday cheer. Of course, there are also several other holidays celebrated by millions this time of year, but the notion of Christmas not getting explicit top-billing in every possible venue really irks some people.

In the growing list of things about which I don't need to remind you, Christmas as celebrated by most people is a true hodge-podge of Christian, pagan and purely secular traditions. I'm not even providing a link there because I can't imagine anyone doesn't know that. Oh, what the heck, here you go. I was fully aware of this pretty early on in my life, so the furor over Keeping Christ In Christmas (hereafter referred to as KCIC, or maybe KXIX since atheists, according to many Christians, can't bear to type that sweet name) always seemed a bit strange to me. In my younger years my Christian (Xtian!) friends and I would use it to mock paranoid cultural conservatives. We'd see some pundit on Fox News or on book covers in a Family Christian Bookstore going on and on about how this holiday is being ruined and taken over by these Ebenezer Scrooge-like secular killjoys and, like most Christians, just laughed it off.

In particular, I laughed it off because it would be nearly impossible to untangle Christmas from it's non-Christian ingredients. It would be completely unrecognizable. It contains elements of so many things that finding the base element is nearly impossible. In fact, what IS the base element? You've of course got your marking of the Nativity. Then you've got the holdovers from pagan celebrations, which comprise a great many of the decorations as well as the televised Yule log. You've got the whole time of warmth in the darkest and coldest part of the year thing. Then, most predominantly in the west, you have the massive Christmas mythos of Santa, elves, reindeer, etc. You have the generalized notions of charity, giving, peace, forgiveness and universal brotherhood. And finally you have the thing that means Christmas to most people, young and old - gifts. Even in you are not focused on receiving gifts, if you have family or friends you are most likely focused on the procuring and giving of gifts. So very, very little of the preceding has anything to do with Christ. Some of it has been folded back and related somehow to the Biblical account of the nativity (often in a torturous fashion). Most of it, however, is simply a terrible mess of different cultures - You've got a nativity next to a pre-Christian decorated evergreen, under which are presents supposedly delivered to children by Santa Claus, who is himself a giant mix of Christian, pagan and secular influences. I know many non-Christians who do not put up a nativity set, so it really is only fair that Christians who only recognize the Christian elements of Christmas get rid of their tree, their holly, their yule log, and gift-giving, all of which pre-date Christmas or have been in-grafted from non-Christian celebrations. Also, the Rankin-Bass Christmas specials largely have to go, along with many Christmas carols. But of course no one wants to do that, nor should they because it would be terrible. We have all tasted the sweet pepperminty flavor of a truly syncretist, highly-evolved celebration and no one wants to give it up. In fact, the main points of contention seems to be the level of exclusiveness of the holiday. Everyone wants it to be their own first. Like atheists who rail against the religious symbolism of the holiday while still celebrating it, Christians who campaign against the secular and pagan elements of the holiday are attempting to have their disingenuous gingerbread cookies and eat them too. Christ is at the center of Christmas for some people. Santa is at the center for others. The planets and the seasons are for others. For many people, it's simply a holiday about family and friends. None of these, or a strong combo of all of them, are at the center for many people. And that's ok. Like so many of our most treasured cultural artifacts, Christmas thrives because it means so many things to so many people, and touches deep parts of our selves in some common fashion. See also : music, love, family, marriage, art, food, beauty, language, cats, etc. I have no problem with the religious elements of Christmas. It is a historical part of a holiday we all enjoy. It would be disingenuous and downright silly to argue otherwise. Heck, I'm a firm believer in non-violence who is suspicious of unwavering allegiances to nation-states, but I like the Fourth of July just fine. Fireworks and barbeques. Yes, please!

Now that we've gotten that out of the way, I find that this Christmas harkens back to those of my youth in one particular manner - everything is somewhat new again. The best example of this can only be summed up in one word - SQUIDTIVITY.

Ok, so for those of you who don't know, my wife is an artist. Her chosen medium is felt and floss. Her livelihood is based upon making handmade, plush, anthropomorphic squids. This started back in 2005 when a live giant squid was first filmed by a fishing vessel. She made some Christmas Squid ornaments for a few friends and then got the idea to make a few more and sell them on an etsy shop. Now our yearly calendar is based around traveling to various indie-craft shows and peddling them. We just finished about a month-long stretch that included trips to Providence, Atlanta, Chicago and Cleveland.

Now, one of the things my wife is known for is a set of 8 squid that are only available during the holidays - the Squidtivity.

When she first made it in 2006, I knew both that I had married the right girl and that no one would ever buy a nativity set comprised of plush squids. Boy, was I wrong. I don't know how many of these we've sold, but every year we are inundated with messages and requests. "Are you making the Squidtivity this year?" "When is the Squidtivity going to be available?" "My friend has one and I just have to get one." "I saw this four years ago and can't get it out of my head, so I need to get one." "I'm going to get this because my mother will love it!" "I'm going to get this because my mother will hate it!"

Every year I make a habit of googling "Squidtivity" to see who is talking about it. As you can imagine, it draws rather extreme reactions. Generally the reaction is one of amazement and amusement, though there are some outliers, such as the time when the about-as-funny-as-a-Jay-Leno syndicated writer Dave Barry posted it on his blog at the Miam i Herald, drawing a chorus of comments and derisive Christmas-carol parodies. But among the many who have bought the Squidtivity throughout the years, we've had the pleasure of being part of a central item of their holiday celebration. Non-Christians (and some visibly angry Christians) sometime assume that Bethany had made it in order to subvert Christmas and mock Jesus. Others understood it as a highly personal take on a story that, especially at the time, was incredibly important to us. In actuality, the Squidtivity was meant as a tribute to the simple tradition of the low-rent Christmas pageant at the tiny, rural Methodist church in which Bethany had grown up. You know - Bob the deacon, who in real life was a plumber, dressed in a bath robe with a rope belt, awkwardly fumbling through his part as a shepherd as his family and friends watch. The choir playing the part of the angels, singing "Angels We Have Heard On High", which makes no sense for angels to sing about themselves. The pastor and his wife playing the part of Joseph and Mary. Maybe a local farmer brought in an actual sheep that pooped on the floor. The Squidtivity celebrates people attempting to mark some miraculous event as best they can. Christmas pageants are the most mundane things, made with whatever a poor church has on hand (to say nothing of the spectacles wealthy churches create), yet to those involved they can be truly transcendent experiences. Humans are great like that. And so the Squidtivity takes that idea and translates it into what Bethany does best - she makes plush squids that reflect our aspirations, quirks and weaknesses as humans. Like most animal characters, they are less other species as they are little humans.

In years past, we'd giggle at those who were offended by it, knowing that it was in fact a tribute to a very traditional celebration of Christmas and our shared faith in Christ. But this year, it suddenly became something else. We are no longer Christians. We are no longer part of the club. As out-atheists we are part of the scary group of invading Turks who question the possibility of an immaculate conception, the existence of a divine god-man messiah, and if the manger birth even happened. We now see the holiday as a venerable tradition that is important to both of us, steeped in ancient and contemporary symbolism and mythology. What do we say now? "No, we're not Christians. In fact, we're atheists. But my wife made the Squidtivity when we were both devout Christians and it is still a tribute to the Christmas Pageants she grew up with. We're not really sorry if you're offended, but you shouldn't be - we mean no offense."

I've found that losing my faith in God and self-identifying, by default, as an atheist continues to shift things all over my life. Take, for example, the recent hubbub about the dueling billboards around the Lincoln Tunnel. American Atheists put up a blandly-designed billboard saying of Christmas that "You know it's a myth. This season, celebrate REASON!". I can't deny that I agree with them. Do I think it's tacky and made mainly for the predictable media blitz? Yes. Do I think that complex ideas are best communicated by billboards? NO. And, like clockwork, the justly-reviled Catholic League put up their own silly-looking billboard claiming that "You know it's real. This season, celebrate Jesus." That is an amusing thing to say for a group that falls back on unknowables as a regular defense against inquiries into their beliefs. Before I lost my faith, I would have still agreed more with the American Atheists billboard but had a fond, somewhat embarrassed kinship with the Catholic League billboard. This was a common before - I would harbor a growing admiration and agreement with rational skeptics but labor under a familial bond with every Christian and, as an extension, every stupid thing they did. And I can't deny that some of these ostentatious billboard campaigns spoke to me. The Atheist Bus campaign in the UK was a great comfort to me as I struggled with my waning faith. But I still find these cultural wars tiresome and ineffective as a whole, though I also believe that such a debate is a signifier of a healthy discussion within culture and above all, a proof that free-speech is alive and well more than ever today. That having been said, the Christmas billboards mean different things to me now than before, as well as others. We've done a lot of driving along interstate highways this year. Imagine for a moment what the following billboards meant to Bethany and I before and after our de-conversion.

Christianity is my home country. I'm from there. I speak the language and know the customs. I find myself still absent-mindedly miming certain traditions from it. I don't believe it, but it has been one of the fundamental things that have shaped the person I have become in my adult life. I'm reasonably happy with that person, and I acknowledge the bits of the faith that have informed certain positive things in my life. I don't feel much conflict about Christmas itself, but I do feel the push and pull of the larger cultural conflict waged most visibly by giant screaming heads and 3-foot-tall text speaking in the fewest syllables possible on cable tv, talk radio, and billboards. It reminds me of my position in this debate. It reminds me to be sure of what I think I know. It makes me wonder if I'll ever connect with a larger group of like-minded people, or if I'll be just as turned-off by the blaring campaigns. I have just as little interest in a bloody sacking of Jerusalem as a bloody sacking of Europe. I don't know. But this Christmas, in ways both good and bad, everything old is new again.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - In the next post, we'll leave all of this nonsense behind and discuss what Christmas is to me now, and how we're forging some new meanings while keeping just about all of the old ones. I can promise mirth and merriment.

Miracles, Martyrs and Children

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 05:07:00 +0000

See? You have a baby and you're bound to have problems with feral people.

There have been, of late, a few theories going around about why my wife and I left Christianity. I want to talk about two of them here. We're both turning 30 in the next couple of years, we've been married for 5 years, and we do not have children. This has caused some people to form ideas. Theory #1 goes that we simply haven't looked into the face of a child of our own, because how could one see such a miracle and not know that there is a god? Theory #2 supposes that we have tried to have children, have been unsuccessful or infertile, and are therefore angry at God.

I suppose I don't have to explain my own emotions upon hearing these rumors, as they are probably the same ones you would feel. I am saddened that despite the many pages of hard reasoning I have posted here, some simply cannot get past the idea that this is just some emotional thing we're going through. I wonder if they have read it at all, much less thought about it. But my great annoyance with these theories is just how silly and shallow they are. I don't know how well it serves me personally, but poor arguments vex me infinitely more than gossip. We'll go through them both here.

#1 part 1 - The Miracle Theory

Julia Sweeney, in her not-to-be-missed monologue Letting Go of God, talks about reactions from believers upon seeing her newly-adopted daughter. "Look at how beautiful she is! How can anyone look at her and NOT know there is a God?" To which, Julia wonders "If she was ugly, would that disprove God?"

There is a tendency among believers to see evidences of what they believe in everywhere they look, no matter how banal. A day when the kids behave and get to school without a fuss is a sign that God is good. A feeling of peace when one is specifically trying to feel at peace, often repeating mantra-like prayers, is a sign of divine intervention. A $20 bill found in a pocket is a sign of God's provision. This extends to other supernatural beliefs as well. Those who believe in luck, omens and curses flee from black cats and won't leave their beds on Friday the 13th. All such believers have a tendency not to admit contrary evidence, or at least they find ways to make contradictory evidence work in their favor. I covered this pretty extensively in an earlier post.

An interesting side effect of this pattern-seeking behavior among Christians is the use of the word "miracle". Christians believe in a benevolent God who clothes even the lilies of the field and eyes every sparrow in turn. Every good and perfect gift comes from Him. When something happens that they deem favorable, it is attributed in some way to God. This turns every good thing into an instance of divine activity. This is why, when an egg and a sperm combine in the same way they have since time immemorial, and a child is born in the same way they have since long before humans could recognize the concept, it is not simply a natural process - some Christians will call it a miracle. They do this for many reasons.

One reason is a side-effect of our inherent isolation as individuals. Everyone who is in love is the first person ever to be in love. Every new parent is the first parent ever. Our isolated experiences are such that extreme subjective experiences, no matter how commonplace, feel like events happening outside the natural order and only to us. This is a wonderful thing (perhaps one of the most wonderful things and the basis for most art), but it is not to be confused with actual reality. In truth, having a child is as common as every person who has ever been born. But having your child... well, to you that just feels like something impossibly wonderful happening. Hence, we call it a miracle. I have a similar, if somewhat smaller feeling whenever I've written a song or made a cartoon. Millions of other people have done the same thing, but to me it's an experience so unique and special that it feels at the time as though I'm the only one who ever accomplished such feats.

The second reason is a question of gratitude. If all good things come from God, and the God of the Bible is explicitly involved within the lives of humans and is in the miracle business, then it is well-on blasphemous to NOT call something like a child a miracle. In fact, it's hard to find something good that doesn't qualify as a miracle in that sense. Christians often take such great pains to recognize miracles in everyday life that they forget what everyday life looks like. They cannot imagine a world in which good things actually happen, where serendipity occurs often, and where personal subjective experiences are wonderful. There is also pain, cruelty, ennui and crushing disappointment. Both exist and need no further explanation than natural law and the interaction of the choices of billions of sentient beings. But a worldview where having faith in the face of evidence to the contrary is elevated to the highest good, it becomes a useful skill to attribute happenstance to divine intervention. Indeed, the more God-related meaning one can pull out of any and every situation, the more God seems near. And the more gratitude shown to this God, the more one feels taken care of, the more things feel in order, and the less one has to fear. I know this, because I have seen the world in that fashion.

The fourth and final reason is one of sloppy definitions. Let's look at the dictionary.com definition for miracle:
1. an effect or extraordinary event in the physical world that surpasses all known human or natural powers and is ascribed to a supernatural cause.

2. such an effect or event manifesting or considered as a work of god.

3. a wonder; marvel.

4. a wonderful or surpassing example of some quality: a miracle of modern acoustics.

Note that only the first 2 definitions necessitate a divine action, and yet events fitting any of the definitions are attributed to God as if they all did. This is similar to people misunderstanding the definitions of the word theory, and therefore throwing out any scientific explanation that doesn't fit their common-sense idea of how the world works. I will wholeheartedly agree that a child is a miracle in the sense of definitions 3 and 4, but 1 and 2 require some sort of evidence, as they are not simply based upon conjecture. If you've been reading the entries up to now you should know that I have no small amount of fascination and wonder for our universe, my loved ones and people in general. Knowing that there might be no divine hand arranging things like, say, my wife and I meeting by chance doesn't make such an event meaningless. On the contrary, it makes it so fortunate as to be statistically highly improbable. But it happened. This is because two people meeting is not statistically improbable. And so things like this are bound to happen. Miracles are said to occur because no one counts the number of people they meet in lifetime that AREN'T their spouses. If they saw the huge list of people they have met, then chancing upon someone with whom they are amazingly compatible probably wouldn't seem like such a miracle. It would just seem fortunate. Taken out of content, EVERYTHING is a miracle.

Whenever I have a child, it will surely be an amazing, earth-shattering, wonderful thing. But I don't think it's odd that such a thing would happen. Surely not odd enough to say that it could only occur because of God. One, there is no evidence for it - I might as well say that a habit of never stepping on sidewalk cracks is to thank for it. Two, it is such a sad and pathetic view to think that nothing good (especially since the term is so subjective) could ever happen in the universe unless someone outside made it happen for you. Honestly, give the universe and yourselves some credit.

#1 part 2 - The Secret Club

Of course, there is also an exclusivity implied, or even directly stated here. If only we could experience seeing a child of our own, we would agree with them. I don't even know if I need to elaborate on why this is such an infantile (if you'll excuse the pun) suggestion, but I'll do it anyway - briefly. To take this seriously, one has to assume that those without children cannot know that God exists. It also assumes that God is revealed, beyond disagreement, in children. I would point out that just about everyone in the New Testament had no children. I would point out that there are many couples who simply cannot conceive, or loose their children horribly. I would point out that many of them are Christians. I would point out how disgusting this entitled, exclusive, smug train of thought is. But who wants to waste the space? I only note it because it'll come up again in another post, so remember it.

#2 - Hardship-related Rage

Is a faith contingent upon personal circumstance any kind of faith at all? I've never understood the CS Lewis idea that atheists are angry at God. I actually had a very nice relationship with God. We talked often. The example of Christ and the message of grace were central to my worldview and my decision making. I never got it anywhere close to perfect, but it was certainly the main pillar holding up the house, as it were. It was very painful letting that go, admitting that this thing I had believed and dedicated myself to was wrong. I really had nothing to gain, personally, by leaving the faith. I'm an white adult male with a comfortable life living in Pennsylvania. In our culture, there honestly isn't much higher on the food chain than me, other than wealthier white people. If anything, the elongated trauma of losing faith was the biggest "hardship" I've faced in the past half decade.

But hardship, for many Christians including me, actually worked to prove that the object of my faith was real. My faith was realest and strongest right before it evaporated. I fought. Religious faith thrives on drama. How much of a Christian's faith is tied up in their emotions - in experiences so emotionally strong that to deny them is to deny themselves at an impossibly deep level? And hardship, for some, provides some of this drama. The best way to radicalize a committed group is to persecute it. Christian writers like to say that this is a singularly Christian trait, but history tells a different story. Honestly, Christianity (among other groups - see the ppps below) all but fetishizes persecution and martyrdom. I have to point back no further in history than to the sad story of Cassie Bernall. I was in a christian band in the years directly following her death. I saw, as we traveled from church to church, how pictures of her adorned the walls of the youth ministry buildings. We played a youth retreat where the speaker was a teenage girl who was a former classmate of Cassie's. Her credentials and indeed her entire talk was nothing more than "I was there, I am a Christian, and it was awful". Kids asked for her autograph after the talk. The narrative of the Columbine Shooting, in some circles, became about an attack on Christians. This strengthened the faith of many Christians, including me at the time.

A giant personal setback in my Christian life was far more likely to cause me to cling to the hope of my faith, that someone who loved me was in charge, and that I didn't have to worry because it was all taken care of. An inability to have a child would have been seen as an opportunity, nay - a divine signpost - for adoption. In fact, strip out the God bits and that's still how both my wife and I see it. Would it be a disappointment? Of course! Do I really want to pass along my genetic code? Sure! But to assume that an inability to do so would destroy a committed faith in God is to neglect history, pass petty judgments upon those who cannot conceive, and to elevate children (and the role of parent) to a ridiculous level of paranoid, self-aggrandizing idolatry. You all know people who do this, I'm sure. Just look at your facebook and see how often you've been mommyjacked.

I am looking forward to having children. We already have started building a library of books for them. We have names picked out for up to two boys and two girls. We've bought one or two articles of clothing. We've had extensive discussions about the kind of parents we wish to be (knowing full well that nothing quite turns out as planned). I imagine that children of our own will be the single greatest thing ever, and fill us both with wonder lasting even beyond them puking and pooing all over everything we love. They will not, however, be admission to some secret club, privy to revelations about the nature of God that are unreachable by those not blessed enough to have them. They will not cause us to turn into insufferable cranks who only see the world as an evil beast, crouching in wait to devour and corrupt our perfect darlings. They will not cause us to redefine God or the universe in service to our own emotions. To do so is to cheapen the idea of a god, our universe, our future children and ourselves.

Be Well,
-Scott

PS -To set the record straight, as others seem to be already busy writing a record of their own, we do not yet have children because we don't have very much money, we have no health insurance, our apartment would likely kill an infant dead, and, you know... we've got other stuff to do. When things stabilize to the degree that we can move to a place with reliable heating and walls that aren't crumbly, we'll be sure to have a kid, post-haste.

PPS - I know normalness isn't a word. I just felt it got the feeling better than normalcy, which usually has such a nice, tranquil ring to it.

PPPS - I do not mean to say that Christians alone obsess over persecution and martyrdom. History and current events speak to the contrary. And I bet you that if Richard Dawkins were shot by a Christian or Muslim, the atheist community would posthumously elevate him in some way. I would hope that it would be in a less sensationalist way, but I think it is simply human nature to do so, and no one group has a monopoly on people desperate to connect themselves to drama. In fact, how many people have been the victim of some sort of hoaxed persecution at the hands of a pastor, youth leader or camp counselor? One of the best episodes of This American Life has a portion that touches on this, as people relate stories about various types of camp experiences from their youths.

Bones

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Sun, 28 Nov 2010 05:11:00 +0000

HOLY CRAP.

I needed a new wallet. The old one was all but falling apart. At a show in Providence, Bethany mentioned that a girl was selling them. I marched over and purchased one, not realizing until afterward what a story the new wallet, when placed next to my old one, told.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

The visual metaphor is not lost on me. I suppose my heart is with the dinosaurs now. Perhaps it always was.

As a child, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. Many of the first books I ever owned were about them - huge ones with giant, colorful illustrations. I received some sort of dinosaur hunting license (I have no idea where from and what it's purpose was, other than thrilling me to death) from my grandmother for my birthday one year, and we took it to Dinosaur Valley State Park. When asked in kindergarten what I'd like to be when I grew up, I replied "paleontologist". The teacher told me that wasn't a real word. It was probably the first time I knew something an adult did not. It was surreal. In our side yard in Ohio, I dug with a spade, hoping to find a fossilized trilobite or the tooth of some ancient beast. When my dad caught a garter snake while mowing the lawn one day, I was enthralled to see something up close that was reptilian - just like the dinosaurs were.

In the second grade, on valentines day, I got a heart-shaped box of chocolates and gave it to Debbie Page, a nice girl from my class. She was surprised. We often sat across from one another at lunch and she laughed at my jokes and liked my drawings, which at that age was as close to hopeless devotion as I could fathom. That day at lunch she shared several of the chocolates with me, which was a nice treat. When my family moved that fall, she bought me a going-away present - a little hard-backed book entitled "An Instant Guide To Prehistoric Life". It is lovely - I am holding it in my hands right now. It's still in great condition, with the blue ballpoint pen inscription on the inner front cover, written in the pristine handwriting of a studious girl who only learned to write a couple of years earlier:

To Scott From your good Friend Debbie Page

Looking at it now, it resembles an EE Cummings poem.

She even put a bookmark in it. It reads "MY BOOK'S PROTECTED BY AN ATTACK DINOSAUR". Awesome. It was a great gift, which is probably why I kept it so long. But as I look at it now in light of the events of that time, I think there is another reason.

In the summer of 1989 I was at the library as often as I could manage. My parents were delighted with my appetite for books. Along with my devouring of the Hardy Boys books, I was searching for as much dinosaur info as I could find. I had grown tired of the dinosaur books aimed at kids. I wanted to learn more than what a few sentences and a sweet picture could tell me. I began checking out larger, encyclopedic volumes on prehistoric animals. I could already name the major eras of dinosaur life off the top of my head, but these books delved into life before the dinosaurs - and after. In fact, so did the book Debbie had given me. On page 89, to be precise. Page 88 is dedicated to cynognathus, and the next to "mesozoic mammals". That was a confusing jump, so I consulted my other books from the library. They discussed the major theories of what happened to the dinosaurs. There was always some picture near the end of the book where we see a valley strewn about with the bones of dinosaurs - and a small ferret-like creature emerging from a hollow log or something. But how did that happen? Well, I was curious to be sure.

One afternoon in the way to the library, my mom asked me if I was learning a lot from the new dinosaur books. I sure was, and said as much. I mentioned that, among other things, I was learning about the first mammals and where we came from. My mom suddenly looked concerned, in a way that showed that she was trying not to look so. This worried me, as she only did that when things were so wrong that she didn't want the kids to know about it. Or at least that was what I thought. That night my parents sat me down and explained that we didn't believe in what was called "evolution". Evolution said we came from monkeys. Monkeys! And I shouldn't believe any book that told me any different. It dawned on me - of course! I mean, I believed the account in Genesis of the creation of the world, but it never really clicked with me that what I was learning in my books was a flat contradiction of the literal truth of the biblical story. These scientists, they didn't believe in God because of Charles Darwin, a man who hated Jesus and wanted to destroy people's faith in God. The books were full of lies, and we had to stand against them as Christians. Understanding this conflict made two other recent events suddenly make sense:

1. When The Land Before Time came out, I was understandably out of my freaking mind with excitement. A cartoon MOVIE? About DINOSAURS? Sign me up! We saw it as a family and I laughed, cried and was enthralled. I spoke to a few of my classmates about it and one kid in particular told me that they weren't allowed to see it because their dad said there was no land before time. I probed a bit and found out that the word "prehistoric" was also outlawed in their family because there was no time before history- the bible tells us what happened at the beginning.

2. We had the Disney Channel sporadically throughout my youth and would often spend some time after school watching the shorts anthology shows that littered the afternoon schedules. My favorite of these where the Jiminy Cricket educational shorts. On of these introduced the concept of taxonomy as it related to humans - we were animals, and specifically we were mammals. My mother asked us to change the channel, as she didn't want us learning that we were "no better than animals". Coincidentally, the very next week in science class we were delving into the basics of taxonomy. My teacher drew a simple chart of the animal kingdom. She drew it as a pyramid, with mammals as the capstone, then reptiles and amphibians and so on down to the base. And at the top, standing at the point, she drew a stick figure. "You are not an animal", she said. "You are made in the image of God to have dominion over creation. The idea that man is an animal is a lie from the Devil to get us to turn away from God."

During the move to California I was very, very sick. I was a sickly kid to begin with, but a long-carried strep virus and a recent head injury (it's a fun story - ask me sometime) had weakened me. I spent most of the trip wanting to die, reading a biography of George Washington Carver and going through my Instant Guide To Prehistoric Life. I kept coming to page 89 and staring at the little rat creature. "This is a lie", I told myself. Suddenly all of it seemed wrong. Of course there was no land before time. Of course there was no pre-history. In the years to come I would return to the library many times, only to find that ALL of the books on dinosaurs spoke of evolution, and none of them about Genesis. And so, with a heavy heart, I stopped checking those books out, choosing to delve into my other obsession at the time - mythology.

The issue changed dramatically when my school attended the Back to Genesis talks. I actually attended the seminar twice - once in california and a few years later in New Jersey. Ken Ham talked about how there were dinosaurs in the old testament and that man had hunted them to extinction after the flood because they were so effing delicious. Bel and the Dragon (which is easily my favorite book in the apocrypha) talks about a huge lizard. And those descriptions in Job! Totally a sauropod and maybe a plesiosaur! Heck, I had seen the definite proof that humans and dinosaurs existed back in Texas, at Dinosaur Valley. And many cultures have stories of being bedeviled by monstrous lizards. Heck, it was likely that there were dinosaurs walking around on earth right this very instant, in deep jungles and caves. He brought up the monster at Loch Ness - it was certainly a dinosaur. And the fact that, though many people have seen it, no research team can find it only confirms that scientists sometimes can't see the evidence right under their noses. The main event at this part of the talk, at least for me, was the fact that Ken Ham had an actual audio tape of an an actual, existing dinosaur. This proved that dinosaurs never went extinct, that evolutionists (a new word I was learning to describe those who pushed this "theory") were covering it up, and that OH MY GOD DINOSAURS WERE STILL HERE.

I was elated. Dinosaurs! Today! I read every book I could find at my school's christian library about this new field of "Creation Science". As I remember, there were two. I read them several times. Mrs. Schimke, the mother of my best friend at the time, gave me a few more. One had a cartoon on the inside. There were two castles, facing one another, one labeled "Evolution" and the other "Creation". Atop each were little men firing canons at one another. The shells from Castle Evolution bounced off of the walls of Castle Creation, who were busy taking aim at the hill below Castle Evolution, destroying its foundation. Surely it wasn't long for this world.

The lesson had been learned too well. I would continue to read about prehistoric animals throughout my youth and into my teens, but always knowing that it was mostly wrong. I would skip any chapters on evolution. Sure, they had fossils and theories and such, but that just made the subterfuge seem worse. They were not only wrong, but they were taking such pains to make their case, which made it seem all the more like a lie. In fact, the more I read about most subjects, the more I found that the official line clashed violently with the truth I knew about the world. Books spoke of angels and demons being fictional. They spoke of other religions in the same breath as Christianity, refusing to place it at the top of the pyramid with Islam, Judaism, and the polytheisms below it. They spoke of mankind as an animal. Eventually, around 9th grade, I simply stopped reading anything that was not fiction or theology. I stopped caring about learning about the world. After all, what was there to learn that was not corrupted by the world view of secular "experts"? What was the point of being smart, if your answers were all skewed so hopelessly against God? And so I dedicated myself to the one thing that actually mattered - studying the Bible and learning about God.

I have kept my Instant Guide To Prehistoric Life these many years because it has always held a strong emotional resonance for me. Something happened within those pages, specifically in the space between pages 88 and 89. I stopped trusting books. I stopped trusting science. I stopped trusting history. I stopped trusting anyone who couldn't back up their ideas with the Bible. You'll notice that a great many anecdotes in this blog have dealt with my epiphanies between the ages of about 6 and 10. I was a smart, critically-thinking kid. But page 89 put a stop to that. It made me pick a side. I was no longer learning about my world, in all of it's near-infinite mystery. Instead, I was on the front line of a war between God and The World. Love not The World. I was never a fanatic about it, but it was something I never forgot and in fact informed a great many of my decisions from that point on into my adult life. I never stopped reading, but I had stopped learning just to learn. I began learning in order to defend my worldview. I stopped questioning and began memorizing apologetics.

I look back on those years as my own personal dark ages. They lasted until about the age of 21. And while they were full of wonderful times and wonderful people, they were also the most empty years of my life. There was a gnawing hollowness to everything. I now realize that it was the desperate hunger of a smart kid starved of knowledge and critical thinking. The rigorous theology of the church I attended when I was in my second band fed that yearning to a degree, but theology is ultimately such a tiny and amorphous thing that one can quickly reach the borders of that country and find oneself staring out into lands beyond, unable to reach them. And so one turns back and rereads the texts, meditating further, attempting ever to glean some new pearl of wisdom. When one's only business is the business that God has laid out for one, the road can indeed be narrow.

A dear friend of mine doesn't believe in dinosaurs. Or rather, he believes that there are bones and that something existed that we call dinosaurs. However, he refuses to give them any real credence because he cannot find them in the Bible. When I was a believer this got under my skin like few other things. He would say things like "I don't believe in science, because science says one thing and then a year later they find out it's wrong and say something else". He is correct, of course. But he misses the fact that this is not only what makes science so great, but what enables any progression of humankind at all. Science fills in gaps because scientists are eager to review new research, disprove false ideas and craft new theories that correspond with the data. In fact, it is in the best interest of a scientist to disprove conventional knowledge with compelling evidence because that is precisely how new discoveries are made. This notion of a scientific system that regularly represses any theories that contradict the orthodoxy makes no sense - fame and fortune awaits the scientist that can disprove the roundness of the earth, the existence of God, or the false nature of evolution. It's not a perfect system, but what is? And beyond that, people within this system can call back to actual evidence, as opposed to intuition, tradition and anecdotes.

I was having dinner with a friend recently whose young child had pinkeye. We began discussing his home remedy for it - squirting breast milk into the eye. Judging my own proclivities a bit rigidly, he concluded that I would be immediately dismissive of such a treatment. I did giggle a little and ask what other boob-based medicinal cures he had up his sleeve, but I was certainly not particularly against it. If it can be shown to work, it is not a flouting of science - it IS science. The same thing goes for the recent anti-vaccination hysteria - if people can show, beyond anecdotal or "common sense" arguments that vaccines do more harm that good, they would be proving it scientifically. They haven't even begun to do that of course, but if they did it would still be science working. Being anti-science is simply being anti-learning. It is being anti-critical thinking. Being anti-science is relegating yourself to reading only fiction. Science has never been discredited, only made better.

But of course, most Christians know that. Which is why, as I have said many times, hospitals are generally the first stop after someone has broken bones because medical science has a fantastic track record and faith healing has, quite literally, NONE. Medical science is not perfect, but it has cured at least a million more people this weekend than prayer has. And I say this as someone who rarely takes medicine and hasn't had health insurance for 10 years (here's hoping for next year!).

I began this post with a picture of my wallets and a verse from Luke. Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. If your treasure is a belief that goes against everything we've learned as a species and discounts any evidence put against it, how much more likely are you to believe other pseudo-scientific claims? Homeopathy thrives on anecdotal evidence in no scientific proof of its efficacy. Christians give and receive prophecies from one another on a regular basis. People place crystals in their house to give off positive energies. My wife's grandmother wouldn't leave her bed on Friday the 13th for fear of the creeping unluckiness waiting just outside her door. All of these things have exactly the same amount of evidence in their favor.

Scientific theories can be proven wrong. Faith cannot - in fact, it thrives most when it is least believable. And that is why science cures diseases while faith has no measurable effect on anything other than the person who holds it.

I have found that as my faith eroded throughout my adult life, my curiosity has become more and more voracious. And now that I have no prior allegiances, I can go as far as my feeble intellect may take me. I ran into Charles Darwin again, still waiting on The Beagle, ready to make his expedition and this time take me along. I don't know if I'll agree with everything I read, but I will be sure to base my agreement or disagreement upon evidence and argument, not worldview. And, while digging, I discovered again the dinosaurs, still waiting where I left them back in my youth. The Tyrannosaur waved a pathetic little forearm at me and asked where I've been these past few decades. The Parasaurolophus, co-star of one of my favorite read-along book tapes as a child, honked a welcome to me. I'm looking right now at page 89 of the Instant Guide to Prehistoric Life. By now this text is probably hopelessly out of date. It's time to keep reading.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - So I really, really, really want to go to the Creation Science Museum. Does anyone else want to make a trip down sometime?

PPS - In researching some of this, I came across these shirts. I might just grab one of the better-designed ones.

PPPS - I completely cut a paragraph listing the shocking similarities between Jesus and a Tyrannosaur. Just know that it was hilarious.

Housekeeping Notes, Some Definitions and Reflections

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Tue, 09 Nov 2010 04:46:00 +0000

In case you're wondering, flying a goat is what I mainly get up to since renouncing my Christianity. It saves on gas but the upkeep is murder on our oat supply.

In the past couple of months I've articulated a few of the main reasons I left the faith. I could keep clarifying and breaking them down, but I feel that they stand on their own pretty well at the moment- particularly the multiple posts on faith, the three-parter on the rejection of objective morality and the groundwork for a thoughtful, subjective morality. Of course, I have much more to say, but I need to take a couple of weeks and really puzzle out the next big topic. In the meantime, I'm still more than happy to field questions or rebukes (I've gotten both), as well as any other conversations people are willing to have. I've also talked to a few people recently who are expressing some frustration with how quickly they get behind on reading this blog, so the next couple of weeks should be a good time to catch up.

I'm going to be spending the next few weeks reading and writing, along with animating and traveling. You can look forward to some new posts closer to Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a few reflections.

I want to clear up some terms. Agnosticism is not the middle ground between atheism and belief, as many people think it is. Thomas Huxley, who coined the term "agnostic", had this to say:

Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle ...Positively the principle may be expressed as in matters of intellect, do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.

And this is where I find myself more and more. I tend to be an atheistic agnostic because I do not think that one can provide evidence for the existence of a theistic God, much less the God of the Bible. Therefore I do not have a belief in him. Atheism doesn't mean that I think that I can prove that God doesn't exist, it just means that I lack a theistic belief. I'm open to the unprovable idea of a deistic god-type character, but only because I really can't rule it out and it exists so far outside the realm of our experience of the universe that it seems almost a moot point. For me, the difference between the theistic and deistic god claims are this:

Deism : There might be intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.
Theism : There is an alien living in my closet that only I can see, hear, or speak to.

And as a former Christian, I suppose I have more invested in this distinction than others. I'm still coming to terms with all of it, and trying to understand large chunks of my life in which I was also speaking regularly to a voice that identified itself as Yahweh. It is humbling.

I was recently reading the blog of an atheist. Someone had posed a question to her - "What Does Atheism Offer?" I think this question had been posed by a theist to many online atheists. Some responded by saying how happy atheism made them, or how they felt free from their experience of religion, or something like that. But the girl whose blog I was reading had an interesting response. To paraphrase, she rejected the idea that atheism somehow offered more happiness than other worldviews. If your goal is simply to have an easier time of things, then by all means believe in the chocolate chip cookie god who wants us all to eat ice cream. If, however, you are interested in whether your beliefs are true, then atheism might be for you. If you gain great happiness from finding truth and regularly updating your views in light of new evidence, then atheism will give you great happiness.

And I think that this is true in my life. I DO gain great happiness from getting as close to the truth as possible. Truth in this sense is not democratic, despite what many may think. You may think that thinking positively will make the world around you naturally react to your positive energy and thus benefit you, but you would be provably wrong. However, you may think that thinking positively will cause you to act positively, influencing you and those in your immediate orbit to make positive choices which often benefit you. In this case, you would be provably correct. This willingness to update your impressions of the world based upon evidence, even if it means you have to let go of some attractive ideas about yourself and the way the world works, is the first building block of any progress we as a species have made. It is also the antithesis of religious faith. I would say again that if you doubt this, try praying away your next broken limb. Of course you won't- because you actually want the damn thing to get better. This is why no faith healers ever cure anything visible - no eyes growing back, no prosthetic arms cast to the ground as a new one takes its place, no scars melting away, no documented curing of advanced cancers. If it can't be faked or cured psychosomatically, a faith healer has no ability. That should probably tell you something.

Thus, I find that life after God is far more peaceful. The Bible certainly makes complete sense now, and many of the weird paradoxes that vex Christians daily and nightly actually have some pretty simple explanations. The actions of Christians of all stripes also become pretty simple to explain. And I've been able to follow evidence where it leads, which is a journey constantly full of surprise and wonder.

I was on hayride last week with my wife and another couple who are dear friends of ours. It was dark and we were bumping through a field in the cold night air. The stars were incredibly clear, so I took out my phone and booted up the GoogleSky ap in order to see which stars were which. After a few minutes of identifying stars, constellations and planets, I put the phone away and just stared up for a very long time, in silence. These points of light aren't small bits, stuck up on the black ceiling of earth. Most of them are bigger than our planet, and are only so small and quiet because they are so far away. In reality, we're staring out into an endless abyss, a vast ocean across which we can just make out the other islands on the horizon. It strikes me that most tribal religions (including the three monotheisms), begin with one tribe being the chosen people. When you hear Islamic suicide bombers speaking of their expectations of virgins, almonds and figs in the afterlife, the provincial nature of their cosmology is laid bare. It is the musing of an earth-bound being, trying to remake all that he cannot explain in the image of his tribal traditions. The likelihood of there being an afterlife to begin with, much less one that matches up perfectly to the notions of what heaven would be like to a certain culture at a certain time, is laughable. I suppose this would be like an American saying that the Christian heaven is one giant 1950s suburbia - it is so specific an anachronistic that it deserves no credence. And yet the cosmology of a theist is so utterly Earth-centric, the plan of God so laser-focused on humanity, with no thought of the galaxies going through endless change just outside of our neighborhood. It is no wonder that so many people had such a hard time letting go of an Earth-centric galaxy. I suppose we should "teach the controversy" there as well, as for some the geocentric model is still an ongoing debate.

But the stars are still beautiful, still awe-inspiring, and still endlessly interesting. So is the world around us, and so are we.

So I suppose that's where I am at the moment - rediscovering the world to a degree, feeling far more at peace and noticeably more free of cognitive dissonance, and finding out just how wrong I was. There's a tendency for some nonbelievers to say that, while they do not need superstition, some people just wouldn't be able to function without it. I think that's more than a little egocentric, colonial and crass. So I'll instead say "Hey! If you're also starting to think that your faith-based worldview is false, come join us over here! Don't be scared! And I'd love to talk to you about it."

So that's all from me for the next few weeks. Ahead, we'll be taking a look at what the holidays are like for recent atheists, gender issues, more arguments for the existence of god, and maybe even some politics if I'm feeling nervy enough. Keep in touch and enjoy the autumn!

Be well,
-scott

Objectively Meaningless, Subjectively Wonderful: Part Three

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 05:32:00 +0000

Shared goals are important.

Ok, no anecdotes. Let's just get into this.

Ok, so if there are no objective transcendent values, why shouldn't you run out and shoot that guy who tried to get you fired from your job that one time? Why not go and date other people besides your spouse? Heck, why even date when you can simply go rape any people that you can physically or chemically subdue? And why stop there? Why not cook and eat them, wearing their skulls around your neck when you return to the office on Monday?

Well, first I might ask: why you are not doing these things? I mean, really. You're obviously sitting somewhere reading this instead of fulfilling whatever horrible urge may occur to you. If you are a Christian, why aren't you fulling it? Is it strictly because God has forbidden it? Well, then why are people like me, who strenuously deny the existence of objective, transcendent evil, also not doing these things?

I do not believe that God exists at this point. I don't know for sure, but the evidence just isn't there, therefore I don't have a belief that a theistic god is there. I honestly don't. It follows, then, that I don't believe that anyone other than material beings will ever watch me or judge my actions or character. After death I'm probably not going to get any sort of talking to about my choices for good or ill. Furthermore, I think I've addressed at least somewhat well that the idea of objective, transcendent moral values is a myth. And yet, right now, I am sitting at my computer, drinking a Coke Zero and petting my cat. My wife, who holds similar views on God and morality, made some homemade chicken-noodle soup this afternoon in a big pot. She froze it into servings for the winter. This weekend we're thinking of going to a corn maze with our friend Matt. Maybe we'll drink some hot cider and watch a scary movie. On Sunday we're looking forward to taking a stroll through the neighborhood to watch the children run around trick-or-treating. When I am done writing this tonight, I will probably do some reading, do some work, and then go to bed. Note how little immoral mischief we're getting up to.

Why aren't I taking advantage of the huge, crazy, depraved, destructive options that we fear an amoral universe affords? Because I have one heck of a personal stake in not doing this.

I have goals. My goals, at the base, are that I attain happiness and well-being in some way. Your goals are the same. Really, they are. Even a devout Christian has these goals. They believe that a relationship with God will give them meaning, clarity and purpose. They also believe that they stand to gain after death, and may also believe that their faith removes the possibility of suffering tremendously then and now. The threat of hell is a threat of pain and torture. The idea of living in some godless, confused state on earth also promises some internal suffering, harm to others or perhaps great physical suffering as well (see the skits in any Hell House). Even the harder parts of Christianity, the possible real persecution (well, not really all that possible in the western world) and all of that - with it comes purpose and a feeling that you are cared for. Thus Christians have the same subjective, self-interested values at base. Any moral duty will come back to a self-interested, personal value - though it may feel like the least self-centered action you can take. The subjective itch you are scratching may simply be a desire to transcend a feeling of self-centeredness. If a person who values selflessness performs a selfless action, it is therefore an act that gratifies self-interest.

The phrase "self-interested" is a hard one for many people, because to them it automatically means "selfish" in the moral sense. I don't necessarily mean it in that manner, though I am 100% sure it plays a huge part in all of the previously discussed decisions. I mean "self-interested" in the same way that stretching, or eating your favorite food, or kissing your girlfriend might. It gratifies you, but not necessarily at a detriment to others. It does not have to be competitive thing, or something done at the neglect of a duty to others. I'm not Ayn Rand.

So, getting back to my goals - I want to be happy and have some measure of well-being. That includes things like health, safety, basic needs, some sort of companionship. It looks differently to everyone. Now, we can objectively say that humans thrive in certain circumstances and suffer in others. There is a wide gradient of what those circumstances look like and they sometimes contradict between sane, reasonable people, but most of us can agree on certain things. We would all like to not be tortured against our will. We would all like to not lose things that are dear to us. We would all like to not have our lives taken against our will. We would all like to have a warm, safe place to sleep at night - or at least have the choice to have one (I say this for those of you who prefer sleeping in moving boxcars). We could go on from here, but I think you realize that the vast majority of people have some similar, basic goals. With this in mind, we can move on.

In fact, let's return now to the CS Lewis quote with which I began this series of posts.

"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later." - CS Lewis

Lewis comes back to this argument often, as do many Christians. They recognize that most people, in most civilizations, value some similar things to some extent. Most people also recognize atrocities when they see them. This is just true. Go on out and do as many surveys as you like. The cannon of world culture alone is reason to believe that people tend to share values. How many national myths involve triumphing over injustice? How many mythic heroes defeat monsters that have been preying upon villagers? How many deities embody virtues? And how many cultures have striven to put the value of human life and dignity before more and more of their other values? The answer to all of these is quite a lot.

Where Lewis goes wrong is thinking this needs an external explanation beyond humans themselves. We all have a stake in the world we live in. We have the best chance of happiness and well-being if we choose to help create an environment where those values are respected and even nurtured. And our choices, when we are thinking them through, often reflect that. Thus, it can be said that by making a personal decision you are also choosing for everyone, because our actions change the rest of us and the world we share. An example:

So I'm driving through my crowded neighborhood and some idiot walks out in front of me, causing me to jam the brakes and squeal to a stop. I've been having a bad day. It's hot and I've got a mosquito bite right in the middle of my back. I didn't sleep much and I have loads of irritating and boring obligations to take care of before I can take a nap. I have a headache. And what would make me, personally, very happy right now would be to slam down the gas pedal and mow this jerk down. And perhaps if I were just listening to my emotions, I might do it. But I'm not. Instead, I'm thinking about how I've done the same to other people and have been glad they did not run me down. I am empathetic to others (as most of us are to some degree), and I have been in pain before. Therefore, I do not wish to cause pain because I also feel pain when that happens. I also value my own life and those I know, and so it behooves me to contribute to an environment where life is respected. I also know that there would be severe, detrimental consequences to me on a personal and practical level. And I also know that if I can keep myself from running this jackass over, I can quickly leave behind the rage I am feeling at the moment and thus improve my happiness. If I do not control this impulse, it will affect my future in ways that are in direct opposition to my happiness and well-being. Obviously all of these thoughts happen in a split-second and I barely notice them. So I may punch the steering wheel or something, but I do not murder the guy, who actually looks like he feels bad for making me stop so suddenly. He waves an apology and I wave back, signaling him to not feel unhappy about it. Notice that I have, in doing that, gone out of my way, almost unconsciously, to reduce his level of unhappiness. And we both go on with our day. All of this happens because of my stake in the world around me, and my interest in my happiness. And even if you are a Christian, I suspect that similar quick lists of reasons to not do certain awful things flash through your brain more often than not. But such a list does not require God or anything transcendent or objective. People forget that selfless behavior has, at it's root, self-interested motives. Altruism feels good, and we subjectively like feeling good. Love gives us many things, and that is why we love others. If love only caused pain, suffering and disconnection, it would be far less popular.

Thus, we have established at least a few basic shared goals and have seen how they work themselves out in common situations. Traffic works because of our shared subjective goals to get somewhere quickly and safely. Trick-or-treating will work this Sunday because of a shared goal as a community to enjoy Halloween and provide kids with a great time. The raising of those children works because we have shared subjective goals involving reproduction and the care for our offspring. Even tribes in the desert, far away from our western interpretations of morality and stability still mourn their dead, and comfort one another. Most overwhelmingly disapprove of random, indiscriminate killing. Heck, even my CAT understands this. When one of us is crying, he'll find us and rub up against us before laying next to us and purring. When one of us is sick, after awhile he'll notice and come downstairs and sleep next to the person until they are better. He'll also, when he notices we are in distress, will bring us his favorite toys and leave them beside us. The flip-side of this is that he gets a stress-induced eye infection sometimes when we've been away for too long. He recognizes his stake in our being around, and that extends to a stake in our well-being. We humans, naturally, begin to identify with one another. We like to be in groups (with exceptions, of course). We are social. That identification with one another leads to several things that are foundational to having shared goals. One of these, and I think the most important one, is empathy - the ability to appreciate suffering in others. After awhile we find that the suffering and happiness of others is contagious (you actually see this among other mammals as well).

And so, if we have set down some goals, we can now bridge the is-ought chasm. IF a group of people share a common subjective goal of happiness and health, then THEY OUGHT to act in such a way that creates an environment where they can attain this goal. Let's go a bit smaller. IF I wish to coexist with others, AND I rely upon other people fulfilling their responsibilities, then I OUGHT to fulfill my responsibilities in order to maintain such an environment. You can break it down further. IF I wish to feel valued, then I OUGHT to act in such a way that causes others to value me. Let's go one further. IF I wish to like myself, then I OUGHT to act in such a way that makes me likable. One more. IF all sentient beings wish to avoid suffering, AND all sentient beings are vulnerable to the actions of other sentient beings, then ALL SENTIENT BEINGS OUGHT to avoid actions that cause suffering. Thus, we actually get objective statements from subjective ones. From a purposeless void, we have created purpose. We can therefore start building some moral laws. The easiest ones to observe and defend (and arguably the most useful) would be:

Act in such a way that creates the most happiness and well-being. Avoid actions that cause unnecessary suffering.

It's simple, it's useful, and it is based upon subjective values that most of us share. We all stand to objectively gain what we subjectively want by following them. And you probably already live your life this way, because I'm only the zillionth person to articulate these rules. I never said the search for truth would be original.

This is why The Golden Rule is so central to most systems of morality, including (but certainly not limited to) that of Christianity. Jesus was correct in saying that loving others as we love ourselves is the basis for all other moral laws. Understanding the stake we have in the well-being of others is what has driven successful human relationships and endeavors since time immemorial. No magical stone tablets of commandments necessary. In fact, if you think that people before the Ten Commandments had no idea that it was a bad idea to murder and steal, then you really have to account for how any group of people ever survived together before that time. There were massive, successful civilizations long before Moses trudged up Mt. Sinai, and in many parts of the world that didn't get that particular set of rules for millennia.

Basing a morality upon shared, observable goals has many benefits. It can grow and change and address our changing needs as people. One can judge actions based upon their usefulness in relation to practical goals. In this sense, one can actually speak of objectively good and bad things, because one is referencing observable goals, actions and preferences. One can be empirical with these goals in ways one can never be with laws that stem from some impossible Divine nature. We can reason and debate them, and revise them when we need to do so. One can say "No, it is bad to blow myself up in this crowded street because it will cause pain to others and actually set my political goals back by giving my sect a bad name". One can say "No, we should abstain from burning this heretic because it will cause suffering to others and create an environment where I, too, may one day be burned for something I believe". One can say "No, those two men are not physically hurting me by kissing, but if I physically hurt them it will cause unnecessary pain". You can see how focusing on the actual repercussions of one's actions, to oneself and to others, causes our morality to be grounded in actual human need. It also happens to solve some of the issues that socially conservative Christians have with evolving morals. For example:

"But if you say that homosexuality is okay, then what's to say that pedophilia is wrong?"

Well, we can empirically see that there are many healthy, happy, non-suffering gay couples in the world. We can also see that pedophilia causes suffering to at least one party involved. Therefore we can allow homosexuality but still be opposed to pedophilia.

These two rules certainly won't solve all of our problems and moral conundrums are inescapable, but in the absence of a set of objective values you could certainly do worse that the two moral rules above... especially since they are what most systems of morality already have as a basic building block.

You simply do not need God, or to pretend that logically impossible objective values are really behind your actions. If you define "good" in relation to yourself and others and not simply to God, then being good is possibly even more possible without God because you have one less non-human obligation. It also, as I said in the last post, makes you completely accountable for your actions. It removes the excuse of adherence to some divine voice that no one else can confirm or reproduce in public. It also invalidates the idea that Christianity or any faith system is the only source of moral truth (especially since Christians' adherence to the morality of the Bible happens for the same subjective reasons that anyone else has for their moral code). Instead, it puts the focus on thinking, self-reflection, wisdom and self-control.

Now, let's talk about your objections. I'm sure you have a few.

But what about people whose subjective idea of happiness IS to suffer?

Suffering, for these people, is not an involuntary act. It is a choice. Therefore it does not hold the same definition of suffering that we generally use. I like painfully spicy food sometimes. However, being held down against my will and having capsaicin poured into my mouth would cause me suffering. I enjoy a scary movie, but actual mortal fear in my real life amounts to suffering. So let's not confuse what someone chooses and what someone has done to them involuntarily.

But what about people whose subjective idea of happiness is causing OTHERS to suffer?

This is a big one, perhaps the biggest one. In fact, it was the subject of the first email I received after posting yesterday's entry. I will start by saying that this isn't a problem for a subjective moral consensus any more than it would be in a system held up by objective moral values. Many murderers, rapists and genocidists (I invented a word!) actually believe in God and objective right and wrong, yet they are still driven by passions or simply a differing set of thought-out subjective values to commit actions that most of the people on earth would consider barbaric. So let's start by saying that recognizing subjective morality doesn't cause this problem or even change how we address it, because it's the exact same situation that would exist in any system of morality. In fact, I'll just copy and past this part from my response to the email.

Thus, my answer is that we deal with them as we deal with them now- attempting to reason with them and bring them around to more widely-held subjective values (ie: you shouldn't rape my cat), treatment (ie: I think we can find a way to reduce your desire to rape my cat) or as the last resort, curtail their ability to do such things (ie: OK, I'm going to sit on you until the police get here)... there will always be moral outliers and people whose goals are opposed to the vast majority's wish for happiness and safety. And so we'll continue to deal with it as we have before, constantly evolving better methods (hopefully) or coming to consensus and dealing with problems.

You may be asking how I, understanding that my own views on morality are just subjective values, can possibly pass judgment upon the actions of a psychopath. There are a few answers to this. In the first place, I can actually logically explain my morality in terms of its direct benefit to myself and others, including the psychopath. In the second place, my own feelings of connection and actual, real-world inter-dependencies upon others spur me to make such decisions in order to minimize damage to these connections, and thus minimize suffering in others and myself. This even benefits the psychopath because it creates an environment more favorable to their flourishing, even if they then choose to act against it. Thirdly, I have no choice. I am in the position of having to make choices. When faced with such a choice, not making a value assessment of actions that cause unnecessary pain is a choice itself. Therefore it it logical to make such assessments as a way of minimizing pain and promoting happiness. No moral philosophy will ensure that no one murders anyone else, because for many people moral philosophy just doesn't enter into it. Let's be realistic - there are sometimes no clean, easy solutions to messy problems. There are horrible people doing horrible things. Also, sometimes people just disagree, are misinformed, are damaged in some way or are just plain wrong. And so we deal with it as it arises.

But even beyond the existence of crazy axe murderers or horrible dictators, we have problems at home. We ourselves don't often do what we want to do. Some of us find it downright impossible. But we deal with such things. We long to be connected and valued because it makes us happy. If we choose to act in a way that causes unnecessary harm to others (and who hasn't, despite their best efforts?), it still benefits both ourselves and the community at large to stay connected with one another. Thus forgiveness and grace enter the equation. I can say with some empirical strength that Christianity is not the origin of grace and mercy - it exists in every culture. These values are necessary because our life here is never going to go as planned, and rarely as smoothly as we like.

OK, but doesn't this just come down to a majority rule?

Yes, but at least humanity is the majority. Since we're pretty much the only game in town that's as good as we can hope for. And it beats the alternative, which is no subjective values at all, and therefore no values of any sort. But I honestly don't think that's even possible. And remember, I'm not talking about some out-of-left-field moral system here. I'm basically talking about The Golden Rule. All of our other moral and philosophical disagreements must still be worked out. My goal here is only to argue that one can have a coherent moral philosophy even in the absence of objective value, and in fact that most people have already adopted it. This is one of the main points of my post last week about the changing interpretations of parts of the Bible to suit evolving ethical needs. Christians are already doing everything I wrote here and in doing so are interpreting the Bible in ways that cause less unnecessary suffering than before. Perhaps some more of them will decide to go all the way.

And so, to sum up these three posts.

ROAR. I TOTALLY AM THE SUMMARY LION. WHY HAVE YOU SUMMONED ME?

An objective, transcendent moral value cannot come from God's nature, as His actions often include actions that would be wrong for humans to perform. His commands present a separate standard from his own actions, which presents two problems. First, if one believes that the command is good because it comes from God, then we are back to appealing to His nature again and we have seen that this is not our moral standard as humans. Secondly, if one believes that God only asks us to do things that are good, then God is appealing to a standard of goodness other than Himself, rendering Him only the messenger and not the standard of objective, transcendent moral value. Also, merely stating that a command is from God is no indicator that we ought to follow it, unless we begin to appeal to subjective values. The same goes for appealing to God's authority. A statement like "God is Love" is a meaningless and misleading statement because if God's attributes are innate to Him, then God is simply God. He is what He is because He is. No moral qualifier, in absence of subjective values, can be put to Him. Also, if His values simply ARE, then they are by definition purposeless, as is He. Lastly, even if all of this somehow made sense and were true, God's values would still be subjective to Him, and our obedience would still be personal choice based upon subjective personal values.

From there we saw that ALL value is subjective, because value is contingent upon a valuer. Hence, there is no objective value to any object or being. But since we are beings with the ability to choose, our choices create subjective values, purpose and goals. Beyond that, we have no choice but to choose and therefore create. I find this to be great news. These goals (in particular the most popular ones - being happy and not suffering) give us the ability to say what ought to be done if we want to achieve these goals. Therefore laws based upon shared subjective values are possible. The most basic one would be something resembling the golden rule. It does not solve all of our problems, but we are at least being coherent, logical, honest and curious about things and those values have been behind just about any advancement, moral or otherwise, we have achieved as a species. We simply do not need an incoherent and demonstrably false idea of an objective moral standard given to us from on high in order to behave ourselves in a manner that benefits ourselves and others. And like a lack of objective meaning forces us to choose, the lack of objective value forces us to be responsible for our moral codes.

And if you think that sounds too spooky and iffy, think about this: Unless you can disprove most of my statements above, you must conclude that civilization, your family and yourself have been running on subjective values the whole time, whether you knew it or not. And you have to admit, all things considered, that at least some big swaths of people seem to be doing just fine with this. So give yourselves a little credit. Accept that no one is going to do good unless you do it. All of the meaning in the world has been created by us. It's just us, floating around and trying to figure things out. We are born, we live, and we die. And during that too-brief time we leak values and meanings and purposes everywhere we go. You may be discouraged to think of all of the horrors that mankind is responsible for. But remember the flip-side as well. Think of all of the great and wonderful things we've accomplished as a species. Think of something like the written word, or music, or architecture, or friendship, or romance, or philosophy or morality itself. You should feel somewhat honored to be in such great company, and feel the weight of history upon you. You have the distinct honor and the dizzying responsibility of looking out into nothingness and making a choice.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - Yes, I must stress further that there are real bastards out there. But pretending that an objective moral standard exists doesn't seem to be preventing them from being bastards, and at no point in history have we ever been short of our bastard quota. In fact, some of the biggest bastards in history have been directly involved with organizations that preached objective moral values that they had no problem disobeying. That's a correlation, not a causation, in case you're wondering.

PSS - Of course this is all open to development, but at least you know where I stand and how I back it up. In the future when I say something is moral or immoral, now you know what I mean.

PSSS - I am taking a week off because my brain is exhausted from these last few posts.

Objectively Meaningless, Subjectively Wonderful: Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:20:00 +0000

"You know, I personally think you look great. But objectively you're still a goat."

"We are alone, without excuses. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. There is no power of 'beautiful passions' which propel men to their actions, we think, rather, that man is responsible for his own passions. - John-Paul Sartre

I was about 6 or 7. I was sitting on the couch, enjoying the cool indoors on a hot summer afternoon. We didn't have many movies to watch and the ones we had were all taped off of the television. I had exhausted Annie and Darby O'Gill And The Little People, and was watching a great deal of the Disney version of Robin Hood. Seriously, I must have watched it dozens of times that summer. I really loved it. I loved the characters. But for some reason, I had started to have a weird, melancholy feeling when I watched it. At first it was barely noticeable but it grew and grew. I couldn't quite figure out what it was until that one afternoon. Here, I'll show you what happened. Watch this video and pause it at the 1:12 mark.

Ok, right about there I realized that I was looking at lines and shapes and not fox people. I obviously knew what drawing and animation were. I knew none of it was real. But it suddenly struck me that I was not watching two beings having a romantic, meaningful moment. I was watching a series of configurations of ink on paper and acetate, played in sequence while people manipulated instruments to create sound and a woman sang. Nothing there was real in the sense that I had been experiencing it. It was all just a combination, however purposeful, of processes. And the biggest realization, deep down, was that these two characters did not exist and would never exist. The moment on the screen between them would never happen. I of course knew this all intellectually going into it, but now I knew it. Any attachments I had to the characters were completely one-sided, as they were dead, or at least nonexistent. I shut off the tape and went outside to ride my bike and think.

Around the same time, I began to have some pretty awful nightmares, including one that I still sometimes have today. My dreams at that point reflected things about which I had just learned. I had seen a good portion of both Jaws and Orca (has anyone else seen that movie?) at the time, and so many of my nightmares focused on deep, dark water and the things that swam beneath it. To this day that is really my only phobia, such that I don't even like drinking from a cup in which, when I tip it up to drink, my eyes are focused on a dark space in which there is water. I know, that is really stupid. I also prefer showers in small part for this reason. Back then, I was also very afraid of the monsters I had seen in movies like Clash Of The Titans. I would have all kinds of nightmares about being in the temple of Medusa, knowing that I in no way would survive. The dreams would focus not on the fact that I would not escape, but rather on sitting there knowing that I had no hope of escape. Then there were the common bogeymen of the 80s, Freddy Kruger and Jason Vorhees. They were also prominently featured.

So how do you think I dealt with these problems? Well, as my parents could tell you, I drew them and read about them. I became utterly obsessed with sharks. I watched the first shark week front to back. I drew sharks all over the place. I wanted to go to an aquarium and see a shark in person. I read books about them and looked at pictures of shark attacks. I would hold my face under the water in our kiddie pool and roar into the liquid, thinking for some reasons that sharks roared.

I checked out every book I could find on monsters out of the library. I read endless compilations of folklore and encyclopedias of mythology. I had always loved the topics, but now I was reading them for a purpose - to understand the things that were scaring me. And once again, I drew. I drew every kind of monster you could fathom. When we moved to California in 1989, I had the room at the front of the one-story house, right next to the front door. I was afraid of someone breaking in through my window at night. So I drew awful killer monsters. I drew bloody swords in their hands and sharp teeth in their mouths.

My father came into my room one night and closed the door. Holding a stack of my drawings I had left by the couch, he asked me what I was drawing. "Monsters", I answered. "Why?", he asked. In a moment of weird childhood intuition, I replied "Because if I draw them they can't hurt me." I remember this disturbed him a bit, and I understand why that was. It really sounds spooky coming from a kid. But it was true. In order to deal with my fears, I was trying to understand them and master them as best I could. I read about them. I put them into categories. And then I drew them, making them my own creations. They weren't so scary anymore. They were just lines and shapes and ideas.

In a world without objective values, things can seem terrifying and depressing. Once you see how the card trick is done, you just have to accept that there was no magic there to begin with. And that is hard. We want purpose. We want meaning. We want an answer when we ask "Why?"

There is good news and bad news here. We'll cover the bad news first.

You are asking in vain. There is nothing out there that will provide an objective value that is intellectually honest. It simply cannot exist by definition. The quicker you understand that, the better. This is one of the reasons why some people leap from extreme to extreme - one year they are a Christian, the next a devout Buddhist. One year they are a dedicated Marxist, the next a free-market libertarian. They pass from identity to identity, from answer to answer. They seek value statements that they consider authoritative and when those value statements inevitably fail to fulfill them, they simply move on to whatever looks better. Perhaps the next narrative from on high will provide the objective values they seek, but my money is on that not happening. They merely have to dig deep enough to find the subjective center and it is all over, the search begins anew. And even if God existed and could tell you what the meaning of life is, it would make no difference. He could only tell you His subjective purpose for you. That is by no means an objective value. The best you could do is accept His subjective purpose, and in doing that you are actually defining your own subjective purpose for yourself anyway. Thus, Christians are every single bit the moral relativists they claim non-Christians to be, because there is no way to make a subjective value judgment in a manner that is not somehow relativistic. God's existence makes no difference here - everyone must make choices. Everyone must individually make subjective value judgments. They cannot refuse. Even by not choosing, they are still choosing. As Sartre would say, we are condemned to be free. At any given point you have every choice available to you. You may not like the choices themselves and some of them are unthinkable, but that does not mean that they are not there. And you must choose. You will stop choosing when you no longer have the capacity to think, and not before. The only thing about which you have no choice is choice.

One of the reasons why people are drawn to the Christian idea of objective value is that it
takes the responsibility out of their hands. I can remember pastors saying to congregations that they are so thankful that God has made moral decisions for them, because they would hate to have to answer these impossible questions. Well, they do have to choose and in fact were choosing at that moment - they just did not recognize it. Puritans could burn a witch without feeling guilt because it was simply the command of God and they had no control over it. Take it up with God if you don't like it! They were just the messengers! I absolutely love it when Christians say that they don't want to be all against homosexuality or anything, but God's against it and thems the breaks. In fact, the one ill-advised debate I had on a street corner in DC with a Westboro Baptist Church member boiled down to the same idea. They do not have to take personal responsibility for what they support or don't support, for their ideas of morality and for how they deal with the world. Terrible, crushing poverty? Pray about it and know that God has a purpose. Problem solved! But the problem, of course, is that there isn't really any evidence for God and certainly no knowable way of ascertaining that such a purpose exists or how to evaluate it (and even if there were, you have all of the problems we discussed in the last post). No one is minding the store!

I'd like to briefly discuss one of the last ditch efforts that Christianity throws at the problem. That would be one of the great unfalsifiable answers to any possible question, Proverbs 3:5-6. I used to love this verse as a child, but over my adult life it became more and more incoherent and insulting. So we're really being told not to think? It's just coming right out and saying don't trust your reason? Not to mention that the argument is a complete and utter contradiction. It is making an argument to say that one should not make arguments. It is giving you reasons not to trust reasons. It's like when I hear Christians say "God is not bound by logic, so logic is useless in finding truth." This is of course a statement that uses logic, seeking to explain a truth. They are seeking to logically explain that they do not utilize logic. I might as well write "It is a true statement that this is not a sentence". People who employ this verse to dismiss objections and doubts are being dishonest - they are still leaning upon their own understanding but denying it so that they do not have to do the actual work of thinking through their beliefs.

And really, can we be honest and say that Christians do interpret their "received revelation" on objective moral values by referring to moral standards that are external to the nature of God? How many times have you heard (or found yourself saying) that God must have a good purpose for something tragic? Or maybe you read of the endless slaughter in the Bible and just think there HAS to be some great reason for it that we'll understand when our knowledge is made complete? Or, as I went over last week, people invent The Age of Accountability to patch a glaring ethical problem with the Biblical idea of sin and the afterlife? I mean, can we be honest about that? Can we be honest and say that a moral disgust toward slavery is at least PART of the reason that people seek to interpret away the Bible's near-universal support for it? Can we give people just a little credit and say that the Christian church has become more inclusive not because it has read the Bible better, but more ethically over time? This is just a theory, of course, but I think that there is more than a nugget of truth there. And as we have seen above and in the last post, for the purposes of an objective morality it doesn't matter anyway - there simply is no way, even with a perfect reading of scripture (what is that anyway?) and some bat-phone to God, you still have to subjectively weigh God's subjective values and agree with it for your own subjective reasons. There is nothing objective or transcendent about it. And you still have the massive logical problems. Things don't look good.

And now the good news. Or at least my subjective take on all of this that I would consider good news. (Just saying that to be consistent.)

When we say "Everything is without meaning", we often mean that everything is full of despair, confusion and futility. But these are also subjective value judgments. When I say that nothing has intrinsic value, I mean that it is a blank sheet of paper. Being blank, the sheet is devoid of meaning - however, our normal relationship with paper has trained us to immediately begin thinking of possibilities, of ways to fill that space. Thus is it also with our lives and our world. I am not an animator today because I was yesterday. It is not my purpose in the sense that a machine has a purpose, because I have the ability to choose. I am an animator today because I woke up and chose to be one (though to be honest today I've mostly been a blogger and a video game player). This has huge implications for everything in our lives. I am not simply a combination of external influences and genetic predispositions, though these things are part of the equation. My ability to think, to reason, and to subjectively value mean that my choices are what make me. No one can say that they are something that their actions do not reflect. Someone may say that "Well, I'm a gas station attendant right now but inside I'm REALLY an astronaut". No, you are a gas station attendant because of choice and circumstance and you wish to be an astronaut. The same thing applies to morality. Someone who thinks all the time of good things but doesn't do anything about them has no claim on goodness. If you care enough about the poor to pray for them but not to help them, then you do not care about the poor - you are more than willing to use subjective, unprovable channels of aid to help the destitute, but decide to keep the more concrete means of aid for yourself. Thoughtful.

Also, it follows that we are creatures of endless possibilities. We are adaptable. We are the most intelligent creatures for which we have any evidence. Think about that. And because we have the ability to make choices, we can fight against the things that oppress us. Is your family full of idiots? You don't have to be an idiot. Are you a life-long screw-up? You don't have to be. You're not bound to anything. Deferring to an objective moral standard (which, I must stress again, can not possibly exist) takes away any say you have in the matter. You are powerless. To change, you are reliant completely upon this external standard. Your only measure of success, morally, is your adherence to this code that has nothing to do with you, and by definition has no stake in your happiness, well-being, or continued life. But understanding that you are responsible for your choices in a subjective moral universe turns the tables. It opens the door for a morality that is first and foremost based upon other people and this world, as opposed to pleasing a distant, non-contingent authority figure. It makes you responsible to others and to yourself. It makes a humane humanity possible in ways that divine edict could never possibly achieve.

We can listen to music and form subjective connections that mean everything to us. Some small item like a ring of metal can be imbued with such subjective, personal meaning that it becomes the most precious item in the world to someone. Hey that last line was an inadvertent Lord of the Rings reference! This is also the crux of the numinous experience. There are reasons that people who attend worship services, hike through the mountains, care for children, create art, love another person or just really enjoy music all claim the same types of ecstatic experiences. These are moments of connection and appreciation so profound that they often power the wheels of our entire life. I was at a show the other night at a local venue. It was a completely secular event. And yet when the band there played a song I loved, I felt the exact same feeling I felt at the best worship services I ever attended. I connected with the song. It spoke to me. It meant the world to me for those few moments. And all of this was subjective, a filling of the void with meaning.

My spouse is not a being that exists for me. She is like me in many ways, but she has her own mind and her own intentions - her own subjectivity. I can never completely understand what it is like to be her. Consequently, we are separated by a wall that can never be broken through. But we do all we can to go over, under, and around the wall. And our connection is such that it defines large parts of my life. So profound are these interpersonal connections that they often provide all of the meaning anyone could want, despite the problems inherent in dealing closely with other people.

Our world around us is also something that is terribly meaningful to everyone I've ever met. It is our native environment. We recognize beauty in sunsets, trees, and city skylines. We go to mountains or the ocean in order to feel small, and to feel connected to something almost too massive to imagine. We celebrate the passage of time because we have survived. Change has happened and yet we have endured, through our own choices and more than a few fortunate circumstances.

We solve problems. It's what we do. Everything we do is to address something we don't like. There is always hardship and pain to ease, in ourselves and especially others. And there is always so much more to learn, so much more to understand - an endless sea of things we don't yet understand. There are huge conundrums that really do affect people (like the ones we are currently discussing) that provide more than enough meaning for many people.

I could go on and one, but you get the point. We live in a world that simply exists, without innate value. We have no say in this matter. However, we are unique in existence because we can make subjective choices. We have everything to say about what meaning fills that void. We have everything to say about who we are and what kind of world we wish to live in. We create ourselves through our actions and our actions, together, create our human world around us. And beyond that, we can connect and find value in others, in what we and others create, and in the world around us. But we each bear this responsibility. We cannot avoid it.

Take everything in your life that means anything to you. It still means the exact same thing as it did before, even if there is no objective standard for values. And really, what does that even matter? Would your child be any more precious to you if it were imbued with divine purpose? Is the autumn less meaningful to you because it is not objectively valuable? And does the fact that assault is not objectively, transcendentally wrong really make you want to go out and beat a person until they are crying and begging for mercy? If you can't find an objective, transcendent reason not to incite genocide, are you suddenly far more interested in doing so? Because, I have to say, most of the rest of us are not interested. And tomorrow we'll go into how we get from this to a coherent start of a moral system that does not need to appeal to a god for which we have no proof or a system of objective, transcendent moral truths that can not possibly exist.

Be Well,
-scott

PS- I am extremely suspicious of soundbites or slogans, as they often have no substance and get by on naked appeal alone. However, I think that perhaps an excellent way of explaining this whole philosophy (which, I will stress again, is based upon observable logic) can be summed up in a few sentences:

1. The absence of Objective Purpose does not preclude Choice.
2. Choice allows for Subjective Purpose.
3. Subjective Purpose allows for Fulfillment and Happiness.

I'm still working on it, but you get the idea.

Objectively Meaningless, Subjectively Wonderful: Part One

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 21:01:00 +0000

It's only beautiful because you think it's beautiful.

"Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later." - CS Lewis

Because of the intense love and admiration I felt for 'ol Clive Staples when I was a younger man (and still do to a lesser extent), it always pains me to directly contradict him, but here goes: There is no such thing as an objective, transcendent moral value. There is also no such thing as an objective, transcendent moral obligation, much less one from God. And I'm going to prove this to you by argumentation. That is, I am going to prove it to you like an astronomer can calculate where Pluto will be in the sky in a certain place - he cannot walk out to Pluto and prove that it will be visible in the south on May 21st, 2011. Rather, he can use the tools of mathematics and physics to predict it and see if this prediction holds true. And when it does, he can be reasonably certain that, barring external circumstances, he can predict where Pluto will be tomorrow.

Now, this is important. If you are a Christian, what I am about to say has gigantic and devastating implications for your view of morality. It really will be of great import that you pay attention to this, as it is pretty close to a smoking gun on a large part of the God thing. It also concretely addresses what would be called the moral argument for the existence of God. These posts will be different from my series on biblical ethics last week (though I'll probably reference them at times, especially the last one), as they will have much less personal opinion and far more logical, testable reasoning. As such, do not take this as just "Scott thinks this is true". Test it like you would test a mathematics equation and see how it works... because it really does work. It might take a few posts to completely outline, but it is as logically true as I can make it and I honestly am asking for rebuttals. By that, I mean I would like arguments to the contrary that can be backed up by something other than "That's not what I believe" or "I don't like it". Also, as a side note, "Sure I can't prove my case, I refuse to accept any arguments to the contrary because, like, can we really know anything?" is a silly response, because instead of actually discussing the truth or untruth of something you are simply denying that any truth can be ascertained in any way, which also kills your beliefs just as dead. So become an universal agnostic, disbelieving every bit of evidence that meets your five senses, and kindly remove yourself from any discussion of anything ever because, logically, you have nothing to add or learn since you deny that one can know anything to begin with. Or you could stand up straight and come along on this trip.

But also, before we begin, I have a few things to say. So clear a few minutes, grab a glass of your favorite beverage, put on some of your nice music and just relax.

1. These are going to at times be complex issues, but they will be issues that YOU CAN UNDERSTAND. I meet so many people who refuse to even think about the things they hold most dear because they are too afraid they will not be able to follow it. I think sometimes that this is just code for fear of being wrong or just fear of getting the wrong answer in front of someone else; but let's just assume that people are being honest. Email me with questions and I will explain whatever it is you don't understand or that I may have gotten wrong. If we are honestly talking about the most important issues in the world, you might want to take the time to really think about it.

2. When I first realized, somewhere back in 2007, that there could not possibly be such a thing as an objective moral value (despite my best efforts to prove the opposite), I was depressed for about six weeks. I mean, deeply depressed and afraid on a base level. And after that it took a couple of years to really come to grips with it figure out what to do about it. It has huge effects on your life if you take it seriously. So take it seriously, because it is important. But also understand that, like most other worthwhile endeavors in life, it may take some time to work it out for yourself.

3. That having been said, there are actually great, rational reasons that this fact is actually a great thing. It may be the best thing, though that's a subjective take obviously. I will end these posts by explaining why the fact that there are no objective moral values might be one of the best things you've ever discovered. Note: It is not great because it means you get to drop acid and have orgies now. I'll also get my own skin in the game by explaining my own moral views and how I square them without much effort with the inarguable reality that an objective, transcendent set of moral values does not exist. I'll also explain how this is all probably not bad news for your own views.

OK, ready?

What the heck is an objective moral value and why is it so important to Christianity? An idea can be said to be objective when it does not depend upon the thoughts of the viewer. I can objectively say that my guitar pick is .88 millimeters thick and made out of nylon. Now, why can I say this is an objective description? Because we have agreed-upon definitions of measurement. We also have an agreed-upon, testable understanding of what comprises the material known as nylon. Therefore one can objectively say that the guitar pick has these attributes. We are simply describing testable, reliable aspects of an object. Laws of logic work in a similar fashion. For example, my guitar pick is what it is because it is not something else. That may sound silly and obvious, but it is actually a very important thing to get straight. If my guitar pick had different attributes, it would not be what it is anymore. It would be something else. If it was thicker or made of plastic, it would be a different object. If it had four legs and a tail, it might be a cat. This is such a reliable law that mathematics couldn't exist without it. Guitar pick = guitar pick. 3 = 3. A = A. This is possibly the most basic element of reasoning. If I were not around to observe the guitar pick, it would still have those attributes. This is why a tree falling in the forest, with no one around to hear it, most likely does make a sound.

Now, the words "millimeter" and "nylon" are just words. They are symbols we use to express meaning to one another. But they point to testable attributes of the object we are discussing, and they are the basis of our understanding one another. In the same way that people had to, at some point in our distant past, come up with a specific grunt that meant "HOLY CRAP WATCH OUT FOR THAT LION!", we have these symbols we call words. Our word for "lion" is not a lion itself, but rather a symbol, a picture of what we have agreed as a lion. The lion itself does not change should we decide to describe it differently. Go ahead, try it out on the savanna! Incidentally, this is why both The Secret and Word of Faith Doctrine are utter, utter bullshit. Symbols do not bring about their objects, if you follow me. I can draw a lion but it will not run away and eat a zebra. So, to review, things are what they are and we do the best we can to represent their attributes with symbols, in order to understand them and communicate their attributes to one another. And we research and study and test these attributes to make sure we have them as objectively correct as possible. This is what enables things like medicine and computers and the fact that you can order a hamburger and not receive a live cat instead.

Now, let me tell you something else about my guitar pick. It is the best kind of guitar pick. It really should cost more than it does. These are both what we would call subjective statements. A subjective statement is one that depends upon the point of view of the observer. We often use subjective and objective statements interchangeably. Instead of saying ".88 millimeters" I might say "really thin". This is one of the reasons that language is tricky - our choice of symbols is often based upon our personal views. My "worst day ever" is the "best day" some people will ever have. Me being "broke" means I don't have any money in my bank account, though I have some in savings and thousands of dollars in available credit. Even things like color are weird. An example: We were leaving the East End Co-op the other day with our groceries in some cloth bags we brought from home. I asked my wife which bag she'd like me to carry, and she said "the orange one". I looked at the two bags - one green and one fire-engine red. "The red one, you mean?" I said playfully. "No, that is orange" she replied with a smile. Just then, two people walked past us. Holding up the bright red bag, I asked them what color it was. "Red!" they replied. "Goddamn it!" said Bethany. All four of us laughed. We agreed that Bethany tends to see a bit more yellow in things than most people, which explains why we can never agree upon the exact difference between aqua and seafoam green. Bethany was wrong in her subjective view of "orange" because it does not match up to the definition of "orange" that we have agreed upon, the definition that makes the very use of the word useful. So, to review, a subjective statement is one that is based upon one's own ideas of a thing, rather than it's objective attributes. It imbues an object with meanings of one's own. As an artist, I do this for a living. A good way to remember the difference is that an objective statement is true because of the object, while a subjective statement is true because of the subject (ie: the one doing the describing). This is also the big difference between a statement being descriptive as opposed to proscriptive - one describes the attributes an object has and the other imposes attributes on it. Thus we can all agree that something is spherical but we may not all agree that it is beautiful. Such is subjectivity.

I also want to define what I mean by transcendent. This is a word that gets thrown around all over the place, particularly within spirituality. When we say that something is transcendent, we mean that it passes through our normal boundaries for that thing. So if a feeling of joy is said to be transcendent, it means that it "transcends", or passes through, our normal understanding of the properties joy should have. When we talk about a transcendent ethic, we mean an ethic that does not depend upon the situation. The Christian call to obey God, for example, is a transcendent value. Even if God's commands transcend other prohibitions such as murder or theft, we must obey God. It simply passes beyond all other obligations. The command to love your neighbor is a transcendent value as it does not depend upon your neighbor's reciprocation of that love, which is often seen as prerequisite for lasting love. Another thing about transcendence is that it breaks wide open when it hits the trusty law of identity that we mentioned earlier. Nothing can transcend itself. If an object's attributes overflow the borders of the attributes that we give it, we must either update our understanding of the object or classify it as a different object. Therefore my guitar pick melts in a microwave, it is still what it is, though it has lost some of the attributes I originally observed in it and has indeed taken on new ones. However, if my guitar pick turns into a cat, it's probably the work of a sorcerer and I need to update many of my definitions.

Finally, let's talk about values. Value is a special kind of attribute an object can have. We say that human life has value. We say that gold has value. We say that a beautiful sunset has value. In an ethical sense, we also use it to mean a statement ABOUT something we value. So, a statement like "Human life is precious. Therefore, we should take steps to protect it" is a value. "Freedom" is a value. "Love" is a value. Since we are going to be speaking principally about ethics here, it is best that we understand exactly what we mean when we speak of a value.

You should have a pretty good idea by now what Christians mean when they say that there exist objective, transcendent moral values. These are things which are true even if an observer is not there to observe them. They do not require external explanations and they apply to everyone. They are not based upon situations or cultural trends. When God tells Abraham to murder Isaac, Abraham is bound by the transcendent moral imperative to follow the command of God and therefore must do it. Since God is the ultimate being and creator, he is the ultimate standard by which morality is judged. Therefore, whatever He does is good. When God tells Christians to forgive, they simply must because it is a command from God. The general idea of Christian morality is that the only basis for morality is a Creator, and that without a creator no objective morality can exist - there can be no ability to say what is right or wrong. And in fact many Christians take the existence of morality as one of the strongest evidences of the existence of God.

Sadly, this is utterly, provably wrong. Here is why.

1. To say that moral values stem from the nature of God is both false and logically incoherent. There are countless actions committed by God within the Bible that would be wrong for humans to enact - let's say, for example, killing two people for fraud. If God is by nature the standard for good, and his actions cannot transcend his nature, then killing two people for fraud is by this definition good. There are countless examples of this type of thing in the Bible, so much that you don't even need me to enumerate them. Therefore, the Christian response to this is to say that there is in fact a different standard for people than God, and that this is revealed in the commands of God. Well, then we've already knocked out the idea that God's nature is the moral standard for man and instead we focus on the commands of God. However, this poses some immediate issues. As we discussed at length last week, the Christian has a problem here defining why a command from God is, by definition, good. Is it good because God commands it, or is God commanding it because He is good? If it is good because God commands it, then we are back to the question of why a command is good because it comes from God, particularly since His nature is not the moral standard for humanity as we undertakes actions that are both consistent with His nature and immoral for humans to perform. If God only commands things that are good, then God is appealing to an external set of values for His actions and therefore morality is not contingent upon God, but rather this external set of values. God becomes merely the messenger, but a messenger that breaks many of these laws all over the place. Neither of these options can be said to be logically true. In fact, this is why you will often get utterly circular statements on the nature of God. "God is good because He does good things. Those things are good because God is good. And God is good because He does good things" and so on and so on. Now, I am not saying that this necessarily means that the biblical God is immoral, but rather that His nature is not the origin of our moral standards. And if our moral standard is something other than the nature of God, then there is an external moral standard to God. Therefore, the idea of an objective moral value that comes from God is false.

I also said that the idea is incoherent. David Hume posed a great little dilemma that you have probably heard before (and you really should click on that link to understand the rest of this paragraph. Don't worry, it's not that long). He said that there is no logical way to move from an "is" statement to an "ought" statement. So to say that you have a child does not mean that I should not throw your child from a bridge. We can make descriptive statements all we like about reality and the logic and so forth, but there is an unbridgeable gap between saying what is and saying what ought to be. Christian apologists have latched on to this and a version of it is pretty much the first line of defense against someone like me.

Wow. As an aside, it's weird to realize that one is now fighting on the opposite team in this regard.

Anyway, a William Lane Craig would immediately say that I have no ability to say that I should not throw your child from a bridge, as I have no objective moral values with which to back it up. Unfortunately for Dr. Craig, neither does he. Like many, many theological arguments, Dr. Craig's reliance upon the commands of God only serves to push the question back one step further. Let's say, for argument's sake, that God did in fact appear today and was documented and interviewed and all of that. Even if He were to present us with a set of moral absolutes, it does not follow that we should agree to them. By itself, the "is" of God's command in no way gets you to the "ought" of our obedience. We'll get back to this idea in a bit, but for now let's just say that God presenting you with a command not to steal is no more an objective moral value than saying that the speed limit on rt. 80 is an objective moral value. It also does not follow that a moral value is an objective one simply because of who gives it. Even if your response is "yes it is", then you might be arguing that God's authority is what makes the command objective, but since the command is now contingent upon God's authority, it is by definition no longer objective or transcendent. One could say that it is in our best interest to obey God because His commands are great and He threatens punishment if we do not follow them. However, we are now appealing to subjective ideas such as self-preservation and fear and this is no different from what Christians accuse non-Christian moralists of doing. Thus, we see that Christians are in the exact same position as atheists in dealing with the is-ought dilemma. Even faith does not solve this problem, it merely pushes it back another layer. One could say that we simply do not possess the capacity to understand the intentions of God. If that is true, it cuts both ways - it also means that the Christian has no capacity to know whether God is a benign or malevolent force, or if He represents any moral ideas at all.

2. An objective moral value is a good old fashioned contradiction in terms and can not, by definition, exist. This is true no matter what your theological views may be. My guitar pick is .88 millimeters thick. It has this thickness even if I am not around to observe it. Even if I don't have a ruler to measure it, it is still that thickness. Even if we had no word for it, it would still have that same attribute. However, a statement of moral value is always, always, always a subjective moral statement that can, at best, be reduced to series of rational statements that are themselves based upon a subjective consensus.

A fantastic example of this that should hit home right about now is the value of capital. Why is money valuable? Well, because in theory it represents an amount of gold. Why is gold valuable? Because it is shiny and rare. Why do we value shiny things? Because they are aesthetically pleasing, perhaps? Because they are interesting? Why then, do we value things that are aesthetically pleasing or interesting? Why do we value things of rarity? Because they are not something we see every day? Because if we have one it makes us special or gives us power? Because we just think it is? It is all based upon a cultural definition of value that is based upon some subjective ideas I can't for the life of me understand, though I do understand why certain things I own are precious and valuable... because they are valuable to me for my own subjective reasons. My younger sister made me a statue once in art class and it sits on my shelf always because it reminds me of her, I value her efforts and intentions, it makes me laugh, and it makes me feel valued. Hence, I value it.

Thus we can see two things. First, that value judgments are, by their very nature, contingent upon personal feelings and therefore subjective. Second, we can actually make rational value judgments based upon subjective value judgments, but only if we are using the same set of subjective value judgments. If we are stranded somewhere on a desert island and you have a Snickers bar and I have $1000, you are suddenly the richer person because our subjective value judgments have now shifted from being based upon capital to being more nougat-based, since we can't eat money. Therefore, one cannot say that human life has intrinsic value. I'm just getting that out of the way because I know someone's going to ask it. Human life has no objective, transcendent value because there simply cannot be, by definition, an objective value - value depends upon valuers. It does, however, have mountains of subjective value. In fact, the vast majority of humans agree with this. Therefore, if we subjectively hold as a consensus that human life is the most valuable thing, then we can begin to make arguments such as "Your Snickers may be worth more than my $1000 right now, but there's no reason to kill one another over it". In this way, a moral value is like a word as described above. It is a consensus based thing that, while subjective in its origin, one can use to make objectively true statements as long as one is using the agreed-upon definitions. But since subjective statements are based upon one's own views, we cannot say that murder is wrong in the same way that my guitar pick is .88 millimeters thick. In a universe with no rulers, the guitar pick is the same width. However, in a universe without objective moral principles, no action is objectively, transcendentally wrong.

Now, the brakes may be squealing in your brain right now. You may be thinking of Hitler, of Charles Manson, of Islamic suicide bombers, of the mugger in the alley down the street. You may be thinking that we have gone off the deep end into that terrible pit known as moral relativism. You may have visions of the book of Revelations. You may be thinking that if we hold to no objective, transcendent moral statements, then soon we'll all be raping, murdering and eating one another. After all, how can I look at a rapist/murderer/cannibal and pass any sort of moral judgment upon them? How can I possibly look at the "is" of an action and get to the "ought" of right and wrong? You may scream now. I'll wait. It's going to get worse before it gets better.

It is that fear that often stops people right here. They think about how disturbing that fact seems, and then they think that it could not possibly be true, and then they either stop thinking about it or start building ramparts around it. They say things like "There MUST be an objective, transcendent value or else all things are permissible and nothing means anything". Let's take a moment to understand that this objection is based upon fear. It merely is a reaction to opening the door on something one finds hideous and terrifying or discovering that one has walked off of solid ground and out into nothingness. Discovering that values are projections of conscious beings can be very difficult. This goes beyond morality and into everything else. My wife is the most valuable thing in the world to me. However, she is a clump of atoms that will decay in time. Her mind is a product of a mass of cells that will at some point fail and cease to function. She is not valuable in the absence of someone to find her subjectively valuable. The trees outside, so beautiful to me in the autumn, are uncaring constructs and each by their unthinking processes are growing there with no intention of their own. The fact that they represent something wonderful to me is arbitrary to their existence. The vine growing up the side of the building seeks to grow, expand, and find the sun simply to sustain itself and it does so with no intention or purpose of its own. If it reaches those trees, it will grow up and choke the trees to death but not because it cares or doesn't. It simply will because that is what it does. One cannot bridge the gap between that "is" and any "ought". And even if God were to exist and moral values were found in His character, than these moral attributes just happen to be what God is. So it is utterly misleading to say "God is Love". God is simply God. His moral attributes, if they are part of His character, are as arbitrary and meaningless as the placement of the leaves that litter the sidewalk. They simply are. If God values obedience, He does it subjectively. If He did not, then for the Christian it would cease to be valuable. Without valuers to imbue something with value, it ceases to exist. And so, objectively, we find that the whole of existence simply is. It has no value in and of itself. If the tree falls in the forest and no one was there it would certainly make a sound, but it would only mean something if someone was there to find meaning in it. No thing has innate meaning. No thing has innate value.

And all of this is, to me, may be the single most wonderful thing I have ever discovered. Tomorrow we'll talk about why this is the least depressing view of things I can conceive of. But even if it was not so wonderful, the logic supports it. More than that, the arguments for objective moral truth, and particularly the idea of an objective moral truth found in the nature of God just do not hold up on their own. So you may be able to find alternate explanations than my own, but you must find alternate explanations that actually represent reality in some way. Because the idea of transcendent, objective value is provably false. You had better come to terms with it.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - If you are inclined to be horrified by all of this, please do not think me horrible by association. Instead, prove me wrong. I didn't WANT to find a void at the center of everything. I have very little to gain by discovering, like many others, that moral values are inescapably subjective. This is simply what is true. I am seeking truth here, and if you can get me closer I would thank you heartily. However, I am not holing my breath - not because I think you are intellectually deficient, but because the law of identity yields to no man and Hume's Is-Ought dilemma affords no solution that is not subjectively based. Merely saying that one "believes" that the law of God is objective is such a basic contradiction I didn't waste the space to deconstruct it. We simply are stuck in a universe where objective, transcendent moral values and obligations cannot exist and we would be well served to shed our tears quickly and start thinking about what to do next. Because when objective meaning evaporates, your ability to make choices becomes the single most important thing you will ever have.

PSS - Oh, in case you're wondering, we are actually going to address these problems and try to find some solutions. You didn't think I would just leave you hanging, did you? It gets better from here on out.

A Voice From Ages Past

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 06:56:00 +0000

I'd like you to listen to the video posted above. Go on. I'll wait.

A friend uploaded this and asked how I would respond to the kid in this video. That kid is, of course, me. I'm happy to say that my voice hasn't changed all that much in the intervening decade. I would say that I think I'm a better speaker now.

At first, I wasn't sure how to respond to the video. I was so young and so early in my thoughts on faith that I don't even know how to react to it. I say this because this blog is mainly about me leaving a matured faith and how I came to that. So taking a specific moment from 9 years ago and asking how I would respond to it now is really asking many questions at once-

1. How would I respond now to what I said then?
2. How does what I said fit into my larger journey through faith and out of it?
3. What was my life like at that point? What is the context?
4. Am I really going to tell this very earnest kid that he is wrong?
5. Well... how do I feel about that?

As is my wont, we'll go through this point by point, but we'll tackle them out of order. It'll be like a bad post-Tarantino student film! And also, prepare for what may be the longest post ever written. You may need to take bathroom breaks.

3. What was my life like at that point? What is the context?

In high school I had a band. It was great. We were called Benny's Joyride, we were terrible, and we had a lot of fun being terrible. My best friends were in the band. It was the nucleus of my entire life during the last few years of high school. I had somehow lucked into the position of lead singer, along with my dear friend Kevin Delaney. We had been best friends since I was in 7th grade. I miss that kid so much. Being brought up in the church, christian school, and on christian music, I knew that it was incumbent upon me to at some point stop the proceedings and deliver a short message to the unsuspecting audience. This was usually followed by a song called "The Hardcore Song". It was so titled because we screamed during it. Avant-garde! The lyrics to this song mainly amounted to myself making physical threats to Satan. There was talk of the normal binding of the Devil and all that, but it went further with explicit threats of stomping Lucifer's face into an unrecognizable mush.

Not everyone in the band was similarly devout. Greg, the guitar player and other singer (yes, we had three different people who could be called the lead singer), was not as interested in the band as a ministry. I honestly to this day don't know what he thought of the whole situation, but he is another guy I wished I had stayed in touch with. Weird tensions arose in the band as we entered the spring of 1999. My friends were starting to discover things like alcohol and drugs and my interest in having a Christian band with a "strong witness" were making me the odd man out (see the PS below). Or maybe I just wasn't much fun. I'm open to either explanation. Either way, the band broke up because at one point Greg uttered a mild profanity on stage and we could not come to an accord within the band on what we should do about that.

A few weeks later, I graduated high school and realized that I had no idea what to do next. I felt that God was calling me to the ministry, particularly in a band. I remember one sunday night in particular, watching the end of Braveheart (don't laugh) and feeling so inspired that I literally, vocally cried out to God, asking him to use me in whatever way he saw fit. He would answer a few weeks later with an email conversation with a band in western PA called Bob. Well, they were called Bob. They had to change their name because of an abomination called B.O.B. I don't even want to go into all of that, but if you are brave enough, click here and skip to the 1:15 mark. I ended up joining this band, who adopted me to a degree. They were all older by 3 to 6 years and many of them were music majors. I learned much from them, including important skills like paying rent and playing the guitar properly. These were people who took their faith as seriously as I aspired to. They were all very involved with their churches. Almost everyone played on a church worship team. The songwriter (and my then-roommate) would even get his pastor's reactions to lyrics to new songs. There were deep discussions of theology. Every action of the band was checked for how it would serve others in Christ. When I think about it now, it was certainly a ministry first and a band after. We would often be in a position to travel around, playing at what amounted to special services at different churches. We would play a show, often someone in the band would give a full-on talk, and then we'd play a full worship service. These shows would go on for hours. They were fun, exhausting, and could be incredibly deep experiences. After the shows we would often talk to kids one on one about their lives. It felt great.

To be completely honest, I never really quite gelled with the music we played and the band tended to lean very strongly toward the goofy. There were costumes (I remember a big controversy when some members felt like not wearing afro wigs and neon pants anymore), big choreographed dance/percussion routines involving mops (which were actually quite impressive in hindsight), and for some reason a lot of jokes about deer. To be fair, goofiness was the order of the day in the pop ska scene of the late 90s and also the youth ministry scene. But the band also played songs that were very heartfelt, the heart for ministry was so authentic, and the people were so great that I chose to participate, only gritting my teeth when necessary. I'm really glad that I did, because it really hammered home the idea of making favorable compromises. I matured very quickly in the company of these people.

We had this thing going on at a local church called LIFT (it was an acronym for something), which was a worship service for high school and college kids. Speakers would be brought in or we'd do the speaking. In the years after the band broke up, I would continue to be heavily involved with LIFT and it was one of the things that brought me the most happiness in my early 20s. Thus, there were several different eras of LIFT as different people came in and out of the life of the group. On the eve of one of these transitions, as the members of Short For Robert were going their separate ways, we decided to record one of these services. It was a greatest hits of worship songs we liked and most everyone in the band gave a little blurb at some point or another. The clip posted above was my blurb.

2. How does what I said fit into my larger journey through faith and out of it?

Leaving high school, feeling that I was losing my friends and being completely unsure of my future served only to galvanize my faith. Humans really are fantastic at coping. When I joined Short For Robert, it was like all of my hopes had been fulfilled. It was such a great experience with such great people. We saw the country, played with great bands, endured hardships like a family and ministered everywhere we went. I joined a church many of them attended and whose tone was really brought through in the band. I think the best description would be Starbucks Calvinist. The church was very concerned with having strong, Bible-backed and researched doctrine. They were very into the idea that as Christians we were called primarily to serve others and that was a huge influence on my early critical thought. They believed that God ministered primarily through the local church, and that the goal on ministry was to funnel people back to a strong and trustworthy church. They were almost maniacally concerned with gender relations, being complementarian, and more than a little in favor of kissing dating goodbye. There was also a great deal of focus put on the atonement. This makes sense, but it was given special attention here. I remember the pastor saying "Whatever you do, whatever you say, think - how does it point to The Cross?" A head pastor from the family of churches we were a part of once gave a talk in which he related being asked by someone if it was ok for a Christian to watch an R-rated movie. He replied "How much of a poison pill is too much?" Why have any of it, he asked? Should you be entertained by depictions of sins that Christ died for?

This rigor was a fantastic thing for me. This was a group who were into working out their faith and really living it. I mean, not dating! How counter cultural! I dreamed of meeting a modestly-dressed nice girl of my own one day. I was never that into not dating or having my wife be subservient to me, and I felt their media restrictions were a bit frivolous, but I really admired their consistency and seriousness and was very much influenced by it in some great ways. I was a self-identified straight-edge at the time, and there was something similar in this rejection of cultural norms for the sake of purity. But this purity was not just for personal reasons, it was a response to The Cross. And beyond that, they really liked me. I had funny-colored hair and too many safety pins in my clothing, but the worst that could be said about their response was that I might have possibly been dubbed the token weirdo in the group, giving some false notion of heterogeneity to an otherwise white, khaki-wearing, middle-class crowd (not that there's anything wrong with those things).

Worship services would often go for 90 minutes at a time. This would sadly only be comprised of a half dozen songs. At the time Short For Robert was often on the road every weekend, getting back home in the wee hours of the morning. Rising and attending church the next morning was difficult. I was working 45 hour weeks at the grocery store and had LIFT monday night and bible study on Wednesday. Friday and Saturday nights were shows. So when it came time for the hour and half long worship sessions, I was often extremely tired. After the first 45 minutes I would sometimes sit down. On several occasions a friend sitting next to me or the worship leader himself would immediately chime in, saying "Imagine the agony that Jesus went through on The Cross. The greatest torment ever endured. Remember the scourging and the thorns. All He is asking of you this morning is to stand and worship Him. He died for you - can you stand up for Him?" I would stand, trying to gather any energy I had to express my devotion. It was an unpayable debt, but we kept on paying.

This was the time period and the line of thinking that I was going on in the clip above. There are several flags in that speech that really point to my church life at that point. The obvious one was my reframing of that very argument about worship as response to The Cross. In fact, I thought that I was putting a much more liberal spin on it, making it a question of priorities as opposed to a question of somehow stiffing God when he had done so much for me. Another flag, and the one that stood out to me the most, was my use of the word "extravagant". This was not a word I often used, particularly to describe God. It was, however, a word that my church used. A lot. There was a very specific slang at that place, full of people who were "jealous to serve one another" and sometimes found themselves in "the furnace of affliction". And God's love was "lavish", "unseemly" and "extravagant". Even my tone of voice echoed the emotion one would hear near the end of an invocation to worship, as the speaker really dwelled on the love of God. I'm not saying that these were all affectations, of course. There was a deep well of sincerity there. But I was certainly adopting some of the affection to go with my sincerity.

And sincerity is a good word to use. To be honest, my relationship with God was the worst it had ever been during the years I was in Short For Robert. This is no fault of the band. I came into it ready to learn, ready to experience God and ministry. I did all of those things, but never in that time did I really find my place. I did the best I could, but it was like calling out into the darkness. The focus on holiness and our obligations because of The Cross made normal things like having a crush on a friend a question of deep significance. I just couldn't be like the people around me, and sometimes I didn't even want to. Whatever they were getting at, I wasn't getting it. As much as I felt like I was in a relationship with God, I could only once in awhile feel the deep connection others seemed to have at the drop of a hat. And these moments would be playing shows, listening to music or going for long walks. But I was sincere. I tried and strove and pushed and strained after the goal. Like many people of faith, I filled the silence with sincerity (see the PSS below). It wouldn't be until I had my own crisis moment a year or so later that I would enter into something I would call an "authentic" relationship with God. It wasn't until after that point that I began to realize that the previous years were a time of trying terribly hard to attain something numinous by following a set of directions. After that, I would often use the "Christ died for you, the least you can do is stand and worship" thing as a funny anecdote in talks. It rarely failed to get a laugh.

1. How would I respond now to what I said then?

"Dude, it is totally ok to be excited and not excited about different things in your life. Of course seeing a band you love is super awesome. But your church life at the time was a means to an end. You were trying to figure out how to attain the experience of God others around you seemed to be having. In all reality most of them probably felt the same way. No one has it completely together. So go and enjoy the show and then enjoy the community around you as best you can. Breaking it down to such a granular level as you are is really just creating stress out of a pure thought experiment. This whole drama is really just that- a drama. People come into groups, sing songs often to the point of exhaustion while focusing all of their minds on this numinous thing, and then when they feel ecstasy or transcendence, it is ascribed to God. Yet when they attend a purely secular event, they either still ascribe it to their ability to find God there or just cannot connect in same way without the trappings of liturgy. This is the same thing you find in any participatory religion. All faiths have their mystics, their evangelists, their poets and their ascetics. In fact, many completely non-faith structures have them too. So enjoy and explore those experiences but don't be so down on yourself if you can't find as much joy in a grating, 90 minute, early-morning worship service as you can in a concert by a great band. It's going to get easier, and then in like a decade it's going to get much easier. And when it gets difficult, it's going to be rewarding. You'll never really fit in with a big group for long, but very soon you'll at least be somewhat comfortable with yourself. Also, there isn't really any proof that there is a God anyway, so stop driving yourself insane trying to contact him. No one was listening in on those thoughts you felt so guilty about. Also, you're totally going to marry that cute art student so don't sweat the girl stuff. And here are the lotto numbers for next week."

4. Am I really going to tell this very earnest kid that he is wrong?

I want to say that I think I already addressed this issue, at least in principle, in the multiple posts on faith I made earlier. But let's focus on just this specific question.

This particular question really deserves a multiple-post treatment, but the short answer is yes. My friend who posed this question to me made mention of the fact that by denying that I (and millions of other people worldwide throughout history) have had a real relationship with God (and for argument's sake, lets say that he's referring to a time later in my life where I would have truthfully agreed that I was experiencing one), that I am being presumptive. His point of posting the video was really to ask how I would respond to claims of an honest-to-goodness experience with God.

I am in no way denying the experience of connecting with God. I am merely saying that it is misattributed. In fact, I can still completely conjure up that feeling at will. When I hear a song on by a band I love, I feel a strong connection with that band. So many people have sung songs that have hit me in a very deep place and really connected with where I was, and still am. A band like The Bouncing Souls or The World/Inferno Friendship Society (who actually wrote the song from which this blog steals its name) write songs that might as well be written for me personally. Nick Cave wrote a song that might as well be my own personal theme song as an artist and a thinker, so much do I identify with it. Even watching that video now I feel a deep stirring and sense of reaching out and connecting with something subjective and universal. But honestly, that's all they are. Connections and emotions. And they are beautiful and wonderful. But isn't that enough? The imaginations of believers are so impoverished sometimes. They look at something wonderful and can't imagine that something so wonderful could exist without God. They look at good things that happen to them and can't imagine that the world exists in such a way that great, serendipitous things happen. In truth, people talk to themselves. They have odd intuitions. They have premonitions, some of which are statistically likely to happen. They see personality and consciousness where none exists (see: teddy bears). Our minds are just weird and very powerful and life can be big, complex and confusing.

As I mentioned previously, there is a great problem with a Christian expressing incredulity at the denying of the veracity of one's subjective hunches. Christians every day, as an article of faith, deny the existence of the Gods that populate the other faiths in the world, and also Xenu. They say that these people are deceived - some would say by the devil who is just faking being Allah or something, and some would say these people are just caught in the throes of false religion. This idea poses a huge issue if one takes these statements seriously. If sincere, thoughtful people are so easily to be deceived by Satan behind a mask of deity, can they actually be sure that the voice in their own head is not him? It's impossible to know. But surely they themselves know that they are not so deceived. And if someone can be caught up in some false doctrine, how can they themselves know on the basis of subjective experience if they are not also caught? They cannot. But of course they know that they are not, because their experience has given them private assurances that they are correct. And this is the problem with using a subjective, completely personal experience to ascertain a truth claim beyond personal thoughts. This is why people like Anselm tried to come up with a logical proof of God. This is why people point to things like morality or existence itself as proof that God exists (to say nothing of the sea of thoughts attempting to prove the existence of the specific God of the bible). In absence of this, to believe in a vast, complicated thing like Christianity, to base your life around it and teach it to your children and, for some, to murder in the name of a completely subjective, unprovable hunch... this is possibly the very definition of presumptive. In fact, belief with no evidence at all or in the face of mountains of contradictory evidence is viewed as one of the greatest virtues to be striven for within Christianity. I don't claim to know exactly what is or isn't true to the exact 100% mark (who does?), but at least I am continually trying to get as close as I can by employing evidence and argumentation and logic, which are three things that thankfully aren't much dependent upon my numinous experiences with them. The vast majority of Christian argumentation centers around the conversion and retaining of believers. Rational thought simply says "Follow the logic and the evidence wherever it goes. It may not be where you thought you would end up, but at least you'll surely end up closer to an actual truth this way than by simply trusting the conversation you had with an invisible person this morning. And above that, you'll be honest."

And really, as I've said before, Christians know this and employ it all over their lives. When their children swear they see a beast in their closet, parents turn on the lights to check and prove to the children that no matter how much they believe that it's still there, the light shows that logically it cannot be. They look at the horoscopes and know that people believe in these because they apply to everyone and there are some who just want to believe it... or are just really gullible. They know this because the horoscopes are so vague and they all contradict one another and honestly? The stars define our destiny? Really? They use logic to disregard it and the claims of those who swear it is true. Why is it so difficult to turn that spotlight on oneself? Why is it so difficult to keep asking questions? I actually know the answer to that last one. It hurts, it's scary, it attacks deeply-held certainties and presents a host of difficulties. It feels like if this one thing is untrue, than nothing else can possibly be true either. And it is often so tied up in personal identity that it feels like they are one in the same. But (and here I'll get up on a proselytizing soapbox) being honest with yourself it is better in so many ways and that is something I've been finding out in the past few months.

5. Well... how do I feel about that?

So now you probably know why answering a question like "how would you react to this clip?" is such a complex one. It was a time in my Christian life that was in no way typical of what my faith came to be at its strongest and most long-lived. That clip is a snapshot of a deeply transitional time in my life. I'm honestly not too much like that kid now. Obviously, I still am in some ways, but within a year or so after that I had settled into something resembling the Scott you know and love today. My wife jokes that we never would have worked out if we had simply started dating when we first met during this period. I want to write a post, and maybe I'll do that immediately, about what changed directly after this and why, as it really simultaneously sets the stage for the faith that was so important to me and (in some cases) influential on others as well as the ingredients for its destruction.

As far as my actual emotional feelings on the clip, I am proud of young Scott's earnestness but somewhat embarrassed that his critical thinking engine hadn't yet clicked on. I feel bad for him because he was so conflicted inside and even in a group of great friends never felt like he quite clicked with their experiences of the Divine. But he tried and tried again, and really what better thing can be said of a 19 year old? I've known many who don't even do that.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - My worry about having a "strong witness" in my first band is really amusing in hindsight, as I had had premarital sex several times. I was eaten up with guilt about it to the level of a complex, but still it was happening. Somehow that never made me think to look at my own transgressions in the area of band image. Oh well. Sorry, everyone.

PSS - We'll talk about this again when we talk about my "great awakening" moments in the early 2000s, but you might notice in my evolution as a Christian really does mirror Kierkegaard's whole three stages thing. Ten points for another reference to The Melancholy Dane!

The Design Flaws of God

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:47:00 +0000

After years of work, we finally have built a god who is so perfect he can't even exist!

(sorry, I'm too tired to be mildly amusing tonight)

Ok, you're going to have to bear with me through this. It's going to get somewhat technical. If you are tempted to think something like "Well, these are just high-minded arguments" remember that we are talking about a perfect, uncaused being from which all reality flows. So you should expect it to get heady every once in awhile. And if you're also tempted to say "Well, you can prove ANYTHING with arguments" I can only respond that actually, no you can't. That's why arguments exist. However, you can prove anything with BAD arguments.

God, according to the Bible, is perfect. Complete in and of himself. Capable of anything. All powerful, all knowing, everywhere at once, outside of time and space and yet in it. Nothing is above or beyond him. This sounds great, in the same way that a ten-mile long cake sounds great to a 5 year old. You take something you like and just multiply it to infinity and it sounds infinitely good. But the only way for the God of the Bible to actually function as indicated is to continuously redefine God's nature or simply ignore glaring, huge issues with the concept itself.

Let's start with something foundational. Why do you do anything? By that, I mean why do you undertake any action? And by that, I mean ANY action. Why are you reading this? Why do you walk across the room? If you are a parent, why did you become one? If you are an artist, why do you create? The answer to all of these are the same - you are addressing a perceived state of imperfection. I walk across the room because I first notice that it would be a better state of affairs if I were over there, and then I work to address this. I am going on an autumn bike ride with my wife this Saturday because I recognize that we would enjoy it - that is our lives would be bettered by it and possibly (though probably insignificantly) worse without it. You paint a picture because it is creatively fulfilling - that the process and finished piece fill a void of some sort. You scratch an itch because the condition of being not-itchy is preferable to the alternative. Everything we do, even if we do not view it this way, is undertaken to address a lack - in ourselves or in the world. And the only reason we address lacks in the world is because doing so in some way fulfills lacks in ourselves. We see a void of some sort and seek to fill that void with a solution. So we walk across the room, paint a picture, make a sandwich or watch a sunset. In all of these things, we are addressing needs and wants and desires, all of which have their basis in a state of imperfection.

A perfect God cannot desire glory. He cannot love. He cannot do much of anything but exist. He cannot create. In fact, he cannot desire anything or recognize any lack at all, unless he exists within a system he does not fully control, in which case he is not the god of the Bible because Yahweh is the uncaused cause of every system. Stay with me here. For God to desire anything, he must first be cognizant of a lack - there is something that would make his perfect state more perfect. Such a thing is logically impossible.

In classical mythology, Zeus would sometimes see a beautiful woman from afar. He would come to her, sometimes in disguise and have his way with her. Thus, Zeus is recognizing a state of affairs which is preferable to his current state of affairs and then endeavoring to create that more perfect state. We look at this as how the Greek gods were merely super-powered reflections of humanity, but how are the actions of the God of the Bible different? I mean, obviously there is far less divine rape happening. You can argue that the motivations are different, but motivations themselves speak of desires and that lands us right back where we started.

The idea of perfection defies quantification. You cannot add to perfect, you can only subtract. A god who creates is by definition not perfect, as his desire to do so is a recognition of a better state of affairs in a system that is completely contingent upon that god. A perfect god cannot author anything, let alone an imperfect anything.

Don't misunderstand me. I don't mean that god wouldn't be powerful enough to create something, or wouldn't have the freedom to create something. I simply mean that his desire to do so is a nullification of his perfection. You might say "Well, he does so because he CHOOSES to". Well, actually, by definition a perfect being does not have choice. If God has a perfect knowledge of the future, or at least a perfect knowledge of all possible consequences (which you kinda need for that whole prophecy, predestination and divine providence thing) then he is not free to act, as his actions are the most perfect they could be and thus set in stone, denying him any choice at all. His nature negates the possibility of action, precisely because it negates possibility. A perfect being allows only perfect existence. Nothing more. Anything more is impossible, anything less is imperfect.

Freedom, as we know it, comes from autonomy and choice. We make choices because we have desires, needs and an imperfect understanding of the cosmos. We cannot see the future or the past. We can barely take in the present. We have no idea what life is like for anyone else but us on a basic level. And so our freedom of choice is based upon our imperfections, our limitations. If you program two computers to play Tic Tac Toe you will always get a stalemate because winning the game requires human error in your opponent. We love the autumn because it is beautiful but ephemeral. We cherish youth because it fades. We champion wisdom because it is hard won over years. We love our friends because we connect with them as opposed to every other being on the planet. I love my wife because there is no one else like her. My cat is the best cat because he compares so favorably to every other cat. These are ALL based upon imperfections in the system. If you take out the lacks, the voids, the desires and needs, you are simply left with a self-sustaining state of perfection. And with it goes most all of what we hold dear about life itself. The greatest things we do and the worst things we do stem from that same well of imperfection. Murders and love happen because of a desire for a different state of things from that in which one begins. It's a void. A lack. A desire.

The Bible is adamant about how our imperfections lead to every evil thing ever conceived. This is true enough and I don't think that anyone is going to argue that. But what it forgets is that our imperfections are also the source of every GOOD thing that ever existed. Forgiveness is a response to offense. Compassion is a response to suffering. Art is a response to meaninglessness. Community is in response to loneliness and vulnerability. Love is a response to many things, including isolation, emptiness and a feeling of incompleteness. Every good thing that the Bible claims comes from God, that we have no ability to feel apart from him, is in fact the response of imperfect beings to an imperfect situation.

Again, isn't it obvious at this point? You can turn yourself around and around trying to make sense of this (and no one has yet, even after millennia of study and through). But the great thing is that there is already a solution that makes perfect sense - the God of scriptures is a concept created over thousands of years by imperfect people, and therefore doesn't make a ton of sense. This is because when the original writers of the Bible were kicking around ancient Palestine, they didn't think the whole thing through. Concepts like the ones we are discussing here probably weren't on their minds. However, obedience of children, a good harvest, explanations for the weather,and the menace of enemy tribes probably were. The attributes assigned to the God of the Bible make about as much sense as those assigned to any perfect being. They did the best they could at the time to conceive of something more perfect and holy than anything else, but in doing so they locked the door on it.

It is again like the ramblings of a child. A child will get so excited making stories that they forget to make any of it make sense. "The lion jumped in a spaceship but the dragon was SO big he ate the whole UNIVERSE so then the lion jumped out of the spaceship and punched dragon and then they were friends and they got pizza!" Sounds awesome, but not particularly possible. It's a vindication of human creativity and enthusiasm, but it doesn't exactly represent logical possibility.

You make music because there is music yet to be made. It doesn't exist yet. We endeavor forward because there is still road ahead. We cling together because we are so isolated. The best things about us, including our gods, are imperfect.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - If you are tempted to simply reply "Well, God can do whatever he WANTS to do". That's all well and good, but it's a complete non-sequitor in terms of discussing perfection. And as we've seen, want is a mark of a imperfect being. So weigh your arguments.

The Kid Under The Tree

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 08:41:00 +0000

Hey! Totally stop being scary and be Christians!

By 5th grade I was an evangelist.

That year, we had gone to a local park for track and field day and there were kids from the public school doing the same thing on the other side of a wooded hill. One of the kids had brought a small boombox and was playing Kriss Kross or something popular at the time. The music made me uncomfortable, in the same way that watching a sex scene in a movie with your parents is uncomfortable. The adults we were with were obviously noticing. I sat alone as the other kids in my school ran relays and monopolized the jungle gym, listening to the secular music these public school kids were listening to.

I had long ago made the mental connection between non-Christian kids and the bad kid in the neighborhood. You know the one. Ratty clothes, foul mouth, parents who acted strangely. A dad who stood on the front lawn without a shirt, drinking beer from a can and belching loudly. A mom who you never saw but only heard yelling from inside the house. The kid who saw R-rated movies and listened to heavy metal. He maybe had a bb gun and would shoot action figures and when you played with him you were afraid he'd shoot you too. He would stand in the garage and dare you to punch him and when you did he would punch back. Hard. It was from him you learned your first dirty jokes and heard the first bits about sex. The kids you knew from Christian school would be clean and well-kept. But not this kid. His family wasn't Christian.

And so these kids on the hill were threatening to me. They were The World. They did things I didn't understand or approve of. Their parents didn't love them. They said bad words and wrote dirty things on bathroom walls. And at least one of them would probably punch me in the stomach.

I stood up and marched up the hill to the kid with the boombox. He was sitting among a loose group of other kids under a tree that would have been excellent for climbing. He had a bowl haircut and was wearing a black tshirt. He was picking blades of grass.

"Excuse me," I said "But do you know Jesus?"

He stared at me blankly.

"What?"

"Have you accepted Jesus into your heart?"

More stares, now from other kids who were around.

"Why would I do that?"

My heart was racing.

"Because if you die right now you'll go to Hell. Do you know what Hell is?"

He stared at me still, but was suddenly thoughtful. "Yes. I saw it in a movie."

A girl near him piped up. "Yeah, hell is a bad place to go. There is fire and the devil forever."

I was doing it. I was witnessing. Maybe they would make fun of me and persecute me, like a missionary.

"Well, you don't want to go to hell, right?"

The kid under the tree shook his head.

"Well, why don't you pray right now?"

He looked around at the group, whose wide eyes were focused on the both of us.

"Well.... couldn't I do it later?"

I was prepared for this.

"But what if there is an accident on school bus on the way home. You'd die and go to hell then. Why won't you do it right now?"

He looked mortified by both the concept and the idea of praying in front of such a crowd of his peers.

"Leave him alone, you faggot!" said another kid to me.

"Yeah, go away nerd!"

Someone pushed me and I turned, red-faced, and marched down the hill. Some of my classmates were sitting on a curb and motioned me over.

"What were you doing with those kids?"

A teacher hovered over to listen in.

"I was witnessing to the one kid but the other kids were persecuting me for my belief in God."

My classmates looked stunned. The teacher looked concerned and directed us to some empty swings. One the swing set I stared up and into the sun, then down at the sand, then up at the sun again as my momentum brought me ever higher. I held up my hand and mimed grabbing the sun, my small hand blotting it out for a moment, a halo around my palm. I prayed and prayed for the kid under the tree. And feeling the warmth on my skin, I knew that God was pleased with me for my faith. I had not denied Him like Peter. The great cloud of witnesses that surround us at all times were applauding. I was not ashamed. It was all real because it was happening, right now. As real as the swings and the sun and the warm, June breeze combing the tall grass.

It was time to leave and the teachers began calling the kids back to the vans in the parking lot. I walked right past the vans and back up the hill to find the kid, now alone, hanging with slack arms from a low branch from the climbing tree. Kids can do that in a way that would pull the shoulders of adults out of joint.

"Did you ask Jesus into your heart?" I was standing there with my arms similarly limp, but at my side. My hands felt very heavy.

He stared back just like before but said "Yes."

"When did you do it?" I asked.

"I went behind the bushes before."

His classmates, seeing that I had returned, ran up the hill screaming and laughing.

The girl who had know about Hell yelled.

"He did it! He became a Christian! He went behind the bushes!"

"Yeah! He's going to heaven now!" called another kid and I wasn't sure why he was laughing.

I was too lost in my thoughts and the moment itself. I felt the wind and listened to the leaves as they rubbed against one another. I was walking back down the hill, high tops crunching the grass. I had won a soul for Christ. I had witnessed. I had done the hardest thing, the thing they train you for endlessly in christian school and church. I had fulfilled the Great Commission. My classmates saw me walking down the hill and could hear the public school kids yelling about Jesus. Kelly, a girl on which I had a public but unrequited crush, walked over and said "That was really brave, Scott".

It was my happiest day that school year.

Be Well,
-scott

PS- You should see a picture of me at that age, by the way. It really makes the story. I had a neon fanny-pack.

Juggling

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 07:03:00 +0000

The Juggler's Tale was sadly left in Chaucer's wastebasket.

The very first email I received after starting this blog, was from a friend I had not talked with in some time. This friend and I had disagreed gracefully on politics before. When looking at some of the issues upon which I had found myself differing from most Christians he began to wonder about whether my political stances were really behind my loss of faith. He noted that my issues included "A laundry list of liberal and progressive causes". Now, for some context, the list included, among other things, gay marriage, slavery, women in leadership and divorce. Well, you can go read it yourself. It's the 8th paragraph down.

Minutes later I received my second email, also from a friend I had not spoken to recently. He was somewhat shocked and understandably concerned by my admission, especially since he felt that my political and social views were closer to those of Christ than many people he had met.

I am somewhat tickled, and I think you also should be, about how telling this is. Two people I knew were concerned and thoughtful enough to contact me (which they both did out of love for me, and I appreciate it). Both pointed to my political and social views and drew completely opposite conclusions, backed up by their own faiths. These are not guys who just went with the flow, either - they are both guys who were older than me and far more active in politics than I. They are both strong Christians and head Christian families. As far as I know both are involved in the local church. Both would say that their moral views were based upon and backed up by the Bible. But somehow on certain moral issues they were completely different.

Earlier this year, after leading bible study on Monday night, I retired to the local bar/grill with three friends who were in attendance. The conversation somehow turned to the issue of transgendered persons. One person stated that they couldn't see how it could be morally ok to be transgendered. Another person disagreed. Both gave Biblical backups to their claims. We continued in this vein, discussing odd and controversial parts in the New Testament, including those in 1 Corinthians 14 regarding women. The girl at the table was quick to point out that this was simply a cultural issue and we all agreed without hesitation.

To what do these things point? I think, honestly, that our conversation over dinner pointed less to an honest reading of scripture and more to the point that the idea of a transgendered person weirded more people out at the table out than the idea of a woman pastor. I have attended churches where both would be viewed in the same suspicious light. I also have many friends who think both are absolutely fine. But why is this? The New Testament is, for example, pretty clear on the subject of homosexuality. Spoiler: it isn't really a fan of it. Now, many attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to say that this is not the case. One could point to the idea that the word for homosexuality in Romans can be taken to mean pederasty, a somewhat common thing in those times. Or one can simply say that all sins are equal in God's eyes, so best not pick at it. But the question remains - why even try to make a case that the Bible isn't really anti-gay? For that matter, why try to find a cultural explanation for the Bible's largely subservient vision of women? And furthermore, why try to explain away the Bible's unequivocal support of slavery?

The words of 1 Timothy 2 are written in the exact same manner as admonishments against drunkenness and rage. The hierarchy of God as head of man, man as head of woman isn't listed in an optional appendix. But, particularly in the last century, people more and more recognized that this was a doctrinal basis for misogyny and strove to diminish its importance. You can dig into the cultural norms of the time in which it was written and the original Greek and come out with an alternate reading, but you'll notice that even this was in response to the growing idea that constraining women to a ghetto of quiet, subservient domesticity was unethical. This has set off a wave of women reclaiming and reframing the New Testament view of women as well as a backlash from women finding great meaning in the biblically defined roles for themselves and their gender. This is not exclusive to Christianity. You can see this same battle over the burqa all over the modern muslim world.

Southern slaveholders pointed to the Bible's support for slavery before, during and after the Civil War. But as time went on, more and more Christians started to believe that slavery was immoral across the board. No exceptions. Today you would be hard pressed to find a church that would heed the words of Ephesians 6 in any but a purely metaphorical manner. The emphasis is instead put on the egalitarian aspects of the New Testament.

Right now, as I mentioned earlier, this same thing is happening in regard to homosexuality. Things are changing. More and more Christians are accepting gay marriage as a completely moral institution that should be legally accessible. Many Christians I know have gone out of their way to mention having a gay friend, similar to how white people brag about having a black friend to show how above racism they are. More people who are morally opposed to homosexuality are heading into rest homes than the work force. And they know it, which is why the anger at this "cultural relativism" is so charged among anti-gay Christians. They see the tides changing on the issue, faster than ever before.

Why is this happening?

I am certain that this is due, in some small way, to a segment of society who will just agree with the last thing they've heard. Peer pressure or just wanting to go with the prevailing wind will change the minds of many people who simply do not wish to exert any effort. But what about the thinkers, the researchers, the people who actually attempt to find some level of truth within their views?

The answer is that people are actually doing the hard work of critically thinking through the morality found in the Bible. They probably don't want to admit it, but it is true. And when the teachings found in the Bible become, to their minds, unethical, they try to find ways around them. The passages on hell are diminished and the grace of God is amplified. The directives given to women are seen as quaint leftovers of a less egalitarian time and are treated more as curiosities. The command for slaves to obey their masters dissolves in admiration for those who railed against that very institution. When the choice comes between a moral responsibility only to God or a moral responsibility that puts first a concern for the rights and well-being of others, many will (to their immense credit) choose the latter. The Bible can speak as much as it wants about submission to authorities, but people will still champion those who stand up to oppression. They will go in and redefine those passages and form them into weapons against tyranny. They can do this because the Bible, for most people, is not and cannot be the final moral standard. And in fact, those who take a completist view of the morality of the New Testament (to say nothing of the Old Testament), leaving nothing out and never compromising, are viewed as fundamentalists - the worst examples of what religion can do to people. When Paul speaks of long hair being shameful to men we may laugh or chalk it up to a cultural norm, but we shudder at churches that would enforce a strict hair code.

That first email I received warned that people are all for the love of God, but his law is something they are quick to discard. I don't entirely disagree with this, but I would clarify that God's law is not so much discarded by Christians as filtered through the past 2000 years. The children of parents who opposed gay marriage are looking around and noticing that the ethical qualms they may personally feel about it are overwhelmed by the moral responsibility they feel toward those people. I discarded the notion of hell a few years ago and my baptist parents believe in hell with a fraction of the fervor of their baptist parents. The moral doctrines, when they crash against our empathy for one another, tend to bend and break over time. This is because thinking, empathetic people tend to base their moral decisions on what they see harming themselves and other members of their species. This isn't a slide into immorality - rather, it is a view of morality that takes people's well-being into consideration before the Bible. It is an inversion of monarchy, the notion that rule can come from below, which is the founding notion of democracy. It is taking the one-directional moral responsibility and dragging it back down to earth, pointing it outwards at one another. And Christianity changes and flexes with this because it is constantly being revised by people who see part of it as being ancient, cruel, barbaric and misanthropic.

This has a flip side as well. It is no surprise that many people have no issue with some of these controversies. They agree that homosexuality is an abomination, that women should never speak in church, or that slavery is morally defensible. Does it not also reflect upon them that their personal moral compasses are directing them to uphold these notions? If they uphold one of them but not the others, why is this? Because they are personally comfortable with them. These issues haven't touched the person in such a way that they feel compelled to diminish them. In our country, this often falls along political lines which is a shame because it makes it difficult to speak about them without falling one way or another into some culture war. But those whose party opposes gay marriage statistically are bigger supporters of a large military and a hawkish foreign policy, which in and of itself takes some work to back up from a biblical standard. I mean, look to the founding of our country and just try to back up shooting someone over taxes using the pages of the Bible. Seriously. Try it. My point being that these views flow from a different moral standard that the Bible may guide along, but rarely replace.

And this is a profound thing. We abandon or neuter parts of the Bible's moral code because many of us deep down reject the notion that divine edict trumps our concern for others. When an edict seems to serve no purpose in making life better for us and our fellow homo sapiens, we wisely discard it, as we do with all other information we receive. We filter. We do away with slavery not simply because we can find some verses to back up egalitarianism, but because it is a travesty that destroys the ability of our fellow people to live. There are those who simply use the Bible as a smokescreen, a wall that stops conversation about morality. But those who are honestly willing to realize that they themselves are already discarding or muting parts of the Bible may find that they are doing this because they find the morality of the Bible unnecessarily cruel. They are picking the good parts out of a mixed bag. Those who stockpile weapons in their household do so first because they are afraid of those outside their door, secondly because of some biblical backup. Those who give to the poor do so first because they care for the poor, secondly because of the commands of God. And if one is kind to another primarily to obey God, what manner of kindness is this? It is no longer empathy or love. It is obedience. And obedience without internalization, without thought is a childish, infantile notion that does not befit thinking adults.

Buying a set of values wholesale, obeying them without critical thinking and defending them to the death is the mark of someone who desires only personal comfort and vindication. If one can only back up the Biblical view of the roles of women with the Bible, one has already lost the argument. If one can only defend the Bible's views on homosexuality with verses from the Bible, one has simply retreated behind the wall of untested authority. I don't understand how one backs up these views without simply relying on the divine inspiration of the scriptures or tradition, but I don't doubt that it could be done. But the opponents of these views, including many Christians, can also appeal to philosophy, ethics, empathy, egalitarianism and a concern primarily for the well-being and happiness of others. Threat of hellfire is simply a recourse to physical violence. Calling back to scriptures is simply an uncritical appeal to authority. If your first allegiance is to God, even if his commands may include arbitrary rules that reduce the rights of minorities (and women... I don't think they're a minority in the States anymore), then you have abandoned your fellow man to follow a set of principles from 2000 years ago. If you find ways around these parts of the Bible, you are shaping and diminishing those principles to be a more empathetic person. Either way is uncomfortable for a thinking Christian, unless they feel that they alone have somehow gotten the exclusive scoop on what God REALLY wants.

There is an idea called The Age Of Accountability. It is the idea that children, up to a certain age, get a free pass into heaven. This is because they are too young to really understand sin and Christ and substitutionary sacrifices and all that. So when a baby is stillborn or a child drowns or something, it is horrible to think of them going straight to hell. So a child that dies (younger than anywhere from 6 to 13, depending on who you ask) is not held accountable for their sin. This is an immensely popular idea and it is taught all over the place. It also has no clear scriptural basis. I mean, seriously. Look at the actual scriptural evidence. It just isn't there. The Bible is mostly pretty clear that all who ever existed have sinned, that our nature itself is one of sin, being born of the line of Adam. Also, our understanding that we have sinned is not the factor that determines sin in the Bible. But people will defend The Age of Accountability because they looked at the notion of people who they consider innocent receiving what the Bible calls just punishment, and decided that it was unjust. So Christianity has adopted The Age of Accountability to make the doctrine more ethical, so that people don't have to apply the concept of damnation or sin to their children. I've read the defenses for this doctrine and they are pretty thin, particularly compared to how the alternative is so spelled out in the New Testament. But people are better than that. They refused to believe that even the brattiest kid would go straight to hell after death, apart from a real faith in Christ. People are more humane than the Bible itself. Their allegiance is to the kids first, it would seem, and the Bible's ideas second. So they've created a doctrine and taught it so widely that many people probably don't know it isn't even in the Bible. And that is a perfect example of how plastic these ideas really are, and why at some point you have to notice how arbitrary much of it is. At some point you have to be honest with yourself about to whom you choose to be morally responsible, and why.

Be Well
-scott

PS - This is of course another gigantic can of worms, but the past four posts have kind of worked together as one big super post. Ethics are a huge huge interest of mine and played a large part in my teaching when I was a Christian. In the future we'll be returning to this topic and others including moral relativism, sources of moral authority, and common ethical arguments relating to The Bibles own morality. It's a rich subject.

Fulfilling The Law

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:40:00 +0000

Nope. Even as an agnostic I can't make a joke here.

Housekeeping note - Hey, you should probably read the preceding post before this one. Go on now.

I'm not going to belabor things by going over the concepts covered in the gospel- namely sin, atonement, grace, and the promise of eternal life. I can't imagine you've made it this far unaware of the narrative contained in the first four books of the New Testament, but please feel free to employ your search engine of choice if you need to be brought up to speed.

I am a fan of Jesus. Well, most of his work, at least. It is hard, as a person brought up on the Bible as a whole, to separate the teachings of Christ from those of Paul and the other apostles. One thing that has always irked me, though, about people who say something like the preceding sentence is that they assume that under a pile of ingrafted "religion" there lies some amazing pearl of unadulterated truth and beauty. That is open to speculation, I suppose. And of course that glosses over the entire subject of whether or not the gospels record any authentic teachings and if so what is left out and what has been done over the years to what remains. It's difficult, frankly, to get a really great image of what the guy was really like. A survey of different churchs' sermons on Sunday will tell you that much. But I would say this, and I think it is true not just of me but for most Christians - I really like the Jesus I personally extricate from the Bible. I like the guy who talks to people, tells interesting stories full of meaning, takes the side of the oppressed, is moved to tears by compassion, talks radically and creatively about issues with human nature, and isn't afraid to look bad in front of people or sacrifice everything for others. He zones in on what I think should be the building block of our entire morality as humans - empathy. He's not alone in history in this respect, but we'll talk about why that's a good thing later.

So honestly you're not going to find a ton of Christ-bashing here. I say this to be honest. I still have a strong affinity and connection to the ideas I associate with the Jesus I have picked and chosen from the Bible, and I don't think I have the emotional distance at this point to really lay into him. The idea of needing to gain some emotional distance from a person who hasn't walked the earth for 2000 years may seem odd but such is the power of faith, my darlings! In fact, this is a necessary entry precisely because the concepts in it are so near and dear to my heart, and in years past were sources of great consolation and hope. That is not to say that hope has left me- in fact I am more full of hope than ever before, but returning to the topic of atonement in a critical manner is emotionally draining in a surprisingly heavy way.

The Bible is abundantly clear in its view of Jesus' place in it's grand ethical scheme. A sacrifice is demanded. God walks out of heaven (but also stays there, being God and all) and shuffles around the desert as a man, resisting sin, performing miracles, preaching and eventually being tortured and executed, thus fulfilling his own demand. This in turn means that any and all sins may be covered by grace and forgiveness. We no longer need to make regular animal sacrifices to atone for the sins of the people.

Let's pause there for a moment. One of the main threads that runs through the Bible is the notion that the death of one can act as reparation for the wrongdoing of another. And by this, it doesn't mean reparation to those on earth you have wronged. When you murder someone, the offense is still primarily against God. The actual murder victim and their loved ones are secondary. The death of Christ is payment to God. And if indeed Christ is God, then this is a purely internal transaction. God satisfies himself. One may partake in this and share in this state of grace, but this is only necessary because humanity is still a distant second to God's obsession with the "sin" he built into humanity and the slight he feels when humanity enacts this "design flaw". So offended is he that no pile of dead, sentient, unique beings is too high to be waded through on his way to satisfaction - even if he is one of them. There are several points about this that are simply overlooked in popular Christian teaching, and they all point to the same issue of the one-directional moral responsibility issue. I'll try to enumerate a few of them here.

1. Christ did not bear the penalty for sin alone - everyone in history up to that point at least did. How many people were killed or allowed to die on the predetermined, prophetic march toward Good Friday? We've got all of the deaths in the Old Testament, some of which, I'm sorry to say, sound at least as horrific as what Jesus endured. In fact, the majority of human history goes by with people bearing that penalty with no hope of redemption. Then we've got Judas, destined to commit suicide. It's no fair ascribing the good things to god and the bad things to people. If God plans the ends, then he plans the means (to quote a great song), especially since ends are illusory to being with. In fact, death as a penalty for sin is completely within God's control, so every death can be seen as an attempt to repay the debt to God's sense of justice for himself. One can make a completely coherent argument that it is unjust for God to place sentient beings capable of suffering in a situation where they are statistically likely to suffer terribly, especially since their intellect is supposedly so far below his own. But that is not the focus - the focus is on God, who is offended and simply cannot tolerate it.

2. Christ says one of the most beautiful things in the Bible when he looks down at the crowd who was in the midst of mocking and murdering him and says "Father, forgive them for the know not what they do". The crazy thing is that the God of the Bible (who is also the same guy who said this through some complicated cosmological gymnastics) completely refuses this request. He forgives only those who have heard the gospel and ask him for grace, or alternately those who are preordained by him. Those who are unknowingly bumbling about murdering messiahs are pretty much destined for hell. This statement asks for a level of compassion that a just God cannot supply. After all, He is right in the middle of a preordained torture session so that His jealousy can be at ease. And as an extension - where the heck was this forgiveness in Genesis? We really could have used that right at the beginning, because Adam and Eve sure as heck didn't know what they were doing. So this compassionate plea - this yearning that has been all but a bumper sticker for Christianity - is a plea to overturn the very system that the God of the Bible has set up, as opposed to fulfilling it. And it is not possible, since the goal is to satisfy God above all else. Clemency, in a universe where God is the basis of morality, is only moral when he desires it to be.

3. This goes back to the last post, specifically on the subject of Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac. This is commonly seen as a call-forward to the sacrifice of Jesus. This is because Isaac is the thing most precious to Abraham, just as Jesus is the most precious thing to God. This notion of being willing to sacrifice what is most important to you for a greater purpose is a fine one, but these stories ignore something incredibly important. Isaac is a sentient, thinking, feeling person. He is not a possession to be sacrificed. He has hopes, dreams and fears. This transaction isn't simply between Abraham and God - there is a third party victimized here. So we are supposed to look upon a murderer and say "Well, it was really bad for him because who wants to murder their own son?" It's an interesting thought experiment and definitely something to explore but it has to take a backseat to concern for the victim. To refuse this is to refuse empathy. The whole notion of the sacrifice of another person to satisfy the demands of an offended authority, without challenging that authority at all, is cowardice. A person sacrificing himself is noble. A forceful sacrifice of another, particularly without a terrific fight, is an abandonment of one another to the whims of a monarch. And the monarch sacrificing himself to meet his own needs simply makes it unrelatable in any real sense. There was still great suffering enacted for no reason other than to satisfy a party who longed for it, leaving the plight of the actual victim as an afterthought.

4. All sins are equal in the eyes of God. This notion comes from the fact that if you have broken one part of the absolutely ridiculous law found in the Old Testament, you are reckoned as having done everything that law prohibits. Many Christians (and this is my reading as well) take this to point to a sinful nature that cannot be transcended on one's own. We are simply crooked and cannot be made straight. And so whether one is a genuinely nice person and a joy to those around them or a suicide bomber, you are in the same boat. That sounds so egalitarian, and truly understanding that we are all often guilty of the same things can bring a fantastic level of honesty and humility. But once again that is not the primary goal. The Bible is only concerned with God's level of offense taken. You show grace because God shows grace. You love because Christ first loved you. You forgive because you long to be forgiven by God. These are terrible reasons to do good things. Obedience is obedience, even if love itself is the vehicle by which the obedience is fulfilled. All that needs to happen to destroy that love is for a different demand to be made, and then obedience means leaving love behind.

Again and again we see that even the great strides in morality made in the New Testament have a fundamental flaw in that the moral responsibility flows only upward. It is all for the glory of God, once again. We are simply fortunate that he has decided to keep some of us. One can certainly revel in one's good fortune, but to ignore the fact that the system itself is so hideously awful is to once again abandon one's fellow man. The beautiful concept of forgiveness is based, Biblically, upon God needing to be satisfied by torture and death. Now that he has worked that out, a number of people may win the chance to spend eternity worshiping him while the rest of humanity flows directly into hell as if the atonement never happened, to receive their own torture and death.

The notion is all wrong, and leaves the door not only open for terrible and continuing atrocities in the name of God, but practically installs a conveyor belt. It poisons even the better parts of our nature and makes them a question of subservience as opposed to proactive, problem-solving empathy. The issue here isn't really that the God of the Bible is cruel, but that the cruelty is doctrinally unquestionable. A morality based soley upon a top-down hierarchy is bound to the fluctuations of the desires of the authority, thus robbing people of the real work of developing ethics based upon shared empathy and concern. If God unquestionably asked you to murder someone, would you? The Bible says that God cannot tempt one to evil, so by definition such a command must be good. So would you pull the trigger? If God demanded that you sacrifice the person most precious to you, would you do it?

Now, I'll say again that many of you are essentially universalist in your leanings. At which point most of what I've said over the last few posts has no heavy bearing upon you, as the scriptures themselves do not. You have chosen to believe that a good God could not possibly demand such barbarism for his own satisfaction. And this stems from the fact that you yourself cannot morally defend it. It seems awful. This is great, because it points once again to the fact that you are filtering the Bible through an evolving, advancing morality. The notion of a moral responsibility that flows upward only, as found in the Bible, is repugnant to you because you do not feel that authority alone is the basis of morality. We'll talk about this next time.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - That was a tough one to write. I thought about throwing some levity in the middle to break up some of the mild blasphemies, but you know... couldn't think of anything funny today. It's a big topic and like any criticism it's my own take on it. But that doesn't mean it isn't valid. I mean, I'm critiquing the traditional faith-based view of a holy text written two millenia by people who are thought to be divinely inspired. It's bound to get messy. Maybe I'll just post a picture of a kitten next time.

PPS - I am having the hardest time with the capitalization of God and Him. I honestly don't know whether or not to keep doing it, so I find myself endlessly fluctuating back and forth.

Fire From Above

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 07:44:00 +0000

Awkward.

A small housekeeping note: I've been writing and talking about God for many years. I still have the habit of writing about God as a present person, as opposed to a concept I don't really buy anymore. Do not take my criticisms of God as a tacit vindication of his existence. CS Lewis wrote that he was angry at God for not existing, but how can one be angry at one who does not exist? From this he extracts that he had an indwelling belief in God all along. I mean to be critical of the God character found in the Bible, here. I have no problem separating the question of God's existence from this criticism.

Hey! Read it before we start!

In 2003 I was living with a good friend, former bandmate and then-current ministry partner. We had both recently read The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning and it had impacted us greatly. It was the first time I had really read an exploration of the concept of grace. The concept goes as such : We are all born into sin. God is just and demands punishment for this sin. But He is also a loving God, so He sent His son into the world (who was God and man at the same time). He lived without sin and was then killed to satisfy God's punishment. He then proceeds to rise from the dead after three days, death having no claim upon a sinless man. If you believe this and ask for forgiveness, you are given grace. Grace is unmerited favor. You are guilty, but God sees you as innocent. I actually find grace to be one of the best concepts in history and the single best idea in the Bible's considerably mixed bag. So my friend and I are discussing this book and the concept of grace. The subject invariably turns to why people would ever resist Christianity when it offers such a wonderful thing. I rolled my eyes and said "Well, they'd probably just bring up something about 'how could a loving God destroy Sodom And Gomorrah' or something." We both laughed as if this was some silly, facile, childish, overblown thing. I mean, obviously we had dealt with that old chestnut years ago! Did we even need to drag it out again?

Yes we did, and we do now.

Here is a question: is it acceptable for God to destroy people outright? I don't mean acceptable to God. Obviously he has weighed the options and considers it the best course of action. I mean acceptable to you. That may sound bizarre to ask. In Christianity you are never asked to evaluate the performance of Yahweh. The more you study, the more you are required to find explanations for things such as the wholesale destruction (and presumably eternal damnation) of entire groups of people. It often seems like a large part of the vast ocean of theological writing is dedicated to excusing God's behavior.

The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is honestly one of the easiest to defend mass-killings in the Old Testament. After all, no one likes roving bands of rapists. And while the details may vary for different people, we as people have a vested interest in addressing issues of extreme anti-social behavior. We have a vested interest because we have to exist alongside people, and therefore we tailor our actions to make it a place where we can individually and as a group live in peace. We want to live in peace because it affords us the ability to enjoy life, to devote ourselves to meaningful work, raise families if we so choose, and experience all that our short lives can afford us. Most people have pretty much decided that it is better to not be raped than to be raped. Therefore we try our best not to form rape squads. This is based upon our desire for well being, our empathy, and our ability to problem solve and check our desires against one another. It's the same thing that makes traffic work, why people will stop to help someone pick up their groceries if they drop them, or hold the door for one another. We recognize suffering and have a desire to address it in others and avoid enduring it ourselves.

For Yahweh, however, the stakes are notably different. He is offended because his commands are not met. He has not suffered. And any suffering he endures is traceable back to him and him alone. This is one of the things that no one can really answer about the Biblical narrative. Why create a race with the huge design flaw of being able to offend you? And is it possible to say that the ability to be offended is in itself a flaw? Offense points to a lack and a fear. Why is this jealousy such a central concept in God's character? He is under no obligation to do, or have done, any of this. We are often obligated to make tough decisions about how to deal with others because both our options and we, ourselves, are limited. The only reason people get so jazzed up about the shoot-first-ask-questions-later idea of an old west lawman is that he is the frail, tenuous wall holding back a flood of death and cruelty. There is drama there, and we see our own struggles against hardship reflected in his plight. But Yahweh, as an immortal creator who is intimately involved with the free will of his creations, is nothing like this character. He's an deathless monarch, remembering that we are dust.

Only chapters before, God had drowned nearly every living thing on earth. That includes babies, kittens, whatever else will make you think about the actual toll of suffering. How strange it is that we are completely ok with the notion of grown humans dying, but the idea of a kitten, trapped on a floating log in a quickly flooding valley, makes us stop and think? What of a child, shivering and wet, desperately trying to stay afloat. He calls for his mother and no one answers. He is alone, and he will be alone until he slips under the heaving waves and drowns. He spends his last moments in agony, terror and confusion. He was not invited to the ark. God looked at him, every choice he could ever make, every dream he ever had and said "Drown him". This is the Yahweh we find later wiping two cities off the map because he could not find anyone worthwhile in the city. This puts the character of the God of the Bible in a questionable light. He would go on to command untold slaughter all throughout Genesis and in the history of Israel. Were there truly no "good" people in the city? Were there no people with the smallest potential to turn from a life of bad decisions? Were there no children at least? When fire rains from heaven, are we able to gaze skyward and ask why? And rape-mobs aside, is a weapon of mass destruction really the best answer we can expect?

Truly, Sodom and Gomorrah, for as little as we know about them, seem like awful places full of awful people doing awful things. It was a barbaric time. But God doesn't seem to be acting the defense of the victims of Sodom. He is merely upset by their disobedience. And God's willingness to glass an entire populace, especially given the track record he is developing at this point in the Bible, forces us into an awkward place - with whom do we identify? Do you side with humanity - rapists, children, murderers, philanthropists, your family and your enemies? Or do you side with the God of the Bible? Are there really masses of people, entire civilizations, who need nothing more than fire from above? If the Leader says that a city must be destroyed, is it okay simply because the leader says so? And if the entire plan is for the glory of the Leader, is it fair to question why the plan has such a massive body count?

A few chapters later we get to one of the central narratives in the entire Bible, much less the Old Testament. Go ahead and read it. I'll wait.

My old friend Kierkegaard wrote what many people think is the definitive text on this story. It's an early triumph for the idea of subjective truth, that individual choices sometimes will make sense only in the context of individual experience. This is partly why he is held up as the early father of existentialism. Kierkegaard makes the point that the actions of Abraham here are viewable from several different vantage points and have different meanings depending upon which vantage point one chooses. On one hand, it is a command to murder a child. On the other hand, it is obedience to God. On the other hand, it is a symbolic call-forward to the death of Christ. From a philosophical standpoint it is a complex and interesting idea. Unfortunately, it also includes the MURDER OF A CHILD by divine decree. If you are awoken in the night and a numinous voice tells you to murder your child, your wife, your neighbor - whoever - would you do it? Is a hunch reason enough to end a life? Is religious duty reason enough to end a life? Is a direct command from above reason enough to end a life? When we are taught this story, and indeed when it is referenced later in the Bible, the focus is on Abraham's faith and obedience. At the last moment God steps in and says "Hey! It was just a test! Now I REALLY know you'd do anything I ask!" How is this anything other than terrible cruelty- if not to Abraham, then to Isaac? And how does this do anything other than divorce our morality from the suffering and well-being of our fellow humans?

Let's do a fun experiment: How many instances of religiously-inspired destruction and murder do we look upon as good today? There are more than enough examples, including several people who have killed children because God told them to do so. Go ahead. Google it. I'll wait.

You may be saying "Listen, we all know that the Bible has some pretty awful things in it, but they happened so that we might LEARN from them. They are LESSONS to be learned, and God enacted them and caused them to be written down for our edification." Not only is this an incredibly self-centered take on history, but it ignores the notion of these stories happening at all to actual people. It ignores immense suffering, terror and misery - and that's only if we sidestep the question of whether such ideas have any justice to them. Are these really fables before they are atrocities?

So what is my overarching point with all of this? It really isn't that the God of the Bible is morally reprehensible - though that is a discussion worth having. The best many apologists can do is state that God has no moral responsibilities and could indeed exact any cruelty at all even upon one who had not offended him because he simply is god and we have no recourse to question him. And really, most western Christianity views the Old Testament as just that - old and barbaric. The God of the New Testament would never flood the earth because He didn't like His creation or destroy a tower and confuse languages because he was afraid of human cooperation. So we'll leave those questions for another time but it really must be said that if all one can say about the Old Testament is that is is irrelevant, that is surely damning it with faint praise.

But there is still a problem, and it is a question of our personal moral responsibility. Why is it wrong to murder children? Well, Biblically it is wrong to murder children because God prohibits it. When God commands the murder of children or does it himself it is fine - in fact, it would be sinful to refuse. Why are rape-squads a bad idea? Because God prohibits it. If God were to command rape, it would be morally incumbent upon the Christian to go out a-rapin'. Let's go larger - why is it a terrible thing to commit genocide? Well, according to the Bible it is because God prohibits such things - except for when he specifically, subjectively commands his people to massacre entire groups. And as we've seen, he is not opposed to getting his own hands dirty. Why is vengeance wrong? Well, because vengeance is something God saves just for him. Are you detecting a pattern here?

The issue here is that instead of a morality based upon the well-being of others, it is based upon an obligation to God. Yes, we are called to love our neighbor as ourselves - but not for its own sake. It is for the sake of showing obedience to God. This may seem like a splitting of hairs until God commands murder. I do think that the New Testament addresses this issue a bit differently, but we'll get to that tomorrow.

Is it wrong when, in the middle east, a woman is stoned to death because she was not a virgin on her wedding night? If you say yes and are a Bible-believing Christian I'm afraid that your arguments must come down strictly to theological issues, as the idea of being willing to kill another as an act of faith and devotion is well established in the Bible and Christian tradition. Contrary to what some rabid atheists might say, this is not because Christians are wicked people, or even more immoral than others - it is because the moral responsibility taught in the pages of the Bible flows in only one direction - up. The body count, the toll of suffering, even the good things brought about by Christians - these are all far secondary to one's devotion to God. Once again, a goodness based upon duty to the Leader replaces solidarity to historically disastrous results.

If God calls you to kill, will you? If God calls you to detonate an atom bomb, would you? We can see the results of this one-directional moral responsibility every time a suicide bomber explodes in a market place. We have seen it for decades in Ireland. We can see it in the eyes of a man leveling a gun at a doctor who performs abortions. We can see it in the killing of children suspected to be witches in Nigeria. We can see it in the unquestioned support for any and all actions of the state of Israel. We can see it directly on the other side of that fence as well. We can see it in the parents who do not take their daughter to the doctor because God has directed them to have faith first. We can see it in the family who rejects their child because she is gay. This isn't simply being an alarmist - these are things happening right now all over the world. In big and small ways, the top-down moral law of the monotheisms, rooted in the Bible, direct our attention not to the suffering of one another but to a grand narrative in which the body count is simply irrelevant. When one looks forward to the end of the world and the destruction of much of humanity by the Leader, one is at best a goose-stepping collaborator and at worst a misanthrope.

There has to be a better moral base than this. Tomorrow we'll trace this into the New Testament and see how the gospels treat it.

Be Well,
-scott

PS - It feels a bit raw to merely mention Fear and Trembling in passing, so maybe in the future I'll do a whole rundown on my thoughts on it. Oh Soren. You may be a depressed guy who lives inside his own head most of the time, but you're MY depressed guy who lives inside his head most of the time.

PPS - I want to point out that many, many, many Christians have a morality that extends first to others and then to God. This is fantastic and a credit to them - but it does not come from the Bible as a whole. It comes from a selective reading of the Bible they have accepted because the narrative taken literally is, to them, immoral. You can see this every time someone holds fast to 1 Corinthians 13 as divine writ but explains 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 as merely a cultural moray. It is to be lauded that so many reject such misogyny when they see it. They are doing what everyone who reads any book of ideas should do.

PPPS - Maybe you've started thinking "Hmmm... you know, this all sounds less like a dispassionate account of early history and more like the foundational myths of a barbaric tribe of nomads in the bronze age. That would explain why the concept of God's character isn't really all that well developed and he seems to really delight in the slaughter of the tribe's enemies and disciplining the tribe itself with things like disease, floods and earthquakes. And really, at a time when most people were terrified of the dark and natural disasters and had no concept of viruses or anything, perhaps this whole Yahweh narrative was just mapped onto the hard-to-explain bits of life." You might find that the Old Testament starts to make perfect sense overnight.

In The Beginning

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 01:45:00 +0000

Holy crap! This was in the bible all along!

It was 1990. When I was in 4th grade, sitting in the far left row and in the back, I was often bored during bible class. I was in such a specific row and seat so that Mrs. Zerbe (whose desk was directly behind me) could make sure I wasn't drawing all over my math tests again. But when she was at the front of the class I was far away and could draw and read to my hearts content. The year prior I had been in a school that used the A Beka curriculum, which was considerably more rigorous that the one I was now experiencing. In fact, jumping in and out of schools that used the A Beka was one of the things that put me dreadfully behind in math in elementary school, something I never quite shook throughout school. A Beka was also far more advanced in its Bible education and as I was always a big reader, I flourished in that respect. But here in this new school we were using some other Christian curriculum. One of the first things I noticed was that we were learning catechism. I can still quote the first few of them. Also, our Christian Living workbooks frowned on things such as watching movies (any movies) and listening to the radio (any station). My family had recently made the jump to listening to all christian music. My dad's cassette of Genesis' Invisible Touch was the only refugee of the secular music world still kicking around. Otherwise, it was all Sandi Patti, Carman and Amy Grant for us. We had began listening to a radio show on the way home from school called Focus On The Family. In class, we were beginning to discuss society outside our immediate experience. I was beginning to see the world in a much different way - a world in which I was part of a persecuted minority. We were a city on a hill. We were a candle in the darkness. And the government, the media, those kids who said bad words - they were lost. I had always recognized the distinction between Christians and non-Christians, but now I was beginning to see The World. The World was hostile. They prayed to false gods or no gods at all. They did whatever they wanted because no one could tell them what to do. They murdered babies. I wasn't that much older than a baby. And the time was coming for a final confrontation, at which point most everyone in the world would be cast into hell.

But in the meantime, I was bored in bible class. They were still memorizing the books of the bible. I mean, two school ago we had done that in 2nd grade! And so, as the rest of the class memorized the measurements of the tabernacle, I started to read the Bible cover to cover for the first time. I had recently discovered the joys of the highlighter, so I marked every verse as a read it. Every verse. In different colors. There is a Bible floating around somewhere in Lodi, California right now whose pages are likely to induce seizure. It was a few days into this journey that I discovered the story of Lot, his family and Sodom & Gommorah. I would posit that, like many things in life, there are parts of the Bible best not experienced alone and at age 9. At first I was intrigued because it contained the first direct mention of sexual desire I had seen in print. It was also between men, so that was also a first. I had heard the word "gay" growing up in the late 80s. Because my sister knew a boy named George whom everyone taunted by calling "Boy George". My sister explained that it was because Boy George was a rock star who was gay. He wore makeup and an earring. But that was all I knew. So this was new ground for me. I wasn't even sure how such a thing would work, but then again I was 9, so my knowledge of anything of that sort was pretty hazy. I was also impressed that, once again, God had stumbled upon an entire group of people who were just bad. Like, irredeemably bad. Like leftovers forgotten in the back of the refrigerator. And since God had recently promised to never again murder just about every living thing on the planet again, He decided to just do a smaller version here, but with celestial fire.

As an aside, this is why you should always press for details when dealing with promises from an all-powerful being. He may vow to never again outright destroy humanity, but that doesn't mean that a city-sized group isn't still completely fair game.

I read those chapters over and over. It was a crazy story. Angels! Attempted rape! A desperate flight! Mass destruction by fire from heaven! A lady turning into a rock! Successful attempts at rape! I marked the story and recommended it to my only good friend Johnny, informing him that once you get away from what you learn in Sunday school, the really interesting stuff begins. It felt crazy and dangerous to be finding such R-rated material in the foundational book of an extremely pious culture.

A scant few chapters later, I came to the story of Abraham's test of faith. Now, when you are raised in the church the notions of both blood sacrifice and filicide are pretty old hat by the time you are 9. It is true that for some, even at that age, reading these stories is enough to drive them to reject the 3 monotheisms outright. But I was so focused on the character of the divine that I was comparatively disinterested in the small people shuffling through deserts. My mom had a giant bible known as The Family Bible. In it was information about our family and important papers. In addition to being a sort of filing cabinet, it had these incredible old paintings of bible stories. Everything was dramatically staged and lit. Robes flowed in the wind. Scrubby trees stood against a stormy sky on Mount Sinai. The walls of Jericho tumbled onto screaming forms below, their hands upraised in a futile gesture of self-defense. Eyes rolled back, the giant head hung by the hair from the extended hand of a young boy, in whose other hand was a gargantuan sword. This was a mythical land of long ago. These weren't real people to me. They were characters in a story. It was true, but it didn't feel like history. Or rather, it felt like history rather than events. At that time I also became fascinated by Biblical maps. There were several in the back of the NIV bible I had received as a Christmas present a few years before. One showed the wanderings of the Jews in the wilderness. Another showed the divided kingdom of Israel and Judah. Still another showed the missionary journeys of Paul. I studied these intensely. I went home and tried to find the places on the maps in our Collier's Encyclopedias to no avail. It made no sense. The maps in the Bible clearly showed showed that these places were big enough to fill the whole page. But all I saw on the world maps or on the globe was America, other continents and ocean.

At age 26 I was starting to feel an anxiety about my spiritual life. It was subtle at first. It was like placing your hand on the surface of a very deep pool. All I could feel were small undulations and splashes, but there were hints of an abyss far beneath. I couldn't really put my finger on it, but somewhere there was an alarm sounding. Like a pattern you don't notice until you do, and then you can't stop seeing it. In the darkness there was something there. Where once there had been nothing, there was something. And so, as tradition instructs, in went to God with my concerns. I began taking long walks during which I would pray harder than I had ever prayed. I devoted myself even further to ministry and the community of believers I loved (and still love) so much. I reread books that had encouraged me in the past. And I decided to once again read the Bible from cover to cover. I had not done so in a few years and it had previously always been something that had refocused me and given me clarity in my Christian walk. So I bookmarked a reading schedule and started one bright spring morning at Genesis 1:1. By the time I had finished the book a few days later, things were looking worse than before. Genesis is a book that is largely unintelligible if taken to be an account of actual events. This is probably why a literal view of Genesis is growing more and more unpopular. There is so much to talk about in this book alone, but in the next few days I want to focus again on those two stories I remembered so well from 4th grade - The Destruction of Sodom And Gomorrah and The Testing of Abraham. For these stories are microcosms, I think, of what is terribly wrong with Biblical ethics and morality, both on a divine level and a human level. And yes, these issues extend right through the New Testament. I am sorry to say that, contrary to what I myself have taught in past years, the Gospels do not suddenly fix everything that disturbs us about the Bible. After all, Jesus came to fulfill the law, not destroy it. Grace is only necessary because of the horrors that began in Genesis. It is hard to admit when one has been wrong, but I suppose that's what I am doing.

Be Well,
-scott

PS- WHO WANTS TO SEE PICTURES OF A CAVE WE EXPLORED WITH AN AMISH GUY? You do!

PPS - Instead of using a Family Bible as our filing cabinet, what book should Bethany and I use? An antique Websters dictionary? Our anthology of English literature? When we got married my parents graciously gifted us a huge Bible to use. Should we still employ the Family Bible out of tradition? I'm open to suggestions.

In Summary - Faith Edition!

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 02:41:00 +0000

Grrr... I am The Summary Lion!

So the subject about which I've talked most in the past few weeks is faith itself. It's also the subject you guys have the most to say about. I think this is to be expected, as it is possibly the most important ingredient in Christianity - it simply doesn't work without suspension of disbelief. I've said most of what I want to say on that matter in particular, at least as far as how reflection on it was instrumental in my growing agnosticism. I wanted to sum up my basic points here, and then take a few days off before moving into other subject matter. Gathering one's thoughts is a luxury one should take as often as one is able. I also have cartoons to make.

So, to summarize my thoughts from the last few posts and discussions in the comments section:

Faith that is ungrounded in evidence is untrustworthy because it is unfalsifiable, it is arbitrary, it is proof for anything the faithful wants, it does not interact with the observable world, and it offers false assurance as to truth claims that often leads to a lack of real thought, research and learning. It then thrives upon the mysteries that this lack of knowledge creates.

Someone who is making a positive assertion about the world bears the burden of proof for that assertion, unless the evidence is so high as to make that assertion a foregone conclusion. At which point, honest discussion can occur without relying on inarguable hunches. And to merely posit "have faith" is to undermine the notion that one's assertion is true as it assumes the destination as the starting point, thus relegating the whole thing to a whim. Actual ideas can be argued and debated. Actual evidence can be observed and tested. And rational arguments are open to change, falsification, and real proof. Actual evidence leads us to consensus, and consensus on that brings us most of the good things we've accomplished as a species that people tend to take for granted. Rational faith is earned by predictable results and a track record (ie: I have faith that the word won't turn into a banana tomorrow). And really, you already know that because you live your life in this manner all of the time, with the possible exception of religious faith. You take Tylenol when you have a headache because Tylenol was made by scientists who tested it and made sure it worked, and then you have also tested it with your own use. When you are very badly injured you go to the hospital because the hospital has a much better track record that anointing with oil and praying. Actual rational reasoning has a huge track record that faith simply does not have. People just tend to take the former for granted while scraping for any trace of proof from the latter.

Also, not all faith statements are equal. Having faith that gravity will pull you toward the earth is not the same as having faith that it will not. Having faith that horses exist is not the same thing as believing they all speak to me in their horse language that only I can hear. But of course, you can't PROVE that they're not speaking to me. Right now. About you.

And finally, one can have these discussions about Christianity because it does not simply relegate itself to being a nice idea - it makes positive assertions about many things: the power of prayer, the birth-giving abilities of virgins, the possibility of resurrection from the dead, possession by external entities, and predictable miracles, just to name a few. These are things that can be tested in some way, though I doubt many Christians would want to do so. They are more than ready to falsify the positive assertions of other faith traditions- and rightly so. But they simply stop at their own doorstep. This is hypocrisy at the very least. I just decided over the years to turn that big old spotlight on my own faith.

Obviously this is a big subject. We'll probably talk about it for a long time to come. But, to be truthful, if you really take the idea of God, faith, the world around us, and our decision making processes seriously, I don't know how this could fail to at least make one think. There is a serious lack of taking the idea of God seriously among Christians. To say something along the lines of "I have no proof at all and I know that my subjective claims completely contradict the revelation of my fellow believers, but it makes me happy and I want to believe it is true" is to make God a commodity - something useful for you in times of need, and an organizational aspect in a chaotic and often frightening world. I took God seriously enough to try to find Him, to research Him and test Him. It wasn't so much that He failed. It was that He wasn't there. Oh, I can still conjure up the God voice in my head if I want, but that's all it is - a voice I conjure in my head. Notice how angry God sounds to southern Baptists vs. how loving and progressive He sounds to post-moderns. When you pray, what does God tell you about homosexuality? Let's take a poll. Unless God is purposely screwing with people, there should be an excellent consensus. But there wouldn't be, and I think everyone knows that. That alone is excellent evidence that it is in our heads to begin with. And evidence is what we are after, because Faith that springs from no evidence whatsoever is a whim.

I'm off for a few days. We're going to explore a cave somewhere in an amishman's field this weekend. I'm not kidding. I am beyond excited. Perhaps I will post pictures next week, as long as there is no argument about whether or not that would be an unacceptable act of pride on the part of the cave. Thanks as always for your thoughts and thought-provoking questions. I will be responding to comments and emails, so hit me with either. Enjoy your fall and I'll be back next week!

Be Well
-scott

PS - I know the Amish don't apply their moral laws to holes in the ground. That was a joke.

PPS - I mentioned before that it is difficult to write about these subjects without sounding terribly arrogant, but I am really not feeling very arrogant here. That would be like saying that a kid who figured out the whole Santa Claus thing was arrogant. I am trying to reason all of this through and maybe get a few other people thinking. So I ask that you give me the benefit of the doubt and imagine that I am saying all of this in my normal, jovial voice... because that is how I am typing. Jovially. That is all.

Can You Prove That You Love Your Spouse?

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 04:47:00 +0000

Happy anniversary!

I had a conversation about 2 years ago with a friend who did not believe in God. She was asking me what I believed, whether I thought the Bible was true, and how I could defend that notion. The subject quickly turned to the existence of God. By this time many of the traditional arguments for God had become unpersuasive to me, so I thought for a moment before I answered. "Well," I said "I can't prove that I love my wife in any scientific manner, but it is a defining truth in my life". That seemed to give her food for thought and we left the topic and moved on. But directly after I said it I felt a small, heavy feeling in my stomach. The kind you might have when you've dodged danger, but only for the time being. My argument may have kept me from losing face, but it rang false to me. I couldn't say why, though, and I left it at that. I never again used it as a defense for belief and it took me about a year to really work out why, as I lay awake at night.

I will say, as an aside, that the notion of abandoning arguments that ring hollow to you, even if others will accept them as evidence of the validity of your position, is a notion largely absent from apologetics.

So can I prove that I love my wife? Well, let's set up some definitions first. By love, I assume we mean a deep affinity for someone that manifests itself in ways that we recognize as a culture, ie:close friendship, romance, deep commitment, protectiveness, priority, other stuff and so on. And we'll be tracking love in the specific institution of an American marriage, in all of its cohabitating, tax-break glory. I think that more or less covers that of which we are attempting to find evidence.

The truth is, I can prove that I love my wife far beyond reasonable doubt using observable evidence. In fact, if you are so inclined, you can participate in this. First, you'll need to go and purchase the proper technology for an around-the-clock camera surveillance of me and my wife. You can then observe how I react to her, how we work together, and whether or not I demonstrate regularly that she is a priority in my life. You could view me when I am away from her and see how I react when we are reunited. You could look at how I have changed for the better since we have been married. You could hook me up to monitors and see how my heart rate fluctuates when I talk about our past and our plans for the future. If you wanted, you could convince me that she had been killed and record my lamentations. You could gauge how faithful I am to her, and if I flirt with attractive women I meet in her absence. You could observe my free time and track who I prefer to spend it with. You could poll me regularly about my decisions as I make them and note how often she comes up as a deciding factor. You could watch us bicker about directions and see how soon we are laughing about it. You could go back in my blogs to when we first started dating and see what I have written about her. And if you could turn back the clocks and ask me if I'd choose to marry her again, you could note my response.

With this evidence one could prove beyond reasonable doubt that my claim of love for my wife was true. That is because love is an affinity. It is an emotion, and a choice. All of these are things that exist first inside me, then become demonstrated to others. Love is a cultural idea that we use to describe a great many different things happening at once between two people. And our relationship fulfills that idea more than many I have seen. So yes, beyond reasonable doubt I can prove to you that I love my wife.

Now, I could simply be faking it. I could be biding my time, waiting for all of the parts of my sinister plan to click into place before renouncing my love. All I have had to do for the better part of the past decade is live a lie so complete that no one, not even the person I spend the lion's share of my time with, the person with whom I work as an artist, the person with whom I hash out difficult ideas and the person with whom I do most things would notice. She would need to be a rather slow person for this plan to work. And the times I have met other people, been away from my wife, or that one time a girl I knew from my teenage years suggested an extra-marital dalliance - those were all times I had merely been playing the faithful husband. The matching tattoos we have - simply a smokescreen. I think you can already see that it is MUCH more likely that I love my wife. Certainly, it could be the most elaborate ruse in history, but the evidence is far against you and whats more - you have no real reason to think it in the first place. My behavior more than fulfills our notion of love. The evidence is vast. And all the evidence has to do is add up to become the most likely solution. In reality, nothing is air-tight. Every time I walk, I am experiencing the effect of gravity pulling my foot down after I lift it into the air. Let's say that just once today, that effect was not gravity, but the result of a witch's spell. It could be. But I think we can all infer from the wealth of evidence of gravity and the scant evidence of the efficacy of magic spells that it was most likely just gravity.

The evidence also works here largely because all I need to do is prove an affinity through my actions, which is usually how affinities manifest themselves in the world. I really love chips and salsa, and really one only has to observe my behavior at Emilianos Mexican Restaurant to gain all the evidence one needs. And we generally ask no more, because not much actually rests upon my claim.

Now, lets say we do all of that. You're going back through your tapes and your notes and something jumps out at you. You've never once been able to film Bethany. You think you might have heard her a few times when you were observing me, but now you're suddenly not so sure. And when you show up at my apartment asking to interview her, maybe just get a picture for your report, I inform you that only I can see and hear Bethany. You are shocked. I poke my head back around the door and yell "Oh, it's just that researcher, dear!". You did not hear anyone ask. You say that really for the validity of the report you really need a picture, or just to hear her voice through the door, whatever. I say that I'm sorry, but you really can't. But maybe if you leave, you'll meet Bethany yourself one day. I can only tell you about her. And with that I close the door. You hear conversation inside the door, but only my side of it. You realize that while you've been able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that I love Bethany, you have done little to really prove that she exists. And the whole part about her being unknowable in any conventional sense has really thrown you. You now wonder if I have just convinced myself of this invisible ghost-wife, and can I really love something that may not exists? I mean, you took it for granted that she existed until out of the blue there was reason to doubt, and the evidence for her came up short. Suddenly there is very good reason to probe and find proofs of her existence. Suddenly the burden of proof is one me, and you might want to change the title of the report to "Man Swears Love To Wife That Only He Can See And Hear".

Be Well,
-scott

PS - Happy five year anniversary, darling!
PPS - I know you want to know about that picture at the top.

Impossible Distances

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 20:34:00 +0000

And then they beheld it - the very nipple of the universe.

Faith. I have it tattooed on my inner right wrist. Faith is the currency of Christianity. It's such a massively important word that it really has many definitions in the Christian tradition.

- Belief in a proposition that does not rest primarily on evidence.
- The condition of having said belief.
- The practice of that belief.

If you were a word-of-faith believer (or someone who read The Secret... or a fan of Depak Chopra), you might add something about faith being some sort of cosmic currency that effects spiritual and physical reality. I was never a believer in any of that, so I won't be addressing it here. But actually after making that mental link between those three different beliefs, I might write about it later.

When I say "I lost my faith", I find at that I'm simultaneously being truthful or evasive, depending upon what definition we are using. In terms of faith as a condition of having a belief, I lost that. It faded away slowly over a few years. But this happened because I simply could not bring myself to believe in something simply because I wanted to believe it. I rejected the value of faith in that sense. In high school once, a classmate asked the teacher what would happen if the bible were not true. Like, if it could be proved that the bible was not true. The teacher responded that he would still stand by to his faith in the bible. I have heard speakers say (many times) that if it could be proven that God did not exist, they would still believe. What struck me, even then, about those statements is how much they focused on the drama of the believer as the central focus of faith. True, the believer is far secondary to the object of belief in theology. But that notion of belief without evidence (and in fact, in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary) is something that appeals to us on a base emotional level. Kierkegaard obviously devoted a great deal of ink to the issue, using the story of Abraham and Isaac to great effect. But I am also reminded of Camus, writing about damned Sisyphus eternally rolling his stone up a hill, only have it roll back (and yes, I am also reminded of Blake - I am not immune to self criticism). The futile task itself gives meaning. And in the face of the howling winds of fortune, it is good to stand strong and howl back.

But what also struck me, and perhaps this is also why I think of Camus, is the sheer arbitrary nature of this task, this belief. If faith does not rest upon evidence, the question turns to what it does indeed rest upon. And if evidence has no place in Christianity, how does one compare faith in it to faith in something else? Without evidence of some sort, faith isn't simply "the evidence of things unseen", it is the evidence of ALL things unseen. Faith is just as useful for Christianity, Islam, Scientology, Astrology and the Psychic Friends Network. An appeal to faith is a rock upon which both conversation and critical thinking are dashed.

The object of faith is arbitrary if faith alone is the means of knowing it. One might as well say "I believe it because I really, really like it". This is why philosophers have wrestled with the question of God's existence. Not because they do not take faith seriously - it is because they have taken the idea of God more seriously than most.

The vast majority of Christians I have known in my life, including great friends, know very little about the Bible or Christianity itself. Furthermore, they know very little about history, philosophy, or science - especially how these things have shaped both their worldviews and the worldviews of others. They know all there is to know about their local football team or their favorite movie series, but they spend little time really analyzing what it is they believe. If I had to guess why this is, and I were trying very hard not to be cynical, I would posit that faith offers an assurance that renders critical thinking vestigial. Studying the Bible in the same critical manner with which one might study other holy texts is generally restricted to seminaries. Hard questions on the internal and logical consistency of theology are usually seen as fine, as long as they do not trespass the hard line of faith. This is obviously not true in every case, and there are pockets of hard-thinking Christians all over the place. But at some point the thinking stops. It is satisfied. Further evidence is not required. It is finished.

And this is why merely throwing the conversation to faith causes many people, myself in my christian years included, to let out a sigh. In my time as a speaker, and ever before as a songwriter for my awesome last band, I was interested mainly in the ethical and philosophical ramifications of the Christian faith. By the time I was 22 or so, I was a terrible evangelist. It just wasn't a conversation I even knew how to have anymore. Looking back at it now, I think that may have been the earliest thing that points to my unbelief now (I keep looking back and finding things that now make perfect sense to me). I was standing at point B, and I had no idea how a thinking person could reasonably move from point A. I could hash out and explain point B well enough (and that is probably why I am still talking mainly to Christians here), but the voyage there had happened in the dark ages of youth, before I was much of a critical thinker. Perhaps this is why the Bible says to remember the Lord in your youth. (Though, as an aside, what a depressing verse. Really? I'm going to one day just wake up and find no enjoyment in my life because I grew up and noticed that the world is scary? Honestly.)

I bring this up because the lion's share of the material on the retaining of one's Christian faith has essentially one bit of advice - Have faith, seek God, have faith some more. But I don't know that Christians understand what an unintelligible bit of advice that is. Faith is belief independent of evidence. It is merely something one chooses to have. So, to rephrase the advice - If you were only at point B, you'd no longer be at point A. If you could only believe, then you'd believe again. If you only prayed (as if I did not do that for years, desperately near the end), then you could be praying again. If only you decided to have faith, you'd not lose your faith. But if one wishes to decide what is true based upon something other than what comforts one, one cannot accept this. For faith not based upon anything might as well be nothing, as far as truth in concerned. I have faith that the sun will rise in a few hours because of an extraordinary track record. I could even check and see if it is dawn over the Atlantic yet and anticipate the rays hitting the front of my apartment building. So that faith leaps from a rock of evidence. I have faith that my friend Kev is still my friend because we have spent years observably being friends and he is not so capricious as to simply call such a thing off. Christianity makes positive statements about the world - how it works, how we work, whether virgins can give birth, the speaking ability of donkeys. That makes it completely fair to investigate those claims. But even purely philosophical systems are open to debate, to argumentation, to logic, and to being falsified. The same goes for personal views, especially when they effect others. And that is GREAT, because that is how things like civil rights, technology and pants come about. We think and refine and throw away what we can't use.

The notion of Seeking God (which is odd, as I believe the notion of God is that He is generally a prime-mover type of guy)- What does the concept mean? I believe it means read the Bible, be affected by it, pray to God and try to believe He will "make Himself known". But isn't this simply a restatement of "Have Faith?". I sought God in that way for a very, very long time. If I may say so, as rigorously as anyone I have met. Good Christian friends would even chide me for having taken the time to work through tough theological questions. And upon draining the bathwater, I found no baby. Upon reaching the end of world 8, the princess was still in another castle. I'm not angry at God for possibly not existing (sorry, CS Lewis). It's possibly not His fault. And since coming to that conclusion (if proactive agnosticism can be seen as an end point), I have actually found the evidence and arguments more thin than before, because they too require faith as fuel.

And that is the impossible distance, the distance between A and B. If one goes by faith alone, the only way to point B is just being there. And if one goes by faith alone, every point B is as true as another. I don't now understand the obsessive fear Christians have of relativism - what is more relative and subjective than personal revelation as sole needed proof?

Of course, very few people I know believe simply by blind faith. They DO employ argumentation, authoritative sources, and apologetics as their supports even if they do not want to admit it. And this is why I focus on those, and really think the only sane way to evaluate the truth of Christianity (or anything) is by sifting what we can know, what we can discuss, what we can falsify. Retreating into a non-falsifiable faith defense is really just another way of saying "It is true because I believe it".

Be Well,
-Scott

Solidarity

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 08:23:00 +0000

Hey guys. Totally let's have a battle.

I want to briefly expand upon a concept from my last post - the concept of solidarity. It's something to which I'll be returning, so I figured I'd at least explore it a little bit here. And yes, this is continuing the critique of Christian doctrine. It should be remembered that I don't actually believe that God exists at this point, so this isn't a silly rebellion of some sort. This is picking apart doctrine as philosophy, which is what I was doing as a believer as well. I feel that, based upon some of the feedback that I've gotten, that I must restate this with some regularity.

I've often heard people say "Well, it doesn't matter if I can't prove God exists or that the Bible is true - I don't want to live in a universe in which such a sublime order of things is not true." I suppose I'm going to posit why you may want to rethink that.

One of the worst things about an authoritarian power structure is that it doesn't simply oppress a society - it corrupts the society itself. Neighbors inform on neighbors. People betray one another. Good is defined by the Leader, and often goodness is measured by the essence of the Leader himself. By that I mean that "goodness" is not a word that one ascribes to the Leader - it gains it's definition from the Leader. If the Leader does something, it is by definition good. All else may be sacrificed. If you do not follow the authoritarian narrative, you will at least be interested in your own survival, so you will turn on others in order to prove your loyalty. If you do truly believe, all else is secondary - sacrifices must be made for, an to, the Leader. And if something seems unjust, unfair, or just downright insane - you trust that the Leader has a plan. We are worth nothing, the Leader is worth everything.

This is nothing new. Already your minds are swimming with instances from history (or maybe your workplace). The Christian narrative is that people are pathologically unwilling to submit to any authority but their own, but history shows that is simply not the case. Every army that has ever marched has done so under some banner or another. In school and in church I learned that the problem with dictatorships is that people make a person their god, placing a mortal on a throne no mortal can fill. I think this is true enough, but I would go one further. The issue is not who is on the throne, this issue is the throne itself.

Is murder wrong because it causes suffering, steals away choices, destroys possibilities, ends life? Or is it wrong because God says so? What if God told you to murder? Would that make it correct? Is your morality independent of a human element? The six billion (and climbing!) of us on planet earth mean something. The untold masses that came before us meant something. In this kingdom, perhaps the peasants themselves are worth more than the idea of royalty. In fact, when was this ever not the case? Solidarity, kids!

As I said before, this is to be a (comparatively) short post, so I'll spare you huge plunges into ethics today. If you've attended one of my bible studies in the past few years though, you know it's inevitable. The plunges are coming next week.

Have a great weekend!

Be Well,
-Scott

Hell

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 01:24:00 +0000

Seriously. Just about every person in this picture is smiling. Creepy.

Well, you had to know this was coming. We're going to get into some doctrinal criticisms. Not simply a rejection of belief, but actually critiquing Christianity. I know. It'll be awkward. But understand that I'm not necessarily criticizing all Christians. And yes, I am aware that by the nature of these criticisms I will be stumbling in to some blasphemies. I assure you I am not trying to be offensive for it's own sake - I am merely asking hard questions. And what does it say about the discourse that one should fear for asking questions?

This is a touchy subject, but one about which you would be hard-pressed to find a consensus among many Christians. When I began this blog, I had a small fear that I would receive still-smoking messages warning me of my impending damnation. Thankfully that hasn't happened, though I don't think that I have simply dodged a bullet. Most Christians I know don't really believe in Hell, at least not in any practical way. Oh sure, they may believe it like they believe the tower of Babel happened, but as far as something that effects either their lives, their outlook for the future, or even their interaction with non-believers, it is hardly an issue of any weight. Many of my close friends are theologically very liberal and don't believe in Hell whatsoever. If you are similarly universalist in your leanings, you may find this whole thing to be simply an exercise in the exploration of barbarity.

This is probably for one or more of a few reasons. Firstly, the idea of Hell is rather unpleasant. Secondly, the existence of Hell causes some tension between different tenets of Christian belief. Thirdly, there is (once again) a shocking lack of consensus about it. And finally, it simply doesn't make a ton of sense as an actual place of torment. Let's go through these one by one. This is also a huge topic, too big and amorphous for one post really, but I don't want to drag it out. I am, as always, open to comments and emails.

Points 1 & 2
We'll go through points one and two at the same time, as they flow into one another. If you asked most Christians that don't believe in hell why they do not, you'd probably get a large amount who say "Well, it seems odd that a loving God would willingly send people to hell". And they are correct, I think. So correct, in fact, that various Christians have spent a lot of time formulating worldviews to square this with the rest of Christian doctrine. A popular argument is that God created us with free will, and we decide to reject Him, thus He is blameless. I can't be the first to say this, but it's odd to, on the subject of eternal torment, let God off on a technicality. We'll address this again when we talk about the fall of man, I do expect. If I create a maze and on one end of it put a trapdoor over spinning saw blades, and on the other end an exit, I still bear some responsibility for the life of the child I throw into the maze. I bear this responsibility because I MADE THE DAMN THING. In that sense, God is only as culpable as the killer who constructs elaborate killing devices but leaves you the ability to get out of it. There are going to be some number of people who either don't get it, want to die, can't physically cut it or just make a mistake. That killer would still be seen as a sadistic villain. Especially if the killer was infinitely more capable, mentally, than the victim. Also, the killer can't die. And he made the victims.

Now, let's say you're a Calvinist. To be a Calvinist and believe in eternal Hell, you must believe the following : God created sentient humans to run out their lives on imperfect, often barbaric earth, and then upon death to writhe in agony for ever and ever. If all the glory for divine election goes to God, then all of the ignominy for reprobation must follow. Common ways around this are to say that God simply knew who would reject Him and therefore didn't soften their hearts to His message. Another answer, and more prevalent in my experience, is this : God is not bound by morals as we are. If He does something, it is by definition right. He created us and has the right to do anything he pleases to us, and we have no right to feel bad about it. There is no hope, only destiny. No freedom, only hierarchy. You will go to hell because that is what you were created to do. You will enjoy divine bliss forever because you were created to do so. Your agency is moot. If you are born in a non-evangelized area, suffer greatly in a war, work as hard as you can to do right, you will burn in hell because that is what God decided you were to do, long before you were even born. You'll notice here that no attempt is made to square the morality of Hell with any moral doctrine, including the moral doctrine God expects of us. It is simply a predestined system.

Another take on the subject is that God MUST punish people because He is just. He is offended by our sin, jealous of our worship, and His justice must be satisfied. Now, let's try to divorce ourselves from these terms, as their very ancientness and ubiquity I think lend them more credibility than they deserve. God, by His very description in the scriptures, loses nothing. Ever. He is always God. He has nothing at all to lose. And if there even were an impossible situation in which He could paradoxically lose something, He is still the author and sustainer of the situation. He can call time outs, drop divine revelation, change everything on a whim. He is complete. But somehow this complete God is not content. He commands worship and devotion. Yet His ego is such that millions must die for Him to bring glory to himself. And when you choose something that is not what He has expressly commanded you to choose, He is unwilling to let it go or accept this as simply a limitation He, in fact, built into the system when He did not even have to. Instead, death must occur. Blood must be shed. And this is not simply for what we would call capital offenses. Biblically, everything is a capital offense. By that I mean that the slightest derivation from the commands of God is met with the sentence of death. The fall of man is so called because by one person sinning, the entire world became mortal. I would call that an overreaction. There are many other things God could have done - do over? Allow people to explore, make mistakes, and gently teach them as they went? Turn the whole thing into a learning process, so that no human has to face annihilation? Cause people to feel the pain they caused others as a deterrent to anti-social behavior? I mean, we could go on. What wrong could someone possibly commit against you for which you would feel justified in handing them an eternity of torment? Why in the world would this be necessary? And if it is just that we all be damned, why go through the trouble of allowing a way out at all? Why invent a system in which opting in is automatic, but opting out is conditional? Especially since the initial opt in bears such a ridiculously over-the-top penalty? This could go on and on, guessing and second-guessing and postulating. But bear in mind I'm only doing what theologians since time immemorial have been doing. Except that instead of trying to make it seem ok, I'm simply not letting the biblical God off of the hook. I shouldn't really have to. Christians have worked and worked to make this make sense, to seem okay, to paint a God who creates Hell as one who is not capricious or cruel, to convince themselves this is not barbaric. We are so ready to abandon solidarity with our fellow mortals. What does that say about us?

Point 3.

What is hell? Well, depending on where you fall theologically, hell is probably one of these:
1. A place prepared for the eternal torment of Satan and his demons, as well as death. Unbelievers are cast in as well. Attractions include: fire, teeth gnashing, weeping, smoke, and a complete separation from God.
2. A place ruled by Satan, who has some rightful legal claim on the souls of those who turn away from God. Also: you are, by default, turned away from God.
3. Similar to the first concept, only sans flames. Just dark. And Godless.
4. Annihilation - the damned are simply destroyed. No eternal life. Just deleted.
There are many hybrids as well. Satan is destroyed, the damned are tormented. The damned are tormented by Satan and/or demons, and the punishment is that God does not stop them. Maybe things are just really hot and dry. You wander in darkness, and the knowledge that other people are whooping it up in heaven is the punishment. Or maybe God doesn't want to punish people at all, and he just leaves them to their own devices - but removes His spirit from man, which is apparently the only thing keeping us from continuously murdering and raping one another. This is to say nothing of the prevalent concepts of hell that are simply warmings-over of Dante's Inferno. I do wonder how many people actually know how much of their doctrine of the afterlife comes to them straight from The Divine Comedy.

Also, who goes to Hell? Well, depending on your view of salvation, most people or no one. Some Protestants assume that Catholics will go to hell, and vice versa. Jews are an interesting case in that some denominations view them as chosen by God and therefore saved to a one (I wonder how much Hebrew you must have in your genes?), while others view them as a people who have rejected Heaven when they rejected (en masse, apparently) Christ as savior. So all Jews, no Jews or some Jews will go to hell. What about people who have never heard of Christ? Well, the bible says that God's creation bears witness to Him, so that men are without excuse. This vague verse leads some to believe that everyone should simply deduce the whole Christianity thing by appreciating the sunset. Conversely, it leads some to believe that this means that simply a subjective appreciation for an abstract creator is enough. And, of course, what of the kids? We have this age-of-accountability thing going on, but that's not really supported scripturally (as far as I've ever seen). In fact, we'll come back to the age of accountability in another, more positive post. Or, finally, perhaps salvation is to all people, and all will be reconciled with the God who is willing that none should perish, has sent a son into the world not to condemn but save it, and in whose "book" every day of every life is written before one of them came to be. However, then you have to get past the apocalyptic bad trip that is The Book of Revelation.

Point 4.
So I've always had some misgivings about the concept of hell. Not just the ethical or theological concerns, but the actual conceptual implications. Since the doctrine of hell is cobbled together from several places in the bible, and subject to so many interpretations, I'm not sure these specific misgivings apply across the board. But let's just think for a moment. I'm sure you could add your own to this list.

Ok, so let's assume the lake of fire hell that is so popular. So you and I are there, writhing in agony. Our skins burns off and, I don't know, grows back again. It hurts every time. After about 5000 years of this, skin on fire is going to seem pretty passe. There are people with awful and debilitating diseases than learn to live with it. It's terribly unpleasant, but they adapt. They move on. They deal. Now, if you take the entire population of hell and remove the fear of death that is such a part of our misery as humans, after awhile you're simply going to be repeating unpleasantness ad nauseum. And since all of this torture would be not nearly as effective without our mental capacities (and the lake of fire idea is all about effectiveness), we would probably at some point accept this as new normal. And so we would be tortured not with fire - but with boredom. How shall we pass the time? Well, we're adaptable. Already this has simply become a holding pen. Torment, by its very nature, is temporary. It relies upon fear of loss, fear of death, the unknown... these are all things that evaporate in an eternal, immortal setting. Hell, then, becomes simply a reset button and a change of rules. I'm not saying it would be pleasant or preferable to another setting. I AM, however, saying that really thinking about it subverts many of the horrors so feared. I think this is a conceptual error on the part of those who invented it (and continue to iterate on it). They just thought of the worst thing their minds could conceive at that time in history and then said "Yeah, but.... it'll be like FOREVER!" Humanity has been iterating on it ever since.

As another thought experiment, let's take another classic vision of hell - the one in which the spirit of God simply leaves. We are separated from God and left with each other to ponder what we have done. On the whole, I'm not sure this makes much sense. It relies upon the notion that anything good, decent, beautiful or interesting is a result of the presence of God. A cursory glance at people who do not believe in God might make you question this. They would probably set about building new lives together, marveling at how crazy the end of the world was, and in general getting on with things. There is a rhetorical comeback to this - that people without God are not good in spite of the fact that they are without God. I've never really been able to buy this, obviously, and history is also not terribly kind to it.

In fact, history has not been kind to the entire notion of Hell. We've found a lot of good common ground across groups of people once thought evil to the core. We've noticed that we ourselves have excellent moments and terrible ones. We've seen terrible people reform and become invaluable members of our species. We've seen how people thrive when not living under the threat of punishment for opinion. We've learned (even in The Bible) that it is better to seek a diplomatic solution whenever possible. We've seen what it is like to be rounded up and tortured, not for what you've done, but for what you were born into. We've seen the horror of conflicts handed down over generations, where each generation inherits the guilt of the one before - stretching back to an original sin than no one can remember or take responsibility for. Can there be gulag without a dictatorship? Is a gulag the mark of any good system, let alone the best system?

Be Well,
-Scott

PS - I have an intense fascination with religious experience, and specifically how it interacts with popular folklore and legend. If you are also so fascinated, I would recommend seeking out any of the large number of testimonies of people who have found themselves in hell for some reason - a vision, NDE, bad day, etc. They are almost invariably influenced heavily by literature, movies, art and current events. A popular place to start is Bill Wiese, whose 23 Minutes In Hell is truly fascinating.

PPS - Another amusing thing about Christian culture is how it simultaneously fears, threatens and laughs at the concept of Hell.

Floating Over Mars

noreply@blogger.com (bombsfall) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 06:28:00 +0000

If you are a Scorpio, be wary of centaurs this month.

I have had exactly one dream in my life to which I have gleaned any insight. Many people I have known throughout my life have gone so far as to journal their dreams and comb them for any snippet of revelation from the divine. I knew someone who actually began a relationship with his now-wife by telling her that he had a dream in which they were married. He did not believe in dream-revelation at the time but we both knew that she most certainly did. The jury is still out on whether or not the original dream even happened. But for me, dreams have mostly taken the characteristics of whatever video game I had been over-playing, the stresses of the day, and random people from my past and hit the puree button. I am especially susceptible to this in the late summer, when I tend to experience a seasonal low point in brain function and mood. And really, to be honest, I have always found the notion of prophetic dreams somewhat ridiculous - not simply by predilection or personal experience, but also because I have known many people who have had them almost every night and they were no more prophetic or intuitive than most people. They simply had been given the confidence to speak as if they were.

In July or August of 2007, though, I had a dream. In the dream, I was an astronaut and there was no God. His existence had been proven to be a myth. My space pod and I were orbiting Mars. Something had happened to the pod so I strapped on my space suit, hooked up some sort of space umbilical chord to both tether me to the ship and feed me oxygen, and opened the airlock. Stepping out, I clung to the structures on the external wall. I climbed toward the underside of the ship which faced away from the planet below. It was soundless and bright when the ship exploded beneath me. I don't know what happened. I clenched my eyes shut. With no air to resist me, I went tumbling end over end into the vacuum. Being from Earth, I expected to feel the wind rushing past me, to see the ground rushing up toward me. But it was almost peaceful as I floated. Opening my eyes, I saw the void all around me. I was going to run out of air sooner rather than later. My lifeless body would float here, possibly forever. I was overcome with a sense of terror, of loss, of emptiness. I turned around.

I realized that I was still caught in the orbit of Mars, falling around the planet. Eventually I would enter the atmosphere and burn to dust. If Martians existed, they would maybe see a flash on the night sky as I was incinerated. A few tears leaked out and floated inside my helmet, little orbs glinting in the red light. I looked around. My entire field of vision was taken up by the surface of Mars. My gloved hands dangled in front of me as we hung there. The surface was a mosaic of red, orange, white and beige. I could see mountains ranges and geological structures I could not identify. Turning my head to the left, I could see the curve of the planet and, beyond, other planets - including earth. And beyond all of that, the only source of light even out here, our sun. It looked smaller. Everything looked smaller. I felt a wash of elation roll over me. What a fantastic thing this was. To see light from the sun from so far away. To see the whole world on which I was born, hanging like a blue dot, with everyone I know crawling around on the surface. To see Mars, almost impossibly huge, and to know that I would, if only in death, come into contact with it. To float in the vacuum, to fall endlessly alongside the spheres. Space didn't seem like such a void - it seemed full. Full of things, full of meaning. I was going to die. My life and experiences were about to come to a hard stop forever. But even if there was no God, no afterlife, no providential narrative in which I played a part - this was enough. It was enough to see this for even a short time. I watched the universe and felt lucky.

In hindsight, I now recognize that I was even then beginning to understand. I was, kicking and screaming, discovering that my faith was not tenable. Julia Sweeney, in her fantastic monologue "Letting Go Of God", speaks of a moment years into her own decline of faith, when a small voice suddenly became audible. She didn't know how long it had been there, but now it spoke just a tiny bit louder and entered her mind. The voice simply said "There is no god". I look at this dream as a moment when that voice was audible, if only for a moment. It wasn't pushy. At the time I had no intention of renouncing Christianity and I continued to fight the good fight for years. I clawed and strained to hang on. I wanted to believe for so long. But slowly and surely, I was becoming okay with the idea that God may not exist.

Be Well,
-scott