Here’s a thoughtful video about one person’s deconversion process: the interesting thing about it is that he was a believer who reasoned himself out of religion.
Although I was brought up in a religion, I’ve discovered that there is a large difference between those who were seriously immersed in a faith, like this fellow, and people who just got a fairly brief and not very deep exposure, like myself. I was rather easily disabused of religion — when I first was taught the tenets of the faith, my reaction was more like, “You believe what? And you expect me to believe it too? That’s batty!” I didn’t need the careful dissection of belief, because what jumped out to me was the raging absurdity of original sin, virgin births, gods manifesting as men, etc., etc., etc.
When the very means of evaluating the world is held to be entirely religious–the Bible in many cases–or at least the final authority, understanding another, more reliable, system is not easy to do. Indeed, it seems impossible for many later in life.
This guy received the kind of education that would evoke doubts, while many do not.
For me, it was somehow not that difficult, because at one point (early teens) I realized that all of the “arguments” and “evidence” I had given probably had been considered and answered, and that one should be open to that possibility. If you reach that point, and are serious about thinking, you’re well on your way out of religion.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
I think I come from a situation more like the fellow in the video, albeit from a somewhat more “liberal” religious tradition (Episcopalianism, for whatever degree of “liberal” that’s actually worth in religious terms) that encouraged things like interpretation” and metaphor.
And Tea and Cake or Death, of course.
But the process of deconversion was longer for me. It underwent many stages, too, starting about age 17 and my first encounter with Camus, then a later period in my late 20s embracing alternate belief systems, and finally reaching the point of realizing that I didn’t believe in gods and so forth and coming to see the rational arguments in my 30s.
It’s funny looking back, and wondering why I didn’t have more “You believe what?” moments about my own belief system. Sometimes when you’re immersed in something it’s harder to see just what’s really going on, or it can be harder to accept it.
I’ve watched this guy’s videos, and they’re very well done. Kudos to his process, and the accounting of same. I hope these videos reach others with questions.
Still learning,
Robert
I was 23 before it finally clicked (in Israel of all places). I had been very heavily involved in Christianity, but I never bought into creationism. PZ, I think you were right when you were here in Belfast – evolution does often lead people to atheism. But what’s bad about THAT? ;-)
I feel more fortunate every day that I was raised with not even a shallow, cursory sort of religion in my household. By the time friends in elementary school started talking to me about what they actually did in church, and why they went, I had already had a very basic kid-oriented introduction to Greek, Roman and Norse mythology, so it seemed obvious to me that my friends were talking about something very similar. It wasn’t until second grade that I started to become aware that people actually believed the stuff they were talking about.
So it’s hard for me to relate to these discussions of how people had to “unlearn” their religious upbringing, and how difficult it was, and how in many cases there was a significant sense of loss. I can’t really even imagine how difficult it would be.
i was like you PZ. Not all that impressed with religion, but then I found the old time Catholic Church and fell in love with it. I became a true believer for about 5 years and then over the next 4 years, it ebbed. Now, I’m back to where I was before…only more so.
Just goes to show why AIG is right to fear human reason, as displays and texts in their Creation “Museum” make abundantly clear that they do. The displays explicitly contrast human reason with scripture, denigrating the former and elevating the latter.
First Grade, hearing the clergy talk among themselves regarding my invalid mother — half of these people who should know their theology better than the laity split whether mom was an inspiration for never giving up, or that god was punishing her.
At that time, I realized they didn’t know what they were talking about.
I suppose that’s what happens when you deconstruct goddidit. Ergo, religion is basically forced into the position of declaring rational thought as evil, if this is what rational thought leads to. I particularly liked his framing of the argument at ~6:20 in; the argument is not “There is a god v. there is no god” it’s “There is a god and he does all this shit to make it look like there’s no god v. there is no god.” Nice.
Also, I like your blog PZ. :)
scampers off to find out about the Bible author dubbed “R”
You were the lucky one. I was brought in a highly religious environment and even at 15 I strongly believed in a god. it took me some years to realize how bogus that very idea was so I ended up as an atheist. And I can’t help but loving it!
I’ll have to watch that video when I’m not at work, but I also reasoned my way out of religion as an adult. I was raised by agnostics and got into fundamentalism as a teenage convert. But that kind of mellowed out over the next 25 or so years, and I was an atheist by my mid-40s. Obviously, it helped that I hadn’t been brainwashed as a child, and somehow have acquired a life-long habit of continually asking questions — and then questioning the answers. (In a perverse sort of way, even my initial conversion is an example of that. Skeptical inquiry is a process, not a result).
My experience was similar to PZ’s. My family is what I call “roman catholic-lite.” When I was around 10, we moved and I had to change schools. My options were the local catholic school (basically a couple of portables with a library the size of a closet) and the local public school which was an actual school with all the facilities that a proper school should have. My Mom made the right decision – she enrolled me in the public school and thus ended my formal roman catholic upbringing. I’ll always thank her for that.
As for the development of my lack of belief? I can’t say for sure. I don’t think I ever bought into what the church was peddling. Hell didn’t make sense, the trinity didn’t make sense, the absurd claims of the old testament didn’t make sense…The confessional was the real kicker for me though. Even as a 7 or 8 year-old I thought it was just stupid. I mean, what sins did I possibly have to confess to? The whole process is creepy as well. You go into what looks like a darkened phone booth to talk to some shadowy figure on the other side of a screen. Most of the time, I just made shit up in order to make the whole thing go faster…
I have been following this video series — it is very well done. I was “raised” Catholic, worked my way through the sacraments to Confirmation and all, going to Catholic school k-12, alter boy, the whole bit.
When I try and look back, I can’t really pinpoint any particular moment that stands out for “losing” faith. There was just a slow accumulation of questions and thoughts that couldn’t be answered.
People like Evid3nc3 experienced a much more intense version of religion than I ever did. I can remember Confirmation being one of the biggest “spiritual” let downs growning up. We were all told about the holy spirit, tongues of fire, etc. Silly of me to expect to feel anything more than a bishop smearing oil on my face.
But if I were to explain that to some Protestants (or even Catholics, probably) they could take that as a sign I had never really felt the holy spirit. And it is sort of true, I never experienced the “Protestant” version of the holy spirit. But I did believe, at least until I got older.
It is a sad thing that part of Evid3nc3’s reason for making this series is to show “Real True” Christians, that he really was one of them too. Because many of the more intense versions of Christianity have the nasty idea that if you ever stop believing, you never did.
I come from a pretty strong Lutheran background, one brother a minister, another considered it (now an atheist), I also considered it, and am now also an atheist.
What changed my mind about the whole thing, when I was about fifteen, was thinking about where the bible came from, and where all this ‘knowledge’ about god came from: It was handed down from one generation to the next. What was the origin? Someone, long ago, made it up. I realized that everyone came into the world with exactly the same amount of knowledge of god: none.
It was a long time before I actually called myself an atheist rather than an agnostic, but my attitude since then has been ‘If god wants to talk to me, he knows where to find me.’ I’ve never listened earnestly to another religious person on the subject.
i grew up going to church each sunday – it was a conservative, but not overtly political, country “Church of Christ”. whole family went, on account of my parents believing it was necessary for things like social integration and moral education, etc. they just thought it was a normal thing to do, though neither is/was particularly “Christian” – I’ve never heard either mention god or Jesus, though they definitely believe in life after death and higher powers, etc.
anyhow, about the time I’m ten or eleven I start guilty in Sunday school each week (where we’re taught individual Bible stories), because I feel like I don’t understand. already, I know that the Earth is very old, and people didn’t live with dinosaurs, etc. (my parents, especially mother, always taught us Adam & Eve was a sort of fairy tale). I felt like I shouldn’t be there, like I was missing something that the other kids had. now I realize, what I was missing was credulous, creationist parents.
Proof: one week, I’m about 11 years old, in Sunday school, we’re going over some Genesis story, maybe Adam and Eve, something like that. I ask “what about the dinosaurs, you can find their bones, they’ve turned to stone!”, and the ‘teacher’ explains that dinosaur fossils are a kind of a test, to mislead the unfaithful. after church, I tell my parents what he said, and she gets very, very angry. my sister and I never have to go to Sunday school again (meaning that we get to show up an hour later at church each week)!
around this time, I think to demonstrate our bona-fides as church-goers, my parents say that me and my sister have to get baptized. they keep encouraging us to go up and volunteer at the end of the church service each week, when the preacher makes his “call” for believers. we refuse. finally, we agree to do it in private, on a Sunday afternoon. I was twelve, and it made me feel like a lying shit, because I didn’t believe anything the preacher said (and he was such a nice guy, in my memories) as he dunked me under the water.
so, this is where it really broke down, and I realized that the church people might actually be either 1) lying to us about these stories, or 2) stupid. either way, over the next couple of years, in my adolescent mind, the whole “God, Jesus, souls, etc.” schema fell apart piece by piece. by the time I was 15 or 16, I could say I believed in God nominally, I think because I was afraid to tell anyone otherwise; and, I would say things like “Jesus was just a good person, but not a god”. remember, we’re still going to church each week (though as my sister and I get older, we’re more and more effective at resisting and skipping a Sunday here and there) – I don’t want to make myself out as a target for some spiritual repair.
when I’m 16, I get to know an older girl in school who is the only person I know who proclaims herself an Atheist, and I get comfortable thinking of myself in those terms. I’m getting angry now, like a good teenager, and I’m especially angry at all the phony/stupid/lying Christians and their bullshit.
one more step: my first year of college, I attend a ‘liberal’ Christian college in Nashville, my hometown, as a piano student. I only go there because I’ve been studying with the piano professor there for years, and it seems natural to get a degree with him. It is a disaster – I get extremely depressed over the next year. I’ve always loved science, and I realize I’m surrounded by a campus of anti-science creationist Christians. I have to go to ‘chapel’ each morning, and hear a sermon. I get more and more depressed, more and more unhappy, until at the end of the second semester I decide never to go back, and I apply to the state University in Knoxville to be a Physics major. I want to study astronomy, stars, the ancient mysteries of the universe!
so, finally I become a science student. I wind up getting a PhD in psychology, and now I’m a postdoc studying visual perception and psychophysics. it has all worked out, but it took me 18 years to break out of the trap…
As a kid attended a couple of Lutheran Churches of German heritage (parents switched from LCMS to WELS because LCMS was in danger of not being properly intolerant of reason), but realized at a high school that was teaching me to prepare for the ministry that this was not the right direction. Eventually switched to ELCA and then realized that I didn’t believe anything any more.
I’d particularly like to thank Young Earth Creationists for getting me to start on the road to reason by showing me how silly dogma could be.
Yeah, the I’ve seen the entire video series up to this point. It’s a great series. Highly recommended.
The kind of Catholic I know and was doesn’t expect anyone except the occasional saint to ever “feel the holy spirit”.
Funny thing is, I viewed much of the Bible as mythology from the very start, and the rest except I suppose the Gospels as heavily mythologized history, but that didn’t make me stop believing. I think this is common in Europe.
It’s common among the mainstream protestants and for many RCC. Often, if you have the black-and-white fundamentalists screaming at you that you are not a believer if you don’t believe everything they say, it can become easier to throw the whole thing away once you break away from the control because they are clearly opposed to reality.
Very interesting video. I especially appreciated the fact that his previous faith was a reasonable, moderate one. Most theists are somewhere in the middle, and often convince themselves that atheists are really just rebelling against extreme versions of religion. Their own, reasonable faith, is immune. This young man started out with the recognition that morality was human based (but God inspired), and that petitionary prayer was selfish. He wasn’t a fundamentalist. He was presumably practicing an atheist-proof belief system.
The most impressive thing — and what probably really tipped the scale — was his analytical process. The real ‘beginning of the end’ wasn’t learning about the origins of the Bible, or taking in Occam’s razor: it was the person of faith valuing the idea of discovering the truth, more than he valued basking in the joy of being the kind of person, who “had faith.”
That’s where most theists I know, hold back. Many of them will gladly and freely admit that atheism makes more sense. But this is about the heart. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point. When you want to believe in God, you show yourself to have more depth, sensitivity, inspiration, and wisdom than people who are just analytical. Treat the question over God’s existence, the way you would treat the existence of your mother’s love (when you’re not being analytical, bad analogies aren’t really bad; they’re deep.)
I grew up without conventional religion, but did imbibe a vague Higher Power idea from parents and culture, along with some New Age beliefs. I became a Transcendentalist. Eventually I figured out that the stuff that wasn’t vague, was wrong — and the stuff that wasn’t actually wrong, was terribly vague. Being vague and considering it transcendent stopped working when I realized that sort of thing has no explanatory power — and without that, I was left with nothing but wanting to be the kind of person who was spiritual. In trying to be selfless, I was focusing on self.
I also recommend this series. I’ve been fascinated by it for months and look forward to more. He says he has about 7 more to go.
Wow, these videos have great content. The author does a fantastic job of supplementing the voice content with the video content.
I grew up in a generally benign splinter group off of the Mormon church. When people asked what church I went to and I said “The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints” instead of “Catholic”, the usual response was baffled laughter. That made it a lot easier for me to question.
Whoever wrote that hadn’t seen the Everlasting Thread :-)
<lightbulb above head>
This is very well done. I grew up with television as the primary media outlet. And now I get it (the revolution will not be televised).
No matter how insightful or thought provoking- video as revolutionary as this would never have been put on television.
“The revolution will not be televised.
It will be webcast.”
Very well put together. My experience was pretty similar, except that I didn’t have an atheist professor or mentor to point out things to think about. I did have many Christian authorities to whom I could turn, who were always more than happy to try to answer my questions (and attempt to guide me to a Christian conclusion) but it was their failure to have answers to important questions that was decisive for me. Many things, in fact, that they didn’t seem to have really thought about very much.
I was raised in very much a Christian tradition (albeit the previously mentioned on this thread Church of Tea & Cake or Death), and pretty heavily invested in it by my early teens. I think I’d pretty much reasoned myself out of the whole thing by about age 15, though.
I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness and was sprung from the religion (and subsequently shunned by my whole community) at the age of 31 by a friend who startled me into rational thought rather abruptly with one question: “Is there anything you could find out about The Truth that would make you believe it’s not The Truth?” The Truth, of course, was what we called our belief system as JW’s, because no other religion or group could possibly have The Truth but us.
What followed was a lot of painful deprogramming, existential angst, depression and lots and lots of reading (I’ve lurked here for quite some time) as I kept asking that question about everything I held in my mind to be true. Eventually that meant giving up God, letting go of my beliefs in alternative medicine and facing my own mortality. No easy task.
It’s taken me the better part of four years to have reached a place of contentment with atheism and skepticism. I still have rough moments though where it would be easier to be re-inserted into “The Matrix” but I’m managing pretty well overall. Rational thought has helped me come to an acceptance of reality in a way I never had as a JW. It has helped free me in so many ways.
If you’re interested you can read about my light-bulb moment at:
http://www.tallpenguin.com/2009/09/how-book-changed-my-life.html
I’d be happy to hear your comments.
In grade school, while the other kids were out playing ball, we were in the school library, reading everything we could on Greek mythology.
We reasoned that if God was real, then it stood to reason that Zeus could be real too. So we were surprised to find universal agreement among adults, that Zeus was only a myth.
It didn’t make sense. How could the adults be so certain that Zeus was myth and that God was real, when, as far as we could see, there was very little difference between them?
We reasoned then, that given the nonexistence of fairies, unicorns, and ghosts, it was highly probable that Zeus was, in fact, a myth — and as Zeus and God were essentially two-of-a-kind, it followed that God probably was a myth as well.
Thus began our first doubts about religion. It took several decades for those doubts to blossom into full-blown atheism, but blossom they did.
I don’t really consider myself to be an Atheist. Even though I don’t believe in a Deity. When peopl tell me that this is contradictory I ask them the following question: “If I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny do I get a special title? How about Santa Claus?”
I don’t really feel a need to do anything about my un-belief in God any more than I feel a need to do anything about the other two.(Like attend convention or speak about how great it is to not believe in God)
It isn’t like I weighed to equal alternatives and found one to be wanting. I have simply never seen anything in this life or in this world that would make me believe in a supernatural entity. When you boil it all down it comes to lies, bullshit, hearsay and fuzzy photos in the woods.
Lumpy,
I tend to say: “I am atheist” rather than “I am an atheist” for the reasons you brought up.
Does anyone have a link to this guy’s other videos?
I’d have to say I had a reasonably intense indoctrination as a child. I went to a Catholic school staffed by some serious hard-ass nuns and Jesuit priests. I went through the whole drill. It just didn’t take. What got me out at a very early age, about ten as I recall, was the sheer boredom of ritual. That and the demand that I not apply the excellent grounding I had in logic (the Jesuits are very big on that) to church dogma. I can’t say there was much of an internal struggle. It just seemed that one day I’d be told some bit of catachysmic dogma and I was thinking “now pull the other one”. Just thinking mind. They still had corporal punishment then.
I was one of those that was very devout. (It’s vaguely weird that many of my similarly devout friends are now ex-Mormon like me, while many of the kids at church who didn’t study as hard as we did, are still members. This doesn’t hold 100 percent true, mind you, but the case is still pretty strong for us DevoutNerds studying our way out of the church. My semi-rebellious uncle on the other hand? You never saw somebody as devoted to the church as he is now. I swear, he was guilted back to church.)
One of the things that still throws me is how much of this crap is still embedded in my head. If I stop and rationally think about it, I can figure it out and excise it, but I have so many gut/reflex reactions to years of churchy indoctrination. The big Christian myths are among the last to flee, it seems, as I catch myself following history back and accepting the tribe’s mythos about itself. Or I find myself still taking little maxims from seminary teachers to heart. Frex, we had a seminary teacher who was very big on chiasmus in the Book of Mormon. He kept pointing out that chiasmus wasn’t identified as a Hebrew poetic form until after Joe’s death, so there’s no way Joe could have known to put chiasmus in. Nevermind that Joe could have been mimicking the language patterns of the Bible unconciously, since it was the canon his fanfic sprang from, a point I wish I had thought of at the time. The teacher kept repeating over and over again that no matter how cool the physical evidence was, we couldn’t build our testimony on it, but we had to build our testimony on faith. Well, when I got to be older, and figured out the loopholes in the chiasmus thing by myself, the stupid corrollary about not building testimony from physical evidences stuck with me. Never mind that it didn’t make sense ESPECIALLY after the physical evidences fell apart. My brain got stuck on that one thing. Years of indoctrination kicked in. It took me forever to realise that I could just as easily abandon the argument from faith as I could the physical evidence argument.
This is the reason I wanted out before I had kids–I still feel mentally handicapped in many ways. Despite having reasoned myself out of the labyrinth, I’ve got remnants of belief trying to strangle my reason. Almost all of the time, reason still wins, but those beliefs shouldn’t even be there.
Anyone annoyed as I was from the unnecessary backgound music?
Posted by: Hu Flung Pu Author Profile Page | February 8, 2010 3:01 PM
Does anyone have a link to this guy’s other videos?
There you go:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Evid3nc3
pixelfish: “I still feel mentally handicapped in many ways. Despite having reasoned myself out of the labyrinth, I’ve got remnants of belief trying to strangle my reason. Almost all of the time, reason still wins, but those beliefs shouldn’t even be there.”
pixelfish, I can very much relate to this. It’s tiring, isn’t it? I still find that I have to be on constant guard to question the information I take in each day. I’m still in the process of developing critical thinking skills and find that the old emotional, indoctrinated self still lurks in the shadows. It’s a constant battle but I do believe it’s getting easier with time.
(My apologies for not knowing how to use HTML tags. Oh, and I feel completely nauseous posting here. I’m afraid I’ll be censored or booted out of the discussion for my POV. That’s one Jehovah’s WItness leftover I’m not sure will ever leave me.)
@Sastra #19
Actually, if I recall correctly, he did start out believing in God-based morality and intercessory prayer. Those views were moderated over time (as can be seen by watching the whole series of videos).
Thanks for the link!
The disgusting attacks on science by the fundamentalist Christians prompted me to look into what was going on with religion and politics in the US. I found out what was going on and that I was as deluded as they were. I gave up the last frayed remnants of childhood catholic indoctrination at age 44, and, am now using spare time to learn all I can about skepticism.
It’s great to see Evid3nc3 featured here. For such a talented youtuber, he is tragically undersubscribed.
I also moved away from Religion over a period of many years. But it was people in the church (narrow minded, grasping, power hungry, image conscious) that drove me away from the church and my mind that finally concluded that whether or not God existed was an entirely pointless debate. And finally, probably is no God.
If you use logic, assume (against Occums Razor) that an intelligent being created the universe. Such a being would not in any way resemble what any religion I am aware of describes. Such a being would be beyond our limited ability to comprehend. Such a being would NOT CARE if we believe in him.
So why believe? It doesn’t matter if I believe or not, so why not believe. If it helps someone, great. Believe in Dragons if you want. Just don’t try to make me believe in them. And don’t tell the rest of society how they should act or think.
An important point, and a painful one for many people. Start to favor truth over faith, you’re peeling the onion. Gotta be a core after all these tears, right?
Because what use is faith if, deep down, it isn’t true? How many people have dug right through core of their beliefs, thinking that, if they just went far enough down, they could find something real to anchor onto, things would make sense again.
So further and further down they dig, until the only way any of it makes sense, is if the one thing they were trying to prove true, is false.
Legion #28 wrote:
Hey, I did the same thing, became obsessed with the Greek myths when I was in fifth grade, and loved that section of the school library, checking the same books out over and over. But, my own reasoning was that, these gods weren’t being worshiped or believed in any more — and that meant I could have them all to myself!! They would be so grateful to me! So I drew pictures and constructed a little worship temple and mooned over them like movie stars, imagining in my head their appreciation for somebody, after all this time, paying them some attention. I looked around for signs that they were watching me, and found them.
At this date, I don’t remember how much of this was serious, and how much of it play-acting fantasy. I probably couldn’t have told you at the time. I was what, nine? If this had been a group effort, especially one involving adults, I think I could have really talked myself into being a true-believing pagan, suckled in a creed outworn.
Faith is in the wanting to believe.
The whole series is well worth the time.
-D
I am very glad that I grew up in (and am still living in, awaiting college) a house where religion plays almost no role. I have been to church about the same number of times as I have years in my life, as we make our annual Christmas Eve trip to church more I suppose out of tradition than anything. I always considered it foolish to waste Sundays inside when I could be out playing, but it was only recently when I started realizing that there simply was no god. The best mark I think of the secularity of my family is that my younger brother actually argued with a kid about the existence of Jesus. . .He’s so skeptical of religion that he didn’t realize the difference between Jesus in history and in the Bible (which is a fuzzy subject in schools.) Hopefully this is a good sign for the future.
@ tall penguin and pixelfish and anyone else who wishes the remnants of their dogmatic upbringing weren’t making it harder to remain vigilant and skeptical about new/current claims…
i was never raised with religion and even my secular school was not very religious, so i was amazed and amused when i got to college and met people that actually believed religious claims literally, rejected reason itself, etc. BUT: know that even if you’re an atheist from the beginning, there remain all kinds of things that you only kinda know but are basically taking on the authority of other people. given the ridiculous amount of accumulated human knowledge, this is totally inevitable, i.e. you can not personally verify even a small fraction of the claims, say about science, that you need to accept in order to understand the world and/or make any kind of contribution yourself. then throw in the mainstream media, whose information is carefully filtered to further the interests of its owners and major patrons (advertisers) and you get into a very tricky situation where you have to have a degree of (justifiable) faith in some people/sources but also a healthy degree of skepticism with respect to many (non-religious) sources of information…this is hard for everyone, not just people shackled by youthful religious indoctrination. so, keep up the good fight, we’re all fighting alongside you too. or at least, a lot of us are…
As I entered college I think I wanted to be religious. I lost my mother and a number of friends growing up and wanted the reassurance of a next life. Catholocism brought memories of Midnight Mass at Xmas and saying prayers for my Grandma Grace. But I never was able to get straight answers about what Catholics actually believed while I was growing up. In college I studied biology and had to take a religion class for my general requirements (Presbyterian school). I drifted from disaffected Catholic to a kind of universalism to respectful agnostic to full blown nonbeliever. These days I call myself an ignostic, which posits that a person’s belief in a deity and afterlife is of no consequence and unworthy of discussion. (Interestingly, one’s choice of a church – a social organization – is highly significant.)
If the vast majority of people did believe in the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus, then yes, you would get a special title. Some people like to say that if there were no concept of god, there would be no atheists. I disagree. We would all be atheists, we just wouldn’t have a word for it.
I remember the day I finally figured out that OTHER people were serious and really meant it when they claimed to believe their religions. I don’t think I ever really believed – not that strongly anyway. But I was surprised to find out that other people DID. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t brought up in a religious household – I was. My parents were Bahaiis (I never was – one thing about the Bahaii faith that I think Richard Dawkins would like is the fact that it’s against their rules to call a child under 15 years old a Bahaii. It’s not until you make an official public declaration of your belief in front of the congregation that you are officially a Bahaii, and that’s not allowed until you are at least 15 years old. This is the reason why most of the time when they put out fliers for events they would be phrased with something like “Bahaiis and family of Bahaiis are welcome to attend” at the bottom – so as to avoid calling the children in attendance members of the religion. As a result, unlike ex-Christian atheists or ex-Muslim atheists, I don’t have to call myself an “ex-Bahaii atheist” because, officially speaking, I never was one in the first place – by their own rules I would have had to declare it officially after I was an adult in order for it to count.)
Anyway, we got taught a lot about other religions (due to the way Bahaii’s think they all came from the same god), as well as a lot about our “own”, and not once did I ever think anyone was being serious about all this.
To make an analogy, its like when you hear tall tales about Paul Bunyan, or when you read “Lord of the Rings”, or read about King Arthur or any other work of fantasy fiction that presents itself like it was telling a history. There’s an unspoken undercurrent in those stories that the audience is expected to understand that they’re fake and purely for entertainment purposes. That even when they are fables like the Brothers’ Grimm’s tales that tell a moral story, that even if the moral lesson has some truth to it that the story itself does not. It’s fiction, and it’s intended as such. If the audience came away thinking it really did happen, the author would probably NOT consider that a success, since that was not the author’s intent.
And yet, despite all this, at no point do you have to be told explicitly that it’s fiction. It’s just obvious for some hard to pin down reason. Even when people form sentences that superficially sound like they’re talking about real events, such as “This is like that one time that Robin Hood split the arrow in two in the archery contest.”, it’s understood by shared context that this is referencing a fake event – a tale of fiction – without having to explicitly say so.
Well, as a child, I thought religion was the same way. It was a LONG time before I caught on to the idea that people really MEANT it when they claimed the world was made by a god, and they really MEANT it when they said Heaven and Hell exist, and so on. I was happily playing along with all the fun storytime fiction tales I thought people were talking about in sunday school until I realized I was the only one in the room who saw them as fiction, including the adults.
I even remember when it happened too. I was in 6th grade. (That would be about 11 years old, for you across the pond in the UK.) I finally realized my teacher in school really meant it when she talked about Jesus. I don’t even remember what it was that was said that made it become obvious. It was after reading some story in English class (I don’t even remember now what he story was). I think I must have said something like “This was a fun fictional tale like that one about Jesus coming back from the dead.” And the ensuing anger that came forth out of other classmates and out of the teacher was a complete shock to me.
That was when it finally dawned on me that other people really really MEANT it. To them it wasn’t just fiction.
And I fell into a deep depression as I realized how hopeless it would ever be to live in a world surrounded by such people. Especially since they were clearly the ones in charge. (This incident involved sitting me down and giving me some bullshit lecture about tolerance and sensitivity and not mocking the beliefs of others, to which my reaction was along the lines of, “Why are you trying to tell me that telling the truth is wrong and lying is a virtue? When did that rule change?”)
This is why I get a bit pissed off at people who try to claim that religion isn’t intended to be literally believed and that therefore both atheists and fundamentalists are equally wrong. No, I used to believe religious people didn’t literally believe their stories. I found out I was dead wrong about that. The idea that they view their stories as mere metaphorical fables is utter bullshit. I remember the day I found that out the hard way.
Hi, tall penguin, and welcome! It’s quite hard to get thrown out of Pharyngula, as you may have noticed while lurking, and although it’s a “rough bar”, in terms of the language used, anyone who’s genuinely interested in rational, evidence-based argument will get on OK. We’ve had at least one JW around recently, but no ex-JWs I can think of, so you’ll be particularly useful if any more of the former appear!
Just for comparison, my upbringing was British lukewarm-Christian. It was probably sheer boredom with Sunday School that started me on the road to atheism, but being sent to a “School for the Sons of Missionaries” at 11 (no, my parents weren’t missionaries, but it was erroneously supposed to be a “good school”) supplied the final impetus. At 12 I realised I didn’t believe any of it. I persuaded my parents to let me switch to a secular state school at 15. My brothers and I had helped my mother deconvert fully, and pretty much my father, by the time we reached adulthood.
My exposure to religion was at a very young age and to be perfectly honest I remember little of it. What I do remember was attending sunday school. This went on until I was 7 or 8 years old after which my mom asked me if I wished to attend anymore. I said no.
There was no religion foisted upon me after that. As I came to understand later in life was there was sort of an agreement between my parents. My Mom, though raised protestant wasnt particularly religious, my Dad raised catholic (I presume) was more so. They agreed between themselves that I would decide for myself. Hence the decision at an age I notice cooresponds nicely with the age I was at when they divorced.
I probably vacillated for a number of years on the subject, if only because it never came up, I never thought about it. I know that it was later in life when religion became a subject of discussion that I recall claiming to be agnostic about the subject, though again, later I realised that was just a cop-out on my part to avoid claiming I didnt believe at all, which was the real case.
I have very few strongly religious friends, easily counted on one hand. While I have, through no purposful intent on my part, surrounded myself in the large part with non-believing friends.
‘BeyondBelief’ here.
PZ, and others, who were fortunate enough to NOT have to go through this kind of deconversion would be well advised to pay attention to the lessons presented, as they offer clues to where the “deconversion meme” might be found.
I went through an almost identical sequence in my conversion from a Catholic Seminarian on the way to priesthood, to a solid non-believing citizen. The descriptions of physical illness and nausea at the final “ah-ha” moment brought back strong memories. The “Professor’s” approach may also be noted as valuable. He planted additional seeds of doubt in a questioning mind. He did not belittle or mock. If you actually want to help others deconvert, honest, principled and reasoned answers may be the best bet.
Finally, re: Ken Ham’s aversion to reason… it is clear that “they” know that it is possible to think your way out of faith, and so the memetic evolutionary battle continues on THEIR side as well: How can we put in circular thoughts that will kick in early enough to get those people considering reason to drop it before it becomes a problem. There are SO many loop memes in the successful religions that tell the believer that salvation only comes in abandoning reason.
Getting the believer to allow him/herself to take a side step around those memes and consider things he/she has been told are out of bounds all his/her life, is THE key breaking point. How can we get believers to step into the “forbidden zone” rather than sticking their fingers in their ears and loudly singing “la La La LA Jesus loves me this I know… la la la la”
Sastra@43,
Your anecdote reminds me of the short story Sredni Vashtar, by Saki (H.H.Munro), which I must have read 40 years or more ago. I didn’t recall much, except that an isolated young boy invents his own religion, worshipping a caged ferret he is secretly keeping in a garden shed. However, such is the wonder of the intarwebs, here it is. His faith turns out to be fully justified.
Also, a friend and I used to play a competitive game of our own invention, too involved to describe, which involved a great deal of both luck and frustration. As part of the game, we would adopt deities (Allah, Buddha, Zeus, Shiva, Loki etc.), to whom we would “pray”, and whom we would fire and replace if they didn’t come up with the goods. If only real theists had as much sense.
I was raised in a fairly relaxed form of Cumberland Presbyterian. I think my parents were cultural xtains, but they encouraged my budding fundamentalism. I was your basic Texas fundie, with two differences. I was willing to talk to people who were different from me and I liked science.
I made my first atheist friend my sophomore year of high school, lets call him “Jo.” We spent hours debating. Me for god, him against. Oddly, it solidified into a very good friendship. He might have taught me to think, except that I got into an emotionally abusive relationship with another fundie. I fell deeper into the xtian cult for about 3 years. I lost touch with Jo.
Then I left my hometown to go to uni. I got back in touch with Jo during my second semester. I had begun to realize that my fundie boyfriend was not treating me well. Jo and I spent many hours online talking. He was able to show me that my relationship was not healthy. He gave me the strength and courage to break up with fundie.
We lost touch again. At some point during my sophomore year I became aware of The God Delusion. I bought it on the sly and read it. It coupled with Jo’s explanations during our debates clicked with me and made a light bulb go off.
“There is no God.” I remember feeling completely floored. My next feeling was one of relief. I am responsible only to myself.
Despite being raised in a household with a father who considered being a Methodist minister and a lapsed Roman Catholic mother, I don’t recall ever truly believing (I don’t recall ever truly believing in Santa Claus either!).
Though I didn’t name myself ‘atheist’ until high school, there was one stand out memory of Church that confirms my lack of belief from a very early age. I was about 8. The minister tried to equate faith in god with faith that the light would turn on when you flicked the switch. He said that you didn’t trace the wires to make sure they were connected; you didn’t ring the electricity company to make sure the electricity was working; you just had faith that the light would come on.
I clearly remember thinking, well, yeah, but sometimes it doesn’t come on. There might be a black out, or the light bulb is blown. I only have ‘faith’ that the light will come on from experience that most of the time it does. I have no experience of god, so why should I have faith in him?
What still astounds me is that, if as an eight year old, I could make that simple connection, why didn’t all the adults in the congregation get it? I still don’t understand the cognitive dissonance required to hold a belief as whacky as religion.
I very much recommend watching the whole series, it’s such a great presentation.
Like some others have mentioned, I, too, was fascinated by mythical traditions outside my own upbringing: Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, Mayan, etc. It’s interesting to me, though, that it took me so long to get to the point of “Group A used to believe in this set of deities that are now regarded as non-existent, whatever makes me think the deity I believe in actually exists.”
Sastra said something that resonated with me: “Faith is in the wanting to believe.” I think for a long time, I very much wanted to believe.
Still learning,
Robert
I know this is off topic, but does anyone know how to get my name back to Dentroman? I’m using my Google account…
D
This is quite possibly one of the dumbest things I’ve ever heard. Having faith in god is just like having faith in the light switch providing you never, ever check to see if the light came on.
Really it’s just more of the “faith in your senses = faith in god” bullshit. Conditional acceptance of that which we can observe is not the same as unconditional acceptance of that which we can’t, despite using the same word to describe them both.
TSG – exactly.
Sadly, I remember him repeating the story the following year. It was about that time that I actively rebelled against going to Church, much to my father’s distress.
I feel so lucky that I was not brought up in an organized religion.
The woo, on the other hand, has been very hard for me to give up. My lapsed catholic grandmother is now a wiccan priestess with her own church. I believed in auras, past lives, psychic healing, and I was not vaccinated after the age of 8.
Even just a couple years ago, when I considered myself an atheist, I clung to my tarot cards and crystals as they filled a psychological need. My family has gotten better, and my sister is now at the very least an atheist-but, my mom stopped going to the chiropractor, and I was able to convince my dad that his alkaline water wasn’t going to do a damn thing except hydrate him.
I have no recollections of ever seriously believing, perhaps because my parents were split, with one very much a believer (possibly with creationist leanings) and the other very probably a non-believer (albeit of the quiet variety). In any case, any doubts / residual belief I may have had were destroyed by a (failed) attempt to read the entire babble, a series of blatantly stupid books like The Late, Great Planet Earth, and most importantly and influentially of all, Asimov’s Guide to the Bible.
re God as a light switch…
The light comes on even if I don’t believe in the light switch. Even if I bump the switch unintentionally and unknowingly.
A light switch is a mechanism for my achieving something – a safe and easy way of completing an electrical circuit. What does the God mechanism allow me to achieve (and how)?
That was a fascinating video, and his series is a really good deconstruction of religious belief. Lucky for me my deconversion was more like PZ’s – I was raised catholic-lite, and when I went off to catholic high school they taught me what the church actually believed. It was pretty much 4 years of “I’m supposed to believe that?!” moments. I left catholicism soon after, stayed christian for all of a month or so, and waffled around agnosticism and deism before settling on atheism.
I once said “religion seemed a lot less believable without the binds of catholic dogma holding me in” and I stand true to that. Once I left organized religion, I felt more free to question central tenets of the entire religion and faith itself. I did away with them before long.
It’s funny. This reminds me of a church sign that I pass on my way to and from work. It’s always got these vapid platitudes on it trying to convince people to believe in god. I get much joy out of debunking them in my car as I pass. Lately, whoever decides what goes on the sign has gotten into repeats, and all I can think of is some (possibly aging) minister thumbing through his box of dogeared index cards with dividers labeled “Easter”, “Christmas”, “Thanksgiving”, “Generic”, etc., finding one that strikes him as witty, deep and inspirational and not realizing he’s already used it twice in the past year.
Just for shits and giggles, I may start keeping records of what the sign says and for how long.
This is a bit like a ‘coming out’ party.
Although I went to a Baptist primary school (the only one in the village), I remember my Mum saying to me to not take too much notice of bible class. I always got the impression it was some sort of story time, and I can remember feeling a bit confused when I heard other parents talking to their children in serious tones about it. My parents attitude always seemed to be ‘well, there might be a higher power, but organised religion is just an excuse to rob the poor’.
Later, when I had a crush on a school mate, I went with him a couple of times to church. Even at 12, I couldn’t take it seriously, and I think my mocking of it lead to the end of our friendship.
As I learned more about history, and the shameful part that the church had in it, I found myself unable to even go into churches, identifying them with an evil regime. My Grandparents lived in Wells, and I remember learning of the conditions that the people of the area lived in, the shocking number of fatalities during the building of it, the obscene wealth of the Bishop of Bath and Wells, compared to the grinding povery that most of the citizenry lived in. To me, it was a monument to the evil of the church.
My views have changed a little. Much as I still despise the church and its history, I can now visit cathedrals and marvel at the skill and technology that was used in the making of them.
tsg #59 wrote:
No; it’s like flicking the switch, the light doesn’t come on, but that makes no difference. You have faith that the light is on, even though you can’t see it. It’s not just “light” as we normally think of the light from bulbs, and it doesn’t “light up” the way we normally think of what happens when you flick a light switch on. When a face lights up with happiness, or your mind lights up with excitement, or a new idea suddenly illuminates something you did not understand before — was there an actual light? No. There are many ways for light to exist. There are many things we don’t understand. How the light can be on, even when we appear to be in the dark, is one of them. Light, is like hope. Trust, and you will see — and the dark will be light. Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah.
Otherwise, expecting the light to come on when you flip the switch is just pragmatic reliance, open to disconfirmation. Faith is something you try not to lose, not something you’re supposed to change. It’s knowing how to spin a result into being just what you should have expected.
I was raised fairly moderate by comparison to fundementalists, but nevertheless, was very devout and completely indoctrinated as a child into Church of England. Both my parents and grandparents were very involved in the church community and would partake in religious holidays and re-enactments of The Passion, taking my baby self along with them. I was Christened when I was only a few months old and so was my brother.
I never had any reason to doubt religion growing up. No one I knew was a young earth creationists, everyone accepted evolution as a natural process that had been intiated by God. There were relatively few contractions, the bible was not taken literally but was seen as God’s word interpreted by man at that particular time period. In addition to this, the community we were surrounded by and in which my large family were a part was very welcoming, loving and supportive. We were taught to accept people for what they were and be the best we could be ourselves.
It was only as an adult in my mid 20’s that I started to question my religion seriously. I had obtained my unergraduate degree in biology and focused on developmental vertebrate biology in partciluar, doing my thesis on the difference between urodele and anuran (both amphibians, newts and frogs essentailly) limb development and whether this might have evolutionary implications (the digits form in a different order). I started my masters in electron microscopy and it struck me how complex these microscopic structures really are. I started to read widely and found myself questioning my faith. I wanted to believe so badly. I was at peace when I prayed (several times a day) and felt centered and balanced at those times. My science career, however, was bringing my critical thinking skills into sharp focus.
In order to bolster my faith I started to try and find a church community near my uni. I attended a variety of different churches. They were all welcoming and supportive, but none seemed to fit and some of them horrified me. One particular instance comes to mind of praying in a church for all the non Christians, said in such a derrogatory tone that I was shocked and never returned. The more I looked the more I could see a them and us mentality that appeared to go against what we were actually taught.
My explorations and wider reading led me to an online comminuty where we would debate morality etc. There was one thread that struck a chord. It was called Reason for God. In this thread came up all the usual arguments for and against a god. One particular post stands out in memory. That either Christians should accept all that their holy book instructed them and told them or they accepted none of it, by being in the middle and choosing which aspects to believe we were not only betraying our ability to reason but also our faith.
That caused me to really examine what i think and felt. I recognised that emotions were a very large part of my belief. I wanted to believe. I was afraid of what it would mean if there was no God. So I spent some time analysing those feelings, really looking into the confidence I gained when I prayed, the companionship I felt being a part of the Christian community, the joy that I felt at certain times when worshiping and singing hymns etc. And I came to the realisation that all of that was simply my feelings and emotions. There was no logical basis for feeling any of that, none that originated from an external source such as a deity. It originated within me, stemming from my desires and fears.
That realisation was like a light-bulb going off in my head. It was at that point I knew this was all a fabrication and based on no real facts or evidence. It was predominantly a desire that people held.
It took me a long time of grieving to let go of that desire, the wanting to believe and recognising that i could no longer be part of the community. I stopped my faith, I stopped the impulse to pray everynight (and for many weeks found I could not sleep as a result, it had been my ritual all of my life), I lived with the fear of losing my loved ones forever (and I did in fact lose some people very close to me at the time) and quite simply I dealt with it all using my reason and logic.
I understand some of the difficulty more moderate Christains have with seeing it from another perspective. It was a combination of my education and curiosity that led me to the recognition that my faith was blinding me to relatity. I am a far happier and content person now than I ever was as a Christian. The loss of my faith cost me my marriage, my home, angered almost all of my family (especially my parents who were “disgusted” with me) and led me to move to the USA to follow my career. I do not regret it. The truth is far more important to me than any amount of comforting lie.
Sastra:
This is what struck us most profoundly. If these gods were once thought to be real, but were now known to be myth, why couldn’t the same apply to the god of Abraham? It just seemed obvious to us at a very young age that Yahweh was just another mythological creation. We were dumbstruck that adults couldn’t see the same thing.
Pixelfish:
It’s a bit like David Banner trying to control the Hulk, or Spock trying to keep a lid on his irrational human half, or Smeagol suppressing Gollum’s evil influence.
Self-deprogramming takes a long time. It’s a bitch, but worth it.
Apropos of nothing in particular, cycling into work today, I had a bit of a revelation. No, I didn’t see a squashed dog turd in the shape of Jesus.
My thought was, what if God is dead? Or busy elsewhere? What if he did create the Earth, but didn’t have time to hang round and do the job properly, so he meddled for a bit, smote a few tribes, set fire to the odd bush, left a stand-in (‘just make up some rubbish about me being all-powerful, they are too stupid to question you’), then buggered off. Maybe God exists, but isn’t all powerful. There is a lot of universe to get around, and maybe, a lot of multi-verses. So what we got was a rush job done by a less-than-all-powerful deity, who was in a bit of a bad mood anyway, and then who decided that he had stuffed this planet up, so best he gets on and starts again somewhere else and hopes for better luck next time. A bit like an ego-centric, SimCity playing half-strength God.
sexycelticlady # 68
‘The truth is far more important to me than any amount of comforting lie.’
This is a fascinating statement, and, to me, seems to be at the crux of the matter for a lot of people of faith. They would rather have the comforting lie. Why do you think you came to this understanding? Do you think it was your immersion in science, the need to find proof and to base your conclusions strictly on evidence? Do you think that, had you taken a different path, that you might have ended up at the same place?
I was only slightly exposed to religion as a child – my mother made me go to Sunday School and the occasional church service – but I never remember a time at which I ‘believed’ any of it.
I’m not sure exactly why, though. But it’s so ingrained that I still struggle to understand how anyone can actually believe in gods and so forth. I find the very concept of faith – believing in spite of the complete absence of evidence of any kind – to be truly baffling.
OK, don’t laugh. I attribute my deconversion to Sarah Palin. Yes, Sarah Palin. My discovery of the “truth” behind Christianity and religion in general, happened right after Palin was announced as the Republican VP pick. Before this, I just assumed there was a god and the bible was written by him because that is what I was raised to believe. I hated going to church which is why I haven’t been since I was 17 (I’m 40 now and female). I’ve been busy just getting by and raising a family. I was your typical uneducated, small town girl who didn’t know shit from shinola.
Anyways, after watching her speech at the Republican Convention, I was so enraged by the words being said by this vile woman that it prompted me to start reading everything about her. While reading a blog post about her on Huffington Post, I discovered she was an Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist. I didn’t know what ECM was. I went to Amazon.com and typed it in to see what books there were about it. I got a bunch of books such as “With God On Their Side: How Christian Fundamentalists Trampled Science, Policy, and Democracy in George W. Bush’s White House” and “Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism”. Well these books scared the crap out of me. I had no idea that any of the things they talked about were even going on in our country. There were 20 or more books similarly titled. At the bottom where it says “Customers who bought this item also bought:”, I saw a link to a book by Bart Ehrman called “Misquoting Jesus”. I read the first couple of pages and my heart about exploded. I researched him first by watching every YouTube and Google video I could find. Then I bought his book and read it in one day. I became pissed beyond belief. Today, after reading over 20 books (on atheism, the bible, and evolution), I’m a full-fledged anti-theist. I got over my initial anger but not my fear of our country being taken over by the Christian Right.
bunntcatcher #24,
Revolutionary? revolutionary? I guess that word doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Slick? yes–well done? yes– entertaining? yes –but the content/message/story is the same as a gazillion other deconversion accounts. Hardly revolutionary.
a.debaser #42:
Core question, for me. Mom often said, (and this fitted snugly into my thought patterns) “Believing isn’t what saves you; it’s believing the truth.” Of course, for her, and for me for the better part of 50 years, the “Truth” was the inerrant Word of God, the Protestant Bible.
Finding a crack in the reasoning behind inerrancy was enough to inevitably drive me to atheism. Took a while, though; the brainwashing was early, deep, and thorough.
Prostock69:
Our guess is that eight years of GWB and Sarah Palin were responsible for a bumper crop of fresh new unbelievers.
Must have been all the fertilizer they were spreading.
prostock69 @73:
So what you’re saying is, Sarah Palin actually has had some small positive impact on the world. I never would have thought.
But seriously, I think that’s a great story. Sometimes it takes a spectacular failure like Palin to gain national traction to wake people up to the reality around them. It’s also neat that, because of the Internet and the ease of access to vast swathes of information, you were able to find out about a whole world you didn’t know existed.
You (and anyone else here) might be interested in this blog, called On Leaving Fundamentalist Christianity, written by a former evangelical pastor’s wife who has since became an atheist.
heddle #74 wrote:
I think bunnycatcher was using the word “revolution” in his/her post to refer to the chipping away of religious belief. It is unlikely that something like this would show up on television. Most people are much more familiar with conversion stories in the media. Generally speaking, if a character in a family drama is an atheist, the likelihood is that they’re either going to see the light and change, or they’re the bad guy, the foil against which others are measured.
With the notable exceptions of Dr. House (who is a jerk), and Edward Elric, who is a moody teenager. Ya can’t win ’em all I guess.
Sastra,
Oh c’mon. You mean like Dr. House of House? Or Dr. Becker from the 90’s show Becker? Or Sandra Oh’s character on Gray’s Anatomy? Or Elaine in Seinfield? Or Picard on Star Trek? Or the Dog in Family Guy? Or to go way back, Steve Landesberg’s character in the no-guns police show Barney Miller?
A bit of atheist persecution complex here. In fact going way, way back to All in the Family the atheist was the voice of reason and the Christian was the buffoon.
Oh, FFS. Dietrich. Ignoramus.
prostock69, I appreciate the opportunity to read your story. I hear a hopeful element in there.
If you’re interested in hearing what it’s like to be a fundamentalist, an incomplete but valuable account is Valerie Tarico’s The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth.
As a kid I had not trouble rejecting original sin and virgin birth and noah’s ark and a whole bunch of other stuff as obvious nonsense… but still blithely accepted that there was in some sense a god, and that in some sense the bible was about that god.
And now, as a middle aged man, I have trouble even comprehending HOW I could have rejected so much of it as nonsense yet fail to go that *one step* further and simply say “…so on what basis should I *accept* any of it???”
I also look back in astonishment at my teenage self and all the woo I was prepared to uncritically swallow and credulously regurgitate.
It took me so long to sort it all out.
—
Re #80:
Dr House: an ass.
Dr Becker: an ass.
Dr Yang: an ass.
They may be interesting. They may be geniuses. They may even be principled, after their own fashion, but the standard picture is of an ass, at least in recent times. (I don’t count the dog)
My father was an atheist and a aggressive one by all accounts. My brother and I weren’t raised as atheists, we were raised a-religiously in the sense that religion never came up.
I’m an atheist for all the logical, rational and evidential reasons that sites like this one promote. I’m not sure exactly how I came to this belief, perhaps it was all the science fiction I’ve read, but perhaps not. My brother though, he’s a fundamentalist, born again, young earth creationist, speaking in tongues, pentecostal.
He was going through a very, very rough time in his life and one of these fundies got a hold of him and never let go. I consider myself lucky that I didn’t meet a similar fate when I was in a similar situation.
I have a 2 year old daughter. (The smartest, most beautiful baby in the whole world, of course!) Just like my father I’m not going to raise her as an atheist, but I am going to do everything I can to teach her critical thinking. To do anything less is irresponsible parenting because rational thought is the only defense we have against the dogmatic fucktards who prey upon people in emotional distress.
And evidence suggests he was an agnostic:
Nick @ 70
So we’re just a test piece. I like it. It sounds like we’re the handiwork of [drum roll please] God’s Intern!
I think the technical term is “grownup”. :P
This, like the Nikki thread, has become one of my favorite threads to read.
Joffan # 86
[God’s Intern!]
I am getting visions of the sorcerer’s apprentice.
heddle #80 wrote:
Not quite atheist persecution; I don’t deny that more atheist characters have been depicted recently. But most of the characters you mention are not part of a family drama — and I suspect very few of them give actual, cogent reasons for being an atheist. But shows like Touched By an Angel were meant for the whole family, and characters would often tearfully explain how and why they came to believe in God. Many times, the shows or movies will supply an actual miracle, so that the change of heart makes reasonable sense.
It’s been a while, but, as I recall, Meathead announced he was an atheist — the live audience gasped — and that was pretty much the end of it. He “couldn’t believe.” Do you remember more to it? Their arguments were really political.
What you really don’t see are arguments such as made in the video, presented in general public media — with the possible exception of interviews on PBS and public radio. I don’t know if this is about to change, given the unexpected popularity of the ‘new atheists’ and the rise of the Nones. Somehow I rather doubt it will make it to Movie of the Week, but I could be wrong.
Really? Am I the only one who’s belief died the second I hit a comp religion class? Bible history cures most beliefs in God, really. Even in the Deconversion vids, that turned out to be the case. I just needed a lot less of it.
Science Fiction explicitly plays by different rules because it’s made by people who actually sympathize with us, but they *are* true examples of the Atheist not coming off poorly. However, Brian? He’s not a very forceful atheist, as best we can claim any character has a consistent personality. He hates Peter’s Father and his stark Catholicism, but he doesn’t seem to hate all religion. More to the point, God and Jesus are very real, and have very real abilities, in Family Guy, so he’s also demonstrably wrong…
Either way, Brian’s a self-insert. Sort of ironic that he’s demonstrably wrong, but Seth McFarlane doesn’t seem that self aware. Also, Brian has become an increasingly focused character, obsessing over screwing Lois.
Actually, Michael Stivic was Agnostic, and the probability that he was in the right and Archie was in the wrong declined substantially as the show stayed in broadcast. Towards the end, Michael was the one having marital and life problems while Archie was the old, wise, and rough around the edges correct one in a stable relationship with his loving wife who he just happened to call a dingbat.
Mind, you are correct that atheists are beginning to get better press, but we still appear to get a poor shake overall. This will hopefully change in time.
IIRC, in Australia something like 9% of self-identifying Christians actually attend church. That’s kind of indicative of how important the other 91% consider their religion.
But, considering all you have to do to qualify as a Christian is answer ‘yes’ to the question ‘are you a Christian?’, it’s probably not that much of a surprise. People’s reasons for calling themselves Christians are unlikely to have any basis in rational thought – at least beyond consciously wanting to adhere to the sociocultural practices one was raised in.
Huh.
I have to admit, as soon as I saw a post about deconversion, I found myself thinking, “I bet heddle shows up.”
And sure enough…
But he didn’t post what I thought he might post. Guess I’m not psychic after all.
That having been said, I wondered if Wiki had a list of atheist characters. Sure enough:
http://enwp.org/List_of_fictional_atheists
Actually, no.
I did, too.
I actually expected him to do what he did: post something in relation to a particular reading of a portion of a comment rather than address the substance of the post/video.
Oh, that reminds me. I fear the lesson in these videos for Christians is “An open mind is like a fortress with the gates unbarred and unguarded”…
What would their relationships and happiness have to do with “the probability that he was in the right” or that Archie was “correct”?
Owlmirror wrote:
Wouldn’t his position be that such a thing is not possible, and that an ex-Christian must, by definition, have never been a Christian in the first place?
That would be my understanding, and fits in with the ‘magically turned into a believer by their god’ concept he’s espoused in the past. I’m going to assume this means that if their god magically changes you it couldn’t be undone.
Sastra,
True enough–you are not likely to see a deconversion story such as this one as a story line. On the other hand, you are not likely to see a story line about a conversion to Christianity either.
It seems to me that for most characters no mention is made. Of the shows I’ve watched, um, religiously over the last few years: House, The Wire, Dexter, and the British show MI5 (a guilty pleasure)– I don’t know any of the characters’ religious beliefs of lack thereof–except Dr.House.
I just don’t see any evidence that atheists, on the whole, are portrayed any more negatively than Christians.
@Above links:
Fair enough, I was in error. However, both points on how good of an example they turn out as hold true.
Which was pretty much the point of the comments about “revolutionary” internet videos that you were purportedly responding to.
Oh, please. You have entire shows like Touched by an Angel.
That’s because your concept of “Christian” is what normal people recognize as “fundamentalist fool.” Average Christians are portrayed more positively than both atheists and your fundamentalists.
Here is the dungeon. On its door is nailed the list of bannable offenses. Having or lacking any POV is not among them.
I only read about the weirder things occasionally. I knew about differences in opinions and interpretations through time and between different people, and I never had a problem thinking the entire church, up and down the hierarchy, had got something wrong – so no revelation that some crazy shit was technically Catholic dogma did anything to shatter my own vaguer and vaguer faith.
Basically, when all the gaps a god could hide in had closed, one after the other, it all dissolved into apathetic agnosticism – Sire, je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothèse. That was after confirmation, but not much faith was left before; I participated only to keep my mother from getting angry, as she already got every Sunday when I didn’t want to go to the ever-same boring church…
:-) :-) :-) I’m now, in the abstract, very familiar with this topic. Stay tuned for my next paper, it’ll contain a few paragraphs of literature review and an original conclusion. :-)
It’s very easy: just be naïve and believe what parents, priests, and everyone else tells you.
…But then, I believed in the local equivalent of Santa Claus till I was almost 10. I don’t develop at a coherent speed. :-|
Quite literally.
Behold the Hollywood Atheist.
The redheaded kid on The Partridge Family was an atheist.
Oh, because Archie would use his stable marriage as grounds to (correctly) attack Mike on how weak Mike’s marriage was, when they re-appeared. Gloria didn’t come off much better compared with her mother. The last episode I can recall with them didn’t really wrap things up in a positive (Or negative) way for them.
And that’s putting aside that even before Michael and Gloria went to hell, the number of episodes where in the middle of a conflict, Mike came off as the insensitive one were steadily increasing, while Archie’s dislike for everyone dissimilar to him was played more for laughs. Never quite legitimized, but…
Raised catholic,traditional west-german catholic family line , with the ritual drowning and everything, did the communion thingie, and finally walked out of the firmation coaching whatchamacallit, because it was just all too ridiculous.I remember feeling pain and embarrassment reading bible verses or singing xtian songs in school before that though.
Somehow the whole thing never got a foothold in my brain.
And where is the evidence that Captain Picard is an atheist please ?
If you’re trying to say that Michael’s character came to be portrayed less sympatheically, fine. But don’t confuse the issue by talking about probabilities that someone is “in the right” when the larger discussion is about atheism and belief.
Huh? I thought the point of conversation was the portrayal of people of belief and people with no belief in the media.
Rorschach, since Picard is ultimately a character, there are contradictory Picards out there depending on who wrote and edited which episode. In season two, which dropped a lot of woo on the Star Trek TNG universe, he tells a fake Troi and fake Data about his belief in an afterlife (Troi also gets into Cosmic Consciousness around the same time). But in season three he pretty much makes a laughing stock of religions and that Picard, the one who does not believe in supernatural beings but in science, seems to be the most prominent one for the rest of the series. If not atheist, at least he is soundly an agnostic.
WowbaggerOM #72 wrote:
I find that definition, or description, of faith, to be baffling. I’ve never heard anyone who was religious (spiritual) describe faith that way, as believing in spire of the complete absence of any evidence. On the contrary, there is always evidence.
How good the evidence is, varies. Many times, religious people insist that the evidence is not only good, but excellent — plausible, convincing, and compelling.
The “faith” is needed because there’s just enough reasonable doubt for someone who doesn’t want to accept the truth, to deny it. To fundamentalists, it’s like denying the sun. They think there are people like this out there — or pretend to think it.
Other times, theists will admit that the evidence is skimpy, and requires a lot of faith — the ‘substance of things hoped for, the evidence of what is not seen.’ A reasonable person, will not believe. Beyond reason is the territory of the heart.
In pretty much every case, it seems that whatever amount of uncertainty there is in the belief, the amount of faith necessary to ‘overcome’ doubt is just the right amount needed to increase one’s love for and appreciation of God/Spirit.
The larger conversation is about what I said. The sub-conversation is about positive and negative portrayals. What does language like “in the right” and “correct” have to do with the latter?
#53 – If Sredni Vashtar is to your liking (it’s one of my favorite short stories), permit me to recommend The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. A truly great novel – if you haven’t already read you should do so.
I’ve often stated that I became atheist in church camp. But this oversimplifies what happened. I was raised Methodist, attending Sunday School and so forth, but it was always pretty obvious that everything the teachers said was complete and total bullshit. But it was easier not to think about any of it, because when I did question something I didn’t much care for the response.
So I coasted along, preferring to devote my time to reading (mysteries and science fiction mostly), building electronic gadgets, collecting various things, and so on.
Then my best friend convinced me to go with him to a church camp. A Baptist church camp, no less. And I had to face what all the stuff I had been ignoring. And although I admitted it to absolutely nobody at the time – not even my parents, who I told almost everything else – being forced to stare Christianity in the face like that convinced me more than anything else ever had that it was nothing but wishful thinking.
I do recall thinking at the time that if I were to make up a bunch of lies like that, I would at least come up with something nicer and more consistent.
Four subsequent years of Episcopal high school, with required chapel attendance six days a week, only served to harden my total lack of faith.
Nick @ #71
“This is a fascinating statement, and, to me, seems to be at the crux of the matter for a lot of people of faith. They would rather have the comforting lie. Why do you think you came to this understanding? Do you think it was your immersion in science, the need to find proof and to base your conclusions strictly on evidence? Do you think that, had you taken a different path, that you might have ended up at the same place? ”
Yes, I do think I would have ended up at the same place. I have never been scared of accepting difficult truths.I had simply not been exposed to conflicts in my faith until that point. My deconverstion was relatively rapid. Part of it was the development of critical thinking skills but for the most part it was growing up and wanting to hold to truth as one of my highest values, including truth about myself. There were a few triggered that helped me on the way but I think that I would have come to the same conclusions, regardless.
…
The conversation’s about media portrayals, so if one side is presented as being correct or not, doesn’t that have everything to do with at least the *intention* to portray someone as positive or negative?
It never ceases to amaze me how much angst, and to a certain degree regret, you people who were indocrinated though childhood actually go through. Like a few others here, (and this seems to be the minority strangely) I was brought up with no attempt to brainwash me with religion, although we had religious studies at school, I guess I can blame the total lack of enthusiasm on the teacher, that even at such a young age, very few in the class, at least amongst my own friends, had any kind of spiritual enlightenment.
I still consider myself fortunate that my own parents, or even peers, (lets face it, peer pressure can persuade us to do shit we otherwise wouldn’t) didn’t appear to hold any religious belief, that I knew of, (I only discovered recently that my mother believes in god, and i’m 48).
The first instance I knew I was an atheist was when I could actually read AND understand the meaning of the word, I was always an atheist but didn’t know the correct descriptor.
My own sense of bewilderment at the stories of others deconversion, is only muted by how very painful some of your stories appear to be.
I applaud all of you who’ve had to overcome your upbringing, and pressure, to be who you are today.
What do you mean by “correct”? I think you’re missing my point.
Rutee and SC, I’ve been trying to follow your conversation, but not having seen the show I have a question.
are you guys talking about being “in the right” and “correct” as in: the advice/opinion/viewpoint of the atheist character turns out to be the correct one less often in the later episodes, or is this more generically about discrediting the character in the sense of “look at the mess this dude’s life is! if he can’t get his own life sorted out, why would you trust his advice/opinion?”, but without ever actually showing that the specific advice/opinion given in an episode turned out to be incorrect?
Well, since so many others are “testifying” here is my story.
My Mom was a nebulous Christian (granddaughter of two Methodist ministers who were both sons of bitches) and my Dad was an atheist, though he did not discuss it with us kids. We went to Sunday school for a while, until a mildly psychotic Sunday school teacher started talking in graphic terms about hell and scared my sister half to death (she was 8 or 9 at the time). After that my Mom took us to church (non-denomiational services on an Air Forcer base) when we wanted. I never was taught the Bible was inerrant. Far from it. My Mom hated the story of Abraham being ordered to murder his son and said so a great length.
As a young teenager I tried. I really did. I wanted to believe. I heard the preachers and some of my friends going on and on about the power of the Holy Spirit and I really tried. I prayed and prayed and felt nothing. I sang in the choir and did a lot of Youth Group stuff and the youth pastor was a really great guy who tried to answer my questions and in the end couldn’t. He said, “That is where faith comes in.”
Then when I was about 15 I read Stranger in a Strange Land. Now, we can talk out the rest of this thread about what was wrong with that novel (as well as what is right), but in one passage, Heinlein has a character tell the story of Lot tossing his virgin daughters to the mob. The character says, “That’s not the only surprise in store for anyone who actually reads the Bible.”
So I did.
Well, I could only get through the first three or four chapters of Revelations, and I might have skimmed over some of the begats pretty lightly. I thought about it for a while and decided that it didn’t make any sense. Then about (I think) six months later, I saw a B.C. cartoon. One of the cavemen says, “Do you think part of you will live on after you die?” The other says, “Yes.” and the first one says, “That settles it. There is an afterlife.”
I realized that the whole structure of religion was just as simple as that.
Of course I became much more sophisticated about it later, but after reading the Bible and that cartoon, I realized that, at least, the Christian concept of God was balderdash. I decided that religion was a bunch of wishful thinking and crowd control. What good there was to be found in religion was the work of individual humans doing good work, often facing opposition from their fellow religious.
One of the best ways to shut up a concerned Christian who wants to help save you, is, when they ask, “But how did you lose your faith” to tell them the truth: I read the Bible.
Here’s my take on how the characters on “All in the Family” evolved over the course of the show…
Archie and Mike started out as caricatures: ideological positions with arms and legs. Their arguments generated a lot of the controversy that spurred the show to the top of the ratings heap.
The show was a lot of fun to watch, but somewhat shallow in the beginning. I think that what truly makes the show a classic is that the writers and actors worked to make all the characters three-dimensional as time went on. Archie wasn’t (just) the pompous bigoted prig he seemed at first, and Mike wasn’t the all-knowing light of progressiveness. They became people over the course of the show. And that’s why audiences continued to tune in. All the characters on the show had their flaws, but also hidden strengths that were revealed as time went on.
Besides, even though Mike (and Gloria, I suppose) may have been an atheist, the central ideological battle between Mike and Archie wasn’t “christian vs. atheist”, it was “liberal vs. conservative”.
Smart young man. It is great he is doing this series.
I as a very religious and superstitious child. I would pray every night that I not die that night.
My father was a religious liberal who saw the bible metaphorically and believed that there were many paths to god. So did I. In my teenage years I was very bothered by the my way or the highway attitude of religions and just could not longer believe that was correct. I became a Baha’i. But I still was bothered. Women were no allowed positions of high power. It was rationalized.
I married a Hindu so I was exposed to an entirely new belief system.
My beliefs became more and more abstract. Finally I realized that I had abstracted god right our of existance.
It took me 50 years.
I’ve told the story before about how I dropped religion.
I went to Catholic schools. In 8th Grade religion class, Br. Louis asked “Is abortion moral to save the mother’s life?” My hand shot up and, as a naive 13 year old unfamiliar with Catholic anti-abortion dogma, I answered “Yes.” I then got a screaming rant from Br. Louis, including being told I was “a heretic, damned by God.” I was also severely beaten pour encourager les autres.
At this point I started to seriously consider Catholicism, Christianity, and the whole concept of religion. This process took several years and included reading the Bible cover to cover three times.
I was the valedictorian at my high school. I gave my speech at graduation. After I sat down, the bishop praised me as a credit to the Catholic faith. I said “Thank you but I stopped being a Catholic some time ago. I thank Br. Louis for showing me the way to atheism.” The bishop didn’t say a word.
I’m with CunningLingus (what a handle!), only even moreso.
I was raised in Southern California in the seventies. No church, public schools, irreligious parents. My parents both came from religious upbringings and, my mother especially, vowed to let their children make up their own minds about religion as adults. They were both lapsed (my mother a catholic, my father I’m not sure) and didn’t have nice things to say about their own experiences.
My father was really into science, and science fiction. He got me a telescope one year for christmas, and we spent many evenings outdoors looking up at the stars and planets. He took me to see “2001” when I was about 9 or 10. I never had that weird “fear of reality” instilled in me that so many religious people struggle with. The universe was the way it was, and learning about it was not only good, but exciting.
Not surprisingly, I’m an atheist. It’s the simplest thing in the world when you aren’t indoctrinated as a child. And a large part of my POV of religion-as-irrelevant is the absence of the social aspects that a religious community provides. Never had it, don’t need it, don’t understand those who do.
First time for me posting here, but I have to sign up and comment apparently, so here it is.
This was a very nice video. I will be showing it off to a few of my friends that seem to waver slightly when it comes to religion. I don’t know if it will push anyone one way or another, but it is best to try in my estimate.
I suppose I am in the camp that had a lot of doubts about what was being preached from the sermon on Sundays. Mostly the time spent in a hard church pew could be chalked up to pure boredom, but even if I had been listening most of the comments from the pulpit just didn’t resonate in my ears. My family grew up in a very hit-and-miss tradition of going to church on Sunday and my father never really saw the value in going. My mother would prod us into going but by the time she had a job to help the family she rather looked forward to days off.
By middle school religion just seemed to be this thing that many different societies adopted, and they all couldn’t be right. That feeling pervaded my thoughts for a while until by high school I was out and out telling people I didn’t believe there was a god or gods. That was some 20 years ago now.
The more I learned about Christianity, then other current world religions, and then ancient mythology, the more my own confidence grew in my choice of dis-belief. I don’t see how it could be any other way. As with most non-theists, it hasn’t dulled my desire to want to learn more about religious/mythological thinking OR scientific reasoning. The world we inherit by the sheer luck of being born is so cool that I couldn’t contemplate not wanting to know more about its truths.
Thanks for the link PZ.
What I mean is this: In, let’s say, Left Behind, Christians, specifically Pre-millenial Dispensationalists, are portrayed as correct in every manner. God is real, punishing the unbelievers, and vaguely rewarding the faithful. The work is, in part, meant to reaffirm PMD Christians that yes, their beliefs are the choice of action that leads to the greatest rewards. It isn’t necessary for what I’m referring to, but bonus points if you make everyone who disagrees with you either look like, or be, a complete jackass. I’m referring to artist intent here; Going back to the example of Left Behind, just because Vera, or Smart!Chloe comes off better then the Jackass heroes doesn’t mean it’s what the author’s going for.
Why would painting either Christians or Atheists as characters who are obviously right or especially wrong (With varying degrees thereof, from misguidedness to outright EVIL)in regards to the show or movie not have bearing on a discussion of how maligned atheists also come off in fiction?
I have no earthly idea what SC is talking about, to be perfectly honest. What I’m referring to is close to your example, but rather then not showing them to be incorrect (in real life), they’re shown to be incorrect within the story somehow. I used to have to watch Touched by an Angel, and the unbeliever is A: factually inaccurate within the fictional universe (Because God is very real and has sent tangible help), and B: The sympathetic ones generally come around, and the unsympathetic ones are often being manipulated by the devil.
I can say from experience that at least some people watch this for validation of their beliefs. Or, maybe that’s too simplistic. But I know after an episode my mom would sagely nod and say “This is reality, yes”, as if to affirm that indeed, there are angels helping everyone.
RickR Said:
Honestly, you’re probably correct. I mostly watch old TV so I’m not actually qualified to comment on the ratings wars this stuff was in when it was new. I certainly didn’t watch in Broadcast order.
There’s a very clear artistic intent there. You haven’t provided any reason for anyone to think the people who made AitF had any such intent in mind in portraying the life trajectories of the characters. If your account is correct in the first place. I agree with RickR concerning the pattern and the central division in the show. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but you haven’t provided any support for the notion that the portrayal of anyone’s life difficulties on that show was any sort of statement about the correctness of that character’s religious beliefs.
“I would pray every night that I not die that night” (Martha @ 118)
My father used to make us pray the following litte ditty every night “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep; If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take”. I know he was well meaning in is belief, but what I think to have a child recite every night. Bringing thoughts of mortality into a child’s head at three or four!
Sorry, ‘what a thing to have a child recite…’
I watched this video first, then the others, then this one again. It much much more sense the second time.
This man’s experiences are a lot like my own. I think I’m gonna try to get my parents to watch this.
Emergence and liberation from Catholicism (daily mass at 6 am all my childhood; a life time being told that god wanted me to be a priest, etc) made the escape feel like I was “coming out”. The experience makes me a bit gentler with theists now than I might be otherwise.
It can be incredibly difficult to give up a profound faith – particularly if you believe that in doing so you are going to be punished for eternity. Ironically I spent many hours praying (as a teen in particular) that I would never become an atheist. Funny that!
Like a few others here, I was raised in a deeply fundamental evangelical household from an early age. Luckily I was into science and even encouraged to go into a scientific discipline. (ended up in computer science)
Even early on I saw inconsistencies in the strict literal teachings of the bible. The obvious and clear age of the universe and Earth etc.
Oddly, the books I was given to supposedly firm up my faith tended to do the opposite. All those books were anecdotal, with no references to other papers and works, unlike the scientific papers Ide read from say Science or even the pop science Scientific American. Darwin’s Black Box almost did it, but it too was just anecdotes; nothing in it proved irreducible complexity.
However, I had a complete lock around me on christian social activities, and so I just tucked christianity into one nook, while I explored the world with the rest. This state lasted for quite a while.
Throughout my life inconsistencies and false information just kept piling up and up. Finally, out of high school and out of the 360 degrees of fundamentalism real evaluation could take place. I remember the moment (stewing for years post high school) when the conversion took place. It physically felt much like the necker cube illusion feels. All of a sudden huge swathes of cached thoughts were up for reevaluation. Base assumptions Ide had for 15 or 20 years had to be reevaluated. After all that evaluation, I moved through questioning, to agnostic but deistic to agnostic but atheistic to atheistic to antitheistic pretty quickly.
I am a little angry about (probably) having corrupt thought processes driven into my head at such an early age like a few others have mentioned, but alas, Im here now.
Reading everyone else’s posts, I realise that I spent my very early childhood surrounded by mythologies of all sorts: Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Sumerian, Norse. Despite my father being a member of the clergy [and a biblical archaeologist], I seem to have filed Christian beliefs under “myths and legends” with everything else. I don’t remember ever believing.
Oddly enough, I did believe, wholeheartedly, that my real parents came from Mars and would save me from the hellhole that was Earth when I was 16. Ah, well.
My father being a pastor (of the Mission Convenant Church of Sweden, an offshoot of Lutheranism), I was naturally brought up a Christian, albeit a pretty liberal sort of Christian by American standards. I learnt in my teens that some members of our church were creationists, but to me Genesis was always mythology (altho I would not have used that word – I might have said “allegory”).
I eventually abandoned religion at age 22, after a long period of my beliefs becoming vaguer and vaguer. The driving factors were, near as I can tell in retrospect – I didn’t really think consciously about it a lot – a combination of osmosis from a largely irreligious environment (after I moved out from my parents, I didn’t meet anyone openly religious on a regular basis) and the nagging cognitive dissonance from accepting God on faith while applying (more-or-less) scientific standards of proof in other parts of my life. The Internet helped some, less by the arguments of atheists than by the arrogance and intellectual bankruptness of most online Christian apologists – when your belief is more rooted in identity than reason, Christians setting themselves up as the bad guys is corrosive to it.
That I (unlike my siblings) didn’t let go sooner was in part due to having been bullied in school -leaving Christianity meant recognizing that the bullies had been right on something.
(This being the Internet, there’s a pretty good chance someone will now materialize to attack me for having been bullied. One speculates that, being weak, they feel vicarious strength by identifying with bullies, who, it’s true, do exhibit a strength of a sort.)
I’m fascinated by all the folks here who didn’t have a religious upbringing and yet find the energy to be atheist.
A goodly part of my atheism is a level of anger about the insane abuse that is part and parcel of religion inflicted on children. Me as a child in particular. That contrasts with my Mum who is the classic RC zealot having chosen to convert (against the family’s wishes) when she was 16 – inspired by the nuns who taught her in Kenya. It does happen. Turned her into a sad extremist though.
But what drives those with no religion to get worked up about it? Having had it night and day, for me there is no sitting on the fence. I have to know and it has to be definitive. If there’s a god – then – fine. And if there isn’t then there is one hell of a lot to fucking answer for. It really ruined my life!
I sense some common ground with others who have posted here: a I retain a deep embarrassment that it took me to my early 30’s to realise that I was an atheist. And it took Dawkins to convince me I needed to say so publicly. I have a profound debt to Dawkins for helping me realise that I really was an atheist – and that was just fine!
I should probably write and tell him…
Anyway – I am impressed by those here who are selfless enough to express their non-belief (or whatever it is) publicly, despite the personal drive and reasons that I have.
SC OM,
I never saw Touched by an Angel but two comments from what I read–both may be wrong. The first is that it was a spiritual show, not Christian show–it fact it routinely argued against the fundamental Christian exclusivity position–that the only path to salvation is through Christ. Second, atheists were not portrayed negatively. Condescendingly, perhaps, but not negatively. They were given a tolerant “everyone must find their own path” treatment.
That’s what I recall reading about the show. Maybe it is not accurate.
otrame, #116
I call BS. On this and every argument, from any side of any debate, that fits the template: I said this magic sentence, and my opposition’s jaw dropped open and they silently slithered away in defeat! Never happens. Ever. And in particular your response “I read the bible” would not be a showstopper, it would be viewed as an opening.
So because they weren’t as rigid in their beliefs as you are, they weren’t Christian? Typical.
No one expects Christians to literally shut up and slither away. If they have a reputation for nothing else, it is for being annoyingly, persistently stupid and never shutting up about their ridiculous certainty in the saving power of Jesus. They are blinded by dogma and faith.
Case in point: Heddle.
My story is pretty similar to Andreas Johannson’s, above. I was brought up in a liberal Christian household. During my teen years I went through a very religious phase. Since I grew up in the relatively secular environment of the UK, where most of my peers were non-religious, my faith was strengthened by my natural contrarianism.
However, in my late teens I started really questioning Christianity. By the time I came to Pharyngula, at age 19, I was still a believer but no longer went to church, and entertained grave doubts about the whole thing. The more long-standing regulars here have seen me transition from a moderate Christian to a convinced atheist.
As the regulars are aware, I’m active in student politics, and I’m now fairly well-known as one of the few outspoken secularists in a political association mainly dominated by conservative Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. As an atheist on the political right, I’m always likely to stand out, though British conservatism is much more friendly to non-believers than its American counterpart. But as I said, I’m a natural contrarian. :-)
Killfile can be a friend…
That’s because I don’t think that’s the meta-reason for Mike and Gloria having trouble. They were off screen for what appeared to be a season at a time. Having them have enormous problems in their life is a good, cheap way to insert high drama and a sense of time passing. Taken on its own, absolutely nothing. Taken in addition with the Hollywood Atheist as it is pervasively depicted, however, it can be another contribution to the list.
Sort of like “Joss Whedon did not create the Dead/Evil Lesbian tropes, but he did contribute to them spectacularly”
Can you not “No True Scotsman” for once? I’ll certainly grant that I saw this as a kid, there were no other Gods, no other correct mythologies. Assuming a level of respect for other faiths(Which I have no reason in my recollection to give it, and no reason within precedent like Highway to Heaven and Little House on the Prairie either), by being in factual error and portraying itself in real world fashion, it was commentary on Atheists, and not flattering. Manipulation by Satan is also negative, not condescending.
PZ,
No they weren’t Christian because they weren’t Christian. (Perhaps–I didn’t see the show, but I recall many Christians complaining about the show.) Muslims are as rigid in their beliefs and they aren’t Christian. Duh. Some are amendment that there are many paths to salvation. They are not Christian. Duh.
Do you see the pattern? It has nothing to do with rigidity.
You’re an ass PZ. I came here making reasonable arguments, none of which had anything to do with proselytizing, none of which were theological. I merely pointed out that this deconversion story is ordinary, not revolutionary. And argued that atheists are not portrayed especially negatively on television. Finally I argued that reported incidents of showstopper arguments are largely BS–which they are. You blathered on in your usual style about me being dogmatic–when nothing I wrote was dogmatic nature. Bite me.
Hey Heddle – I wonder who gets to dictate who is and who is not christian? If you say on the authorioty of the bible – then clearly that’s rubbish: all christians claim that one – and they obviously disagree! The only group that has any more to it than that is the RCC (ie authority outside the bible) – and their beliefs are also clearly a load of nonsense.
So – who is the arbitorr? (Apart from you: you made it pretty clear that you are happy to make a definitive judgement).
Cheers,
Jim (ex-christian)
Touched by an Angel was a show built around non-denominational Christian beliefs — not pagan, not muslim, not buddhist — that are common in American culture. It is Christian. The people who wrote it and participated in its production were Christian. They took some misplaced pride in promoting what they thought were good Christian values.
When you declare that because they do not adhere to some point of dogma in your Christian sect, they are therefore not Christian, you are being rigid and dogmatic.
It’s especially amusing because you can’t even see it.
Your arguments have been pedestrian and pointless. I don’t think this is a revolutionary deconversion story, either: I was mentioning in the OP that there are broad classes of deconversion, and that this one doesn’t quite fit mine. Here I just pointed out that I don’t believe in simplistic show-stopper arguments either, and pointed to you as the perfect example of an obsessive Christian who won’t stop babbling no matter what you say to him. My case is made once again.
Oh, wait. I was brought up Lutheran, and you don’t adhere to the precepts of that faith. So maybe I shouldn’t call you a Christian, since Lutherans are, after all, the one true faith. You’re just some weird member of a fringe cult that thinks they’re Christian, and you’ll be burning in hell while all my former co-religionists cluck sorrowfully and sip their weak coffee while planning the church bake sale in heaven.
Jimmy Boy,
Heddle swims up to the tiresome bait–finds it unappealing, and swims away.
Because he is a fat, lazy, sludge-sucking junk fish who realizes that actually answering the question would expose the vacuity of his assertion.
Point of fact, PZ: Exclusivity is church doctrine among most denominations. Amusingly, that means exclusivity against each other as well.
That said, here in the babble belt they fucking loved Touched by an Angel. I had to deal with that bullshit personally, Heddle, so don’t lie and say it wasn’t made to appeal to Christians. “IT ISN’T CHRISTIAN BECAUSE I SAY SO” isn’t a reasonable argument.
PZ wrote:
American Lutherans drink weak coffee? Clearly they’re apostates and frauds!
Don’t talk to me about apostates and frauds. You guys don’t even give out donuts at the end of Mass.
Heddle fails to answer a simple question once more. Ho hum.
heddle #134 wrote:
I only saw Touched by an Angel in short bits and pieces, and read reviews, but I think you’re basically right in that the show advocated a sort of Christianity Lite — all paths are valid, with Christianity being one of the best. Since I know a fair number of Christians who assure me that this is exactly what Jesus implied if you read the Bible without blinders on — and the true heart of Christianity — I’m willing to grant it as a form of Christian belief.
As for the portrayal of atheists, since I never watched the show proper, I can’t say. But I would assume that, given the fact that God clearly exists as part of the premise, those atheists who do not convert are going to be portrayed as perverse.
Sometimes it does — depends on what you mean by “defeat.” No single sentence is going to change anyone completely. Sometimes a question or point can strike someone with surprise and confusion (not just in religion, in any subject in which a person feels confident.)
What I think mostly happens is that most people are not prepared — either intellectually or emotionally — for a real debate or serious discussion, especially one that challenges their religious beliefs. They throw out a softball question to an atheist, expecting a general, vague sort of answer, and then get nervous when the nonbeliever takes the question as a real question, and gives them a serious response, and oh crap this isn’t what they wanted. Not now.
I’ve had people tell me “wow, I hadn’t considered that. Let me think about it and get back to you.” They don’t, but that could be because life got to them, not because I stumped them. Even if I did, people can be stumped by really stupid points. Stumping someone isn’t necessarily an indication that you’re on the side of the angels (so to speak ;)
Agree… you weren’t being dogmatic. Though, if you had been proselytizing, or arguing theology, I don’t see that as a problem either.
Temperance Brennan on Bones and a couple of her colleagues are atheists.
PZ,
Geez Louise. Good comeback. Really, very impressive.
No, because I’ve answered the question “who makes you the judge of who is a True Christian?” about a gazillion times on this blog–and am purposely avoiding theological questions. (See the Owlmirrow comment way above, where he thought I would make the theological argument regarding this deconversion story.) Admittedly in a failed attempt (how naive I was!) to stay below your lidless-eye radar in the childish hope that like say, Ed Brayton, you actually welcome different views as long as they are not proselytizing or godbotting.
Not to mention that I admitted that I never watched the show, and that I admitted I could be wrong, but that I recall a great deal of Christian criticism of its sugary ecumenicism.
PZ Myers #141 wrote:
No, not fair. I don’t think heddle fits the profile of “annoyingly, persistently stupid and never shutting up about their ridiculous certainty in the saving power of Jesus.” He doesn’t come here to convert: when such discussions do take place, they’re almost always initiated by us atheists. We don’t shut up here on Pharyngula.
Calvinism is a frustrating dogma, granted. But from what I can tell heddle always tries to be reasonable within that framework, and does well — given the conditions. ;)
I hear Elmer Fudd subscribes to Asatru
Heddle, if you want to avoid theological complexities and avoid the question of who’s a Christian or not, you can’t go around claiming that anyone is or is not Christian. As soon as you do, the question “how do you know that?” arises- and you hate that.
heddle #150 wrote:
There was also a great deal of Christian praise for the sugary ecumenicism.
Outsiders are always going to have a narrower definition of heresy, because they’re classifying according to objective criteria that tries to set the boundaries to include only what’s critical to the definition of the religion. Asking us to agree that ecumenical, all-paths-are-valid Christians don’t qualify as Christian would be like asking you to determine whether the Shiites or the Sunnis are the Muslims.
We’d both have to ask God by direct route, and there is no such thing (as God, or as the Direct Route.)
BECAUSE THERE ARE A LOT OF DOGMATIC CHRISTIANS WHO INSIST THEIR VIEW OF CHRISTIANITY IS THE ONE TRUE VIEW. That’s why you read a lot of criticism of the show.
Seriously. Sugary ecumenicism or stalwart defender of Calvinism, I don’t care, you all look like a mob of deluded Christian gits to me.
And no, you haven’t answered the question. You have a rather elevated view of yourself if you think I give much of a damn about your comments or your blog, or have been following so carefully that I must be aware of your position on theology. All I see is a bizarre assertion that one sappy version of Christianity is not really Christianity, and a refusal on your part to explain how you know exactly what Christianity is to such a degree that you can claim that a large number of annoying faith-heads aren’t really what they say they are.
Stephen Wells,
I have never avoided the “who is or is not a Christian and on what basis can I make the claim” argument. On this blog I have argued on various occasions that, for example, Fred Phelps is not a Christian. But it is not relevant for this thread. If I had made the claim that the person who made this deconversion tape was never really a True Christian, then you would be right to call me out.
Taz,
Fair enough. But my point was that my impression of the show was that it broad by design–that it was purposely not a Christian show per se but a spiritual, monotheistic show perhaps cast mostly in Christian motifs. Now if the show was a self-proclaimed “Christian Show” of any flavor then I stand corrected.
And again, having never watched the show I welcomed correction if I was wrong. I did not say: “It wasn’t a Christian show even though it claimed to be a Christian show because it doesn’t agree with my view of Christianity.” If I sent that message, it was not intended.
Hey Heddle – “Heddle swims up to the tiresome bait–finds it unappealing, and swims away” (someone show me how to use html tags sometime…)
That’s pretty rude/poor/etc. I’ve no prior history with you – but your comment hit a key point that a while back, caused me to drop my faith. Hence the question. You definitively know who a christian is and who isn’t apparently. I find that ironic to say the least.
If you don’t want to answer because this is old ground: apologies. But you just could say so? And I’m still none the wiser. I want to know on what basis one group of the faithful can dismiss another group, who sincerely, and in good conscience believe themselves to be christians. Why are you right and they are wrong?
Examining that question led me to realise the 30 years effort I devoted to (profound and devout) faith was wasted.
Cheers,
Jim
Putting aside NT quotes and explicit beliefs in Jesus and Satan (Boy that one cracks me up whenever it comes up), if you have never seen it, and weren’t trying to claim that heterodox belief = UnChristian, why did you open you mouth on the subject to begin with, when you admit yourself that you’re ignorant on the subject? Why not, say, ask? You know you know nothing; Work to correct that, rather then argue based on your acknowledged ignorance.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ on a Stick…
Technically, even if your point were granted — Touched by an Angel wasn’t a Christian show, it was a spiritual one — I don’t think that would make any difference to the main argument, which, as I recall, had to do with the popular media being comfortable with showing atheists converting to belief in God, but not the other way around. Explicitly atheist characters are pretty much confined to adult-themed shows or movies, and they usually don’t go into their rationale.
But “how I came to believe in God” is rather standard fare, I think — especially when it’s aimed at “the whole family.” If nothing else, there does seem to be a taboo against presenting children with reasons not to believe in God.
“Who’s a real Christian” is a sidetrack. You can’t coherently argue that the example of Touched by an Angel didn’t involve God. Atheists aren’t that picky about the form.
Jim,
Sure. Given that I never made the claim that I knew who was or was not a Christian–well that’s just a minor inconvenience. Given that even in the case of someone like Phelps (or the big H) I only argued that I choose not to treat him as a Christian regardless of his claim, not that I know he is not a Christian–well don’t let the facts get in the way of your claim that I claim to “know” who is and is not a Christian.
PZ,
Gee now you are using CAPS. Next you’ll be endorsing positions like “Science is Utopian!”
To quote Jon Stewart, “Don’t they know we’re recording this stuff?”
In what universe is “X is not a Christian show” not a claim to know that X is not a Christian show?
Heddle,
Genuinely confused now. If I’ve misunderstood – again – apologies. You said:
“On this blog I have argued on various occasions that, for example, Fred Phelps is not a Christian”
Given that he fairly clearly thinks he is a Christian – I understood that you are making a judgement about who is and isn’t in the club.
And likewise you said:
“No they weren’t Christian because they weren’t Christian”
about folks who claimed to be such – right?
This isn’t a point of accusation though: if you don’t want to judge who is and who is not a christian, then cool. And if it’s old ground and I’m catching up – no worries. If you do want to make the judgement and do want to discuss – even better.
Cheers,
Jim
…
Wow.
jim,
Fair enough–when I make the careful argument, the conclusion I am striving for is “We are instructed by the bible to judge, based on their fruit, who is and is not a Christian, with the caveat that only God knows for sure, but nevertheless we are supposed to judge and to remove from our community those found lacking.”
That is my position re. Phelps. I am guilty of sometimes shortening that to “Phelps is not a Christian.”
Stephen Wells,
In a rational universe, where my point that it was my understanding, with the acknowledgment that I could be wrong, that Touched by an Angel was not, by its own design, a Christian Show as much as a Theistic show–in a rational universe where that is not immediately seized upon as applying a dogmatic litmus test. I realize that on Pharyngula many are engaged in such dogmatic tests, applying pejorative terms like “faitheist” and “accomodationist” and “appeaser” to apostates, but that doesn’t mean that’s everyone’s style. Mea Culpa–I should have recognized the audience.
A nit, perhaps even a cavil: Is this video’s version of Occam’s Razor correct?
The way I’ve most often heard it, OR states that the explanation with fewest assumptions (or “entities”) is more likely to be correct.
It’s an epistemic tool, not a psychological axiom.
According to Evid3nc3, the unnecessary premise is rejected by human mental preference, on emotional or esthetic or similar – undefined – grounds. Is psychological compatibility a reliable guide to factuality?
* waves upper limbs around at random, warbles “it does not compute!”, lurches off erratically *
Heddle, you technically admitted the possibility of fault without ever actually acting like that possibility were the case until you were dogpiled on. Don’t even pretend otherwise. I said from the start “You’re fucking wrong, it is in fact Christian, and presented as such”, and you maintained that it was not.
heddle #165 wrote:
The problem here is with the phrase “based on their fruit.” Their fruit, the outward signs of their belief. Does it refer to doctrine, does it refer to behavior, or does it refer to both and either/or, flipping around as needed and maybe conflating differences in doctrine with bad behavior?
Is a Muslim suicide bomber not a “real Muslim” because no interpretation of Islam comes anywhere close to justifying suicide bombing — or because Islam says not to murder innocents, and suicide bombers murder innocents? That second one can’t slide into the first. The interpretations of Islam which justify suicide bombing happen to come along with the interpretation which says the people killed are not innocent, as a package deal. Same problem with Phelps.
Not a good analogy, because we’re not arguing that the faitheists aren’t real atheists. They’re making mistakes in analysis, epistemology, and tactics in a common area that can be reasoned on.
If God were to say that Phelps was right, and you were wrong, then Phelps is the true Christian, and you are not. Case closed. It’s just that the atheists would be able to argue with God about whether both He and Phelps are right.
I’m not sure what you’d do, given that God Has Declared.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom ,
Leaving aside that I did not do what you claim– that I employed the qualifier I might be wrong from the start, from my very first comment on the matter, not only after people piled on, leaving all that aside–I’m sorry–did you prove this statement–or am I just supposed to accept it because it because you say so? That is–do you have some proof that the show’s producers intended to give a Christian viewpoint as opposed to a generic theistic viewpoint? If so I am willing to go beyond saying “I might be wrong” to saying “Yes, I was wrong.” But not because you say so.
Pierce Butler #166 wrote:
No, you’re right. I remember it made me wince at the time, but I forgot about it by the time I’d finished reading all the comments.
As you say, a human psychological preference for “simple answers” should mean jack nothing when it comes to analyzing for truth. After all, the human preference for simplistic answers got us into religion. Occam’s razor isn’t a statement about what we find comfortable — and it doesn’t say anything about the universe being more likely to be “simple” either (the periodic table of the elements is much more complex than “earth, air, fire, and water.”)
Instead, it’s a tool that helps to reign in our tendency to overshoot ourselves and make assumptions that can’t be checked up on. In the example which was used, assuming that a cat knocked the box over — even though there was no sign of a cat and no need for a cat — would place the belief in a box-knocking-cat in an unassailable position. You can’t be reasoned out of something you didn’t reason yourself into. This grants too much power to the believer. Occam’s razor, or the principle of parsimony, is really a commitment to humility.
Most of the methods of science are designed to force humility on the seeker.
Faith, on the other hand, covers itself in the elaborate trappings of humility, but is a covert bid for power.
Real, true Christian believers can and do deconvert to atheism. Like Evid3nc3, I was a true believer most of my life, mainly because I always had an internal feeling that God was always with me and I was never alone. I always felt loved and protected, even though I knew bad things could (and did) happen to me. Bad things happened to good people so they can “grow” from the experiences, I thought. Unlike many others here, I did not initially doubt what I was taught in church, I believed it but I wanted to confirm it—I wanted to know how God did all these amazing things like create the universe and life on Earth. So I became interested in science.
My deconversion experience was akin to a curious child exploring the secrets of magic only to learn that it’s all an illusion. But knowing that magic is illusion, for me at least, does not take away the sense of amazement and wonder of seeing a talented illusionist like David Copperfield at work.
I think I am very fortunate that after going through the initial “existential angst” phase of deconversion, I emerged with what I think are the best of both worlds: I have a more realistic understanding of the universe and my humble place in it, but I still have that internal feeling of belonging to something greater than myself. My concepts of “God” and “The Universe” gradually melded into one, with “God” becoming more abstract and less an imaginary friend, and “The Universe’ becoming more personal and intimate.
But you have to get past that “existential angst” phase to get to where I am now. And that’s a big deal that should not be underestimated. That experience of loosing one’s sense of divine nurturance can threaten one’s sanity and will to live. Before I ever doubted God’s existence, I had never felt alone. But the moment I doubted for the first time (in my early 20’s), I felt completely and utterly alone and abandoned, and that was absolutely terrifying.
I get perturbed by old friends who despair that I’ve “lost my faith”. They don’t understand that my faith has evolved into something better: understanding. I don’t think I’ve really “lost” my relationship with “God”, as much as I’ve gained a new appreciation for my relationship with “The Universe” or “The Cosmos”, as Carl Sagan would call it.
I’ll close this post with my favorite quote from Sagan:
“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?’ Instead they say, ‘No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.” –Carl Sagan
Just admitting it is a question to which you have no answer would be more honest. But then you are honesty are not really on talking terms are you ?
What would be really really honest it say you cannot answer the question, and you realise that presents are major problem for your religious belief. I have long since given up any hope of you showing that degree of integrity.
I saw snippets and pieces of it. I liked (…checking Wikipedia…) Roma Downey’s lilting voice.
No, I think calling it “spiritual” goes too far in the other direction. The show was specifically monotheistic, and with a very Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism. It was very ecumenical and liberal, with a nice and fuzzy Universalist sort of theology, but this was not so vague as being merely “spiritual”.
I did not see the series finale, but Wikipedia has that as an episode that specifically references Jesus.
Or in other words, a Universalist theology.
The WikiP article on TBaA is interesting, in that it says:
“While John Masius is credited with creating “Touched by an Angel,” the series as produced was substantially different from the pilot Masius wrote, which never aired.[2] Masius’ script emphasized human suffering, and the angel Monica confides that God toys with humans for sport.[3] CBS fired Masius early in the first season when Masius refused to write a more life-affirming story.[citation needed] He was replaced as executive producer by Martha Williamson, a Christian writer and producer who made the show what it eventually became.[citation needed]”
And the WP page on John Masius says that he has three children, two of whom are autistic. Hm.
============
Sure. And then the various atrocities carried out by God or ordered by God in the bible are mentioned, and the interlocutor can then silently slither away in defeat, or they can argue that any action the God wants to happen, no matter how atrocious, is good.
But the (proto-)atheist doesn’t even have to know the logical technical term “special pleading” or the ethics technical term “Euthyphro dilemma” to realize that there’s something very wrong with that argument.
============
Interesting. They specifically complained because Christ and belief in Christ was not mentioned (until the finale)?
Your last sentence isn’t clear — does it refer to Muslims or Christians?
=============
I did not actually specify that, did I?
Actually, I thought you would repeat a phrase I’ve seen you use on other deconversion posts: something along the lines of that it’s “too good to be true”. (And then I would have asked you what exactly you meant by that, and maybe you would have gotten theological.) But you didn’t.
=============
LOL.
“The language is the that of Pharyngula, which I will not utter here. But in the common tongue it reads:
One poopyhead to rule them all,
one poopyhead to find them,
one poopyhead to bring them all,
and in teh internets bind them”
heddle #169 wrote:
Darn you, heddle! Never having seen the show, I was curious, too, and made the mistake of going to Wikipedia. It says
Ok, fine. And then it goes into some of the plot details. I had not watched the show, I did not know. Ewwwwww. I’m supposed to eat lunch.
Thanks a lot.
Jimmy-boy@ 133-
It doesn’t take a personal experience of the abusive aspects of religious indoctrination to know that such abuse exists, or that it does damage. I have many friends who bear the scars of that abuse.
I don’t know where you live, but here in the U.S. (a majority christian culture with large numbers of politicized christians wishing to force their beliefs into the laws we must all live under) there’s good reason to get worked up.
I also self-identify as gay for the same reason I identify as atheist- I no longer wish to have my worth, and value to society, defined by others. In a heterosexist culture dominated by christianity, gay and atheist are mostly political labels, at least in my case.
I’m sorry. I’ve read a lot of life stories on this blog from people who suffered in the religion they were brought up in. And like I said, I have friends with similar experiences. For me, the question of god’s existence has never been that important on a personal level.
The only sort of god that ever made any kind of sense to me is a distant, deistic sort of being. But “worshipping” such a being seems nonsensical, to say the least. Besides, there is zero evidence for even that nebulous, distant “god”.
The way I see it, a world where an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent deity actually existed and intervened in human affairs would look vastly different than ours. For one thing, we wouldn’t have to be scouring a 2000 year old book to gain knowledge of it.
Legion @ # 69: It’s a bit like David Banner trying to control the Hulk…
That’s Dr. Robert Bruce Banner, you heretic dog! Blasphemer! Imposter! Splitter!
Speaking of the lidless eye — PZ, can you ban those nasty
hobbitsspammistses “hery”, “baju” and “funscience”?Heddle – OK – clear. When I used to read the bible though it said ‘by their fruits you shall know them’ – not judge them by their fruits. On judgement, it said ‘judge not lest ye be judged’. And take the log from your own eye’ etc.
But anyway. Perhaps they don’t apply any more or something? Or have some alternative interpretation in the original that meant ‘do judge if you are very holy and feel like it’ or something?
Or perhaps they have to be taken in context and what would I know? Fair enough then…
I came into ‘activist atheism’ through activist skepticism — applying scientific reasoning to claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience. Started out with Skeptic Society. Not only are the arguments and apologetics pretty much the same, but religion turns out to be the “one ring to rule them all.” I’m fascinated by the underlying psychology and neurology, and inspired by the values and approach of secular humanism.
I then got into debating the existence of God: it’s where the action is, and its filled with passion. After getting your head handed over to you repeatedly, you realize that you need to study everything from philosophy to biology before you can even stick your toe in. By exploring what doesn’t exist, you wind up with what does. Challenging and fun and right in the heart of where things matter.
Interesting. Masius was also the producer who took over the reins of “Dead Like Me” when series creator Bryan Fuller quit over creative differences. Fuller’s version of the show was somewhat darker than what it evolved into, and he wanted one of the peripheral characters (the lead girl’s father) to be a closeted homosexual, which the network (Showtime) wouldn’t go for.
Whatever the behind the scenes drama was, “Dead Like Me” is an excellent show, and well worth checking out on DVD.
Reading comprehension isn’t your strong suit.
I said “Yes, you did in fact have that ‘I might be wrong’ from the start. However, you never *ACTED* like you might be wrong, you just claimed you might be.” Which is in fact exactly what you did.
What more do you want? Satan and God were real. So was Jesus. Do you expect episode by episode Citation? Using a non-spoiler example, if I said “Luke Skywalker’s father is Darth Vader”, what the hell else am I supposed to do? “He says so in the movie”.
Shit, man. THE FINALE HAD JESUS AND SATAN AS STARS. Give the fuck up.
You are implying here that PZ is a snake?
Or a gecko?
I think heddle was addressing Owlmirrow — owl. Kinda cute ;)
Matt Penfold,
It would be honest if it were true–but it isn’t true. Again, search the archives of this blog. I have repeatedly tackled the “who is a True Christian and who are you to say so?” challenge. You can say that I have no answer if that makes you feel all warm and fuzzy–but the truth is I don’t want to get in that argument all over again. If PZ devotes a thread to “How do Christians support a True Christian argument?” I’d be happy to contribute–but I won’t be accused of leading this thread down a theological sidetrack.
but…but…
owls have lids.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
All kinds of productions have Jesus and Satan in them and are not Christian. At a bare, bare minimum–at an even lower level than affirming historic creeds, Christians agree that they are saved by faith in Jesus Christ. If the show portrayed that one is saved by faith in Christ then it was Christian. But having Jesus and Satan characters, even if Jesus was really really good and Satan was really really bad does not make it Christian. Is this a difficult concept for you? It seems hard to believe.
Why is Jason Rosenhouse one of the few among you sensible about this? I have heard him argue that if someone claims they are a Christian and they believe Elvis is Jesus then they are not Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. He understands there is some defining minimal set of beliefs. If the show supported those minimal beliefs it was Christian. If it didn’t, it wasn’t.
????
Comment #150 mentions me (s/r$/w/), but is responding to PZ @#143.
Come on. The only reference that makes sense is Sauron.
Actually, you generally don’t see Jesus otherwise. Generic horn-ed devils come up a lot, but you generally only see Jesus in Christian stuff, or explicit parodies thereof like Life of Brian.
So when the Catholic Church claims that it’s possible to be saved through any other means whatsoever, or that anything else might POSSIBLY count…
If your show revels in Christian Metaphysics, Christian Values, and Christian Themes, you have a Christian Show to at least 95% of the populace, including devout churchgoers who waste way too fucking much time on religious bullshit. If you’d like to whine, bitch, and moan about the finer points of faith, do it with someone who specifically wants to debate teleological points, not someone who had to deal with that shit for years growing up as part of explicitly Christian gatherings. If you do not have a more substantive argument than “BUT ACCORDING A STRICT READING OF *MY* DOCTRINE-“, then I’m done with you.
Replaying the Crucifixion in Modern Times: Not Christian. Got it.
So Universalists cannot possibly be “true” Christians?
And yet, when people try to suggest that there is some “defining minimal set of beliefs” for science, you land on them with both feet.
Hm.
oh, I know.
I was just having a little bionerd fun with the snake (=serpent)/gecko thing.
Owlmirror,
Ah..touché.
heddle #186 wrote:
Yes, of course there are minimal beliefs — but there’s a fuzzy area on what is, and isn’t, minimal. I agree with the Elvis example. I’ve also argued that people I know who claim to “belong equally to every religion” are speaking balderdash (a very unpopular position to take in ‘spiritual’ circles, btw — that it’s balderdash, I mean.)
But many Christians believe that salvation is often extended to people of other religions, if they somehow ‘know’ Christ without consciously realizing it, or something. There’s a rather long and grand tradition behind it. You can therefore believe there are “many paths to God,” and be a Christian.
And then you get into whether Mormons are Christian, or Adventists, and so forth. What’s minimal is up for debate.
But I do draw the line at the good Episcopal Bishop John Selby Spong. Not Christian. There is only so far you can metaphor the religion before you’re technically out of it.
I haven’t seen Touched By An Angel, but it sounds rather bland, but concrete. Christianity Lite.
You know … real Christianity, the way the hippie-dippie liberal ecumenicist Jesus intended all along. It’s all about Love.
Owlmirror #187 wrote:
No, you’re right, I got confused and screwed up. Sauron it is.
(my emphasis, by way of ???)
And what if it was a metaphor in the first place?
I would submit that at least the Gospel of Mark (the first narrative gospel) privileges orthopraxy over orthodoxy. “The Way” in Mark has nothing to do with what one believes, and everything to do with how one behaves. So there is a sense in which Spong’s socially radical “universal love” version comes closer to ancient (original?) Christianity than any modern confessional creed.
CJO #193 wrote:
From what I can tell, Bishop Spong rejects the virgin birth, the Trinity, Original Sin, the incarnation of Jesus, the resurrection, the atonement, and the existence of the ‘theistic’ God. What is left, is pure Christianity.
I don’t know, I think that’s an awful lot of metaphor there. I seriously doubt that even ancient Christianity was quite so rarified. If it was, then it’s so out of step with today that you might say that Christianity has ‘moved on’ from its origins, and morphed into something else.
At the very least, I have some sympathy with the Christians who cry foul here. From my end, I’m also rather tired of people soaking secular humanism in talk of the “sacred” and the “divine” and insisting that “God” is a symbol that points to transcendence — which comes down to being nothing more than feelings of awe for the universe, and scorn for the unsophisticated new atheists who caused fundamentalism by not being nuanced enough to “get” religion.
Sticking with Mark, there is no birth narrative and Jesus is presumably like any other man, born of a woman who also explicitly has other children; the Trinity is nowhere in the Synoptics; original sin is nowhere in Mark at least, but it’s a Pauline concept, so it is fairly “original” to at least some versions of ancient Christianity; Mark seems to take an adoptionist stance regarding incarnation based on the baptism account; all there is is an empty tomb at the end, so the resurrection is perhaps implied, but in a highly literary way; “atonement” is complicated, but that word doesn’t really speak to how Mark treats the crucifixion.
It clearly did, as far back as when it became the religion of an imperial state and an apologia for violence committed in the name of the state.
As for the existence of the ‘theistic’ god, aren’t we all (atheists) convinced that that’s a stupid and unsupported belief? I would think Spong would get some kudos for jettisoning such an archaic burden.
This smacks of preferring Fred Phelps as an adversary because he’s so obviously wicked and wrong.
Yeah, y’know, it seems useless to me too. (I’m mostly playing ‘angel’s advocate’ here.) But why should Christian humanism be unacceptable? Don’t we want more humanists, promoting more humanist values?
It’s more than awe for the universe in Spong’s case. It’s a conception of “God” that includes all the good humans can do in the world. Like you say, it’s essentially humanist, as I believe also is the core of the message in Mark. And I highly doubt that Spong feels scorn for atheists or believes we caused fundamentalism or that we really should “get” religion, unless that means practicing a selfless, inclusive humanist ethic. Armstrong, maybe.
CJO #195 wrote:
No, this is about trying to define Christianity as inclusively as possible, without including beliefs that are too far outside the definition. Tricky business, because the gray areas are going to be the points in contention. What beliefs are bare-bones basic?
I admire Spong, but think that Paul and the early church set the religion of Christianity in a direction that makes the Atonement and its implications critical to the definition, today. Ditto the God of Theism. You can play with them, and think that good acts or good hearts somehow “accept the sacrifice” — and God is “beyond comprehension” — but at some point, I just want to put my foot down.
Christian humanism seems like a nice compromise from the atheist’s point of view, but part of the problem with re-purposing language and narrative is that most people are still going to stick to the original meaning — and think that the Christian humanists do too. Which they might.
Greta Christina wrote an interesting blog post on what people professed to believe, and what people believed “when nobody was looking.” She used the personal example of her thought processes when she was a Wiccan. It was all symbolic and metaphorical and of course not taken literally — except that she and the other Wiccans would also look for signs and evidence that confirmed the truth of those forms they somehow seemed to take seriously after all. It all depended on who — or what part of her — was looking, and evaluating, and asking hard questions.
Christian humanism seems to encourage a waffling sort of fuzziness of thought that doesn’t really mesh well with trying to be rational. It tries, very hard, to be reasonable — but I’m not sure that’s the same thing.
*groan* please tell me you aren’t trying to weasel out of this by comparing TBaA with shows like South Park and Family Guy?!
You really are impervious to evidence which goes against what you’d like to believe, even if you do state that “you might be wrong” (which seems merely like a dishonest attempt at deflecting criticism of your obviously wrong statements).
The show was about being “saved” (in many different definitions of the word) by a squad of angels, who worked for a god, and against a satan, and in which jesus was a character on the good guys’ team. and it wasn’t satire.
how much more evidence do you need to finally admit that you are (not just “might be”) wrong, and that it was a Christian show, just not your preferred flavor of Christianity?
OK – since lot of you giving your stories I’ll briefly do mine without doing much revealing.
1. I was really faithful as child and even into teenage years. Well schooled, well versed, well practiced.
2. In teenage years knew that most of the stuff being fed me was BS. Especially when it came to morals and other rules and regulations. This wasn’t simply a teenager rebelling. I was pretty level headed in general. What struck me was how hung up, sniveling, self-doubting, and self-loathing god wanted you to be without any real good reason. And add to that how blown out of water god became over almost impossible to avoid (as robust teenager) so-called infractions. God did not seem very “god-like” in all that pettiness.
3. I also knew (from lots of personal experience) that prayer had no power. Certainly seemed like it was useless.
4. I started to look at all the people I knew who were agents of god and realized they were no more happy or moral or grounded than I was. In other words – all too many of them were child like in maturity and thus frustrated as adults. God did not seem to really bring them the peace they raved he brings.
5. I read philosophy, science, fiction, classics, etc. Religious texts seemed so empty of wow moments in comparison.
6. I just somewhere in my 20’s said very casually in my mind – and I cannot even remember how or when I said it – but I know I did … “I don’t believe in god or any hocus-pocus”
7. I never had any anger, any doubt, any desire that it was not so. It just was right to me.
In Summary
until 13 I was devout believer
then until about 16 I played the game by the rules
then until about 22 I was secular 100% without the A word
thereafter I admitted what I was – but it was very casual – nothing I did not know already
Frankly I cannot see how any sane intelligent modern person can really believe in god in 2010. But that is another story. My wife is a sane intelligent modern person – and she does (very loosely but does) – so I guess it is possible.
Jadehawk, OM
No I am saying there are shows with Jesus and Satan in them that are not necessarily Christian. The History Channel, I believe, has a number of them—search for the historic Jesus sort of stuff.. As another example, I could do a story on the Koran—and it could contain Jesus, portray him favorably, and certainly not be Christian. So it is not out of the question that Angels uses Jesus as a vehicle, as a good guy, a nice teacher, our friend, or even a deity without saying anything unique to Christianity at all. Nobody has demonstrated that the show was anything else. Stating “I might be wrong” is not a deflection of criticism, rather it means this (are you ready?) : I might be wrong. But you have to give actual evidence, not just pretend you gave evidence by claiming “I am impervious to the evidence.”
So *groan* yourself.
heddle #134
It may not shut up a Christian trying to proselytize an atheist but it does have one advantage. The magic sentence “I read the Bible” usually works when an atheist is confronted with the claim “You don’t know anything about Christianity.” This is a particularly annoying claim which presupposes an adult living in Western civilization has never heard of Jesus.
heddle wrote:
And you’d be 100% correct. However, as Jadehawk pointed out, this show had their Jesus working against Satan, with angels on his side, to ‘save’ people. Is that what the Discovery Channel programs featured? Is that in the Koran?
How do you know that Touched by an Angel is not, in fact, the 100% true and correct interpretation of Christianity?
That you don’t accept that that’s Christian is because it doesn’t match your version of Christianity – which would be fine if you could demonstrate that your version of Christianity is the correct one and the one presented in the show was incorrect. But you can’t – because you admit you don’t know that it isn’t – and therefore your claiming that it’s ‘not Christian’ is as baseless as a Mormon claiming your Calvinism is ‘not Christian’ – unless the Mormon can demonstrate how.
WowbaggerOM,
I’m sorry–from what I heard the show had angels helping people in worldly situations. How to overcome tragedy, illness, hardship, etc. Did it actually portray eternal salvation salvation?
Blah, blah blah same old same old. Yes –and what can I say. I defer to Jason Rosenhouse (he may not like that) and others above that say, paraphrasing, it is reasonable to define a minimal set of beliefs as Christian–otherwise the word has no meaning. Jesus and angels helping people in this world, even if it is against Satan, has Christian symbols and Motifs granted–but it is not Christianity–my sect or any other Christian sect, all of which state that your eternal soul acquires eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. That is a minimalist definition of Christianity–if the word is to have any meaning–and I’m funny about the fact tat I think words should have meaning. If that show was not about eternal life through faith in Christ then it was not Christian, even if it featured Jesus beating the snot out of Satan in a cage fight. If it did have themes of eternal salvation through Christ–even if they were allegorical a la C. S. Lewis, then I stand corrected.
I find it interesting that Heddle defines Christianity as “Shit that happens to you after you die”.
I wonder if Heddle thinks the “Left Behind” series is Christian.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
Are you on ‘luudes? In my statement that minimalist Christianity is:
“your eternal soul acquires eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ”
did you really read that as the required faith happens after you die? Do I have to be explicit and say that the faith must be (mustered or received, based on your theology) while you are still alive?
Or maybe you don’t grasp the concept of a “minimalist” definition?
stevieinthecity,
Yes I do, although I disagree with virtually everything in it related to the end-times or the role of Israel in eschatology. But the series certainly portrayed salvation through faith in Christ. So yes I would say it was a Christian series, albeit a seriously flawed one.
Yes, it must be boring to be reminded – over and over and over again – that your assertions lack support of any kind.
Hey, here’s a thought: only present assertions that you can demonstrate are true rather than present them as if they were true for as long as it takes for someone to back you into the ‘I don’t know’ corner.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly – that word has no meaning, that is. Since none of you can point to anything definitive to use I think it would only be honest to use the specific sects’ names rather than Christianity, seeing that you can’t agree on a hard-and-fast rule for what does and doesn’t qualify.
Why can your minimalist definition not be ‘those who call themselves Christians are Christians?’ if you can’t demonstrate that that is not sufficient to quality?
How, exactly, would doing so undermine your faith?
All christian beliefs are seriously flawed.
WowbaggerOM,
They are not assertions, they are opinions. Will this restriction apply to everyone or just me? For example–when is your opinion on animal testing–is it ethical or not? But only tell us if you can demonstrate the truth of your claim.
I happy for you that you peachy-keen with words that have no meaning. Is that an OM thing? I guess you are much more of an intellectual than I.
Because it is idiotic. Would you accept “those that call themselves scientists are scientists?” I wouldn’t. Although it would make writing dictionaries very simple:
Chris-tian n [kris-chuhn]. One who claims to be a Christian.
Sci-en-tist n [sahy-uhn-tist]. One who claims to be a scientist.
That does have a certain appeal.
It has nothing to do with undermining my faith, which it wouldn’t do at all–it has to do with language. Words have meaning–sometimes they are not precise but here we can easily capture 99% of the people who claim to be Christians with a minimal definition. Why does it bother you that those who claim that Elvis is a Christian and therefore they are Christians are left out of the 99% solution?
heddle, can you answer the question I asked above:
So Universalists cannot possibly be “true” Christians?
I mean, I suspect your answer is “no”, but I don’t want to go putting words in your mouth.
Ah, but with science, there is an empirical standard with which to measure what it is the putative scientist is doing. Not so with Christianity.
The thing is, in a free society, people are allowed to make whatever religious claims they want, more or less (there are exceptions for legal fraud and false labeling and such). And we are allowed to dispute with their claims, as you do. You have a standard for what Christianity is, and who meets that standard, and you assert that some Christians do not meet that standard. Sure. Fine.
But obviously there exist people who do not meet your standard, who call themselves “Christian”, and maybe insist that it is you who are not a “true” Christian. You can insist that they are wrong, and be sure that you’re right — but there is nothing that I know of that allows you to enforce your standard on others. You each have to throw up your hands and agree to disagree (or, I suppose, start a religious war).
Would you want to live in a country that did have strict religious labeling laws; that prohibited self-identification as a Christian (or other religion) if you did not also swear that you also believed one or more state-regulated propositions?
heddle wrote:
Er, that doesn’t mean it’s not accurate, does it? Idiotic and accurate aren’t mutually exclusive, are they?
Fine by me. Why would I care? The morons at AIG and the DI call themselves scientists; I don’t jump up and down about it. It doesn’t have any impact whatsoever on how I view science, because unless the scientist (self-described or otherwise) can (here’s that word you hate so much again) demonstrate the validity of his/her findings, then it’s not relevant.
Because you have no way of demonstrating that that is a fair way to discriminate – and if there’s a subjective criteria you will pick and choose who is and isn’t Christian so you can distance yourselves from Christians who do things you don’t like – such as murder, genocide and making wretchedly saccharine television programs.
Why do you think the No True Scotsman argument exists, for crying out loud?
Oh, and I’ll assume – based on your earlier comment – you meant someone who believes that Elvis was Christ; my question to you is this: can you demonstrate that Elvis wasn’t Christ? If you can’t, then why are those who would believe that automatically considered to be wrong?
except that there’s a lot of Christians out there who interpret the goats&lambs parable as meaning that good people are saved, whether they know of Jesus or not, while those that profess but are bad still end up in hell.
once again, just because something doesn’t agree with your definition of Christianity, doesn’t mean it doesn’t agree with someone else’s. “christianity” really only means a belief system with Jesus Christ at its center. Other than that, there’s really no independently verifiable way to figure out which “christianity” is the real deal and which isn’t. And it gets even more confusing with ancient Christianities, which couldn’t even agree on which god they were supposed to worship, and which texts were holy scriptures.
So Jesus wasn’t a Christian when he said that you’re saved based on what you’d done? Was John Calvin a Christian when he said God’s Grace is independent of what you do?
That’s a great minimal belief, what with it not catching the guy who started the religion and one of the major offshoot founders.
No, I did not. I mean “Christianity only really matters to anyone at death, apparently.” What a useless faith.
Maybe think of it this way, heddle – would you agree to stop calling yourself a Christian if all the non-Calvinist Christians got together and agreed that Calvinists weren’t Christians so they should stop calling themselves such?
Like, y’know,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Heaven
Owlmirror,
Actually, in my opinion, the answer is “yes they can.” You must have heard me talk, in the past, that the most important verse to the Calvinist (well at least to this Calvinist) is that God will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy. But that’s a technical answer. I think you actually mean: Do I consider Universalists to be True Christians?” You deserve a straightforward answer–which is no, I do not.
WowbaggerOM,
Actually I didn’t say they were automatically wrong–what I said what they believe is not consistent with the label Christian. You can go on saying that Christian should mean whoever claims the title, and I’ll go on saying that most reasonable people (like Jason Rosenhouse, for example) would agree that usage is king, and the common usage of the word Christian does not include people who think Elvis is Christ–even if they call themselves Christians.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
Oh boy, you really got me there. I was hoping that nobody would notice that “Eternal salvation comes through faith in Jesus Christ” would be contrary to the teachings of Jesus and John Calvin. But I see nothing gets by you.
So you don’t know what minimalist means.
Olwmirror,
Hmm– usually you don’t argue this way. But first of all I could not care less whether Universalists or Mormons or JWs say they are Christians and I am not. Nor am I arguing for Government standards. Nor do I care if you agree with my minimalist definition of a Christian. I am saying, again, that in language usage is king and I am pretty confident that the definition along the lines: “A Christian is someone who believes that eternal life comes through faith in Jesus Christ” would win any poll regarding “what is a Christian.” By that token it gets to define the word.
Sheep. Goats. If you’re going to claim faith in your prophet, fucking listen to him. I don’t actually care about his opinions, but you should.
You really don’t see what’s amusing about the idea that the kernel of Christianity has nothing to do with anything that happens in life, do you?
heddle wrote:
If Jason Rosenhouse can demonstrate that Elvis isn’t Christ – or that believing Elvis is Christ somehow prevents one from qualifying as a Christian – then I’ll stop pointing out the flaws in your reasoning.
I’ll assume he hasn’t – so until he does, please stop using him as an authority.
Anyway, reiterating my hypothetical at #215, if enough people started using the term Christian to mean only those who weren’t Calvinists, you’d happily stop calling yourself a Christian?
I know you Calvinists pretend that you’re saved by grace but in reality, according to your prophet Calvin, you’re not. You’re saved by winning the lottery. It fucking doesn’t matter what you believe or how good a life you live. If god shits on you, then it’s the burning lake for ever and ever but if Mary gave god a piece last night, then you get harp lessons.
And don’t whine at me about misinterpreting your apostle. Whine at Calvin for inventing TULIP.
Personally, I could never understand why Calvinists would want to worship their sadistic bully god. But if that’s all you’ve got for a god, then I suppose there’s no choice but to give him blowjobs in hopes he won’t shit on you when you die.
Actually, that’s still Grace. It’s effectively random though. What Heddle is discussing is, rather then belief in grace, belief /in the belief in grace/. It’s not even calvinism, it’s calvinismism.
I’ve been thinking about definitions.
Which reminds me, the JW who was arguing here was, I think, claiming that JWs were true Christians following a “by their fruits ye shall know them” argument.
Because JWs had never set anyone on fire for believing differently, or something like that, and were otherwise better people than those (fake, I presume) Christians who had indeed set people on fire, and so on and so forth.
It depends on what other definitions are on the poll, doesn’t it?
When [Traditional Roman Catholic] Piltdown Man was still around, he brought up “pseudo-Christians”, and his minimal formulation for who was a “true” Christian was: “Properly speaking a Christian is someone who belongs to the Church established by Christ.” And of course he added, in his snide way, “The term is also commonly used to refer to members of pseudo-Christian sects.”
I tried to get him to specify exactly what exactly he meant by that, but he was banned for his typical insipidity (and his more general creepiness as well, I suspect). I think it’s a reasonable inference that he meant that only baptized Roman Catholics were True Christians, and *ALL* others calling themselves Christians were fakes.
Are you sure that put to a world-wide poll against an explicitly Roman Catholic formulation, your admittedly more ecumenical formulation would not be voted down into non-Christian-ness?
Or what if the poll included a behavioral formulation (“A true Christian is one who does as Jesus would do”), and that won?
Would you agree if your definition lost that you were not a True Christian, or would you decide that most Christians don’t know what True Christianity means?
Following up on the last sentence in #222: If choose the former, then kudos on your consistency. If you choose the latter, well, it looks like we’re back to self-definition after all…
That is an easy question. Xians have been settling that one for 2,000 years. You simply get your armies together, grab as many weapons as you can, and fight it out. Last one standing was a True Xian.
This might sound like hyperbole or snark. It isn’t. The xianizing of the Roman empire was far from a peaceful takeover. Pagans were killed frequently.
For much of the Dark Ages being an atheist, apostate, or heretic was a capital crime. Ask Giordano Bruno about how that works. He was burnt at the stake for Heliocentrism. Or the Cathars during the Albigansian heresy. Or the Puritans and Pilgrims. Or the Hugenots.
The world war of xiandom is well known. The Reformation wars lasted on and off for 450 years and killed tens of millions. Catholics and Protestants still hate each other.
This doesn’t happen too much anymore. Those mean old secularists took away the cults armies and heavy weaponry. Too many people got tired of the bloodshed. The Moslems haven’t figured it out yet. No one knows how many Shiites and Sunnis have been killed in Iraq. Well over 100,000 at least.
Don’t bother wondering why I’m no longer a xian.
everybody please stop using the term “Dark Ages” as if it were synonymous with “Medieval Period”. it isn’t. the Dark Ages are a subset of the Medieval period, and it only lasted until the founding of the Holy Roman Empire around 1000CE.
Thanks.
Hu Flung Pu @ # 171 said:
“But you have to get past that “existential angst” phase to get to where I am now. And that’s a big deal that should not be underestimated. That experience of loosing one’s sense of divine nurturance can threaten one’s sanity and will to live.”
I agree. And I think it IS often underestimated. That was the hardest thing I found in reading Dawkins and Harris. I love their writing and it has freed me in so many ways but it also makes me sad because I feel sometimes a lack of empathy for the deconversion process and how difficult it can be for so many.
My parents are still Jehovah’s Witnesses. My mother is quite devout. And honestly, I’ve thought many times about trying to help her “see the light” about her beliefs. But I don’t think she could handle the deconversion process. She’s in her 60’s now and has a number of health issues and has so much invested in her beliefs and her religious community.
I know what the deconversion process did to me. I entered the worse depression of my life and almost didn’t make it out the other side. It’s hard enough to wake up at 31 and realize your whole life has been a lie. I can’t imagine my mother dealing well with that at the age of 61. She needs it to be true.
Hi tall penguin: your point about how to interact with parents is poignant to me – I face the same issue. I can’t see any point in attempting to discuss religion with them. What would I achieve? If I persuade them, they would presumably look on their lives – dedicated 100% to their faith – and fall into a crisis of depression for all the waste.
Alternatively, I can let them live out their lives peacefully… I see no reason to do otherwise, even though it does give rise to a few difficult moments!
WowbaggerOM
Put it this way: If by usage “Christian” came to mean believing Elvis was Christ–then I would stop calling myself “Christian”. I don’t if I would do it happily, but I wouldn’t want people to think I worshiped Elvis, so I’d find another term. This has happened before. “Evangelical” used to mean Protestant. Then it came to mean a certain type of Protestant, and some people didn’t like that type, so they stopped calling themselves evangelicals. And oddly enough, some Catholics now call themselves evangelical Catholics.
Owlmirror,
You are right, it would depend on the poll of course. I am thinking of a poll that is not diluted with choices that are virtually equivalent to one another:
For example: Christian is
1) One who believes that eternal salvation is achieved through faith in Jesus Christ
2) One who believes Jesus is the Son of God and died for our sins
these two definitions very close–so that if you had to pick one you’d be splitting the vote even among people of identical theology. But I would bet that either one would defeat: “Someone who follows the teachings of Jesus Christ” or “Someone who does what Jesus would do”.
Also, if you had an option that was either limiting to Roman Catholics or precluded Roman Catholics it would lose (I suspect) to the option I offered.
Something you wrote earlier. In response to my question “So would you accept that a scientist is someone who calls himself a scientist?” you wrote:
“Ah, but with science, there is an empirical standard with which to measure what it is the putative scientist is doing. Not so with Christianity.”
I say–not so. What you are saying here I agree with in part. That is, a scientist is not just someone who calls himself a scientist. But your “empirical standard” is demonstrably false. What is this empirical standard? Applying the empirical standard, would there be universal agreement on Pharyngula as to whether Francis Collins is a scientist? Whether I am or am not a scientist? I doubt it.
‘Tis Himself, OM
Why would I whine at Calvin for something he didn’t do? If I want to whine at Calvin it would be for something he actually did, like helping to establish a theocracy in Geneva. I’m really pissed at him for doing that.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
I would like to tell you that you look stupid arguing that the teachings of Jesus and the theology of John Calvin are inconsistent with my minimalist definition of Christianity makes you, but too late for that. If you argue that they taught more than that, I’d agree. But you are arguing that what they taught is inconsistent the definition I gave–which is utter nonsense.
No–that is why it is called minimal. You could add: and a saving faith is made manifest by good works, etc. but soon you are at a creed or a doctrinal statement, not a simple definition. As I said, you fail to grasp minimal.
Heddle, if you really think that “1) One who believes that eternal salvation is achieved through faith in Jesus Christ” and “2) One who believes Jesus is the Son of God and died for our sins” are close, you have completely lost the plot. Haven’t you noticed that per definition 2 one could quite coherently believe that, Jesus having died for everybody’s sins, everybody is saved regardless of what they believe?
Of course the concepts of eternal salvation, dying for sin, and God are all poorly defined and/or ridiculous, but that’s a secondary problem. It’s as if you’re so far gone in Calvinism you’ve forgotten that justification by faith is not the only positions Christians can hold.
“I would like to tell you that you look stupid arguing that the teachings of Jesus and the theology of John Calvin are inconsistent with my minimalist definition of Christianity makes you, but too late for that.”
Jesus said: “They were saved based on what they’d done”
You said: “They are saved based on what they believed”
And you don’t even see how I can logically say these two sayings were opposed. Christian Humility at work!
I know you don’t. That’s why I posed the question.
I’ve had a long deconversion myself. I grew up in an especially religious area, with a very backwards sect of Christianity, the Southern Baptists. My parents ascribe to that faith, but they were also, shall we say, human. They didn’t find fault with drinking or gambling, mostly because they couldn’t find anything in the Bible that denounced it.
Personally, I loved science all my life, and it always bothered me that religion might not be shared by scientists. Somehow, that didn’t dissuade me from my love of it.
As a teenager, I went to a small 1A “attendance center”. So small that my graduating class was 35 and the highschool was joined at the hip of the elementary school. During this time, I rediscovered Star Trek: The Next Generation.
TNG gave me something I loved, science fiction, and lessons I’d never forget. Equality, the importance of science, debates on morality.
The breaking point didn’t come until college. I purchased the Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and recognized its satire. I still didn’t want to give up on religion, for some reason, even though by this point, God had been reduced to window dressing on a completely atheistic world view.
I tried teaching other Christians a message of giving science its due, and not arguing if it conflicted with biblical reports because, hey, what did a bunch of nomadic goatherders know anyway?
They didn’t like that. The next semester, my Psychology teacher, Dr. Collin Billingsley challenged us to debate the existence of God with one another. On a lark, I chose to say he didn’t, using a modified version of Oolong Colluphid’s disproof of God. No one had a good rebuttal.
Then someone asked me, “What DO you believe?”
“I’m undecided,” I knew then what I didn’t believe, but it’d be years before I figured out what I did.
Jadehawk #225
The Dark Ages ended when they solved the Y1K problem.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
I gather you refer to the parable of the sheep and the goats? I have a question for you. Every single mainstream Christian denomination: Roman Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, etc—all deny salvation by works. Every single one. (Hold on—my question is not what you think it will be—probably). It is not a Protestant thing or a Calvinist thing or a Catholic thing etc. Now it is true that they often accuse one another of teaching “salvation by works”, but each denomination denies it and claims it does not teach salvation by works.
Given that, and since you think the parable of the sheep and goats teaches salvation by good deeds, my question is,
Do you think all these denominations:
1) Never noticed the parable of the sheep and goats
2) Noticed it, but pretended not to
3) Have bogus explanations because you have studied them (that is, you could tell how, say, a Calvinist denomination would explain the parable)
4) You assume they have bogus explanations even though you haven’t read them–because in effect you don’t have to read them, —given that they are all morons, to first order.
Or some other option I didn’t think of. Really, I’m very curious.
I think salvation by works got bad press by association with the sale of indulgences and was dropped to keep things looking clean. Religions have long histories of changing or modifying doctrine due to scandals or other events. Since we’re discussing the Catholic Church, this is also the folks who ultimately decided that they should translate the bible after a LONG time opposing such a thing as being counter to God’s Will or whatever else have you.
I don’t disagree that there is also Grace as a component in your Really Big Cult. I find it hilarious as hell that /belief in the belief of Grace/ became a component, however, and especially when it becomes the kernel belief that is more important and best sums up Christianity. It’s delicious irony.
Heddle, you seem to be implying that “Christian” means “belonging to a mainstream Christian denomination” (circular much?) and tacitly, “actually believing in the official theological doctrine of that denomination”. Both are dubious. The first simply changes the “people who call themselves Christian” definition you mocked so much into a “people who can get several other people to agree they’re Christian”- big whoop, and the second assumes that the average churchgoer even knows much theology; lots of people don’t. Ask around the _membership_ of most churches and you’ll find at least some people who’re convinced that some nice people will get into heaven for being so nice.
Since you ask, an obvious reason why large denominations tend to insist officially on salvation by faith is because otherwise people could just go out and do good things and never bother with the church or the faith or the tithes. Can’t have that! Gotta have the clergy to tell people what they should be thinking.
Stephen Wells ,
No, you are inferring that. I merely pointed out that the mainstream denominations deny salvation by works, and I wondered what Rutee thought they made of the parable of the goats and sheep. Was my question to him unclear?
If your explanation really is they insist on salvation by faith
well–I don’t know how to respond to that. (It even seems counter-intuitive. Wouldn’t these churches, interested only in money, be better off teaching salvation by works and that one of the best-of-all-possible works is tithing?)
heddle #228
Why should you complain about that? Calvin was doing what every other religious leader does, grab as much power as possible. Do you honestly think Calvin was interested in anyone or anything other than John Calvin? That’s what religious leaders do, they prey on the incredulous who’ll believe any idiotic shit as long as it’s wrapped in religion.
How could any intelligent person believe in the psychopathic god that Calvin pushed is something I cannot understand. But obviously some do or else Calvin and his sociopathic teachings would have died the death they so richly deserve.
Heddle, you think that a minimal definition of Christianity involves salvation by faith, not works. Your justification for this is that all the mainstream denominations officially say that salvation is by faith. This only works if the only Christians are believers in the official doctrine of a mainstream denomination; otherwise there would be Christians wandering around out there who think you can be saved by works (lots do), and they wouldn’t fit in your “minimal” definition. See the problem? Sheesh.
Most churches seem to tell people they must believe according to the church (without this step, the church would be unnecessary and clergy would have to get proper jobs), and _then_ tell them to do the good works with lots of tithing.
Tis Himself, OM,
No, I agree with C. S. Lewis who wrote that he never had a selfless thought in his life. I know that applies to me, so I assume it applies to others, including John Calvin.
Believe it or not, I more or less agree with you. So would Calvin (again, more or less), I suspect.
Stephen Wells,
No my explanation for that is that I suspect that “salvation by faith in Jesus Christ” would be the “winner” if you asked all people, regardless of whether they are in a mainstream denomination, indeed regardless of whether or not they identify themselves as Christians, to select a simple definition of Christian. That for most people, even say Muslims, they would agree that this is what a Christian is. That is, if you held a poll and the choice was this or “A Christian is someone who believes that heaven is your reward for good deeds” (or something like that, if that seems unfair) and “A Christian is someone who calls himself a Christian” (or something like that, if that is unfair) that my option (or something like it) would win, overwhelmingly. At least in the west where virtually everyone has a rudimentary knowledge of the Christian gospel.
Given that, and given that words should have non-circular meanings and given that the accepted rule is usage is king, then I would say that we have a definition. If someone is left out, such as the Elvis is Jesus sect–then that’s too bad. That’s the way language works. Words have meaning. Words are not subject to an “everyone must agree on the definition” requirement.
Are you saying this is your definition as well or just those held by the majority of western Christians?
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
It depends what you mean. For common use, I would have no problem with this definition. As a technical definition it falls too short for my tastes. For example, a JW would agree to this definition, and I would not quibble over anyone calling JWs Christians. But if someone wanted to join our church (as opposed to just visit–even indefinitely), I would support a different minimum–something like affirming the Nicene creed. My own circle of orthodoxy is just about right there, at the Nicene Creed level. Is that what you are asking?
Yes to some extent, but I thought that Calvinists also held a certain amount of predestination in their beliefs? So faith in Jesus Christ isn’t enough, you have to have been chosen as well.
Am I wrong here?
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
Well, I don’t want to get too deep into Calvinism but it is not that “you have to have faith and be chosen” but closer to “you will not have faith, unless you are chosen.” But it doesn’t really matter, because most Calvinists do not say that only Calvinists are Christians. In our own church, which is self-proclaimed Calvinist (actually “Doctrines of Grace”, which is what many Calvinistic Baptists call Calvinism) we have and welcome non-Calvinistic visitors and even members. They will hear many sermons and Sunday School lessons that are “Calvinistic” but when they join the church they are not asked, for example, to affirm TULIP. They are asked to affirm something very similar to the Nicene Creed.
Ok, but can Christians who are not Calvinists really be “saved” in your or your church’s mind without subscribing to your church’s particular doctrine?
And does that also mean that people who claim faith (in some form of Christianity you or your church see as being Christian) are the only ones who have been chosen? Can god chose someone and they have no faith or is there little choice in the matter?
What reasoning does a Calvinist use to try and understand why certain people are chosen and some are not when it is seemingly beyond that person’s control via actions etc. ?
If you don’t feel like answering these that’s fine.
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
Of course. We believe in salvation by faith, not salvation by being a Calvinist, or even salvation by believing in the doctrine of salvation by faith.
Calvinism is just an attempt to understand what the bible teaches about salvation. Given it is a human endeavor it is quite possibly wrong and most certainly wrong in the details.
God can choose whomever he wants. The most important verse to the Calvinist, as I have said many times, is that “He will have mercy upon whom he will have mercy.”
None that I know of. The answer to the question: Why doesn’t God choose (save) everyone? is: I don’t know.
Ok forgive me if these are “newbish” questions and I know you’ve probably answered them 100 times here (and to some extent to me I’m sure) but that helps me understand the position a bit. As long as their faith seems consistent with the Nicine Creed then their domination’s particular ceremonies or doctrines (to a point obviously) are inconsequential including subscribing to your particular ceremonies or doctrines.
So if you are chosen does that mean you will have faith? As in, if you happen to be one of the “lucky” ones that you will go through your life with faith or at least at some point come to faith? What does this say about areas or populations of limited to little Christian faith in the past or currently?
Is there something other than the idea that the Christian god would be all knowing and timeless that would lead the Calvinist to take from that verse that it is predetermined who is saved? Or is that pretty much the point of it?
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
In the normative case, yes. But of course we believe (and have reason to believe from scripture) that infants can be saved–they certainly do not have faith in the usual sense. Also, if someone is saved who has never even heard the gospel–obviously they would not be able to articulate their faith.
I think if that verse were the only verse that spoke to the matter it would be nebulous at best. But when all the scripture is examined that Calvinistic apologist used to support Calvinism, that one sums it up the best.
You know, it’s easy to pick something so extreme that no-one (that I know of) actually does believe it. But what about denominations that did and do exist that simply have different tenets about soteriology and/or christology — how about if one of those became the obvious and vocal majority?
Hm. I suspect that you are wrong.
I was (and am) not sure how one would go about demonstrating this, but I did go to the Pew research site to see if there was any poll that tried to define Christianity at all. I have not found any, but I did find the following interesting pages:
Many Americans Not Dogmatic About Religion
And this one, which I think is an even greater argument in favor of my point (it certainly does not favor yours):
Christians: No One Path to Salvation
I suspect that most people who call themselves Christians simply don’t care about dogmatic (in the technical sense) definitions and theological correctness as much as yourself — and if I am correct, then Christianity, at least in the USA, really does not mean what you think it means.
But perhaps you could suggest a doctrinal poll to the Pew forum (or Gallup, or ARIS, or whatever), and see if your formulation actually does win out.
Could you re-read what I wrote, please?
Is it not the case that science by definition requires empirical evidence?
It’s strange that you object, unless you are misreading or misunderstanding me, inasmuch as the sentence, as I intended it, agrees with what you have expressed here before about science and religion: As long as the actual science being done by some individual is based on empirical evidence and sound reason, it is not relevant to the scientific work what other beliefs that individual has.
While many (including PZ) sneer at Collins and you for your statements about and arguments for religion, I don’t think they’ve ever claimed that you are not scientists (and if they have, I think that they are wrong). There is no objection that I’ve seen to anything you two have published in your respective scientific fields.
Of course, that having been said, as I understand PZ’s objection to Collins, it stems from the incompatibility between religious presupposition and the scientific method, and Collins willingness to rely on religious presupposition in areas not in his field.
So it’s not a case of Collins not being a scientist, or even being a bad scientist (he didn’t try publishing this assertion as being science, as best I know), but of his public statements, in at least one case, promoting dogma over science.
This holds twice and thrice for Europe.
Owlmirror,
I don’t think I could get such a poll commissioned.
I think you are optimistic. With Collins I doubt you’d get a Pharyngula-universal “yes he is a scientist” and with me I’m darn near certain.
What does that mean? (If it is true). It means that we can not come up with a definition of scientist that is perfect–one than can achieve universal agreement as to who is a scientist.
But obviously that does not mean that we should cave and define scientist as “whoever claims to be a scientist.”
The same applies to Christian, or any other word.
That was my only point.
I’m happy to give defining scientist a shot – how about ‘someone who endeavours to increase knowledge via rigourous application of the scientific method’?
I disagree with what you expect the greater proportion of Pharyngula posters to respond that you and/or Collins aren’t scientists; as PZ (and others) have pointed out that it’s not that you’re not scientists, it’s that you both give your religious views a free pass from the same kind of analysis you’d apply in your scientific endeavours.
After all, an executioner is still an executioner even if he doesn’t kill everyone he meets.
But the real issue is that the definition of scientist, even if it couldn’t be agreed upon, is something humans themselves can argue about because the term – and the logic underlying its application – were conceived by imperfect humans.
Christianity, on the other hand, is supposed to have come from the perfect god who (we’re told) created us, owns us, and will at some time see fit to judge us in some way – no matter how unjust that might be.
Why would he send us an unclear message? And the message is demonstrably unclear; if it weren’t we wouldn’t be having this conversation because what is and isn’t Christianity wouldn’t be able to be anything other than what was set down and clearly and unambiguously communicated to humanity.
If I was worried about my ‘immortal soul’ right now I’d be crapping myself because I’d have absolutely no fucking idea what he wanted me to do in order to endear myself to him and guarantee the afterlife I may or may not (since that’s unclear as well) expect to achieve.
Yes, I know that’s not what you’ve interpreted scripture to mean. But you’ve also said you don’t know if you’re right or not. And because of that your justification for drawing a line for determining who should and shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves Christians when no clearly defined standard was provided ‘in the manual’ (so to speak) is unwarranted.
Heddle,
to follow on from Wowbagger’s comment, the definition of a scientist is going to change according to context, (following the scientific method, possessing a science degree, currently working as a researcher, and so forth), but the context is always human, and can be argued in human and contextual terms. In any given context, I think it would be possible to come up with an agreed definition of scientist.
With Christianity, we can apply “by person’s own declaration”, as a nominal standard, but the ambiguity of what Christianity is precludes much more detail than that.
Furthermore, even this definition is wrong by Biblical standards (not everyone who says “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven” – (Matt 21)). You must do God’s will (contradictory and ill-defined as it is), especially after St. Paul essentially gutted the law.
I don’t think it is possible to come up with an objective definition for Christian in any context. Self-declaration is all you have to work with.
WowbaggerOM,
I disagree that you can come up with a universally accepted definition. (I think you are very optimistic to think that you can.) Furthermore, if you came up with a universally agreed definition, it still wouldn’t get applied uniformly.
As partial evidence it would seem that if we can agree on what a scientist is, we should also agree on what science is–but we can’t. I’m not talking about ID crap. I’m thinking here of String Theory. Very reputable scientists disagree on whether or not String Theory is science. (As opposed to mathematics masquerading as science, or even “not even wrong” worthless crapola.) If we can’t agree on whether something is science, even something that has received lots of research money and allowed people to get tenure at elite R1 universities, then I submit that we will also never agree on who or what is a scientist.
As for Christianity “supposedly coming from a perfect god” making it different–I say: that’s a deflection. Let’s accept what you all, or most of you believe, that it didn’t come from a god. Does that mean that suddenly I (or rather “usage”) am allowed to define it in a way that might exclude some who claim to be Christians? Where before the best I could do was “A Christian is whoever claims to be a Christian”? That makes no sense.
echidna,
You are absolutely right–you see the theological flaw in the “anyone who claims to be a Christian, is” definition in addition to the linguistic flaw that I have been emphasizing: even the bible points out that not all who say they are Christians are, in fact, Christians. I purposely avoided that–but I’m glad someone else pointed it out.
I remember when (elsewhere) a presuppositionalist Baptist claimed
Bah. Bad link, should’ve been this
heddle wrote:
Of course you’d say that; to say otherwise would involve you admitting that your god messed up, and you will avoid that at all costs. But that’s beside the point.
Look at it from the consequences – what’s the worst that happens if someone is wrong about the definition of a scientist? Something very close to bugger-all.
The worst that can happen if you’re wrong about the definition of what a Christian is because it was not made clear and you inadvertently did the wrong thing? A bit more serious, no? Plenty of Christians (regardless of whether or not you agree with them – or consider them Christians) believe that getting it wrong will mean an eternity of punishment.
Not exactly a fair comparison, is it? A minor semantic quibble can’t really compare to eternal suffering.
And, once again, I’ll point out that I’m aware that that’s not what your interpretation of scripture says is going to happen – but will also mention that you’ve also admitted that you don’t know whether or not you’re right about that.
Mm. Well, I put the question to the endless thread. We’ll see what happens.
Of course, it occurred to me to wonder what “Pharyngula-universal” means. Is it “all regular commenters”, or does that also include lurkers? Everyone who has ever read a posting on Pharyngula?
And as I was composing it, I wondered if there were those whom you disagreed were scientists. I mean, you don’t include actual pseudoscientists in your own definition, do you?
How about YECs/Flood “Geologists”?
Yet it seems to me that disagreement, if any, would be perverse. Yourself and Collins have, after all, published empirical-evidence-based science in the peer-reviewed literature, and neither of you have tried promoting creationism as science.
What grounds would there be to reject either of you as a scientist?
There are plenty of grounds to charge both of you with intellectual inconsistency, but that’s not the same thing at all.
What’s wrong with “someone publishing legitimate empirical-evidence-based science in peer-reviewed scientific literature”?
That would only disbar someone whose entire publishing career is fraudulent, I think.
The problem is that categories and definitions can be fuzzier and more ambiguous than we might wish, especially when it comes to something with little grounding in empirical reality, like religion.
That’s my point.
If the Bible, or theological tradition, made it explicitly clear what was necessary and sufficient to provide salvation, there would be only one definition of Christianity. But they don’t, and there isn’t.
If God made it explicitly clear that only God’s ineffable will was necessary and sufficient to provide salvation (as in this story, which always seemed rather Calvinist to me — do you disagree?), there would be no room for argument about it at all. Indeed, there would be only one religion, period.
I hadn’t thought of that while composing my earlier comment.
Maybe that subfield of “theoretical physics” should be renamed to “cosmological hypotheses”?
That is not what it says, though. Read it again: It states that not all who call on God (“Lord, Lord”) will enter heaven. It’s a statement about salvation, not about group or personal identity.
It doesn’t refer to the label of “Christian” at all.
The verse doesn’t really help except to emphasize how confused the issue was even when the movement now called Early Christianity was just starting out.
Well, my question was more about predestination in reference to that verse and what else is used to support that.
Really? I’m going to be the one to point out the weakness here?
“Words also have more then one definition, and they’re not generally chosen by one person based solely on what that one person agrees or disagrees with.”
Oh, no. That’s right, I have to hit refresh to see current comments. Oh well, carry on.
I’ll willingly admit ‘those who call themselves Christian’ is probably a bit too loose for practical purposes, but on the other hand, how many people are there who call themselves Christians who don’t have a least a little more Christ-specific substance to their worldview anyway?
Really, to say ‘one who follows the teachings of Christ’ has got to be as strict as it can get; after that point those who wish to can argue over precisely what ‘follows’ and ‘Christ’s teachings’ mean for all eternity can do so.
I don’t see why someone who otherwise follows Christ’s teachings (whatever they are) but – for some reason – doesn’t choose to believe in the ‘immortal soul’ – shouldn’t be allowed to call themselves a Christian.
Yes, it’s twisting the scripture to do so, but if scripture wasn’t twistable, there wouldn’t be the thousands of denominations that we have today.
My main opposition to heddle’s thinking is what I’ve mentioned already: that it allows people to conveniently distance themselves from those whose actions they don’t approve when it suits them and then attempting to deny the tartan-wearing, haggis-eating, bagpipe-playing McElephant in the room.
And it certainly happens; delugionist idiot Alan Clarke, when reminded that the Catholic Church accepts evolution, insisted that meant nothing to him because – based on his subjective interpretation – Catholics aren’t Christian.
My only disappointment is that I couldn’t lure Piltdown Man into that thread to argue with him about it.
Such stubborn ignorance. Stephen Wells #235 is right.
The people, even the preachers, at most of the Protestant churches I’ve ever been to couldn’t have cared less about a person’s faith in Jesus, except for the Baptists. It was the Baptists who jumped up and down hollering about salvation and faith and being saved like a bunch of annoying fuckwads.
And in the South, despite all the Baptists, if you kindly hold a couple doors open for a person they may turn around and tell you what a great Christian you are. Even the traveling salespeople for Jesus trip themselves up talking about being a good person and doing good things (until they find out they are talking to a nonbeliever).
Clearly, many Christians I have met were not getting the absolutist salvation through faith message. Heck, there are tons of Christians that don’t believe in being saved at all; their god is all about Love and whatnot. Christian beliefs are too complicated for your narrow pigeonholing.
Rev. BigDumbChimp,
If I provide the biblical support for predestination I will surely get tossed out. So baring PZ’s permission, I’ll defer, but if you want to take it offline, I’d be more than happy.
Rutee, Shrieking Harpy of Dooooom
I agree that words can have a secondary meaning. If you want the secondary meaning of Christian to mean: Anyone who claims to be a Christan then go for it.
WowbaggerOM,
That’s is a strange argument. I don’t know of any sect of Christians that teaches salvation by “other people agreeing you deserve to be called a Christian”. No, if I am in the Elvis sect and someone doesn’t award me the title Christian then I would say to them: “bite me, what do I care what you call me?”
Owlmirror,
Quite right–I don’t. But even there it is fuzzy. What about people who do both science and pseudo science? Are they scientists? In fact with String Theory I guess you might find people who argue: I don’t think String Theory is science, but I think String Theorists are scientists. Ponder that!
But that’s the point, isn’t it? The word scientist has to appear in the dictionary even though not only is it impossible for everyone to agree and to apply it uniformly, but for any single person to apply it unambiguously. Nevertheless there needs to be a definition that gets us 95% (or whatever) of the way there, and the rest is just arguable. Same for the word Christian.
aratina cage of the OM
This is so stupid as to be unworthy of comment, except this meta-comment. To imply that Presbyterians, Lutherans, Methodists, Catholics, Anglicans, Non-denominational evangelicals, etc “couldn’t care less” about faith in Jesus–that it’s a Baptist thing only–the mind reels at such stupidity.
That’s not what I meant. It’s not about whether or not the majority of people agree with you, it’s whether or not adherence to a particular interpretation of scripture is going to lead to salvation or to an eternity of torment.
If one path leads to salvation and another does not, would it not be good to know how to determine which is which?
WowbaggerOM,
Leaving aside the fact that I would totally dispute that “adherence to a particular interpretation of scripture is going to lead to salvation or to an eternity of torment.” (It’s salvation by faith, not salvation by correct interpretation) again I would say: who cares what you are called? You would seek what you believe is the truth. If it lands you in the group that society has been labeled “Christian” so be it. If not, so be that too. And if not, and you want to call yourself Christian in spite of the fact that your position is not aligned with a dictionary definition, then nobody is stopping you. The Elvis sect can always call themselves Christians. But that doesn’t mean that there can’t be a dictionary definition that includes most of those who call themselves Christian, but not the Elvis sect.
Except that is itself an interpretation of scripture, is it not? You have no more support for that than does anyone else who cites a passage that suits their position.
Except that many dictionary definitions of Christian are far less specific than that. See here. The first three:
No mention of salvation whatsoever. Let’s try another. From Dictionary.com:
Nope, no mention of salvation there either. Even the word ‘faith’ only appears in one of the definitions.
So, if we’re going by dictionary definitions – as you insist we should – the Elvis Christians have just as much right to call themselves Christians as you do.
Heddle, the issue is that a large proportion of the groups generally recognised as Christian are not, per your attempt at a definition, actually Christian, because your definition is entirely “justification by faith alone” and a pretty good number of Christians either don’t know what that means, or have a mental reservation for virtuous pagans. It may bother you that lots of Christians are doctrinally dodgy, but that is your problem not ours.
I always wonder about the whole salvation by faith thing. It doesn’t sit right that a virtuous non-believer who was charitable, helpful and kind – that they would be subject to eternal torment, while a baby-raping, homicidal maniac who believed would be eternally rewarded. It seems the most arbitrary system of justice that could possibly be devised.
heddle, I’d make (and, in fact, have made) the exact same argument against Catholics who claimed Protestants weren’t Christians (actually, vice versa is more common), against Greek Orthodox who claimed that neither Protestants nor Catholics were Christians; ditto any combination of the aforementioned plus Jehovah’s Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Coptics, Pentecostals, High Anglicans, Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mormons, Baptists, Anabaptists, adherents of The Western Branch of American Reform Presbylutheranism and any other sect you’d care to mention.
Face it, if someone can demonstrate their religion involves following the teachings of Christ – in whatever way they choose to interpret that to mean – then they’re a Christian. It’s the same logic that allows you to tell anyone who tells you you’re not a Christian to go jump in the lake.
Stephen Wells
Nice try.
I’m sorry, where on this thread did I add the hot-button word alone? That is what the Reformation was fought about–and while I personally agree the word alone should be there, I did not include it in my generic definition. I gave a definition that is aligned with the Catholic catechism. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that salvation is by faith, which is the definition I proposed–because I agree a dictionary definition should be as inclusive as possible without being meaningless. It has to teach something to the person looking up the word. If someone says “I met this man who said he was a Christian, what does that mean? let me look it up” and then if the dictionary says: “A Christian is someone who says they are a Christian” he should immediately burn the dictionary. If it says: A Christian is someone who believes that by faith in Jesus Christ they can achieve eternal life” then it’s a definition that most sects can agree with (and most sects will argue isn’t quite right or doesn’t go far enough) and will teach the person something reasonably accurate about Christians to the person looking up the word.
No, heddle, because you’re not allowing for those, for example, who think everybody’s saved regardless, or those who think that it’s works rather than faith that matter, or those who don’t believe in an eternal life at all. But keep digging if it makes you feel better. Note also that none of the actual dictionary definitions quoted so far matches yours- did you even perceive post 267?
Trying to define “Christian” with one minimal pithy definition is a hopeless endeavour; it’s like trying to define “French” in a way that’s consistent with the language, the nationality, the geography, the kissing and the cuisine, and ending up with “Likes Camembert”.
Stephen Wells,
‘s right–I am excluding some, because you can’t have a definition of Christian (or scientist) that doesn’t exclude some who claim to be Christians (or scientists).
If the majority Christian view was that everyone was saved, then that should be reflected in the primary definition. If the minority view is that salvation is by faith, then that should not be reflected. Simple as that.
So we’ve established your definition of Christian is inadequate; it does not describe Christians, only the majority of Christians.
Stephen Wells,
And this you find insightful? After I have said in every instance that it is impossible to find a definition that includes everyone?
Can you find a definition of scientist that includes everyone who claims to be a scientist? Of libertarian that includes everyone who claims to be a libertarian? Of a conservative that includes everyone who claims to be a conservative?
And yet, it reflects what the Pew research link @#248 strongly suggests is the case.
It might be stupid, but isn’t it also completely in accord with Calvinist theology? Faith is a gift by the grace of God; most people are not granted the gift of faith, and so do not have it. If people do not have something, they might not emphasize the importance of having it. Thus, people not being dogmatic about faith, and thinking — incorrectly, by your dogma — that faith is not in and of itself important; that one can achieve salvation without faith.
Yet, it seems to me, your wording — in emphasizing doctrine — specifically excludes large historical populations of people who have called themselves Christians. That’s unnecessarily ethnocentric and divisive.
Your wording would be fine for a short encyclopedia article emphasizing the various beliefs of mainstream Western Christianity, but I think this article would have to acknowledge the Churches of the East, and (admitted) splinter sects of Western Christianity.
So are you willing to change your primary definition in light of the links @#248?
heddle wrote:
Except that, as I’ve pointed out before, none of the criteria for determining othodoxy in those definitions was provided via a supposedly perfect god who was giving us instructions on how he wanted us to please him and avoid eternal damnation.
Or, in short: we would expect god to be totally unambiguous when eternal souls are on the line.
And you keep referring to dictionary definitions when I’ve provided you with several definitions which do not support your argument but do support a less strict criteria for being ‘Christian’. Please either provide dictionary definitions which do, or stop with that line of argument.
Owlmirror,
I would like to spend the time to understand that survey. I’m just amused–because I believe once on this blog I used that survey to argue how evangelicals are more tolerant than people give them credit for, and was roundly booed–and now I have pressure to defend it from the other direction! Go figure.
Seriously I have forgotten whatever details I knew–like what is another religion?–was Catholicism presented as another religion to the Protestants? I can’t remember.
Wowbagger OM,
I think we have reached diminishing returns. (Plus I have to go teach thermo in 15 minutes) But I would say two things: the first is that what you expect from God is irrelevant. You get what you get. You don’t get to say: we expect him to be unambiguous. Maybe he doesn’t feel like being unambiguous–what with all those parables. But that aside (and this one is entirely in just) maybe that’s why God chose Calvinism–instead of people whining about his book being ambiguous and all those lengthy appeals, etc he said: well who needs that? I’ll just pick ’em in advance. No muss, no fuss.
Since your god is imaginary until proved otherwise, it’s saying nothing anyway.
heddle wrote:
Agreed. I’ve only one more thing to add, and it relates to this:
If that’s the case, then, you don’t get to do determine who does or doesn’t qualify as Christian, because taking that approach means you therefore can’t know what God wants Christians to be. Maybe he’s happy to let anyone call themselves Christian; otherwise he’d have been more specific.
But yes, Calvinism does solve the problem of achieving salvation – well, for the Calvinists, at least. It certainly takes out the second-guessing.
Have fun with thermo.
Oh fuck off, heddle. You weren’t there with me, so how would you know? I observed multiple Protestant sects and except for the Baptists, there was virtually no talk of being saved or salvation through faith. The only time I felt like I was being mentally accosted within minutes was when I was at a Baptist church. I also remember how oddly fun the CCC meetings were that I went to as a slipping Christian. Nobody babbled about salvation; they just really liked to talk about Jesus and sing songs about him, even the YECs who were there. I suspect you are treating the zombie-talk and formalities that Protestants engage in during church services as evidence of their beliefs which I think would be a mistake.
I don’t remember that. Oh, well.
The people asked might have given different answers if they were actually in church. And if the questions were limited in being put to priests, ministers, pastors, and/or theologians, they might have gotten answers more in line with the specific theology; I don’t know.
I’m a bit surprised at your #239, which suggests that even the nonreligious and people of other religions — let alone Christian laypersons — would know and affirm a specific definition involving specific doctrine as being the “primary” definition of Christianity.
But the dictionary definitions @#267 strongly imply that the dogmatically doctrinal lost the definitional battle long ago.
Well, no muss or fuss that God might care about, at any rate. The thing about having an oubliette to drop people into is that once they’re dropped, you don’t have to think about them anymore.
Any thoughts on the story linked to @#257? Calvinist, or no?
aratina cage of the OM
By chance do you remember the words to any of the song you sung at CCC? Were they along the lines of “Jesus is splendiferous!” or did they, as I suspect, talk about salvation and faith and grace?
What formalities? Especially at a Baptist church? There is almost no liturgy at all. Singing and sermon is it. Baptists don’t even like creeds, which I think is a mistake.
Owlmirror,
Yikes, what a story. I can’t figure out what the message is, but is is pretty darn depressing (but still fascinating.) I think there are some definite Calvinist overtones.
heddle, no I don’t remember the words to the songs (I do remember plenty of hymns though). I’m sure some of them were all about faith and grace and salvation. The formalities I am thinking of are the group prayers, the creeds, the greetings, the communion, baptisms, and confirmations, you know, stuff where they all mumble something together. My point was that a great deal of the Christians I interacted with did not fuss about faith and salvation; faith was apparently not something they were worried about losing. Even in the sermons, knowing and doing the moral thing, doing good works per God’s teachings, was stressed much more often and was not denied.
Would it matter if they did?
Theological terms have rather more specific meanings than general ones, but the specific meaning may depend on the theology — or the theologian. The theological meanings of the words have to be taught along with the theology itself. If the words are just in a song, a singer or listener might interpret them by any definition at all, or just not bother interpreting them.
There are far too many songs out there whose lyrics, when examined carefully, are often vague word salad that just evokes emotions, or contains very oblique references — “American Pie”, anyone?
I’m not sure if there is a message, but I think its fascination is in its absolute rigor; the way that it sets the “rules” of the universe and makes clear what they are, and sticks to them throughout. One of the frustrations that atheists have with apologists is the rhetorical and presuppositional Calvinball that they play with words in defending their theology.
There’s more discussion of the story here.
Thanks for confirming my hunch.
Of course, as pointed out at the page I just linked to above, the story isn’t Christian at all — Jesus isn’t mentioned, and in the universe of the story, isn’t necessary for salvation. But the story is monotheistic, and doesn’t “feel” Muslim or Jewish or Catholic — there is no religious hierarchy, no priests or imams or rabbis that can intercede with God or provide any particular additional knowledge of God, no religious rituals or prohibitions or fasts or feasts or concepts of ritual purity and contamination. But there is a God, and angels (with Hebrew names, I note, and some of whom are “fallen”), and a heaven or hell that one enters immediately upon death, and resides there permanently.
It’s a monotheistic theology stripped of all ornament (which makes me think strongly of Protestantism), to its bare essentials, more or less, which in turn reminds me of all of religion summarized as “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind”.
As we see, there’s also something like grace as an undeserved gift, in the light from heaven that gives you that perfect love of God, but as the finale makes clear, not even loving God with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength and all your mind brings salvation — only God’s ineffable will does. Which is precisely what made me think of Calvinism.
Speaking of which, Sastra mentioned a while back that she has a Calvinist friend who is certain that he is damned, because he considers God to monstrous — “He doesn’t reject Calvinism, just God: therefore, he accepts that he’s not regenerated.”
Which I thought was theologically interesting, and reminded me of the general resignation of most people in the story to the near-certainty that they were bound for hell.
I’m certain that in that universe, hell would be my lot as well, as would be the case if Calvinism were true in this universe. But I suppose that’s hardly a surprise.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to watch the video yet, but when I saw this post I had to comment. I’m 14, and recently revealed that I was as an atheist. I have been raised in a heavily fundamentalist home, and have gone to church all of my life. For the last few years my personal beliefs and religious beliefs have been splitting and recently reached the point where I cannot reconcile them. This, coupled with continuing realization of the hypocrisies of religion is why I can now proudly say that I do not believe in god. Unfortunately my parents are still making me go to church even though I am an atheist.
Actually, in thinking about it, I think I have figured out what the message might be. Of course, I’m an atheist, so this reflects that perspective:
The message is what Ethan evangelizes; a plea for terminological consistency and honesty.
Words have meanings. We may argue over their definitions, but we do at least try to give reasons for why those words may have a different definitions in different cases.
And that goes for words used by theologians as well; words like “good” and “evil”; “just” and “unjust”; “kind” and “cruel”; “merciful” and “merciless”. These terms are descriptions of human actions and intents. Using them as presuppositional theological labels is inconsistent, and unfair.
The universe may be configured as you believe, with a God that made it, and a heaven and hell the destination for all who die. God may condemn most to hell and raise a few to heaven, for reasons having nothing to do with how those condemned or raised act.
We humans may have been “created” [in whatever sense that may mean] such that we cannot easily (or at all) by our own ability meet the terms of being permitted to enter heaven after death. But that lack of ability is no more “evil” or “depravity” or “sin” than our inability to see radio waves or x-rays, or hear infrasound or ultrasound, or taste or smell certain chemicals. If “evil” has any meaning that we can understand, it means something like causing intentional unnecessary harm to others [and I suppose each of those definitions can be argued over as well]. Not being able to have true faith in Jesus Christ, or not being able to love God, is not intentional, and does not harm other humans, and certainly cannot harm God.
And by the same reasoning, God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful. God may be the power that runs the universe, but whether the powerful are described as “good” or “evil” depends on how they behave towards those who are weaker — and everyone is by definition weaker than God, in the story, as in most theology.
God, and his will, may well be incomprehensible, but cannot consistently or with fairness be described as good.