Do you have religious trauma syndrome?

I don’t — my departure from religion was painless and occurred at a young age. But I know that many people experience great stress at leaving the faith.

Breaking out of a restrictive, mind-controlling religion is understandably a liberating experience. People report huge relief and some excitement about their new possibilities. Certain problems are over, such as trying to twist one’s thinking to believe irrational religious doctrines, handling enormous cognitive dissonance in order to get by in the ‘real world’ as well, and conforming to repressive codes of behavior. Finally leaving a restrictive religion can be a major personal accomplishment after trying to make it work and going through many cycles of guilt and confusion.

However, the challenges of leaving are daunting. For most people, the religious environment was a one-stop-shop for meeting all their major needs – social support, a coherent worldview, meaning and direction in life, structured activities, and emotional/spiritual satisfaction. Leaving the fold means multiple losses, including the loss of friends and family support at a crucial time of personal transition. Consequently, it is a very lonely ‘stressful life event’ – more so than others described on Axis IV in the DSM. For some people, depending on their personality and the details of their religious past, it may be possible to simply stop participating in religious services and activities and move on with life. But for many, leaving their religion means debilitating anxiety, depression, grief, and anger.

Next step: the day will come when religion itself will be recognized as a mental disorder, not just the effects of breaking away from it. You can find more about dealing with the trauma of escape at Marlene Winell’s site.

Ken Ham vs. Karl Giberson — should I care who wins?

Randall Stephens and Karl Giberson have written a book, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, which I haven’t read…but the NY Times has what appears to be a very balanced review. It’s premise is that evangelical Christianity has gone far astray, that within the evangelical stew there is a strong strain of anti-intellectualism and contempt for academia…it is not surprising that Uncle Karl would make note of that, given the way his own views were steadily squeezed out of BioLogos, the site he co-founded, as more literal-minded views took hold.

The reviewer makes the point, though, that evangelicals’ attitudes towards academia are more complicated than the authors make out: that in particular, there is a tendency for many Christians to make an exceptionally big deal out of degrees. Kent Hovind went to a fake college to get his Ph.D.; Jonathan Wells stumbled through a real graduate program to get a degree; Marcus Ross got his Ph.D. in Cretaceous paleontology so he’d have more credibility in his claims that the earth is less than ten thousand years old. I don’t think that really sinks Stephens’ and Giberson’s point, though — evangelical Christians love the mantle of authority that a Ph.D. gives, but despise the substance of it. A person with a doctorate is only revered as long as they reinforce their superstitious prejudices.

But I don’t find all this serious discussion of the book that interesting. What made me laugh was that both the book and the review have infuriated Ken Ham, one of the chief targets of the argument against these evangelical know-nothings. Oh, Ken Ham is spitting mad.

Recently, two AiG staff members reviewed a book entitled The Anointed, co-authored by a writer who is well known for compromising the pagan religion of millions of years and evolution with God’s infallible Word.

If you follow the creationist movement at all, one of the clear messages is that atheists like me might be the imps of Satan, but we’re mostly irrelevant to their concerns. We offer no serious temptations to Real Christians™. No, the real dangers are those heretics who still promise all of the good rewards of Christianity — eternal life, paradise, good buddy Jesus, that sort of thing — yet do so without demanding the rigors and trials of pure Biblical literalism and fundamentalism. They offer an easy route out of their specific sect, and the fear is that they will substantially erode the faithful away.

So Answers in Genesis will take an occasional contemptuous swipe at godless heathens like me, or even Richard Dawkins, but the real enemies and the real targets of their hatred are people like Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Compromisers. People who try to find a place for Jesus in evolution are especially wicked.

They also cannot comprehend atheism in the slightest, which is why we’ve been relegated to the status of “pagan religion”. Everything is a religion, from church service to lifestyle to beliefs, so everything is dealt with in a great grand act of projection.

Here’s how Answers in Genesis sees the world:

In our modern church today, there are many leaders who have compromised with the pagan religion of the day (i.e., evolution and millions of years—indeed, this really is today’s pagan religion to explain life without God). Sadly, many Christian leaders have been teaching generations in the church to accept this secular worldview and re-write God’s Word (particularly in Genesis) to fit with it.

Yes, as harsh as it might sound, today there are shepherds in the church who are also “wolves”—they have infiltrated the church with their destructive teaching. Now, I am not saying these wolves are not Christians—I suppose the term can fit Christians as well as non-Christians.

One such example is seen clearly in the writings of Dr. Karl Giberson. Until recently, he was a physics professor at Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts—probably leading many students astray about the Bible’s authority with his compromised teaching.

Gosh, I’m a little bit jealous — I wish Ken Ham saw me as just as dangerous as Karl Giberson. All I’d have to do is convert to liberal Christianity and start attending church regularly and…ack. No. Not going to happen, too high a price to pay.

Ken Ham and Georgia Purdom also ripped through the book and found errors. These are real errors and represent genuine problems in the scholarship behind Stephens’ and Giberson’s book (if Bill O’Reilly can get slammed for errors in details, then Karl Giberson should, too), but it’s amazing how petty the problems are.

This is a book that attempts to be a scholarly look at “unscholarly” Christian leaders of prominence in America. It is, after all, published by the prestigious Harvard Press. Yet we were surprised to find several mistakes in the introduction and first chapter alone—plus a generally snide tone that is unbecoming of a scholarly work. For example, the authors gave the wrong month for our Creation Museum’s opening (p. 11); they mistakenly claimed that Dr. James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, is a young-earth creationist (p. 19); the year given for the first “Back to Genesis” seminar is incorrect (p. 41); and the name of our daily radio program is incorrect (p. 11).

The biggest mistake there is the attribution of young earth creationism to Dobson, although to be fair, Dobson has been a murky wad of BS on the issue, and seems to me to be willing to take whatever objection to science is currently expedient and babble ignorantly about it. He does promote Hugh Ross, the old earth creationist, which indicates that if nothing else he lacks the ideological purity expected by AiG.

And the bottom line is that Ham cannot refute the major thrust of the Stephens/Giberson argument: the evangelical Christian attitude towards science is epitomized by their lionization of unlettered wacky yahoos like Ken Ham, Kent Hovind, and Eric Hovind, and that they’re willing to learn from people with Ph.D.s, like Philip Johnson for instance, only as far as they give them rationalizations for their dogma. This is what the NY Times says about that central issue, and Ham can’t dispute it.

Many evangelicals, Randall J. Stephens and Karl W. Giberson say, get their information on dinosaurs and fossils from Ken Ham, an Australian with a bachelor’s degree from the Queensland Institute of Technology. Ham believes human reason should confirm the Bible rather than reinterpret it, and teaches that God created the world a few thousand years ago. His ministry, “Answers in Genesis,” includes a radio program broadcast over more than 1,000 stations, a magazine with a circulation of 70,000 and the ­multimillion-dollar Creation Museum in Kentucky. While other evangelicals — for example Francis Collins, the born-again Christian who runs the National Institutes of Health — offer more nuanced perspectives on science’s relationship to the Bible, Ham commands a far larger audience.

It’s entirely true that Answers in Genesis is the most popular creationist organization in the US (he won’t argue with that), and it’s also entirely true that he’s an ignoramus with minimal education in biology. Not mentioned is that, without concern for what letters he has or doesn’t have after his name, he gets all the science wrong, misrepresents the evidence, and willingly confesses that he’s irredeemably shackled to a book of dogma. Yet his is the voice evangelical Christians choose to listen to. And if they don’t like him, they turn to Eric Hovind, another moron for Jesus, or his jailbird daddy, Kent Hovind.

To be fair, they’re stuck in a hard place. I disagree that Collins is more nuanced — he’s just as loony on Christianity as Ken Ham — but that’s the Christian problem. Ultimately, all of the paladins of faith are forced to defend Christianity, which is antique ooga-booga bullshit on toast. When all of your choices are eye-buggingly batty, you can’t use reason to decide among them any more.

Why I am an atheist – Krio Gnosz

I grew up in a rural area of Finland and went to a tiny school of about thirty pupils. As such, I now suppose their education methods could get away with being less than mainstream. Being only about seven to eight years old, we were taught Biblical stories as though they were the truth of what happened.

I was a personality that would find the thought of a perfect, just, omnipotent authority appealing. Being an obedient, yet ingratiating child I strove to act polite and hide my flaws from God in an effort to appease him. All in a very similar manner to my faith in Santa Claus. However, I also had a very absolute sense of morality. Since the Christian stories that I had heard taught that even a malicious thought is a sin, I figured that I was not in control of my own sinfulness. A person would be sent to either Heaven or Hell according to their sins. This made me panic, since I would have to live my entire life in constant fear of a divine punishment that might not even be fair. Normally, I would disguise my misdeeds and pretend to be nothing but pure of thought… but how could I even attempt to disguise and pretend in front of an omnipotent, omniscient God?

One day, I finally broke in tears due to this sense of insecurity. My father asked what was wrong, and I opened up to him. What he said to me afterwards was nothing short of comforting as hell. Something along the lines of “There are thousands of religions on this planet, many of which promise eternal comfort and threaten with eternal agony. And everybody believes theirs is the right one. Christianity just happens to be dominant in this particular country, so take it easy, you are not bound to anything.” This did not make me truly atheist, though. I just mentally told God, “Well, it seems that despite all your greatness, you haven’t provided me with any proof that you exist. So I’ll continue to live my life without you. No hard feelings, but you can’t expect me to have faith in you when you don’t give me a proper reason to do so.”

There was a subsequent chapter of my life where I was, in fact, fundamentalist… in a very special way. Although it is rather hilarious and would make this story much more entertaining, it’s also so incredibly embarrassing that I don’t quite feel ready to disclose it, even anonymously. Let’s just say that I was extremely devoted and routinely exercised some serious fact-bending to justify my brand of religion.

Since having gotten over that phase, I was a live and let live -style nontheist. I figured that since there are so many people who are fervent believers in God, they must all have very good reasoning. As an outsider I couldn’t possibly know enough about their beliefs to criticize them. This changed when I started frequenting a certain forum on the Internet where certain posters in particular, who had received “orthodox upbringings”, were very vocal about what their religions ordered and forbade them to do. This opened my mind to the possibility that… maybe the human mind really can be so willfully illogical as to endlessly defend a mindset that has some serious flaws in it? After all, I had been through this too.

I finally got my hands on a copy of The End of Faith by Sam Harris upon skimming through a selection of books in an online library. At first, I thought the writer must have been some sort of radical. Yet his arguments, backed up by statistics as opposed to meandering pseudo-philosophy, were such a refreshing treat that I became a “radical” myself in my stance to religion. Eventually, my sister found my copy and mentioned that she had read a similar book too, by Richard Dawkins. And so on.

Krio Gnosz
Finland

Collaborators!

We’re on our way to Minneapolis this morning to conspire with a Skepchick, Kammy, on our plans for Convergence. It’s true: not only does it take 6 months of preparation to organize a kick-ass party at a SF convention, but FtB and Skepchicks are deeply in cahoots. You might really want to be in Bloomington in July for this one.

If you have event suggestions, too, they’re welcome. What do you want to see FtB and the Skepchicks do that would draw you out here (we already have 3 days of panels on science and skepticism, so don’t bother telling us to do that!)

Bishop labels file-sharing religion a ‘sham’

The Swedish government has formally recognized the Church of Kopimism, which considers information holy and uses copying as their sacrament. It’s rather silly, if you ask me, and I’d rather just get away from the nonsense of religion altogether, but it does have one virtue: it has inspired at least one crazy Christian to rage.

But Bishop Peter Ingham, head of the Catholic Diocese of Wollongong, said the move cheapens the value of ‘real’ religious organisations and labelled the group a ‘sham’.

"There should be some measuring stick against what you call religion," Bishop Ingham told ninemsn. "In my mind, if religion has nothing to do with God — or what people perceive to be God — then it’s a sham.

"It cheapens the currency of religion in general because [now] anything can be defined as a religion."

Right. I hear that there are some people who worship a dead man who they claim was a god! I hear that there are some people who think their god manifests as a cracker, so they eat him! I hear that there are some people who think that if you don’t dunk a baby’s head in a tub of water, it won’t go to heaven if it dies! Boy, there sure are a lot of silly beliefs out there that cheapen religion.

And that takes some doing. Religion is bottom-of-the-barrel garbage as it is.

And then he says this:

“It looks like it’s just a way of getting around the law of piracy and copyright. How could a religion promote illegal activity?”

Wait…isn’t it a tenet of the Christian faith that early in their history, they were intensely persecuted by the Romans? That the martyrs refused to obey the laws of the land and thus were executed? And wasn’t Jesus himself executed for his rabble-rousing disobedience? How self-unaware are these guys?

Does he consider the current events in Nigeria to be an example of a religion promoting a legal activity?

Glorifying god’s name

In Nigeria, an Islamic group called Boko Haram has been murdering their Christian compatriots in an effort to drive the Christians out of northern Nigeria. The details are sordid; automatic rifles, bombs, unarmed citizens gunned down en masse, churches being blown up, more than 500 killed in total.

But there is a theme, and it’s a telling one.

Witnesses said gunmen burst into the hall and shouted "God is great" as they opened fire.

“Gunmen who are, from all indications, members of Boko Haram came in large numbers and have encircled police headquarters. They chanted ‘Allahu Akbar’ [God is Great] and fired indiscriminately,” a resident told AFP.

God is a self-righteous delusion in the heads of believers that justifies terror and death.

God is not great.

God seems to be more on the level of a conscienceless thug with a gun.

Why I am an atheist – Tony Moss

I was a devout Catholic. I believed. I believed in literal transubstantiation, I belived in Hell, I believed in the Virgin Mary, I believed in Adam and Bloody Eve and the damned Deluge! I was, I suppose, a victim of the phenomenon put forward by Dawkins in which adults tell you, in a serious voice, that something is literally true and you have a tendency to believe them.
When the priest said “let us pray” I really did, and a friend of mine in the pew next to me used to pray with an incredible intensity that made me envious. So what happened? Very basically I left my childhood.

The questioning that is customary in one’s teenage years led to me to realise the absurdity of some of the propositions. For instance the creation story was completely incompatible with evolution which living in England was considered science and not some infernal little secret. But the one thing that really led me to seriously question my pre-pubescent faith was the utter ridiculousness of the notion of an all loving, all forgiving father who would let you burn forever if you didn’t believe. I began to be exposed to the mental gymnastics of Catholic theologians who attempted to explain away quandaries like “what about people who never heard of Jesus?” and “what about babies who die before they get baptised?”. It was also revealing to me that the age of your confirmation at which you declare, before the Church, that you as an adult of sound mind accept the teachings of the Catholic faith and are baptised again as a permanent member of the Church began to diminish from fourteen (!) to eight (!!). What sort of eight year old could possibly be ready to declare their eternity? The cynic in me might suggest that this rewinding age of responsibility might go some way to explain the disgusting scandals that have plagued the church in recent years.

For years I struggled with faith (the imagery of eternal damnation is horrible enough to resonate with a young adult and I’m not ashamed to admit that the main motivation of my flirtation with Catholicism in my older years was fear) eventually settling on what I thought was a reasonable position of agnosticism. Then I read The God Delusion. Dawkins’ description of himself on his scale of belief seemed to gel perfectly with what I was. I didn’t believe and hadn’t for decades! I was a de-facto atheist, and because of stupid religious apologism I never realised it.

To put this in perspective the bulk of my catholic teaching came from my public Catholic school. My family were fairly liberal. My dad is a nominal Anglican protestent to whom Sundays were an excellent opportunity to sleep in. My mother describes herself as Catholic but her statement on belief is “I think that there’s something….”. Her mother was the daughter of Irish catholics and while being very devout she indicated she did believe in reincarnation. I think the liberal nature of my family’s beliefs can be summed up in the female members’ reaction to one of my cousin’s neighbours, a gay couple:

“It’s such a shame that those to are gay isn’t it? They’re both GORGEOUS!”

Imagine then the struggles facing an atheist brought up in a truly devout or dare I say fanatical household. I had it easy.

Tony Moss
United Kingdom

Creationist math and accounting

It took me a moment to figure out what the heck Answers in Genesis was banging on about. In this bizarre article, AiG says the Galileo wondered why pumps could only move water upwards about 32 feet in 1630, meanders through random technological innovations, and ends up with Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone, and then they do some higher math and figure out that 1875 – 1630 = 245 years.

Are you as baffled as I am yet?

Then they say that in their imaginary Biblical chronology, there was 1600 years between Adam and Eve and the Flood. 1600 > 245, therefore the Ark is plausible.

Riiiiiight.

Well, gosh, I think 1600 is a lot bigger than 245. If 245 years was enough to inevitably lead from mining pumps to electromagnetism and world-wide communications, then I think 1600 years was enough to go from fruit-picking to starships, therefore we ought to look for the wreckage of Noah’s Ark on the largest mountain of any habitable planet in orbit around Alpha Centauri. That makes about as much sense to me.

Hey, also, if I found a quarter on the sidewalk this afternoon, two years is more than enough time for a dynamic, brilliant organization like AiG to raise $25 million to build their fake boat. So how come their fundraising is stalled out at $5 million, and they’ve had to delay and delay and delay their groundbreaking?

(Also on Sb)