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“Of course we need the concept of hell.  Do you really think that someone should be able to murder someone else and get away with it?  Well, without hell, they’re never going to get punished if they don’t get caught; and even if they do get caught, they may not get punished enough.  Is that justice?”

The response I usually give to that common Christian argument is that, for most Christians, what you do doesn’t really matter.  What matters is what you believe.  In the world of Christianity, you can be a Jeffrey Dahmer or even a Ted Bundy…and if you ask God for forgiveness before you die, you’ll spend eternity in bliss.  Why?  Because the most awesomely perfect innocent guy who ever existed got punished instead.  Right.  OK.  And you’re lecturing me on justice?  What kind of justice is that?  Honestly?  That’s outrageous.  I mean, if you start out saying hell is necessary for justice and then turn around and say that your own moral system depends on an innocent man suffering for the very worst evils of the worst people in history so they could spend eternity in heaven…um, you’re a bit off, to put it mildly.

But there’s possibly a deeper problem here, I think, in the fact that here in the United States, the most religious western country in the world, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.  The HIGHEST.  That’s right.  Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, China, Cuba, etc., etc., etc…..amateurs.  We outdo them in the number of people who we imprison by a wide margin — we have about 40% more incarcerated per capita than Cuba, the country in second place.  It’s absolutely extraordinary.

And yet, when you talk to people, it’s almost as if they don’t think we’re actually getting the job done unless we incarcerate even more people.  It’s an amazingly vindictive attitude that we have here in the United States.

Lemme give you an example.  I watched a documentary last night about Judge Ciavarella, who was accused of sending kids to a for-profit juvenile detention center for a cut of the check the detention center got from each kid sent there.  The children got taken to trial at 12, 13 years old.  Oftentimes, their parents were discouraged from bringing in an attorney.  The trials themselves were closed to the public (purportedly to protect the children).  Parent after parent told stories of taking their kid in thinking the kid would get a slap on the wrist, or maybe a week or two in a detention center.  They thought the judge would carefully look over the facts of the case.  They weren’t bad kids, to hear the parents or kids talk.  They just made mistakes here and there — maybe got caught drinking, or making a spoof MySpace page of their vice principal, or even jumping over a cafeteria table.

But Ciavarella looked down from his intimidating seat as judge, glared over his glasses, and condemned kids right there in front of their parents to sentences of three, four, five years for minor offences in the stunning space of 60 seconds or less.  The shocked kid was shackled in front of the screaming parents and taken to a detention center where they were locked in a dirty detention center, in a cell for most of the day, every day, suddenly, for the next several years.

They unsurprisingly come out, often, with severe PTSD, health problems, depression leading to suicide, repeated worse offenses (due to the lifestyle learned in jail), and thoroughly ruined lives.  Interviewed parents frequently cried that their children weren’t the same.

But here’s the thing — Ciavarella was giving these sentences out before he began allegedly accepting bribes (and the evidence indicates that the “bribes” probably weren’t quite that).  And the people in his district KNEW about it and LOVED him for it.  People in the county were urging and rallying for harsher punishments for kids who acted up in school, and Ciavarella, their instrument of justice, delivered.  Before, when you threw a spitball, you got sent to the principle’s office and maybe got a couple weeks of suspension.  In Ciavarelli’s jurisdiction, if you threw a spitball, you went to a juvenile detention center for three to four years and had to come out of your key developmental years after that and somehow put your life back together.

And everyone not in a detention center loved it.  Served those kids right.  Deserved to be put away for being troublemakers.  Knowing my audience, several of you may be thinking that, too.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SPeTJ1I_hc[/youtube]

But here’s the disturbing thing:  What good does that serve the kid?  I mean, the kid is going to come out a worse criminal.  He or she will likely have their education ruined.  There will be ripple effects of pain throughout the family’s sadness.  Locking the child up will not make him or her a better person, in most cases.

Likely, you probably know this.  And perhaps you don’t care.  Why?  Because the kid deserves what he or she got.  There are some people who seem so insistent on this point that I am not in the least surprised when someone says that such children should go to prison for life for a spitball.

Which is weird and downright strange, because no other country really has this problem.  I mean, this country’s incarceration rate for those under 18 is FIVE times higher than that of any other country in the world, according to a citation of Amnesty International at the end of the Kids For Cash documentary.  What is going on?  Why are so many going to prison, and why are so many of us cool with it and cheering for more to be locked up behind bars?

It’s almost as if people have three hardwired premises.  One is that if you do something wrong, nothing you experience will adequately make up for that thing you did wrong.  A second is that the goal for people — especially those we label as “bad” — is not rehabilitation, but retribution and punishment; we can’t have all of this coddling when people do something bad, because they need to SUFFER for the bad that they did.  A third is that they CHOOSE their punishment.  Punishment for the wrong deed is never the fault of the system of law, and only the fault of the offender.

Where did we learn these principles?  Why do they seem so hardwired in the American psyche?

…all these beliefs, on a major scale in the United States, are preached from childhood to adulthood.

In church.

Seriously, I think that’s the issue.  When I talk to people about hell, they are taken aback when I don’t take these three beliefs for granted.  Really, seriously taken aback, and at times fairly dismissive.  Christians almost invariably accuse me of being intellectually dishonest.  It’s truly eye-opening, in discussing the concept of hell with Christians, how sure they seem to be that the analogy of hell is the way things are supposed to work in our justice system.

Many Americans don’t really seem to care if the prisoners will get better.  They care about whether the prisoners are punished.

Because the procedures don’t work.  Now, it’s pretty hard to compare crimes between countries, due to different laws.  But one thing is universal:  Homicides.  Those are the closest we can come to a definition of crime all the countries agree on.  And the United States homicide rate is 5.2 out of 100,000.  That doesn’t sound too bad…until you realize that in Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Italy, Austria, France, Australia, and several others, the homicide rate is about 1 out of 100,000 as of 2012.   And yet we have an incarceration rate of 716 per 100,000 — again, the highest in the world (second place is Cuba, with a rate of 520 per 100,000).  And if you break it up by state, 12 of the states in 1-14th place are in the religious South. In fact, taking a closer look, 8 out of 10 of the most religious states in the United States are in those 12 states with the highest incarceration rate (Utah is Mormon, so it almost doesn’t count with its theology, and Tennessee is in 19th place).  The most religious state, Mississippi, is second place in incarceration, with 1,155 incarcerated per 100,000…which is more than twice the incarceration rate of that of the country with the second highest incarceration rate in the world (for scale, that’s more than 1 in 100 people — which is a lot of incarcerations).  Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate, is the fourth most religious state in the nation (and also has the fifth highest violent crime rate in the United States — maybe the incarceration isn’t doing the job).  By contrast, in the 14 states with the smallest incarceration rate, you’ll find 7 of the 10 least religious states (Connecticut and Oregon are in 18th and 19th place, and Nevada — home of Reno and Las Vegas — unsurprisingly has the 20th highest incarceration rate…but it’s still lower than those of any of the ten most religious states, save Utah).

I know that correlation doesn’t equal causation…but it makes an awful lot of sense.  And again, the high incarceration rates aren’t really ending crime, it seems.  Our homicide rate is still nearly the highest among developed countries.

This phenomenon, I think, exposes an importance in breaking up the logic of hell in the United States that seems to be ruining so many lives.

Instead of thinking that prisoners deserve whatever punishment they get, so that anything they don’t get is undue grace, maybe we can think about the importance of deterring certain crimes, so that the focus is more on prevention than on punishment.  Doing so may require turning away from conservative Christian thinking that sin deserves infinite punishment and that anything less than that is grace.  It may require us to forget about punishment and the murky concept of what people deserve and think about deterrence. A switch to thinking about how we can effectively deter crime, instead of about how to punish criminals.  The justice of hell is not interested in deterrence as much as punishment — if we do away with punishment and try to focus on deterrence, we may find that — surprise — we actually have less crime, especially if we see that the prisons and detention centers that we currently have contain conditions that encourage crime.  And trying to deter crime will also make us concerned about how prisoners are treated, perhaps, so that we prepare them better to succeed in society.

Instead of having the mentality that “you choose to go to hell/prison,” perhaps we can start thinking about what people are actually after.  Most criminals don’t choose prison time — they chose the benefits they anticipated from whatever activity they were participating in.  We can take a step back and look at that benefit to determine whether its fulfillment would cause more overall harm than benefit.  If does cause more overall harm, we can go back to the discussion in the previous paragraph and deter it.  If it does not, then we can stop assuming the choice to partake in that activity is a choice to go to prison, and let people do it because there is more benefit than harm in doing so.  If individuals find that they want to change their behavior but don’t have the ability to (with drug addiction, for example), we can simply give them treatment that is looking out for their best interests, because that’s what makes sense.

People may say, “But that will cause money!”  Yes.  Yes it will.  But prisons are pretty expensive, already.  I mean, they’re so expensive that the state of Utah has found it less expensive to give the homeless housing and  a caseworker than to put homeless people in jail (note that Utah was the only one of the top ten religious states that wasn’t high on the incarceration rate list).  The average prison cost per inmate is about $31, 000 a year — for often terrible conditions.  Imagine spending that money helping the people, instead, getting on their feet.

Well, you don’t quite have to imagine it.

Let’s travel to Norway.  According to a 2010 poll taken by the European Commission (on page 381), only 22% of people in Norway believe in God.  44 believe in a spirit or life force, 29% don’t believe in a spirit, God, or life force, and 5% say they don’t know.  Anyways, Norway has a prison called “Halden.”  It’s a maximum security prison — where you would put your murderers and others who have done terrible crimes.  Here is an overview of it on YouTube:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4beUC3-ckw[/youtube]

Here are some descriptions from the write up of the prison in Time magazine (taken from here):

To ease the psychological burdens of imprisonment, the planners at Halden spent roughly $1 million on paintings, photography and light installations. According to a prison informational pamphlet, this mural by Norwegian graffiti artist Dolk “brings a touch of humor to a rather controlled space.” Officials hope the art — along with creative outlets like drawing classes and wood workshops — will give inmates “a sense of being taken seriously.”

The maximum sentence in Norway, even for murder, is 21 years. Since most inmates will eventually return to society, prisons mimic the outside world as much as possible to prepare them for freedom. At Halden, rooms include en-suite bathrooms with ceramic tiles, mini-fridges and flat-screen TVs. 

Every 10 to 12 cells share a kitchen and living room, where prisoners prepare their evening meals and relax after a day of work. None of the windows at Halden have bars. 

Security guards organize activities from 8:00 in the morning until 8:00 in the evening. It’s a chance for inmates to pick up a new hobby, but it’s also a part of the prison’s dynamic security strategy: occupied prisoners are less likely to lash out at guards and one another. Inmates can shoot hoops on [a] basketball court [that] absorbs falls on impact, and make use of a rock-climbing wall, jogging trails and a soccer field.

There’s also a recording studio with a professional mixing board. In-house music teachers — who refer to the inmates as “pupils,” never “prisoners” — work with their charges on piano, guitar, bongos and more. Three members of Halden’s security-guard chorus recently competed on Norway’s version of American Idol. They hope to produce the prison’s first musical — starring inmates — later [in 2010].

Halden’s architects preserved trees across the 75-acre site to obscure the 20-ft.-high security wall that surrounds the perimeter, in order to minimize the institutional feel and, in the words of one architect, to “let the inmates see all of the seasons.” Benches and stone chessboards dot this jogging trail.

Halden hired an interior decorator who used 18 different colors to create a sense of variety and stimulate various moods. A calming shade of green creates a soothing atmosphere in the cells, while a vivid orange brings energy to the library and other working areas. A two-bedroom guesthouse, where inmates can host their families overnight, includes a conjugal room painted a fiery red.

Norway’s prison guards undergo two years of training at an officers’ academy and enjoy an elevated status compared with their peers in the U.S. and Britain. Their official job description says they must motivate the inmate “so that his sentence is as meaningful, enlightening and rehabilitating as possible,” so they frequently eat meals and play sports with prisoners.

To help inmates develop routines and to reduce the monotony of confinement, designers spread Halden’s living quarters, work areas and activity centers across the prison grounds. In this “kitchen laboratory,” inmates learn the basics of nutrition and cooking. On a recent afternoon, homemade orange sorbet and slices of tropical fruit lined the table. Prisoners can take courses that will prepare them for careers as caterers, chefs and waiters.

It’s amazing, to put it mildly.  Just jaw-droppingly ornate.  Not all prisons are like this, of course.  However, as Time magazine reports:

Thirty-six percent of prison places in Norway, including all of those at Bastoy, are classified as low-security. With perks like unlimited phone calls and up to four days of leave per month, they act as inducements for good behavior elsewhere: inmates at high-security prisons can apply for transfer at any time, and authorities are legally obliged to consider transferring them during the final year of their sentence. And while the conditions at Norway’s 52 prisons vary, even the strictest facilities stress rehabilitation over retribution. The maximum sentence, even for murder, is just 21 years. “At some point in the future, these men will live in the community,” says Knut Storberget, Minister of Justice and the Police. “If you want to reduce crime, you have to do something other than putting them in prison and locking the door.”

And does it work?  Well, remember the US homicide rate of 5 per 100,000?  Norway is at .6 per 500,000.  But the prisoners would all be rushing into the prisons, right?  Well, remember how the Mississippi rate of incarceration was 1,155 per 100,000?  In Norway, the same chart shows it as 72 per 100,000.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-xJKVo78-4[/youtube]

Now, you can say that it’s a different environment, that it’s like comparing apples to oranges.  And it is.  Vastly different cultures.  And we are so used to thinking that prisoners will take advantage of luxuries we give them that, here in the US, doing these reforms tomorrow would turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.  People would also be furious that criminals weren’t punished and were instead respected as human beings.  You might even be furious at the prisoners of Norway at this point.  So, for those and many other reasons, Norway’s solution doesn’t seem workable in the United States right now.

But if the goal is not to say what people deserve, but, rather, what can help people live dignified lives; if the goal is to deter the actions that create harm in society as opposed to punishing individuals; if we can see the criminal as not choosing prison when they commit their acts, and thus be self-critical of our own justice system and strategize to determine win-win situations consistent with the prisoner’s choice and the public’s safety…then we may have a shot at getting closer to where Norway is right now.  I doubt I’ll see it in my lifetime, but I’d like to help us get there.

Getting there will require us to get rid of the concept that people deserve eternal punishment for any wrong they do, and that anything less than that is grace from the justice system.  It will also require us to dispose of the concept that it is just to punish retributively instead of seeing if a kinder, more respectful approach that recognizes dignity in those who break the law is potentially more effective at reducing overall harm.  Finally, this change will require us to be critical of those who enforce the law — making sure they are making society better for all involved instead of seeing those who do wrong as “choosing” whatever fate they assign them, without examining this fate.

And that starts with pulling out of the American psyche the linchpin that so many are taught from childhood, especially in states in which the incarceration rate is highest — the concept of the Christian hell.  We need to stop believing it, stop preaching it, and stop teaching it to the next generation. That’s not the last step, but it seems a needed first step for us to stop incarcerating America.

 

The Suspicion

Have you ever read the Gospels and wondered, “I wonder if whoever this came from was high when they thought of that?”

I have.  Like, for example, there’s the part where he says, “If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to him the other also.”  It sounds nice.  But nobody follows it, because it’s ridiculous.  I’ve yet to find a Christian that will happily take an insult that way.

But it is just the thing I’d be able to imagine some guy saying, chilling with his buddies, smoking a blunt, and just letting the fumes take over his mind as he’s sitting back saying things like, “Love your enemies, man, do good to them, and give to them without expecting, like, anything back, man.  Yeah…” as he takes another long drag, looks down at the blunt and meditatively muses “consider the lilies….”

I can see it.  So I was curious about it this evening.  What was the likelihood that Jesus, if he existed, got high?

It’s actually pretty high, according to some.  I mean, we know, already, that Jesus was prone to endorsing mind-altering states. His first miracle, famously, was turning water into wine after the guests had had a lot to drink.  Apologists try to point out that, in context, the wine was actually not that potent.  I suppose that’s possible.  But I also suppose it’s possible was just, y’know, wine.  Jesus made it, and all the book says is that it was good; it doesn’t specify the alcohol content.

Anyways, there was that other really trippy experience in the desert.  Forty days and forty nights without food or drink.  That could make any human being see things, and Jesus (again, if he existed) did  — he saw Satan, who took him to the top of the temple and showed him the entire world, asked him to turn stones into bread, and asked him to bow down to him.  Then at the end of it, these angels came and ministered to Jesus.

Is it just me, or does that sound like a really bad psychedelic trip?  I mean, think about the credibility.  Was anyone else there? No.  You had to just take Jesus’s (or whoever  made him up’s) word for it that this story happened.  I mean, if my buddy said this, the question would, at the very least, occur to me…especially if he seemed sincere.  Was there any chance, any at all, that he was high?

And the answer, apparently, is yes.

 

The Chances That Jesus (If He Existed) Got High Are Pretty High

According to a couple articles I read, a primary ingredient used in anointing oil may have been cannabis, which was growing wild in Jesus’ area at the time.  It’s a bit of a controversial point, but it seems to be a strong possibility.

And it has a lot of explanatory power, if you think about it.  A lot of the sick people in the New Testament were magically healed after they had this cannabis-oil poured on them.  The Bible also speaks of the disciples being anointed with this cannabis oil.  And cannabis can have its effects when absorbed through the skin.  So if you poor cannabis-oil on someone, you could literally make them high.

Suddenly, it seems, the miracles begin to, possibly, make a lot more sense.

Turns out there’s a small field in this subject.  Looking around on the net, I found that the idea was popularized by Chris Bennett in an article called “Was Jesus a Stoner?” that was written in 2002.  Now, if you go to that site, you’ll see that, to put it mildly, it’s a bit biased — the site is called High Times.  Not exactly the most reliable…but the article does rely, in part, on the research of a Carl P. Ruck, who is a professor of classical mythology at the respected Boston University, and he has impeccable credentials.  The part of the article that discusses Ruck’s opinion is so interesting I couldn’t help but just quote it for you, quickly, below:

Carl P. Ruck, the scholar who coined the term “entheogen,” is a professor of classical mythology at Boston University, and has researched the history of psychoactive substances in religion for over three decades, working with such luminaries as the father of LSD, Albert Hoffman; entheobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, and mycologist R. Gordon Wasson. On the subject of Old Testament cannabis use he explains:

“There can be little doubt about a role for cannabis in Judaic religion…. There is no way that so important a plant as a fiber source for textiles and nutritive oils and one so easy to grow would have gone unnoticed… the mere harvesting of it would have induced an entheogenic reaction.”

Ruck comments further on the continuation of this practice into the early Christian period: “Obviously the easy availability and long-established tradition of cannabis in early Judaism… would inevitably have included it in the [Christian] mixtures.”

Hmmmm….I thought.  This might actually be legit.  

So I looked up Dr. Carl P Ruck.  Turns out that he wrote an article entitled “Was There A Whiff Of Cannabis About Jesus?”  Here are a couple parts that stood out:

So, did Jesus use cannabis? I think so. The word Christ does mean “the anointed one” and Bennett contends that Christ was anointed with chrism, a cannabis-based oil, that caused his spiritual visions. The ancient recipe for this oil, recorded in Exodus, included over 9lb of flowering cannabis tops (known as kaneh-bosem in Hebrew), extracted into a hin (about 11 pints) of olive oil, with a variety of other herbs and spices. The mixture was used in anointing and fumigations that, significantly, allowed the priests and prophets to see and speak with Yahweh.

Residues of cannabis, moreover, have been detected in vessels from Judea and Egypt in a context indicating its medicinal, as well as visionary, use. Jesus is described by the apostle Mark as casting out demons and healing by the use of this holy chrism. Earlier, from the time of Moses until the later prophet Samuel, holy anointing oil was used by the shamanic Levite priesthood to receive the “revelations of the Lord”. The chosen ones were drenched in this potent cannabis oil.

Early Christian documents found in Eygpt, thought to be a more accurate record than the New Testament, portray Jesus as an ecstatic rebel sage who preached enlightenment through rituals involving magical plants.

In addition, wine itself often had hallucinogenic properties in those days, according to the article.  Ruck also states:

 Ancient wines were always fortified, like the “strong wine” of the Old Testament, with herbal additives: opium, datura, belladonna, mandrake and henbane. Common incenses, such as myrrh, ambergris and frankincense are psychotropic; the easy availability and long tradition of cannabis use would have seen it included in the mixtures.

So, remember the last supper?  it might have actually been a tale of people getting high….

Before, I was just messing around.  A bit of a joke.  But now that things were getting a bit more serious, I was more genuinely interested in whether this was legitimate.  This had gone from a joke I might mess around with among friends, to a real possibility that I might use in debates with apologists.  Because if Jesus was using cannabis in his healings…in my mind, that’s a very probable scientific explanation for some of the reactions that were experienced.

Maybe “Jesus” Wasn’t A Person — Just Another Word For Being High Off Mushrooms 

I kept digging. On Ruck’s page at Boston University, his highlighted book, Entheogens, Myth, and Human Consciousness, was written in 2013.  I checked it out.  I found it a bit melodramatic…in the beginning, the preface, a preacher named Rev. Richard Immanuel states the following:

We will not have to wait long to see consequences from this work, because the speed of the Internet is in place. The shock wave from this book will travel like a tsunami and will wash upon every shore where false temples have been built. The astounding collection of knowledge in these chapters contains the parallel impact of the revelation in Cosmology, that we see only one percent of what we call the Universe. Ninety-nine percent is invisible to us. The cosmological conundrum mirrors the metaphysical crisis of belief.

I told you it was melodramatic.  I cracked the book open.  It was a fascinating read.  It theorized that the “forbidden fruit” of the Bible was parallel to the Greek concept of the forbidden fruit of the tree…which was rooted in a mushroom.  Combined with other discussion about the dawn of consciousness in human beings being joined to human experimentation with altered mental states of drugs, the heavily hinted implication seems to be that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is, basically, a tale of people who took from the “fruit of the tree” — which was mushroom — and had a trippy experience.  And, to tell you the truth, that made a lot of sense to me (plus, it made me laugh).  I swear I’m not making this up.  Here, see for yourself in this hyperlinked free sample.

In addition, I found, in another book he wrote in 2011, on pages 151-152, that not only was the wine possibly containing psychedelic properties, but the bread eaten at the passover may have as well.  To paraphrase, Ruck discusses how the wine and bread were seen as connected to a deity in both pagan and Judaic circles, and it was easier to see it as connected to a deity if you added a little…inspiration to it.

And so now I had cannabis-laced oil that soaked through skin, possibly making the disciples, Jesus, and those he “healed” a bit high through the effects; some indication that the wine drunk may have had psychedelic properties; and some indication that the bread eaten at Passover  may have been laced with psychedelic properties (that last one, according to Ruck, actually happened as recently as 1956 in Yemen Passovers, as a continuance of a long tradition).  I also had a well-credentialed professor of that time period basically saying, “Yeah, Jesus probably got high every once in a while.”

And the implication hinted at here is that Jesus may have used the experience from the drugs to associate strong feelings with himself, as these feelings were usually associated with some spiritual deity.  As when Jesus said (in words that seem as if they would make more sense if he were high),  

“Very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise them up at the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.This is the bread that came down from heaven. Your ancestors ate manna and died, but whoever feeds on this bread will live forever.” (John 6:53-58)

And, I found, that wasn’t all.  A bit more digging revealed to me a book called The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross that was written in 1970 by John M. Allegro, who was a respected archaelogist and scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls…until he wrote that book and basically was laughed out of academia in reaction.  In the book, he states that — get this — Jesus never existed, and was instead was a code word to describe the experiences of a cult that used mushrooms to create their experiences.  So Jesus did not only get high in this thinking — he was, literally, the definition of “high.”  For this outrageous hypothesis he basically left before being fired from academia…however, others have more recently dug up this hypothesis.  One is John A. Rush, an instructor at Sierra College, a community college in Northern California.  Yeah, not impressive, but he revisits the discussion in this book and also discussed in an interview on YouTube here.  Also, Ruck seems to have endorsed the thesis in the reprint of the book that occurred in 2010. Less scholarly than either of these, it seems, is the uncredentialed Judith Anne Browne, daughter of Allegro, who tries to defend her father’s reputation by revisiting his thesis in John Marco Allegro: Maverick of the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Also passionate, but still not very scholarly, is a 2009 book by enthusiastic pagans Andrew Rutajit (who lives about an hour from me, in Dallas, Texas) and Jan Irvin called Astrotheology and Shamansim: Christianity’s Pagan Roots.  And that’s the tip of the iceberg; a search for “Jesus mushrooms” currently turns up 856, 000 hits.  If you want to read more, knock yourself out.

Wrapping It Up (No Pun Intended)

Although it may well be the case, I’m not completely sure that there’s enough evidence, yet, to conclude that Jesus was dreamed into being, as these proposers (and others, like Richard Carrier in a more probable theory) claim — although the burden of proof for that existence is definitely on the Christian.  But I do find that the theory that Jesus took psychedelic drugs and used cannabis-based oil in his “miracles” seems more probable than people walking on water, getting sight after being born blind, and a sane person saying some of the things Jesus said.  It’s definitely more probable that Jesus and the Disciples were high (maybe even when recording or relating past events to Gospel writers like John Mark?) than that the events happened.  And this goes on top of other problems individuals like respected scholar Bart Ehrman, Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has noted.

So next time you find you catch a Christian struggling with a scripture like “turn the other cheek” when they want to retaliate, or looking for a loophole where Jesus says, “give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you” and thus see how impractical such scriptures seem to be as they try to do interpretation gymnastics, maybe you can add your own interpretation.

“What if Jesus said that while high off a blunt?  Or Jesus never existed, and it was made up by some guys on psychedelics? Maybe you’re taking the whole thing too seriously.”

It’s much more probable than what’s in the book, right?  I mean, the whole thing kinda reads like a powerful trip, if you’re honest about it…IJS.

I can remember few times that I’ve been more nervous.

This was my last Bible Bowl…and I had a reputation to keep.  Everyone on my team was counting on me performing my end of the deal.

Context: I was homeschooled in the Quiverfull movement and never set foot in a school outside of the home until I began attending community college when 17.  It’s hard to overemphasize how much religion was at the center of our lives. Other high school students at the churches we attended over the years were serious about football, soccer, basketball, editing the school paper, climbing to the top of the local school’s population chain, and so on.  I did not have the opportunity nor, at the time, the strong desire to engage in such pursuits. My “sport” was the Bible Bowl  — because, as people who wanted to be devout Christians, it was hard to think of something that would be a more important activity than reading, studying, and living the Word of God.

We had two hour long Bible studies with mom almost every day.

We memorized at least 115 verses a year.  We studied and prayed fervently every day.

We looked forward every week to 6 am Saturday morning, when we would listen to Adventures in Odyssey and Focus on the Family broadcasts.

We went to week-long Bill Gothard Institute for Basic Life Training Seminars with family and friends in which we discussed arranged marriages, the evils of rock and roll music, and the importance of patriarchal authority.

We listened to Mennonite tapes as background on long car rides, and we frequently spent the half hour before church (which we attended at least four times a week, when you took all the Bible training into account) listening to what we thought was the highly insightful teaching of a Dallas preacher named Tony Evans.

We were a family of nine, because we fervently believed that children were a blessing from God  — but we were still a bit of an embarrassment in the Quiverfull community, which frequently had families of twelve or more members because of its beliefs on contraception.

At our church, which was predominantly filled with children who were not part of the Quiverfull movement, we stood out like a sore thumb,  the definition of a super-religious family.  Dad frequently taught a class on Sunday morning called The Family Class that was frequently fairly well attended because of that reputation.  People talked about us as a respectable family (if a little bit holier-than- thou, at times), and parents told their sons that they should be more like me; I was the definition, according to the talk of the church, of The Good Christian Kid.

And a major part of keeping that reputation up was in Bible Bowls.  I prepared for them for about an hour and a half a day because, at first, of Mom’s rather strong encouragement.  Every weekday, as part of my schoolwork, no matter what else was going on, including summer vacation, I would read for at least about 90 minutes.  It was a chore at times, but as the results came in, the victories became my own.  I began looking forward to it.  What could be more valuable, I thought, than studying the word of God?  What could be a better use of my time?  What a blessing it was!  And so her enthusiasm eventually was met and exceeded by my own.

Like an invested audience picking out the key players in a high school football team, people knew my name and discussed my reputation when I came into the Bible Bowl arena.  Old rivalries trashtalked me in good fun.  It was the time when I felt loved, wanted, and respected most at that age.  I felt a joy in contributing what I thought was healthy competition in learning about something larger than myself, for at the time I sincerely believed that the Bible was the Word of God.  And it went deeper than just reading; I really tried to get the words that I read in my heart and mind, too; I often had private prayer sessions with tears of joy and, at times, sorrow, and read the Bible every time I needed guidance or help in life — which was a lot.

Up to this point, I had been to 9 Bible Bowls at the high school level.  I had gotten fifth place twice, second place once (to my sister) and first place six times — more than any other Bible Bowler in Bible Bowl history (not to brag but, to the best of my knowledge, that record still hasn’t been broken).

This was the last Bible Bowl of my life because  I was 17 and about  to graduate from high school, which would disqualify me.

There were 80 questions.  They had begun to make the questions harder (which wasn’t difficult to do when the book of focus was 1 Kings — check out the temple details in chapters 6 and 7) because, according to the organizers, of how much our family was raising the bar, so I was nervous.  I was interested in God’s word, true, but I also didn’t want to let all that hard work go to waste or disappoint anyone, including myself.  And there were all the other kids trying hard to beat me — I knew I had to get all 80 questions right to win or miss no more than 1 question.  There was absolutely no room for error.  In previous Bible Bowls I had thought I’d studied the assigned book well, only to find that I missed the exact name of a minor character or something.  All it took was one small detail that I missed, and it was over.  I kept waiting for that question that would shatter my goal.

But this question…there was a technical element in it I couldn’t remember, and I got it wrong.  I was devastated.  Did one of my competitors get a perfect score?  It would be two days until the results would be announced on Easter Sunday.  So I waited, nervously, until the award ceremony that Sunday…

For the rest of my life I would be able to brag that I had that I had earned first place in seven out of ten Bible Bowl tournaments.  It felt like validation and earned acceptance, at the time — a beautiful moment I’ll never forget that often challenging, difficult time of my life.

_________________________________________

I wanted to be a preacher in those early teenage years because I fervently wanted to save the world from hell and thought that was the best way to do it — but then I took my sophomore level Critical Thinking (English 201) class and found a passion for challenging non-Christian professors.  That experience led me to decide to, instead be the Christian Force for God in the university, like the student challenging the “atheist” professor in the infamous movie God’s Not Dead (in ways that made me relate to that movie, even as an atheist).  However, years after that decision I made as a college freshman, while 28 and in a doctoral program in literature (yes, I’m still in it at the time of this writing), my doubts on Christianity were increasingly became convictions, until I finally made a decision to leave the religion.

That moment, a week before leading a Bible Study in Christian Apologetics that was based on Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project (a follow up to an earlier study I had initiated based on Tim Keller’s The Reason For God video series), I saw clearly that all the fighting I had done to be the Force for God in the university couldn’t be honestly kept up.  I had been wrong about religion the whole time.  Extremely wrong.  I had wanted so desperately to cling to Christianity that by the time I left there was no choice, really, BUT to leave — there was nothing of substance in the religion that I valued enough to remotely respect it.  I had explored alternatives to the Christianity that I had grown up with and found they usually still didn’t solve my basic problems with the text; I had tried exploring a more postmodern Christian approach and found the metaphors it strenuously applied to the secular world unnecessary and cumbersome — in addition, interpreting the Bible through such an extremely non-literal lens seemed somehow dishonest to me.

So I left.  Angrily, loudly left.  And all the scriptures that I had lived for for so long, all the status I had cultivated as the “good kid” that was now attached to a late-twenties body, instantly was turned against me by the very people who had rubber stamped my reputation before. I began to fight back hesitantly at first, because I thought doing so was selfish and gratuitously narcissistic…

But then I read the thousands of stories like mine in places like NoLongerQuivering, Dawkins’ Convert’s Corner, and ExChristian.net., and found that the when people expressed their stories they were often being very helpful to me, and that anger at Christianity is a strong in-person response that is somewhat healthy and needs to be articulated.  The more I saw the need, the more compelled I become about expressing that history and its results,

Those years were not a waste of life.  I loved others, and they loved me, and they understood me and I understood them in profound, valuable ways that I’ll carry with me until the day I die.

Maybe this will illustrate the point — the other day, my mom and I were talking.  Now, there are a lot of trophies at home from all those Bible Bowls I won back in the day.  They all occupy a shelf over at my parents’ place, and, as I’m 31 now, they’ve been there for awhile, collecting dust.  She asked me if it was OK if she threw them away.

My answer?  “No Way!  That was my high school.”

There was no way I was going to forget all those years and experiences that have made me who I am today.  There was no way I was not going to recognize the effort it took for me to know the Bible well enough to leave Christianity and to communicate with Christians today, no way I was going to forget what those experiences taught me about what it was like to be a devout Christian — the sense of bliss one feels, along with the sense of angst.  I know what it feels like, to a major extent, to be embarrassed at James Dobson, to hang my head in shame at ever following Bill Gothard, to experience the joy of being deeply devoted to what I know is a fantasy.  And all those experiences, though they sadden me, also have given me an experience that connects and helps the experience of others; they also teach me to listen to myself and to avoid making unimpeachable heroes, valuable lessons that I carry with me today.

So…I said all that to say this:

I can’t say that the time I spent in religion was a waste of time.  It is what I make it.  Yesterday’s memory teaches you things about the way the world works, and that makes it valuable.

When I first left Christianity, I did, actually, get the sense that I wasted my life for 28 years.  But then again, I would have missed out on a lot of understanding.  I may wish the world were different than what it is, but the world IS what it is, and through my history I can communicate with, help, and bond with people who have had similar experiences.  And I can bond with other people who, also, understand my story.

I think I am not the only ex-Christian who felt he wasted his life, which indicates that there are many Christians out there who may be terrified that leaving religion is admitting your entire life was worthless.  But you’re the one, ultimately, who gives value to your life.  There’s no omnipotent, authoritative God, so far as I can see, giving anyone value.  It may sound restricting, but it’s also deeply freeing — any struggle you may have with religion is your struggle.  You don’t have to give it to God.  You can totally own that shit.  You can direct it.  You can claim the title of CEO of the value your experience holds to you.  It’s up to you how you decide to value your life, but my experience is that past experience — especially interpreted with improved knowledge — can teach us about ourselves and our experiences that may help others tremendously who are going through similar issues.

And you can also sit here and remember the beautiful times you experienced in your religion were real — you really had them.  Admittedly, I may be an extreme case in the United States, but I can still look back on some times fondly.  It wasn’t perfect, but I do see lessons I learn in reinterpreting my past that are valuable in my present and seem as though they will be valuable in my future — in addition to teaching me the discipline that needed to be connected to the seeking of a certain goal, there were other valuable things like the sense of camaraderie I felt, and in how good it felt to be accepted and loved and seen as someone who made a difference in people’s lives.  And the drive and joy one feels in feeling that you are making a positive impact on others. And that does, indeed, make me smile and want to pass that on to others, which makes it something that I very well may use for the remainder of my thinking life.

So when someone tells me that their time as a religious person was a waste of their lives, I wince.   The study of life that you engaged in during your religious past may have had flawed premises, but the raw data of what happen is always available for you to use.

You have a treasure chest of experiences, regardless of your past.  It may have been hard, and you may have been told lies, and you may wish it was different.  OK.  But do you really want to throw that away when there is so much for you to learn about the way the world works from those experiences?  You know more than you knew yesterday, but you know it because yesterday happened.  You suffered, but understanding that suffering and perhaps even the nuggets of joy within it can help you lessen the suffering of others.  You may think now that that past is a waste, but in using it to further the way you see your own journey and the way you help others, you might find uses even for the parts of your past — or especially for the parts of your past — that seem most flawed.  You don’t have to dwell on it and be stuck in the past — that’s not what I’m saying.  But you don’t have to throw all that raw data away, either — we can reinterpret it with new premises, using it to help others and ourselves.

So that’s why, for me, when someone says that my religious years were a meaningless waste of my life, I disagree.

Hopefully that makes sense.

 

 

If you’ve been paying attention remotely, you probably know that Richard Dawkins is the most prominent vocal atheist out there, by a long shot.  As I write this, his book The God Delusion is at, in various forms, places 1, 3, 5, and 10 in the “atheist” section of Amazon’s bestsellers list (which changes frequently, of course — but he tends to stay in the top ten), even though the book was written seven years ago.  Everything he says seems to polarize people; bloggers seem to pay attention to his Twitter feed like meteorologists do wind speeds.  So, it seems, people have looked at him as a major representative of atheist views.

But I don’t think it would be right to say that he is the face of atheism.  Because I’ve yet to find a monolithic definition of who atheists are, besides the fact that they don’t believe in God or gods.  Every time I’ve remotely touched on the subject, I keep bumping up against the fact that there are several differences in the way my atheism impacts my life, compared to the way atheism affects other people’s lives.  I’ve come to relate to other atheists, yes — but I’ve also come to see that calling my atheism, “my atheism” is a necessary clarification, oftentimes, when I’m talking about my lack of belief in God or gods — it’s not easily applicable to anyone else.  So I feel a little out of place when someone says “Richard Dawkins is the face of atheism,” because atheism’s impact on his life does not automatically seem to necessarily apply to the affect an atheistic stance has had on my life.  Even though I’m an atheist, I’m not Richard Dawkins and thus can’t, in many ways, relate to his specific position.

I mean, In spite of the media trying to say, occasionally, that he somehow is the face of my atheism, we don’t have a ton in common.  I mean, to start with, we actually look totally different. I swear; here, look:

I know it might be hard to tell us apart, but it’s true.  We’re two different people.  In case you didn’t notice, I’m not a white male who is a major figure in evolutionary biology, has written several bestselling books, and has lived in the ivory tower of privilege his whole life.  I’m in my thirties, not my seventies.  I’m black.  You can’t hear us now, but I don’t have anything even closely resembling a British Accent.  And I know relatively little about the evolutionary process – my deconversion was due more to philosophical problems with the biblical text, in addition to the unreliability of the Bible’s accounts and the fact that a lot of it didn’t mesh with practical experience.  Learning in biology had almost nothing to do with it.

In some ways — sure, I have a bit of respect for Richard Dawkins.  For one, I like his straightforward stance against religion.  But at the same time, I do think that when he discusses social issues and other elements within the realm of the humanities, he is, to put it mildly, at times a bit crude.  And, like other atheists, I hate being associated with that crudeness.

It’s not like I’m trying to get rid of Dawkins — like I said, I think he has some valuable things to say, as other people do.  But I don’t want to have that one perfect leader I follow or am thoroughly associated with, 24/7…when I was religious, I did that, and I don’t want to go back.

I guess I just want to be my own person.  I want things set up so that when people see me they see ME instead of automatically associating me with the New Atheists (or, for that matter, with anti-new-atheists like Greta Christina).  Yeah, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris had something  to do with my deconversion – just seeing them out there, speaking out against religion strongly, with occasional wit and brilliant rhetoric, was pretty helpful for me.  But beyond that, they they weren’t all that important to me.  I mean, if I wanted information on the reliability of scripture, I turned more to the likes of Bart Ehrman.  If I wanted information on philosophy, I turned to the likes of Jean Paul Sartre and Nietzsche.  If I wanted information on feminism, I found that Judith Butler and bell hooks had awesome things to say.  If I wanted to relate to a voice that reacted to the hypocrisy of white Christianity’s treatment of blacks in America, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and W.E.B. DuBois are examples of people who had my ear.  If I was struggling with figuring out dynamics of power in how religion worked, Michel Foucault seemed helpful. If I want a feminist perspective on an atheist issue I’ll check out Greta Christina, Rebecca Watson, or Sikivu Hutchinson. If I’m looking for a trans atheist perspective on an issue, I may take a look at Zinnia Jones or Dori Mooneyham.  And so on.

Your list may be different than my list, and that’s fine, because that’s not the point — the point is that neither Richard Dawkins, nor any of the four horsemen, has to define one’s break from Christianity or a continued irreligiousity — I got information, filtered it through my own calculus, and eventually found that the evidence seemed to point away from religion; so I left.  And to this day, I have yet to find any atheist I agree with on everything; I see myself as an individual with a unique set of social forces and interests working in me that have given me a unique perspective.

Part of this sense of authority I have over my perspective was nurtured in leaving religion, because when I left church I was kinda making a point out of leaving groupthink.  I had no desire to unthinkingly accept  or seek affiliation with another incarnation of church.  And, I’ve gathered, many other atheists are really insistent on this point – we didn’t, for the most part, leave to become devotees of a certain person.  Most of us atheists who were formerly religious left because our own circumstances, goals, desires, and standards of rationality – our own minds, our own sociological positions, and our own psychologies — ran directly counter to some aspect or another of religion’s groupthink.  Or at least, that’s what I hear.

I mean, let’s face it: When you have something as outrageous as the miracles in the Bible, for instance, or as preposterously cruel as the doctrine of hell, or as jaw-droppingly misogynistic as the Law of Moses or the Letters of Paul, or as slavery-supporting as Philemon – when you have something with a history of many dead and tortured bodies rubber-stamped by church-defining theologians like Aquinas and Augustine and Martin Luther and John Calvin who Christians revere to this day that could use the Bible as a rubber-stamp for the deeds – when you have as many incredible lies and failed promises made from pulpits week after week, and when you are so thoroughly and extremely wrong as most religions obviously are today – when you have all that, it should be no surprise when millions of people, from a wide spectrum of former religious beliefs and ideologies, a wide spectrum of experiences in the very different groups they identify with, and an stupefying variety of temperances and tendencies and preferences, come to the conclusion that your religion just isn’t working out for them and decide to unceremoniously break up.

We are different.  We aren’t all followers of one person.  We are our own people, and many of us don’t want to be trapped behind Dawkins Masks.  Or that of any other “atheist leader.”

So, someone might ask — if you have such a problem with being so thoroughly associated with Dawkins, why the hell are you talking about him?  Why not just ignore him?  Great question.  Basically, looking at the media and hearing how women and minorities are afraid to say they are atheists, I think the thought that we ARE associated with the likes of Richard Dawkins and company — inside and outside what’s commonly called the “atheist movement” — is what’s holding back people more people from leaving their religion.  Because, let’s face it – the demographics of atheism and agnosticism, in the United States at least (and probably other places as well), is mainly made up of white males.  No, I’m not saying that just because I’m black.  Look at the atheist/agnostic category below:

I’m NOT saying that white male atheists should quit being atheists; hopefully that’s obvious.  What I’m saying is that that’s not the face of atheism.  Richard Dawkins — and other white males — doesn’t represent the only reason someone might become an atheist, although the connotation that they do seems to have skewed atheist demographics tremendously.  Sam Harris (joking — as he later claimed to be — or not) was wrong when he said, “The atheist variable just has this—it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”  You don’t have to look like a white male or be in their position to be an atheist who is pissed off about religion — which is good news for people like Katha Politt, who said recently in The Nation after a tirade over the indiscreetly sexist remarks made by the likes of Dawkins and Harris, “Why would women join a movement led by sexists and populated by trolls? If this is atheism, I’m becoming a Catholic.” 

Here’s the deal:  If we want to make it more socially acceptable for people who aren’t white and male to become atheists, it is becoming increasingly clear that we are going to have to break out of the media’s monolithic image of what an atheist looks like, and perhaps the way to start is to stop listening to the media talking about people who are “the face of atheism” or “atheism’s leaders” as much, and try to listen to ourselves, even though it’s hard in a geographical locations in which we are saturated with stereotypes.  We have the freedom to effect change simply by enjoying the uniqueness and concerns of our own stories, and the reason why we, specifically, are not in favor of religion if we happen to be anti-theist — without feeling any obligation for our stories to smoothly mesh with anyone else’s.

And in being different, in telling your own stories, you may be surprised when the specificity of the story will allow other people who may not relate to Richard Dawkins to relate to where you’re coming from. For me, at times, I’ve even found comrades, in some instances, with religious people on fairly important issues.  For example, I despise religion, for the most part – but when Ferguson and Eric Garner was in the news and I saw that the predominantly white male population didn’t see the sense of being concerned about it, I was a fan of Cornel West, and of how he could inspire people – religious and non-religious alike – to fight to make the streets safer for myself and others to walk.  I can be an anti-theist when it comes to the contents of the Bible and the history of its use and the way con artist preachers line their pockets by preaching falsehoods and psychologically crippling the masses under their charge – and at the same time applaud Cornel West when he gets escorted to Jail for demanding justice for Eric Garner.  Because this is ultimately my story, and it has many facets; I can identify with each of them.  I don’t have to be one-dimensional or follow according to the beat of a certain drummer.  I can march to my own tune, and so can you.

Sometimes, though, you need to know that you’re not alone in who you are and how you want to help the world change.  And it’s entirely possible that you’ll find yourself in a demographic that, because of the current definition of what is commonly known as the “atheist community,” you may have difficulty finding it, even among your atheist peers.  Although my own experience of white atheists who are personal friends indicates that there are several white individuals who make a special effort to be socially conscious, I’ve been in enough online conversations to know that this is not the norm; many think I take my stance too far.  It can be discouraging – and not just for me; I’ve talked to several friends, of several races (yes, including white), who experience a similar frustration, a similar aloneness.

But the truth is that the world is that you can connect to people.  You can find camaraderie by cautiously joining group – finding ones that are near your area, on meetup, or that meet virtually.  There’s no law saying that you can’t occasionally cross ideological lines on one issue to help the world on another issue you feel passionately about.  And commentary on your views that are written by knowledgeable writers can provide you with ways to grant yourself a dignified, well articulated understanding in ways that weren’t available to you before the read..

Also, it seems very important to not be so distracted by what the supposed celebrity “leaders” are doing that we miss out on the people right in front of our face who can bring joy to our lives, who have the capacity to make the experience of life richer and fuller.  Just think — Christians in some denominations believe that people who don’t believe as they do deserve to spend eternity in hell.  We just think people who disagree with us are wrong – there is no need to push things to that extreme.  We have the freedom to see the beauty in every human being if we want to.

For me, atheism has also provided a tremendous opportunity to accept myself and who I am instead of measuring myself up to the Bible’s God – and as I accepted myself, I was surprised to find that I was an empathetic person without God, and that many of my goals, as far as my basic desire to positively impact the lives of other people and better know myself, had not disappeared but, in many ways, were powerfully enriched.

What I mean is that being religion-free has allowed me to explore who I am.  And in that journey of self-discovery, I constantly find ways in which I am connected to others around me.   Those connections have allowed me to discover love for people in places within my heart I didn’t know I had.  That’s my experience; it may not be yours, but I’ve found that owning and sharing my experience connects me to the experience of others, deepening the love I feel in my heart for myself and for them.

So…I may be repeating myself, and I’ve said just about all I want to say, but I feel it may not get across if I don’t say it one more time…you are yourself.  Atheism gives you freedom, should you choose it, to appreciate the locality of your social position, preferences, and tendencies in ways that can allow you to understand and connect to the world around you with less restriction from creeds written or voiced by men.  Within that freedom, I’ve found a love-based right to be angry when unbased restrictions are placed on myself and others.  And I don’t have to hang my head in shame every time Richard Dawkins or another atheist says something that doesn’t line up with the values and the love in my heart that I have for the world.  And I think the same for you — you do you; you are not responsible for Richard Dawkins.  You may appreciate some of the things he says, but there is no obligation on anyone’s part to stand with or even to strongly stand against what he says.  He ain’t you, and if the media tells you different — fuck ’em.

If you’re religious…you should know that most of us don’t have just one book we all follow, or a prophet, or a leader.  We’re individuals.  We’re your friends, your neighbors, your coworkers, your acquaintances.  We’re just…us.  We’re tired of being painted with a broad brush.  We come from a wide range of races and former creeds, a wide range of concerns, and a wide spectrum of attitudes and orientations that are attached to each of these concerns.  We’re our own people, defining “atheist” with our own experiences and through the handshakes of your friendship, even if — and largely BECAUSE — we desire a relationship with you as opposed to with an imaginary being.

And finally, a word to other atheists…if someone asks you who the face or leader of atheism is…maybe the best thing to do, in my opinion, is freely say you own your atheism and provide them with a selfie.

Honestly, what Craig Stephen Hicks did deeply disturbs me.

It bothers me because, in many ways (if the USA Today story is any indication), Hicks is a lot like me.  He was vocal about the importance of equal rights between individuals in ways that ran directly counter to the tendencies of religious conservatives.  He also “liked” several atheist pages on Facebook, including the page for the Freedom from Religion Foundation.  He strongly disliked theistic religions.

In those ways, he and I are fairly identical, which is why I was deeply disturbed to learn that he was a murderer of three college students.

The more I looked into the incident, the more distressing it was.  ABC News said the following:

Namee Barakat, father of victim Deah Barakat, told ABC News from his home in Raleigh that his son was “always smiling.” He described his son and daughter-in-law, who met as undergrads at N.C. State, as “bright, intelligent, thoughtful, generous and loving.”

Later, the article states that Barakat was involved in several charity fundraisers.

Barakat was married to Yusor Mohammed, who had gone to Turkey the previous summer to be a volunteer for dental relief. Her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, was a sophomore with a passion for Architecture and Design, which she was getting her BA in at North Carolina University (she was a sophomore).

All of them were model, hardworking students who clearly made a positive difference in the world — a Facebook page made in their honor respectfully reveals their positive qualities.

Yes, the fact that Stalin had killed millions and claimed atheism as his religion bothers me, too, but this – possibly because it was set in a current context, and possibly because the story was more relatable because it was set in a smaller scale – upset me deeply.

I thought about the expectation from religious individuals that I should give an apology for Hicks.  But an apology wouldn’t be honest, because the reason most religious people tend to say I should do that is that Hicks and I both reject the theistic God, which allows us to create our own moralities instead of his.

The problem here is that even the theory that we atheists can construct our own moralities and do whatever we please means Hicks and I have less in common, not more, when it comes to our moral systems:  We are not beholden to a common God; we are defined as constructing our own moralities, which makes us two different people with two different moralities.  This difference makes it clear that there is not a common foundation from which to apologize.  In other words, were I to apologize for Hicks’s actions, I would be indicating that I am not constructing my own morality – that Hicks and I are constructing our moralities from the same source, instead of from our separate, individual selves which happen, at some points, to agree with each other.

But although I can’t apologize for Hicks, what I can do is ponder his actions and try to learn from them.

Along that vein, I began examining my own moral system to determine why, exactly, I didn’t want to murder people who disagreed with me.  Because, like most atheists struggling with an arguably unfair stereotype living in the Bible Belt South, this is a question I get asked all the time.

There is talk about why Hicks did what he did, but we all probably know that, in the eyes of much of the American public, it doesn’t really matter whether Hicks killed the students because he was angry at parking conditions or angry at their religion – the fact remains that he is a New Atheist who killed three Muslims (which, from all appearances, may actually have been the case).  What matters is the fear people experience afterwards of atheists, a fear that was always latent, anyway.  Because theists frequently, after saying that atheists don’t have a right to morality (although, they assure me, atheists can do morally right things or even construct ungrounded moral systems), challenge me as to why I don’t want to murder people or do other disturbing crimes.

So what people want to know (and, what I want to know myself, after the incident) is: Why, unlike Hicks, am I not going to murder people?

In thinking about this, as far as I can tell the only way I would want to murder someone is if I thought they held no value, if I saw them one-dimensionally as The Person Protesting In Front Of The Abortion Clinic, or The Preacher Who Refused To Marry The Same Sex Couple, or The Person Who Stole My Parking Spot.  If that was the entirety of their definition – if they were nothing more than that – then I might become angry enough to be violent, were there no laws to stop me.

The reason I don’t want to murder people is that people are much more multifaceted and valuable than that one dimension, and because there is an experience within each human psyche that is deeply valuable to me.  There is more to them than a negative action I may witness — more value in their day-to-day life and inner subjective experience than that.

I think that’s where Hicks and I may differ.  And what contemplating this issue encourages me to do is continue to be different in that way.  In the future, I want to realize that people have more value than I often give them credit for, and to strive to see that value as more important than ideological disagreements and minor “real world” frustrations like parking spaces.

And it’s that desire to explore and recognize that value that gives me an empathetic love which drives me forward. Yes, it drives me against religion, because I cannot support a religion that says one needs to be “saved” to have this value realized; in my experience, people come with it pre-installed (one of the reasons I had to leave Christianity is because I saw the Christian concept of “grace” in the lives of too many people, and at some point it simply became “justice”).  But this desire to understand value also drives me against many efforts to engage in actions that, due to ignorance, undervalue human life.

I may hate your ideas.  I may hate your God.  I may hate some of your actions.  But in my eyes, there’s more to you, something value in many of your actions and the beauty of your subjective experience, and it’s that value, that opportunity you create for understanding, that makes me grateful you are alive.

The Journey

I hate driving to Dallas.

I live in Fort Worth, TX, so it took me an hour.  And the drive feels like a trip to the other end of the world, for some reason.  Especially with the traffic of the evening’s 6 o’clock hour, when the residual nightmare of five o’clock hour traffic is occupying the highways.  And I’m making the whole drive in a beat-up 2004 Kia Spectra, so it’s not the smoothest drive in the world, either.  Plus, I got my start at 6:15; I was running late.

But this event at Southern Methodist University on February 10, 2015 was very important to me.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I was a fairly devout Christian who occasionally struggled with doubt.  To help me through that struggle, I read the writings of several apologists — the most-worn book of my apologetics collection is a glossy-brown hardback still at my parents’ house (by the front door, in the bookcase on your left coming in) edited by Josh McDowell that is entitled The NEW Evidence That Demands A Verdict.  I found the book fascinating, and it started a long investigation into hermeneutics that eventually led to my having to abandon my faith — it’s hard for me to know whether books like McDowell’s kept me a Christian longer, or whether they fueled my curiosity even more, leading me to ask questions I wouldn’t have otherwise asked and thus ultimately instigating my eventual break with Christianity.

Around the time I was 24 (I’m 31 as I write this) I began to read Frank Turek, and for the next few years his book I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist had a powerful impact on me.  Although I had doubts that there was a Christian God, I was attracted to the book’s title because the world outside of the one with the Christian God was frightening.  I wasn’t sure how I would cope with it, and thought that if I stopped thinking that the Christian God was the answer to morality, purpose, and human worth, I would be left with a lot of uncomfortable questions.  I was afraid, and that fear translated into a faith that drove me to the Christian God.

In many ways, I had come to forget that fear by the time I left Christianity.  Part of the reason is that, by the time I decided to leave Christianity, being a Christian had become an extremely traumatic experience for me; like other former Christians I have heard from, I had literally begun to imagine the sulfur of after-judgment consequences burning my being forever (if I left Christianity) and the eternal, anguished cries within a richly imagined hell, I was horrified at the slaughters in the Old Testament that were commanded by the God I claimed to follow, and I had begun to deeply empathize with people Christians I knew said were going to spend eternity in hell due to a life lived without or squarely against Christ.  In addition, I had seen that the “Christian worldview,” as the apologists put it, was full of holes in history, philosophy, and empathy; it saddened and enraged me to see billions defrauded into giving their lives away to a phantom because of what I saw as a clearly overblown, exaggerated case.

In the first few months after I left Christendom, I became intensely curious as to why so many people stayed within it, in spite of my communication of the (to me) straightforward reasons I left.  And the answers that I seemed to keep hitting against were not very complementary to Christian character — they seemed to indicate a clearly hypocritical pride, closed-mindedness, and lack of empathy that I found disturbing.  Christian apologists often seemed to exemplify these qualities.

But no one seemed to have them on display more than Frank Turek.

In a Facebook comment string shortly before the talk, I had a discussion with a couple friends about what we atheists found so unlikeable about Frank Turek.  One thing we all agreed on is that he is unlikeable because twists the truth, as when he seemed to knowingly mischaracterize Richard Dawkins’s “space alien” answer to a question by Ben Stein in a movie called Expelled — the clip shows Dawkins theorizing that aliens could have brought life to earth, and Turek uses it to show how ridiculous Dawkins’s theories on the origin of life are.  Dawkins revealed in a later inquiry on that question that he was asked by Ben Stein to give intelligent design its best shot — and as Dawkins didn’t believe in intelligent design, he had no choice but to use the alien example (because intelligence requires an embodied mind.).

Another item that made Frank Turek unlikeable is that, in videos on the Internet, he regularly comes across as uncharitable to atheists.  This is by no means unusual, of course; atheists are used to individuals who follow the lead of apologists like William Lane Craig or Sye Ten Bruggencate being uncharitable to atheist views.  But Turek treated atheists almost like criminals, like people who deserved to go to hell.  Now, to be sure, he thought everyone deserved to go to hell who didn’t believe in Christ — but he thought atheists knew they were dependent on God, and were criminally denying it.  In Frank Turek’s view, the problem was not ignorance, so much as it was brazen defiance.  Or, at least, that’s how he came across.

So I was dreading this meeting.  But I was curious, and there was nostalgia, and I wanted to actually confront an apologist who had, for years, made a major impact on my attachment to Christianity face to face, to look him in the eyes and challenge him as I had seen so many other atheists do.

So that’s why, during the 6’o’clock post-rush hour, I was driving to Dallas.

The meeting started at 7pm, and in spite of speeding 5-10 over the whole way there, I still didn’t arrive on the SMU campus until 7:15.  I was lucky enough to easily find a parking spot, and then looked for the building, which, I found upon asking a student, was actually about a third of a mile away from where I thought it was.  Truly late at this point, I sprinted to the building in the 75-80 degree whether, counting it as my workout as I ignored the glances from the students I passed.  Then a dash up stairs, a quick request for directions from an elderly lady near an elevator, a dash up more stairs…and around 7;25, I heard Turek’s voice and followed it into the auditorium, a bit embarrassed by the sweat on my face from the run as I tried to unobtrusively take a seat.

The Presentation

There were mostly college students there (which made sense, as it was on a college campus).  Then there were also parents.  The audience itself reminded me that these events were often very much family affairs — like the Bill Gothard seminars I attended when I was young.  It was about the speaker, but it was also about the sense of togetherness, about family tradition and heritage, and about bonding around a common goal and hope.

What surprised me was how much Frank Turek catered to this space. Although by this time I was about 25 or so minutes late, Turek had not even begun to really introduce his slide show presentation.  He was talking about his family, about his general ministry, and about different trips he had taken.  He spoke like a person trying his hand at stand-up, trying to get laughs.  Some of the jokes appealed to parents, and they murmured.  The college students openly laughed.  Remembering a YouTube video in which he complained about an atheist in the audience who didn’t laugh at his jokes, I made sure that I cracked a few smiles, as well.

Then he began his presentation.  His first discussion was on truth.  He basically spent fifteen minutes saying, in various ways, that the statement that we can’t know truth is self defeating (because, the logic goes, how would we know that was true?).  His comedian side was in full force here, and, to be sure, it is hilarious.  How can someone know that they can’t know anything?  That doesn’t seem to make sense, on the outset.  The college students laughed.

And that moment brought me back to a cause of the laughter.  I remember laughing like that once at apologist meetings, and the laughter wasn’t merely directed at how absurd the apologist could make an argument seem.  Much of it was a relief as the fear that there was no God — a fear that was often heightened in a university environment in which our childhood beliefs clashed with the rigor of academic scholarship — was skillfully assuaged.

As I watched, I began to feel a sense of empathy where I had once felt merely anger.  I still strongly disagreed with what was being stated, but I felt the heart behind the crowd’s reaction, because I had once had that heart to, even if my experience as an atheist had shown me that the fear defining it was unnecessary and based largely on false premises.  And I also could see Frank Turek’s own attraction to that heart, and why he would want to shield it from its vulnerabilities.  I didn’t agree with the man —  I saw him as appealing to the correspondence theory of truth, and, in my view, when I say “I can never know what’s true” I’m saying that, given a concept (created by me) of a reality outside of myself, I can never know that reality, because, by my own definition, it is outside of myself.  I can theorize about what might be outside of myself, and I can, based on experience, say that it seems more likely that position x is more reliable than position y regarding things that I see as being as outside myself, but, by definition, I will not be able to access what is outside of myself.

To be sure, this admittance of uncertainty can lead to anxiety, especially if I care about other people.  I can say or think I’m doing what you want, or need, or what is in your best interests, but ultimately, as far as I can tell, I don’t have access to your mind — only my own.  Understanding, then, seems more difficult, and complete understanding may be impossible.  In the case of concerns like morality, where I may be interested in empathetically negotiating the best ways to work in our mutual interests, things don’t seem clear cut — my perception seems different from your perception, and what may be the right direction to you may not be the right direction to me. Although it seems that we can work together to come closer to a compromise or a win-win situation regarding what we want, the fact remains that a mutual respect of our perceptions  seems in order, as I will never completely know your perspective, and you may never completely know mine.  This sense of a necessary respect can lead to a kind of anxiety, perhaps; it would be much easier if someone who knew all minds said what was best for everyone, so that we could simply follow it instead of trying to figure it out what each other’s perspective (which, again, we don’t have direct access to and, it seems, can never fully understand) is.

So I can understand the appeal of saying that there is absolute truth that comes from God.  But then again, jumping from uncertainty as to whether I know your perspective into certainty that I know your perspective because an imaginary third party gave it to me is a move that seems to have resulted in many events in our history, that seem clearly morally problematic today.  It seems healthier to listen to individuals as opposed to a “God” who trumps their opinion, because if you buy into a God who trumps human expression, you can be comfortable ascribing to them any viewpoint you want and ignore what they say.  You can say they are not true to themselves for having certain sexual preferences, you can say that they are intentionally “choosing” to spend eternity in hell, and you can even feel justified to commit acts of genocide because you think they are fundamentally evil.  You can do these and many more things without having to think twice about whether or not you are morally right or doubting your understanding of the perspectives of those you may be abusing, so long as you think these viewpoints are held by a mind-reading God.

As I sat there listening to Frank Turek speak, then, I noticed the relief in many eyes around me, the relaxing as they thought they had a right to hold onto something firm regarding morality, and that the relativists who often challenged them didn’t have a leg to stand on.  And even as the nostalgia of the environment I was in allowed me to partially experience that old feeling of relief and assurance I had once experienced when I was a young Christian, I was, simultaneously, angry at the way Christian morality had run roughshod over my own desires and goals and those of many I cared about, due to a frustrating “just so” bully pulpit of “God said it, so that’s just the way it is.”  Sometimes, as an atheist, it seems as if my own voice and experience doesn’t matter at all — that what I say about myself doesn’t matter at all, and that the only thing many Christians seem to care about is what an imaginary being supposedly says to them through a book to me.  It feels much like a trial in which I represent myself with my mouth taped shut, a mask over my face, and my hands tied to my chair — while the prosecution discusses the case freely, claiming that I’ve already declared myself “guilty” of the charges brought before me, no matter how outrageous they are.

After this discussion on truth, Turek went on to argue that the universe’s makeup and history was powerful evidence for God. His first argument was that the universe had a beginning.  The second was that, due to the complexity of the universe, the universe had to have a designer.  These arguments were discussed using interesting details about the complexity and ornate nature of existence, and the auditorium of around 200 people sat there, spellbound, as they looked at the illustrations of how complex, vast, and seemingly intricately designed the universe was.

I was moved.  The complexity and vastness of the universe was spellbinding and drove me to contemplation.  But when Frank Turek said that this was proof that there was a designer, I had some trouble.

The trouble was a manifestation of the age old objection, “who designed the designer?”  Turek tried to get around that argument by saying that God was spaceless, timeless, and immaterial, but I still found the basis of his reasoning behind consciousness unconvincing.  If the complexity necessary for life to operate and for consciousness to perceive its surroundings was so amazing and called out for a designer, it was hard for me to see how a consciousness so advanced that it could create the entire universe did not itself need a designer, especially since consciousness is produced by some of the most complicated physical processes we are aware of.  I carried this thought in the back of my mind as he talked, and bookmarked it as my question for the q and a session.

Turek ended his talk with an argument that morality indicated the existence of a personal God.  He said that if a personal God didn’t exist then (cue a picture of dead bodies piled after the Holocaust)  there was no way to say that atrocities were wrong.  What he did not go over is the fact that the concept of God was precisely what, in many cases, justified the practice of running roughshod over expressed human preferences in some of the very atrocities (like the Holocaust) that he mentioned.

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dx7irFN2gdI[/youtube]

He also didn’t touch on Euthyphro’s dilemma, though he might have had a ready answer for it if it had come up during the q and a session.  Euthyphro’s dilemma, which dates back to the writings of Plato, concerning the philosophy of Socrates, basically boils down to this question: Is God good “just because,” or is God good because there is some standard outside of God by which his goodness can be measured?  If the response is that God is good because there is some standard outside of God by which goodness can be measured (cf., God is good because he is powerful, knowledgeable, etc.), then the return response is that God is judged by a standard of good, which means he does not determine standards of good…making him unnecessary in ascertaining morality.  If the response is that God is good “just because” of his nature, or because He is named “God” — then “good” doesn’t mean anything; it’s simply a descriptor of what God does.

In any case, Turek did seem to reassure the audience that its morality was safeguarded by the concept of God.  Unlike atheists, who did not have the authority of God behind their moral system, Turek argued, Christians had God’s authority and could therefore be more confidently moral people.

I could somewhat understand the appeal of this argument, as I do want to “do the right thing,” but frequently have difficulty trying to figure out what it is.  Although the God of the Bible advocates several positions that go strongly against my moral instincts, I will readily admit that it would be nice to be confident about what right and wrong is.  I suspect that it is this confidence that may drive people to simply accept that the God of the Bible as a certain denomination interprets it is the end of the question as to what is right and what is wrong.  On the one hand, this desire for comfort is somewhat cruel to people that this “just so” standard seems to oppress; on the other, there is, when seen in a certain light, a certain beauty in what I would call the somewhat naive comfort this “just so” standard gives to people who may not have the time or desire to closely question their morality.

Finally, after Frank Turek graciously thanked those who participated in hosting him, it was question time.  The setup was intimidating.  In the middle aisle of the auditorium there was a microphone, and if I wanted to ask a question, I would have to walk around all the chairs and go up to the mike.  It seemed like a long walk.

I stood up and began to walk, then got cold feet and sat down in the far left corner of the auditorium.  Only one person had briefly asked a question so far, and she had been sitting right next to the mike — she had stood up very briefly, stated her question quickly, and sat down.  After answering her question, Turek pleaded for about another minute for another question, but the auditorium was too nervous. Then, I finally got the courage to stand and went up to the microphone.

And there he was.  It was surreal…here was the larger-than-life apologist right in front of me.  And I was about to challenge him.

 

Dialogue

I started by complimenting the ornate, complex, majesty of the universe he had discussed about a half hour before.  Then, I connected that material complexity to consciousness, and stated that consciousness was according to all we knew, connected to these physical processes.  There did not seem to be any evidence of a disembodied mind — consciousness itself is constructed by complex physical processes.  So it seems contradictory to marvel at what is necessary for consciousness, and then go back and state that this indicates that this ornately constructed consciousness must have been constructed by a consciousness….because that consciousness would have to be ornately constructed itself.  There was no evidence that a disembodied mind was possible — in fact, our fascination with the necessary design of our bodies is based in the thought that the physical processes are necessary for the workings of the brain and, thus, the mind.

His rebuttal was, basically, that the experience of consciousness was immaterial, so consciousness itself was immaterial as well.

My response to that was that what I had to do was use my consciousness to determine whether something else was conscious.  In evaluating the consciousness of another party, I can only see consciousness arising from physical processes.  I do not see, nor have we ever seen, consciousness arising from empty space — although there is some suspicion that quantum fields might.

I also argued that, although (not being a physicist) I had no idea of what happened “before” the universe, or even if that makes sense, that’s only gives myself, and others, the ability to say, “I don’t know,” not “I don’t know, therefore it’s God.”  Furthermore, I argued that the physicist’s claim that the universe probably has a beginning extends to a beginning not just of matter, but of most, if not all, physical processes that require matter to operate, including the process producing consciousness; to take the thought that consciousness designs things and apply that thought to before the beginning of the universe is to smuggle the workings of the universe in an arena that existed before the workings of the universe and thus to run roughshod over the claim that the universe and its principles began ex nihilo, which is the argument Turek was basing the necessity of a conscious God on in the first place.

This was very difficult for me to communicate at the time; hopefully that makes some sense here.

In response, he asked the question as to whether my will was determined or free, and connected that question to Daniel Dennett’s compatibilism (basically, the thought that decisions are constructed by physical processes, but that we can treat them as free, partially because of the complexity and lack of knowledge of all these physical processes, and partly because of the experience of making a choice).  The argument Turek was driving towards seemed to be that, if I had free will, there was a part of me that was not determined by physical processes and, thus, was not subject to the rules and restrictions of physical processes.  The other horn was for me to say that my decisions were due to completely material processes, at which point he could say that my thoughts were completely pointless and meaningless, an argument famously popularized by CS Lewis.

My response was that it didn’t matter whether my thoughts were material or based in free will; the same results happened either way.  My perception was that I made choices — even if those choices were produced purely by physical processes, that did not mean the choices had no weight on my experience or that they had no ability to positively or negatively impact it.  The question of whether they were produced by physical processes also had no effect on whether or not I was right.

(Later, I thought of another argument — if we truly have free will, then how do we make choices?  If our choices are, at some point, completely divorced from material processes, then what are the choices based on?  Wouldn’t they be produced by random chance?  Wouldn’t that make them MORE, not less, unreliable?)

After going back and forth on this vein for a couple minutes, another person behind me came up behind me to ask a question, so Turek had to end his dialogue with me to get to him. He said we could talk after the event, because this back and forth could go on for awhile.  But then, he had one last comment, “So you’re saying that all your thought processes are material?”

I shook my head and repeated, “I’m saying it doesn’t matter,” as I prepared to leave.  I had been steeling glances behind me somewhat nervously the entire time I had been talking to see if someone was waiting, and now that someone was, I felt I was overstaying my welcome.

He called me back to the mike, “What do you mean, ‘It doesn’t matter?’”

I had to answer off the cuff, and it had to be short, and so I said something like, “I’m saying all that matters is my perception.”  What I would have said if I had had more time is that if I perceived I had choice, and that these choices had a positive or negative impact on my life, then it didn’t matter if the choices were determined or not insofar as they had the ability to positively or negatively affect my life, or to make me right or wrong about outcomes that occurred within the arena of my perception.

As I walked away from the mike, I wished I could have walked right back up (I couldn’t because another person was there now), because the next thing out of his mouth was that by saying that it didn’t matter that my choice was determined my material processes, I couldn’t really validly say I loved somebody — all I could say is that materialistic processes got me to feel certain emotions.  This is, of course, insulting — the emotions are real, whether they are determined by material processes or not.  In fact, if they are determined by circumstance and material attraction, that grounds my love in a basis that is more a compliment to the person they are attached to, arguably, than if they were attached to the person by pure chance, void of any of that person’s qualities.

The question and answer portion proceeded.  Two exchanges stood out to me.

One was when a person challenged a statement Turek had made early in his talk about the importance of Christian political involvement. The questioner (who was a Christian) had a strong point, I thought, that in the Bible Jesus was in, not of, the world, and that there was no mandate in the Bible for Christians to be involved in politics.  I half expected Turek to go to Romans 13 (where Paul says the government has the responsibility to punish the evildoer) to justify the Christian’s role in politics, but he did not.  After a back and forth of about a couple minutes, in which Turek said that good political principles were necessary to preserve religious freedom (a seemingly week argument — the argument that Jesus never called Christians to be part of the political sphere stood), Turek put on the screen a picture of North Korea and South Korea that looked like this:

North Korea is the one on top with no lights; South Korea is the one on the bottom with lights.  He then said that the atheistic Communist country of North Korea is obviously less developed than the much more developed country of South Korea…so if we didn’t want to turn into North Korea, we should make sure Christians were in politics and that religious freedoms were protected.

This was a terrible argument, partly because there are Christian countries that are fairly poor and war torn in places such as the Congo, and partly because South Korea itself is a bit over 70% non-Christian, as of last count, and partly because the stats show that the most religious countries tend to be the poorest.

After a back and forth for a more minutes (the person asking the question didn’t buy Turek’s Korea argument) on this vein, the line was getting longer, and Turek finally gave the person a dismissal similar to the one he gave me — that they could talk more later.

The other memorable question was from a young college student — she asked how she could bring an atheist to Christ.

Frank Turek’s answer literally widened my eye sockets and made my mouth gape.  He said that she should continue being the atheist’s friend, and wait for the atheist to experience a tragedy.  And when that happened, the atheist might call her for help, and that’s when she could share with the atheist her own faith.  He went on to say that many atheists are more open when they are going through a crisis than when life as usual was happening.

At first my reaction was pure disgust.  The thought of a Christian trying to be close enough so they can be there when you go through a crisis so they can convert you seemed sick.  I don’t want my friends to wait for me to fail; I want them to encourage me.

But afterwards, while fuming about that on the drive home, I thought about how many Christians were probably converted by that very tactic — when they had very little hope, someone offered them Christ, and that hope of a heaven in which they would be forever may have given them the courage to keep going.  So, in their minds, they may be thinking that people who aren’t going through a hard time don’t need God — but if that person goes through a hard time like they do, they may be comforted that, in their view, they have something to offer that person.

After the talk was over, and after mingling with others there, Frank Turek greeted me on his way out.

 

How I Left

“Thanks for your questions!” he said.

“Thanks for the talk!  I used to be a fan of yours when I was a Christian.  Read some of your writings.”  The whole time I was talking to him, it was difficult to believe that I was speaking to him, in the flesh.  It was strange. It wasn’t like I was talking to an enemy — at least, not just.  Even though I had never met him before, I felt like we had gone on a bit of a journey together; for about seven years he had been very important in my life and helped me hang on to a hope I thought I needed.  After the talk, even though I disagreed with him, I somewhat sympathized with what he was trying to do.

So when he said with a slight look of regret, masked by a smile and a confident voice, something along the lines of, “And you didn’t find them convincing — you veered away, eh?”

I couldn’t help but politely return with a smile and laugh, “I dunno.  I didn’t read all your writings.  Maybe if I had read more, I would still be a Christian, haha!”

We had walked together outside of the auditorium; almost everyone had left save the organizers.  The newest book Frank Turek had written (which his talk was meant to promote), Stealing from God: Why Atheists Need God To Make Their Case, and his other book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist was being taken off the display tables and put back in the boxes — the title was obviously fairly rude and incorrect, and I had complained about it previously on Facebook and fumed about it privately.

“Hold up,” Frank Turek said.  “I want to give Peter a free book.”

The person at the counter reached for I Don’t Have Enough Faith To Be An Atheist, Turek’s 2004 book that I already owned — presumably because I was an atheist, so the book was more suitable for me than Stealing from God, which was written more for Christians.

“No, not that one,” Frank Turek said, remembering me saying that I had read his work before. “Get the newest book.” He turned to me.  “You haven’t read that one, have you?”

For some reason, I found myself struggling to hold back a smile. “Um, no.”

He took it, opened it, and signed it.

“Peter, I hope you find this encouraging.  Blessings, Frank Turek.”

At the time, it struck me as odd…but later, I remembered how he told the college student who asked him about how to convert an atheist that she should wait until the atheist friend she had was going through a hard time and use the hope she had for her friend’s encouragement.  I thought that, perhaps, Frank Turek had at times found encouragement in his writing, and insulation from realizing his perceived fears, in his own moments.  That may sound patronizing, but one thing meeting and seeing Frank Turek taught me is that he came across as a man — an apologist who has what I think are unhealthy views, but someone who, like all of us, is trying to make it through this life.  He has found something that keeps him going through dark times, and he wanted to pass that on to me — perhaps so that, if I experience dark times in the future and turn in desperation to his book, this militant atheist will find it encouraging.

Or at least, that’s what makes the most sense to me now.

I had expected to leave that auditorium fuming, but, although several things about the presentation deeply bothered me, I found myself fighting a smile as I walked the third of a mile back to my car, signed book in hand — trying to ignore, again, the glances from passing college students.

At the same time, this experience made things harder.  Maybe I’m getting a little too sermonic here…but it felt like existence reminding me that most things are not just bad or just good; life is multifaceted, so that even those you most despise may, when looked at from a certain angle, give you a glance of beauty that brings tears to your eyes.

And while that makes things indeterminate, and complex, and sometimes bewildering — in some contradictory, paradoxical way it also makes the experience of life encouraging.

As I started up my car, I found that I was grateful for the long drive back home.  It would give me some much-needed time to think.

One of the many problems with Christendom’s imaginary friend is that it calls it “God.”

Here’s why….

Suppose there was a dispute as to whether a king had a right to rule over a country, or whether values should be determined by a democracy.  You’re on the side of democracy, and you’re arguing against someone who is on the side of having a king — a position, he says, that should be taken by someone named “King.” The argument goes something like this:

“I think that people have the right to determine morality.”
“No, I think King is the only one with the right to determine morality.  He is, after all, King.”
“No, he’s not ‘king’ over me — or anyone else for that matter.”
“Yes, He is.  That’s his name. It’s simple.  You KNOW he’s King.  Why don’t you let him take the throne of your country?”
“Well, that may be what you call him.  But that doesn’t make him king.”
“No, he is.  That’s his name.  Are you saying that King isn’t King?”
“Well, no…yes…well…just because you call him King, doesn’t make him king.”
“But he IS King.  It says so.  All public records.  That’s his actual name.  And you’re saying he doesn’t have the right to be King?”

Etc.

See, I think that’s where a lot of the confusion is.  The name of Christianity’s imaginary being is “God,” and that’s synonymous with His supposed title.  Thus, it’s not unusual for me to have conversations like this:

“I think that people have the right to determine morality.”
“No, I think God is the only one with the right to determine morality.  He is, after all, God.”
“No, he’s not ‘God’ over me — or anyone else, for that matter.”
“Yes, He is.  That’s his name.  It’s simple.  You KNOW he’s God.  Why don’t you let him take the throne of your heart?”
“Well, that may be what you call him.  But that doesn’t make him God.”
“No, he is God.  That’s his name.  Are you saying that God isn’t God?”
“Well, no…yes…well…just because you call him God, doesn’t make him God.”
“But He IS God.  It says so.  All through Judeo-Christian history.  That’s his actual name.  And you’re saying God doesn’t have the right to be God?”

Etc.

This business of making the name of this being synonymous with its supposed title can make arguments confusing, and many Christians I’ve been in conversation with have used rhetoric that takes advantage of this confusion, partially because most seem to be confused themselves.

Which is why I often refer to this imaginary being as their “imaginary friend.”  Calling the imaginary being an imaginary friend reinforces the fact that the burden of proof is on the person I’m talking to, instead of allowing for the name “God” to be seen by any of the interlocutors as synonymous with the title.  In the past, it’s clarified to Christians my disgust with certain positions.  It also answers the incessant question, “Why are you upset by something that doesn’t exist?”

Think about it.  The typical phrases just don’t have the same ring to them if you replace “God” with “my imaginary friend.”  And it’s clearer what makes them annoying, offensive, or frustrating.
“Prove my imaginary friend doesn’t exist.”
“My imaginary friend says gay marriage is wrong.”
“You are lost if you don’t worship my imaginary friend.”
“Why do you hate my imaginary friend so much?”
“My imaginary friend deserves respect.”
“If you don’t believe in my imaginary friend, why does it matter to you that I do?”
“I love my imaginary friend more than you.”
“What is wrong with your heart that you don’t love my imaginary friend?”
“I’m going to talk to my imaginary friend about you.”
“You need to stop rebelling against my imaginary friend.”
“My imaginary friend loves you! Give him your life…or you’ll be tormented forever.”

The more you care about the person voicing the sentiment, or the more power these sentiments have over your life and general reputation, the more pissed off you may be by the tyrannical, sanctimonious Imaginary Friend — not in spite of it being imaginary, but because of it being imaginary.

I tend to use this phrase, on occasion, when Christians fail to see the difference between the name “God” and the title “God.”  If God was, say, “Hank,” it wouldn’t be nearly as necessary to clear up the confusion.  For example:
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaFZQBb2srM[/youtube]

To be sure, the typical Christian response to this statement is either, “My God isn’t imaginary — that’s offensive,” or “You’re assuming that God doesn’t exist — in the hypothetical of our conversation, he does.”

My response to it being offensive is sincere — it is far MORE offensive for someone to have the gall to tell me that their imaginary friend is God, and thus has authority to tell me everything I should and shouldn’t do, and will burn me in hell forever if I don’t submit to his authority.

My response to the fact that I’m assuming God doesn’t exist, in most instances is, “Good.  Now we have an understanding.  It’s up to you to prove he does exist — I start, as with all supernatural beings, with the null position that he doesn’t exist.  If he is more than your imaginary friend, prove it.”

Seems reasonable to me.  You?

Thank you for reading.

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about Obama being sympathetic to Islamism, largely due to his recent statements comparing the atrocities of Islam to those of Christianity (as well as the fact that his father was a Muslim before becoming an atheist and the fact of Obama’s four-year prepubescent residence in the predominantly Islamic country of Indonesia).  Many who discuss this issue have pointed to a seeming failure to repeat that platitudes regarding the supposedly evil regimes of Islam that Bush used incessantly.  At the same time, it seems indisputable that Obama himself has repeatedly claimed to be Christian, in spite of the fact that he has stated that several parts of the Bible are unsuitable for implementation in public policy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how to characterize Obama here, as my own position is that he does not believe in a literal interpretation of the Bible, but does see value in some aspects of Christian communities’ espousal of liberation theology that he identifies with strongly enough for him to use the title.  As an African American outspoken atheist who, I must admit, owes a lot to liberation theology (although atheists, to be sure, did play a part in my ability to enjoy my current rights) I identify with the value he sees in some aspects of Christendom, if not in the Bible itself.  To me, liberation theology is a powerful example of how blacks in this country managed to take an ideology that was used as a tool of oppression to fight back against that oppression.  They found that the scriptures in the Bible that were used to limit and harm them could actually, through changes in emphasis and interpretation, bring them some liberation.  The very book that was used to keep them weak and subservient could be repackaged, in many ways, as a tool of unity and strength.

Many black American atheists of history, like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, A. Philip Randolph, Alain Locke, and so on…were not squarely against religion among blacks, because they saw it as a tool of comfort and strength — though they did not believe in Christian tenets themselves, they saw that many of the goals espoused within liberation theology coincided with their own.  At the same time, in their writings and lives they often made room for those who wanted to make the world a less segregated, less oppressive way to live, whether they believed in Christ or not.

I left a relatively conservative Christianity not only because it was untrue, but also because it was oppressive to many groups of people I had come to deeply care about.  The literal meaning of the scriptures simply did not leave room for the wide range of vitality’s expressions that I found within others and myself.  That it was untrue gave me the option to leave; that it largely seemed oppressive gave me the drive to speak strongly against it while leaving it publicly and decisively.

However, my position relative to Christianity, has been revised and reexamined since I first left.  Although I am squarely against the Bible and much of the way theology is commonly translated into policy, I have come to think that Christianity — once you get past some of the figureheads and apologists — is mostly best characterized as a social activity, a community.  While it is difficult for me to stand manifestations of this community that seem to more closely resemble that of a patronizing country club, I do, at times, feel myself powerfully drawn to groups of individuals that are passionate about helping the poor, sharing love, showing tolerance, and seeking not only to be understood but to deeply understand and empathize and wrestle with the ideals of friends that are different from their own.

I have said before that to call yourself an atheist is to make a statement, at least here in the Bible Belt.  There are large groups of atheists, I’ve come to find, that are very enthusiastically insistent on their apathetic status, and I do think that status is available in many cultures; it seems to be somewhat less available in heart of Texas.  If you keep it to yourself, no one may notice — but eventually, many conversations come around to the topic of religion and the statement that you’re an atheist is, in itself, frequently seen as an affront to the religious people you happen to be engaged in discourse with.  It is far more socially acceptable — and a much more fashionable — to say that you’re a Christian moderate or progressive.  Those titles give you a comfortable middle ground — they allow you to symbolically associate with the perceived beauty of a Christian aura that has real practical social, political, and even economic benefits, while at the same time it allowing you to disassociate yourself from the more outdated positions that Christendom perpetually finds itself apologizing for as moral standards adjust to developing perceptions of morality.  Were I a more apathetic atheist who was part of a Christian culture and had no real objection to the content of its belief system, I would probably call myself a Christian moderate or progressive.

And here someone may exclaim, “Really?  You would lie?”

Is that a lie, really?

Because, to be perfectly honest, I think that’s what Obama is.  He has a strong connection in his history to liberation theology , but I doubt, because of some of the things he’s said about doubt, that he literally believes someone who was stone cold dead for three days waltzed away, or was otherwise evicted, from a tomb 2000 years ago.  However, it does seem highly unusual that one’s value to a community would be based on their belief (or lack thereof) of a such a highly unlikely story.  If a community in Christendom does provide some real benefits he would like to contribute to, what is to keep him from identifying with its ideals and furthering them?

Yes, I am an atheist.  But I also think that, though he may not believe in a remotely literal interpretation of the Bible, Obama has drive to identify with a group of people who are making a social impact he wants to make.  And that’s a beautiful thing, I have to admit.  Although the prominent group of people in the United States happens to be progressively Christian because of Obama’s strong identification with the black church’s fight for liberation, it also extends to Obama’s understanding of Islam, due to the fact that many (though certainly not all or perhaps even most) Muslim Americans identify with his ideals.

Although I am firmly against Christianity and I think that the Bible is an absolute nightmare of a book, I also feel a need to admit that there is beauty in some communities of Christians who have extremely liberal interpretation of the Bible or who largely ignore the book altogether.  As I’ve said before, ideals are there for people, not the other way around.  If Christianity were fundamentally changed so that it becomes a more purely symbolic way to promote respect among and between cultures, as opposed to literal truth all humankind are expected to serve at the expense of heart, mind, and conscience, then, although I would not call myself a Christian, I would be much less vocal about its content; there wouldn’t be as much need to oppose it.  But standing in the way of such a change is, among other things, unsavory passages and common interpretations of the Bible.

In our current state, I recognize that an atheist who wears the title has no chance of holding the office of a House Representative, let alone the President of the United States.  In the end, however, as an anti-theist I am looking for change that respects human lives over that of a nonexistent God, and does so in practice.  If Obama can find — as I think he has — a way to identify with the Christian culture while at the same time seeking to promote an ideology that does not place heavy emphasis on allegiance to the literal creeds and prejudices voiced by the Bible…he is probably doing close to what I might be doing if I were in his place.

When trying to figure out whether this makes him an atheist, a deeper question emerges — what, or who, is God?  What does it mean to believe in him?  I call myself an atheist because I reject a God who has inherent authority over the universe (in addition to rejecting the literal specifics of the Bible’s God in particular).  But beyond that, what about an ideal that we give authority to, like the ideal that all human beings should be treated with a sense of dignity and respect?  That ideal may not have inherent value, but if we give it value, it carries that value for us, right?  So…if we don’t have a blank check of authority that we give to God “just because,” but instead only value ideals insofar as they help us achieve certain effects, then we may be doing something that is in the arena of common sense.  It’s hard to deny, for example, that the ideal of equality is not a vehicle in realizing equal rights.  But that ideal of equality only has value, then, if we want equal rights to happen.

In a similar way — although most atheists don’t believe in an inherent authority of God who is in charge “just because” (which is what, I think, most religious people mean when they speak of “God”), one may look at a list of effects that benefit humanity, identify the conceptualizations of ideals that would further those effects, and, by valuing those ideals, give the path towards achieving those effects a kind of direction.  The ideals are valued because we as human beings want the effects, not at all because the ideals are valuable in and of themselves; without humanity, ideals have no value, so ideals are there to serve humanity, not the other way around.

I think Obama would call the collection of these ideals so conceived “God.”  I wouldn’t, partly due, perhaps, to my conservative Christian background.  But I think Obama would.  And what is in the way of these ideals, he would call “sin.”  But the pursuit of that ideals would, in many ways, be secular.

Does the fact that Obama  doesn’t actually seem to believe in a real God with inherent value in and of himself — and that he calls himself a Christian to be part of an influential community whose goals coincides with his, as opposed to a belief in the literal Bible story — does that make him an atheist?

Does the fact that most Christians in the United States primarily seem to see Christianity as a social activity as opposed to something whose tenets they take as being serious and binding on their personal life in a profound way — does that make them atheists?

Pastors will mostly say “yes” in more conservative churches, but I think it’s hard to say — I lost interest in defining what a “real” Christian was a while ago, and I use the word “atheist” as a drastic shorthand for an arguably more nuanced position.  But it does seem important to realize that, functionally, Obama is doing something important in realizing that people of various social groups and backgrounds can and should come together for the common goal of promoting human dignity.  On the outside, as an atheist, I’ll continue to fight to deconstruct the lines religion has constructed.  But while that’s a long term project I am passionate about, I also see the value in someone looking at objectives as opposed to the literal rightness and wrongness of ideology, and in that person seeing how they could change ideology in a way that connects them to communities of religious individuals while at the same time promoting a sense of dignity that accomplishes laudatory objectives that help people in very real ways.  Though overall I see religion as harmful, I partially agree with Obama’s recent statements (although I disagree with them significantly in places) that the metaphors of religion can be used for negative and, at times, for positive ends, and I do appreciate the fact that his conversation of these metaphors and their ideologies has moved a focus on protecting a sense of dignity for human existence to the forefront of the American psyche.