“God has a plan for your life!”

Many people have heard this bold declaration from fundamentalist Christian apologists. It is meant, and heard as, an invitation to join the great story of redemption that God is authoring, to be a part of the inevitable sweep of human history and indeed of all Creation.  It is an invitation experienced by believers as deeply personal and yet, simultaneously, epic. And judging from the numbers and influence of evangelical Christianity, this claim has a powerful appeal. But I want to look more closely at this appeal, and to try to understand it better from a psychological perspective. As rhetoric, how does this work?

Most people living in Western culture have some familiarity Christian stories.  I say “stories” because there are more than one – the individual events and legends in the life of Jesus, the parables he told, and the overarching narrative of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus himself.  More importantly, the Christian story seamlessly weaves a believers own, individual story – his or her life – into this grand Christian drama.  Stories, in Christianity (as in all religions), are a big deal.

The is a growing convergence of thought that storytelling may be relatively central to the functioning of the human mind itself. We are, after all, enveloped by stories from birth to death. Stories exist in every culture that has ever been recorded.  Young children naturally tell stories, and crave to hear them. Moreover, so far as we know, no other animal tells stories. We tell stories about sports teams and figures, about celebrities and politicians, and about each other around the proverbial water cooler every day. We gossip. Television, books, movies, and many internet blogs provide a constant stream of stories into our homes every day. Journalists and psychotherapists know that “everyone has a story to tell” (and they’re right). So, to understand Christian stories in particular, we need to understand stories in general.  Why is storytelling so central to human life? 

Gossip & Social Cohesion                            

Stories seem to do a lot of things at once. For one, they may be the way that early tribal societies kept track of complex webs of social networks.  Michael Shermer suggested as such in his How We Believe (2000).  They allow us to distill important information about those around us into memorable and streamlined forms – essentially, gossip – so that we can recall with efficiency who is trustworthy and who is not, who gets along with who, etc. It has been demonstrated that people can solve logic problems better when presented in story form. Stories, on this view, are a convenient form of information transmission, and serve a cognitive and social control function. Important as this is, though, I think we can identify some other functions, served by storytelling, nearer to the heart of human psychic life.

Sources of Meaning

Others have suggested that stories function to provide the sense that one’s life is meaningful.  Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel (Parenting from the Inside-Out, The Developing Mind), notes that in telling our own life stories, we are essentially tying together evocative, emotionally-laden autobiographical memories (memories of what you did and felt during important events in your life) into a logical, coherent sequence – a narrative. And this feeling of “coherence”, he suggests, is – empirically – precisely what makes our lives feel meaningful. The story of one’s life is what makes one’s life make sense. To say it another way, we feel that our lives have meaning when we can recall all the important moments (whatever we feel them to be) and show how they work together to form who we are today.

Think, for a moment, about a time when you were young – say, ten years old.  You probably recall that memory with a feeling of identity – i.e., “That was me.” But think about your life then.  Chances are, there was little about you or your circumstances that is very similar to your life today. Your close relationships were different.  You lived somewhere different.  Your routine was different.  You had different goals perhaps, and different ideals.  You thought about different things. Even your body was different.  So in what sense, them, does it make sense to call this person “you”?

This concept of self-as-story is part of the answer.  We just are, in a psychological sense, our stories.  Our stories define, or at least explain, who we are.  All the events that have happened to you are, in a way, a part of you.  The important ones formed you.  Even if we feel we have transcended or overcome some adversity in our past, that very overcoming is itself part of our story (and odds are, a very important part). One’s story, then, constitutes one’s deepest sense of self.

Taken together, this suggests why the Christian story – the journey from sin to redemption, which is adopted in some fashion by every believer – becomes so central to the lives of believers. The core Christian story, first of all, serves as a kind of template on which the individual can project his own experience.  It thus serves an organizing function, providing ready interpretations to one’s experiences in the past (e.g., doubt and anxiety, or problems with one’s temper = sin), as well as the present. In providing this structure, the Christian story gives adherents a sense of overall coherence and, thus, meaning. A Christian’s life feels meaningful to her because she has had the right sorts of (very powerful and emotional) experiences, and because it becomes organized in the proper way.

Moreover, since one’s self is, in a sense, defined by one’s story, to criticize the larger Christian story in any way is often perceived as an attack on the very self of the believer. No wonder it is so tenaciously defended! 

And please note, fellow deconverts, that we are not exempt from attachment to our own stories.  Stories are not the exclusive purview of religion. How many deconversion stories have you read on the internet? How helpful have they have been to you?  Perhaps, even, you have written your own. Your own story from believer to “decon” is likely an important part of your life (otherwise you would not be reading this): it organizes and helps make sense of your experiences with religion. And how do most decons react – and I include myself in this – when someone challenges certain aspects of our story, such as, for example, by claiming we were never “really’ Christians to start with? At such times, our very self-definition is under attack, and our reaction to this is both predictable and understandable.

So, one reason the Christian story is central to believers because it is the basic source of their sense of having a meaningful life.

Stories and Theodicy

Another psychiatrist, Jerome Frank, in his masterful 1991 Persuasion and Healing, delves further into the nature of myth and story. He is writing mainly about psychotherapy, but more broadly about all the methods of “healing” human beings have used throughout the eons: namely, cultic, ritual, and religiomagical healing.  Though we today may draw a sharp distinction between (say) shamanism and modern psychological treatments, Frank sees a number of surprising similarities.  Interested readers will need look to the book itself for a full presentation of his fascinating argument, as for brevity’s sake I must limit myself to a discussion of those parts of his theory needed for my purposes here.

Frank suggests there are a number of elements that all forms of psychotherapy have in common.  Important among them, he suggests, is the provision of “..[a] rationale, conceptual scheme, or myth that provides a plausible explanation for the patient’s symptoms and prescribes a ritual or procedure for resolving them.” (p. 42, emphasis added). 

And why is this helpful to suffering, directionless, or otherwise demoralized (Frank’s term) individuals? “Myth”, in this sense, has a number of functions.  It combats a sufferer’s feelings of isolation and alienation by forging a bond between him and the group whose belief system he is adopting.  It arouses the expectation of help, and hence, hope. And as I have laid out in parts 2 and 3 of this series, myths (like sin and rebellion) can be emotionally arousing – stirring up one’s vulnerabilities – which can provide a powerful motive to seek relief from unpleasant emotions, such as helplessness.

But Frank also notes that myths can enhance a sense of mastery and self-efficacy.  He notes:

            “Since words are a human being’s chief tool for analyzing and organizing experience, the conceptual schemes of all psychotherapies [and I would add: and religions] increase patient’s sense of security and mastery by giving names to experiences that seem haphazard, confusing, or inexplicable. Once the unconscious or ineffable has been put into words, it loses much of its power to terrify. The capacity to use verbal reasoning to explore potential solutions to problems also increases people’s sense of their options and enhances their sense of control. This effect has been termed the principle of Rumpelstiltskin (Torrey, 1986) after the fairy tale in which the queen broke the wicked dwarf’s power over he by guessing his name.

            To be effective, interpretations… need not be correct, only plausible. ” (p. 48) (emphasis added)

This is, I suggest, near to the heart of the lasting appeal of the fundamentalist Christian mythos – it provides a theodicy, an interpretation and explanation of human suffering. No one is more susceptible to apologetic efforts than those who are already struggling with pain, grief, and loss, low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness or directionlessness in life. Apologetics, as I suggested in parts 2 and 3, amplifies and deepens these feelings, convinces people they represent their “real” self.

Indeed Christianity has an extraordinarily keen eye for human frailty, and thus makes it easy for you to feel understood if you are, for whatever reason, already prone to feel bad about yourself.  And where there is understanding, there is hope. Just naming one’s pain serves to tame it, and Christian theory provides an easy-to-use backstory that explains where your suffering came from – your alienation from God through sin – and what you can do about it.

And it is worth noting the robust pragmatism with which the human psyche operates.  Explanations for suffering do not have to be correct to be helpful.  They only have to be plausible, and the domestication of these formerly inexplicable and overwhelming experiences (pain, loss, difficult emotions, etc) does all that is needed to provide relief. And lest we too blithely dismiss this as placebo effect, I offer for the reader’s consideration that the placebo effect is a “real” effect.  Relief from suffering is relief from suffering, whatever the source.  Thus, in a very real sense, religions often work. Question of truth are decidedly, from this perspective, secondary.

This is worth remembering all this when we get caught up in the endless disputations about Christian metaphysics (i.e., arguing that the Gospel stories are true on their evidence). These efforts are, I suggest, decidedly post hoc for the suffering believer.  Some apologists pursue this out of a perhaps admirable desire maintain consistency in the belief system, but for most others, “evidence” for all the supernatural and historical claims is mostly beside the point. The core message and appeal of Christianity is redemption: purpose, guidance, relief from suffering, the benevolent attention of a loving deity – in effect, the fusion of one’s own story of redemption with that of one’s Savior.

Conclusion

The sense of meaning, purpose, direction, sure ground, ethical certainty, and social belonging that the grand Christian story provides cannot be overstated, as we former believers can attest. Christianity tells the story those who are suffering need most to hear: why we struggle, how it was never meant to be this way, and how things can be set aright.  The Christian narrative makes life make sense, and the powerful appeal of this function should never, ever be underestimated, especially by atheists and agnostics.

I hope it goes without saying that I believe in my soul that a life without such supernatural explanations can be exquisitely rich in meaning and purpose…. but we should also not forget that this takes some getting used to.  No longer participating in the Greatest Story Ever Told, we each must find a new source of meaning, and, often, a different way to understand our own life’s pain and tragedies.  And we can – better and with eyes-open, we think – but this takes some work, and it is not without loss. In a way, in leaving this grand drama, our stories and our meanings will both inevitably become smaller and more local. 

But, we also think, they are no less life-affirming for being so. 

 - Richard

In my previous post, I recounted my childhood years and the wonder and awe I felt at being a child of God. True, there were my moments of doubt and darkness, but they were always trumped in those early years by the moments of rapture and ecstasy as I read the very living Word of God and soaked up Christian teaching like a deer to water.

I cannot even begin to describe what followed my twelfth birthday. My love for Jesus turned into a living hell that words cannot describe. Most of my teenage years I just wished I could die to just relieve some of my doubts. I contemplated suicide. I had a loving family, loving friends, I was intelligent and insightful, wise beyond my years (as many told me), was far beyond the learning and knowledge of my peers about my faith, and was intelligent and had the potential for great success in life. By the time I was fourteen or fifteen I had to have read the Bible at least six times completely - not including the countless thousands of times I had poured over certain texts and their associated commentaries. I would often spend an hour or more in Scripture per day, trying to understand what passages meant. But I was an emotional wreck beyond words.

To help people understand the depth of my curiosity about Scripture, I should probably describe the black and white way in which I viewed the living Word of God. In my little teen mind, it occurred to me that if all 66 books of the Bible were inspired / God-breathed by the almighty, fearful, just and holy God of this universe, then it was in my best interest to understand every verse and line as much as I could. To me, memorizing John 3:16 and Romans 8:1 were child’s-play. I wanted to know what Revelation was about, what Ezekiel was about, and why Christians today do not have women wear a head covering to come to church. I wanted to know why Paul said women should not braid their hair, yet even women in conservative churches braid their hair out of modesty. I wanted to know why most Christians did not rest on the Sabbath even though Jesus did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. I wanted to know it all. After all, every word was inspired by God and the Bible was God’s love letter to me.

But in addition to my desire to know the Bible, I also had a passion to receive and be filled with the Holy Spirit. What was up with this second baptism thing? I thought it was somewhat hypocritical that my spiritual mentors loved the writings, devotion, and teaching of A.W.Tozer, but they flippantly dismissed his view on the second baptism. This seemed so, well, disrespectful! They wanted to take his theology that made them feel a certain way (holiness of God, sinfulness of man, etc.) but dismissed core teachings they did not agree with. I thought it was odd that my spiritual mentors were so - well - lazy in their spiritual faith. Did they not care? Well, I would not be like them. I would care. So I desperately sought to have the depth of spiritual life of men like Tozer, Spurgeon, or Bunyan.

Around this time I started experiencing voices in my head. At first I thought they were from God (or angels). They (at first it was only one voice) would give me suggestions on what I should do, or encourage me in a certain path, or speak Bible verses to me. Normally they were pretty passive, saying things like “I love you”, or “You are my child”, or quoting verses like “The fruit of the spirit is love”, etc. I loved these voices. They were enthralling, and I felt that I had a connection with God that was beyond that of my peers. Keep in mind these voices began when I was around thirteen years old.

But then things started going dark. To be honest, my years from the age of thirteen to sixteen are so dark ’spiritually’ I can barely remember how awful they were. I will do my best to recount what was going through my head. To do this, I will simply explain one (of literally dozens) of consistent ‘battles’ going on in my head at this time.

As a fundamentalist, conservative, Bible-believing Christian in the midwest, our family and its hand-picked churches adhered to the notion that a believer cannot lose their salvation. Using proof texts like John 10:29, my pastors and family would carefully explain how biblical it was to hold this view.

But my own reading of the Bible told me otherwise. Now that I look back I feel that most of my spiritual mentors - as ‘godly’ as they were - were dishonest. They did not want certain Bible verses to exist, so they would use the hermaneutical principle that the “clearer passage interprets the more difficult” to back up whatever theology they wanted to hold. So then, if they wanted to believe in “once-saved-always-saved” theology, well then the “clear” passages were obviously the ones they agreed with and the “difficult” passages were the ones that made their theological stance appear incorrect. Obviously, if interpreted “right”, those difficult passages were really saying what the simpler ones were.

There were three particular texts that honestly terrified me night and day for years. At times I was so horrified by these texts I literally wished I could just die (or commit suicide) so that I could get them off my mind. They are:

“For it is impossible for those who were once enlightened, and have tasted of the heavenly gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost, And have tasted the good word of God, and the powers of the world to come, If they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance; seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and put him to an open shame.” Hebrews 6:4-6, this one definitely bothered me the most.

“If any man see his brother sin a sin which is not unto death, he shall ask, and he shall give him life for them that sin not unto death. There is a sin unto death: I do not say that he shall pray for it.” 1 John 5:16

And Matthew 12:22-32 [Not quoted for brevity. "Blasphemy of the Holy Spirit" passage.]

What bothered me so much was just how bad every single interpretation of these passages was. To me they were crystal clear: a person could lose their salvation. Not only this, but if a person did “lose their salvation”, they could not gain it back. Furthermore, if you couple these with 2 Peter 2:20-22, a person who has come to Christ and turned their back is worse off than when they started.

Now, by themselves these passages were not enough of a catalyst to encourage my doubts. But coupled with an experience I had, they soon became all I could think about night and day for years.

One day I was sitting reading my Bible and came across the Matthew 12 passage (or its equivalent in the other synoptics). As I read, a thought popped into my head: “The Holy Spirit is a bitch”. I had never sworn in my life. This thought nearly knocked me over. Had I just blasphemed the Holy Spirit? If I had, did this not mean that I could never be forgiven “in this age or the age to come?”

What was this blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, anyway? How could there possibly be a teaching that a person could reach a state where they could not be forgiven? I thought every moment we lived on this planet was a testament to the mercy of God in giving us “another chance”? A camp pastor once taught that this passage was referring to the sin of unbelief. If a person dies “not believing”, they will never be forgiven (quite a clever interpretation!) This helped me out for a while, but I kept feeling that this was all wrong. This is not what the passage said, even though it was a cute interpretation and made me feel better.

To make matters more complicated, it occurred to me that even though I was “saved now”, what if I denied my Lord later? My family regularly received Voice of the Martyrs magazines and paraphernalia. I read Richard Wurmbrands Tortured for Christ and almost literally was frozen stiff for most of it. I was not afraid of the torture so much as I was that I could, quite possibly, someday be put into that awful situation where I might deny Christ. What if I did? The Bible says in one place that if you deny the son before men, he will also deny us before the father. It occurred to me that I could spend an entire life in devotion to my Lord and loving Savior and then, in a moment of weakness, deny him and spend and eternity in hell anyway. So much for hope.

I poured daily over these passages. I read every commentary I could find, and regularly talked to my dad and pastors about my doubts. Often I would go for a few days and be “fine”, and then reading the Bible I would feel the strong urge to turn to those passages and muse on them as if gnawing my spiritual fingernails bare. I was worn, abused, and tortured of mind. I was agonizing over my potential fate like a dog licking its fungi-ridden paws until they bled. I was miserable.

Nothing could relieve my doubts, and I tried everything. If I talked to someone about these passages in Scripture no one would give me a straight answer. Often they would just ignore the passage as if it was irrelevant to the Christian faith. Why could I not just believe? Idiots! Why could they not see what was right in front of their eyes? The Bible was so crystal clear! Could they not see it? Why were they not terrified? Did no one care?

To make matters more frustrating, Paul talks about the seal of the Holy Spirit and how a follower of Christ has the Spirit of Christ testify with our Spirit that we are indeed children of God. But then it occurred to me that my doubts were probably good evidence that I was not saved, because I certainly did not feel like a Spirit was testifying with my spirit. If I was saved, why did I doubt? How could other Christians have occasional doubts but it was not a big deal for them? What in the name of God was wrong with me?

To make matters more frustrating, there is no consensus at all in the Christian community on whether an individual can or cannot lose their salvation. No commentaries that I read about Hebrews 6, for example, seem to make any sense of what the passage actually says. They often run in circles around the passage like it has some sort of mystical meaning that none of us can quite grasp, then explain all the “popular” interpretations, and then sum up by saying that “this is a difficult passage”. What the… I already knew that. But what does it mean?

I can remember going to my parents on multiple occasions trying to get help. They would just say I was going through puberty (which “all kids my age go through”), or that I was arrogant and spiritually proud. Sometimes my dad would sit down with me and say “Josh, maybe you have not ever truly become a Christian”. My doubts would well up even more at this suggestion. Maybe he was right? I felt like he was pouring salt on my wound. I already believed that Jesus was the Christ, the Son of the living God, and that I could not be saved through my good works. I was even more spiritual, more in-tune with God than he was. How dare he! What more could God want? If my faith was not enough - what more did I need to do? Did I need to be baptized by the Holy Spirit a second time? If so, God - get on with it! But it gets worse! If Hebrews 6 is correct, then admitting that I was not already saved meant I could never be saved at all because I had already tasted the heavenly gift. And if I could never be saved, I might as well die and go to hell then and there.

It was awful. I was in mental anguish, on the brink of suicide, and my parents would not even bring in a pastor to talk to me about it. I wanted a psychiatrist and they did nothing. Nothing at all. Instead I was left to wallow in this freakish guilt and condemnation for years on end. If I were to admit that I was not a Christian, it would mean admitting that all of my spiritual experiences up to that point (including my dream, giving my life to the Lord at age 12, and numerous other experiences) were all facades. I would be admitting I was a fake, a liar, an impostor in the church. But if I admitted that my previous spiritual experiences and beliefs were wrong, what could I replace them with? If my dream, for example, was not ‘real’, then how could I trust any spiritual experience in the future?

The voices added to the torture. They began to be darker, more ominous, and often condemning. They derailed me, reviled me. One moment a voice would say “Josh, you must be such a good Christian that God would allow you to be tempted by Satan like this.” The next moment a voice would say “Josh! What a wicked sinner you are for thinking such a proud thought. In order to be greatest in the kingdom, you must become the least”. These voices would often go on for hours and hours. I could not pay attention to schoolwork, I could not enjoy anything, I was depressed almost all the time. If I had gone to a psychiatrist, I probably would have been labeled a bipolar schizophrenic. [More on this in my next note, and how I have completely cured myself from these voices.]

The only thing that kept me going through all this time was the thought that I must not be alone. Reading stories of John Bunyan and other Christians who went through the dark nights of doubt and came out on the other side as great Christian writers or orators gave me the courage to keep going. I felt that I was on a mission from God, and some day I would be free from all this mess and would then be able to help others who had gone through the same “trials”. I often comforted myself with 1 Peter 5:8-9.

These dark years lasted from when I was thirteen until probably last year. They consistently got better as time went on. I can remember when I was seventeen I laughed freely at a joke in church. My friend Anthony looked at me with surprise in his eyes and said “Josh, I haven’t heard you laugh like that in a long time.” I was embarrassed. Unfortunately, each time someone would say something like this it would only hurl me back into doubt, despair, darkness, and agony. What the heck was wrong with me?

As I have mentioned, some people would comfort me by saying I was just going through adolescence. Others would say I was spiritually proud. Others would say I was extra spiritually “sensitive”. I consistently thought I was going through some demonic oppression.

Oh, one other thing I desperately need to mention. During this entire time I would often feel demonic presences in my room. My hair would stand on end, I would get goosebumps, and I would feel as if there was a living soul hovering above me, ready to show its face and terrify the living daylights out of me (see Job 4:12-16). This probably occurred a couple hundred times over the course of my teenage years. I often submitted this “being” to scientific tests, and did everything I could to prove it was only in my own mind (I now believe it was, but that will be covered in my next note). I was extremely scared. I would leave the room where I felt the presence, and immediately the feeling of its presence would go away. It would not follow me. Then I would reenter the room and it would be there, as clear as ever. I could turn on a light, and it would not go away. I would just sit and pray, begging God to send it away. Eventually it would pass on like a fog lifting.

Similarly, I would often get the feeling that “something was wrong”. I would have panic attacks, which I learned to control out of sheer will power. Often these would occur and I would suppress them, trying to act normal. They would normally be triggered by communion, alter calls, or reading certain passages in the Bible and especially at times when I needed to contain myself the most (in church for example).

Sometimes people would encourage me to read the Bible to alleviate my doubts and fears. They never seemed to have the brains to realize that reading the Bible increased my doubts and fears. I was so afraid to admit that I was terrified beyond imagination by some of the things the Bible so clearly said. Others would read the Bible and get a warm fuzzy feeling and say how loved they felt by God. I would read the Bible and ignore those “easy” passages. What about the ones that say that a person can be predestined for hell and eternal torment? Do those make people feel lovely? What if I was that person?

I probably should mention my sexual life during this time. I was terrified by my sexuality. Sexual stimulation from anything made me feel miserable. I knew what Jesus said. He said that if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, gouge it out. After all, it is better to enter the kingdom without a hand or eye than to enter the eternal fires of hell. There were moments where I seriously considered following these verses. And then some Christians had the gall to say that they were metaphoric? Jesus taught clearly that it is best for some people to become eunichs for the sake of the kingdom.

I must confess that my fear of my sexuality basically kept me from discovering masturbation until I was nineteen years old. I did not even know what sex was until then. When I was around thirteen my dad had the customary “talk” with me. He told me everything - except what sex was. I remember asking him: “Dad, well, I know all about my sexual urges now, but what is sex?” I can remember him sortof shift in his seat uncomfortably and very sternly he said “Josh, that is something you will discover when you get married.” Get married? That could be ten years from now! I was filled with an irrational sense of curiosity about this subject, and at the same time was restricted beyond imagination by my fears of committing sexual thought crime. I was absolutely miserable. So many times I wanted to open the dictionary out of sheer curiosity, but was held back by my “love” for God and desire to be holy - and fear of sin. My friends did not seem to have these problems. What was their problem? Why were they not miserable all the time because of pent-up sexual energy? When I was older I discovered that they probably did not have these problems because they were regularly masturbating. I spent years of purity, resisting every sexual urge, wallowing in the freakish misery of being sexually stressed out, and my friends enjoyed life because they did not take the Bible as seriously?

When I was fifteen or sixteen I wanted to get a girlfriend. My parents kept telling me I was not “ready”. I should wait until I was more mature. They consistently told me this over and over. I read Joshua Harris’ “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and bought it hook, line, and sinker. But how was I supposed to know when I was “ready”? After all, what makes someone “ready”? I had all the hardware, what was wrong with my software? The teachings I learned about relationships in the church did the greatest thing in the world to destroy my relationships with women. I was always awkward, despite my raging hormones, because I was always wondering whether the level of my hormones was a sign that I was sinning or not. I was always analyzing my relationships, trying to figure out if it was “God’s will”. I was always analyzing the women I was interested in, to see if we were “spiritually compatible”. If I had a bad thought, was that enough that I needed to back off from the woman? What if liked two girls at a time, did this mean that I was not a “one-woman” man (per Paul’s requirements for eldership)? What if I sat next to a girl and had an erection? Should I chop off my hand or not?

One last thing before I end. When I was thirteen years old, I remember reading a little about evolution. I was enamored by the beauty and clarity of the theory. The thought popped into my head: “This is amazing!” Then it occurred to me that it could not be true, because the Bible says otherwise. Therefore, I must be under attack by Satanic forces. I was thoroughly confused. How could Satan’s theory of evolution be so beautiful and make so much sense? I spent my entire teenage years supressing this thought, in fear that I was under spiritual attack for seeing the beauty of evolution. I bought six-day creation thoroughly. If you look in the Creation Magazine archives and find that I wrote Answers in Genesis back in the late 90’s and was printed in the letters to the editors section.

Well, I had probably better wrap this up. I think you guys get the point. My teenage years were a living nightmare. Every thought, every action, and every feeling were under constant scrutiny by my desire to honor Jesus, obey Him, and be “Holy as I am holy” - at all costs. I was truly trying to bring every thought into subjection unto Christ.

To be finished…

- Josh

My de-conversion story is one that will probably leave many of you appalled and shocked at just what religion can do to someone. My story is not simple - it is extremely involved, intense, and complicated. As such, this small (hopefully only 3-part) series will relate my detailed journey from fundamentalist, six-day literal, biblical inerrancy believing, calvinistic, highly spiritual Christian to atheist. I will cover my reasoning, my spiritual experiences, and my the internal hellish torment that my faith gave me. The first part will cover my childhood, the second will cover my teenage years, and the final portion will cover my recent de-conversion at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago at the age of 23.

[Please forgive me for the length. I want to make it as clear as possible that I was as deeply into the faith as one can imagine, because most accusations made against de-converts have to do with the fact that we were never a "true" Christian. Well, if I was not a "true" Christian, then I cannot imagine what one is!]

As a child I never knew anything but Protestant Christianity. My parents were not forceful in their beliefs, but it was certainly obvious they took them seriously. My dad was born into a pastor’s family, and my mother grew up in the same church as my father. Both of their immediate families were extremely devoted Christians.

I was extremely intelligent for my age as a young child around the age of 7-10. I can remember some of the things I pulled off and the arguments I concocted and even now I wonder how I came up with that stuff. For example, I can remember basically explaining the problem of Zeno’s paradox to one of my dad’s bicycle shop employees who was in college at the time. I must have only been ten, but it occurred to me that when molecules travel from point A to point B they must travel an infinite set of possible locations in order to reach their new location. How do they ever arrive?

My parents knew from the beginning that it was important to raise their children in the faith. I commend them for this, only because it was the best they knew how at the time. This devotion to the faith eventually lead them to home-school all of us children.

Around the age of 7 or 8, I can remember my mom giving me a small booklet on being a good little Christian boy or girl. I thought it was silly and scoffed at it in my little mind, but I remember distinctly feeling a sense of remorse at this thought. Not so much that I had scoffed at “God” or anything, but more so that I had rejected my mother’s advice. I never read the book.

But my parents were intelligent and were not easily phased by our lack of interest in spiritual things. We all loved to play computer games, and they knew that they could get us to do just about anything if they used our love for computers as bait. My parents started this rule: we could not play our allotted one hour of daily computer until we had read the Bible for half an hour. So, of course, we consented. I can remember the drudgery of reading through Isaiah when I was around 10 years old - for half a lifetime (excuse me, half an hour). But it was all worth it because we wanted to play F-19 or blow up Russian tanks in M1 Tank Platoon. It was for a good cause. Because of this I had probably read the Bible from cover to cover 2 or 3 times by the time I was 12 years old.

What my parents could not accomplish, reading the Bible did. Through study of Scripture, I became seriously interested in Christianity. Beyond this, the thing that got me most convicted was a spiritual dream I had when I was around 9 years old. In my dream there was a river with a bank. On that bank lived the devil - in a small shack. There was a small path that separated the devil’s “workshop” from a park at the top of the river bank. In my childlike mind I understood a few ground rules. First of all, I knew deep down that if I crossed the path into the devil’s territory I was able to be caught by him. Unfortunately the poor devil could not cross the path into the park until sundown. So what I would do is sneak past the path, down the riverbank, and tease the devil until he chased me back up the bank to the path. There I would mock him on the other side of the path - confident that he could not get me. But there was a catch.

At sundown the devil could cross back over the path and get anyone he chose. I can remember distinctly in the dream that I was playing with my friends on the playground when I saw the sun slip behind the trees. A deep dread fell over me, as I remembered that the devil could come get anyone he chose. This, of course, would be me. And get me he did.

I remember the dream took on a nasty overtone when the devil grabbed me to take me back to his little “workshop”. The sky was black - a nasty black. The playground faded into the distance. It was just me, the devil - and my dad (of all things). The devil said “But Josh crossed the line, he belongs to me…” I thought to myself: my dad will show him! But my dad said “You are right” (or something like that). I was in the pits of despair, depressed, sullen, and dreading my impending torment. At that moment the entire dream changed. I looked up, and it was no longer my dad next to the devil. It was a man who was facing away from me with dark, long hair. He had his shirt off and he was sweating drops of blood. And the words he spoke before my dream ended have haunted me to this day: “Don’t take Josh, take me instead.”

Then I awoke.

For years this dream was the only token I had that I was “saved”. I considered it a personal revelation from God Himself that I was indeed a Christian, because it was one of the first times I truly grasped the story of salvation. How many people on this planet have a dream when they are a child that clearly reveals the entire gospel message to them in such allegory? While my friends simply had conversion experiences where they were afraid of the rapture when a tornado siren went off (hey, it was Kansas), I had a full-blown revelation from God. Ironically, I was somewhat embarrassed at this story for quite some time because I did not want to be accused of being sensational.

Despite this obvious revelation from God, I was filled with doubts about my salvation for several years after that. I can remember once when someone asked me my “testimony” for an AWANA assignment that I was suddenly stricken with this fear: what if I was not actually saved? How could I know? I never “prayed the prayer” or “had that moment” or had the “date written in my Bible” of when I was saved? How could I know for sure? One would think that the dream would have done it, but not for me.

Most of my agony was due to the preachers I was accustomed to hearing. They would often end their sermons with the little marketing speech “If you have never received Jesus as your Savior, or you have any doubts about your salvation” - then you are probably not saved. I was horrified by these sermons. They terrified the living daylights out of me. I am not sure, but I probably prayed that sinners prayer dozens of times, trying to make sure I “did it right”.

Despite these doubts, I can remember also having my moments of rapture and joy beyond human description. One time I was sitting on my bed (at probably 11 years old), and I remember reading Galatians and I was suddenly filled with this overwhelming sense of God’s presence. It was all I needed. I was enraptured - addicted. I wanted it to never stop. Who was I that the God of the universe would choose me to be his son?

This experience was like gasoline to a flame. I became enamored with spiritual experiences. I can remember sitting on my bed, wanting God to form the clouds into a special message for me - I just knew He could do it. He never did. I remember the dozens of time I must have prayed for God to speak to me personally. I wanted to hear his voice - to feel His touch and to know He was as real in my little physical reality as I knew He was in the spiritual realm. I will not say He never spoke - but that will be a topic for my next post.

I also became extremely ethical. I was honest - too honest. I would often apologize for mistakes I did, dreading the next time communion would come around. Knowing that the pastor would say “If you know of any unconfessed sin in your life, you should talk to that person before you take communion… because some have fallen asleep [died] because they took of the bread and the cup in an unworthy manner.” [Side note: I always wondered why pastors never took this reasoning seriously. They never had the boldness of Paul to claim that someone died in church because of bad communion.] It was an awful thought: that I could be punished by God for taking communion with one unconfessed sin. I would often pray long and hard before communion, asking God to show me any unconfessed sins. Often little “misdeeds” would come to mind, and then I would agonize in torment trying to figure out if this was a “big enough” sin that I needed to go confess it to someone.

I can remember once reprimanding my parents for unfairly arguing that they could watch a movie and us kids could not because it was “inappropriate” for us. This was ridiculous. In my theology, if it was inappropriate for us, it was inappropriate for them. They did not watch the movie (that I know of). I must have been a nightmare!

My own personal internal judgment did indeed extend to others. I would often judge my friends for their dirty jokes, or their swearing (gosh, darn, dang it, etc.), or for their bad theology. I can remember getting so upset that some of my friends believed they could go to heaven by being baptized, or that another friend believed that their pet dog was going to be in heaven. This was just not right. Jesus didn’t die for animals! I would often argue with them for quite some time, pointing out Bible verses to show that they were wrong. I can even remember going to a Ken Ham conference and during the Q&A my “big question” was about how I could prove from the Bible to my friends that animals do not go to heaven. All I got was some equivocation and a slight reference to Ecclesiastes (”Who knows that the soul of man ascends into heaven and the soul of animals descend into the earth?”, paraphrased from memory). Not a very good answer, but it did not bother me at the time.

When I was 12 years old, I remember distinctly sitting in the basement of my house, reading Romans. I came upon Romans 12:1 and was filled with passion for my Lord. I gave my life to Jesus Christ that day, looking into a beam of light coming through the basement window that seemed to wrap me in its arms, as if Jesus Himself was telling me how much He loved me. I was ecstatic. It was the most fulfilling feeling I have probably ever had. Could I have this feeling forever?

That next year my parents moved to a new church and I was baptized. Coming up out of the water at that cool Kansas lake I can remember the feeling that what I had done was right somehow. It was just - well - good. I had done the right thing.

To be continued…

- Josh

I’ve noticed Christians are really hung up on the concept of free will*. It’s a very useful tool invoked to explain away everything from the Problem of Evil to the need for Jesus to die on the cross to the reason lives aren’t saved and prayers aren’t answered. Christians explain that God gave people free will which he has promised not to violate. He gives us all the freedom to choose between good and evil and thus eternal life and eternal damnation. He is grieved when we don’t choose the “right path,” but he will respect our decision and not intercede in our lives.

Christians really love this idea, and if you talk or debate with one you will surely hear them invoke their beloved God-given gift of “free will” with a twinkle in their eye that betrays their facade of modest humility and lets you know that they’re unbelievably certain of not only their chosen faith, but also of the usefulness of their apologetic “free will” card which will proved a philosophical answer to any of the difficult questions posed by nonbelievers.

Free will is an essential part of God’s salvation plan for the world. We are supposed to come to God freely, of our own volition, and make an informed and personal decision to accept him as our savior. My question is this: if Christians cherish free will so much, and believe that it is central to the process of belief, why do they also practice and praise childhood indoctrination? Doesn’t this seem directly hypocritical?

Research and personal experience both have proven that where a child is born and the religious affiliation of a child’s parents have the largest baring over their religious affiliation. Take a look at this map which shows the distribution of Christian denominations in the US if you don’t believe me. If you happen to be a baby born to Christian parents in a part of the world that is populated primarily by other Christians, you are going to be a Christian.

As a baby I was not baptized because my parents wanted to give me the freedom to choose religion on my own. They felt like baptizing me into the church as an infant violated my free will. My parents believed that the decision to follow Christ or not was ultimately up to me, and one that I would make once I reached the “age of accountability.” The majority of Christians believe in this mysterious “age of accountability,” which is a stage in development a child reaches where they are able to understand right from wrong, and thus are able to make a lifelong dedication to Christ. My family believes this age is about five or six, or whatever age a child reaches where they begin to empathize and understand simple moral concepts like “sharing is good” and “hitting is bad.” They believe that at five years of age a child who can’t even pick out their own clothes is ready to pick out their religion. A child of five is going to choose whatever their parents chose, or whatever they believe will make their parents happy. They are not coming to God based on their own will.

Thus I was born a Christian. I didn’t have any choice over the matter. Like all Christian parents, mine felt that leading me to Christ was their most important duty. They took the words of Proverbs 22:6 to heart, “Train up a child in the way he should go, even when he is old he will not depart from it,” and began my religious instruction when I was just barely learning to talk. I was instructed that I needed to ask Jesus into my heart as my savior because of how much God loved me. It wasn’t a matter of choice, it was a matter of duty. I wasn’t given any other options. They didn’t explain to me that, if I wanted, I could pray to Allah instead, or maybe Buddha. They certainly didn’t tell me that I could chose to not believe in God altogether. They violated my free will by urging me to make a decision that I did not understand the implications of, and without offering me alternatives. It wasn’t even a matter of “Will you decided to accept Jesus as your personal savior?” but rather “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savior yet?”

Indoctrination violates free will, and that is why many free thinkers (myself excluded) consider it child abuse. It stifles a child’s ability to make a personal and conscious decision to follow any particular faith. Yes, a child might grow into an adult and decide to abandon their religion of their own volition, but it is extremely rare. It turns out that the old proverb is actually true. A child who is taught “the way [read: RELIGION] he should go” will not depart from it, even after they reach maturity. Darwin realized this when he wrote that it is as likely for a child to apostatize from their indoctrinated faith “as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake.”

Christians love free will, but they fail to see the how often they violate it.

- orDover

A Clarifying Addendum:

I am in no way saying or suggesting that parents should be careful to keep their children’s free will in tact and unvoilated. I recognize that all parents, regardless of their belief system, will have a great influence over the belief system of their children. This cannot be avoided. I am singling out Christian parents only because their religious belief claims that free will, coming to Christ via an independent personal decision, is a crucial and paramount part of God’s plan for salvation.

*I should take this opportunity to explain that I am skeptical of “free will” and believe that it is likely a cognitive illusion.

In this article, I want to examine one of the more recognizable yet curious features of fundamentalist belief: the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy. Fundamentalist Christian apologists claim that the Bible is perfect and without error – certainly a striking thing to claim of any book. And this “wow factor” is exactly what gets apologists their mileage with this maneuver. If one were to become convinced that the Christian Bible really is utterly flawless in everything it says, that would certainly be a powerful argument for the truth of a religion based on it.

Now, let me remind the reader that in this series I am assuming a naturalistic stance. I am assuming without argument here that the Bible is not actually inerrant. Instead, what I wish to look at here is two things: one, how to apologists do it? How can they possibly argue that the Bible – which on an honest first reading appears to be resplendent in contradictions and errors – actually only has “apparent contradictions”, not “real” ones? Secondly, why do they do so? What is the pull of this idea, and why is it so hard to let go of for those de-converting?

The Case of the Missing Car

Let’s start with a simple thought experiment, seemingly far afield perhaps, but something that touches directly on how we form beliefs about the world. Suppose one morning you wake up, get dressed, and go outside to get in your car to drive to work, like any other morning. When you get outside, however, you discover that your car is missing. It is not where you think you left it. Here is my question: what explanations might we entertain to account for this finding?

Well, the first, most obvious possibility that springs to mind is that it was stolen. And that could certainly be, but consider a few others: you misremember where you parked it. Or, maybe your spouse moved it and forgot to tell you. Or perhaps you next door neighbor had a life-and-death emergency and needed a car, so he just took it, planning to tell you later. Or, perhaps it was towed for some reason.

Or, perhaps a passing alien spacecraft abducted it for sinister purposes all their own.

Hear me out! I am not by any means saying each of these explanations is equally good. But I am saying it can be very helpful to articulate why. Why exactly is it better to say the car might have been stolen than that it might have been abducted by aliens?

Now, one might be tempted to employ the skeptic’s trump card here: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And although I do agree with this principle, I also note it rather begs the question at hand: why do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? What makes this theory “extraordinary?” Moreover, in this example, I deliberately did not provide any evidence at all as to what really happened. Yet most people reading this would conclude – correctly, I think – that “stolen” is a possibility worth more serious consideration than “alien abduction”, despite there being no evidence either way.

My point is that rational belief formation is not simply a matter of what does, versus what does not, have evidential support. Neither is it simply a matter of logic: there is nothing strictly illogical about the UFO hypothesis. In the example above, all the explanations given (including “UFO abduction”) entirely explain the available evidence, and do so logically. But the “updating” of our belief system in the light of new information or evidence does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs, rather, in the context of a very large and complex array of “background beliefs” – not all of which are created equal.

The Web of Belief

W.V.O Quine, a 20^th century American philosopher, was the first to articulate this view. Quine’s famous metaphor for this model of scientific reasoning and belief formation was “the web of belief.” Our belief systems consist of a vast set of interlocking statements that impinge on reality (that is, contact with new evidence and experiences) at the edges. There are any number of ways to distribute the “force” of new information and experiences throughout the web.

When a new experience (i.e., evidence) presents itself, we must update or alter our existing belief systems to accommodate it. But which beliefs actually get altered is never forced by the evidence itself. Any evidence can be accommodated, logically, in more than one way – infinitely many, in fact. Quine called this the “underdetermination of theory by data.” As the metaphor suggests, though, there are some beliefs that are more central to the web than others. For most of us, the belief that the laws of nature are constant across time and space is much more basic to our webs of belief than other claims. So, we never explain something by saying, for example, that today is Friday, and the laws of nature are different on Friday, and that’s why my experiment did not produce the expected result (as opposed to saying my prediction was just wrong). In our example above, you would probably be more willing, in this situation, to alter your pre-existent belief that you live in a low-crime neighborhood, than your belief that there are no car-abducting flying saucers.

But you wouldn’t have to, and this is the striking consequence of the “web of belief” model: any given theory can always be coherently maintained, whatever the evidence, if you are willing to make enough modifications elsewhere in your belief system. For example, if I wished to believe in the UFO abduction hypothesis no matter what, I could “explain” any contradictory evidence on other things – a cover-up, perhaps. I can also point to all the many sightings and photos of UFOs, and other (claimed) abductions – and dismiss skeptical efforts as the sinister machinations of malevolent aliens who really want my car. Now, this is not a very elegant theory. But it is not a contradictory one – and, importantly, it is one which any and all evidence (no matter what it is) can be accounted for.

So how do we choose one theory over another if the evidence can be construed to fit logically with any of them? I have already hinted at one way: an inherent conservatism in our belief systems. We usually wish to change the fewest beliefs, and the “smallest” beliefs, as strictly necessary in our pre-existent web to accommodate new evidence.

Quine also identified other “virtues” (his word) such as simplicity, explanatory reach, parsimony, etc. that can be used to guide belief formation. He called these “pragmatic” virtues. What it boils down to, in essence, is that the best way to run a web of belief is the way that makes the most practical, common-sense sense of the data we have. Ultimately, it’s really a matter of good judgment.

Tangled Apologetic Webs

What does this have to do with apologetics? This model of belief-formation bears directly on how we resolve potential contradictions between evidence and belief, and between one set of evidence and another. If we are willing to sacrifice some simplicity, parsimony, and the like, we can always maintain a consistent web of belief while simultaneously holding on to any particular belief we wish. Creationists do this all the time. So do conspiracy theorists, end-times theorists, and radical ideologues of every stripe. These folks all have a strong commitment to a handful of central claims, and they are able to retro-fit the rest of the data in around them. They say they can answer every objection – and they can.

So, when Biblical harmonizers say there are no contradictions in the Bible, in a way they’re right. There is nothing that can’t be “explained”, if you’re willing to accept some rather tortuous explanations. The differing times of Jesus’ death reported in Mark versus John are “really” the same, if you accept that one used “Roman time” and one used a different time frame. The differing stories of the Resurrection narrative are explained by voluntary omissions among different writers reflecting differing emphases. The different lineages of Jesus are explained as one coming through Mary, the other Joseph. Isaiah 53 becomes “really” about Jesus if you accept that all the parts that don’t seem to fit are to be understood as metaphor.

Given the complexities involved in the translation and study of any ancient text, there is always room to maneuver in your harmonizing efforts. One can always delve into the language, the sociology, the context, the historical details, etc., to create a coherent (though unsimple) rationale as to why, when “properly understood”, any two disparate passages “really” mean the same thing. Indeed, debates about inerrancy often turn on these very types of issues, as each debater challenges the other’s premises, and premises of premises, and the whole debate mushrooms into an ugly fractal of syllogistic minutia.

And that’s the point. Simplicity is the first casualty in this sort of endeavor, but for the fundamentalist, needful as he is of sure guidance from his god, this is an acceptable loss. A coherent belief system in which he can maintain his belief in inerrancy is his primary objective; all else is secondary. And so that’s what he creates.

God’s Perfect Word

Many years ago I was in the process of gradually shedding my faith. But I feared being wrong (as many de-cons do) and wanted a way to be “sure” I was on the right path. I searched high and low for some problem in the Bible – a contradiction, error, inaccuracy, something that was just too glaring. Something that just couldn’t be explained away by any apologist no matter how clever. I never found one.

What I have since realized is that, basically, I had been asking the wrong question. There are no irreconcilable discrepancies in the Bible… but that is only because inerrancy, for fundamentalists, is not a conclusion arrived at, it is a premise they start with. It is a central strand in their web of belief. In the face of seeming contradictions, it will be given up last of all – or never.

If you think about it, to even begin the task of harmonization is to assume inerrancy in the first place! After all, given two ordinary texts that contradict one another about some point, no one would sit down and try to show how they are somehow necessarily both correct. We would naturally assume one or the other, or perhaps both, to be simply wrong. Yet this is exactly what inerrancy apologists do not do. They try to find a way for both texts to be correct, and by so doing betray a pre-existing assumption that, in fact, they both are.

The real question, then, is whether these harmonization offered, individually and en masse, are the simplest and most parsimonious explanations for the existence of apparent Biblical discrepancies. Is it simpler to assume inerrancy and then have to write enormous justifications explaining away the hundreds to thousands of Biblical inaccuracies and contradictions? Or is it simpler to conclude that there appear to be contradictions and inaccuracies because there are contradictions and inaccuracies, and that that is exactly what one would expect from a patchwork of human religious texts written twenty centuries ago?

Again, it is not just whether one’s web of belief is coherent and answers all the questions. That part is easy; every crackpot conspiracy theorist in the world can do that. It is whether it does so in a simple, elegant, practical, and convincing way.

The Why Question

But what is the appeal of this idea, and why is it so difficult for many of us to give up? I suggest that Biblical inerrancy is so appealing because it meets a desperate psychological need, for believers. It provides a sure ground for certainty.

Certainty is a defining need of the fundamentalist mindset. Fundamentalists are overwhelmed at the prospect of not being sure, or at least not being sure about the things that matter – one’s role and purpose in life, the basis for ethical behavior, what happens after death, how to make good decisions for your life. Now, these sorts of things often arouse anxiety for many people, not just fundamentalists. But because of their religious indoctrination, adherents to fundamentalist religion have a hard time managing that anxiety any other way.

Remember, as I have been elucidating in this series, the value and competence of one’s self is thoroughly undermined, in fundamentalism. Fundamentalist Christianity powerfully hammers home the idea that we are “horrors” to God: corrupt, prideful, and incapable of improving ourselves. The goal of fundamentalist apologetics is to overwhelm you with a gut-level conviction of your own badness, and thereby induce a sense of profound helplessness. It’s every effort is directed against undermining a believer’s sense of self-esteem, competence, or efficacy.

Such a believer can hardly be blamed for feeling inadequate to run his own life! Making important decisions when you cannot be sure of the “rightness” of your decision arouses normal anxiety in everyone. And to tolerate this anxiety and make a decision anyway requires some measure of basic self-esteem and self-confidence. But fundamentalists often have neither, because it has been ground out of them. So they have to get their confidence from somewhere else.

An inerrant text comes in right handy for such purposes. A better anxiety emollient than a perfect Word from a perfect God can hardly be imagined. In errant text quells a believer’s anxiety about life. He does not feel in control of his life, worm that he is – but he doesn’t have to be, because he can hand the reigns to God, certain of the guidance he finds in his book. Inerrancy serves a desperately needed function of establishing confidence in the only guiding star a believer thinks exists. Without it, he is adrift with nothing at all to lead him across some very scary and very lonely waters. The idea of steering using his own judgment just doesn’t occur to him.

So, my proposal for understanding the claim of Biblical inerrancy is this: fundamentalist believers posit inerrancy just because they need inerrancy. They can then just fuss with the details until it all fits. The result is not very elegant, perhaps. But who cares about elegance when your very soul is at stake?

And for those de-converting, the question thus would seem to become: if it is true that there is not, and never will be, perfect and unfailing guidance for making important decisions about your life, how are you going to learn to trust yourself enough to make them on your own?

- Richard

Are de-converts able to move beyond Christendom? An honest question. Many of us invested our entire life into evangelical endeavours. Others are swayed by the subtle power of the various denominations Christianity have to offer. One thing is for certain, it has had an unbalanced effect on our growth as human beings (for better or worse).

While I believe my Dobsonesque childhood damaged me in certain ways, I am thankful for my evangelical upbringing if only for, ironically, my skepticism. My parents taught me to be skeptical of everything, other than my own religious views. I was to be on the look out for big government moves to a New World Order, raise a cautious eye to new religious movements (or “cults”), and question everything that society and science through my way. They just didn’t expect that they gave me the same tools to critique my own religious upbringing.

But what now? I continue to keep a skeptical view, including of the sociological reports I must read for my academic life as well as the science I read in pop culture. But what about the rest of my life? Can I move past that Christian worldview? Is it healthy to continue to brew on past beliefs? As a religious studies major, it is inevitable, and I probably have made it harder on myself by choosing such a discipline. But what about this site? Is it a help, or a hindrance to mature growth?

Are we ex-Christians sulking about, fooling themselves that we are providing positive reinforcements for other non-believers and soon-to-be non-believers. Or is it what we say it is - a resource for former and skeptical religionists? Perhaps health and instruction is not part of what we do. Perhaps we are merely deconstructers, allowing the faithless to flounder in their own philosophies of non-belief. Is it possible for this sort of community to act as just another crutch, another religious-like entity that cannot think beyond itself?

I present these questions not as a criticism, but an inquiry - not as a debate, but a conversation. When is it time to move past perpetual de-conversion and just live? For some of us, this article will ring more truth than others. We are all at different stages in our lives. What stage are you in? Is the project of de-conversion a healthy step, an immature one, or a little of both?

Comments, please.

- The Apostate

“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?” – Morpheus

I grew up as an hard-core fundamentalist, and have been slowing drifting secular since the beginning of high school. In sixth grade, my parents got rid of Aladdin due to Jasmine’s inappropriate garb. My church started playing contemporary music in the evening services, and as this form of music is displeasing to God, we changed churches largely for this reason. Together with being home schooled and highly gifted mathematically, I was not what you would call a normal child.

Although this may be barely believable to many of you unless you also have been brainwashed at an old enough age to know better, I followed along willingly. “It will be worth it all, When we see Christ.” In high school, I was not allowed to date. With most people, no dating means that the “courtship” model is the alternative, but in my case, no clear alternative was given. (My adolescence consisted of “enumerated powers.”) As a junior in high school, when cute girls noticed me, it was depressing more than anything, because I could do nothing about it. It’s only a slight hyperbole to say that I thought the F-word was flirt (that’s a sin too for kids that age, in case you didn’t know.) When I was a senior, God told me who I was to marry. *Pathetic story squelched.* A year later, she married another.

I should mention that although I frequently poke fun at home schooling culture, I’m very grateful to my parents for teaching me. It was without a doubt, the best possible environment for me to receive an excellent education. This came at the price of a great deal of my mother’s time for more than a decade.

But socially speaking, as I’m sure you could imagine, my freshman year at a public university was … interesting. Shortly before arriving, I had shaken off some of my crazier beliefs regarding moral standards regarding music and dating, but that didn’t stop me from asking questions like “who’s Jessica Simpson?” or having to go to urbandictionary.com to figure out if making out meant sex. I had been betrayed into living a miserably legalistic life with standards above and beyond the Bible. Much of my social dysfunction was suffering left over from trying to live a godly life in the way that other’s thought I should. At this point, it would have been rational for me to walk away from faith based on what it did to me. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. It wasn’t Christianity that was to blame, but rather my legalistic upbringing. My parents were no longer the Disney-movie-banning type, which went a long way toward helping me laugh at my past without disowning my religion.

By my sophomore year, I had settled into a life as a fundamentalist where I was at peace. I outgrew some of my weirdnesses, and found friends (both Christian and not) who accepted the rest. But as I learned about theology and the Bible and discussed it with my friends, I began growing discontent. There was something wrong, but I found whatever it was to be elusive. What I couldn’t admit was that the Bible didn’t make sense to me. Paul kept on making logical arguments that didn’t work. For instance, why couldn’t he just say women aren’t supposed to teach men and leave it at that in I Timothy 2? I could accept that. Why must he give the reason that man was formed first – what did that have to do with anything? At this point, it would have been rational for me to walk away from faith based on the way it was clashing with reason. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. It wasn’t the Bible that was to blame, I was trying to impose the reason of man on the Word of God. The Bible wasn’t wrong, I just needed to accept that it was true.

The summer after my sophomore year was spent with 13 other students working on a research project. I was the only Christian, and my roommate was an ex-Christian who knew the Bible better than me. He wasn’t obnoxious about it, but when I tried to convert him, he knew how to push back. There’s just something about explaining theological concepts to a hostile audience that reveals just how convoluted the arguments are. By the end of the summer, when I thought about religion, neither of us had to open our mouths for my faith to get stomped – the internal skeptic in me was stronger than the Christian in me. I spent a day as an agnostic, and that could have been the end. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. I was caving in to social pressure and just rejecting the Bible for emotional reasons (if you didn’t follow that, then you are following me.) It was then that I had the most real religious experience of my life. However, I also knew even at the time that these feelings were indistinguishable from the ones that told me the one I was to marry. The human will to hope has great power over the mind, even when the hope is in vain.

When my junior year started, I considered myself to be on agnostic watch, and was depressed most of the time. But then I started coming back. I began taking an online theology class that switched me from presuppositional apologetics to evidential apologetics. You mean I don’t have to assume the Bible is true a priori, but there’s actual evidence for it? Hallelujah! As Sam Harris put it, “at these moments, religious believers appear like men and women in the desert of uncertainty given a cool drink of data.” I knew that my mind had outgrown fundamentalist Christianity, but at least I knew what I was growing into: evangelical Christianity. I had been de-constructed down to Jesus’ Resurrection and the historical accuracy of the Bible. Now it was time to rebuild. I cared not if my reconstructed theology was anything like what I started with – fundamentalism wasn’t working. I determined to follow the evidence wherever it led.

During the spring of my junior year, I was in for an unpleasant surprise. In order to affirm my beliefs in six-day creation, I began researching origins from all sides. What shocked me was not that there was evidence for evolution, or even more for evolution than other theories. What shocked was that it was not even close. By now, I knew my religious foundations lay in my relationship with God, the moral teachings of Jesus, and especially his Resurrection, but evolution was still a very tough pill to swallow. Among the three statements: evolution is true, Christianity is true, evolution and Christianity are incompatible, one of them had to give. At this point, it would have been rational for me to walk away from faith based on the way it was clashing with science. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. It wasn’t the Bible or observations of reality that were wrong, I was trying to impose far more precision and clarity into the Bible than was actually present.

During my senior year of college, I stabilized as moderate evangelical/emerging Christian. I began putting together a coherent picture of what I believed about evolution and the Bible. Whether or not they realize it, all Christians have some sort of distinction in their mind about what aspects of the Bible are due to God and what parts are due to man and which are both. In the case of inerrantists, this is writing style and not much else. To reconcile evolution with Christianity, I expanded which aspects I thought were due to man, now allowing for Moses to use myths to communicate spiritual truths.

I also painlessly let go of several other de facto Christian positions regarding politics. After seeing how easy it is to misunderstand the Bible, I wanted separation of church and state lest both be corrupted (or rather, corrupted further). I thought gay marriage was wrong, but should still be legal. But all things considered, I was a solid evangelical Christian in January 2007. I had just dodged a major bullet in accepting evolution and holding onto what I would still consider to be somewhat conservative theology. But then two things happened to me, both of my own doing, which permanently damaged my faith.

While surfing the web, I found the blog of a former Christian. After reading for several hours, I felt the Spirit leading me to e-mail him. Our religious backgrounds were vastly more similar than I thought possible. My first impression was that this made me one of the best possible people to talk to him – maybe he rejected God for a reason that I had successfully dealt with. The primary topics were anecdotal evidence, the origin of Jewish monotheism, and the genocide of the Midianites. I soon realized that this was two-way persuasion, and he was my better. I began to see that the ways of every god are justified in its believers’ eyes. What was worse, I started to see myself in him and that I just might be an agnostic/atheist in the making.

The second event was that I decided that my friends needed to hear that I had rejected creationism (I was kind of in the closet…) and why. I wrote a 20-page paper defending theistic evolution and posted it on facebook. I was a conservative evangelical living in the Bible belt. I knew that posting the paper would sacrifice my reputation, but someone had to stand up for truth. For the most part, my friends stuck by me and my acquaintances didn’t. In church, I sometimes felt like I was walking around with 666 tattooed on my forehead. I began to realize that unity in Christ is often unity through homogeneity of ideas and the squelching of dissent.

My conversations/debates with the agnostic compared favorably with any conversation/debate I had with a creationist in terms of respect, courtesy, making real arguments, and giving rebuttals that expressed an understanding of what I had said. Both most significantly – he had better arguments. At this point, it would have been rational for me to walk away from faith based on the way people of faith are wrong on the issue whose truth is most easily determined and based on the way that I got owned in debate. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. Maybe most Christians are wrong about evolution because their relationship with God is so real that they forget about empirical evidence. Maybe I was losing my debate because I was simply over matched, and not because his position’s arguments actually were better.

When I graduated, each of the seniors in my campus ministry had a chance to give a closing word to the group of several hundred before leaving. My closing line was something like, “Half of me is excited for the opportunity to be a missionary into the spiritually dark world of graduate school. But the other half is just scared to death.” I don’t know how many people recognized that I wasn’t being humble, I was for real.

The summer after my graduation in 2007, I began the final stage of losing God. I was living away from home and my college town, so I was looking for a church or some form of spiritual support. Quite a few Saturday nights, I prayed that God would lead me to a church while looking online for somewhere to go the next morning. I kept showing up at different churches and feeling like they or I was faking something. This process repeated a couple times the next fall at graduate school. But Christianity is not based on feeling, so I persisted. (I have since found it interesting that many consider the strongest argument for faith to be their relationship with God, but when this relationship seems distant, they instead say it’s not based on feeling.)

I began to have a great deal of admiration for Mother Teresa’s ability to persist while in my state of feeling abandoned by God. When I say abandoned, I’m not referring to trying circumstances, but to the fact that no matter what I did, I felt like I was praying to the four walls around me.

I read the Bible, I studied the Bible, but this only discouraged me further. Fall 2007, I set up my schedule to read through the New Testament in a semester. I started with Matthew and for the first time, I decided to look up the context each time he quoted the Old Testament. This Bible study laid the foundation for one of my clearest reasons to disbelieve.

I tried to find where InterVarsity or some other campus ministry met. Their website gave their meeting location from 2006 and an out-of-date e-mail that did not respond. When I just showed up anyway, I found the Episcopal group. That was the closest thing I’d seen in a while to God’s leading, so I went with it, despite the fact that at times they were liberal enough that I was a bit uncomfortable. But they were all I had, and I was sick and tired of making theology-influenced friendship decisions. They loved God and they welcomed me – should I want more?

I tried re-reading works that had once spoken to me, from Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain” to Tozer’s “The Pursuit of God.” Nothing. “God, what do you want me to do?” Nothing. This seems like the kind of prayer that God would answer. At this point, it would have been rational for me to walk away from faith based on knowing that I had been seeking God will all my heart, soul, and mind, and yet I didn’t have a relationship with God. But no, that would be the easy way. My path was the hard one – one step at a time. By spring 2008, I began wondering if Christianity was true, but I just wasn’t one.

But this destroyed another set of reasons to believe: I thought what I had was real because people had told me that they saw a difference in my life – skeptic and Christian alike. The Bible says believe and you will be saved, and I believed, or at least I used to. Eventually, I realized that it was far easier to explain my past perceived relationship with God in the context of skepticism than it was to understand the difficulties I was having in the context of Christianity.

The death stroke against the argument for God based on others’ relationship with God was struck when I compared it with the practice of speaking in tongues. Pentecostals argue that the strengthening of their relationship with God through tongues as a private prayer language means tongues are for real, while cessationists like me had no trouble writing them off. To quote Jonathan MacArthur’s view of tongues as well as I can remember, “you don’t interpret the Bible based on experiences, you take your experiences to the Bible.” As a skeptic whose primary arguments are biblical, I am still following his advice.

C. S. Lewis once warned against an unbalanced leaning on apologetics, as one man he knew became so obsessed with studying the reasons to think it was true that he lost track of what it was that was true. With this story, I was content with my struggle for the final time. That must have been what happened to me.

But then my mind screamed back – that’s not how it happened! I studied theology out of “Lord, I want to know you!” I wanted to know what His Word said. I wanted to know why I believed so I could share a reason for the hope that was in me. I now merely wanted that hope. I lost my perceived relationship with God, not through neglect, but through wanting it to be more real than the fuzzy feelings I get while watching Rocky. The pouring of myself into apologetics did not cause this loss, but rather, I studied apologetics and the logical side of faith due to learning how weak and suggestible such a “relationship” can be.

While I had suspected I was losing my faith off and on for over three years, I didn’t think there was a chance I actually would, even up until the moment it happened. I sincerely believed it was true, and thus I believed that sincerely seeking the truth would lead me to God in some way.

On April 19, 2008, I went to see the movie “Expelled.” I was unsurprised to see ID propaganda, but what surprised me was how many arguments for atheism were presented and how good they looked when paired with Christianity’s most foolish tenants. As far as I was concerned, the movie ended when Dawkins was asked what he would say to God were he to meet him after death. Dawkins replied, “Why did you take such pains to conceal yourself?” This retort was crushing as I thought about my lack of a relationship with God.

There was but one piece left of my faith – my belief that there was evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus. Several times, I had thought to myself that if resurrection apologetics were as bad as creationism apologetics, I might not know the difference. I had read plenty about the historical evidence for Jesus, but only from a Christian perspective. Out of fear of the truth, I had protected myself from learning what skeptics have to say. But finally, with only this left, I overturned the final stone. Just like with evolution, my shock was not that skeptics have a case, but that it’s not even close. At the age of 23, I de-converted on Sunday morning, April 20, sometime around 3-5am while reading this exchange.

When I finally de-converted, I could best describe it as the final scene in a mystery movie, where the detective has been following the bad guy for a while, and finds the smallest clue out of place. A montage follows as he remembers the dozens of times something was amiss, and one-by-one, puts the clues in the proper position and sees he has enough evidence to convict the real villain several times over. After I de-converted, my first thought was “Wow … What took me so long?”

But my second thought was that I had just lost something very dear to me. My identity and purpose for living have been ripped violently away. I have to completely reforge what I think about everything. “Why don’t I just kill myself” was a thought that went through my mind – not that I was actually suicidal, but why not? Instead of protecting myself socially from ungodly influences, I have to find a way to re-enter the world without God.

Several weeks later, I began relapsing back into Christianity. I found no answers to my problems with the Bible, and I had found no new reasons to believe. The problem was that I believed in hell as eternal conscience torment all the way until my last moment as a Christian, and I was thinking there was maybe a 25% chance Christianity was true, and hence a 25% chance I would burn for eternity. I grasped the full meaning of this and just couldn’t take it.

After a heart-wrenching 2-3 hour conversation with my brother, I was ready to be saved again. Like the victim of a brutal interrogation, I wanted to believe to stop the pain. I was already seeking God and trying to live my life for him, I just needed to believe. The next day, I even picked up the phone to call my brother back to say I believed again. But when I thought about what I would say, I couldn’t think of anything. I had given numerous reasons to not believe, and as much as I wanted them to go away, when I remember what I said, they were really good reasons. They were not mere rationalizations – the only rationalization going on was my attempt to ignore them. I put the phone down. That night, I prayed, “God, if you’re there, and if you won’t show me the evidence or help me believe without it, please just kill me in my sleep. I think I believe in you now, but I’m not sure I ever will again.” The next morning, I woke up as normal. I never again wasted a breath on the great cosmic indifference.

“I didn’t say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.” – Morpheus

But the more I know about a secular view of the world, the better it gets. I no longer need a belief in a second life to make this first one precious. Far from being nihilistic, I care about humanity with a passion that I seldom had as a Christian. God isn’t helping us – the only peace and justice to be found in this world are the peace and justice we fight for. I’m finding in free thought more morality and purpose than I ever found in Christianity.

- Jeffrey

In this section I would like to examine one of the claims often made by conservative religionists, namely, that nonbelievers have no basis for morality or ethics.

This is a common apologetic maneuver. It is partly a scare tactic, to be sure, but partly, I think they say this because it really looks that way to them. From within a fundamentalist framework, based on what’s called “divine command” ethical theory, such claims can seem compelling, even natural. It seems natural and obvious that, if there is a Deity, then doing the will of the deity guarantees that one will do what is good. Without God, the universe would seem to devolve into an aimless, amoral chaos. Why do anything if there is no God? Why not cheat, lie, murder, and steal if there is no higher right and wrong and we’re all dead in the end, anyway? “If God is dead, all is permitted.”

How ultimately satisfying such a view is is another matter (e.g., Euthyphro problem), but perhaps us former believers can sympathetically recall its appeal. It does make things rather easy – your moral duty is handed to you. Nevertheless, on leaving the faith we often must work to extricate ourselves from the sometimes long shadow of this worldview. In this article, I would like to propose a naturalistic “basis” for these human needs and thus work to allay the fears of those in the midst of de-conversion. In so doing, I also hope to shed some light on what has gone wrong in the fundamentalist worldview in adopting such absolutist standards in the first place.

The (Real) Basis for Morality

I think it would be helpful to start by looking at how, empirically, people do in fact learn morality. Scientifically speaking, where do we get our ethics and why do we behave? This part is easy: morality is largely internalized from our relationship with our parents.

There is nothing mysterious about this. Humans, social primates that we are, have a protracted period of immaturity compared to other mammals. Our brains our wired to internalize the implicit social norms of the group, because cooperation of the group is evolutionarily advantageous – our survival has depended on it. Such internalization of pro-social behavior is based first (in the earliest years) on the intrinsic pleasure of pleasing one’s caregivers and the aversiveness of displeasing them. We can naturally and very keenly detect the emotional responses of those around us and, indeed, we thrive on such responses.