Reconversion!

So, I'm a Christian again now.

LOL! Just kidding. God, you're so gullible sometimes!

So a few weeks ago, a friend of a friend on Facebook noticed a comment I had made about my recent deconversion on a particular posting. He had some questions about that, and so sent a message indicating that he was an atheist who converted to Christianity. He wanted to see if he could address the issues I had regarding the religion, which caused me to leave; to which I responded that he would be wasting his time, if his goal was to reconvert me.

And so the time wasting began.

He wanted to know what, exactly, caused me to leave Christianity. My response:

Too many questions that Christianity couldn't answer, my friend. 

There comes a certain point when history and science and logic put a wedge into one's faith, and then the hammer falls down upon that wedge and breaks it apart...

...just questions, and history, and science, and logic. And 30+ years of religion crumbled away...

Naturally, he was curious as to what those questions were. So I presented them:

1. If Christianity is true, then why are there some 40,000 different denominations? Many of those are at odds with each other over very fundamental beliefs. Many pronounce doom on believers of other denominations. How is the Christian supposed to know which one is really true, and which one is not?

2. How do we even know that the god of the bible, among the millions of other gods throughout human history, is the true god? Every religion has its anecdotal stories which supposedly prove prayer and faith works.

3. How can any loving, personal god, who is truly interested in his creation's salvation, leave that creation with nothing but questions and mystery over what is true, and then say, "oh by the way if you don't figure it out you're spending eternity in hell"? What kind of god can be called loving for punishing humanity for not knowing the truth he refuses to clarify, and to punish eternally? The judgment does not even fit the crime. It reeks of a man-made concept used to reign people in.

And this is where things started to go downhill. The first thing he did was to start arguing from bible scripture. Which is, of course, the #1 no-no when trying to argue your faith with someone who does not believe it. To begin with, the "non-believer" probably doesn't even accept your religious book as valid or true (much like Christians do not believe the Koran or Bhagavad Gita to be true). And so starting off in this manner comes across as very arrogant, as you are all but saying, "your holy book is false, therefore what you believe is false -- let me correct you using my holy book, inspired by the true god."

Christians, how would you react if someone from a different faith approached you like this? Would you laugh them off, or try to convince them otherwise? So why expect your targets to act any different?

Now, in the course of this conversation, arguing from bible scripture was just the starting point. Then he began, in all honesty, making excuses for how men misinterpret things, and we should just stick to the scripture and, quite frankly, blah blah blah. If you are interested, here is my (rather wordy) response:

I understand completely what you are saying, as an apologist I also argued from this position myself. The problem we get into, with the concept of just following the scripture, is that it is up for too much personal interpretation. In fact, the innumerable translations from the Hebrew/Aramaic and Greek into English can determine multiple different ways a particular scripture can be interpreted.

Another problem with the concept of "solo scriptura" is that there are thousands of different manuscripts of the Greek New Testament books. All of them are divergent from each other in some way...

The third problem is that there are actually more non-cannonical New Testament gospels than there are in the currently accepted cannon. The New Testament as we know it today evolved over the course of 400 years. So does that mean all the other types of Christians were wrong and are in hell, because they believed adoptionism, or gnosis, or any one of the other dozens of divergent concepts of who Christ was in early Christianity?

Finally there is one other glaring problem: with exception of a few books of the New Testament, we don't even know who the authors were. All of the gospels were anonymous, and are completely at odds with each other in many areas. Many of the epistles were not written by who they claim to be, and several were written upwards of 150 years after the fact.

...I appreciate your gusto and what you're trying to do. But the more I read into the history of bible, its origins and formation, the more I see that it really is a loose coupling of books written by divergent men over diverse time periods.

If you want a good understanding of why I don't believe the bible to be reliable, read this blog post of mine on Paganini's 24th Caprice.

I welcome any arguments that you may be able to present from outside the bible, but anything from inside that book I am not going to agree with. I am sorry, but that is where I am at. It is not that I don't believe in the possibility of a god, but that I do not believe in the god of the bible.

Sadly, his response was only more rhetoric: "you can actually read the writings of the early church father's and put together the entire New Testament cannon just from the quotations of their writings." I have heard this argument plenty of times.

In fact, the same argument can be used of any religious text. All religious fathers will quote their holy books as they make their cases or debates. I am sure one can reconstruct with some accuracy the entire texts of the aforementioned Koran and Bhagavad Gita by referencing religious pundits' quotations of them.

You can do the same with almost any popular book of any antiquity on this planet. Eventually (if it hasn't happened already) enough people will quote enough of Shakespeare's Hamlet that one could recompile the whole play without the actual source material.

Let's be honest here: the proliferation of quotes is not a logical argument for the accuracy or truth or reliability of what is being quoted. Truth is not a democracy, it is not based upon majority rule. 200 copies of the same section of scripture does not mean it is more true than one copied only 20 times. It just means it was copied more, for whatever reason.

But single-handedly the most disturbing thing he said during our discourse (before I stopped him and told him he really is wasting his time because I already know all the arguments he is going to use, and defeated them all for myself): 

I believe because I believe the evidence bears out that what the scripture says is true. Not necessarily from the context of naturalist materialist post-scientific 21st century American worldview, but from the context in which it was given - that of the pre-scientific ancient near east Semitic people from about 2,000 BC to 100 AD. It makes quite a bit more sense when we don't try to impose filters on the scripture that are completely foreign to it.

So... basically you're telling me that your own belief is not even based upon evidence, but upon the belief that it proves scripture? And, that we should relate to the bible in a way which only ancient Jews understand? And that the bible makes more sense when we don't apply logic, reason, or science?

Is this the same religion which tells me I can have a personal relationship with god and that the bible can be relevant in my daily life?

To answer those questions: The evidence constantly and overwhelmingly disproves scripture. We cannot relate to anything in any capacity other than what we have, ourselves, experienced (in other words, I am not an ancient Jew...). And if we were to remove logic, reason, and science from everything (in the same way religion asks us to) humanity would regress to what we were hundreds of years ago. Of course, then maybe we could relate to the bible like ancient Jews a little easier... 

It is obvious, through this short conversation I had with him, that he is just spouting off the same spoon-fed apologetic arguments that all Christians use. I wonder what would happen if he honestly questioned these arguments. Would he revert to atheism? No, I doubt it. Any atheist that would engage in such weak logic would be doomed to waffle.

Above all, I truly feel bad for him. And I know he feels bad for me too, because he said he would pray for me. And we all know how well prayer works. Oh wait, no we don't... (check out my previous post on Faith, part 2).

Until next Monday,

Frank