Six Month Anniversary!

Well it has been six months thus far!

I feel that, for the most part, my deconversion is fairly complete. I am sure there are still things I will have to learn, things to adjust to, and things to forget. I have certainly experienced all of the 5 Phases of Deconversion (this will be presented in a future post).

Time has marched on and, as I slowly start to settle into the life of an apatheist, atheist, agnostic, or whatever the hell I am (which is another thing I've learned: I don't have to accept any given label other than my name, and I can even change that) I am finding that I need this particular forum less and less.

No disrespect to you, my reader, but I can't make this blog and my raging lack of belief the central focus of my life. It is time for me to shift perspectives and start fully living this one life I have to live.

It is true that I want to, in part, turn this site into a resource for other Christians who are toying with joining reality; so in order to do that (and to do the aforementioned perspective shifting) I will no longer be posting on a weekly basis, but rather a bi-monthly basis.

This will allow me to work on bringing resources, media, and higher-quality posts.

I will miss our weekly chats, but trust me: the best is yet to come.

See you in two weeks,

Frank

Columbus Day!

Today is Columbus Day!

I am too lazy today (actually, I’m behind on a billion different projects) to actually write about all of the atrocities committed by Christopher Columbus (in the name of Christianity, don’t forget) so instead I will point you to TheOatmeal, which can illustrate the disturbing details of this horrific (yet ignorantly celebrated) point of human history.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/columbus_day

I hope Matt Inman will forgive me for this slight form of plagiarism.

Until next Monday,

Frank

Prayer (A Reprisal)

In my last post, I closed by indicating that prayer doesn't work. I pointed to a previous post whereby I attempted to argue against the four common beliefs presented by the religious when it is shown to them that their prayers fail.

I feel like that was insufficient. I want to be absolutely explicit when I proffer the claim that prayer just does not work. And so I'm going to point out a few more quick things.

The problem is that the anecdotal evidence offered up by the proponents of prayer are, at best, confirmation bias. At worst, extreme arrogance. In between lie statistical probability, coincidence, and pareidolia.

Arrogance? How dare I! And yet, to declare the "power of prayer" works simply because you prayed for, and received, a promotion, or a good parking spot, or that special toy for Christmas is genuinely offensive to the millions upon millions across this globe whose prayers for clean water, or food, or medicine are ignored.

Those people pray, too. They may pray to the same god as you do, or to different gods. And yet the kind, benevolent, and loving god which blessed you with a little extra whipped cream on your mocha has turned his/her/its back on the disheartening cries of a mother pleading for food for her child. God looks away and hums when a teenage girl is being gang-raped. And god seems to love damning the poor to poverty, while blessing the pastor with abundant riches. Is it ironic that the poor who, in their naivete, give their last dollar to the pastor, because he promises blessings from god?

Complete bullshit.

Confirmation bias I say? Yes, absolutely. We tend to forget all the prayers that go unanswered. Why? Because so many of us suffer so little in life, we can afford to forget the little inconveniences that slip by.

Coincidence? There are billions of people on this planet, and billions of things going on each minute of each day. Pure coincidence can -- and does -- happen, quite frequently.

Pareidolia? Our brains are hardwired to find patterns, to search for meaning. We look for hidden symbols and answers in everything.

Statistics? 10 out of 10. If a radio show selects the 99th caller to win tickets to the circus, then 1 out of 100 callers will win. Someone is bound to be that 1 person!

And while I could easily turn this post into a huge dissertation citing examples and research and studies and science, I'm not going to. Anyone interested in furthering their understanding of why prayer does not work can start with the Wikipedia article on Efficacy of Prayer. If that isn't enough to get your brain gears working, then always remember: GIYF (Google Is Your Friend).

And finally, let's meet Bill: an average middle-aged Baptist church-goer from the Appalachian hills of eastern Kentucky. He has cancer. He prays daily to his god for healing, during his chemotherapy sessions. He visits his doctor once per month, and is sure to take his pills every day during his morning devotional. At church, he asks for the prayers of the congregation, for healing from his god. The cancer goes into remission. Who gets the credit? Hint: it ain't the doctors, and it ain't the medicine.

"Oh," but you say, "that's because god was working through the doctors and the medicine!"

Seriously? So what about all the people who are in the same situation, but don't survive? Did god forget to work though those doctors and those medicines? Or maybe it is part of some great plan -- perhaps the same plan where millions on this planet suffer and die in horrible, disgusting conditions?

Like I said, complete bullshit.

Until next Monday,
Frank

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

Relics

Everyone has heard, I am sure, about how the Catholic church has maintained certain relics throughout history. Bones of saints, bits of the cross, the spear which pierced the side of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea's toilet paper, and the like. Of course, most of us in this enlightened age realize the truth -- that relics such as these are complete hooey.

But yet there is still a reverent fervency for certain biblical relics; specifically the Holy Grail, Noah's Ark, Mount Sinai, and the Ark of the Covenant. Well, at any rate the Holy Grail certainly does not exist (and never did -- it is a purely Catholic tradition which got entirely out of hand). But what about the others? Many have actually claimed to have found them.

One of the most prolific self-proclaimed biblical archeologists in history, Ron Wyatt, claimed to have found the site of the Red Sea crossing, the "real" Mount Sinai, Noah's Ark, the Ark of the Covenant, and just for good measure, Sodom and Gomorrah. PS: Wyatt was a nurse anesthetist who claimed that the big guy upstairs had blessed him with keen insight. In other words, he had absolutely no experience as an archaeologist.

As a fundamentalist bible-literalist young-earth creationist I also believed wholeheartedly in Wyatt's discoveries; to such an extent that even through my deconversion and up to this very weekend I had a difficult time trying to reconcile them with the fact that I no longer believe the bible or consider it to be anything close to historically accurate.

But then! I ran across this blog: Against Jebel al-Lawz, which presented a very clear, concise, and well-researched, well-referenced rebuttal on some of Wyatt's "discoveries." The author even piled on the resources to help refute all of Wyatt's other claims. It was scathing. But the best article I read was about the Noah's Ark formation on Mount Arat: the author theorized that the formation (while certainly not a boat) may actually be responsible for the creation of the legend!

Regardless, it is satisfying to once again learn the truth and dispose of the fiction. But also a little sad -- another bit of childhood, of the last 35 years of my understanding of the universe, is gone. It seems like a recurring theme now -- in some regards, I am digging up these religious relics of my mind and exposing them to the light of truth and reason. And just like those physical relics, each mental one "promptly disappears in a puff of logic."

Until next Monday,

Frank

The Butterfly Effect

Three weeks ago, one of my coworkers gave me (along with several others) a monarch caterpillar to care for while it embarked on its journey to become a butterfly. I took it home, watched it munch down on milkweed plants for a few days, and then form a chrysalis. For ten days it did nothing but hang there; then yesterday morning a beautiful, giant orange butterfly emerged. This morning we set it out into nature. It waved an antenna and then fluttered away.

I spent a good deal of time researching monarchs during the chrysalis phase, and I learned a great deal: that they shed their skin and the chrysalis is underneath, that they only eat milkweed when they're caterpillars, and that those little caterpillars are feces-making machines. I am not joking -- they poop. A lot.

But the most amazing thing I did learn was that monarchs go through four generations every year. The first three all hatch, eat, transform, lay more eggs, and then die -- all within a two-month time-span. But the last generation, born in late August / early September, is special. They break that short-cycle and migrate to Mexico for the winter. There, they enjoy the fine beaches, cuisine, and everything else the exciting central American country has to offer. Well, no: they hibernate, for six to eight months. Then they fly back to their homes, lay eggs, and the cycle continues.

Evolution at it's best! And I am sure that it would be a very fascinating story, to discover why caterpillars ended up this way. But for me, the monarch has come to symbolize transformation; I am sure it has symbolized this to many people over many eons. But it hits home in a special way for me, having gone through my own metamorphosis recently. On top of learning about evolution, seeing a miniature version of it was a fairly emotional experience. I think that the monarch will forever hold a place in my heart; and may very well be my new favorite insect (it used to be the pillbug).

It’s almost enough to make me believe in god again.

LOL, just kidding. Hooray science!

Until next Monday,

Frank