(I’ll write more about this later, but I wanted this out now.)
I began to realize that I needed to write this down before I forget it. Basically, it boils down to a few reasons, which I will share with you here. I welcome you to add your comments.
I should tell you about my Christian life. I became a Christian essentially because it was the default religion in Iowa when my mother died from cancer when I was 19. Prior to that, I attended church in high school, but was not a real believer as defined in the Bible. In other words, I did not accept Jesus as my savior. My mother’s death was a nasty shock in itself, and was enough to push me toward religion. Thus, from my sophomore year in college in 1992 to the Spring of 2006, I was a fundamentalist, Baptist Christian.
At the time, the whole creationism thing was not a big deal for me. I wanted salvation and heaven, and while some taught that the earth was 6000 years old or so, I felt free to believe that God could either create the earth to make it look old and could fit it all into 6 days a few thousand years ago, or that the “days” referred to in Genesis could be longer than 24 hours. I eventually rejected the latter way of reconciling science and creationism as it’s pretty clear the Bible is meant to be taken literally, at least in Genesis 1.
Now, if you consider that the creation story and the subsequent Fall of Man in Genesis 2 are the reason for the sacrifice of Christ in the New Testament, you will realize that if the creation story is wrong in any way, then the whole Christian house of cards collapses. You might think that I came out of Christianity because of evolution, but that’s not quite true. The end came about due to geology and climatology. More on that later.
My deconversion began several years ago when I developed friendships with several non-Christians through the local Linux user’s group, who weren’t sleeping around or developing suicidal tendencies or generally being demonic, depressed and so on. In fact, they were nice and thoughtful people. I was surprised at how much they actually seemed to be a lot like the Christian friends that I already had, except that they occasionally consumed a beer or two, and they didn’t go to church. I was surprised that non-Christians could be good people, and that I had so few non-Christian friends.
A few years pass. I drank the Christian kool-aid. Then the Iraq War and Global Warming came along.
You know, if you read this site often, that I am now an anti-war protester. I had believed that Bush was a good, Godly man who would not lie like Clinton had. Only he did lie, and in a big way. Rather than Clinton lying to Congress about a sex scandal, Bush lied about WMDs and an alleged connection to Al Queda to grab public and congressional support for the Iraq War that he’d been planning from the beginning of his presidency. The people that I trusted had abused my trust.
There are also the Global Warming denialists. I remember voting for Bush, and cringing because of his refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol. It is obvious to anyone who has seen the evidence that global warming is real. (The jury is still out as to how much humanity has contributed to the problem, but I ask you this: do you want to contribute in any way to a disaster that threatens the entire human race? I don’t.) I know that any evidence that I present here will have no affect on those who insist that global warming either isn’t happening or isn’t the result at least in part of human over-consumption and arrogance, but please go see or rent “An Inconvenient Truth” with an accepting mind, and consider that the scientists might be right.
I had been thinking about the Christian position on evolution and cosmology for a while at the point that I watched the movie. I tried to reconcile the observations of science with the revelations of the Bible. I could make it work, but it was a stretch.
The turning point came when the movie pointed out that we are able to determine the climate of the past using ice cores in Antarctica. The movie pointed out that we had over 600,000 years worth of climate data in those cores, one ring per year. If the earth was created in 6 days a few thousand years ago and modified significantly in the Noahic flood, it should just look different than it does. Either that, or God’s a liar.
The simplest, logical possibility was that the God of the Christian Bible did not exist. Reconciling creationism and science was too much, and since the whole of the Bible is founded on the creation myth, it all came crashing down. I also find no other reason to follow any other gods, so I am left without a god.
You may say that I could just accept Genesis 1 and 2 as being allegorical or metaphorical. My objections to doing so are the following: first, if I can do that with creation, I can do that with any part of the Bible, and second, I see no reason why the authors of the Bible did not intend for it to be taken that way. It is reasonable to assume that it was meant to be taken at face value.
I have to say that I enjoy life much more now. I no longer worry about loved ones going to hell or appeasing God. Sunday is just another day off for me now, and I love thinking rationally. I’ve found myself rethinking a lot of what I believe, I think, for the better.
Tony,
Interesting thoughts and some good observations. For instance, people can behave well without being Christians. Thankfully, that’s true.
Question: You have to realize that the data on the cores is being interpreted based on many assumptions that aren’t proven, right? I realize the jury’s out on why global climate change is happening and all that but interpreting the data is still essential as a scientist. But if your assumptions are wrong…. your interpretation isn’t going to be correct.
2nd Question: What do you do with the resurrection of Jesus Christ? That’s historical fact, right? Or are you going to discount the evidence of that happening? Because if Christ did rise from the dead… again a lot of your assumptions go right out the window and must be reexplored. Not that everything Christianity has “taught” over the years is correct. But that basic fact of history must allow some influence over the rest.
Just wondering.
It was the ice-cores from Antarctica that made me a believer on global warming as well. I’d long since renounced my religious beliefs (1994 in Nazareth, Israel, after realizing that I’d rather spend eternity in hell with the nice Palestinian Muslims I’d met than spend it in heaven with the Christian missionaries who had accompanied me on the trip to Israel), so accepting dates as far back as 600,000 wasn’t a stretch for me. What was the stretch was that the warming “trend” that we are now experiencing in conjunction with increased carbon emissions is more than just a local (in terms of time) trend – and that the “trend” of increased carbon emissions is astronomical.
In response to the comment… I’d be interested in hearing the supposed evidence of Jesus Christ’s resurrection. On what grounds is the commenter declaring that the resurrection is “historical fact”? I mean if we’re talking about the biblical accounts of Jesus appearing, in the flesh, before a number of individuals… well that rests on the premise that the Bible is a reliable source of information – which it is not. It is useful as a historical document, but it, like all historical documents, has its failings, and any attempt to use the Bible as a piece of evidence for supernatural occurrences is flawed from the get-go.
If you’re using non-Biblical sources (such as Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny the Younger), well their writings indicate that Jesus probably did exist, and Josephus’s writings (though controversial – thought to be edited by someone with an agenda… imagine…), in particular, indicate that Jesus’s followers believed that Jesus was resurrected. Most people who question the divinity of Jesus will at least give you that he existed and that his followers truly believed he was resurrected. But it is a tremendous stretch to say “history supports Jesus’s existence and Jesus’s followers believed he rose from the dead” to “history supports Jesus’s rising from the dead.”
It’s been very sad to me to engage in discourse with deeply Christian people who are less familiar with their own sacred texts and the historical context of their own sacred texts than people like me, who have examined the faith and rejected it through full exposure to its failings. Ultimately, our debates end with their invoking something along the lines of John 20:29 “…blessed are they that have not seen and yet believed.” Ok… obviously you’re welcome to believe whatever you like with as little evidence as you are comfortable. Likewise I am free to do the same, with regard to the Antarctica ice-core samples… though my opinion is that there is a whole lot more evidence supporting that as compared to the idea of a divine Jesus.
But here’s what I *do* see and what has driven me away from fundamentalism. I see fundamentalists seething with anger and hatred toward their imagined surrounding by sodomites. I see fundamentalists of various faiths blowing themselves and others up, killing abortionists, flying planes into buildings (a truly faith-based initiative, if you think about it), calling upon the assassination of the foreign leaders of sovereign countries (Pat Robertson), condemning lifestyles even as they live them to a much more shameful degree than those they condemn (Ted Haggard, Mark Foley), claiming to be Christian and behaving in an extremely un-Christ-like manner (tons of Christians, but James Dobson has been a pretty nasty and vocal offender as of late – whoring himself out to the Republican party, lying about his association with Ted Haggard), proclaiming God’s everlasting hatred for His own creations (the Reverend Fred Phelps) and using the fervent and sincere beliefs of the masses – while meanwhile claiming to be believers themselves – in order to get permission to use the U.S. Constitution as toilet paper and send our beloved children into a senseless war, meanwhile creating a global environment that is increasingly hostile toward the United States. What I see is fundamentalism setting humanity on the path of destruction, and I want no part of it.
With regard to Christianity in particular, I see it as illogical and something that has an inherent tendency to pit humans against one another, and that doesn’t speak all that well of our supposedly all-loving creator. To quote Julia Sweeney, “Why would a God create people so imperfect? And then blame them for his own imperfections? Then send his own son to be murdered by those imperfect people, to make up for how imperfect those people were? And how imperfect they were inevitably going to be? I mean, what a crazy idea.” ~from Letting Go of God.
So for those fundies who end all debates with feeling blessed that they believe in something with no evidence to support it, I applaud them for finding their special way to get up every morning. For me, though, I see plenty of evidence against those blind beliefs, and I’m goin’ my own way, informed and content.
~Rachel
Consider, before I start, that I’m hardwired not to care about anyone else but myself. You’ve been my friend, and you know that it’s true. Off the top of my head, I can list maybe twenty occassions in which you went above and beyond and did the thing a friend does without asking (and without receiving) a thing in return. Yeah, you know me, I don’t care about anyone but the guy in the mirror.
That being said, as previously mentioned, you’ve been a good friend to me, as well as many other people. I’m sorry I wasn’t a better friend to you while you were discovering this new life you now have. Truth be told, if I’m reading your posts and your site correctly, you’re more interesting now that you’ve departed the faith. I wish we hung out more, but since we both work all the time (assumption), that’s not likely to happen any time soon.
Whatever relationship you have with the folks at Campus Baptist, I’m not concerned. Whatever time you spend with your new friends, I hope it works for you, like all things. But if you want to hang out with me, you’re welcome to call me. Starting next week I’m off Mondays at 8 and after the semester ends I’ll have all day Friday free. I still go to church and do things with a ministry team.
I hope we can still be friends. I thank you for not saying anything mean about Christians; in kind, while I cannot speak for the rest of the Church, I will not say anything mean about your life now. Phone number hasn’t changed. Gotta close now, but I hope you take care and stay out of trouble.
Jim