A problem with Christianity that you will rarely hear mentioned.

A number of years ago I wrote articles about my move away from Christianity between October 2007 and January 2008. I think these would prove useful background to this article so you can read them here:

http://www.ecalpemos.org/2007/10/walking-away-from-church.html
http://www.ecalpemos.org/2008/01/from-christian-to-atheist.html
http://www.ecalpemos.org/2008/01/further-background-to-my-deconversion.html

Following on from this I found an equilibrium where I could accept the teachings of Jesus, try and follow them, but avoid the potential hurt and difficulty of making a commitment to a church. I simply could not put myself through all of that again.

In recent months this has become a less workable solution as some more fundamental issues with Christianity have come into focus. Something you don’t often hear from atheists is the effect that Christianity has on the individual’s psychology. Sure, they will claim that religion causes wars or that religious people do bad things, but they can’t really address the personal psychological aspects, as I suspect not many of them will have experienced it themselves. So here is my explanation of what I think Christianity does to some people.

The problem with Christianity is that the process of strengthening your own faith consists of telling yourself that you are not good enough and that you need to be punished. The only relief  from this potential punishment is the offer of someone else (Jesus) taking the beating for you. But there is no objective way of determining that he has, and regardless of whether we can be sure or not, it does not leave us in any better a state. We are still bad, and still deserve that punishment. If we want to feel more redeemed then we have to feel that we are more bad. This is why Christians love stories about people who have led very wicked lives and then “come to know the Lord” because this makes them feel more redemmed. If you examine what happens in worship in a lot of evangelical churches the emotionalism is about “what Jesus has done for me”. In other words being "saved from sin" is really about being saved from punishment.

I think that this need to keep feeling redeemed and pursue continual evidence of redemption can become a sort of spiritual “Stockholm syndrome”.

Stockholm syndrome, or capture-bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with the captors.

The church becomes the mediator of your own redemption because that redemption is only real when someone else recognises it. Where else are you going to get that confirmation, but from other Christians?

This constant feeling of not being good enough, and being undeserving, can either result in mental health issues or willing acquiescence to cult like practices in the church to which you belong - because it is the only forum through which you can get ongoing confirmation of your redemption. You will not want to be separated from that confirming community so you will out up with behaviour you would not tolerate in any other area of life. This explains why people inside the church can't recognise the problems outsiders see in the excesses of the TV evangelists or the fantastic palaces and robes of bishops and popes.

This brings us round to the core of the issue - not being good enough.

When it comes to not being good enough, Christianity goes one step further than other religions by not blaming you for what you have done, but for what you have thought about doing, even if you have stopped yourself from doing it. If you speak to a Christian about this they will glibly talk about “original sin”. In other words, the sins of the fathers need to be visited on their children, starting with Adam and Eve. We need to pay the price for Adam’s disobedience.

Yet, even within Christianity it is clear that some people have fallen less far than others. Original sin is not the great equaliser it might appear to be. Whether it is official saints of the Roman Catholic church or the unofficial saints of the evangelicals (Spurgeon, Hudson Taylor, Smith Wigglesworth et al) some appear to be less bad. And should we be surprised? It is clear from speaking to people of all faiths and none that human beings view certain types of sinful acts as more serious than others. In the Christian church issues relating to sexuality and abortion are likely to be considered more serious than fiddling your taxes. Killing someone in battle is OK, but “causing death by dangerous driving” is not.

Perhaps the lies that we tell ourselves and tell each other, in order to function as a society, are not a bad thing, or not as bad as murdering someone? Maybe we are not that bad after all and we need a new gospel? But still being caught up in the existing one we are left in a stark position: If we are not good enough, and we need to be punished; and the only way out is for Jesus to take our punishment;  and the only way to get that confirmed is by people in the church; then we have the makings of a machine which will hold people captive in guilt, depression and anxiety till kingdom come.

The "Gospel of Jesus Wife" and why it changes nothing.

I follow a range of people on Twitter and on the issue of this small fragment of papyrus they fall into two camps:

1. The academics like Larry Hurtado, who sums it up in this article (worth reading in full as it mentions the problems with the Coptic in the fragment - for more on this see Mark Goodacre):

.... even if authentic, the fragment would have no bearing on (1) the marital status of Jesus of Nazareth, (2) the question of women’s role in churches, (3) the question of Catholic priestly celibacy, etc.  None whatsoever.  Nada.

2. Atheist critics, who seem to have seized on the fragment's recent early carbon dating by MIT and Harvard  as evidence that it must be true and therefore the gospel accounts of Jesus life aren't.


The odd thing, of course, is that the carbon dating puts it at 700AD, far later than the canonical gospels. If any of the four canonical gospels were found to be from 700AD the same critics would be using that dating as evidence that those documents could not be accurate. I guess that a late date can be used to cut any way you want it to.

My return to faith.

Those who have followed my blog over the past few years will already know my spiritual journey,  which could be summarised as “conservative evangelical” to “questioning evangelical” to “disbeliever” (following the crash of my creationist beliefs) to “attempted atheist” to “tolerant liberal”. I now have to come clean and admit that I have never really been able to rid myself of my belief in God. For the simple reason that it is based on knowledge rather than faith and I can’t totally deny something that I know to be true. I have returned to my faith.

Over the past few months a number of situations have arisen where I felt uncomfortable because things were being said or done that were jarring with my knowledge of Jesus which was still smouldering away somewhere within me. This caused me to look at who I am, where I am and how I can reconcile my dislike of church and religion with what is a very real love for the things of God.

So why believe?

Well first of all it’s not about believing, but knowing.

The Scottish pattern I was brought up with is that a minister (dressed in black advocates robes complete with white tabs) stands in the pulpit and give a forensic argument for his case, expounding his evidence and asking you to agree with him. This is exactly the same as the process you get in a court of law where a jury decides what to accept, either convicting or acquitting based on the evidence put before them. Its also why many Scottish ministers had law degrees as their first degrees before studying divinity.

Legal argument is not a method of communication you will find in the bible. Jesus said “follow me”. He didn’t say “get all your ducks in a row theologically and then agree to accept various creeds”.  He said “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”. Notice the emphasis on knowing. There is no mention of going along with things for the sake of it.

I have always been uncomfortable with the addition of different doctrines to mark someone as a “true Christian”. Whether its dispensationalism or creationism or pentecostalism, people have continually added things to Christianity.

Rather like John Lennon’s:

Ev'rybody's talking about
Bagism, Shagism, Dragism, Madism,
Ragism, Tagism
This-ism, That-ism, 

It wasn’t meant to be like this. As creeds were developed new sects split off and more and more options were added to the list of what makes someone a “true believer”.

None of the people coming up with these ideas know any of it for certain, but they need to feel certain.  So they create religious systems that allow them to live in a more solid feeling world where they “know who their friends are”. This is true for many people, not just Christians. We see the same phenomenon in the the conspiracy theory community and  “truth” movement.

Its a natural human desire, but Christianity was meant to be more fluid than this. This is why it was originally described as "the way". Its about a journey, not a destination. You don't need to swallow a camel of additional "isms" to be on that journey.  Its people who make that difference in order to puff up their own self importance. And there is no difference between little faith and big faith. Jesus talked about “faith the size of a mustard seed” and he did not treat people preferentially if they believed more things than someone else.

All I know is what I know, and this is that Jesus lived and walked in Galilee, in some way was God and in some way redeemed me. How that all worked I simply don’t know. But I do know that it matters.

Secondly, the person of Christ.

I don’t normally do relationships well so the idea of having a relationship with God is quite foreign to me. However,  I do understand the concept of following someone and I find that can follow Jesus as the first disciples did. He might be quite far in the distance sometimes and I might be hobbling along at the back with my doubt and uncertainty, but I feel captivated by him as much now as when I first believed.

Thirdly, I don’t need to be able to nail everything down.

Complete knowledge of everything is impossible. We can never know everything and I am happy to acknowledge that limitation. Paul said to the Corinthian church that “we see through a glass darkly”. This doesn’t mean I don’t want to investigate things or find out more. It is part of my nature to do so - and I would argue that our enquiring nature is part of the image of God. We want to know as much as God wants to be known. I just can’t build my house on a sand of conjecture and theorising and I don’t think the church is meant to do that either. Its about simpler creeds and accepting that some things can never be known.

Fourthly, revelation.

I think all religions contain some truth, but the greatest revelation of the divine will is in Jesus Christ and his teachings. Why? Because, as the disciple John put it “We love, because He first loved us.” All goodness comes from God, whether people recognise it or not and this love, and goodness, is personified in Jesus and him giving himself up for others on the cross. This is the secret revealed to us, which is not really a secret, it's just that we often can’t see it.

Fifthly, its not about perfection.

There is no need to be perfect to be a Christian. How often have you heard, or said, “and you call yourself a Christian!”. This idea of the Christian comes from the nominal church where people sadly and often put themselves above others simply because they attended church on a Sunday. The Christian message is that nobody is perfect and everyone needs redemption. Think about this: back at the beginning Peter denied Christ three times, yet, at no time during those denials was he any less a Christian.

Here is a thought which may have an impact on ideas of evangelism. God’s activity is not restricted to Christians. Depicting non Christians as damned or bad is wrong because we are all made in the image of God. We need to recognise that God is out there doing good without us or in spite of us and that some of that is being manifested through people who do not even know him. Imagine going into the world saying "look at this good and how it reflects the nature of God" rather than "look at all this evil".

So where does this leave me?

The only way I can describe it is this: I am simply Christian, not a simple Christian.

I don’t think I will ever be capable of attending a church on a regular basis. I will always be of the questioning type and that would make adhering to any church creed just for the sake of it far too difficult for me.  I also don't like big groups or loud noises, so it is probably not for me.

I will continue to live an imperfect life, but I can live it acknowledging the presence of God along side me. I am happy and content with this life and I thank God for what he has done for me. I have no desire for “more” and no feelings of inadequacy compared to others. I don’t want to be a leader and I am happy to stay a follower. An old friend of mine used to describe this practice as “living in the good of it”, and that seems a good description.

On the issue of evangelism, Christianity is a personal thing and nobody can be forced to believe it. You can create a scheme to trick people into saying they agree with you, but that is not actually faith. They have to “know” the truth and that in part comes from meeting people who are living a life which is on that journey with Jesus in spite of their weaknesses. Through that  weakness they may see the light of life.

For now I am just glad to be on the journey.

Atheist Church Coming to Edinburgh.

According to the Edinburgh Evening News the atheist church based in London will be having an outreach in Edinburgh.

Run by comedians, as an entertainment show, the atheist church has attracted big audiences in London. As founder Sanderson Jones says:

The idea was to build little communities so in that sense that’s what we’re doing with the assembly. We’re really keen on the community side as well, and have tea and cake afterwards, which is the best part of going to church anyway.

A large part of the appeal of any church is that it fills a community shaped hole in our modern, disconnected lives. The conventional church tries to redefine this as a “God shaped hole” and shoehorn itself into it. This doesn't really work as it produces conditional friendships based on a shared set of beliefs rather than the symbiotic relationships of a real community which relies on service.

This may be where the Atheist church eventually comes unstuck too. Conditional friendships and a conditional community based on a narrow range of shared beliefs and self reliance cannot produce a sustainable community. It will eventually fail - along with most religious movements.

Or it will flourish for a time, form committees and eventually die from atrophy....

What "atheism" is not

Dear fundamentalist Christian friends, please take note.

"Atheism" is not:

• a word which describes everyone you disagree with.
• a word which is interchangeable with "science".
• an adequate descriptor for Adolf Hitler (who strongly believed God had a destiny for the German people).
• a word used to describe anyone who is an unbeliever in the gospel - not all unbelievers are atheists.
• a word you can apply to someone so you don't have to deal with them as valid human beings and can write them off.

Thank you for your consideration.

Can life have meaning without God?

Peter Anderson raised this issue earlier today on Twitter:

Without God life is ultimately meaningless "...for apart from Him who can eat or who can have enjoyment." (Ecc. 2:25)

I have written about this previously as part of my criticism of the Alpha Course.

I think that life does have meaning without God.

I know many people who do not believe in God, for a variety of reasons, yet all of them find meaning in their lives. Here is a summary of some of the ways they do this:

• We all contribute to the development of the world through our children, but also through the work we do and the way we interact with and help other people. These might seem insignificant when viewed up close, but in the context of all human development they are very important because what comes after needs the foundation that we have built.
• People seem to find meaning in being part of the whole of creation. By understanding our part in the ecosystem we don’t feel disconnected from the natural world. The feeling of disconnection that many people feel is the result of urbanisation and is quite recent in human history.
• Some of my friends find meaning through art and music.

Painting unbelievers lives as meaningless is wrong in three ways:

1. It aims the churches message at those who are dissatisfied and therefore vulnerable, whilst ignoring those who are essentially quite contented and for whom the case for God would have to be clearer.
2. It contains an implicit reverse argument that if someone cannot find meaning in their own life then they do not have God. This is not going to encourage people who are struggling in their faith.
3. It limits the activity of God to calling people to repentance and otherwise only acting for believers. Yet, the new testament is full of stories of Jesus doing things for non Jews.

Of course this position also contains another reverse argument that if your life has meaning then you already have God. In fact many Christians do believe that life can have meaning for someone who does not acknowledge God.

Christians believe that God created everyone in his image. By recognising this image in all people many Christians are able to celebrate the meaning, purpose and value in the lives of people who do not believe. If God is omnipresent then he is in unbelievers too and doing more than trying to make them repent.

The main problem with trying to claim that life without God is meaningless is the plain fact that it isn't. Most people lead contented and meaningful lives. People of other faiths do too.

Atheism before Darwin

Robert Dale Owen

Its generally suggested by modern evangelical Christians that atheism is the result of Darwinism. However, I have recently found a book containing a debate  between a Christian called Origen Bacheler and an atheist called Robert Dale Owen during 1831, 28 years before Darwin published his book "On the Origin of Species". The debate was carried out by letter and the arguments are surprisingly familiar.

Robert Dale Owen was the son of Robert Owen, social reformer and founder of New Lanark in Scotland. I came across this book while researching Robert Owen. His son lived in the USA.

You can read the book in full, at no charge, here in Google Books:

Discussion of the existence of God, and the authenticity of the Bible, between Origen Bacheler and Robert Dale Owen

The background to the debate (which started over an argument over whether George Washington was a sceptic) can be found here.

The arguments sound entirely modern:

"If sceptics persecuted Christians", sir they do persecute Christians. They are continually slandering, reviling and abusing them, uttering against them all manner of hard speeches. (from Letter X of Origen Bacheler to Robert Dale Owen)

The word "atheist" is also used extensively throughout the discussion as here. Its interesting that Bacheler is here positioning belief as something you can decide to buy into rather than an issue of true knowledge. This is the same issue I have blogged about previously:

I do not ask that it be admitted to me that we cannot know there is a God. I have made no such statement. I now say we can know this; some do know it. And "if any man will do his will, he shall know." However, I do not admit, that it constitutes a man a sceptic or an atheist in any sense, not to know there is a God. The wuestion, however, now under discussion, is, not whether we know there is one, but whether there is reason to believe this. (from Letter III of Origen Bacheler to Robert Dale Owen)

The discussion between the two men runs round the same circles as many I have had, including examples of immoral action by God in the bible, evidence for miracles, the source of morality and evidence from nature (but without evolution of course). It even includes the common response of the exasperated Christian that people deny the existence of God solely because they don't want to live immoral lives without the fear of being judged.
 
It all sounds so familiar, and yet it doesn't deal with the real question of faith vs unbelief i.e. what is faith, is it an agreement to believe or knowledge of the truth?
 
The most interesting aspect, though, is that the arguments rehearsed here in 1831 are no different from those played out in 2011. This shows that Darwin and the theory of evolution have had very little effect on the reasons why people do not believe. Very few Christians rely on creationism to prove the existence of God and very few atheists rely on evolution to disprove God for the simple reason that it can do neither.

What is faith?

Over the past year I have been on a journey of discovery to try and determine what faith (if any) I had lost. At the very beginning of this journey I realised that the first step was defining what faith actually is. There seems to be two possible definitions of faith:

1. Belief or trust in something without proof (i.e. assenting to agree with something and go along with it).
2. Knowing spiritually that something is absolutely true in the way that we know that grass is green and the sky blue.

My faith was mainly of type 2. Extremely sure and based on an apparent inward knowledge of truth. Many Christians have a faith of type 1 based on accepting a forensic (legal) argument which seeks to prove that the bible and the gospel message are true. This is one reason why so many Presbyterian ministers had law degrees as first degrees. Protestantism was based on forensic argument and the minister wore legal dress in the pulpit.

My current position is one of honesty. I decided to maintain a position of non-belief until sufficient evidence for the existence of God is revealed. This means that I have been looking for a type 2 faith, when most people do not have this. Interesting.

As an aside to this I have asked a number of people how they would define faith. Most recently via Twitter with Peter Anderson who is the Pastor of Destiny Church in Edinburgh (a charismatic church, descended sideways from the restoration churches founded by Bryn Jones). His Twitter reply:

I c belief as knowing truth "...the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not seen" (Heb.11:1)

So very much in line with type 1. The difficulty with a type 1 faith is that although it may give you a feeling of assurance about the existential things of life like death, meaning and purpose its uncertainty means that it does not help with everyday situations in the way that it is suggested to by some of the people promoting it. Even the promotion of faith is a bit of an oxymoron. Is it possible to promote something which requires at its centre a lack of evidence? Because faith with evidence stops being faith and becomes knowledge. Thanks to Peter for replying. Communication is always a good thing. I may have to repeat the question to others on twitter.

So where does this leave my journey? Well, I am always open to suggestions, but I am very wary of anything which seeks to supplant reason; makes promises of extreme improvements in quality of life or health or sells itself by saying that life is meaningless without God. I suspect that means I am never going to be pew fodder for an evangelical church.

Why creationism is bad for Christianity - an open letter to creationists in Edinburgh.

I was originally going to write this piece as a response to a talk given by Paul James-Griffiths (a member of the Edinburgh Creation Group) at Carrubbers Christian Centre last week, but its not really about him. There is a wider issue here about changes in the way Christianity is being presented by evangelical groups in the city. Whilst I don’t mind people believing whatever they like, when they try to represent young earth creationism as central to Christianity I think this is both incorrect and damaging to Christianity.

I write this as a former creationist myself who ended up no longer believing in God. Incidentally I attended Carrubbers and was involved in promoting one of the first tours of the UK by Ken Ham. So I speak as someone who had that level of investment in the whole house of cards at one time.

My own faith was shipwrecked by this issue because I had been told time and again that belief in a young earth and creation of the species as they currently are without evolution was essential to being a proper, soundly converted, bible believing Christian. When I started to doubt creationism I also began to question all the other things I had been told about God. I felt lied to, and ultimately I found I no longer believed in God. In hindsight if I had been in an environment where it was possible to believe in the Gospel message without having to accept creationism I would probably still be a Christian, or at least have some level of faith in God. Although its unlikely that this level of faith would have made me acceptable to evangelicals as a “real Christian”.

As time has gone on it has occurred to me that the communication challenges facing the church today are being made greater by the emphasis they are putting on creationism.

If you are a creationist in Edinburgh here are some reasons why I think your activities are bad for Christianity.

You are making the relevance of the bible conditional on the literal truth of a part of it which stands at odds with observable facts. 
You may claim that there is no contradiction between the two and that Genesis is science, but the majority of thinking people do not agree with that position and there is considerable scientific and everyday evidence to support their skepticism. By making young earth creationism central to the Christian message you are narrowing down the number of people to whom that message will appeal.  This is part of a wider movement in Christianity which seeks to add more and more levels of unreasonable belief in order to be accepted by the group as a “true believer” (whether it be pentecostal doctrines, dispensationalist, creationist or any other add on doctrine).

You are unwittingly providing fuel for militant atheists.
You see, if your argument is “Genesis can be proved to be literally true, therefore the rest of the bible is true, therefore God exists” it does not take much to turn this argument on its head and say “science proves that Genesis is not literally true, therefore the rest of the bible is untrue, therefore there is no god”. Even though there is no logical connection between the literal truth of Genesis and the truth of any other part of the bible or with the issue of the existence of God.

You are misusing creation as a proof for the existence of God.
Creationists use of a young earth and dismissal of evolution as a proof for the existence of God is a false dawn. Even if evolution was proved to be untrue it would not necessarily mean that God did it (there are other competing theories) and even then it would not logically fall that it was the Christian God as there are various other deities who lay claim to having created the world.

You are encouraging people to base their faith on a total denial of reason.
One consequence of creationism is that it tends towards putting a limit on how far people can go in investigating the world we live in. Some questions are simply off limit whilst others have a stop put on how far they can go. This means that Christians are more and more standing against education and this includes theological education just as much as scientific education. There is a general feeling amongst evangelicals that education erodes faith and is to be avoided. Hence the increased trend towards home schooling and Christian Schools in the Edinburgh area. By demonstrating outside the University and accusing it of being an atheist stronghold you are representing Christianity as Luddite in relation to education.

You are in danger of promoting lies.
Whilst I will defend your right to hold your beliefs about human origins there does come a point where it parts company with the facts and you have to accept that it is really just a faith position and accept it as such. When you try to promote it as hard fact then many people will view you as liars.

Some creationist beliefs previously promoted as true have later been found to be untrue.  This can not be said for any other area of Christian doctrine or the gospel message, which tends towards the metaphysical and therefore can never be found to be factually false. The alleged discovery of Noah’s Ark earlier this year which was then proved to be false was later defended by those involved as a way of bringing people to faith in God even although it was known to be false.
Intelligent design is worse than creationism because it starts with a definite lie. By claiming “this is nothing to do with religion” intelligent design organisations, staffed by evangelical Christians with religious objectives, start  from an immoral position which is at odds with the purported  character of God (who is supposed to be true and righteous).

In conclusion
It will be interesting to see what sort of response, if any, this article receives. My gut feeling is that there will be lots of comments trying to prove the creationist scientific claims whilst avoiding the actual point of the article which is about the way creationism has damaged the integrity of the way that Christianity is being presented in Edinburgh.

What the Pope is really saying about atheism and the Nazis

By equating Nazism with atheism the Pope is making two fundamental errors which are really not very becoming of someone with his academic credentials and knowledge of German history.

1. He is suggesting that Nazism in Germany developed from atheism. However, Germany was a very Christian country in the 1930's and the Nazis themselves had quite strong religious beliefs. Not necessarily a belief in the Christian God, but the SS had a strong belief in destiny and being guided by a higher power. Hitler himself was a Roman Catholic, never renounced his church membership and used it to suggest that God was on the side of the German people. You can read more about this here: was Adolph Hitler an Atheist.

2. He is suggesting that people can choose to believe. In other words if all those atheists just chose to believe then the world would be a better place. As a theologian Pope Benedict should realise that faith is a gift. People either believe or they do not. Their state of belief may change with time, but the suggestion that an atheist can choose to believe in God is flawed. Atheists are asking for evidence for the existence of God. Atheists want to be true believers, not just people who go along with it for the sake of it. The nature of their scepticism is that if sufficient evidence comes forward then it may be evidence for some other God and not the Christian one. I don't think the Pope is in favour of that sort of open minded seeking of God.

The only explanation I can put forward for the Pope's statement is that he is using coded language. If we substitute "non catholic" for "atheist" it makes more sense. If the Nazi leaders had stayed true to their catholic faith then they would not have done all those terrible things. A Christian can choose to become a Roman Catholic. Their belief in God and Christian faith is already set. In the same way if all atheists choose to become Catholics then we will have a united and peaceful world. It might well produce a social unity, but it would not be people who truly believed.

I don't think the Pope really wants to engage with the issue of faith and atheism. If he did he might be in a better position to add something than any of his recent predecessors, but his concerns seem to be more for the integrity and growth of the Roman Catholic church.

The God I Don't Believe In

Earlier this week I mentioned that the God I don’t believe in probably does not exist. I think I need to expand on this a bit. Not just for the benefit of my regular readers, but because writing it down will give me the opportunity to reflect on it further and order my thoughts.

To start with, its quite clear that I still lack belief in God and that lack of belief is very strong. My friend Nelu Balaj has pointed out during our various conversations that he does not believe in most of the things that I don’t believe in, but he still believes in God. His feeling is that the God I don’t believe in does not exist anyway, and that there is room for me to believe in God and still give the same weight to reason and the world we live in. Nelu’s background is in Romania where most of the post communist missionary work was done by American evangelical churches, and he has had a journey to adapt from that narrow approach to a wider belief about God. This gives him an openness to discussing things like this which is very helpful.

Having had some time to reflect on our discussions I think that Nelu has a valid point and that rather than considering myself as a general unbeliever I should really define what I don’t believe in. As well as helping me it might also help other people having a similar experience of loss of faith or who have never been able to embrace the possibility of faith.

So who exactly is the God that I don’t believe in?

Its quite difficult to distill a lifetimes accumulations of belief, but here are some of the characteristics of the God I used to believe in:

He is a limited God who only enters the lives of people who choose him. I have written previously about my dislike of the alpha course whose main message seems to be that life is pointless without God. Clearly it isn’t. Most of my friends do not acknowledge God in any way yet they have lives full of meaning, interest and - dare I say it - joy. This either means that God only enters the lives of the unhappy and dissatisfied or he is already acting in everyone’s lives regardless of whether they recognise it.

He is a God who requires a decision to accept him rather than a decision to follow him. The disciples accepted an invitation from Jesus to “follow me” which implies a journey, but this God views faith as a destination rather than a journey. Once the convert has accepted God all things will come right provided they sufficiently exercise their faith. Try telling this to a poor person in a developing country where the resources available for change are very limited indeed, or to someone with mental health problems who can’t exercise faith as they are struggling to sustain their own sense of self worth. Real life teaches us that not all problems can be solved and not everything can be put right. The inevitable implication of this God of decision and faith is that if things don’t improve then he doesn’t care, has withdrawn, does not exist at all or that the believer has insufficient faith to conjure him up. Worse still, if someone has the misfortune to have insufficient mental faculties to make a decision then there is hope, but no certainty, that they are acceptable to God. This includes people with mental handicaps, young children and people with dementia. He is a God who has little time for people like these.

He is a God who has favourites. He is vindictive, preferring his favourites at the expense of others whom he actively punishes in life and whom he will hold in eternal torment after death. His favourites vary from the Jews in the Old Testament to the true believers of today. He also favours certain believers by blessing them more than others. Yet the Jesus described in the New Testament regularly showed care towards people who would have been considered outsiders. The story of The Syrophoenician woman in Mark chapter 7 is one example that springs to mind here.

He is a God who requires us to deny reason and accept things as fact which contradict our knowledge of the physical world and our experience of real life. The biggest example of this is the creationist doctrine, barely mentioned in Britain before 1990, but now a touchstone of evangelical orthodoxy. Yet, if God is our creator then he created reason too. It would be illogical for him to ask us to believe things which contradicted what we can clearly observe in his creation.

He is a God who does not like difficult questions. Rather than being open to examination we are asked to accept a fixed understanding of God through a literal interpretation of the Bible with no room for putting it in its historical or social context. If we disagree with something or don’t understand it this is due to our lack of understanding or enlightenment rather than the accepted understanding of it being wrong.

He is a God of the individual. A very 21st century God who delivers on promises made to the individual without requiring anything from us as a community. Yes, he requires our individual worship, and he recognises a body of believers, but they are simply an assembly of individuals. He does not recognise that assembly as a community with a mission to the world or responsibilities to others, other than the need to make more converts. This itself usually manifests as individuals trying to convince other individuals, not as a community accumulating new members as it grows.

He is a collector God. Having created every individual with a soul and free will he then needs to collect them all back in at the end of their physical life. Not only is this an unnatural separation of the spiritual and physical, but it also drives believers to evangelise by quantity through targeting those who are most likely to convert. Why is it that students, young people, the lonely and unhappy get targeted by churches? Does God love these people more, or is it just that they are more likely to convert and help balance the books of a collector God?

He is a God of dubious morals. If the bible is to be accepted as the unadulterated, directly delivered word from God then it logically follows that God does not live by the same rules he expects us to live by. He regularly asks people to kill on his behalf, does bad things to people because of things their parents did, sends plagues on people who have not directly done anything to provoke it and generally seems to revel in his unbridled power. If this God was a person I knew in daily life I would avoid his company at all costs. He just isn’t my kind of person.

He is a God of moving goalposts. As new believers we are given milk and as we grow we are fed new solid food doctrines. These may contradict what we were originally told, but our acceptability to God depends on us accepting them. In marketing this is known as “bait and switch”. Hook someone in with a simple message and then gradually add in the other things like creationism, dispensationalism, pentecostalism and any other number of novel ideas.

So that is a partial description of the God I do not believe in.

In regards to this God I am an atheist, not merely an agnostic.

A Creationist visits the Doctor

A humorous look at the paradox of being a creationist in our modern, scientific world.

The Unraveling of Christianity #2

#2 If God does exist then he must be very complex and that means he must have resulted from an evolutionary process or indeed been created himself by some higher being. God could not have just come into being by accident

Believers often say that the chance of the world having been created by accident is the same as a watch appearing in a field or an aircraft being assembled by a wind blowing through a scrap yard. Here Richard Dawkins shows that this argument can't be used to prove that god exists. Quite the opposite. If a Boeing 747 being created by accident is improbable how less probable is the existence of God?

If God does exist then he must be very complex and that means he must have resulted from an evolutionary process or indeed been created himself by some higher being. God could not have just come into being by accident, so the creationist case is actually injured by the use of this argument from improbability.

Hate mail from Christians

I have received many responses since I decided to come out as an atheist.
Every week I receive one or two emails or blog comments.
Naysayers outnumber well wishers by about four to one and they tend to make very similar statements of dislike towards me: dislike to the point of wanting to see me harmed (usually by God) and a rather gleeful expectation that they will enjoy watching me being so punished.
They rarely engage in any of the issues with me and when they do they can't respond other than to say that I am wrong and I will find out the hard way.

Apart from the unecesary personal hurt that these communications cause me there are a number of areas in which my critics have either misread or misunderstood what I have been saying.

Firstly they assume that I have purposefully rejected God.
In fact I have not rejected God, just discovered that he does not exist, which is not the same thing at all.
If I knew that God existed and rejected him then that would be a very illogical thing gto do, but I don't believe there is a God or indeed any need for there to be a God in order to explain existence, with one proviso: It is possible that a superior being does exist somewhere in the cosmos, but if he does exist then he would have to be the culmination of some sort of evolutionary process himself. The chances of God existing by chance is very unlikely, and if he did exist he could not be the God of the bible.

Secondly they assume that I believe that everything came into creation by chance. This is not the case. I believe in natural selection which means that the environment in which creatures have to survive causes them to adapt and change over long periods of time. This is something that Darwin saw in microcosm when he visited the Galapagos islands and saw the adaptations of birds beaks for different survival purposes. This is natural selection or as I like to call it logical selection.

Thirdly, they believe that I think life is pointless, without meaning and without hope. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have found life to be far more meaningful without God. I have a greater understanding of my role in the world and a feeling of being part of something significant: the human race. I have become a kinder more understanding person and this might explain why I find some of these critical emails so surprising coming from people who tell me that God loves me (while they obviously don't).

So what can I make of this? I think that what these people are doing is defending their own belief system to themselves rather than trying to persuade me to believe. In fact they seem more interested in watching me suffering in hell than persuading me to avoid going there. Therein lies the heart of the issue. Christians seem to require a lot of bolstering of their own faith and can only cope by feeling slightly superior to those with whom they disagree. Rather than trying to win the argument by reason they rely on the fact that their dad is bigger than my dad and will get his revenge while they hide behind his legs sniggering at me.

Argument against proof for the existence of God from experience

One of the responses I have had from a few Christians to my deconversion story can be summarised like this:

"If you had experienced God like I have experienced God then you would believe too."

Yet, I have experienced similar things to the people who have said this (and in some cases in exactly the same places or organisations). I just seem to have interpreted them differently. Rather than looking for unlikely supernatural explanations I have tended to look for more obvious explanations based on reason and knowledge of how the world works. For example, the person whose life has been transformed by prayer, might have just found the confidence to turn their own life around, or the person healed of a gammy leg might already have been a lot better, but just needed the confidence to stop using a stick.

I think this is where the argument for the existence of God based on experience falls down. The whole thing is subjective and cannot be tested objectively.

There is also a certain element of over egging the pudding by Christians. I knew one person who had to go and have tests for cancer, was prayed for and found not to have cancer. This was proclaaimed as a local miracle when, in fact, she had never actually had cancer. The doctors just wanted to investigate it further because they were concerned about her condition.

From Christian to Atheist

Introduction

It is with some trepidation that I write this but I need to come clean with a number of friends around the world and writing it down seems to be the best way of structuring an explanation of where I find myself.


My journey out of faith

First of all I didn't wake up one day and decide "hey I am going to become an atheist". In fact I don't think its possible to become an atheist as atheism is an absence of belief in God rather than a positive belief in something.

It happened like this. One day I realised that I no longer believed that there was a need for a God in order for me to exist or life itself to be worthwhile. The main question that I could not answer from my Christian beliefs was "who created God?". If biological life needed something to create it then God needs a creator. One answer is that God has always just existed, but you could say that about life itself. Maybe life has always existed? We know that’s not true because of evolution and if the bible is wrong about the origins of life (which it clearly is - animals did not appear as fixed species and human history is longer than the 6000 years the bible suggests) then it must be wrong about all sorts of other things.

If Adam did not exist and did not sin then there is no need for a second Adam. Indeed, suppose that atonement was necessary, how could the death of one man actually make God change his mind, especially if the man dying was actually God? It all started to unravel when I looked at the logic of the whole scheme of Christianity.

I did try to discuss these issues with various Christian friends but the universal advice I got was variations on "just believe". In other words, just pretend to believe, agree to all the creeds, but don't really believe and you will be OK when you die, just in case you were wrong. This did not make any sense to me. It had no integrity to it so I had to accept that I did not believe any more and just tell people the truth.

This seemed to be an honest approach, but it was quite challenging for them. Generally their response was to argue in favour of God's existence either from creation or by trying to prove the historical accuracy of scripture (on the basis that if it is right about history then it must be right about theology). It was rather like being cross examined by an advocate who also did not know the real truth but knew what the law said.

I also looked at the standard proofs for the existence of God from Thomas Aquinas and St Anselm, but I did not find these either helpful or convincing.


One brave person

One brave person called Ross (thank you Ross) from a church I attended years ago did engage with me by email which was very kind of him. This included the big question of how anything can exist (creation out of nothing).

I replied:

If God created everything out of nothing, where was he when he did it?

Thats the problem with using that argument, it actually pushes any possibility of God out of the picture.
Matter can not be created or destroyed it just exists and changes.
Science uses superstring theory in physics to suggest that the universe expands and contracts so there is no need for a single big bang event
or something being created from nothing.

In fact Jewish thinking is that God created himself in Genesis chapter one.
Early Christians separated the idea of the creator God from the God, whom they were praying to, which is one reason why Jesus gets assumed to be pre existent and doing the creative acts in Genesis 1.
This allowed the father to be higher than the son/creator.

This also raises the argument in favour of God from complexity.
i.e. something as complex as our world must have been created by something greater than itself.
The same can be said about God.
There must have been something bigger than God that created him, yet if thats true then God is not God.
Therefore the argument from complexity is also self defeating.

This is the problem. There is just not enough evidence for the existence of God or for the need for a God in order for things to be the way they are.


Some reactions from my other Christian friends

These have ranged from "I always knew there was something not quite right about you" to quotations from the parable of the sower about some seed falling on stony ground where it withers and dies, as if this is an occupational hazard and not something they have to be too concerned about. I have also had a large number say "I will be praying for you". I wonder how long they will pray for me?



The overall results and effects

First the negatives:

• I have no contact with any of my friends from church. No one from the church has contacted me since I said I was stopping going. Its like I have stopped existing. It turned out they were all conditional friendships. This has been very painful. People who I thought cared about me as a person turned out to only care about me as a soul that could be won or lost and put on the trophy shelf (in some ways I do feel like a bit of a fool thinking they were my friends, I imagine I am a bit like someone coming out of a cult, I have a bereavement process to go through). To be fair I have not tried to contact them but a couple of them have walked to the other side of the street to avoid me so I have been a bit scared to contact them.
• There is a certain embarassment factor involved in how other people see me. I was a person of faith for so long that they would expect me losing it to have wrecked my life, but I have not really changed.

Now the positives:

• I now realise that only I can help myself. There are no quick fixes or miracle cures. If I am going to make my life better then I have to do it myself. I am no longer bound by the guilt of having to seek professional help rather than prayer or miracle cures so I am going into inter personal therapy with a psychologist and making various changes to my life to improve my wellbeing.
  


• I have developed a great interest in nature. As a Christian I could climb a mountain look down and say "how great is the world that God has created", but I had little interest in the workings of the natural world. Since my deconversion I have started to get great pleasure from small things like watching spiders build webs and birds feeding in the garden. Its as if I can see my place in the world in context for the first time and I enjoy watching all the other living things.
  


• I can see a point to living. I now know what I am here for. As well as passing on my genes to my children the world is being built on the actions that I and all the other people living today are taking every day. Human progress is actually an accumulation of what everyone from every previous generation has done. We all build on what has gone before, so I really believe that I am actually worth something rather than being a soul who may or may not end up in a lake of fire.
  

Some thoughts about the church

At the same time as I was going through this I started to realise some things about the church I had been attending for about eighteen months:

If you joined and your life was not significantly transformed within six to nine months they lost interest in you.

They did not like people asking difficult questions and in group bible studies they asked people not to disagree with any of the material during the group discussion but take it up with the leaders afterwards (something that really set my alarm bells ringing, actually I laughed the first time I heard it because I thought it was a wind up).

A large number of people had drifted through the church over the years so they were used to people leaving. It seemed like a good place to be where everything worked for the people that were there, but what was happening was that of all the people who passed through the only ones that stayed were those for whom it worked. Therefore it gave the impression that it was making a difference to the lives of those who were there and that it could do the same for anyone. I call this the "filter effect".

So what was happening was that people were drifting through the church and if their lives were changed for the better they stuck in the filter and this created the group of people who made up the church.

Some side issues for Christians to consider

At the same time I was becoming very concerned about contemporary Christianity's urge to distance itself from science and discourage scientific explanations for physical effects. At a simple level mental illness has to be caused by a demon not by physiological changes in the brain. I was very concerned that I was bringin up my children in an environment where science was not trusted and they were not going to be able to acheive their full potential as contributors to society by being part of a ghetto.

To set the record straight
Just to be absolutely clear I was a soundly converted, born again, bible believing, spirit filled Christian and I was attending a Pentecostal church when all of this happened. I was not lacking in any aspect of my experience of God. If anything I was looking for facts to back up experience and found the facts to be extremely lacking once the surface was scratched.

Updates
Since I originally wrote this article I have clarified some of the issues in another article - click here to read it.

Please read this before commenting on this article
I welcome comments on my blog and generally let them all through whether negative or positive.

However, this article is my personal opinion and feelings on these issues.
I am not saying I am right and you are wrong.
I am not interested in promoting atheism or trying to destroy Christianity.
In fact if Christianity can be destroyed by one blog article then it really can't be much of a faith.
It is entirely possible that I might change my mind again at some point, but if I do it will be because I have found evidence for God, not because someone on the internet has expressed concern about the fate of my soul or argued with me about the flood or how the evolution of the eyeball.

If you still want to comment then please go ahead.