Yes – I think that describes me very well, as well as several other ex-xtian friends of mine. Thanks for putting it so well. I came from a liberal protestant background. No literalism for us. As I finished middle school I was really trying to believe what the church was wanting me to believe, but by the end of College I was done with religion. I think actually reading the bible cover to cover had a lot to do with it. No earth-shattering break, just a gradual realization that god seemed too much like Santa Claus for grown-ups.

Interesting, thanks for your story Ubi Dubium. I think the drifting away from faith and ultimate realization that one is no longer a believer (typically seems to happen in young adulthood) sound much preferable to the misery of the “deconversion from fundamentalism” process!

Yet another positive to chalk up to liberal/moderate belief – leaving is So Much Easier.

“I ran into lots of people raised in liberal Christian churches that didn’t so much make the painful, wrenching decision to deconvert (as many of us here did) but simply drifted away from belief over the years and eventually realized they were no longer Christians, or even theists.”

But yeah, I think the more appropriate word to use instead of literal is canonical, which is a way of saying that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, perfect in every way. It is more than a human book, and it carries more authority than any other text. I find that an ultimately untenable approach.

You are right. The whole idea of taking the Bible literally is just idiotic as well as impossible.

Some people once took a highlighter to some Bibles and highlighted in one color all the parts that could be taken literally, and used another color for the parts that had to be taken non-literally. They did this to a number of Bibles, using different interpretational approaches.

What they wound up with was nuts. In many places they actually had different color highlights alternating within a single verse.

I believe I recall that they did try to do a conglomerate Bible with all the different interpretational methods color coded, but it was impossible. Just too many variables.

Take home point is that the varying denominations and interpretations out there constitute a massive, irreconcilable mess.

The fact that the Bible can’t be interpreted literally is clear in passages like “give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s”. I have never heard a Christian take this to mean we give anything to Caesar… it’s always a metaphor (aka, not literally) for government.

Oh, the hypocrisy…

Thanks for this post, I thought it was a good one.

The single best place I know to find the whole “soul” story is in The Greeks and the Irrational. UC Berkeley Press. 1950. [ER Dodds's classic in the history and psychology of Greek religion.]

Basically, xianity is a confluence of judaic and hellenistic greek cultural patterns (I almost said ‘thoughts’ but that’s not right). The pythagoreans held that the body is the tomb of the soul (psyche): soma sema = body (is a) tomb. Plato then takes up this strand of propaganda giving voice to it in the Phaedo. Dodds claims that the ‘soma sema’ dogma originates from shamanistic cultures in what is today Russia/Georgia. Only after the Black Sea became open to Greek traders (600 BCE?) did the “separable” soul notion spread.

Shaman to this day go into self-induced (or drug induced) trances, “leaving” their bodies behind as their souls travel great distances to retrieve a soul of someone who has “died.” Sometimes a shaman’s soul can be seen flying as a great water bird, like a crane. This is one of the oldest spiritual images in continuous use going back into the early neolithic, perhaps even back 35,000 years to cave paintings in France.

It took xianity 200 years to get to the point where its leading “apologists” realized that the upper strata of roman society would never “convert” unless xian beliefs were philosophically defensible — there’s little question that as late as 180 CE xianity was still a mish-mash of contending sects, altering their god-given texts, and getting recruits mainly from the great unwashed of major cities in the eastern part of the empire. And the “pagans” said so.

For this — see Celsus’ critique of xianity circa 180 CE, sometimes titled On The True Doctrine. (See RJ Hoffmann. Oxford Pr. 1987 for translation and thorough preface.) Celsus finds the doctrine of the resurrection “disgusting.” As for the incarnation, no god could or would alter his imperturbable states of perfection to become a lesser being. And, Jesus was just another charlatan who’d learned his dark arts among the magicians of Egypt.

Orwell has a word for xianity in practice, he calls it “double-think” — the ability to hold two mutually contradictory ideas at the same time believing in both, in this context, one jewish and one greek: Jesus=Christ=God.

What harm does this cause today outside of religion — large tracts of psychology (and ordinary language) still hold that there are “bodies” and “minds” and that somehow these two different orders of thing, the physical and the mental (ye olde soule) “interact.” This too is madness. But, that’s another issue.

bipolar2
c. 2008

I have wondered about that, particularly after hearing that some people seem to be more concerned with certainty, while others seem to have less need of it. I wonder if this can be tied to Maslow’s heirarchy of needs, on the level of Safety.