Richard. Thanks for your gracious validation of my reading of the evidence. I have been tired of being “beat up” by a Christianity that is elitist and bent on telling everyone that they are wrong. This is not the example that Christ set for us. I am so fed up with it that my wife and I recently took our kids out of a Christian school because of that very type of indoctrination and put them in our neighborhood public school. We have all felt an oppression lift with this change. As I have said before, my Christianity is much different than it was 2 years ago as I focus on ways to included others, ways to learn from others no matter what their beliefs, ways to show kindness and mercy and grace. It is amazing and tragic to me that mainstream evangelical Christianity is so elitist, so us and them. I’m sick of that.

Thanks for you comments – it was “hellish”. Thankfully I am recovering but it has been difficult It is good to know that there are Christians who make an effort to understand – and for that I applaud you

If possible I would love discussing your perspective on Christianity in more depth sometime – particularly your view of Scripture. I am often intrigued by those who ground their faith in truth that they believe rests outside of the Bible. This is something that I did not grow up with and am now trying to understand a little more.

I think this is the most reasonable thing I have heard on here. Kudos.

I just know that Frank’s illness is an aspect of life that must be endured, just as many aspects of life are enjoyed to their fullest extent.

chaplain – I like this line from your post. It reminds me of a philosopher I like, Robert Solomon, a Nietzsche scholar. He wrote that from an existentialist perspective, suffering has meaning just because suffering is a part of life, and life has meaning. I have never heard a better theodicy!

freestyleroadtrip – I, for one, very much appreciate the “tone” of your approach to Christian belief. Although I am an atheist-leaning agnostic,and thus disagree with your conclusions, I can enthusiastically agree with you that it is reasonable to believe, and it is also reasonable not to believe. I think so much misery and ill-will is generated by insisting, in effect, “all reasonable people will agree with me.” Its like my last article (“flapping your arms…”) — its easy, and a mistake, to define a “reasonable assesment of the evidence” as “when you reach the same conclusion I do”.

If more people would recognize the bedrock but difficult truth here — that reasonable people differ — we would live in a much better world.

Welcome to the site!

orDover. In my opinion, I think the Anthropic Principle is a fairly strong argument. I understand that it is not proof. And I understand that other theories such as that of multiverse theory stand in its way. But it is a reasonable reading of that evidence.

Just real quick, can you give me ONE piece of “evidence” that isn’t just an argument from ignorance?

Josh. That sounds hellish and the very arrogance of which you speak is what has led me to a completely different Christianity than what I once knew. This is probably not the right forum for describing that so I will hold. But I have come to realize that there probably is something that is absolute truth but that none of us really knows quite what it is, Christian or not.

I would like to say that I am impressed by the respect that is shown on this website for people like me. It is very freeing to be able to discuss in an educated fashion doubts and questions without being told that I am going to hell.

When I first started my deconversion process, I went through a period very similar to this where my dad basically denounced everything I was teaching (I was only moderate in my Christian perspective: doubting inerrancy). This tipped me off to a serious problem.

If my dad had the Holy Spirit, how could he be so arrogant as to think that he had a firmer grasp on the truth than his own son who had studied so much more than he had? I began to notice that the involvement of the Holy Spirit is basically an illusion generated by the believer’s consistent categorizing of certain emotions, experiences, or behaviors as fruit of the spirit (as Paul did). In this process the ‘truth’ gets blurred behind all the judging of people’s actions – whether one realizes it or not. Christianity does not just teach love, it defines love. By defining love, Christianity becomes a judge as to what is loving. If a person buys this, they become an autonomous individual who by nature carefully analyzes everyone else for behavior that does not conform to what he views as loving.

For my dad, it did not matter how much study or research I had done. Because I was not teaching the “truth” I was obviously not exhibiting the Holy Spirit in my life (a Spirit filled person teaches the truth). This gave him the right to denounce what I was saying with barely a bat of his eye or a moments pause to think it through. He could dismiss what I said without a care at all for the hell I was going through in struggling with my doubts. It was awful.

It would seem best to even avoid the word “God” in this case, since it is such a loaded word. It carries tremendous cultural baggage.

If we’re going to state something created the universe, but that this is all we know about it, it would seem best to be incredibly general. It could be an entity, or entities, or even a blind force.