de-conversion

I might have become an atheist

‘Emerging’ Christian Commentary

Beginning toward the end of college and continuing through grad school into my years as a youth pastor, I went through a radical rethinking of all my conservative evangelical beliefs. I had grown up thoroughly immersed in the evangelical subculture, and as a teenager was an on-fire, committed Christian eager to serve God and share my faith with others. I attended Wheaton College, a conservative evangelical liberal arts school, where ironically, I was introduced to ideas that led me to start questioning key aspects of my conservative faith - from the nature and reality of God, to the inerrancy of scripture, to the existence of “absolute truth” or even “universal morality” free from cultural influence, to the inherent rightness of the Republican party, to the nature of salvation as merely a “get into heaven free” card.

Thanks to postmodern philosophy, as well as friends and professors who led me to look at scripture itself in a different light, by the time I finished undergrad and graduate school at Wheaton I as thoroughly cynical and disillusioned with the faith with which I had been raised. I had learned that doubt and uncertainty were an unavoidable part of the human condition, and that questioning my faith was actually a good thing…

Continue Reading 126 comments March 5, 2008

The True Origins of a Specious Argument

A Guest Commentary

The faithful often try to tell us that without god the world would collapse into chaos. They claim that god provided us with laws or commandments to live by and that societies have base their laws on these commandments. This strikes me as a rather arrogant assumption that overlooks some very basic historical facts.

In fact, the relationship probably works the other way around. Religion took its laws from those that already existed. For example, let’s look at the ten commandments. The claim is that they brought rules to a world without any. The implication is that people ran around killing, stealing, and raping with impunity before them. However, codes of law had been written long before the alleged burning into stone of the ten commandments. For example, the Code of Hammurabi was written a thousand year’s before, and there were others before that.

One aspect about Hammurabi’s code that may seem familiar from the first testament is the eye for an eye justice it espoused. Fire and brimstone Christians will recognize much of what they believe and stand for in it. So, rather than codes of law being based on the ten commandments, it seems that the ten commandments were based on these codes of law…

Continue Reading 51 comments February 11, 2008

God is not Omnipotent

Guest Commentary

Personally, I feel that most arguments for or against the existence of God are too rooted in normative conventions for my personal beliefs. In other words, I cannot accept arguments based on supposedly established conventions such as good, evil, right, wrong, etc., because those conventions were primarily established through man-made religions.

This is not to say that employing norms such as good and evil are not useful in arguing against the existence of a deity. Using religiously established conventions (Christian norms, in this case) of good and evil, and by understanding the hierarchy of God’s characteristics, we can show that the God that Christians imagine to exist contradicts himself, and therefore cannot exist.

The Christian tradition holds that God is many things: God is love, God is merciful, and so on. One characteristic, a seemingly unavoidable prerequisite to being a deity, is that God is omnipotent. God, according to the Christian tradition, is also good and cannot be or do evil…

Continue Reading 191 comments December 15, 2007

The Historicity of Jesus

We’ve had several entries on this subject over the course of this blog including:

• Jesus - to be or not to be, that is the question!
• Is Jesus mentioned in the Talmud?
• Were the Gospels eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus?

However, on a recent comment, evanescent mentioned this subject and I would like highlight it (with some slight edits for flow):

There is good reason to believe there was a man at the centre of the cult that became Christianity. Actually, there was probably many men at the time. The cult that become Christianity retrospectively convoluted stories about its leader.

A fantastic set of articles exploring the historical evidence (or lack thereof) for Jesus can be found here: http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/camel.html…

Continue Reading 25 comments October 6, 2007

My Fall From Grace

2 comments August 23, 2007

A Commentary on De-Conversion

Guest Commentary

Ever since my initial link to this site, I’ve been following it with interest. Why? I don’t know if I can put the reason into words sensible enough to be written in the middle of the night; but possibly because I’m a little surprised that there is a need for atheists/agnostics people who are questioning their faith or people who are in the process of rejecting their faith to have the kind of group support that this blog provides. And because I find some of the discussions interesting.

Right up front, let me declare myself. I’m a believer of the Christian persuasion. My reasoning can be found here and here, to some degree.

The long and short of it is that I’m a Christian because I choose to be. As an anthropologist and as a person who grew up in a society that allows for far more possibilities than are found in anyone’s philosophy — while steadfastly swearing allegiance to the Bible — I cannot accept the material world as all that is, which is what seems to me to lie at the bottom of any atheist discussion.

Continue Reading 26 comments July 16, 2007