Things I did that helped me get through this time of grief and pain:

- Go for a walk outside/get some healthy exercise.
- Fill a playlist with upbeat MP3s (Jonathan Coulton, Weird Al, Tom Smith, ABBA, etc), and listen to them whenever possible.
- Pick up an old, creative hobby I hadn’t engaged in for a while (roleplaying, in my case. Yes, I am a geek.)
- Spend time in a social activity with friends (without discussing religion).
- Find ways to help people as I had when a Christian, without the Christian trappings (and realize that I am still the same person I always was).
- Find a support group of people who have gone through similar struggles (this site was a huge help for me!).
- Find people I could talk honestly to (see previous parenthetical).
- Journal (blog) the experience, and/or what led up to it.
- Remember to breathe!
- Meditate.
- Explore different faiths, different fellowships, different philosophies, and find out what I wanted from them, what I could offer to them, and (most importantly to me) what I could put my faith in.

How about you? What helped you through your de-conversion, if it was painful, or helps you through other times of trial now that prayer is no longer an option?

The more I’ve been thinking about dealing with the arrogance versus humility issue, the more it has pried open an issue which, ironically for me, has become somewhat tautological. Suppression.

I’m pretty sure that every person deals with this on a daily basis, but I’m also pretty sure that conservative Christians are masters of exacerbating it. In fact, I was heavily on my way to becoming a guru when it came to suppressing everything I felt and wanted. And here is how I have been setting myself free.

For the most part I’ve identified two major areas of suppression in my own life: physical and emotional. Intellectually I suppressed some things – like how I considered evolution to be beautiful and immediately thought it was the devil speaking to me. But for the most part, I did not feel like the intellectual side of my mind was hindered too much by the Christianity with which I grew up. And if my intellect was suppressed, I feel that I have sufficiently dealt with that. Many of you may notice the change in tone of my posts – that I used to be much more analytical. So that leaves me with physical and emotional suppression.

Physical suppression revealed itself most strongly in sexuality. I remember distinctly being terrified of my first sexual thoughts. In my early arrogant Christian days – at around the age of 9 – I remember looking up to the teenagers around me in disgust. Who are these apes, gallivanting about all stupid and shit? I won’t be like them. I’m a good Christian. I’ll never look at porn. I’ll never commit adultery. I will never have sex before marriage. I had not yet learned that only the arrogant say “I would never.”

Then puberty hit. Oh gosh was it steamy for me. Forgive the openness if it offends, but I would regularly have two wetdreams in one night and wake up still feeling frustrated. Touching myself was out of the question. Thinking about girls – while at first quite fun – eventually lead to so much guilt and repentance that I was ready to do just about anything short of castrating myself in order to eliminate the desire for sex. To give you an idea of how hard I worked at this, I went for a couple years during my teenage years where by employing certain ‘techniques’ I had been able to avoid sexual thoughts almost completely.

Elimination of desire: that was the goal. Now that I think back, the theology was that desires that went against God’s will were sin. However, I was introspective beyond most of my contemporaries during those middle school years and soon began to notice that I did not have a single thought that was not against God’s will. Either I was wanting something that I was not supposed to have, or getting angry at not getting something I thought God wanted me to have, or trying to throw thoughts out of my mind that I thought might be bad, or trying to suppress every ounce of curiosity that existed in my bones unless it was about getting closer to God. Heck, the only desire I constantly stroked was my desire to be like God and every ounce of pride I had in that desire. As such, I would go from feeling on top of the world to exhaustion rather regularly – especially as I would feel (and subsequently ignore) my sexual desires wax and wane with the passing tide of women.

I can see why some men want to be monks. In some ways that was the direction I was headed. But I could not be a monk and at the same time witness to people: I had to get out there. I could not waste away pursuing a growth in my relationship with God so – selfishly. So, like a fallen monk I tortured myself with human interaction that would never satisfy my desire to only need Jesus.

I was a fucked up mess. I rarely smiled, I rarely laughed, and I could only find fault in those around me. I only became happy whenever I felt like God was speaking to me or when others gave backhanded or open-ended compliments about my relationship with the Lord. Obviously if they praised me too much I would flip and become a self-deprecating mess, but I do remember those few occassions when the comments of others gave me just what I needed. That was so rare.

But the point of this is that I was suppressing dozens – if not hundreds – of little desires. For example, I wanted to play a computer game called One Must Fall, but maybe Jesus would not approve? “Dear Jesus, if I should not play One Must Fall show me by having me lose this next game.” Damn (in Christianese), I lost. Does Jesus not approve… if Jesus doesn’t approve why is this not bothering anyone else? I should follow Jesus, not others. I would stop playing. Moving ahead several years… I want a sports car, but sports cars are vain. Jesus does not want us to be vain and I probably only want one so that I can get attention from the ladies. Getting attention from the ladies is wrong unless Jesus leads them to you… all other attention is fake and is lustful. I  am supposed to avoid lust, so all those desires must be wrong! But why the fuck did Jesus give me hormones that rage at age 13 and 14 if I am not supposed to do anything about them until I am married?

Ranting aside, I definitely took this suppression to an extreme. People have always told me I am intense, and it is true. In just about anything I try I either put all my weight into it or none. So when it came to suppressing my desires I feel like I put quite a damn bit of weight into it. I was not going to give up. In a way, I felt like an oil well spewing out under pressure and I was trying desperately to put a cap on it. For some reason it never occurred to me to funnel my passions out slowly. In my black and white mind, I was either going to stop the well from leaking completely or let it explode all over the ocean of my life – killing everything in its vicinity.

And the latter is what happened, and it ended up destroying so many friendships and relationships and left me feeling alone by my late teens. All my energy was put into setting God’s desires before my own and in the process I became an emotional raisin. And even then, God gave me nothing. I remember on many occasions going into my room alone – without anyone knowing – and just sitting and waiting for God’s presence. I would confess my sins, read my Bible, and just seek Him with every ounce in my being. Nothing. I remember the dry tears, crying desperately for God to listen – to do anything – to show me His presence. So I not only suppressed my every desire, but like a crack addict I found myself scraping the cigarette trays of spiritual gas stations looking for any signs of a smoldering fag to satisfy my endless craving for even the faintest of a smoke signal from God.

So anyway, I know now that I was digging my own emotional grave and since then it has been a slow and choppy – but steady – process of learning to listen to myself.

Here’s how I’m doing it.

First, I’m learning to dig through all the layers I had built on top of all my desires to keep myself from paying attention to them. This mostly involves an opposite pattern of thinking than I normally had been employing. For quite a bit of my life, most of my thought life has been a deep, digging process to resolve all the contradictions I saw between what I thought I should be and what I knew I was in order to eliminate desires that I found to be sinful. My new thought process is about finding those desires I suppressed and learning how to satisfy them in healthy ways. And most of this involves facing my deepest fears and desires, rather than ignoring them. This normally involves me spending a lot of time alone with myself, just thinking and talking to myself or writing out exactly what I want to think or what I actually do feel.

Coming from a Christian background this can be terrifying. For example, there have been points where I wanted to kill my dad. I once woke up early in the morning recently just fuming, incapable of relaxing my body into anything other than the deepest of hate. I knew I needed to face that… not act on it, but face it. That is how I really felt. That was what I, Josh, really felt. It was not some other foreign part of me that I was to suppress by focusing on something Jesuslike. No, it was what I really felt.

And that brings me to the second thing I’m learning to do: be honest with myself. That can be hard, especially when you feel like you have two completely conflicting desires at the same time – most of what I’ve felt my entire life. Last year whenever I was with a girl I inevitably reached a point where I was like “Fuck, I do not know what I want.” Now that I look back, what I was really saying was that I wanted two different things. I wanted true love – whatever that is – and I wanted to have tons of sex with lots of girls. I inevitably felt guilty about the latter and also always failed at the former. But recognizing this – and being able to say that both desires are my desires – is key. Then it is simply a matter of figuring out why I want both, facing the fact that both desires probably mix as well as oil and water and then being honest with myself about the situation and making up my mind.

See, for me at least, Christianity emphasized an internal war and exacerbated it. In fact, I remember preachers who almost taught that if you did not feel this internal conflict something was wrong! It is true that everyone faces desires for things they cannot have. This lust can be crippling and can make us act irrationally. It should be avoided at all costs. But that war should not be encouraged by building up a wall against one side of yourself (“I buffet my body to make it my slave”), it should be dispelled by internal diplomacy (“Hey Josh, why not learn how to attract women and just have fun and be safe and then some day settle down with one them? … or two of them?”).

Ultimately all of this has helped me realize that the most healthy person is the person who has learned to satisfy his or her own needs. A healthy person seeks out what he or she wants and pursues it with confident passion and gets satisfied. A healthy person learns to listen to his own desires – every one of them – and pays attention to them. A healthy person is willing to say “no, I need time to myself” or “self, you need time with others”. Growing up, in many ways, is like becoming your own parent. It is learning to listen to your own cries and taking healthy action to satisfy them.

I feel slightly silly at having only recently discovered this, but given my past I guess it’s what I should expect and I feel like I’m doing pretty well.

Once again, I hope this helps someone else who might be in a similar position. Feel free to unload. I keep doing it and it always makes me feel a lot better.

- Josh

As I remember, the struggle went something like this. I had been told multiple things about humility – and as with all Christian doctrine – I noticed through recurring headaches that there were strong contradictions in what I was taught.

One of those major contradictions was the impossibility of pursuing ones ability to be humble if a humble person does not think about their humility. A lot of people told me not to think about being humble, but I knew I was commanded to be humble. This, naturally, made me introspect to figure out whether I was. Then I would remember that a person who is humble cannot know it. But how am I supposed to pursue humility if I cannot think about it?

Naturally I wanted to resolve this contradiction. I mean, if it hurt my head that much surely resolving it would help others, right?

But there was a problem. The Bible. The Bible was the problem. First of all, the Bible never said that a humble person does not recognize his humility. In some places it implies the opposite. If you believe Moses wrote Deuteronomy, then you have to believe that a humble man can honestly – and in humility – write that he is the most humble man on earth. Noticing this, I began to garner a general distrust for Christian memes, since it seemed like people were ultimately pulling their end ideas out of their ass and these normally contradicted the Bible in some way.

This pursuit of humility exhibited itself in the most bizarre behavior. You soon find out that the most humble people are the people who do not really care about their humility. And even these people got accused of arrogance! The more arrogant people (like me, in my estimation), however, were the ones who cared about being humble and perfect. Tying into my previous post, I guess it seems like we were so focused and insecure about our shortcomings to be humble that we ended up focusing on ourselves all the time and always bemoaning our shortcomings until we thought we were humble and then feeling rather ecstatic that we had arrived. Then, of course, upon the realization that we were excited about reaching our goal we would hound ourselves into feeling crappy again so we did not take pride in our achievement.

After a while, you begin to feel like everyone is chasing a snipe. Sanctification, I think they called it.

Remember Jesus’ parable? He compared two people. One man was declaring his righteousness to God. The other was bemoaning his shortcomings and calling himself unworthy. We were taught to be like the latter.

But in my opinion, they were both wrong. I don’t think people should bemoan their shortcomings or glory in their achievements. If all you are doing is bemoaning your shortcomings and calling yourself unworthy, you’ll never learn anything and move ahead. I can’t believe I spent so many years trying to avoid the one douche and trying desperately to be the other.

So then, what is humility? Consider the two examples in Jesus’ parable and recognize for a moment that he was giving a somewhat false dichotomy. There is a third option: just don’t care. Don’t try to please anyone who is impossible to please and you will never have to resort to wallowing in self-deprecation or glorying in the impossibly rare achievement. Humility seems to stem from lacking any need to prove yourself better than your peers. So then, a large part of  humility begins by rejecting the notion of a “be holy as I am holy” God. After all, if it’s impossible to be holy like God then if you get excited about the least bit of progress you are being arrogant, right? But if you cannot get excited about any achievement without risking a twinge of arrogance, then you end up wallowing in your depression at your incapacity to ever do anything that is up to par!

But even then after giving it years of thought I think that ultimately humility is relative. In the end no matter how humble one person calls you there will always be another person there to declare you arrogant. After all, a great way to gain power over someone else is to find a goal they wish to achieve and tell them the reason they do not deserve X or the reason you do not like them is because they are not nearly close to their goal. So then, calling someone “arrogant”  in the church is a fantastic weapon of control to get others to submit.

In conclusion it is really nice to not have to worry about how close I am to achieving the perfection God wants from me. I no longer have to worry about getting excited about being close and then getting depressed at suddenly becoming arrogant about it.

And at the end of the day, there is nothing wrong with a little arrogance anyway. Sometimes all it takes to achieve something is a meek person who is willing to take charge in a fit of what may at first appear to be arrogance.

Thoughts, anyone?

- Josh

It has come to my attention recently that I am an extremely self-deprecating person. When people compliment me, I find it difficult to just casually accept their compliment without either having a completely inflated ego as if starving for attention or wanting to dismiss their genuinely kind words as unnecessary flattery. In other words, I don’t really like to think about myself except in a negative light and as a result of the lack of confidence I tend to rebound the other direction on occasion in full-on arrogance.

Now, I’m sure a decent number of people struggle with this and perhaps you are one of them. What I’ve realized recently is that the Christianity I grew up with almost encouraged this type of thinking. And here is how:

As a Christian, we were supposed to be humble. Part of humility is acknowledging your mistakes. But it is not just enough to acknowledge your mistakes and fix them, we were constantly reminded that we could not fix our mistakes. Over and over and over it was ingrained into our minds that our own efforts were futile – we must rely on the Lord.

As a result, all success is to be attributed to the Lord and all failures are to be attributed to our self. As you can imagine, this does not do much for self-esteem. And a person who has low self-esteem is most likely to cover it up with full-blown arrogance. The only personal success is to attribute all success to God (Proverbs 3:5-6 anyone?).

Now, when I left the church at first I was ecstatic about the opportunity to start “clean”: the world was my oyster and I was full of confidence. And it worked. I got a job I wanted,  a girl I wanted, new friends I wanted, a blog I wanted, and more. But as time has gone on, little mistakes have begun to pile up and are beginning to get to me and it had begun to put me into a slightly depressed and angry funk. For an example, see my recent blog posts. Not pretty.

Basically, I can’t stop thinking about my failures and insufficiencies. But why?

So I decided at the advice of some friends to begin writing down all my thoughts. Every time I had a thought I would write down “why?” and wait until the answer came to me. In the process I discovered that I was retaining half of my Christian mentality – the part that says I’m a loser and failure. And, as any person can imagine, that will lead to depression.

But then I thought about it, and ‘lo-and-behold’ (got to throw in some sort of prophetic Christianese banter) I discovered that that is exactly the attitude Christians wanted me to have. The more self-deprecating you are the more you can give glory to Jesus and fall into his arms. Remember Jesus’ words? A man who has sinned much will love much, so the more you think of yourself as awful and unworthy the greater a lover of Jesus you will be.

There’s only one problem: there is no Jesus there, so if  I am not careful a person with my mentality can fall into a complete epistemic and self-deprecating funk.

So, now that I’ve made this discovery I’m going to begin the process of finding ways to replace my self-deprecating mindset with a more healthy self-esteem.

Have you ever felt this way? Do you still feel this way? If so, I hope what I’ve written can be of help… and feel free to chip in and give others some advice on ways to develop a healthy self-esteem not based on the ridiculously self-deprecating mentality that leads to arrogance that is found in the beloved – and hated – doctrine of the human incapacity for anything but sin.

Cheers all

- Josh

Not if he’s the god of the bible. According to the theology of most Evangelicals, Jehovah’s wrath is so intense over the first offense of any human that he immediately deems the offender deserving of eternal torture. No joke. One offense by any offender is sufficient to incur a divine wrath so terrible that “there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” for eternity awaiting that offender when they die.

“Can’t god do what he wants?” you may ask.

Sure. There is nothing illogical about a malicious god. God can be as mean-spirited as he wants to be. But in addition to being malicious, the god of the bible is then also a liar since he claims to love the very humans he damns to hell-fire over a single offense. This god of the bible unequivocally claims in 1 Corinthians 13:4 that love (agape) is patient. If god loses his temper over the first offense, and deems eternal torture the only thing that will appease his anger, just how much space is left over for patience?

Normally when we think about patience and impatience we think of 2 extremes with a soft delineation somewhere in the middle such as is shown in the following image.

Here patience and impatience fall on a normal continuum. Because words belong to human convention, the standard for the extremes ought to reflect human sentiments about patience and impatience. For example, you’re not likely to find any human willing to say that “patience” could be attributed to a person who is not only offended at the 1st offense, but so angered by the offense that he wants to eternally torture the offender. Clearly such an response to a single offense would conventionally be positioned towards the far right of the patience/impatience continuum. This response to a single offense is precisely the response of the god of the bible to a first offense. There is therefore no rational way we can claim that the god of the bible could ever be considered “patient”.

But wait! What if we simply redefine “patience”? What if we take the word away from human convention, and simply say anything that our “patient” god does is by our imposed definition “patient”. In this way, we are immune from the attack of non-believers since we have simply taken possession of the word, and have redefined it to match our scriptures. Isn’t this legitimate? Let’s just pretend that anything god does we can tag “patient”. How dare ordinary humans think they can define concepts as they experience them! If what seems like impatience to humans is seen in the character of god, it is merely an illusion, for we obviously must expand our definition of patience to include all of god’s actions, right?

Wrong. Calling an alligator fuzzy will not cover the alligator in fuzz. It will only pervert the conventional meaning of the word. Arguing that the word “fuzzy” is by definition what alligators are will not redeem the absurdity of a leathery alligator being tagged with a word that convention has determined means having fuzz of some sort. This is the absurdity of christian thinking, and is diagrammed below.

This Christian inversion and perversion of human definitions of terms is also applied to other dichotomies such as love/hate and just/unjust. They simply claim that whatever god does is patient, loving and just, then smugly claim god to be immune from any assessment of his character.

This dishonest tactic is applied by theists of all stripes with a straight face and apparently no shame. Can these theists actually believe what they are saying? Let me suggest that they do not. I would argue that were a theist to hear his neighbor claim that he was a loving, patient and just father, then proceeded to eternally torture his young child upon that child’s first offense, the theist would (justifiably) call that neighbor a liar. They have not actually given up the conventional human definitions of “love”, “patience” and “justice”. They only pervert these conventional definitions to something close to their inverse in a dishonest defense of their god’s malicious actions.

It appears clear to me that no christian can claim their god to be loving, patient and just without real cognitive dissonance. Only well-practiced self-deceivers can emphatically justify their god’s actions through the perversion of terms to close to their inverse. I used to be such a self-deceived apologist for this particular god…to my shame.

-phil

Why am I telling you all of this? Because I have realized something that I want to share with you. Even though I’m a curmudgeonly hermit-y atheist, I love going to the 3 atheist/freethinker/skeptical meetings we have every month. That’s 3 Sundays a month where I happily leave the house and go socialize with a small group of people. And I look forward to it. The one or 2 Sundays where we don’t meet I miss it.

Even people like me benefit from social community and contact. The beauty of the atheist/freethinker community is that we are relatively like-minded. We have a foundation of common ground. But we are also quite different, of course, which is good because that makes things interesting. The added bonus of freethinkers, skeptics and atheists is that we seem relatively level-headed (overall – there are exceptions,  of course) and we argue and discuss matters with interest and fairness. No drama llama is invited! So it’s actually fun and mentally stimulating.

I think we all need some type of community, which is one thing that religion has in its favor that being a lone atheist or nonbeliever does not.

But this is easily remedied. I thought I’d share some thoughts on how to get involved with a secular group of like-minded people. If none exist in your area, you can start one up.

Tips For Finding A Local Atheist/Humanist/Freethinker/Skeptical Community

1. Do a local Google search on the type of group you’re interested in. They may have a Yahoo, Google or Facebook group, or other page set up, or a website devoted to their activities.

2. Go to your favorite organizations and see if they have local chapters, or a list of local groups associated with them. Examples would be CFI, American Atheists, AHA, UnitedCoR, SCA, etc.

3. Look in your local paper, either online or in print. We have our meetings listed in the Today section of the paper, as well as a general entry in the church section (which is really more for a laugh than anyone looking there for an atheist group, I think)

4. Visit the library or local coffee shops for possible fliers on the bulletin boards.

Once you’ve seen that no local groups exist, or you find that you aren’t interested in what’s available, it’s time to start your own.

Tips For Starting A Local Atheist/Humanist/Freethinker/Skeptical Community

1. Start a local yahoo group, Google group, and/0r Facebook group. If you are sure of the name you want your group to have, you can get a domain name and set up a blog or website for the group you are forming.

I recommend a WordPress blog that pings to many different listing sites. This gets you into Google and other search engines much faster than a plain old website, in the easiest way.

2. Go to your favorite organizations and see if they offer any tips on starting a local chapter. Examples would be CFI, American Atheists, AHA, UnitedCoR, SCA, Atheist Nexus, etc.

3. Set a date, time and place for the first meeting. Also have a topic or agenda to talk about. For the first meeting, your location can be the library or a comfortable coffee shop. Provide directions to the meeting clearly in whatever web presence you’ve chosen.

4. Set up a Gmail email so people can contact you with questions.

5. Contact your local paper. Look for a contact for the Today section, or something similar. Be friendly and polite and see if they will list your local meeting.

6. Create fliers (they don’t have to be big or fancy) and put them in the local coffee shops, the library, and any other places you can think of. If you created a group somewhere online, make sure to share that on the flier so people can read more, as well as your new email address so they can ask questions.

Also post to any groups you’ve created on Facebook, Yahoo or Google groups. Spread the word!

7. Show up to the meeting about 10 or 15 minutes early. I carry a tote bag that identifies me as an atheist (one of my Sir Lee Tees designs, a positive atheism message) to help people I haven’t met yet find me in the location. I also have my picture up on Facebook and the websites so people can see my face. Then they have no problem recognizing me when they first come to a meeting. You can do something else to identify yourself to make it easier and more comfortable to people who will need to approach you. Or if you meet at the library, put up a sign in the room you are in, etc.

Expect the first meetings to be small. Maybe get a friend to sit with you for a half hour to see if anyone shows up. For Morgantown Atheists, there were quite a few meetings that were just the original founders and no one else. But with lots of messages on Atheist Nexus and other areas, and now with its own website it has grown to quite a dynamic little group that meets 3 times a month and now will have a secular service project ongoing.

8. Have some flexible goals in mind for the direction you want your group to go in. My experience is that these small communities sort of take on a life of their own, but having some ideas to start off with can at least give you confidence, as well as help others to decide if they want to come to a meeting.

~ So that should get you started. Give it a try. You’ll probably be very glad you did.

Cross-posted from Heaving Dead Cats

Don’t expect a Hollywood production here, folks. This has absolutely no production value, and the only edits I made were to remove two or three times where I slipped and called RoseMary by her real name. But I think the audio came out ok, and that is what is important.

I uploaded this to blip.tv since they allow me to embed an audio player here. Here is the description I put there:

My wife RoseMary and I would like to welcome you to the first episode our podcast. She is a Catholic Christian, and has been her entire life. I met her in 2004. We dated, and even though I was a liberal Baptist Christian, we fell in love. We wed in 2005. Some time in 2007, after 2 years of marraige, I lost my Christian Faith, and now considers the term ‘atheist’ to most accurately describe my religious stance. But my wife loves him whom I do not believe exists.

Does this story sound familiar? Is your marraige challenged with a similar situation? Has one of you fallen out of the Faith? Believer, what advice have you gotten from your friends, family and church? Non-believer, do you have anywhere to turn for support, or do you feel compelled to stay in the closet? RoseMary and I both believe that these stories are very common, yet few are willing to share these stories.

We are not so sure that we want to tell others our own stories, but are willing to give it a try. We want to share our experiences of being “unequally yoked”. Do you have a story to share? We would like to hear it, and possibly share it with others. Please contact us at unequallyyoked@hotmail.com

It is my hope that this proves beneficial to somebody out there, and it generates some healthy discussion around here.

- HeIsSailing

I have scoured the online world looking for stories, experiences, perspectives and worldly advice from couples who are “unequaly yoked”, particularly those where one has de-converted after marraige.  With the exception of religious sites that dispense advice to win the heathen back to the Faith or consider divorce, I can find absolutely nothing out there.   People in hurting marraiges need more than that.  I am particularly interested in those who want to remain in a healthy marraige, and those who have children.  How do you maintain a healthy marraige when  you have different religious beliefs?  What challenges do you face?  What compromises do you make?

My wife and I would like to discuss these issues, and maybe (with Paul’s permission) post them here for your enjoyment.  I should be ready to put the first episode up in the next couple of days.  I don’t have any idea what will become of it, but I do think it is an important topic that *nobody* is discussing. 

I am interested in your stories.  Perhaps we can hook up a skype interview or something, if you are interested in sharing your experiences here – or maybe you can just submit emails for me to read.  Right now, I am just in the crazy, brainstorming phase, but this is a much more interesting and important issue to me (and I bet many other de-converts and their spouses) than yet another Resurrection Challenge debate.  De-converts, particularly new de-converts have enough challenges to deal with, and I would like to contribute some help with healthy discussion - even if it is nothing but stories that say “We have all been there”.

If you have any input, or just want to call me an idiotic dreamer, just leave it in the comments, or you can email me at unequalyyoked@hotmail.com- seriously, let me know what you think

- HeIsSailing

Today I woke up and was pretty happy. The birds were churping, we have a full house between my roommates and their parents coming to visit, I just finished a massive requirement for a project yesterday that consumed roughly 115-120 hours in the last two weeks, and I’m just excited to be alive.

While for the most part I have moved on from the religious ‘discussion’ (and have not posted here in a while) I found myself this morning anxious, apprehensive, and conflicted. Religious holidays tend to do this to me now – although it is getting better.

I’m in Chicago – miles away from the friends and family that I grew up with and I miss them. I miss the Easter dinners, the good times we had, and the sunshine and kickball. But I don’t miss Jesus, I don’t miss church, and I don’t miss the beliefs that I once cherished.

Since leaving, I have come to realize that the beliefs of fundamentalist Christians are sadistic. The other day it occurred to me once again that they believe that I am a wretched sinner in need of Jesus and unless I accept Him I am going to hell. They praise the person who created this hell and then blame me wholly for going there. My confession on this Easter is that I don’t know how to emotionally and mentally deal with being friend with people who believe this. I’ve never known how to mentally grasp the concept of an eternity in hell. And yet to the fundamentalist Christian all the joy of Easter rests solely on their being delivered from that awful invented place.

As Laura mentioned on my blog, it is truly a catch-22. In order for me to feel loved and accepted, they must give up the very belief that gives Easter any meaning to them. Their happiness is founded on a principle which makes me an outcast.

I peruse Facebook profiles, littered with references to Jesus, Scripture quotes, and more. I want to say hi – to e-wave my friends – but feel that even the kindest jestures will fall on hearts that are against my very core. I cannot comment on the most important thing in their lives. What kind of friendship can be born from this?

And so, once again, I grow a stronger near hatred toward the Christian religion. It tears apart… it shreds… it annihilates opposition. It treats as outcasts those who question. It provides a means for the Christian to get a fix. It is like alcohol. The alcoholic thinks that by drinking he eliminates his problems, when he creates more problems by drinking. The Christian goes to Jesus to get their problems solved and then Jesus tells them that they can solve their problems by eliminating other influences. But by eliminating those other influences, the Christian creates more problems for themselves and those around them – those like us, who are now considered inferior and weak and depraved.

So I confess that Easter is not happy for me. I am happy, but Easter is tough. Tougher than I would have anticipated. I’m fighting to urge to either break down emotionally or to become cynical… I’m not quite sure which it will be.

I’ll probably call my parents later, and I’m thankful that they will not try to convert me. But then again, I feel that if they really do believe what they do and they really loved me, they should at least try. I haven’t heard from them at all in quite a while.

My roommate’s mom walked in this morning and asked if I was celebrating Easter. I almost replied “celebrating what?”

For me, there is nothing to celebrate on Easter except that I have been delivered from the very beliefs that give Easter any significant meaning.

- Josh

My basic argument was that there is no answer to the question.  The reason is that “Christian” is an arbitrary human group designation that is used with different (implicit) definitions by different groups.  Since none of those groups has accepted authority to establish a (or the) correct definition, and since “Christian” does not (as we used to believe) refer to anything divine or supernatural, it follows that there can be no final, ultimate, “correct” definition.  There is no right answer to whether “I was a Christian” is true or not, independent of context and a pre-chosen definition.

I still think my answer is substantially correct.  But its not exactly punchy.  It takes a bit of explaining, and that won’t always do in the heat of an argument.  When faced with confrontation and criticism from friends, former friends, and others who challenge us, it helps to have an answer at the ready that doesn’t depend on delving into philosophical issues of “natural kinds” vs “nominal kinds”.  I wanted something more memorable – compact & colorful, more visual and less abstract.

So after continuing to chew on this, I think I’ve come up with one.  So, let me share it here and you all can tell me what you think.

Here’s the setting: you are telling a friend, coworker, or stranger on the web that you used to be a Christian, but you deconverted.  She scoffingly replies that that means you never were one in the first place; true Christians remain faithful and never leave.  (Or, as a variant, as was said to me once, that you cannot lose your salvation, so you are still a Christian whether you think you are or not.)

I think I will call this Kenobi’s Fallacy.   Here goes:

Imagine that you once believed yourself to be a Jedi.  I mean, seriously.  You really, truly, honestly, in your heart of hearts believed in the Force, and that you, as a Jedi, were studying to master it.  You dedicated many years of your life to this with the singular passion of a Sith. Then, gradually, after many years of often painful reflection and study, you came to lose your belief.  You came to realize that there really was no Force, and there never had been.  You used to feel so sure – you once believed you felt it, flowing through you, controlling your actions but also obeying your commands – but now, you realize you were mistaken.

It was a very wrenching process for you.  You dedicated your life to this craft, and now, sadly, you see that Han was right: there really is no substitute for a good blaster at your side.

Now, though, your former Master comes to you, and says:  You never really were a Jedi in the first place.

I feel I hardly need to explain any more.  Do you see the silliness in having a debate with this person about whether you “really” were a Jedi?  Now that you have de-converted, you can see that the word “Jedi” doesn’t refer to anything except this:  people who believe themselves to be masters of the Force.  It has no supernatural, extradimensional, mystical (or whatever) aspects to it at all. 

Of course, your former master believes it does refer to something.  He thinks it refers to “someone who actually is a master of the Force”, just like you used to.  But from where you sit now, it cannot mean that – or, rather, it could, but if so then no one is a Jedi, because there is no such thing as the Force.  And since it would seem weird, and needlessly confusing, to claim there were no Jedi when the whole galaxy was full of people running around claiming to be Jedi, it makes much more sense to retain the term but change its referent. 

But how can you answer this person, who says that you never really were a Jedi – in his sense of the term Jedi… i.e., master of a real, literal Force?  By arguing that yes, you “really” were? No, that’s not true – you don’t believe that.  There is no Force.  But its also not strictly accurate that you “really” weren’t a Jedi either, in his sense of the term Jedi, because that still implies there is an actual Force to be a master of. And that’s the point: it cannot be answered whether someone has satisfied his definition of “Jedi” or not, because it assumes a nonexistent entity. His criterion for what qualifies as a Jedi is nonsensical.

So, back to this galaxy, the analog is clear: when someone uses the word “Christian” to mean something like “one whose soul has been saved by Jesus” , it becomes absurd to argue whether or not you ever “really” met that criteria. The only criteria that can really mean anything has to do with mundane and arbitrary group membership, membership that is not based on anything external, in any precise way.  “Christian” can only mean something like “one who considers herslef to be a follower of Jesus.”  “Christian”, thus, is actually more like “soccer fan.” There’s no real right answer as to whether someone is or not.

What I think I like about this analogy – if it holds – is that, in actual use (and I haven’t beta tested it), I don’t think you would need to explain as much as I did here.  Just replying to your critic, “That’s kind of like if, say, you used to think you were a Jedi, but now you don’t, and then I came to you and said ‘you never really were a Jedi’”, and let the implications slowly sink in, would probably be enough.

And if you like, you could reshape this analogy into anything you like: you used to think you were a wizard.  Or a dragonrider.  Or a unicorn-tamer.  Or a Romulan spy.

So ,what do you think of my analogy, my fellow Padawans?  Useful it is, hmm?