de-conversion

Why doesn’t God make things clearer?

I always find it interesting seeing what sorts of experiences and argument were most instrumental in moving a given person out of fundamentalist Christianity. For some, it is Biblical contradictions or Biblical atrocities. For others, it unanswered prayer. For me, it started with a kind of experience and ended with a question.

The experience was this: I moved away to attend school. I fell in with new friends there and, well, they weren’t evangelical Christians like me. Some were liberal or “cultural” Christians, some were outright atheists. In any event they totally disagreed with my view, on a pretty basic level, about Jesus, and salvation, and all the rest.

But the existence of disagreement, and especially of nonbelievers, has always required explanation in fundamentalism. This is because the “Truth” of Christianity is supposed to be obvious and unmistakable – indeed, virtually self-evident. Any fool can see it. After all, it is God’s own Truth. So, then, it stood to reason, to me, that those who didn’t see it had something wrong with them. And, really, there were only a couple of reasons why someone might not accept this obvious and self-evident Christian truth: he/she is stupid, or he/she is willful, unable, or unwilling. What other answer could there be?

But that wasn’t what I found. My new friends were decent and kind, thoughtful and compassionate people…

Continue Reading April 12, 2008 at 11:59 pm Richard 3 comments