Have You Been Harmed by the Church?

Note: this post is inspired by a recent post by Cephus about a challenge from a Christian.

It's not terribly uncommon to come across a religious person who thinks that I am an atheist because I have been harmed by the church in some way. They will often think I am an atheist because I am angry at God, because I have seen Christians do terrible things, because I think my entire childhood was somehow damaged because of the inclusion of the religion. They will then challenge me to put aside the painful emotions associated with these things and consider returning to God.

The thing is, there is some truth to the things they are saying here. I absolutely was harmed by the church in my childhood (luckily I didn't have to deal with molestation or physical abuse like so many people have to deal with, but let's just say telling a child they are evil to the core will give them some psychological problems). I have seen plenty of horrible things done in the name of God, I would even say that I am an atheist today because at some point in the past I had a very strong hatred for God. But it's not as simple as being angry and then suddenly being an atheist, it is the start of a long journey.

I was angry, very angry with God and religion in general. This anger led me to question everything and look for the truth of the matter to the best of my ability. I investigated the real source of my belief in God and thought about what would have happened if I had been born in a different part of the world, or at a different time. I looked for any proof of God I could get my hands on and tried to analyze if I thought they were worthwhile. I talked about these matters with as many people as I could. Ultimately I have concluded that there are no good reasons for believing in God. My own reasons for believing were all based on the fact that I had been told these things by everyone around me since birth, and the same was clearly true for all of them.

So back to the initial question, have I been harmed by the church? Absolutely! Am I an atheist because of that harm? Well yes, but probably not in the way you mean, it's not a simple connection. I was harmed and therefore motivated to seek the truth about religion, further, due to the anger I felt for the church, I was motivated to keep looking into things for about 10 years until I was satisfied that I had seen and rejected pretty much every argument out there.

In the Christian challenge linked at the top, he asked atheists to put aside their emotional baggage and look at the evidence. But for me, and many other atheists I've talked to, the emotional baggage is what motivated us to look at the evidence in the first place. Emotion played a big part in getting us started, but we have already answered this challenge on our own.

It's a Miracle!

I had completely forgotten about this until a few days ago, but when I was a Christian I interpreted a minor event as a miracle. I used to deliver newspapers, the fastest way was to go on my roller blades, but rain was very bad for them, so on rainy days I had to use another means (a bike or having my mom drive me around).  One day I was out on my route and right near the end it started to sprinkle, so I really pushed myself to finish and get home as fast as I could. As soon as I walked in the door it started pouring outside. (In reality, the timing probably wasn't quite this tight, but to me it felt like it went from nothing to torrential rain the moment I crossed the threshold.) I remember thinking that God must have held the rain back for me so I could get home relatively dry. This was my miracle.

Thinking about it later, I realized how self centered I was being. Rain is something that affects a large number of people at the same time. Making a change that would help one person out could have repercussions that would hurt another. If it starts later it would have to end later (or rain harder I guess). Or maybe it would have to rain in a slightly different place. On the other hand, God is pretty big, surely he can help me without hurting someone else. But why would God go to all that trouble just to help some kid not get his roller blades wet? I went back and forth like this for a while.

My other thought in regards to this event calls back to the fact that the rain affects a large number of people at the same time. Let's say for the sake of argument that 100,000 people got rained on that day, odds are that someone will narrowly miss the rain. If everyone had been thinking like me that day, someone would have thought they experienced a miracle, whether or not there is any kind of a deity.

So what really happened that day? Was I randomly just a lucky person who narrowly avoided some water, or did God help me out? The funny thing is, there is no way to know for sure, but that is part of the problem. I can never prove that God didn't help me out that day, but it seems more reasonable to me that I was just lucky.

How Do You Know What Is Literal?

"That verse isn't supposed to be taken literally."

I'm sure that many of you have been in a situation where this was said. You are discussing a verse which is either claimed to be crazy, contradictory, silly, atrocious, or whatever. The theist in the conversation then claims that the verse is not supposed to be taken literally, it is a metaphor or a figure of speech. My reply to that is usually to ask "How do we determine what is literal and what is not?"

There are many things in the bible that seem impossible, it seems that most people believe some of them are literally true, miracles performed by God. For example, in my experience, most people think that Mary was literally a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus. On the other hand, there are other things in the bible which many people think are not to be taken literally. For example, many Christians think that the 6 day creation is not meant to be a literal account, but instead is poetic and was simply something the audience at the time could understand. There are of course many who believe the 6 day account is completely accurate (I wish I could think of an example that is nearly universally thought of as metaphor, but I doubt such a thing really exists.)

So my question becomes, how do you determine what box to put each miracle that is described in the bible? What method do we use to decide X is real and Y is metaphor? If 2 Christians disagree what is the appropriate way to determine who is right? When I was a Christian, I thought about this a lot. I tried to figure out what was real and what was not. Eventually, I put so many things in the "not real" box and I reevaluated the whole thing. Instead of trying to figure out what I should throw out of the 'real' box from the 'metaphor' box, I tried to figure out what deserved to go in the 'real' box. Once I had to justify things being real, rather than justifying things being metaphor, or poetic, I discovered that I had trouble justifying that anything was literally true.

Never seen proof of the existence of God

When Atheists are asked why they don't believe in God, it is somewhat common that the answer they give is that they have never seen good proof of God's existence, or that they have never heard a good argument for the existence of God. I have been thinking about this answer and while I think it is a good answer it feels quite incomplete. For someone like myself who is an atheist but was born religious, I think it makes sense to split the question into 2 parts, why are you an atheist now, and why did you become an atheist in the first place. The answer to why I became an atheist in the first place is the story of a long journey. For me it was a long process (which I have talked a little bit about in this series of posts) in which I basically questioned the ideas I grew up with and found them lacking.

The answer to why I am still an atheist can be fairly summed up by saying that I have never seen sufficient proof to believe in a god. In my mind, there is a long back story of struggle and thought that spanned a decade leading up to me deciding that there is no good evidence for God. Somehow I think that is lost when the simple answer is given to the question. Just saying "there is no evidence" can make it sound like it was a snap decision based on almost nothing. It could sound like "meh, never came across any evidence, never really looked, never really cared, whatever". Hell, for some people this is surely the case, if you weren't born into it I could imagine this being exactly your attitude (now that I think about it I have friends in this situation, I envy their childhood). But for me, when I say there is no evidence I mean something more like "I looked, a lot, I wanted God to be real and I tried to believe, but the more I looked around the more my belief felt hollow until it fell away completely."

I think when we give the succinct answer we need to keep in mind that there is more behind it that is probably not coming through. When appropriate, we need to make it clear that even though our answer is short, it does not mean that we are not taking the question seriously.

Hell

What is hell? I guess it depends on who you ask. If you go by what is in the bible, and restrict to Matthew and Mark and the beginning of Luke (because that is as far as we have gotten here) it is a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. There was also some talk about burning. I have heard some people claim that hell is simply separation from God. This sounds much better, and if that is what you believe I suppose that is not so terrible, but it's not what I want to talk about here today. I want to talk about the hell that is taught in the church I grew up in and from what I can tell, the hell that is taught in most churches.

Hell is the place bad people go when they die. There is a lake of fire, you will forever feel the pain of your flesh burning off. Never getting any relief. You get whipped and raped by demons. Any horrible experience you can imagine will happen to you, endlessly. It will never stop and there is nothing you can do. You will never get used to the pain, it will be agony. Forever. There was always a nice mix of the specific and the vague as I have tried to replicate here. A few very specific very horrible sounding things, but also a good dose of "and anything else you can think of".

Children are taught this. I learned it at such a young age that I don't even remember when I first heard about it. Hell was always there. I am an Atheist now, so I currently believe that the reason Hell is taught to keep people in line. You want to leave our religion, guess you will be tortured for eternity. It is very scary, it kept me from leaving for a long time, and I have heard many stories of people who have left their religion and don't believe anymore, but still have a fear of hell because it was drilled into them at such a young age. I find this completely disgusting.

But lets move past that. Just like anyone else, I could be wrong. Hell could be real and Christianity could be correct about it. I would still argue that the whole heaven and hell system is terrible for the simple reason that the world is not black and white. We live in shades of grey. Simply splitting people up into good and bad, people who get eternal bliss or eternal torture, doesn't make sense. Let's think about this with an analogy, suppose that there were only 2 possible prison sentences that we could give out for any possible crime, life in prison or plain freedom. Now think about all of the crimes that we currently have to deal with and the various prison sentences that we currently give out. For each of those, you have to decide if the person gets life in prison or nothing. How do you split it up? Suppose you decide that anyone who gets 20 years or more is in prison for life? Well then what about 15? 18? 19? Somewhere there will be an awkward split where there are 2 similar crimes and one gets life in prison and the other gets nothing. This would be a terrible way to run things and I assume pretty much everyone would agree with this. But if you then up the ante and make it torture for eternity instead of life in prison and eternal bliss instead of simply freedom you have the heaven and hell system. How do people say this is the system of a just God?

Now, let's think about the way Christians say it is determined whether a person goes to heaven or hell. There is exactly one requirement, you have to accept Jesus. Nothing else matters. I remember hearing this as a child and it made sense to me, I suppose everything does when you have heard it for your entire life. But looking back on it, it seems bizarre. A mass murderer who believes in Jesus gets into heaven. A person who never does anything bad to anyone and helps people whenever he can, but doesn't believe in Jesus burns for eternity. How is this justice?

I've had this argument fairly recently with a few people and the answer I got is that we all deserve to go to hell. We are all sinners and deserve damnation, but Jesus takes pity on us and lets us into heaven, all he wants is for us to accept him into our hearts, what a bargain! I'm honestly not really sure how to answer this. I find it profoundly sad, I think people are generally good. Sure some people are murderers, some people do really bad things, and should be punished for it, but generally people are good. It is sad that a belief system that so many people believe tells people that everyone around them, including themselves, are evil people. They are so bad they deserve to be tortured forever. It is a really fucked up mindset to be in. But even given their assumption that people are all evil, why is believing in Jesus the one thing that gets you into heaven? Why is that justice? It does not make sense to me. Also, think about how this sounds to a child. You are telling them "you are bad, you deserve torture forever".

Saturday Edition: The Church Hates Science

I have been posting on the last few Saturdays about why I am an Atheist. As I mentioned 
previously, there is not one single reason why I left Christianity and eventually became an atheist, but instead I thought a lot about religion and eventually came to my current positions. The entire process took around 10 years to my best estimations.


This week is a little different than the previous 2 weeks because I honestly don't think it is a good argument for atheism by itself. What do I mean by this? Suppose I am correct and the church is anti-science. Does that mean God does not exist? no. Does that mean Jesus didn't/doesn't exist? no. Does it mean you should leave the church? maybe. Does it mean you should question the church? Yes! That is really the point I want to make with this post. Am I an atheist because I perceive the church as anti-science? Not directly, not really, but it got me thinking and helped put me on a path that eventually led to me becoming an atheist. I saw the church be wrong in matters of science and thought to myself "what else does the church have wrong?"


As I was writing this post I felt the need to go back to the top and add a little disclaimer. What do I mean by "the church"? Well, sometimes I mean the church I grew up in, which in hindsight was a bit extremist. At other times I mean the catholic church, and in my final little story I am not even sure which church I am talking about. The point however is unchanged, I saw how these various churches clashed with science and it got me thinking.


I have 4 anecdotes to share about this which I will share in chronological order as they happened to me. The first happened when I was quite young, I'm going to guess around 5-6 years old. My dad had bought a book to read to me about dinosaurs that was apparently from a young earth creationist group. It held the position that dinosaurs and man must have walked side by side. There were dinosaurs around during bible time, it was just not an event worthy of note which is why it isn't explicitly stated anywhere (if you were writing the bible you wouldn't mention every plant and animal you came across). This is the conclusion that you must reach, I guess, if you believe in the genesis story and that the garden of Eden was literally true. At the time I was young enough that I didn't question it. I actually forgot about it for years, but sometime later (probably in high school) something sparked the memory and the whole thing seemed quite bizarre. 


My second story occurred while I was in 6th grade. We were watching a video in school (I'm almost positive it was voyage of the mimi) and there was a guy in the video who said he had proof of evolution. Basically there are pelvic bones in whales that don't serve any purpose, but make sense from an evolutionary perspective. I thought this was really cool and when my dad got home from work I told him all about it. He responded very strongly that this was incorrect and told me that evolution is a lie. I was pretty shocked, what was said in school seemed so reasonable and he just dismissed it out of hand. I accepted that evolution was false for a long time but everything about that experience bothered me for quite a while. (it actually still bothers me that my father is that indoctrinated)
The third thing I want to talk about here happened when I was in high school. I was in a freshman biology class and we learned the story of Mendel. Basically he made some pretty incredible discoveries in his lifetime that weren't accepted until long after his death. The church did not like his work and after he died the church even destroyed it. (the wikipedia page seems to be largely contested and this is not mentioned there, but I found a reference to it here)
Around this same time I learned about Galileo and his run in with the Catholic Church. I'm sure everyone knows this story already, but basically he was also brilliant and discovered many great things, unfortunately, some of those things went counter to the church and he was found "vehemently suspect of heresy" and put under house arrest for the remainder of his life. This is how the church treats new ideas, pretty disgusting. In my opinion this is exactly what is happening currently with evolution.

I have one final anecdote I want to share, it is amusing and also a little sad. I was in a history class in junior college. We were discussing the idea of social darwinism. Basically an old idea that no one really believes anymore, but it was a history class. The important thing here is that it is a concept with the word darwin in it. There were 4 students in the class who were so offended by "darwin" that they interrupted lecture to complain that we were learning it. The teacher tried to explain that she wasn't trying to convince them that it was true (in fact she didn't think it was true either). This did nothing to calm them down, the cried, left class and complained to the dean.

To me this last story is a perfect example of how the church sees science. If there is something that might shake your preconceptions, don't learn it. You are better off ignorant. It's what those students did, it is what the church did with mendel and Galileo, it's what my dad did when I brought home a story about evolution.

One final observation. What is the big sin that adam and eve committed to get kicked out of the garden of eden? They ate from the tree of knowledge. The fact that this is such a horrible thing says a lot to me.

Saturday Edition: Why are you a Christian?

Last week I did a post exploring the questions I asked myself when I was a christian while I was in my transition to atheism. This week, I want to talk about the question that at some point I asked myself "Why am I a Christian?"

I started asking this question when I became aware of other religions in the world. Why am I not a Muslim? Why am I not Jewish? What about Christianity is so great that led me to be Christian? The only honest answer I could come up with was that I was born into a Christian family and therefore I am Christian. It is not like I looked at the various religions and decided Christianity is the best, it was chosen for me.

So then I started thinking, what if I had been born in a different part of the world? Suppose my parents were Muslim, then I would be Muslim as well. I certainly wouldn't be a Christian, I'm sure the situation would be similar, just as I have not looked at various religions and decided on Christianity now, in that situation I wouldn't have looked at various religions and decided on Islam, I would just be a Muslim. What would be the consequences of this? According to the church I grew up in, this hypothetical me would be doomed to hell. This seems supremely unfair!

The funny thing is, my initial thought was that I am incredibly lucky to be born into the one true religion. Awesome, God must truly love me to give me this gift. But after a while, I started thinking about my hypothetical self. How much more difficult it would be for him to get into heaven. "It's not so easy for him, but I'm sure at some point he would see a missionary and learn of Jesus and it would lead him to convert, it's a harder path but he can do it." These things comforted me at times, but they were incredibly distressing at other times. I would think about hearing preaching from other religions and the likelihood that I would convert away from Christianity. Why would I do that? I already am in the one true religion. And I thought "that hypothetical me thinks the same thing." I went back and forth like this A LOT.

There are a few things that I would frequently think that would appease me for a while, one was that whole "God works in mysterious ways" thing, and the "You can't always know God's plan" thing. I was also told "everyone has a chance, everyone hears the true word of God and has an opportunity to become Christian". It worked sometimes, but it just never seemed fair, why do I get this basically for free and my hypothetical self has to work so hard?

At some point I tucked these thoughts to the back of my brain somewhere and didn't think about it for a long time. Then I started learning about primitive cultures. There were hunter gatherer tribes around last century (are they still there?). There are people living in the amazon jungle (still?). These people have their own religions and they certainly haven't heard the Christian story. Do they all go to hell automatically? If Jesus is the only way to get to heaven they can't go there as they have never even heard of Jesus, but them going to hell isn't fair, they never had a chance. The reasons I had above don't work here. It's not a harder path for these people to get to heaven, it is impossible.

So where did this leave me? When it came down to it, I guess the only reason I was able to honestly come up with for why I was Christian was that I was born into it. This never seemed like a good enough reason on it's own. As I said last week, this is not THE reason I am an atheist, but it did play a role. I thought about this a lot when I was a Christian and because of it, along with other reasons, I eventually left the faith.

Weekend Edition: Why do Bad Things Happen to Good People

I have been doing this blog for a little over a month now, and I have been thoroughly enjoying it. I decided to expand things a little bit and I have a few ideas on how to do it. One thought I had was to do a "why I am an Atheist" post in the same fashion as PZ has been doing over on Pharyngula. The problem I had with that was I can't summarize why I am an atheist in short post, I am an atheist because I thought about it...a lot...for like 10 years. So I decided to focus on one thing at a time that I thought about while in my transition to atheism. I figured a good start will be the first thing I can remember that got me thinking about this, the simple question "why do bad things happen to good people?" This is a fairly simplistic question to ask, perfect for me as I was not quite 10 years old when I started asking it. Not quite so simple to answer.

It is probably evident at this point that I am talking about the Christian God here. A God who is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving. He cares for us, wants the best for us, and answers prayers. This is the God I grew up with.

The first answer I ever got to this question was during a sermon of some sort. I was pretty young so the memory is fairly fuzzy, it might have been during a regular church service but I think it was during a youth group meeting. Anyway, he used an analogy of baby bees (or wasps maybe? whatever). Anyway, the larva are put into a little container and sealed, and the babies have to fight their way out, in doing so they gain strength from their struggles and they can be strong adults. On the other hand, if the box was opened for them, they would be weak and useless.

The point of the story is that going through hardships can help you in the long term. Through further discussion, we talked about how God has a much longer view than we do, and even if we can't see the benefit of a hardship we have to suffer, it doesn't mean it isn't there. So I thought about this for a bit, and it basically made sense. It certainly goes a long way toward explaining the kind of hardship a 10 year old is going to suffer through (at least in an average middle class family in america). I was satisfied for a while.

But then I started to think about things on a larger scale. What about something as big as the holocaust? I suppose it is possible that there is some larger tragedy that is avoided by it. Perhaps people saw the holocaust and then were more on the side of Jews afterwards, if it hadn't happened Jews would have been exterminated 100 years later or something. Perhaps in some round about way it kept something worse from happening. Anyone who has seen a time travel movie can imagine some complicated series of events like this. But God can do anything, it is hard to imagine that for whatever his ends, this was the best method.

One answer that I have heard to this problem is free will, God loves us and wants us to love him, but he doesn't want to force us to love him so he gave us free will. This is an attempt to explain away things like the holocaust. Free will is a complicated and difficult subject, which I don't want to go into much here, but even supposing for the moment that free will could explain away man made atrocities, it still does not explain natural disasters which kill millions of people. A big earthquake or whatever. It is similar to the above except the free will answer is off the table.

I remember another sermon about this topic. It was at a youth group while I was in high school. (strangely, I don't remember the pastor, but I remember the room we were in, which narrows it down to high school. Memory is such a funny thing) We were talking about this topic, and he was addressing the fact that I mentioned up above. That it seems crazy that God would use such extreme measures as the holocaust. That it is hard to imagine it being better than some alternative, and that this is the best way to do things. He said "I don't want a God that fits inside my head." I remember him saying it, I had an immediate revulsion to the idea, and I still do today. Not only is he saying that he doesn't understand God, he doesn't want to be able to understand God. The message is "shut up and do what you are told", the message is "understanding is overrated, you just need to have faith." For someone who loves science, loves understanding how things works, and likes to know the reasons behind things, this was possibly the worst answer he could have given me.

Now, as I said up top, this is not the reason I am an Atheist, but it did play a part in getting me here. It is the first thing I can remember where I started to really question things. A few times I got answers that satisfied me and placated me for a while. But I always came back to this topic later on, and really feel like I have never gotten a good answer.