Another Email And Another Person Walks Away From the Fold

It's very gratifying to hear the overwhelming positive feedback about my book. Here's an interesting comparison:
Your book has all but utterly demolished the faith and hope I was holding onto about the evangelical Christian faith. I grew up believing of course, but had certain fundamental questions as I got a little older. I took it upon myself to read both apologetic and anti-apologetic books to address the issue (Strobel, Dawkins, Ehrman, etc). Both sides continued to make good debatable points, but when I finally came across your book, it was like chopping grass with a chainsaw. No chance of survival.
You can read other reviews of it by clicking here. [It's being reprinted and will be available shortly]. Be sure to also get my forthcoming book, The Christian Delusion.

12 comments:

Rob R said...

To celebrate the death of someone's faith is not a good thing.

Anthony said...

Rob R: To celebrate the death of someone's faith is not a good thing.

Why not? I would venture to say that you wouldn't say the same thing if a Mormon left their religion to become a Christian, after all, their faith in the Mormon religion is now "dead."

Leaving ones superstitious faith behind for free thought, reason, and science is indeed something to celebrate!

All I can say to this person that rejected his/her faith is: Welcome aboard!

Evan said...

Rob, would you be happy if someone who was a schizophrenic -- someone who falsely believed that the CIA was monitoring their every movement and was crippled by this belief -- was cured or treated effectively and was able to live a normal life?

___________________________ said...

Well, to a certain extent, the growth of atheism requires atheism get increased acceptance, it requires that religions lose the proportion of the population they are used to holding, and it requires intellectual arguments that are persuasive or even rationally coercive.

All of these goals will basically require or result in evangelical Christianity losing members. And if promoting atheism is a person's goal for any reason, then joy at the loss of a Christian's faith is rational because it is a sign of a job well done.

Camels With Hammers said...

The death of someone's faith=the end of their submission to arbitrary authorities in both belief and practice. It is the affirmation of their reason, the authority of their tradition-independent moral conscience, and freedom from an institution that lies to them in order to keep them in perpetual mental servitude rather than free.

The death of somebody's faith is therefore to be celebrated enthusiastically as the triumph of their reason over unreason, of their moral conscience over bondage to tradition, and their freedom to think over the brainwashing powers that want to control their thought.

Ben said...

Rob,

In a sense, I understand what you mean. It's like cheering for a divorce or the end of what may very well be a happy marriage to religion. However, it seems we *can* celebrate the turning away from intellectual sins and the birth of a reality based moral outlook.

Ben

Lanny Donoho said...

Hi John
Been reading your book along with a number of other atheistic books. some from people who were christians and became atheists and then went back. some who stayed there etc.
I have been a christian for over 30 years. and have led some of the largest gatherings of christian leaders in the country. i certainly see a lot of the reasons you give for leaving the faith and i understand them totally. i do get frustrated with some atheists who seem angry and want to belittle or degrade christians. granted there are a lot of them who are frustrating and ignorant, but not the whole lot. There are great people making great impact on the world who are believers.
But i digress. I wanted to bring up a point i noticed while i was reading your book. I was reading and it was late but you were talking about shotwells hypothesis that there were ghostly little gremlins in each subatomic particle and that each particle did a continuous creative act and is in instantaneous telepathic communication with all the others. Well, i didn't realize while i was reading those sentences that you were putting down some other theory because i thought you were espousing your own...again it was late. But the reason i thought that was because, as you know, Bernard d'Espagnat just won the big deal templeton award for physics because he talked about the theory that since in the subatomic world, or quantum world, we see photons that can be in two places at once, they can be shot in two directions and be heated up and one will immediately show the heat of the other, when one slows the other speeds, they can go up and down at the same time..(one thing)
which sounds to me like little gremlins that do random things and communicate with each other across the universe. The brilliant physicist had to acknowledge that there is a mystery world outside of matter that exists just simply based on what we presently know about quantum physics.
I was wondering...as i am searching as well, if the constant new discoveries about the mysterious universe doesn't ever make you wonder about there being another mystery world out there that has a maker. i am not speaking about the historical flaws of biblical inaccuracies, but the continued discoveries of what entanglement and subatomic particles and the elegance of all that , along with what CS lewis describes as "where did we get our "ought to's".
Both of these haven't seem to be answered by anything you have said.
I am looking for answers.
thanks

Lanny Donoho said...

I made one comment already that was too long. But read the other comments and felt like i needed to say one more thing. It seems to me that most atheist only have one kind of christian in mind when they want to celebrate their departure from the faith. All christians do not believe all the things that many atheist think they do. Notice i didn't say "all atheists"
You just cant join them all together. Many christians are wise, logical thinking, wonderful individuals who have chosen to believe that God exists. And that the history of Jesus is at least plausible. Those of you who have chosen to believe only partial truths about him are scoffing at others who have chosen to believe other partial truths about him. But, if that belief in a system that moves people to help others, to stamp out poverty, to help the hurting and the aged, to feed the humgry and to do it not out of guilt or worry about hell, as you often ascribe, but just because they are christians....these people would not scoff at atheists, (the ones i know) they would not scoff at your lack of belief,
Hey we would be your best friend if you were the kind of person who fit the bill.
You don't automatically celebrate when someone leaves their faith, just as you don't automatically celebrate when someone leaves their family or friends. BEcause you don't know what the story was.
for you to do so, puts you into the shallow end of the pool that you so often ascribe to "all" christians. We are not all alike.

Unknown said...

I'm not sure on this. I know of instances where a person's faith HAS made them a better person (not only in terms of themselves but for those around them).

In these cases, a loss of faith is not necessarily something to celebrate. It might be better for them to live life in their delusions if losing faith means them becoming despondent, hopeless or cruel.

Perhaps some can only be as good as they can be when they have some form or religious faith.
I'm thinking of men in prison for murder who have embraced some form of religious thought and who have, in turn, found some freedom from their previous inner turmoil.

Anonymous said...

Larry, nice to hear from you. I visited your site. You run an interesting evangelistic company which probably impacts a lot of people. That's quite an accomplishment.

Thanks too for reading my book. That shows you're doing the intellectually honest thing by reading the arguments by the skeptics themselves, rather than just Christian apologetic books.

In answer to your question I must say I agree with an important thinker who recently was quoted as saying "there must be something wrong with quantum physics." I cannot remember his name but that makes no difference. I do think there is something wrong with it. It is so counter-intuitive it's difficult to accept and awaits further exploration.

But even if this is the case it is in no way akin to Gremlims who might make choices. There is no choice making quality to quantum physics at that level.

But even if this is the case it doesn't lead us to think your God exists. All it might lead us to is that some deity started a quantum wave fluctuation as his last dying act which in turn created this universe. It is a very large leap from what you say to accepting the God of the Bible. Any number of gods could account for the same data.

You're describing the god of the gaps. This is a god that is used to explain anything we cannot explain by science. See the middle of page 111 and footnote 16 on this point.

The bottom line is that 1) Religious answers have repeatedly been shown to be wrong time and again as science has sufficiently explaining the gaps in our understandings; 2)There will probably always be mysterious gaps in our understanding that science cannot explain, but this is to be expected given our limitations in time and space.

Cheers.

Archie said...

Re "there must be something wrong with quantum physics"
That sounds like an interview with Roger Penrose in the Sept 2009 issue of Discover Magazine

Anonymous said...

Yes, S, that's it. I was in the library reading it but couldn't remember who said it or where I read it. And he also said he was coming out with a book explaining why he thinks that.

Thanks!