Showing posts with label deconversion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deconversion. Show all posts

The Identity Crisis of Deconversion

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This is a tribute to some very brave commenters. Wrestling with God is one of the hardest things you will ever do. I don't care if you keep your faith or not. It doesn't matter to me. What does matter to me and actually gets me choked up is the situation you find yourself in now. I remember what it was like and it was a very sad time for me.

I have a similar story to you. I was the adult bible study teacher, led the singing every sunday, usually sang the lead in the Christmas Cantata, was the 'goto guy' and a pillar of the community, etc. But in the process of my deconversion, I had no one to talk to. No one wanted to hear it. Those that did said to pray about it. But how can they understand that praying doesn't fix it? Praying is part of the problem. They said during and afterwards that I wasn't working hard enough, or doing it right, but just have faith. In the speed of a thought, I went from being a good guy to a bad guy. When I wasn't a Christian anymore I became an Atheist. I went from being morally sound to immoral. I lost a part of myself. It was like losing a spouse or child or parent. I lost my Identity. And I lost the kind of friendships that I used to have. For me, everything changed. I had a library full of christian appologetics and commentaries, I had invested so much time in the church and studying the bible. I was forever going to be a different person. I miss the fellowship, and I guess that is one of main reasons I joined DC, to talk about it and share my experiences with people like you. Now I dabble in reasoning and philosophy. I don't want to get fooled again.
Take care and good luck.
lee

Ruth A. Tucker's "Walking Away From Faith" Blog.

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Dr. Tucker understands what it is to doubt. I recommend her book and her newest Blog to Christians who want to understand ex-Christians like us better.

Here are some minutes from when she spoke at the Freethought Association of West Michigan (I'll be speaking there on June 27th).

Lee's Deconversion Story

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I deliberately tried to keep this to under five minutes reading time. I hope it is adequate. Here is a link to all my Posts at Debunking Christinity.
I grew up in a more or less religious background. I Attended church occasionally and also at Christmas and Easter like a lot of other people. One of my grandfathers was a Baptist preacher. My other two grandparents formed a church about sixty years ago that has grown into something like a mega-church today. About fifteen years ago I got serious in the church and went Baptist Fundamentalist. My reasoning was that since God exists, and he wrote the book, then I should accept my responsibility to have a relationship and assumed the Bible must necessarily be the literal word of God. With this literal viewpoint in mind I got involved in all sorts of conundrums relating to theology and comparing my observations to the way I understood the world should and does work and the way god is described to work and the promises it allegedly made to us.

In an attempt to reconcile problems that I noticed, I started to study the Bible, apologetics and lexicons very hard. I became a staunch apologist, and I could quote chapter and verse like a pro. But I kept running into these people that had really good points about why I was wrong, but I just minimized it using 1 Corinthians 2:14 which supports the idea that because they don't have the holy spirit they can't understand. But even that poses a problem in logic that I didn't bother to reconcile. I just didn't know enough to deal with their questions so I kept studying deeper. I was told that I should go to seminary and seriously considered it, but I wasn't motivated to figure out how to do it.

The more I studied the harder it was to take the Bible literally, so I started sliding into the more metaphorical style of belief. At this point I reconciled the question of how do you know what is metaphor and what is not by believing that praying and the holy spirit would solve that problem. And to take my mind off those kinds of problems, I got involved in "Spiritual Warfare". Having read a book about Earl and Lorraine Warren in my youth called "The Demonologist" and "The Exorcist" I was sure that this kind of thing really went on, and I was going to get in the fray. I sought out Wiccans and people I was convinced were being bothered by an evil spirit and tried to "help" them. In the midst of all this I had some personal crises that convinced me that the demons were fighting back. I prayed and prayed to no avail, and started to try to think of a time when I could say that a prayer actually worked. I couldn't think of many and I started to think that maybe I was just being forsaken like Jesus in the last minutes. I heard from well meaning people that God won't give you anything you can't handle. Well, that meant that I was not devout enough for his tastes or that I was too weak. I didn't buy into either option. After I got to where I couldn’t take it anymore I made a deal with God that he should leave me alone, and I would leave him alone. I was betting it all on my acceptance of Jesus and my baptism to keep the door open, but my advocate days were over.

While I was 'floating through life' I saw the odd news story with the person saying "God saved he/she/me/it from dying or anything worse happening". From my perspective it made more sense for God to have prevented it if he was going to do anything about it all. Away from the Rhetoric of Church, some questions came to mind. Some of them from the church days and some from comparing my observations to how I understood the world was supposed to work with a God around. It didn't add up. Since I am an Engineer, I had some rudimentary critical thinking skills. I began to reflect back on my walk with God, and I realized that my experience in the Church and personal relationship with God was a lot like chance or luck. Not being interested in pursuing that line of reasoning seriously, I just let it go.

After Sep. 11, the Islamist fundamentalists started saying that God answered their prayers, I was wondering why he didn't answer the prayers of the people stuck in the WTC before they collapsed, or the people in the planes, or any reasonable prayer that I ever had in my life. This idea about prayer that "God answers in his own time, sometimes the answer is no, you can't test prayer or God" didn't fly with me anymore. So I decided to apply the same kind of logic, reasoning and research necessary to troubleshoot engineering problems to reconcile this question of "Why does it seem to me that my personal experience with God was so much like depending on Luck."

I went back to studying the Bible but this time I wanted to know where the Bible came from and this time I was going to use secular and academic texts. I wanted to resolve some obvious problems in the Bible that weren't adequately addressed in my mind and so I studied physics, biology, archeology, psychology, informal logic, and reasoning. My first milestone was to discover that God didn't work the way that everyone thought he did. Why was that? I stumbled onto Robert M. Price's Bible Geek podcast and he said something that sounded like "the Old Testament is a collection of Sumerian and Babylonian Myths". I decided that was a plausible hypothesis so I decided to validate it. I have concluded to my satisfaction that most likely the Bible is a compilation of Near Eastern myths. I am sure the Bible was put together over time through socio-political pressures in the near eastern region in an attempt to establish an identity for a community of people that wished to be unique. The implications are that it puts the Bible on equal footing with all the other scriptures in the world, which means that we don't really know anything about God including if it exists or not. Once I realized that I became interested to know how this could go on for so long. That is when I bought the book "Why People Believe Weird Things" and learned about "Skepticism".

Skepticism is a nice buzz word, but I don’t ascribe to being a member of the skeptical movement or a 'Bright' because I am not comfortable with what I consider oversimplified ideals of schemes of reasoning, persuasion and deception. I won't get into it here, but in looking into how people reason including how to influence, persuade and deceive them, it is easy to see how religious belief has gone on for so long. But now I am confident that I have an understanding of what went on with me and is going on with other people. I want to help them answer some of those questions that cause them cognitive dissonance and to be mentally uncomfortable.

References:
Here is list of study material in an amazon.com list that represents what I have studied over the past fifteen years:



Here is link to a researcher that has assembled the information about the origins of Israel in a lay person friendly readable format in his series of Books. He's not the only one in this field, but he has done a good job putting the material in books that non-archaeologists can understand.



If you do a tiny bit of research on the Old Testament. You will find that it is the Hebrew Bible which came about from oral traditions and various historical documents. Now look up the definition of Folklore. Now click here and read this and think about it for a little while

Christians Who Struggle With Serious Doubts.

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[Written by John W. Loftus] While we at DC have moved completely away from Christianity, there are many believers who struggle daily with serious doubts. Many Christians go through periods where they seriously question their faith. Some of them, like us, abandon that faith. Let me briefly mention three Christian scholars who have had serious doubts about Christianity: Ruth A. Tucker, James F. Sennett, and Terence Penelhum

Ruth A. Tucker takes a serious look at those who walk away from their Christian faith in her book, Walking Away from Faith: Unraveling the Mystery of Belief and Unbelief (Downers Grove: IVP), 2002. She shares her own doubt and how she overcomes it, hoping to challenge unbelievers to reconsider what they are missing. But in one place in her book, as she was contemplating her own doubt, she candidly confesses what sometimes crosses her mind. As a seminary professor she wrote, “There are moments when I doubt all. It is then that I sometimes ask myself as I’m looking out my office window, What on earth am I doing here? They’d fire me if they only knew.”(p. 133) Her specific challenge to the Christian believer “is that you seek a better understanding of those who do not believe—particularly those who have walked away from the faith—and that you listen carefully to their stories and respond with honesty and sensitivity.” (p. 12) According to Tucker, for those who walk away from their faith “the process is full of sorrow and a sense of loss.” (p. 13).

Christian philosopher James F. Sennett, is another one who has seriously struggled with his faith, as seen in his unpublished book, This Much I Know: A Postmodern Apologetic. He also confesses to have had a faith crisis and wrote his book as a “first person apologetic” to answer it. In chapter one, called “The Reluctant Disciple: Anatomy of a Faith Crisis,” he wrote, “I am the one who struggles with God. I am the Reluctant Disciple.” “Once I had no doubt that God was there, but I resented him for it; now I desperately want him to be there, and am terrified that he might not be.” His faith wavered as the result of contemplating the mind-brain problem. During this crisis he said, “Sometimes I believed. Sometimes I didn’t. And it seemed to me that the latter condition was definitely on the ascendancy.”

Christian philosopher Terence Penelhum has also expressed his doubts in “A Belated Return,” in Philosophers Who Believe, ed. Kelly James Clark (Downers Grove: IVP, 1993). He says there are “serious inner clashes between the philosophical and religious strands in my psyche. They derive from the fact that I find myself an unrepentantly philosophical being, which puts me at a mental distance from most of my fellow Christians.” “I have become aware of the multiplicity of religious and secular worldviews, each supported by reasons, each felt and experienced, many institutionally developed and expressed, and each having resources for fending off and explaining away the claims of the other. I have found it easy, professionally, to assume the stance of each and all of them for pedagogical purposes. And I think it a mark of human enlightenment to be able to enter imaginatively into these alternative visions, since each of them is a vision that is lived by rational beings.”

Penelhum continues, “As a philosopher, I find that my intense awareness of the multiplicity of rational alternatives makes me feel deep alienation from fellow Christians who appear to be blessed with certainty, and with a correlative perception of the obvious falsity of such alternatives. To be frank, I do not feel their certainty to be a blessing: better, surely, I cannot help telling myself, to be a Socrates tentative than a pig without questions.” (p. 234).

Penelhum has serious problems with “some theological options,” which “seem to me totally closed, and the consideration of them to invite justified ridicule from the most sympathetic enquirers.” Here he mentions the historical Fall of Adam and Eve, and a physical ascension into heaven. He says, “we know too much to continue to encase our Christian teachings in antiquated cosmologies in the way such options require.” (p. 235).

Drs. Tucker, Sennett and Penelhum are not the only Christian believers out there who seriously struggle with their Christian faith. I did myself, just like they do. At some point my faith just came crashing down on me.

A Calvinist Contemplates Walking Away From Faith

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[Written by John W. Loftus] The following comes from the minutes of a freethought association meeting concerning Calvinist professor and author of 14 books, Dr. Ruth Tucker, here. I was struck when she said, "(I am a) heathen in my reason and a Christian with my whole heart." A Calvinist, Dr. Tucker believes in a "sovereign God" that assumes doubt and faith equally. Her faith is more a matter of "God's grace" than "personal will. Here's a Calvinist who thinks that reason does not support her faith but that God decrees her to believe anyway, or so it seems. Interesting, eh? This is a personal example of what I have argued for here.

Anyway, there is much she said that is good fodder for discussion.
Here are the minutes:
Our topic for this meeting was "A Calvinist Contemplates Walking Away From Faith" and was presented by Dr. Ruth Tucker, professor at Calvin Seminary, and author of 14 books. Dr. (Ruth) Tucker, noting the good attendance for this meeting (approx.55 ppl.), quipped that she hoped people had not confused her with the famous speaker on sex topics, Dr. Ruth W. One of Dr. Tucker's books, "Walking Away From Faith," regards those who, like Dan Barker, were once devoutly religious believers but who broke from this perspective to one of non-theism. The content of this book and her personal anecdotes and observations formed the basis of this presentation.

Tucker, who is the Associate Professor of Missiology, first felt her call to mission at age 13. The middle child of 5, she was the only one who becameimmersed in the faith that her siblings had all walked away from. She began to harbor festering doubts about certain doctrinal content, however, with the Canons being the biggest instigator of skepticism. What ultimately was included in this body of ecclesiastical laws, she knew, had been decided on by fallible men. There was room for error and what if the "wrong books" had been inserted, she wondered.

Professor Tucker disclosed that she had had no other doctrinal doubts or peripheral problems with biblically revealed truths. Rather, her main uncertainty zeroed in directly on the heart of the matter: the existence of God Itself. Findings by science seemed to continually push back this Being from a personal, proximal one-to a less and less involved entity far off somewhere on the outskirts of the deep vastness of space. Its heavenly home tucked away somewhere among the billions of galaxies. These "Night Sky" ponderings made her wish to live in the old, pre-scientific times, with the attendant beliefs of geocentrism and a small, personal system of an Earth lit by the greater and lesser lights of Sun and Moon, all for the benefit of Man. She had begun to teach religious tenets, but it wasn't until she stopped and really critically investigated the subject matter that she discovered sharp challenges to her religious beliefs and practices.

The next big blow to test her faith was the death of her mother in an auto accident. Her mother, while a believer, never prayed aloud or made any formal testimony to her faith. Had she gone to heaven? Had Ruth failed her, by not saving her soul before her untimely demise? This single, acutely painful event jelled her more nebulous doubts, powerfully challenging her belief in an All-Powerful God. She had witnessed a portrayal of a court trial of God for the events of the Holocaust. Tucker conducted her own trial of the Deity before her students, charging God with "manslaughter." To her at this time, the heavenly Father who sees every sparrow that falls had essentially "killed" her blameless mother.

It was the "silence of God" that was most disturbing to Dr. Tucker. She had a friend who heard God's voice routinely but Ruth, herself, found only a mute deity that she could not closely connect with. Along these lines, Dr. Tucker mentioned that about half of the Psalms deal with the apparent indifference and apathy of a God hidden from humanity. After quoting some examples, she said that very few Christian writers have dealt with the negative side of doubt. Instead, they generally designate it as a "gift" along with belief.

This forms the basis of her book; the progression from faith to unbelief, with many accounts of those who have left the fold feeling liberated and joyful in their departure. Professor Tucker said that she understands this, but that she, herself, will not leave her faith. In an interesting phrase, she said: "I would be doomed if my faith depended upon my belief."

For Dr. Tucker, this "concoction of men" and "belief in something you know ain't true" to quote others regarding faith, is not based on reason and critical examination of doctrines but more upon tradition and more numinous, anagogical associations. She readily admits to the emotional aspects of her faith, feeling that reason can take one only so far. She summed this state up by another quote: "(I am a) heathen in my reason and a Christian with my whole heart." Dr. Tucker also gave us a few quotes and examples of the now buoyed, now sinking quality of faith and its analogy to a "life preserver of the heart" that one clings to all the harder as the stormy seas of reason buffet it. "God does not depend on (her) faith or (her) doubt," she asserted.

Professor Tucker listed five myths about people who have abandoned their faith:

1) "They are angry and rebellious."

She found virtually no evidence for this. Rather, people felt sorrow, initially. They experienced pain, not anger.

2) "They can be argued back into faith." Because the person leaving his/her faith has carefully and painstakingly dissected the reasons behind this major worldview change, the Christian who proffers apologetics is more likely to convert into non-belief in such an exchange.

3) "Doubters can find help at Christian colleges and seminaries." This is not seen to be the case.

4) "They abandon their faith so that they can go out and sin freely." Our presenter pointed out that too many people who profess faith sin more often than non-believers and that this argument was not a motivational issue in de-converting from faith.

5) "They were never sincere Christians to begin with." She has come across example after example of the most earnest and devout of evangelical, fundamentalist believers who became non-theists. Dan Barker was mentioned as just one of these erstwhile believers.

She then listed some actual reasons given for "losing faith in faith." Science and philosophy has eroded the faith of many former believers. The sense of absence of any caring God was another. Another reason was the myth-shattering experience of the critical examination of the scriptures. Disappointment in God (Its apparent apathy or antipathy to Its creation) and the hypocrisy of Christians were two other reasons listed. And finally, the perception of a dogmatic anti-feminist and anti-homosexual stance of fundamentalist Christianity was given for why some relinquish their faith.

A Calvinist, Dr. Tucker believes in a "sovereign God" that assumes doubt and faith equally. Her faith is more a matter of "God's grace" than "personal will." The meaning, purpose, comfort and fulfillment she derives from the story of Jesus, his death and resurrection is a key part of her life and who she is, going directly to her emotional/affective state of being.

Codifying once again. Dr. Tucker gave examples of responses to the issue of belief and non-belief: Christian faith is not proven by rational proofs and apologetics. The faithful base their beliefs on a celebration of the "mystery of the Christian faith." It is the poetic, not the noetic sensibilities that are called up. Faith is a response to the tensions and challenges in life, not a means to solve them. Tucker, borrowing from Flannery O'Connor, spoke of the naturalness of unbelief and how the assault on a young mind from advanced education can displace the faith instilled in childhood, but that they are too young to decide on unbelief. She offered thoughts on the "winteriness" of faith that stands alongside the atheist in finding a silent God but with this cooler search uncovering a faith nonetheless, opposed to the "summery plaudits" of those whose faith runs warmer. Professor Tucker talked cogently about the sense of community and familiar traditions-the hymns, stories and rituals that ensconce faith and the connection with ancestors and future bridges built with younger relatives as being important elements in faith. And she talked about the necessity of the apostate turning his skepticism on unbelief to the same degree as he does on belief.

There was a marvelous writing by Stephen Dunn that Dr. Tucker shared with us called "At the Smithville Methodist Church" that speaks, in part, of outgrowing faith intellectually but subsuming it emotionally. One line from it reads: "Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes. / You can't say to your child/ 'Evolution loves you.' The story stinks/ of extinction and nothing/ exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have/ a wonderful story for my child/ and she was beaming. All the way home in the/ car she sang the songs, / occasionally standing up for Jesus/ There was nothing to do/ but drive, ride it out, sing along/ in silence."

There was a discussion following Dr. Tucker's presentation. Bishop Shelby Spong and his book "Why Christianity Must Change or Die" were mentioned and his dilemma of being in his official role in an Episcopal church, yet seeing folly in many faith claims. We discussed the importance of the institution-the structure- to believers. We can't change the institution, so we must change ourselves, or else walk away from it.

A psychologist in our group talked of the psychological needs that are met by faith. He said that non-believers can't say: "I'll pray for you" or other comforting (if devoid of meaning to the atheist) words. We can feel the sense of peace that a hymn offers but not honestly believe the message or have this message to impart to others. We have a harder time creating a sense of community, and have no deep traditions to hang onto.

The issue of predestination was brought up by one group member and how to reconcile this Calvinist tenet with genuine ethical considerations. Tucker spoke of finding peace from a sovereign God and placing a high priority on "good works." When talking of the sense of praying to a predetermining God, she said that one does not so much alter the plan of the Creator as one creates changes in him/herself. "We are in a partnership with God," Dr.Tucker stated.

Some other thoughts and questions posed to Dr. Tucker were regarded how she defined "faith" as opposed to "belief," the evil done out of emotional faith to uncritical acceptance of religious doctrines (such as was seen on September 11 and all throughout human history), is faith itself a "good" thing? Or is it only faith in what the given believer thinks is the one "true" belief system? Is it a false dichotomy to set up faith as either a belief in God or not? Is there value in group prayer even if there certainty of a divine listener? Tucker spoke of the sense of community and shared caring focused toward a person or issue and the intrinsic value therein. Does the believer hope his faith is true, or does he believe it on faith?

As she stated earlier, the solving of vexing challenges to one's faith is not the core concern, rather it is the giving in to the mystery and giving one's doubts and even unbelief to a sovereign God." With my naked intellect I cannot believe." Professor Tucker was forthcoming in stating that she swam the shallow waters-enjoying the play of tensions, struggles, etc., on the surface, rather than trying to plumb the murky depths. Talk arose of one's faith emanating from an "accident of birth(place)." How could all the diverse belief systems just in Christianity, let alone other faiths, all have it right? "There is truth in all religions but only one path to Christ," was our speaker's response. As to all the harm done out of dogmatic belief, Tucker quoted another writer who spoke of how Christians have turned many away by their bludgeoning use of faith and would garner more sympathetic supporters if they "…didn't make Christianity so darned unattractive." Another quip was that just one week with Southern Baptists would ensure no new conversions.
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Thanks to Ed Babinski for pointing this out to me.