Does this necessarily make him an atheist, or just a person disillusioned with the Catholic church?
His experience seems to boil down to “Certain members of the Catholic church suck. This sucks. Forget it.”
That seems to speak more about the wrongs of the Church than the virtues of atheism. Not a very strong “atheist testimony”. He might’ve lost faith in the Church and in his fellow man, but later on, he might just find God again in another religion less prone to sex scandals.
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No, in the article he goes into the Protestant “TV Preachers” as well, blasting Benny Hinn and several others.
Regards
testy
Same deal. These are the wrongs of people that he’s upset with, not necessarily those of God. If the sin of Man is all it takes for him to lose faith in God, maybe his faith just wasn’t very strong to begin with. People of all religions have to deal with the basic fact that people everywhere do some fucked up things, and they don’t always throw up their arms and give up their faith just because of that.
It sounds like he wanted to use religion to fill a sort of emptiness in his life, something he alluded to at the beginning of the article when he went to that mountain retreat. If so, perhaps one of religion’s draws for him was that of an emotional crutch, and when the organization providing that warmth was revealed to be less than fully upright, he walked away.
If that is the case, this is no more a testimony against the existence of God than the experience of somebody who walks away from Scientology after learning about that church’s practices. IMO, church does not always equal religion and religion does not always equal God. Losing faith in one does not mean you have to give up faith in all of them, though of course they’re all interconnected to some degree. There are churchgoers who don’t give a shit about God, and I know people who, disappointed with their church, continue their search for a higher power either through the Bible alone or through alternative religions. That doesn’t make them atheists, that just means they’re still searching.
That radio interview I was talking about can be downloaded here. It’s worth a listen and the interviewer (Dan Barreiro) asks some of the same questions that are being asked here.
I’m not religious so I really don’t have a horse in this race but flashy televangelists and hucksters like Benny Hinn are not really representative of American Protestantism. At best, they represent only one small part and have little, if any, influence on the many Lutherans, Episcopalians, Congregationists, Methodists, Unitarians, and members of other Protestant sects. However, I can see that if you begin your review of Protestantism with someone like Hinn, you probably would get discouraged from going any further.
If faith in God doesn’t make the faithful better people, then what the hell’s the point?
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Sure, I agree that people continually do fucked-up things. OTOH, people like priests and even TV preachers are supposed to be an example. They should be an example and a goal for what the layman ought to be. When it turns out that your example is a huckster like Benny Hinn or a child molester like some of the RC priests and the rot even extends up through the hierarchy then someone like the reporter has to start wondering just how effective religion is in improving someone’s behavior. Talk is cheap.
<SNIP>
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I agree with you about the reporter using religion as a crutch. My impression agrees with your own on that.
I agree that a reporter deciding that he doesn’t believe in God anymore due to the activities of the various church leaders is not evidence of whether God exists or not. OTOH, it does seem to be a “testimony” that he doesn’t exist. After all, for an omnipotent deity it looks like he was incredibly ineffective at reforming these characters. I take your point about regular churchgoers that don’t care about God. In my own experience, that describes a substantial percentage of them. Not trying to be snarky here, it just seems that many churches are no more than social clubs.
Regards
testy
NDP
I’m a fairly hard-core atheist myself but to be fair, I have to agree that the likes of Benny Hinn are not representative of most protestants.
Regards
testy
People, both good and bad, do bad things. Even evil things.
We are free to do good and bad things because we are capable of choosing to do good things and bad things and evil things.
This makes the bad and evil things we do worse because we were not coerced, because we chose. It makes the good things even better because we chose them. Because we had the choice to do the right thing or the wrong thing.
Sometimes it is not clear what is good and bad. Sometimes the choice is hard to make. Different people use different standards to choose what is good and bad. Not everybody agrees.
Some people use religion to make these choices. Some people use a philosopher’s words or opinions judged from experience or logic or someone else’s opinion.
Sometimes, no matter how these people choose to differentiate between good and bad, they make bad decisions. Sometimes the decisions are evil. Sometimes they think they’re doing good or they have no choice.
Religious though I am, I do not like blaming a naughty spirit for ‘making’ us do bad things any more than I like praising a nice one for making good things happen. Things happen.
When people do horrible things, it is because they chose to do horrible things. Just because they try to speak for God and do His work does not mean they are infallible and incapable of doing bad things or even evil things. This does not mean God does not exist or even that He is inactive in touching their hearts. It just means they have chosen to do what they will regardless of what they know is right.
I can only think that the people who defend molesting priests are clinging to the belief that we should forgive the repentant. Fine and good, but the Church’s actions have been appalling in this crisis.
For myself, I use religion to give my faith and worship form and structure and a place to go. I use it to help me remember what’s right and what’s wrong. I do not look to God to force changes in the hearts of people who do wicked things. He’s the father who reminds us not to touch the hot stove, not the hand who prevents it from happening in the first place.
Your mileage may certainly vary.
The point? I can’t answer for everyone, obviously, since religion is (ideally, at least) a personal choice. I’ve heard many reasons for believing…
“My life is empty” is one I come across a lot.
“There’s nothing to lose and everything to gain… why not?” is another.
“I had undergone Miracle X and then Miracle Y, and there was no way they could be coincidences.”
“It’s the way I was raised. It’s comforting. I believe in it.”
“I was lost until I found God.”
“I see Him everywhere and in everything I do.”
Personally, I’ve never heard anyone say “I decided to believe because I want to be a better person. I wanted to stand up to higher morals.” I think the “religion equals morality” viewpoint is just the result of our cultural history, and more and more we’re seeing that the two are not the same thing. There are many moral believers, many immoral believers, many moral nonbelievers and many immoral nonbelievers. Among peoples’ various motivations and fears, the desire to simply “be a better person” doesn’t seem to be too high on the list for either camp.
But that doesn’t mean religion is pointless. If it provides peace and fulfillment that an individual cannot otherwise get, and it does so in a way that does not detriment the rest of society… why not? Or maybe it answers important questions that science cannot. Maybe it provides a built-in social circle full of like-minded people who have similar lifestyles. Maybe it provides structure, discipline, guidelines and hope.
In those way, religions can provide valuable societal services. Whether they choose to incorporate God or Morality during their services is up to them.
Whatever the case, religion still does not necessarily equal God(s). The religions of the world can still continue to provide these same services with or without the existence of a higher power. Their effectiveness at their jobs can be used as fuel in arguments either for or against, but fuel, not proof, is all it is. “God doesn’t exist because people fuck up once in a while” is no more a proof than “God exists because people do some good things once in a while.”
But we can figure out not to touch the stove without god reminding us. Those who are going to touch the stove will do so no matter, and those who won’t touch the stove won’t. When god tells us to kick the cat, those who will will, and those who won’t wont. It’s my contention that all morality is basically atheistic (without god) and those whose morality lines up with the Bible or other Holy Book preaches it - though they might not live it.
The only exception might be those of such weak will that they can be convinced to go against their consciences by appeal to God - and I’m not all that sure that they wouldn’t do it anyway.
There’s a chance this reporter had acquired his faith via arguments from authority (being taught by parents and preachers), rather than the Big Guy coming down and ejumacating him personally. If this was the case, then having the credibility of preachers as speakers for/about God obliterated would sorely undermine his own reasons for believing. Also it casts into doubt the divine origins of everything that the corrupt clergy teaches, since presumably a pure God would not serve his sacremental wine from such dirty vessels.
And you don’t need to find definintive proof of God’s nonexistence to reasonably switch to atheism. All you need is the disproof or discrediting of any evidence you thought there was for the existence of god. Absent reason to believe, reverting to disbelief is the sensible default case when it comes to things that break observed natural law (like God).
Very few things are effective in improving someone’s behavior. Psychiatry, self-help books, fables, laws, religions… they all may or may not help. But the ineffectiveness of religion does not prove God isn’t there. Arguments of free will, punishment/reward after death, a little suffering is good in the long run, etc… all apply, but even more basic than that, this might also just mean the Church has strayed too far from God and that people should sidestep it and connect with God more individually.
We simulposted, but yeah… exactly. It’s nice to hear a moderate religious voice.
Maybe good religions can compensate for bad parents?
God does not necessarily break observed natural law. God may just have been poorly defended by people who do not take natural law into account when arguing his case.
Absent reason to believe, the “sensible default case” should be “I don’t know.” If I gave you a plain old cardboard box and asked you who made it, what would you say?
Before answering, you could look at the box for identifying traits, like manufacturer’s logos. You could examine the physical makeup of the box, identifying materials used, construction methods used, etc. You could read industry books. You could ask a box expert. You could ask the International Cardboard Association. You could hypothesize. You could just plain guess. But whatever the case, the box is there. Why would you assume it has no maker?
I disagree, and I think the reporter’s experiences are actually a pretty compelling reason to become an atheist.
If I was God, and my representatives on Earth (the church) allowed its priests to harm the innocent (and, actually encouraged it by helping them avoid punishment), then you can bet there’d be some mighty smitin’. The fact that those priests not only got away with what they did, but still received support from the church, and God didn’t blow those churches up, seems a pretty good indication that God doesn’t exist.
Saying it happened because God allows humans to have free will, or that “He works in mysterious ways”, is basically the same as admitting that God has so little influence on the world that he might as well not even exist.
And why would you assume it’s made by elves? “I don’t know” is not incompatible with lack of belief in any particular maker. Boxes do have human makers, so a human maker is a reasonable explanation. The world can be “created” purely naturally, so a purely natural explanation is reasonable too.
Meh. One more for your side. Faith is what allows me to witness the evil deeds of men and not allow myself to become like them. People lose their faith all the time for a variety of reasons. The abuse of children is indeed very bad and should punished by the laws of man very harshly. I would rather decide a punishment like that with my faith intact than without it. I guess I’m glad I have faith as it allows me to feel compassion when many times I’m just tired of hearing about all the horrible shit that humans do to each other.
I really do feel for Lobdell. Hell, there are days when I’d really like the comfort of faith, but it simply doesn’t exist for me, and I muddle through as best I can, working with the empirical universe as it is.
I suspect that his loss of faith wasn’t just disillusionment with the Catholic church’s cover up or anger with the televangelists’ greed.
Christianity says explicitly that they have The One Answer. That life, the universe, and everything is wrapped up in accepting Christ as your savior, and that if you fail to do this, you are doomed. It is permissible, even demanded, that you disbelieve all other faiths just as much as you believe in The One True Faith. When a system raises itself up as the only truth, then it must have the answers. All of them. For every situation. And the people who practice that belief must be able to put those answers to use. When those answers fail, when they no longer meet the needs of the believers, then that system is no longer the truth.
So Lobdell watched a growing crisis wherein innocents were brutally destroyed once by their rapists, a second time by their church, and a third time by their fellow believers. The pat answers given out again and again lose their virtue in the face of that overwhelming, pitiless tragedy. The system did not protect the innocents, did not prevent others from being hurt, and did not give those innocents justice. How can that system possibly be the One Truth under those circumstances? All the others are already disbelieved. Now there is nothing left to support faith in it. So, faith dies.
I think also that it’s easy to ignore certain paradoxes about the nature of an all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God until you come face to face with true evil. Some suffering can be considered necessary to come to a true understanding of morality, but when that suffering is so destructive there is no way to overcome it, that all-loving/all-powerful/all-knowing God is on the hook for the universe He created and is running by His rules.
It (in my opinion) simply isn’t possible to reconcile the miseries we, God’s creation, suffer with a God who created our world the way it is and loves us through it all. I think that’s the point Lobdell must have come to, and I think that is why he lost his faith.
So-called “faith in God” can take many forms. One person’s “faith in God” can be devotion to a particular church or a particular concept of God. If someone puts his trust in a church that ultimately pays lip service to the deity, for example, then we cannot trust it to make someone a better person.
Not really. There are a lot of possibilities.
Logically: Maybe he does work in mysterious ways and humans are just too stupid to understand them. Maybe it’s not that he has so little influence, maybe he just uses it with the subtle skill of a master puppeteer operating behind the curtains, instead of a brash in-your-face dictator.
Emotionally: Free will is not insignificant. Absent it, you would be nothing more than a computer program, with every thought, choice, and action predefined. You would be a slave to God’s will, and your entire life becomes reduced to one set of pre-written instructions. You will be born, you will do X, you will feel Y, you will do X, you will meet Z, and all this time you will think that it’s your life, when really you’re just a bit actor following a script line-for-line. You cannot ever change your lines, improve your performance, choose to quit. Any fun you think you’re having, any love you think you have, any dreams and hopes you have… are just there because it’s part of your script. And you know what’s really sad? You won’t even care unless your script says you will. Freedom? Dignity? Love? Hate? Without free will, your life is just a pointless rehearsal. But at least, if you’re lucky, the script will say you won’t mind.
Other religions: Even if a benevolent, all-loving Christian God doesn’t exist, there are still other Higher Powers to account for. Maybe Zeus got pissed and decided to fuck with the world for a few millennia. Maybe the aliens are breeding us for food. Maybe some really smart rats decided to build a giant planet for fun. I should’ve been more precise and said “any God”. I didn’t mean to limit “higher power” to the reporter’s faith; that particular image of God just made more sense in this context.
Yep, perfectly reasonable. Boxes may have human makers. The world may have been made by God. Or Elves. Or perfectly natural circumstances. The point is, I don’t know, and I personally believe that anyone who says they do is either lying… or God.
And if you’re God, man, come over here and answer a few questions for me, won’t ya?