My cousin died of cancer a couple years ago. Later, about a month after another relative my age found a lump in his armpit, he too was dead. A few weeks after he died I found a lump in my armpit.
The moment that I noticed it, my heart sunk. I didn’t freak out or panic, but when I suddenly though I might die, my perspective on many issues changed really fucking fast. For example, whatever skepticism I had developed about God and Christianity was suddenly irrelevant. The next day I prayed once while I was in the shower to let it be something simple. Of course, like most armpit lumps it was merely a painful swollen gland and it went away in a few days. But it still left me with the fact that no matter how much I intellectualize my beliefs, when the shit hits the fan, I ultimately still believe.
I was raised in an extremely sheltered conservative evangelical home. The first 6 years of my education occurred in a tiny private evangelical Christian school. In high school I was the weird super-religious clean-cut guy who was trying to preach to everyone. In college I was mostly unphased by 5 years of liberal social science education as I worked toward becoming a history and social science teacher. I understood the secular side of things, and some things I simply assimilated into my faith. I had rationalizations to maintain my core beliefs and I was still a very strong believer after college. Since then, for the last 7 years, my faith has been moving in a gradual downward direction. I’m not sure if its going to just level off or if I would really be able to ever openly come out of the closet and reject Christianity.
I’m going to use this thread as a journal to occasionally explore how an extremely devout evangelical Christian loses his faith and any other musings and observations I have on the subject. This is mostly for me so I can examine my own thoughts. But feel free to comment or ask questions as much as you like, but try not to hijack it with irrelevant debates and crap.
Hey, you don’t have to be an asshole to be a Christian. Believe in Jesus all you want, just don’t bother with the evangelical obnoxiousness. I predict the results of that will be quite positive.
So I’m guessing you’re in your mid to late 20s? You tend to grow out of this sort of thing. Whatever might be said about mainstream Christianity and its general values, the fundamentalist flavour of it is intellectually unsustainable but for the childhood indoctrination. Exposure to education helps.
I salute you, good sir and/or madam and am quoting you for eternity on this line. Perhaps, I dare say, even embroidering it into a pillow.
It’s THAT awesome.
Determinist, you might find thisinteresting. It’s a video of a talk given last month at the 2009 American Atheist convention about how recent research into the brain gives us insight into why religion is so compelling.
Your experience is just another case of foxholes without atheists. You fall back onto the values and beliefs instilled in you since childhood. I do the same thing. I don’t have a similar background, but all it takes is a kidney stone or to see my wife or kids in danger/extreme pain and I find myself doing whatever it takes to comfort myself… including making irrational pleas to the supernatural.
[joke] Shit, I’ve been praying for 4 months for GM to recover more than I can remember praying for anything else in recent memory. [/joke]
I too have faced death and mortality on a number of occasions, and I never once felt any wavering away from atheism.
I always liked Dennis Miller’s response to the claim* that there are no atheists in foxholes: “… but have you noticed, no one ever seems to find Jesus on prom night?”
I consider myself agnostic. On occasions when I felt like I was dying or things were just going really, really bad, I admit to supplicating in my head. Something like, “if there is a benevolent force in the universe, please, please let this turn out O.K.”
I didn’t suddenly become an evangelical Christian, nor would I. But I don’t think occasionally having thoughts like that is particularly consequential either way.
In the first place, the lack of empirical evidence for a creator means that a belief in God is not something that you can “reason” yourself into. It’s something that you merely take as a given.
Secondly, holding a consistent position on a subject hardly requires faith. In general people tend NOT to change their minds about important matters on a whim. Indeed, they will tend to discount facts and concepts that don’t agree with their current position. It takes a great deal of hard evidence and hard argument to shift someone’s beliefs once they settle upon them.
Thirdly, faith doesn’t require training. It is the default setting for the human brain. A tiny child has no trouble making the most amazing leaps of faith. It is *skepticism *which must be trained. It requires a lot of discipline to set aside what your heart and your gut tell you and look coldly and objectively at the evidence the world presents you.
C. S. Lewis is a charming writer. But he wasn’t much of a thinker.
It makes perfect sense. If you have ever seen a really good magician, you know that you can momentarily doubt what you have rationally decided is true.
Every thinking person has moments of doubt no matter what they believe. Faith is reminding yourself of the reasons you believe what you believe until the moment passes.
Of course faith must be trained. Cognitive therapy is a good example. A person who is depressed has thoughts and fears which cause emotional states. During the process of therapy a person has to combat the negative, doubting thoughts with positive, affirming thoughts. One trains in postive thinking until the power of the negative thoughts are broken. Likewise in faith, the more you train yourself the easier it is to overcome doubts.
Well, what was the lump in your armpit? Did it turn out to be anything serious? That must have been scary.
For what it’s worth, I’ve faced death, too and all I really thought was, “Ok, let’s get moving - I’ve got better things to do than lay here and die. It’s time to get better already. I’ve got a newborn to take care of, a husband and family who love me and no time to waste.” There was no religion involved, just a need to do what had to be done. Dying didn’t happen to be part of that.
If you’re reminding yourself of the reasons behind your belief, you’re not practicing faith. You’re REASONING. Faith is not about confronting doubts and convincing yourself that they’re unwarrented, it’s about ignoring them.
This is only necessary if you’re continually confronted with evidence that your belief is in error. But if that’s what you’re experiencing, the correct response is not to attribute it to a passing whim, but to deal with the evidence.
I’ve been an atheist for 30 years now. If I was presented with evidence that called into question my beliefs, I would question them. But since that hasn’t happened, I don’t. It doesn’t require any faith at all to sustain my lack of belief.
You don’t have to go from evangelical to athiest. As Pleonast said, there’s a lot of different types of Christianity out there. I’ve learned a bit about other sects from my Lutheran minister and found that there are a lot of groups that have a set list of ways to be and things to do, and if you deter then you’re out. That sounds exhausting and scary. I find it much easier to go about being a type of Christian that feels God’s love no matter what I am thinking or doing.
If you really and truly believe in God and consider yourself a Christian, don’t just dump all of that because of outside influences. Learn about what your faith means to you, and then see if you can still maintain.
You don’t have to choose between faith and reason / intelligence. Far smarter people than I have faith and believe in God. C.S. Lewis is one, Francis S. Collins (from the human genome project) is another. I belong to a church filled with intelligent, science minded people. I find it sad and troubling that so many people feel that you need to turn off your brain / logical sense to believe in God. (Yes, there are some people that do that! Don’t let your own faith be subject to others’.)
Beyond C.S. Lewis’ many wonderful books on the subject of faith, check out The Language of God (Collins) or The Reason for God (Timothy Keller) if you haven’t already.