Sigh…
So here’s what’s been going on lately. Most of you who read this blog already know that when my wife and I left Christianity, it wrecked most of our family relationships. My wife’s parents and siblings, as well as my own, felt that they could no longer interact with us socially after our deconversion. We were no longer invited to any family functions, and our communication with them all but disappeared. We would speak if it was about religious issues, or if there were logistic issues that needed to be worked out in letting them see our kids, etc.
Over the years, things have gotten a little better, especially with my wife’s parents. Things are by no means back to normal, but at least our infrequent interactions have become more civil and more comfortable. A few weeks ago, I even had a phone conversation with my father that lasted about half an hour and had no references to religion whatsoever. It was nice.
Nevertheless, the awkwardness is still there, just under the surface. And we’re still blacklisted from all the family functions.
Throughout this time, I’ve occasionally reached out to my side of the family with phone calls, letters, facebook messages, etc, in an effort to discuss the issues that divide us. I don’t get much response. I’ve always been puzzled by that, since I know they think I’m completely wrong. If their position is right, why aren’t they willing to discuss it?
In the last five years, I’ve also been sent books and articles and even been asked to speak to certain individuals, and I’ve complied with every request. Why not? How could more information hurt? But when I’ve suggested certain books to them, or written letters, they aren’t read. When I finally realized that my problems with Christianity weren’t going to be resolved, I wrote a 57-page paper to my family and close friends, explaining why I could no longer call myself a Christian. As far as I know, none of them ever read the whole thing. And sure, 57 pages is quite a commitment. But they say this is the most important subject in their lives…
This past week, the topic has started to come back around. A local church kicked off a new series on Monday entitled “Can We Believe the Bible?” It’s being led by an evangelist/professor/apologist that was kind enough to take time to correspond with me for several weeks in the summer of 2010. I’ve never met him in person, but a mutual friend connected us, since he was someone who was knowledgeable about the kinds of questions I was asking. Obviously, we didn’t wind up on the same page.
My wife’s parents invited us to attend the series, but it happens to be at a time that I’m coaching my oldest daughter’s soccer team. So unless we get rained out at some point, there’s no way we can attend. However, we did tell them that if practice is ever cancelled, we’ll go. I also contacted the church and asked if the sermons (if that’s the right word?) will be recorded, and they said that they should be.
Monday night, the weather was fine, so we weren’t able to attend. And so far, the recording isn’t available on their website. However, they do have a recording of Sunday night’s service available, which is entitled “Question & Answer Night.” I just finished listening to it, and that’s where the bulk of my frustration comes from.
It’s essentially a prep for the series that kicked off Monday night. They’re discussing why such a study is important, as well as the kinds of things they plan to cover. What’s so frustrating to me is that I don’t understand the mindset of evangelists like this. I mean, they’ve studied enough to know what the major objections to fundamentalist Christianity are, yet they continue on as if there’s no problem. And when they do talk about atheists and skeptics, they misrepresent our position. I can’t tell if they honestly believe the version they’re peddling, or if they’re purposefully creating straw men.
A couple of times, they mentioned that one of the main reasons people reject the Bible comes down to a preconception that miracles are impossible. “And if you start from that position, then you’ll naturally reject the Bible.” But that’s a load of crap. Most atheists were once theists, so their starting position was one that believed in miracles.
They also mentioned that so many of these secular articles and documentaries “only show one side.” I thought my head was going to explode.
And they referred to the common complaints against the Bible as “the same tired old arguments that have been answered long ago.” It’s just so infuriating. If the congregants had any knowledge of the details of these “tired old arguments,” I doubt they’d unanimously find the “answers” satisfactory. But the danger with a series like this is that it almost works like a vaccination. The members of the congregation are sitting in a safe environment, listening to trusted “experts,” and they’re injected with a watered down strain of an argument. And it’s that watered down version that’s eradicated by the preacher’s message. So whenever the individual encounters the real thing, they think it’s already been dealt with, and the main point of the argument is completely lost on them.
For example, most Christians would be bothered to find out that the texts of the Bible are not as reliable as were always led to believe. Even a beloved story like the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus writes on the ground, we’ve discovered that it was not originally part of the gospel of John. It’s a later addition from some unknown author. To a Christian who’s never heard that before, it’s unthinkable! But if they’ve gone through classes where they’ve been told that skeptics exaggerate the textual issues in the Bible, and that the few changes or uncertainties deal with only very minor things, and that none of the changes affect any doctrinal points about the gospel, then it’s suddenly easier for them to swallow “minor” issues like the insertion of an entire story into the gospel narrative.
Sigh…
I’m going to either attend these sessions, or I’ll watch/listen to them once they’re available online. I may need to keep some blood pressure medication handy, though.
Finding Truth 
At 5, no. But if you put your teeth under the pillow at 40, and bills appeared there overnight, and you lived alone, then your belief would be more reasonable.
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I am REALLY starting to see why some of my friends use the expression, “Lawyer speak”.
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Logorrhea.
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In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea (from Ancient Greek λόγος logos and ῥέω rheo “to flow”) is a communication disorder, expressed by excessive wordiness with minor or sometimes incoherent talkativeness.
Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, resulting in a variety of psychiatric and neurological disorders[1] including aphasia,[2] localized cortical lesions in the thalamus,[3][4] mania,[citation needed] or most typically in catatonic schizophrenia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logorrhea_%28psychology%29
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Crown: If at 40 years of age, you place your tooth under your pillow and the next morning you find a five dollar bill under your pillow, and no one else lives in the house, nor knows that you put the tooth under your pillow, what would be the most likely explanation?
1. The Tooth Fairy did it.
2. Or, a complete stranger snuck into your house while you were asleep and exchanged the tooth for a $5.00 bill.
“What are the odds of that happening??” you ask.
My answer: Much greater than that an invisible fairy did it.
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Judge: Mr. Crown, get out your checkbook and write the court a check for $5,000.
Offense: Excessive Loquaciousness
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If I’m 40 , live alone, and I put my tooth under my pillow and I find a $5 bill there, the most likely explanation is that I have a serious mental disorder and put the money there myself, without knowing it. Or I was drunk.
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Gary, as far as the Ascenscion goes, “heaven” is the Greek word “Ouranos”. It means the sky. According to the author of Luke and Acts, Jesus went up into the sky.
I don’t recall any mention of the Andromeda Galaxy in the text. Could you point me to that?
Paul wrote of someone what had gone up to “the third heaven” whatever that is. We could speculate. He MAY have been writing about John and his revelations. Or something else.
When I was plunged into the black abyss, I don’t know where that was, but it wasn’t HERE, or out in space either.
The heaven where God and the spirits sit may be out in space. But then again, it may be extra-dimensional. Or it may be figurative.
The black abyss is not figurative – that’s real. And awful. The City is real. I’ve seen a gate of it. High above, without ground between here and it.
These are supernatural things, unlikely to be in space-time, located at such and such distance from the earth.
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Gary: ““What are the odds of that happening??” you ask.
My answer: Much greater than that an invisible fairy did it.”
I’d say that the odds are zero. There is no tooth fairy, and $5 bills do not appear under people’s pillows.
But there is God. THAT part of the supernatural is within the real universe, and manifested by actual miracles you can prod and poke. Imaginary fairies aren’t.
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Crown:
You are correct.
My point is that there are always natural explanations for every supernatural claim that have much higher probabilities of happening than that…”the supernatural did it”.
I don’t remember the details of your story about breaking your neck swimming, but unless you had a CT or MRI that confirmed the fracture (which I don’t remember you mentioning) your temporary sensation of paralysis was more probably due to a trauma to the spinal cord, causing brief trauma to the nerves, causing brief paralysis, and then quickly resolving. Kind of like hitting your funny bone. If your proof of being healed is not based on an Xray or other imaging that demonstrated you had a definite fracture, the temporary trauma scenario has a much higher probability than that an invisible ghost god healed you.
Could you have been healed by a god? Yes. Could the Tooth Fairy have placed the five dollar bill under my pillow? Yes. But if we look at probabilities, there are much more probable causes to explain both “miracles” than that a supernatural being did it.
If the bird and mouse were buried for three days, decomposing, and THEN come back to life…I am a believer! However, if you just picked up an animal off of the ground that you thought was dead and it suddenly started moving after you said a prayer, that is not evidence. Many a person has been bitten by a rattle snake that they were SURE was dead.
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Crown, I can’t help but ask – the ‘interesting secular experiences’ you mentioned in a previous comment didn’t include some experimentation with LSD, did it?
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Crown,
You point to internal feelings, intuition, and personal experience as evidence of your god, then when we point out that this is subjective, you return to alleging evidence in the form of miracles that can be examined physically. But when we start examining your evidence, you resort back to subjective evidence such as your belief that God can *poof* AB blood type on a piece of cloth.
As far as I am concerned, that is not being honest or fair.
So which is it: personal, subjective feelings and intuitions of the supernatural or physical evidence that any human being can evaluate by the principles of science? If you say both, then there is no point debating you because you can always pull out the *poof* card whenever it is convenient.
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Gary, we cannot “look at probabilities” of things that we cannot quantify”. All we do when we say that is pretend that we can take qualitative judgments and turn them into quantitative analysis, because ..Statistics!
It’s a game people play, but we know it’s not true.
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“If the bird and mouse were buried for three days, decomposing, and THEN come back to life…I am a believer!”
I hope not! After all of the defensive walls you have built around yourself to refuse to let in any evidence, I certainly hope that you wouldn’t just believe somebody who told you that an animal came back to life, regardless of the facts he told you! You’d never be so naïve.
I don’t argue for the existence of miracle from MY miracles. I use things you can go study yourself.
I refer to mine periodically only to explain that I have a red car, and I know I have a red car, and that your telling my that I don’t have a car, or that my car is blue, is never going to be a productive line of discussion, because I have a red car and I know it directly. Same thing with the existence of God, demons, the City, the Abyss, the Fire.
There’s no way to verify what I say about what has happened to me, so there’s no point in discussing it. I could just make shit up for maximum impact. No. We need external, examinable things.
We went the wrong way with the Shroud, because you asked me to prove too much – to prove things about Jesus. Really, what needed to happen was a simple proof of miracles. THEN we could, maybe, talk about Jesus.
The Shroud is distant, and hard to assess, and tangled up in Scripture and divine identity.
Simple things LIKE my own paralysis miracle, that are documented by medical science (unlike my own) – THAT is the place to start, if there’s a discussion to be had.
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Wrong, Crown.
We humans base most every decision in life on probabilities. We always have.
-What are the probabilities that if I walk across this large open space that I will make it across alive without being eaten by a saber tooth tiger?
-And today, is safe to get out of bed and step on the floor? Will it hold me up? Etc..
-Will the bridge up ahead in the road hold up under the weight of me and my car or will it collapse?
We don’t do all of those probability calculations consciously, but we do do them. We do them based on experience: “I have never fallen through the floor getting out of bed before so it is probably safe for me to stand on the floor today.” and, “I have never fallen through any bridge in the United States so it is safe for me to drive over this one.”
Probabilities, probabilities, probabilities. If we didn’t calculate probabilities on a regular basis we would most likely be head from being run over crossing the street or some other mishap in which we did not calculate when it was safe to cross the street, etc.
I nor anyone I know has any verifiable experience with ghosts, ghouls, tooth fairies, leprechauns, or unicorns. Therefore, based on probabilities, events which happen in my life, the lives of others, and in past history, are most probably NOT due to these supernatural creatures or forces.
By probabilities, your injury was not healed by a god.
By probabilities, your mouse and bird were never dead.
By probabilities, Jesus is still dead.
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…we would most likely be “dead”…
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Although something can seem real to a person that does not mean it is real. I know a person who is adamant that people break into their house at night, leaving no trace but, take away their possessions. This person is convinced these people have a vendetta against them and have explained to me why in great detail with a complete back story.
Invariably I and other friends of this person find the ‘stolen’ goods in other parts of the house. We know what is happening, the person has a mental illness and is delusional. But to this person it is very real.
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No, Crown, I would never believe your story or anyone else’s story about the resurrection of a mouse or bird without the following evidence: VIDEO AND AUDIO!
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Carmen, I have never in my life used any illegal drug, not even a puff or a pill.
The only prescription drugs with narcotic effects I have ever taken were some sort of Tylenol with Codeine back in 1983, prescribed after an operation on my nose was smashed in a boxing accident, and Percocet for a week in around 2007 after a very nasty ankle sprained ankle/torn ligament.
The visions occurred in 2001.
I have never been a tobacco user, and I drink very little alcohol – and can recount the number of times I have been drunk my entire life, and none of them were around that time.
So no, my brain was not under the influence of anything but God.
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If I go back to the three conflicting points of tension I quoted from Christian Hoefreiter a couple of days back:
1. God is good, loving and just;
2. The Scriptures bear faithful witness to God;
3. Both the concept and practice of herem are morally revolting.
Hoefreiter’s point was that it is logically possible to support only two of these three points in any coherent argument. Crown is in good company he has adopted the same approach as that great man of the past St Augustine. Both recognised that it is point three that must be tackled as points 1 and 2 are non negotiable.
Crown, like Augustine, argues that everyone dies, so it is just a matter of degree dying a bit earlier. Augustine’s argument is not without merit. The real elephant in the room is what happens after death.
Being killed in a short space of time is insignificant compared to the doctrine of eternal, conscious torment without relief in hell.
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Crown: Why has there never been a case of someone with a limb amputation suddenly regrowing that limb after praying to Jesus? Jesus only seems to heal illnesses and injuries that have possible natural explanations for the “healing”.
Show me evidence of someone regrowing an amputated limb, please. I bet you can’t.
To me at least, this is absolute evidence that Jesus does not heal; that all “healings” have a natural explanation; or, that Jesus discriminates against amputees.
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“I presented two pieces of evidence:
3. If Crown can find dis-interested scientists (not members of the Shroud society) who claim the carbon dating done by the three labs was invalid, I am open to seeing the evidence. However, as far as I am aware, no scientist has refuted the carbon dating of the shroud other than those who have an interest in saying it is authentic.”
Yes, you have presented evidence, and this piece is good evidence, as I said. But until you check out the peer-reviewed scientific evidence Crown claims to have, you haven’t looked at both sides, and you haven’t “really grappled” with his evidence. That continues to be the case.
“How much more evidence do you require, my friend?”
I have made it clear all along. I need to look at the best evidence on both sides of the question. I’m hoping that you might see that you need to do the same.
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Gary M: You’d believe video and audio? I wouldn’t. I would immediately distrust it.
Remember, I came to a site called “Finding Truth”, onto a thread where other people were discussing miracles, and I stuck up my hand and said Hey, I know about miracles.
I didn’t come preaching a religion. I didn’t knock on your door with a book in my hand to badger you into converting into my religion “or you’re going to hell!”.
My point is only this: miracles exist and are demonstrable using third party things that don’t require much “trust me”.
Sure, EVERYBODY could be lying about EVERYTHING, and all of the records could be flim-flam hoaxes. But that’s unlikely.
The existence of miracle, defined as things that break the laws of physics, is what I really wanted to talk about. That’s the necessary gateway to any religious discussion, because a god who cannot do miracles isn’t God.
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Gary M: “Crown: Why has there never been a case of someone with a limb amputation suddenly regrowing that limb after praying to Jesus?”
There have been, notably in Spain, but not at Lourdes, under the eyes of doctors and with scientific records, so the regeneration miracles are not evidence that I would present, because it doesn’t meat the evidentiary standards I require.
Gary: Those born blind never see in their dreams, because they have no visual sensory input into their memory to be able to form sighted dreams. But the congenitally blind who have had NDEs DO see perfectly in their NDEs, and after their resuscitation are ever after as formerly sighted people who have seen, and know what color is, etc. How is it that the brain, which has no functional eyes to see and thus cannot form dream images of sight, can see things, still without eyes, and form images of sight.
Of what possible evolutionary use is the ability to SEE in the born-blind that occurs only when they are dead and, until modern medicine, unable to reproduce?
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Crown:
UnkleE has asked me to look at any evidence you have from a respected (non-Shroud society or any pro-Catholic organization) scientist who believes that the carbon dating done on the Shroud in the 1980’s was incorrectly done and therefore the results are invalid. I would like to look at his or her evidence.
Would you please provide a link to such a scientist or scientists and I will review it?
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