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 
“On a vast host of measure, including homicide, violent crime rates, poverty rates, obesity and diabetes rates, child abuse rates, educational attainment levels, income levels, unemployment rates, sexually transmitted disease rates, and teen pregnancy rates, etc, the most religious states tend to suck when it comes to well being.”
I have no wish to defend the type of christian belief in those states, but do you have any evidence that religion is the cause rather than just a correlate?
There is very clear evidence that religion is more prevalent in lower socioeconomic countries and cultures, and as countries improve socioeconomically that decline religiously. So the result you quote could certainly have the opposite causation as the one you are inferring. But perhaps there is evidence both ways?
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Cont.
On nearly every sociological measure of well-being, you’re most likely to find the more secular states with the lowest levels of faith in God and the lowest rates of church attendance faring the best and the most religious states with the highest levels of faith in God and rates of church attendance faring the worst.
Source
According to nine different measures of well-being—health, safety, housing, access to broadband, civic engagement, education, jobs, environment, and income, the Bible Belt performed the worst of any region in the country.
Source
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“Hi UnkleE, no problem. For whatever reason I find the shroud fascinating. If it is a hoax it was done very well. If it is not a hoax then I am going to have to re-evaluate all of my positions / worldview.”
Hi Dave. It is going to be very difficult to reach a compelling conclusion, for this subject clearly polarises. Just look at the discussion here. Or the references. The Rogers paper looks impartial, but if he works for STURP then he has a viewpoint. And the critical response didn’t even pretend to be objective, but was highly biased and as much polemic as science. So you’ll likely find polarised responses and little in between. But I agree it’s worth a try.
I just don’t have time right at the minute. I have two websites, which require a lot of writing and even more reading (my work on the shroud will go there eventually), I’m doing family history for two families (my wife and mine) and have a family history website to keep up as well, I lead a few social justice projects at our church, help out in an enormous youth group, mentor a few “kids”, am doing some home renovation and try to spend some time with my wife. So I will fit the shroud in when I can – soon I hope. Meanwhile keep reporting back if you are able and I’ll reap the benefits – who says I’m a parasite? 🙂
I really appreciate you efforts and your real attempt to be objective. All the best.
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There appears to be a stratagem prevalent among the apologists on this board – the inculcation of doubt.
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UnklE: “The Rogers paper looks impartial, but if he works for STURP then he has a viewpoint.”
Who in this world does any serious, sustained work, work that requires the use of labs, time, resources and expensive education, without having a viewpoint? Nobody. Viewpoint-free serious study does not exist, because it cannot.
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Neotenes – overlay your social standards with the areas with the most Catholics. Of course the Bible Belt is a mess. It’s Protestant. Protestants spend their money building competing chapels. Look at the “Blue States”, which are the ones with the heaviest Catholic presence – places like Boston and New York. What do states in the Catholic belt have? A parallel Catholic school system, Catholic universities, a proliferation of Catholic hospitals, Catholic retirement homes for the elderly, and, at the level that people don’t see so visibly, Catholic hospice (in the 1990s, the Catholics provided virtually all of the AIDS hospice care in America), Catholic Services immigrant relief, soup kitchens, AA meetings.
Protestants build churches. Catholics build schools and hospitals, all around the world.
Protestants proselytize, but most Catholics are made by infant baptism, mostly, followed by non-Catholic spouses converting.
Now, you say that you were terrorized by being told about Hell. You would prefer that children not be taught what happens to the evil and unrepentant when they die? Shall we also not teach them of the dangers of crossing the street, because talk of death might upset them.
Reality is reality, and Hell is part of it. Children need to understand that nobody ever “gets away” with anything, ultimately. They need to understand that if they walk across the street without looking, they’ll get hit by a car and killed. They need to be taught that if they stick a fork into the toaster, they’ll get killed. And they need to understand that there are fatal consequences for committing evil acts.
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Howie, I agree with you. I also understand why some theists adopt this view because they see the OT atrocities problem and the problem of natural suffering as the same problem. If I was a theist I would take a different stance. I think natural suffering can be more easily explained by blaming it on something that is necessary or a by-product of this type of universe. Then you take the moral conscience that we’ve been given and the teachings of Jesus (turn the other cheek) and there is a compelling argument that the Creator does not want us killing each other. Then you look at the conquest passages and blame humans for putting words in the Creators mouth that it never would have uttered. It would not be the first time a deity is used to control people and make them do things they would not do otherwise.
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You are definitely correct Crown. I think UnkleE’s point though was that this particular topic (the shroud) is quite a bit more polarized than others. I think if one reads scientific papers enough it becomes clear that there are some topics where bias seems to be kept out of the conclusions somewhat easily. And then there are topics which are on the other end of the spectrum (with many along the points in between). I think it is too bad that the questions that matter the most to us are the ones that are so polarized, thus making it extremely hard to find the correct answers. It’s very obvious why that is, but there’s a bit of irony there – perhaps a catch-22. For those who sincerely want the correct answers, no matter what impact it may mean, this can be very disconcerting.
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Gary, you wrote: “You can point out all the errors and discrepancies in the Bible to Christians until you are blue in the face and it won’t change their minds. But, how do they counter the charge that their god is a murdering son-of-a-bitch? Answer: “He’s good because he says he is.”
You needn’t point out the contradictions in the Bible. I’ll be happy to point out many of the most glaring. That’s a problem for Scripture Alone Christianity. It’s not a problem for Catholicism or Orthodoxy, which are not based on the Bible.
As far as God being a murdering son-of-a-bitch, I’ve freely acknowledged that God kills everybody, intentionally. That doesn’t make God a murdering son-of-a-bitch any more than a farmer who raises cattle for slaughter.
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Yes, that’s true UnkleE. It’s hard to tell when someone is being genuine or not. Both sides overstate their case and you have to constantly take a step back and try to separate the facts from the excitement.
All of Rogers claims depend on being able to examine the rest of the shroud, which no one is able to do. There is cotton present in the sample corner section, is there some cotton present throughout the shroud? Hard to say. There is some “gum residue” on the sample section (he has a photo of this in the paper, figure 3), is this residue also present on the rest of the shroud? Hard to say.
So to add to the problem of polarization there is also the problem of inaccessibility. Even Rogers recommended re-dating the shroud with the samples that have been set aside (last page of his paper), but this has not been done.
Take your time researching it, you’re a busy guy!
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Howie – “I think it is too bad that the questions that matter the most to us are the ones that are so polarized, thus making it extremely hard to find the correct answers.”
But mustn’t it always be so? We live short lives, that almost always end in pain, on a world of limited resources which means that we all live in stress all of our lives. A few people have sufficient resources to have some individual initiative, but most of us are under constant pressure, much of it unfair. We don’t like it, and we’re mostly right about that too: it IS pretty bad. And we know, if we think about it, that it doesn’t HAVE to be this way. There ARE sufficient resources for everybody to have enough, for nobody to be dying horribly. Wars are always optional. So is violent crime. We know it, and it makes us angrier that people are so inveterately evil and self interested.
And then we step within a camp of otherwise good-willed people. And we’re all stressed, living with Traumatic Stress Disorder (there’s nothing “Post” about it – we’re all constantly living with pain and stress and doubt and fear – and we know that much of it is due to the piggishness of other men). So there we are, in a group TRYING to get things right, and we all turn on each other and fight, like those rats in the electric shock cage test of the 1950s.
Think about Democrats and Republicans, Americans both. So many of them truly hate the others, utterly loathe them. They can cooperate, at work, with “The Man” sitting on their collective heads, but if they try to meet to DO something about it, they fight.
It isn’t possible to find all of the correct answers, because there are an infinite number of questions. So what we all seem to do – or perhaps I am projecting here – is anchor on what we know to be true, and then expand out from there.
The trouble with that is that nobody else really cares much about somebody else’s personal views. There’s no power in them. There’s power in politics, science, religion, and money, and people who want to change anything beyond their own lives have to grab onto one or more of those. And when they do, they immediately counter resistance from everybody else.
And that’s why everything has always been a mess, and will remain so.
I do think that, with the right people, things can be reasoned out. You seem reasonable.
It’s called “Finding Truth”, this site. You seem a reasonable fellow. Do you think that we, you and I, could have a discussion? That’d be nice.
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Yeah Dave, you can notice the connection in some of Brandon’s comments.
I think as you, that there are distinctions that could be made between the problem of suffering and the problem of commanded evil (I just named that). There does seem to be a link though between the two which is why a lot of atheists think the problem of suffering alone is enough evidence to counter the idea of an “all good” god. The same link is the reason for the theistic view we see prevalent here.
While I chose not to push it further I still think there is a danger here of justifications of horrific acts. Couldn’t rape of a child be justified with very similar arguments? I can see Brandon coming in with distinctions there, but why ignore the distinctions in genocide? One could use the following similar justifications: “a supreme deity ordered me to rape a child, and a supreme deity knows best – he is all good, and understands why that child needed to be raped for the overall betterment of the universe. We may not understand it, but who are we to question a supreme deity? After all, children are raped naturally anyway, and God created everything knowing that.”
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Hey Crown – if you read all my comments carefully you’ll notice that I’m not always reasonable.
Sure, you and I could have a discussion. I’ve never been keen on or good at debate though, because that involves tactics, and unfortunately debate is an unavoidable side effect of public discussions.
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crown, everybody lies. and when you say you dont’ you are lying.
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demon possessed a-hole!
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“crown, everybody lies. and when you say you dont’ you are lying.”
False.
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Howie – Good! Let’s have a discussion, not a debate.
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“Viewpoint-free serious study does not exist, because it cannot.” – Shhh – don’t anyone tell him about the scientific method, he might go into culture-shock —
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Who knows what might happen if that divine dove ever flew back out of his head?
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The scientific method is executed by human beings, all of whom have a viewpoint and an interest in doing what they are doing.
Viewpoint free science does not and cannot exist, because science is done by humans, and all humans have a viewpoint.
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“Reality is reality” – Until that dove flies out of your head, I’m not certain that that’s a subject you’re qualified to address.
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“We may not understand it, but who are we to question a supreme deity?” – Exactly, Howie – everyone knows that god works in delirious ways.
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“science is done by humans, and all humans have a viewpoint” – I suppose a hypothesis could loosely be called a viewpoint, albeit a very tentative one – you make “viewpoint” sound like a presupposition, rather than a “what if?”.
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@Crown, of the 10 ten best states to live in American, according to the data from the new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), only one predominately Catholic state, Massachusetts, made the list, at #8. The report ranked all 50 states (plus the District) according to nine different measures of well-being: health, safety, housing, access to broadband, civic engagement, education, jobs, environment, and income.
I will repeat, teaching children about hell is child abuse. It’s sanctified terrorism.
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Crown said to Gary: “As far as God being a murdering son-of-a-bitch, I’ve freely acknowledged that God kills everybody, intentionally. That doesn’t make God a murdering son-of-a-bitch any more than a farmer who raises cattle for slaughter.”
Killing human beings and killing cattle are a moral equivalent?? Are you a member of PETA?
Dear Crown: We have two very different standards of morality. I see no point in continuing to discuss this topic with you.
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