927 thoughts on “What Makes Something Right or Wrong?”
Growing up fundamentalist/evangelical, I was told that as a born-again Christian God would “speak to me”, “move me”, and “lead me” to follow his will. I listened to others talk about how God had spoken, moved, and led them to do this and to do that…but He never did the same for me. I finally decided that God didn’t want me and I left the Church.
Many years later I became an orthodox Lutheran and was told that God doesn’t work like that. The evangelicals are wrong. The voice they are listening to is their own. According to “true” Christianity, God speaks to Christians in only one manner: through his Word, the Bible.
That gave me a lot of peace…until I found out that the “Word” is full of discrepancies, errors, and scribe alterations.
I was very sad (and angry) to find out—it is ALL nonsense.
agreed barry, later in my life I could easily recreate the “spiritual moment” when I’d go dancing at a rave. the good feeling emotions that were all I my head and all of my own making, jumping up and down to groovy music, altering my brain chemistry to experience moments of pure joy.
Gary, I’m such a fan of yours. it IS all nonsense.
I consider myself lucky that I recognized it early in life so that it didn’t make me really sad or angry or disillusioned that it wasn’t real.
just somewhat regretful that I had to endure it.
Gary, the biggest mistake in the Lutheran version of Christianity is Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone), which is the doctrine you describe. That is a dangerous road, as you know, but because of the blended history so many American Christians have with their faith, it does often pervade every denomination – just not as bluntly as Lutheran orthodoxy.
yeah, it’s why many will deny evolution or an old earth, even though that’s what the evidence supports. The bible says it’s 6000 years old, so it is. It says that god made everything as it is, so it was…
It’s odd, because they think their book is from god, when creation would undeniably be from god, yet they take the book revelation over the creation revelation. It’s madness.
It’s like a cop placing a stop sign on a street and then ticketing everyone who stopped at it, because they should have known the sign wasn’t real.
Galileo is a the cautionary tale that all YEC’s should consider. But of course they don’t, rather they say that was the Catholic Church, ‘we would never make the same mistake!’ But they are making a worse mistake, at least the Catholic church recognised they were wrong when the evidence became overwhelming.
Part of the problem is that fundamentalist theological doctrines rely on there being a ‘fall’ of humanity. So if they admit that the Garden of Eden story is fiction then they have to re-do their theology.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for fundamentalists is that Jesus and Paul implied that the stories of Adam & Eve and Noah were real events. Thus if a fundamentalist admits they were not real events it is implying that Jesus and Paul were in error.
As a consequence the more a fundamentalists reflects on these issues the more likely the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
“…at least the Catholic church recognised they were wrong when the evidence became overwhelming.” – Yeah, in the 1990’s, 300 years after Galileo made his discoveries and 30 years after we put men on the moon! Better late than never, right?
“I do not feel obliged to believe that some God who endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect had intended for us to forgo their use.”
— Galileo Galilei —
(1564-1642)
it is unbelievable to me the number racists that claim to be christian. I spent all day yesterday calling them all “ignorant racist phony christians” and this morning my facebook acct is suspended. LOL,
arch that was an interesting read. just more proof church is a money making scam that christians will do “anything” for. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
@Peter, I am not sure if you’re aware of this, but some fundamentalist Christians are now even going as far as to deny that the earth revolves around the sun! In other words, they ACTUALLY advocate for a Terra-centric view of the universe. Here is some evidence of Christians actually debating the issue today (and all because “the Bible clearly says…”). http://bibleforums.org/archive/index.php/t-87698.html
Arch, I go ahead and get started with the story for you.
If you ever want to know what it’s like to be reborn in the ashes from the fires of Hell, that’s pretty much it. I grew up in the church, and from the influence of my mother, eventually made my way into ministry because many other means of employment never seemed to fit. I had a good three year run at a small church in Virginia as a youth minister and found an associate pastor position in Maryland (slightly closer to home) open as my time in Virginia was coming to a close due to budget reasons. The position seemed to be a good platform to launch my career into adult ministry, as I would have helmed the young adult ministry program. However, things quickly took a nose dive once I got there.
The position was sold to me as an almost blank slate that needed new blood and energy. I would get autonomy and be able to be creative in my leadership. On top of that, the church was painted as being a healthy place for children and family. My wife and I went to the interviews (also known as call process) with hope and anticipation, and I was admittedly overly eager about it. Even my children seemed eagerly happy. But within the first month, my middle son started to exhibit fearful behavior when going to church.
At first, we thought it was just him having difficulty with transitioning from church to church, so we kept him in, until my wife became unnerved by one of his reactions, and this prompted me pull him out of the children’s nursery program to do an investigation. For the first few weeks, I started noticing odd behavior from one of the nursery staff, and I started asking other nursery workers how they felt working with her and others. As it turned out, the nursery staff member in question was a problem.
She was often neglectful of nursery rules, left kids either unattended or paid no attention to them – instead gossiping in the hallways with other church staff. She was also the grandmother of a boy who often was aggressive and exhibited behavioral traits of an emotionally troubled child (I was at one time a behavior management specialist at an alternative school and was trained to recognize such behavior). So I did what I thought was the responsible thing to do and notified the senior pastor of the situation, telling him everything I had discovered and he in turn agreed that we needed to confront her and make changes. However, his support stopped there as he invited me to address her, which I did. The result being that my position and reputation was threatened.
I notified her in email that we needed to talk, which then progressed to a phone call to set up a time. During that phone call, she cleverly (and because of my inexperience) drew the information out of me as to why we were meeting. I did my best to be professional and tell her what I had found, but each time she would interupt, talk over, and down right deny my discovery. Within minutes, I also discovered that her husband (a prominent, well-monied deacon) was on the phone listening in. He blind-sighted me with a threat to my position, and basically told that I was not allowed to question him or her. I went back to the senior pastor explaining everything only to discover that he quickly washed his hands of the situation and threw me under the bus.
The next few weeks, the family went on a witch hunt, trying to discover who had “talked bad” about them. They tried to coerce the information out of me – to reveal names of witnesses who shared concerns about their behavior towards children – but I refused. When that didn’t work, they went directly to the senior pastor, and he gave them all the information they needed to root out the “traitors” who then denied what they told me and then tried to accuse me of questionable behavior. The senior pastor then tried to force me to make my son and my other kids a part of the children’s program, even invoking the authority of the church in which the family was to submit. I refused, and then was later asked to resign. I did willingly did after talking with my wife.
The whole experience left me broken. I felt a failure as a man, as a husband, as a father, and a believer. The whole thing was manipulation upon manipulation. The senior even accused me of unknowingly being an agent of Satan, comparing me to Judas. I left with the beginnings of PTSD which manifested several months later (now of which I am thankfully recovered).
I went to other pastors and even leadership coaches to find out what I did wrong. I didn’t hold out any information and tried to be as objective with the details as possible. None could find anything wrong, though one pastor tried to justify and defend the senior pastor’s behavior. It tore my whole world apart and began the long journey in who I am today.
This is as best as I can put it in a nutshell, otherwise, I’d be here all day if not longer. Feel free to ask questions if you like.
The House and Senate have both proposed budget bills that would drastically cut funding for the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative (TPPI) by up to 90% and astronomically increase funding for abstinence-only sex education programs by up to 300%.
Man this sucks. I am almost 100% sure that this will result in more teen pregnancies and higher abortion rates….. Then I guess the fundies can blame Satan or Hilary Clinton for the decline of USA
Yes, Peter, that seemed to be their attitude. They were more interested in being in the right, and that meant protecting their false reputation in church with a few key people of being “such good, godly Christians folk.”
The pastor was more concerned about preserving an image of family friendliness to visitors than to deal with the problem, and having an associate pastor whose children were not involved “raised too many questions,” about the safety of their church (not to mention a whole slew of other things I found out during the course of the investigation and the weeks prior to my resignation). That church was of a severe sickly sort, and I was led blind to believe everything was just fine there until shit hit the fan. The senior justified his nondisclosure of details during the call process by saying “well I wasn’t going to tell you everything, you needed to find out for yourself.” Yes, by putting kids in harms way so you don’t have to deal with it.
Barry the Churches response to your concerns mirrors the type of thinking that led to the child abuse scandals in churches a generation earlier. Have these people learnt nothing?
Perhaps they think, ‘oh that was the catholic church, we are different’.
If people do not learn from the past, they are doomed to repeat it.
When I was still a Christian I struggled to understand how it was that the non Christians I knew seemed just as much, if not more, decent people than the Christians. I could not understand how Albert Schweitzer could have rejected Christianity and yet been such a noble human.
I now wonder whether much of the ‘love’ displayed by Christians is sort of forced, because they think that is what they must do. Whilst underneath they sort of resent having to pretend to be decent people.
Then again I suspect many might believe their own publicity and never consider these things at all.
I know how hard it was for me to dare to question whether it as all a human construct and not divine.
“Feel free to ask questions if you like.” – No Barry, I think you’ve pretty much said it all. You inti.mated some of this on Think Atheist, but I never knew the whole story until now.
The more I hear about Christians in general, the more inclined I am to stay as far away from them as I can.
“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”
— Mohandas Gandhi —
“Then I guess the fundies can blame Satan or Hilary Clinton for the decline of USA” – They’ll find something, other than their own narrow-minded thinking, you can count on that.
Arch, I use something along the same lines as Gandhi nowadays when approaching the topic of religion – specifically Christianity. When I told my mother that I was not a Christian it left her very much confused, but when I explained it to her in the manner that reflected Gandhi’s quote she seemed to accept things better, though we didn’t dig deep into the nitty-gritty of it all. I had to assure her not to worry for my soul.
As for others, I tend to avoid religious conversation when it comes to talking to most Christians. They come off very ignorant with such certainty that they are right, and that makes it impossible to have anything valuable to say. I just don’t have time to waste on someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. There’s no mystery to explore and nothing new to discover – it’s a dull existence with those types, and a headache to hear anything through their shouting.
When it comes to others challenging me on my position regarding faith, I seem to be able to wrapped things up by simply tell them that I am at peace with my decision. It’s a silent jab at them, subliminally informing the recipient that they are not at peace with their own and I know it. Most of the time, if they are listening, it shuts them up.
“They come off very ignorant with such certainty that they are right, and that makes it impossible to have anything valuable to say.” – Stick around, Barry, you never know when unklE is going to pop back in.
Finding Truth 
Growing up fundamentalist/evangelical, I was told that as a born-again Christian God would “speak to me”, “move me”, and “lead me” to follow his will. I listened to others talk about how God had spoken, moved, and led them to do this and to do that…but He never did the same for me. I finally decided that God didn’t want me and I left the Church.
Many years later I became an orthodox Lutheran and was told that God doesn’t work like that. The evangelicals are wrong. The voice they are listening to is their own. According to “true” Christianity, God speaks to Christians in only one manner: through his Word, the Bible.
That gave me a lot of peace…until I found out that the “Word” is full of discrepancies, errors, and scribe alterations.
I was very sad (and angry) to find out—it is ALL nonsense.
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agreed barry, later in my life I could easily recreate the “spiritual moment” when I’d go dancing at a rave. the good feeling emotions that were all I my head and all of my own making, jumping up and down to groovy music, altering my brain chemistry to experience moments of pure joy.
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Gary, I’m such a fan of yours. it IS all nonsense.
I consider myself lucky that I recognized it early in life so that it didn’t make me really sad or angry or disillusioned that it wasn’t real.
just somewhat regretful that I had to endure it.
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Yes, it is amazing to one day realize that it was THEM, not me, that had the problem. They were hearing voices. I was the sane one who did not.
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Gary, the biggest mistake in the Lutheran version of Christianity is Sola Scriptura (Scripture Alone), which is the doctrine you describe. That is a dangerous road, as you know, but because of the blended history so many American Christians have with their faith, it does often pervade every denomination – just not as bluntly as Lutheran orthodoxy.
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yeah, it’s why many will deny evolution or an old earth, even though that’s what the evidence supports. The bible says it’s 6000 years old, so it is. It says that god made everything as it is, so it was…
It’s odd, because they think their book is from god, when creation would undeniably be from god, yet they take the book revelation over the creation revelation. It’s madness.
It’s like a cop placing a stop sign on a street and then ticketing everyone who stopped at it, because they should have known the sign wasn’t real.
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This is really well worth reading:
http://valerietarico.com/2015/06/23/churches-get-creepy-facial-recognition-software/
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William that is a very good analogy.
Galileo is a the cautionary tale that all YEC’s should consider. But of course they don’t, rather they say that was the Catholic Church, ‘we would never make the same mistake!’ But they are making a worse mistake, at least the Catholic church recognised they were wrong when the evidence became overwhelming.
Part of the problem is that fundamentalist theological doctrines rely on there being a ‘fall’ of humanity. So if they admit that the Garden of Eden story is fiction then they have to re-do their theology.
Perhaps the biggest stumbling block for fundamentalists is that Jesus and Paul implied that the stories of Adam & Eve and Noah were real events. Thus if a fundamentalist admits they were not real events it is implying that Jesus and Paul were in error.
As a consequence the more a fundamentalists reflects on these issues the more likely the whole house of cards will come crashing down.
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“…at least the Catholic church recognised they were wrong when the evidence became overwhelming.” – Yeah, in the 1990’s, 300 years after Galileo made his discoveries and 30 years after we put men on the moon! Better late than never, right?
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it is unbelievable to me the number racists that claim to be christian. I spent all day yesterday calling them all “ignorant racist phony christians” and this morning my facebook acct is suspended. LOL,
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arch that was an interesting read. just more proof church is a money making scam that christians will do “anything” for. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
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Was it something you said –?
Hey, come on over to https://attaleuntold.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/so-you-think-you-are-a-christian-do-you and have a chat with “GodsManForever” – things have quieted a bit now, but yesterday, it was hopping!
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@Peter, I am not sure if you’re aware of this, but some fundamentalist Christians are now even going as far as to deny that the earth revolves around the sun! In other words, they ACTUALLY advocate for a Terra-centric view of the universe. Here is some evidence of Christians actually debating the issue today (and all because “the Bible clearly says…”). http://bibleforums.org/archive/index.php/t-87698.html
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Arch, I go ahead and get started with the story for you.
If you ever want to know what it’s like to be reborn in the ashes from the fires of Hell, that’s pretty much it. I grew up in the church, and from the influence of my mother, eventually made my way into ministry because many other means of employment never seemed to fit. I had a good three year run at a small church in Virginia as a youth minister and found an associate pastor position in Maryland (slightly closer to home) open as my time in Virginia was coming to a close due to budget reasons. The position seemed to be a good platform to launch my career into adult ministry, as I would have helmed the young adult ministry program. However, things quickly took a nose dive once I got there.
The position was sold to me as an almost blank slate that needed new blood and energy. I would get autonomy and be able to be creative in my leadership. On top of that, the church was painted as being a healthy place for children and family. My wife and I went to the interviews (also known as call process) with hope and anticipation, and I was admittedly overly eager about it. Even my children seemed eagerly happy. But within the first month, my middle son started to exhibit fearful behavior when going to church.
At first, we thought it was just him having difficulty with transitioning from church to church, so we kept him in, until my wife became unnerved by one of his reactions, and this prompted me pull him out of the children’s nursery program to do an investigation. For the first few weeks, I started noticing odd behavior from one of the nursery staff, and I started asking other nursery workers how they felt working with her and others. As it turned out, the nursery staff member in question was a problem.
She was often neglectful of nursery rules, left kids either unattended or paid no attention to them – instead gossiping in the hallways with other church staff. She was also the grandmother of a boy who often was aggressive and exhibited behavioral traits of an emotionally troubled child (I was at one time a behavior management specialist at an alternative school and was trained to recognize such behavior). So I did what I thought was the responsible thing to do and notified the senior pastor of the situation, telling him everything I had discovered and he in turn agreed that we needed to confront her and make changes. However, his support stopped there as he invited me to address her, which I did. The result being that my position and reputation was threatened.
I notified her in email that we needed to talk, which then progressed to a phone call to set up a time. During that phone call, she cleverly (and because of my inexperience) drew the information out of me as to why we were meeting. I did my best to be professional and tell her what I had found, but each time she would interupt, talk over, and down right deny my discovery. Within minutes, I also discovered that her husband (a prominent, well-monied deacon) was on the phone listening in. He blind-sighted me with a threat to my position, and basically told that I was not allowed to question him or her. I went back to the senior pastor explaining everything only to discover that he quickly washed his hands of the situation and threw me under the bus.
The next few weeks, the family went on a witch hunt, trying to discover who had “talked bad” about them. They tried to coerce the information out of me – to reveal names of witnesses who shared concerns about their behavior towards children – but I refused. When that didn’t work, they went directly to the senior pastor, and he gave them all the information they needed to root out the “traitors” who then denied what they told me and then tried to accuse me of questionable behavior. The senior pastor then tried to force me to make my son and my other kids a part of the children’s program, even invoking the authority of the church in which the family was to submit. I refused, and then was later asked to resign. I did willingly did after talking with my wife.
The whole experience left me broken. I felt a failure as a man, as a husband, as a father, and a believer. The whole thing was manipulation upon manipulation. The senior even accused me of unknowingly being an agent of Satan, comparing me to Judas. I left with the beginnings of PTSD which manifested several months later (now of which I am thankfully recovered).
I went to other pastors and even leadership coaches to find out what I did wrong. I didn’t hold out any information and tried to be as objective with the details as possible. None could find anything wrong, though one pastor tried to justify and defend the senior pastor’s behavior. It tore my whole world apart and began the long journey in who I am today.
This is as best as I can put it in a nutshell, otherwise, I’d be here all day if not longer. Feel free to ask questions if you like.
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CALLING ALL AMERICANS –
This just in —
Take a minute to drop a note to your legislators here: http://cqrcengage.com/secular/app/write-a-letter?0&engagementId=112833
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@Arch
Seriously?
Man this sucks. I am almost 100% sure that this will result in more teen pregnancies and higher abortion rates….. Then I guess the fundies can blame Satan or Hilary Clinton for the decline of USA
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Barry that is a tragic story. But unfortunately not an unusual one.
One of the aspects that caused me to question faith was the behaviour of Christians. The experience and behaviour did not seem to match the rhetoric.
I suppose if they think they have ‘God’ on their side then they must be right.
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Yes, Peter, that seemed to be their attitude. They were more interested in being in the right, and that meant protecting their false reputation in church with a few key people of being “such good, godly Christians folk.”
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The pastor was more concerned about preserving an image of family friendliness to visitors than to deal with the problem, and having an associate pastor whose children were not involved “raised too many questions,” about the safety of their church (not to mention a whole slew of other things I found out during the course of the investigation and the weeks prior to my resignation). That church was of a severe sickly sort, and I was led blind to believe everything was just fine there until shit hit the fan. The senior justified his nondisclosure of details during the call process by saying “well I wasn’t going to tell you everything, you needed to find out for yourself.” Yes, by putting kids in harms way so you don’t have to deal with it.
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Barry the Churches response to your concerns mirrors the type of thinking that led to the child abuse scandals in churches a generation earlier. Have these people learnt nothing?
Perhaps they think, ‘oh that was the catholic church, we are different’.
If people do not learn from the past, they are doomed to repeat it.
When I was still a Christian I struggled to understand how it was that the non Christians I knew seemed just as much, if not more, decent people than the Christians. I could not understand how Albert Schweitzer could have rejected Christianity and yet been such a noble human.
I now wonder whether much of the ‘love’ displayed by Christians is sort of forced, because they think that is what they must do. Whilst underneath they sort of resent having to pretend to be decent people.
Then again I suspect many might believe their own publicity and never consider these things at all.
I know how hard it was for me to dare to question whether it as all a human construct and not divine.
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“Feel free to ask questions if you like.” – No Barry, I think you’ve pretty much said it all. You inti.mated some of this on Think Atheist, but I never knew the whole story until now.
The more I hear about Christians in general, the more inclined I am to stay as far away from them as I can.
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“Then I guess the fundies can blame Satan or Hilary Clinton for the decline of USA” – They’ll find something, other than their own narrow-minded thinking, you can count on that.
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Arch, I use something along the same lines as Gandhi nowadays when approaching the topic of religion – specifically Christianity. When I told my mother that I was not a Christian it left her very much confused, but when I explained it to her in the manner that reflected Gandhi’s quote she seemed to accept things better, though we didn’t dig deep into the nitty-gritty of it all. I had to assure her not to worry for my soul.
As for others, I tend to avoid religious conversation when it comes to talking to most Christians. They come off very ignorant with such certainty that they are right, and that makes it impossible to have anything valuable to say. I just don’t have time to waste on someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. There’s no mystery to explore and nothing new to discover – it’s a dull existence with those types, and a headache to hear anything through their shouting.
When it comes to others challenging me on my position regarding faith, I seem to be able to wrapped things up by simply tell them that I am at peace with my decision. It’s a silent jab at them, subliminally informing the recipient that they are not at peace with their own and I know it. Most of the time, if they are listening, it shuts them up.
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“They come off very ignorant with such certainty that they are right, and that makes it impossible to have anything valuable to say.” – Stick around, Barry, you never know when unklE is going to pop back in.
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“Stick around, Barry, you never know when unklE is going to pop back in.”
looooooool
stay classy Arch.
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