My life story, Part 33 and 1/3.....err....I mean Part 3

As I mentioned last time, when I graduated college I had no job and ended up moving in with my parents.  I was jobless, I interviewed with several churches for youth minister positions, but my heart was not really in it.  Either because they could tell or for some other reason I was not hired for any of the positions I interviewed for.  So I ended up working in numerous bad jobs, a 12 hour shift at a factory for about 6 months, Wal-Mart for about a year.

During my first year out of college I had a lot of time to think and reflect on things.  I had steadily become more liberal in my theology over the last year of college.  Biblical inerrancy had gone fairly early, which led me to doubt quite a bit of my religion as time wore on.  If college only did one thing for me, it made me good at research so I began reading a lot, both on other religions and on science.  I began to realize that many ideas I had taken to be true for years had no basis in reality.

I had read many anti-evolution books written by apologists that had told me that evolution was unscientific, was a lie, was nothing but a creation story for evil unbelievers....etc. I wondered if this was as true as I was told, so for the first time in my life I actually started reading the science.  What I found was astounding.  I had been told constantly that there were no good scientific answers for many of the "problems" that were put forward by apologists.  Not only were their good answers, many times I found that that the very questions that were being asked by apologists made it painfully obvious they were totally ignorant of some of the most basic ideas in the theory.  With even a small amount of knowledge most of the anti-evolution rhetoric did not even make sense, much less make a coherent case against the science.

To put it mildly, I was angry, I felt I had been lied too, but I still had to admit that this in itself did not mean that Christianity was totally false.  I had already abandoned the idea that the bible was scientifically inerrant several months earlier, but perhaps it was still valid as a spiritual/moral guide.  However, the more I read the bible the more I doubted its quality as a guide for anything.  Just as with evolution I began reading works by various people who took issue with various teachings within Christianity.  I wanted to disagree with them, but I could find no counter-arguments against any thing I read.  Instead I began to see passage after passage full of "moral" laws that would seem harsh in communist China.

About a year after I had graduated I remember being up at about 3:00 A.M. working through my thoughts and trying to figure how I was going to continue believing after all I had learned.  All at once a thought occurred to me that I had not considered.  I did not need to keep believing.  In fact, I was pretty certain I already did not believe.  I prayed for the last time ever on that night; I asked god to give me some proof or reason to believe.  I felt nothing, then I said to myself, "well that's it then," and went to bed.

After that night I realized I had no idea who I was anymore.  I had spent the last 6 or 7 years of my life defining everything I was by way of my religion.  I ended up getting back into a lot of hobbies I had previously denied myself, gaming, anime etc.  I also tried looking into other religions, but invariably found that they had the same unfounded assertions and questionable beliefs.

At some point I realized that most of the reasons I rejected Christianity could be applied to every religion I studied.  They all contained bald assertions which they offered no proof for.  I began to read a lot of information written by atheists and agreed with most of what they said, but I was a bit skeptical of the claim that one could know there was no god.  Eventually, I realized that being an atheist was not about rejecting the possibility of a god, instead it was simply an rejection of the unsupported claim that he does exist.  I realized at that point that I had been an atheist for quite a while without knowing it.  This was a rather shocking revelation to me.  My liberal religion professors viewed atheists as narrow minded, and my conservative back ground in religion had drilled into me the notion that all atheists were immoral, or at least had no reason to be moral.  As someone who had rejected Christianity because I found many teachings to be immoral I wondered if being an atheist somehow defeated my own argument. 

I wont go in to detail here about how I settled those issues in my own mind, but reading my regular posts should reveal that anyway.  In any case, I did settle these things in my own mind, and eventually became the well adjusted, awesome, genius guy that I am today. (also humble)

Busy life

Sorry I have not been keeping up with my blog lately, I have had lots of things going on in my life the last few weeks.  I should be getting part 3 of my religious deconversion out in the next day or so.  Hopefully regular updates will resume at that point.

My life story, Part II

Me in college

As I said in my last post, my parents decided to take me back to church.  We started attending a small Methodist church, and not long after my parents discovered a local Christian radio station that rebroadcasted many things from Focus on the Family.  They slowly started becoming much more conservative in their religious beliefs.  When I was eighteen I was baptized in the same church we attended.

Not long after that we moved, I ended up doing home school my last two years of high school because we had to move several times and it would have been too much work starting new schools every couple of months.  This hurt my science education, but at the time I really didn't care, nor even realize I was being shorted.  I still managed to get into a good private college, Hendrix, in central Arkansas.

Yes I am in this photo, top row 6th from the left

During freshman orientation I met several people who were involved in a campus ministry called Student Mobilization. This group was heavily focused on mission work and evangelism.  I became increasingly focused on religion, I even decided to major in religious studies, with the plan of becoming a pastor or something along those lines.  My first two summers I went to a summer retreat with Student Mobilization to teach me how to be a better evangelist.  I stopped playing video games very much by the end of my sophomore year because several people in the ministry thought it was a waste of time that could be better spent sharing the gospel with other students.  I gave up listening to secular music and only listened to Christian rock, which except for 3 or 4 bands is almost universally horrible. I ended up giving up many things that made me who I was in a effort to fit in.

During this time I believed myself to be happy, after all I had friends that I fit in with, a group to belong too, and, of course, I was "saved."  However, there were a few dark clouds.  I occasionally felt like I didn't fit very well, like religion was the only thing I had in common with many of my friends.  I still "struggled" with pornography from time to time.  (there is a masturbation joke waiting to be made there but I will resist the urge) Also, I had niggling doubts about things, particularly theology.  These issues would occasionally make me depressed but I mostly ignored this stuff.

My first real doubts about religion came after my third year of college.  I did not attend Student Mobilization's camp that year, instead I decided to go on a mission trip to India, and I did this by going through another group that some people in Student Mobilization recommended to me.  I ended up in Calcutta for the summer, and as it turns out more than half of the group I was with came from a charismatic Pentecostal background.  I had, of course, read about these groups in classes and had talked with a few before.  However, as a guy with a background in Methodist, Baptist, and Non-denominational churches I had never been in the middle of a large group of people charismatic Christians.  The way the approached religion was so different than I did that it was hard to relate to them.  For instance, I believed in demons, but was rational enough to know how germ theory worked.  Therefore, when I got sick I went to the doctor or took some medicine.  I didn't blame demons for things that were caused by completely natural causes.  However, most of these people did blame demons, and wanted to pray over people, and preform faith healings on them when they got sick.  I thought it was common sense, we were living in a strange country with all sorts of germs we were not accustomed too, it was more likely for us to get sick than back home.  I felt like I had stepped 400 years back in time while speaking to some of my fellow missionaries.

Furthermore, some of them had prayed over me to receive the gift of speaking in tongues.  I felt nothing, but eventually I just started speaking gibberish because I was rather uncomfortable and wanted out of the situation.  I was certain they would see through the ploy, but instead they fell for it.  I knew I was not doing anything but spouting nonsense, there was no mystical experience.  There was just...nothing.

These events gave me pause, especially when I got home and had time to reflect.  The position they took would have seemed perfectly reasonable a few hundred years ago, and in fact seemed scripturally sound.  My thoughts on these things were more scientifically based, and they had thought I was not a faithful enough Christian because of it.  The question that came to my mind was how much of my own beliefs were might seem just as crazy to someone else.  I didn't have a good answer, but I did not like the implication of my thoughts.

The year after I came back from India the ministry I was involved in had a change of leadership on my campus.  They guy who took over had been a friend of mine for several years so I was naturally supportive of what he was doing.  However, he ended up being rather controlling and making massive changes to the ministry.  Many of these changes ended up pushing me out much of my active role there, the biggest of which was the shut down of the meeting in which I played guitar for the worship band.  I felt a bit put out by this, but still tried to support him.

I ended up staying in college for a 5th year for various reasons, at this point the new leader became almost hostile to me, he told me outright that I was "not submitted enough to the authorities that god had placed in my life," and told me that he would not write any recommendation for me to join any ministry upon graduation. (which was still a career goal of mine at this point.)  I can only guess this was because I was developing a habit of asking uncomfortable theological question, and because I did not share certain personality traits he found were needed for being a evangelist.  At the same time he decided to start a new weekly meeting for the ministry, and unsurprisingly he did not ask me to be in the worship band.  He instead picked a "disciple" of his that he clearly liked better than me.

Of course since I was a 5th year student most of my closest friends who would have defended me had already left, so with no one to turn to I was quickly ignored.  I became depressed, stopped attending church, barely paid attention to my classes and as a result almost didn't graduate.  I ended up a credit short and had to take a summer class to get my diploma, and on top of that I had no job prospects when I graduated since any ministry was going to ask for references, which I knew I would not get.  Plus I was having serious questions about my religion which no one, not even God, seemed to be able to answer.  By the time I finished college I was an emotional wreck.

I'll leave this to be finished in part 3, don't worry, it will end on a happier note.  Haven't you guys ever been to the movies?  Trilogies always look worst for the protagonist at the end of part 2.

Jesus dance

For those of you who think I am going to hell for my atheism here is a video I found on YouTube made by someone who may well end up there first.  This video made me smile.

UFO meeting in the phoenix area

UFOs are talk of the town in Fountain Hills

I did not know this until I saw a local news report on TV, but apparently Arizona is hosting one of the largest UFO conferences in the United States this year.  They will be in town till this Sunday.

I had a good laugh at the news report.  One minute you had a guy trying to convince everyone that this wasn't a group of people who belonged in a loony bin, and the next minute a person was telling the interviewer that they were only 23% human and the rest of them was made up of various other alien species.  They never said which parts were which.  How many people wanna bet that if we took a sample of their DNA it would look 100% human?

On the other hand the largest UFO conference is only slated to have about 1,000 attendees, so maybe people aren't quite as gullible as I sometimes think they are.

My life story, Part I

Me at around thirteen.

My blog has been up and running for well over a month now, and I seem to actually be getting a few readers.  I am happy about this, though I doubt I will ever be as well known as blogs like Pharyngula or Atheist Experience, we will just have to wait and see.  In any case, I mention over in the "about me" section that I was once a fundamentalist Christian, which is something that I am sure will leave some readers curious about how I got to where I am today.  This being the case I thought I would write a few posts explaining the journey that got me here. 

In this first part I am going to talk a bit about my early life, before I became a Christian, leading up to why I converted in the first place.

In my preteen years I did not get along with people my own age very well, and often hung out with adults.  From a young age my parents cared about education, they read to me, encouraged me to read and told me to use a dictionary if I didn't know what a word meant.  I was reading books like "The Lord of the Rings" by the time I was twelve so it should not be surprising that I had a college level vocabulary before I started Jr. High.  Don't get me wrong, I did normal kid things as well, but I often did not fit in well with other people my age.

Since I was picked on a lot I became even more introverted throughout Jr. High, and high school.  When I was about fourteen I started learning computers which didn't much help my status as a nerd, since this was back in the early 90's when very few people knew much about them.

Through most of this time I gave very little thought to religion, I would have said I believed in god, I also would have said I believed in evolution, but I knew very little of religion or of science, nor did I really care about them.  I had my fantasy/sci-fi books, my video games and my computers so I didn't really care about any of this.

Things changed when I was around sixteen, my parents caught me reading some pornography.  *gasp* *shock* a sixteen year old male reading porn?  Say it ain't so.  Well, to much of the world this might have seemed rather innocuous, even expected, but to my parents it was a sign that I was on the proverbial highway to hell.  My parents had been more religious when they were younger, and in their wisdom decided they needed to take the family back to church so they could "fix" me.

I resented it at first, but at the same time the church offered a place to belong and fit in.  Christianity even often sells itself in this way, and for a social misfit like me this appealed to me greatly, so I gave it a chance and over a period of a year or two I came to believe in Christianity.

I will end here for part I.  In Part II I will speak about my religious experience, and my descent into fundamentalism.

Sometimes religious people get it right

Debunking Church-State Separation Myths

I ran across this article yesterday, by a Baptist of all people, written debunking many myths about church-state separation that are spread by the religious right.

Everyone knows how often I rant about church state separation and how seldom religious leaders seem to understand its importance.  This being the case, I thought it important to point out a religious leader who has it right.

With a few exceptions most of this article could have been written by me.  I suggest everyone go give it a read.

Bible studies in public shools

Bible Classes In Public Schools Debated

So Kentucky it trying to push a bill through offering a bible study class in public schools.  I know, hard to believe from the state that brought us the Creation Science Museum, but its true. Not really much to be said here, though the article does start out with the writer parroting the old canard:

Did you know the well-used governing phrase is not in the U.S. constitution?

This tells me that the writer clearly needed a better history education not more Bible study while he was in school.

Personally I have no problem with teaching students about the bible if it is done from a secular perspective.  I strongly believe that most people who read the bible in a more scholarly fashion will come away with more doubts about Christianity, not fewer, so by all means have the kids seriously study it using modern historiography.

I do doubt, however, that a teacher who refers to the bible as "the holy book" is the correct choice for such a endeavor.  I suspect that he will spend much of his time telling his students why Christianity is true and far better than all those "heathen" religions.  Though considering he admits to already using the bible in other classes he may well be doing that already.  

I also found some of the comments on this article rather funny as well.  One in particular by a person who's screen name read "praise God."  He says:

God is the forefront of this country!!! Religion should BE our schools!! maybe then we wouldnt have so much violence in this world...    ...it is also possible that a Bible class could cut down on teen suicide..think about it!! kudos to this school!! God Bless!!

So horrible writing aside, (does he really need exclamation points after everything?) I found this funny since a study of history shows that religious beliefs seem to have no correlative effect on the level of violence in a society.  Furthermore, it is also true that the level of violence in most modern societies are lower than they ever have been in human history. 

Further, one group of teenagers that have a suicide problem are gay students, and I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest there might be a correlation between gay bashing and passages in the bible like Leviticus 20:13 which says,

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

In short this bill seems to be a thinly veiled attempt to use the government to push religious teachings on students.  hopefully it will be seen as such by the Kentucky house of representatives who are currently debating the bill...but I wouldn't count on it.