Truth and Numbers

I've been reading and listening to podcasts in every spare moment, taking in a ton of new information.  When I haven't been doing that, I've been rolling it all around in my head, trying to process it.  Here are a few points that have stood out to me in the last day or two.

Denominations

I heard the other day on the Atheist Experience podcast that there are 38,000 distinct Christian sects.  They didn't cite the source of that number, and I am not sure how a sect differs from a denomination, but I don't think it really matters as far as the point that it led me to.  This wikipedia page sufficiently demonstrates that there are lots of subgroups within Christianity, and if you look at the timelines, you can see that over time, we end up with more subgroups, rather than less.  Supposedly the Bible is the one source of truth on this planet, but over time believers of the bible fragment further and further as they interpret it differently.

On the other hand, you have science.  Science attempts to discover all that can be known about the world we live in.  What hit me over the head the other day is how significant it is that science does the exact opposite of what Christianity does.  On the timeline, you see convergence rather than divergence.  That is to say, there are not 38,000 different beliefs on the law of gravity.  As far as I know, there are not even 2 different beliefs on gravity.  We just have the one.

So with Christianity, they started with the whole and absolute truth (The Bible), and over time they drift and drift apart, where in Science, they started with hypothesis and theories, and they gradually zero in on a single thing that we can all agree on.

Sure, you can find examples in science today where there is disagreement.  But over time, do you think the number of views on any given theory will increase or decrease?

Another thing I wonder.  Have Christian sects/denominations ever merged?  Have 2 groups ever decided that they did, after all, agree on a point, and that their division was no longer necessary?

Pi

While reading Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, I was actually surprised to find something I never knew was in the Bible before.  It makes a significantly poor use of Pi in two places.  Additionally, in the two locations it describes containers of the same dimensions, but gives two significantly different calculations of the volumes of those containers.  Not what I would expect from divinely inspired texts.  Here are the two verses:

1 Kings 7:23-26 (New International Version)

 ²³ He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. ²⁴ Below the rim, gourds encircled it—ten to a cubit. The gourds were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
 ²⁵ The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. ²⁶ It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held two thousand baths.

2 Chronicles 4:2-5 (New International Version)

² He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it. ³ Below the rim, figures of bulls encircled it—ten to a cubit. The bulls were cast in two rows in one piece with the Sea.
 ⁴ The Sea stood on twelve bulls, three facing north, three facing west, three facing south and three facing east. The Sea rested on top of them, and their hindquarters were toward the center. ⁵ It was a handbreadth in thickness, and its rim was like the rim of a cup, like a lily blossom. It held three thousand baths.

Changing Focus

I've been out of town for about a week.  During my trip, I read the first 50% of The God Delusion (TGD).  I have to say that I'm actually liking Dawkins a little bit.  When I first encountered him on youtube and Ben Stein's movie Expelled, I thought he was an arrogant asshole.  Looking back, I think I felt that way because he very confidently and matter-of-factly dismissed my dearly held beliefs as absurd, childish, and silly.  Now that I'm looking at the world a little more open mindedly, I actually find him to be a fairly easy to listen to guy.

As I read through the book, I didn't feel offended, but rather inspired to think and question.  I like that he admits where science currently doesn't have a good answer, such as how the universe and matter originated.  I can accept that just because we don't have an answer now, doesn't mean that we won't eventually. 

There are many places, though, where he talks about evolution as though it's the most obvious thing in the world.  I understand, in principle, how it works, but I'm not quite to the point where I can "see" how life comes from chemicals, or how a series of minor changes can bridge the "irreducably complex" gaps that the creationists love to harp on.  It's not that I don't think I can understand that.  I'd just like more information, and maybe some more examples.  I'm sure those subjects would take books upon books to cover, and I don't blame Dawkins for glossing over the details when he only has a chapter to dedicate to the topic.  I just need to dig in and find more information on that myself.

Ironically, reading his book has actually brought me a little bit closer to favoring the possibility of some sort of a God or creator.  That may be a bit of an overstatement.  I guess a better way to put it is that I don't have as much confidence in his point of view on the origin of the universe, or on the origin of life, as I have in his criticisms of the accuracy of the Bible, or the fact that the Bible seems to be anything but a perfect source of morals.  Because of that, I'm temporarily changing the scope of my research.  Rather than take a timeout to study up on science to the point where I can really understand evolution, or the lack of requirement for a creator, I think I want to limit my current question to "Does the God of the Bible exist, and is the Bible His complete and accurate word?"  I'm becoming more and more satisfied that the Bible is full of contradictions and ugliness, so assuming that I end up making the conclusion that the Bible is not the true word of God, then I'll feel free to widen the question to "Does any God exist?"

I know a lot of atheists out there are probably wondering why, if I'm starting to think that the Christian God doesn't exist, would I wonder if some other God exists.  All I can say is that I want to be thorough and cautious, and it's pretty hard to undo 37 years of beliefs in just a few weeks.

On a side note, I have noticed one amusing thing about the process.  When I was a Christian, it was always difficult for me to find the motivation to read my Bible.  I've always loved reading fiction.  To make sure I read my Bible, I used to just enforce the rule that I could not read any fiction in a day until I'd read 1 chapter of the Bible.  I had to force myself to concentrate, and much of the time I ended up going through the motions, moreso than actually reading and taking the message to heart.  The New Testament was a little easier, but all the lineages and such in the OT were just boring, and I could never understand how they were supposed to be important to my life.  On the other hand, now that I'm reading books like TGD and The God Virus (TGV), I can't wait to get home and read.  I spend hours a day reading, because I want to.  I've quit playing any games on my PS3, because I am excited to read as much as I can to help me figure out what my life is all about. 

Question 26 on godisimaginary.com asks "Why doesn't a book written by God leave you with a sense of wonder and amazement?"  Although there have been a few times in my Christian life where the Bible left me feeling some awe and amazement, much more of the time I didn't feel that way at all.  The OT mostly left me feeling confused or even doubtful.  TGD and TGV, on the other hand, are thoughtful almost through and through.  How could a book written by an omniscient being be dull and confusing, and books written by mere mortals captivate my attention so well?

Becoming Active in the Process

After realizing that I did not have an answer for the question "why won't God heal amputees?"that I was satisfied with, I stalled for about a year.  Part of it was that I was afraid of what answer I'd find if I questioned my religion or the existence of my God.  Aside from that, was the fact that I really didn't know where to start.  If I could suddenly question my worldview after 1/3 of a century of believing it, how could I possibly start to reevaluate it all?  How could I read any other opposing point of view and evaluate it as true or false if it was possible I'd already failed to do so with my previous beliefs?  Should I start by reading the Bible some more?  Should I read more Christian apologetics?  Should I watch more Christians vs Atheist debates on youtube?  Should I look into other religions?

Two things finally prompted me into action.  First, the Fear Factory song "Final Exit" based on the book of the same name, kept finding its way into my playlist (I use random playlists).  Every time I listened to it, I imagined various scenarios where I may be involved in decisions of life or death.  I imagined my wife and daughter making that decision about me as I lay sick in a hospital bed.  I imagined having to make that decision about both my wife and daughter.  That's not fun stuff to think about.  Worse, is that I kinda like the song, so the chorus was stuck in my head for days, prompting me to keep thinking about it.  It kept reminding me that, where I'd once been very confident of what to expect from my death, I now was less sure about it than I'd ever been.

Right about the time I quit thinking about the song, some insurance salesmen came to our office to peddle life insurance.  After talking to them, and deciding to beef up my own life insurance benefits, it just drove home the fact that I'm nearly 40, and that death is inescapable. Regardless of my beliefs, doubts, or lack of beliefs, I am coming to terms with the fact that I am going to die one of these days and find out what's waiting for me on the other side.  Two or three weekends ago, with these thoughts on my mind, I actually broke down crying in front of my wife.  She asked me what was up, so I spilled the beans and told her what I'd been thinking about as of late.  I let her know that I was mostly upset because I no longer believe I know what's going to happen to me when I die.  I also confessed that I was feeling guilty over having a 3 year old daughter, and that I didn't even know what to teach her in regards to death.  I spent a lifetime believing that it was a parents job to raise your children to be disciples of Christ, and I have only taken my daughter to church one time in her life.  Risking my own soul to hell bothers me, but possibly risking my daughter's feels infinitely worse.  I felt like I'd let her down by being too paralyzed to actually make any decisions about my beliefs, or what to teach her.

My wife was pretty cool about it.  She was very supportive, and encouraged me to just start searching and figuring things out.  Funny.  She didn't tell me that everything was going to be OK when I died.  She didn't pray for me.  All she did was encourage me to look around at the information in the world and see what I could find.

Here we are, 2 or so weeks later, and I've done quite a bit.  I've read all 50 proofs at godisimaginary.com, as well as the book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture.  The funny thing is that I think I could have easily blown them off a few years back.  I could have offered an excuse or explanation for every point that they made.  But once I started to doubt, the sorts of questions that these authors ask stab into me like knives.  I'm realizing that for the first time in my life, I'm in a place where I can honestly value points of view that I previously only did my best to explain away.  I did consider myself open minded, and I'd always listen to another point of view, but I guess I never really gave them the respect they deserved before recently.  Anyway, after actually doing some reading and thinking, I have to say I'm feeling better.  I have, by no means, permanently made up my mind, but I am leaning in favor of the Bible not being the 100% accurate and infallible word of God right now.  I certainly plan to keep taking in and considering a lot of information from as many different points of view as I have the time and patience for.  I'm finding that I'm actually way more excited about this process than I ever thought I'd be.  Regardless of what I ultimately settle on, this is important stuff.  Where I used to fear not knowing what to teach my daughter, I now look forward to telling her what I believe, what I'm not sure about, and what I'm doing to try to figure it all out.   I'm also actually kind of relieved that I haven't taken her to church yet.  Rather than teach her something I'm unsure of when she's too young to think critically about it, We're going to wait till she starts asking, and then just explain where we're at, and the process we used to get there.  There's a good chance, actually, that we'll still be in that process when she's ready to start asking about it.

So here we are.  I've been prompted to action, and I'm finding that it already feels much better than moping around being too afraid to do anything.  I think in my next post I'll be ready to actually start talking about specifics of some of the material I've read.

An Uncomfortable Year

So after cruising through 36 or so years of life, what was it that finally got me to question my lifelong faith? One simple question, really. I forget what site I was reading, but I think it was digg or reddit, and some Christians and atheists were having a debate in the comments of a post. By following a link or two, I ended up on a youtube video entitled 10 questions every atheist should ask (I can't seem to find the original link, and youtube seems to be flooded with videos of that title now). After watching it, I noticed a related video, 10 questions that every intelligent Christian must answer, which I watched as well.  The very first question in the video challenged me in a way that I had no answer for.  Why won't God heal amputees?

I thought about the number of times in my life I'd prayed for someone who was sick or injured.  I've done my fair share of praying.  I knew that my prayers didn't always get answered, but it felt like they mostly did.  I'd been told by various folks, pastors, youth ministers, Sunday school teachers, and even just Christian friends, that God doesn't always answer every prayer in the way that you would expect.  After all, He has a will, and sometimes you may ask for something that is at odds with His will, so you don't get exactly what you've asked for.

Having already accepted and come to terms with the fact that not every prayer gets answered, I could still honestly say that I thought it was worthwhile to pray, and felt like there was a pretty good chance, in each case, that I'd get the answer I was looking for.

The thing about the amputee question is that as soon as I heard it, I knew I wouldn't even bother to ask God to heal an amputee.  Honestly, in my heart, I knew that I would not pray for that because I did not believe it would happen.  After 36 years of believing in prayer, realizing that there was a limit to my faith hit me like a punch in the stomach.  I thought about all of the faith healers I'd ever seen on TV.  I don't recall ever seeing one of them restore an amputees limb.  I have never heard even a story or rumor of that happening.  I've heard some pretty crazy stories in my time.  Stories that I doubted even at the height of my faith.  I once heard about the survivors of some sort of plane crash (a friend of a friend of whoever was telling the story) who, once the pilot announced that they were going to crash, started praying for Jesus to rescue them as everyone else on the plane cursed and swore.  They claimed that before the plane hit the ground, they saw the fuselage crack open, and they felt their bodies lifted up out of their seats, through a hole that had opened in the roof, and they were set down safely on the ground, outside of the plane.  I really didn't quite believe that story when I heard it, nor do I now.  All that said, I've never heard a story of an amputee being healed.

So as I realized that I didn't have the faith to think an amputee could be healed through my prayer, I pondered all of the possible meanings.  Maybe I just don't have the faith?  Maybe it's just a weakness in me?  Maybe my faith is smaller than a mustard seed?  But I know there are some people on this planet who have, or at least give the appearance of having very great faith.  Certainly faith bigger than a mustard seed.  Would they pray for an amputee to be healed?  Would they expect their prayer to be answered?  I thought about all of my Christian friends and wondered if any of them would pray for an amputee.  I actually know one.  My friend's dad cut his thumb off accidentally with a skill saw.  Has anyone prayed for his thumb to be restored?  Would my hardcore Christian friends pray for his thumb if I asked them to?  What would they think of me if I asked them to?  Would they take me seriously?  Blow me off?  Worse, would they start questioning me, and find out that maybe I was starting to have some serious doubts about prayer and about God?

I don't know for a fact, but here are my suspicions.  I don't know they they would do it.  I'm sure they would have reasons.  I'm sure they could explain to me how it would be silly, or "putting God to the test", or something.  Maybe one day I'll ask, but at the time (as well as right now), I don't have the guts.  I'm not ready to let my Christian friends know that I have these doubts. 

Like the video said, this is an uncomfortable question.  I found that I could not put it out of my mind, though.  I rolled it around in my mind for days and weeks.  I was afraid to talk even to my wife about it.  At some point in the process, I decided that I wanted to know what life was like for the atheists.  If there was no God, what did you live for?  What motivated you?  How did you interpret the actions of your friends and the events of the world.  I have plenty of Christian friends, and quite a few non believers as well, so I just sat back and watched everything from a completely new perspective.  How different were my Christian friends from the rest?  Were they smarter?  More successful?  More loving?  More forgiving?  Was it obvious to an outsider, which I was now starting to consider myself, that they had the one and only God on their side, guiding and helping them?  As I sat back and looked, it started feeling more and more like my believing and non believing friends were only superficially different, sending me one step further down the road of doubt.

Not feeling comfortable at all with this new perspective, I did what any sane human would do.  I allowed myself to become paralyzed with fear.  We weren't attending church regularly, so I didn't have to fake that.  Most of my hanging out with my Christian friends was for social events, so there wasn't much going on there to force me to be honest about what was going on inside of me.  I spent the better part of a year just slowly rolling these doubts and questions around in my head.  I mostly quit praying, but every once in a while I'd pop out a quick "God, if you're really there, and I'm just having doubts, throw me a rope.  Give me something to help me know you're really there."  Thus far, I haven't gotten anything definitive. 

So this post pretty much brings you up to speed.  A year ago I encountered the amputee question, it rocked my world, and I kinda just mulled it over passively for a year.  In my next post  I'll talk about how I became motivated to switch from passive to active, and what I've done since then.  After that post we'll be up to current, and I can start blogging in the present tense.

Getting Started

The last thing the world needs is another blog, yet here I find myself, anonymously typing the first post of this blog.  What makes this one any different?  From your point of view, probably not much.  I'm just one more guy rambling on about what's going on in his life.  For me, though, this one is different in a few ways.  For one thing, I find myself struggling with beliefs I've held for over a third of a century.  I've never known any other way of thinking than the one I was raised with.  For another thing, this is the first time I've made any attempt to blog anonymously.  For a person living in a Bible belt community, writing about the process of losing your faith is not exactly something I feel comfortable attaching my name to just yet.  I'm still in the early stages of this, and I have a lot of information to process.  I hope that by writing about the things I'm struggling with, I'll do a better job of arriving at a decision that I can be comfortable with.  I am not sure how long the process will take, but I don't expect it to be short.

Let me start with a little background information about myself.  I had a fairly typical Christian upbringing. I was raised Lutheran, baptized as a baby, and taken to church and Sunday school each week.  During middle school I went through the confirmation process, publicly affirming my own baptism, and my intention to serve Christ.  I had a few moments during high school and college where I doubted things a little bit, but nothing major.  I got past these moments by praying and reading my Bible until the doubts subsided.  I never really had any major "God spoke to me" moments.  I never heard an audible voice, or even a voice in my head.  When I prayed, or heard certain sermons, I'd just get a warm fuzzy feeling, and I assumed that this was God or the Holy Spirit working in me.

After college, I started working with computers.  At this time I was in my mid twenties, and the internet was just getting started.  I was a graphic artist and a web designer.  I transitioned over into software development and kept myself busy until web 2.0.  I managed to snag a nice Christian wife during this time.  We've been married for 7+ years, and have a 3 year old child.

We started out going to church regularly, praying together, and reading the Bible together.  Over time, my wife let it be known that she did not think attending church was necessary, and that she would rather sleep in than go to church.  Each Sunday morning became tense, as I struggled to get us to church, and she resisted.  I suggested that we try other churches, or different times to see if we could get anywhere, but for the most part, it was still a battle to get us to church with any level of regularity.

Fast forward a little bit, and our daughter is born.  This pretty much put the final nail in the coffin.  My wife used this as an excuse not to go, and I had lost all of my steam for fighting.  I gave up.

While all this was going on at home, other things were developing at work.  I managed to have a little time to check digg, reddit and twitter while working, and would often stumble upon articles or comments where Christians and athiests were getting into debates or flamewars.  Prior to the internet, I never had to deal with very many serious challenges to my faith because of the community that I grew up in.  The comments, discussion, and flame wars I saw made me realize that not only had I never really been challenged, but that there are a lot of people out there on both sides of the line that are very passionate about their beliefs. 

Although I never really had to face any serious challenges during my teen years, I did develop the belief that I should never be afraid to hear an opposing point of view.  I prided myself on being much more open minded than most people I knew.  I believed that if I listened to someone that believed differently, I'd either learn that they were right about something, and I would have to change my beliefs, or I'd learn that my beliefs stood up to what they had to say, and I could become more confident in what I believed.  For the longest of times (from my teen years until I was married), I was always able to dismiss an opposing point of view for one reason or another.  I became stronger in my own faith.  It wasn't until web 2.0 that I started to encounter arguments that I could not counter to my own satisfaction.  That's when the walls started to crumble.  That's what this blog will be about.