Clinging to a Thread

Over the past several weeks I have had a series of brief, unintelligible, meaningless conversations on faith with religious believers.

One was with a dogmatic Mormon who didn’t want to listen to anything I said, but was more than happy to spout out the greatness of Mormonism and attempt to proselytize me after shutting me down at every chance. After two or three tries to voice my rational, well reasoned, educated opinion only to be interrupted and cut off before I even finished the first sentence, I decided to end our chat during the middle of the Mormon’s lecture; and just log off. He kept talking and tried to egg me back into the chat by claiming I knew I had no defense and so was giving up, but I was through trying to reason with such a religious-retard.  If one is predisposed to dismiss all questions in this way, they have been relieved of the burden of thinking through their faith.

I am a post-theist  atheist after all—who has a firm grasp on religion. If you want to have a discussion, then I am all for that, but if you just want to hear the sound of your own voice which you are so in love with, then please, go tell it to somebody who cares.

Not soon after, I had a sit down conversation with a good friend who just so happens to be a believing Protestant. I recognized many of his evangelical convictions as being fairly mainstream, so I was wondering what branch of Evangelical Christianity he was raised in (after all I was an Evangelical Christian for nearly three decades). I simply asked him his denomination and he retreated into a defensive, “Protestant Christianity is basically all the same. It doesn’t really matter what denomination you were raised… but I take my beliefs seriously, so be careful…” Of course I'm paraphrasing what he said, but the additional warning to be careful made me *smile inside.

I used to find such warnings a threat… as in… be careful of what you say next, or I’ll have to get medieval on your ass. But that’s merely Fundamentalist  special pleading… hear what I have to say because it's important (whatever you say is wrong so shut up)... yet what my friend was saying was more akin to, “Please be careful not to challenge my faith… because it’s hanging by a thread.” This privatization of faith is not much better than the fundamentalist strain if only because this sort of faith is akin to the Sermon-on-the-Mount style of faith where Matthew instructs us to hide any religious devotion from the approving or disapproving eyes of others.

Mike D. over on his blog The A-Unicornist has raised a good point:

There's a place for serious discussion, since religious belief does have some serious implications; but we shouldn't hesitate to remind the faithful that their beliefs, and indeed their entire basis for understanding the world, are ridiculous.

I have some immediate family members who have also made the same defensive plea for me not to challenge their sacred beliefs and cherished convictions. They have said things along the lines of “It hurts me deeply to have this discussion,” and “It’s too painful for me to talk about it with you,” or “You’re only going to try and prove to me that my beliefs are wrong…” etc. My point is: But what if your beliefs ARE wrong?! As painful of a revelation as that would be, wouldn't the truth be worth knowing? Nobody seems to want to take on the burden of testing their faith.

The reason I challenge people on their religious beliefs, and try to do so respectably, is because I take it seriously. If you don’t take your beliefs seriously, then why the defensive attitude whenever someone asks you to qualify or defend your position? Being critical and holding one’s beliefs, faith, or religion up to scrutiny is necessary if you want to test the validity of such. If not, then you can’t claim to me that your beliefs mean anything—because you haven’t tested them! How could you possibly begin to know?



As Robert M. Prices elucidates in his book The Reason-Driven Life, this form of faith, the type where loyalty to Christianity overrules loyalty to family even, is problematic at best:

...the loyalty one properly feels for one's partners in Christian fellowship comes to overrule one's duty to consider intellectual questions with the necessary impartiality. If a person is to be intellectually honest with himself, he needs to set aside his preferences, what he would wish to be true, and consider matters as objectively as possible.

Admittedly, if you are serious about your faith—then the weakness of these three forms of faith, such as 1) ducking the question because you boast of your certainty (Fundamentalist delusional certitude), 2) privatizing your faith as to make it discrete enough to evade critical inquiry (Sermon-on-the-Mount reclusive moderatism) or 3) showing favoritism without having considered any other possibilities first (party-line adherence akin to obstinacy in belief), should make you, as a believer, want to defend your weary and tired faith so as to protect those personal beliefs from fading away altogether. 

Strangely, it is clear to me that the majority have taken the opposite tactic, of sheltering their faith as if to safeguard it—either behind a pretense of white noise or a penitent silence. But if you ask me, a once devoted Christian, this is no faith worth having at all. Still, I am glad they are keeping it to themselves, because whatever else they may believe, their faith doesn’t really matter in the grander scheme of things… and they’ve only proved my point for me.

Faith seems to be receding, dwindling away, at a record pace and a secular worldview is slowly, but surely, replacing it. This doesn’t mean religion will vanish from the face of the Earth, hardly, but it does show that religion is becoming diminished. These recent conversations, the one with the defiant Mormon with deep convictions in his certitude about  the truth of Mormonism, the one with my strangely silent Evangelical (???) friend, and my tight lipped family members who’d rather not even bring it up because it’s just too much of a bother… is proof enough that for many… they are clinging to a thread.

Dave Allen on Religion (Comedy)

If Atheism Were a Religion

Religions stands for Rape

 

A Tale of the Church Rapist

W

hen I was a believing Christian I had a cousin who was raped by a Church deacon and an elder in our church. The guy had recently paid for the new parking lot at our church. From what I recollect, the Pastor called a prayer meeting and then the elders stood around this fiend and prayed to cure him of his demons, then they prayed for god to forgive him, and there was a lying on of hands to heal his dark and shattered soul.

The next week the monster was sitting in his usual spot.

Now the Pastor who believes in God so much that he believes that saying a few prayers will "magically" cure a chronic pedophile rapist instead of holding the rapist accountable and handing him over to the authorities is just as bad as the rapist in my book. It wasn't until a couple of months later when four more families came out with the news that their eight year old girls had been complaining about the mean man touching them in their private places during Sunday school, or at his house during the adult Bible studies, that the pastor couldn't turn a blind eye any longer to the allegations.

Often times the phrase, "Hate the sin but love the sinner" gets thrown around liberally in Christian circles. How about this suggestion, hate the sin and get rid of the damn sinner and screw the damn parking lot. This all happened when I was 14 years old. I stayed a Christian for another 15 years. Looking back it had no bearing on my faith, although now I think it should have affected me more than it did. I was just too caught up in the whole "Jesus saves" business to worry about those whom Jesus wasn't saving.

The Pastor was eventually asked to leave, but the new guy, well he wasn't all that much better, nor really all that much worse, since he was genuinely delusional. He would have trances and then speak in tongues and hop around the podium on stage. Then he'd raise the Bible high, and say, "Yes Lord! I hear you!" And then he'd proceed to inform us as to the lord's message. A genuine vessel of God.

And to tell you the truth... I can't for the life of me tell you which one was the more scary.

And this all went on in my little unassuming Church. How many more churches I wonder experience this sort of thing but never make it public? Not a single local newspaper reported on these rapes. The court case was kept mum. To talk about it was to besmirch the churches name. I don't think they were intentionally trying to protect a rapist... it's just that everyone was so utterly dismayed that out of sight out of mind sounded best to them. But there is not fast track to healing something so damaging.

Literally, this event ruined lives... destroyed the lives of five little girls, shattered their families, fractured a community, and yet these sincere Christians, all because they were true believers, believed--truly believed in their heart of hearts--that God was loving enough to forgive the worst of men. The delusion runs thick. 

And this annoys me to no end. I'll list a few types of Christians I simply can't tolerate (in no particular order): 1) The Christian who thinks God is all forgiving, 2) The Christian who thinks we're all sinners and that if it wasn't for God's saving grace it would have been that much worse, and 3) The Christian who thinks God is just and will punish the evil doers after they die by holding them accountable. 

Yeah, tell that to the little girls who all got raped.

Well the rapist was a Christian. A depraved Christian but a Christian none-the-less. But part of the Christian premise is that we're all fallen and need of saving. It's a superstitious claim which, in part, lent itself to the horrors I spoke about. Yet if you think that rape in religion is simply a smattering of isolated incidents, think again. Christian Evangelical and also Baptist churches have a high level of rape also. Not to mention the commonly known cases in the Catholic Church. Here's a couple of articles for anyone who doubts rape is common place in Church and Holy Place, some food for thought:

http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/05/former-president-of-evangelical-baptist.html

 http://formerfundy.blogspot.com/2010/06/follow-up-on-rape-case-and-alleged.html 

This grim portrait of a rapist isn't so uncommon in Fundamentalist churches around the world. Religion has been proving excuses to oppress and abuse women for centuries, and rape is just one of its many tools. Rape is not only restricted to Christianity but is a standard fair in FLDS and in Islam as well (see: Out of the Shadows: A rape victim examines her life in and out of Mormonism by Pamela McCreary,  Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan).

My question to Christians would be: why the continued incidents? Is being fallen an excuse? No, it's not. These cases show one of the failures of religion--to make good on producing good people.

 Of course the police were notified—but by the parents involved.  I think mainly because the parents felt so much outrage and shame that this had happened in their Church, in their congregation, right under their noses. They couldn’t even protect their children from someone who they trusted. This is truly tragic.

Yet in a small town of 5,000 people, where everyone knows everyone, and the churches all maintain a sort of prestige in the region, there is a lot riding on maintaining a reputation as an institution of God. In this particular case, I feel that the community officials, the church elders, and the pastor just wanted it to blow over and let the authorities handle it all. Pass the buck onto somebody else. But what they neglected to realize was that legal proceedings would take months to get underway, and a year before a verdict, especially since the man's wife stood by his side and denied all the accusations.

When you halve a church split between those who have been victimized, and those who just don't want to believe something so awful could have occurred in their house of God--there is bound to be a rift. Some left the Church to the one across the street. Others left the town completely.

In such times the Pastor, Minister, or Priest is supposed to be the beacon of support... but some men are not made of sterner stuff. They have weak constitutions, or else they are ill-prepared, lack training, or don't know how to deal with all the added stress a leadership role requires of them.

I've seen it first hand, I've heard of numerous similar stories, and although I understand that rape is a regrettable part of the human condition, I feel that it just goes to show that we are not made in the image of any divine supreme being. We are poorly evolved, and struggle to fight our primitive natures.

Even so, I tend to be an optimist, I feel this will--this capacity to strive to become something better--to be more humane perchance to supply meaning to what it truly means to be human (and the acknowledgment that we can be more than mere primates) is astonishing.

What depresses me about the whole thing, and what I never got over, was that so many "God-fearing" folk chose to use faith-based excuse as a smoke screen for not wanting to deal with the reality of the situation. It was much easier to defer all responsibility onto God.

God will provide, God will make good, God will come through in the end. All they needed to do was have faith. But none of this helped the victims any, and a year later the pervert was tried and convicted, a month later he died of cancer. So much for justice. Oddly enough, the new Pastor said it was the hand of God smiting him for his evil ways. But he had been diagnosed with cancer before the rapes, so go figure.

Appendices (Advocatus Atheist Enhanced)

Blogger now offers customizable PAGE tabs so you can link static pages at the top of your blog (just like Word Press).

I have includes some fun and educational appendices to help anyone who wants a concise, clear, and to the point summary of key Biblical issues. The content includes a simplified time-line of the history and events of Biblical canonization, a Graveyard of the Gods which lists the numerous dead, forgotten, or impotent [G]ods which nobody believes in anymore, making us all atheists of a sort. Additionally I have included a short list of Bible contradictions and discrepancies, as well as an about page and contact information.

Please feel free to click on these informative pages at the top of the Advocatus Atheist blog for a more in-depth view of things. I hope this helps clear up matters for people who may not be so historically inclined. Have a good one!

--Advocatus Atheist

Misquoting Jesus

An first rate interview with New Testament scholar Bart D. Ehrman.

Progammatic Specificity

Excellent discussion.