TruthHammer

Something special happens when a deeply religious person loses their faith. Religion is unique among beliefs. It creeps below everything else, and situates itself as a ground truth – a universal foundation. Changing your mind about religion is not like changing your mind about your favorite color. Religion really isn’t a “belief.” It is more than “God exists” and “Jesus is Lord.” It is something else.

It is the basis of community – not all community, and not of necessity. But it has become the basis of a community. It is the common thread that binds a disparate people together. People, who would otherwise never meet, never get along, and perhaps even hate each other, are nevertheless coaxed lovingly together by the wide and powerful arms of a shared ideology, and a common enemy.

It is the explanation of moral action – not all moral action, and not of necessity. But it has become the explanation of morality, suitably convenient for explaining such things to children. Why not steal? Because of an implicit social contract with our fellow human beings? No, because God is against it. More than an explanation, it is a motivation. Why not kill? Because society will punish us? No, they are fallible. But God can get you no matter where you go.

It is the lens which colors perception and thought. Scientific discovery must pass the test – it must fit within God’s acceptable boundaries. Faith is most important, and therefore reason is its slave.

This uniquely powerful position gives rise to a uniquely moving experience when such a belief is lost. It’s like pulling the rug out from under a life. Nothing is certain. Everything is equally questionable. It is so important to be confident about some things and not others. We must be able to distinguish reliable from unreliable, to know what to trust and what to doubt. But when the foundation – that which is MOST certain – is taken away, this is impossible.

I have experienced and witnessed this process. And, what was at first completely mysterious, is now becoming clear. Patterns are emerging. I want to describe, to the best of my ability, the process of losing faith. But there are some caveats.

First, I will only talk about people who started with a deep personal religious conviction. Many parents who have this conviction have children who don’t, even though they go to church as much as anyone else. You can believe the stories without having a passion for them. I want to talk about people who really loved Jesus, who talked to him every day, who asked him for help and thanked him when he gave it. I want to talk about people who cried at revival meetings, and lifted their hands in the air when they sang. I want to talk about people who made it personal.

Second, I will only talk about people for whom the community, family and morality of the religion were very important to them. I have known people for whom this wasn’t true. They tend to leave the religion in spectacular fashion. Once they doubt its truth, they have no compunction against sharing their opinions, regardless of who it offends. For them the abandonment of faith is less traumatic. Religion really is a belief for them. It is not community, nor a lens for rational thought. So I will not speak to their process.

Third, there are, of course, exceptions to what I’m going to say. The particulars of life are too rich for me to capture everything. And I admittedly write from my own limited experience. But these events have been consistent for many people, and must therefore be worth something. I will tell you what would happen if you lost your faith, and you can know that what I describe is how many of us lost ours.

When you lose your faith, there is always a singular, profound “ah-ha” moment. This is the moment you first think the words “I don’t believe in God.” Later, you can recall this moment in absolute vivid detail. Mine was while I was driving home from teaching youth group, turning left from Boyson Rd. onto the interstate. A friend had hers while looking herself in the mirror one morning. It’s like remembering where you were when JFK was shot, or the Challenger exploded, or the Twin Towers collapsed. It is a moment of trauma, and it gets etched into your memory.

The remarkable thing is that this moment is not a decision, it is a discovery. It’s the moment you realize you don’t believe in God. It comes long after you’ve actually stopped believing. It happens in an honest moment of questioning – not of beliefs but of yourself. It’s the first moment you ask “what do I really believe?” A question you’ve been dreading for a while. You step back and survey yourself. And this introspection brings a moment of clarity. You have abandoned your religion, and now you know it.

The immediate reaction is relief – relief from the tension of self deception. You’ve been fighting to hold on to your religion for a long time, and you’ve been afraid to ask these questions. There is always an urge to cling to the categories we know. There’s something safe about staying a “Christian.” And you’re terrified of the word “Atheist.” Atheists are the villains. They are the “other.” They are the hated. How could you become one of those?

A lot of times it’s hard to distinguish between community or morality and religion. You think “I can’t stop being a Christian, I love my friends too much.” You’re scared of how your family will react. And you wonder how you could still be a good person. These fears combine with the others to stop you from asking the “what do I believe?” question. You suppress your thoughts, and you stay “Christian” through sheer force of will. But this can’t go on forever. Eventually you’ll be honest with yourself. And that’s when the moment comes. That’s why there is immediate relief. The internal conflict ended. One side won.

But, right after the relief, you realize that the WRONG side won, and then comes absolute terror. What does this mean? Who am I now? Am I still a Republican? What do I believe about evolution? Do I still support the death penalty? What about drinking, drugs, premarital sex? What do I believe about abortion? What about gay marriage? What about spanking children? Do I still love my wife? What the hell should I do now?

The rug is pulled out from under your life, and there is absolutely no guarantee that its going to be okay. After all, God isn’t there. He doesn’t have a plan for you. He isn’t working all things for good. Nothing is for sure.

So when did you decide not to believe in God? Never. You don’t abandon your belief. It is taken from you. Not all at once, but in 100 little bits, barely noticeable, spread out over time. And it all started with the loss of complacency.

The perfect Christian is happy with his situation. He likes going to church. He loves the community, and they love him. He’s unhindered by their moral stipulations. He’s surrounded by all the good of religion. Your first step is the loss of this happiness. It is when your love for your religion no longer overcomes your own curiosity.

Church can become boring. The people might judge you, or even just annoy you. You might start sleeping in on Sundays and simply grow distant from the community. You might discover that drinking won’t ruin your life, and that its fun to do. Then you might start to disagree with what’s said in the pulpit. There are a lot of ways that your relationship with the church can grow stale. All it takes is one.

You don’t want to leave the faith - you love it. But that love isn’t tangible. You need the community and the beliefs because they’re all you know. But your mind can wander. You might question your church’s stance on homosexuality. Or maybe you learn about Christianity’s history of racism or sexism, or how it’s responsible for the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of “witches” (in which the church no longer believes). Maybe you start to see the hypocrisy of the Christians around you, or begin to wonder what a “soul” really is. Maybe you ask yourself “Why would God ever change his mind because of my prayer? He’s all-knowing and has pre-determined the whole history of time. Why does my pastor tell me to pray?” There are a million little nasty thoughts that can creep in. And that’s how it starts.

It’s innocent enough. But the conclusions get scary. “The church is wrong about this.” And a little bit of your faith is taken away. Not because you decided it, but because you realized it. You try to cover it up. You try to come up with excuses and explanations. You rework your doctrine until it hangs together again. You ignore the problem as best you can. But the process has started. You are a kid with his finger in a dam.

And then it repeats. Your faith is taken bit by bit. You believe less and less. Of course, you never stop to survey the damage. You’re still a Christian damn it! It’s all you’ve ever known. But you’re heading inexorably towards that moment of clarity, when you realize that every bit of your religion has been stripped away. It’s amazing how slowly this process can go. I fought for at least a year. I know others who went longer. Maybe there are people who can stop it completely – who can hold back the waters forever. I think those people deserve their religion.

The only question left is “What happens afterwards?” The “ah-ha” moment represents an internal change. You know explicitly that you don’t believe in God. You were faking a belief before that point, but you didn’t know you were faking. Do you go on faking after? Most people decide that yes, they will. They’ll keep their decision secret, and just play along. They’ll go to church, say grace before meals, and sing in the choir. It’s not that much of a bother. And they’ll still have what’s important – family and friends.

In my experience, it takes about 1 year for the internal change to completely diffuse to the outside. After a while church is just too much of a hassle. You start to see how crazy all your religious friends really are. The things they say about homosexuals, women and Democrats make you cringe. You want to laugh every time they remind you that Jesus is coming soon. Prayer is just an annoying pause before you can eat. You can’t go on like this.

You never have to say that you’ve stopped believing. After long enough, everybody just starts to realize. And then the transformation is complete. You are a new person. About the same time you get comfortable with your new beliefs. It’s okay that God’s not there to take care of you. It’s okay that you’re not part of a cosmic plan. You can be in charge of your own life. There is still meaning in the world, no matter what your Pastor used to tell you. And then, after three or four more years, you gain enough perspective to write an essay like this. You realize how liberating this transformation is, and you want to help others do the same. You finally understand religion as a shackle and you want to help set people free. And then, hopefully, the cycle repeats itself all over again.

Dennett spoke at TED in 2006. In the last half he gives an informal and simple discussion on Rick Warrens book “The Purpose Driven Life” (Warren spoke at Ted earlier that day). Here is my transcription:

… “The heart of worship is surrender” and “Surrendered people obey God’s words even if it doesn’t make sense”.

Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from The Purpose Driven Life and I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book (which I’ve read, you’ve all got a copy, you just heard the man). And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design stand point, because I think it’s actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal, and you heard just now what the goal is, is to bring purpose to the lives of millions… and he has succeeded.

Is it a good goal? In and of itself I’m sure we all agree it is a wonderful goal… he’s absolutely right, there are lots of people out there who don’t have purpose in their life and bringing purpose to there life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this.

Is the goal achieved? Yes. 30 million copies of this book! [looks at Gore] Al Gore: eat your heart out! I mean, just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing – I mean, this is a fantastic achievement.

The means… how does he do it? It is a brilliant redesign of traditional Religious themes… updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features – this is the evolution of religion that has been going on for thousands of years and hes just the latest brilliant practitioner of it.

I don’t have to tell you this, you just heard the man – excellent incites into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood, I really appreciated that, for instance he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations for different Bible verses.

The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted, just enough repetition – that’s really important. Every time you read it or say it you make another copy in your brain… Every time you read it or say it you make another copy in your brain… with me everybody: Every time you read it or say it you make another copy in your brain. Thank you.

And now we come to my problem, because I am absolutely sincere in my appreciation about all I have said about this book, but I wish it were better.  I have some problems with the book and it would just be insincere of me to not address those problems - I wish he could do this with a revision - a mark-2 version of his book.

“The truth will set you free” – that’s what it says in the bible, and that is something I want to live by too. My problem is, some of the bits in it, I don’t think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion, and that is not my main complaint, that’s worth mentioning. Here is a passage

If there was no God, we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the universe. You could stop reading this book, because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong, and no hope beyond your brief years on earth.

Now I just do not believe that – by the way, I find Homer Groening’s film presented a brilliant alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right and wrong, we don’t need a belief in God to be good or have meaning in life.

But that, as I said, that is just a difference of opinion and is not what I’m really worried about. How about this

God designed this planets environment just so we could live in it.

I’m afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean we don’t have to do the sorts of things Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I’m not happy with that sentiment at all, and then I find this:

All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition…that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Well that’s Michael Dennett, he’s a creationist, and here I think wait a minute… I read this again I read it 3 or 4 times and think – is he really endorsing intelligent design?  Is he endorsing creationism here?… and you can’t tell so I’m starting to think well, I don’t know, I don’t know if I want to get upset with this yet. But then I read on and I read this:

First: Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood God arrogated the earth from the ground up.

I wish that sentence weren’t in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we have just been hearing about the history of the planet for millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding.

Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and factoids in a very interesting way, here is one:

God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you.

I think that’s false. Now maybe we want to treat is as metaphorical. Here’s another one:

For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second…

Well, it would be interesting to find an interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true?

Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hard-wired by God into the very fiber of our being — an inbuilt need to connect with God.

Well, there is a sense in which I agree with him except I think it has an evolutionary explanation… and what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an intelligent designer, you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection and I think on the contrary that it is very important to solving the worlds problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously.

Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well this from Purpose Driven Life:

The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life: the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything.

Well, maybe okay, but what is going to follow from this… and heres one that does concern me…and remember I quoted him before on this line.

Surrendered people obey God’s words even if it doesn’t make sense.

And that…that’s a problem.

Don’t ever argue with the devil, he’s better at arguing then you are having had thousands of years to practice.

Now, Rick Warren didn’t invent this clever move, it’s an old move, it’s a very clever adaptation of religions. It’s a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism. You don’t like my interpretation? You’ve got a reasonable objection to it? Don’t listen! Don’t listen! That’s the devil speaking. This discourages the sort of reasoning, citizenship it seems to me, that we want to have.

I’ve got one more problem then I’m through, and I’d really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it

In the Great Commission, Jesus said, “Go to the people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I have told you.”

The Bible says “Jesus is the only one who can save the world”.

Now here we have seen many maps in the last day or so. Here is one not as beautiful as the others; it simply shows the religions of the world

Now, do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions when their holy books are telling them “don’t listen to the other side, that’s just Satan talking”. It seems to me that that’s a very problematic ship to get on for the future.

I found this sign as I was driving to Main recently in front of a church – “Good without God becomes zero”. Sort of cute, a very clever little Meme. I don’t believe it, and I think this idea, popular as it is, not in this guise but in general, is itself one of the main problems that we face. If you are like me you know many wonderful committed, engaged, atheists/agnostics who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So I wish we could drop this meme, I wish this meme would go extinct. Thanks very much for your attention.

There’s a long, long list of things etched into the back of my mind regarding crazy religious people. It’s easy for me to add to this list because, among other things, I was a crazy religious person. I remember a shouting match in an after school debate where I insisted evolution was a complete farce. When I was finally reduced to answer a logical question with a logical answer, I opted for Christian Reponse #68. Well, I don’t want to live in a world where there isn’t a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in my back yard.

The only response to this type of argument is total abandonment of principle and a resort to nonsense, such as physical violence. It is in our nature after all, and this trait was certainly apparent on the face of the kid I was arguing with. He “knew” he was certainly right, but he did not realize that I knew I was certainly right. I imagine I was more confident in what I was saying than he was.

There is no best or even good approach to arguing with a confident fool. It is nonsense. If you are certain that the religious person you are arguing with is confident, and that your genius Christopher Hitchens questions will have no affect, then:

1. Remind the person of the role of the faithful. A man of faith has no business arguing about the finer points of anything based in an empirical world, outside of religious texts. If you take it on faith that that God made the creatures, then it isn’t acceptable for you to be critical of evolutionary science. These practices are mutually exclusive, and any attempt by a person of faith to enroll in scientific dialog is blasphemy and unethical.

2. Tell them they don’t really love Jesus. That’s a caveat to Christianity — you don’t really believe it. When I was a Christian I said to others and to myself that I loved Jesus. (I also told myself that I was going to stop eating too many tacos, but I did not.) Sam Harris says that we partition our mind to accept religion without applying our standard rules for rationality. I disagree with him in this respect, because I don’t think its possible for the mind to work this way. The mind isn’t like a computer hard drive, and just like you can’t partition part of your gut to process only certain foods, you cannot partition your mind. We process everything we hear, and no matter what we say we feel, our mind doesn’t allow is to truly believe something that we can’t rationalize.

Now, before I go too far, I want to say that I understand there is a large gradient of both ideas and fashions of belief. My point is that when your brother says he’s going to pray for you, he doesn’t think that he needs to run home and pray for you right now, lest you succumb to the wounds from the car wreck and perish. He tells you and himself that he will pray, and he may or may not. Either way, he does not believe this prayer is a pivot to your safety or survival. This formula can be applied to most religious beliefs, even the most precious, the belief in Jesus.

Christians want to believe that Jesus is real, and they can make it real for them on a social level, but their minds just won’t allow it to dig deeper (unless they are really, really dumb). This is why the religious aren’t compelled to drop to their knees and beg for forgiveness on-the-spot; they just don’t honestly believe they need to.

- Person W

Some things overheard from the crowd after Expelled:

“I’m so glad they’re all going to hell.”

“I wanted to punch that guy [Richard Dawkins] in the face.”

“Evolution is such a stupid concept.”

“Hallelujah!”

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” -Susan B. Anthony

“I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves. An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise; such notions are for the fears or absurd egoism of feeble souls.” -Albert Einstein

Transcribed from a recent Point of Inquiry broadcast:

Interviewer: “Do you really think secular, skeptical people should be more intolerant of religion?”

Harris: “yeah, I do - but I think we should be clear about what intolerance can mean. I do not mean we should be intolerant in the sense the Stalinist were in intolerant, sending people to the gulag. I don’t believe we should pass laws against religious belief. I don’t think there is any interolance necessary beyond the intolerance we show to irrationaly in every other area of our lives. We haven’t passed laws against believing that Elvis is still alive or believing aliens are abducting ranchers & molesting them. When someone claims to be sure Elvis is still alive, for instance, that claim is met with chuckles and derision and the whole armamentarium of conversational pressure that really excludes a person making that claim from holding positions of responsibility in our society. Thats a good thing - thats the way it should be and yet there is no formal mechinism for this. It is just what I call conversational intolerance.”

Interviewer: “And you think we should have more conversational intolerance or intellectual intolerance for religious belief. You kind of equate, at some points, religious belief with being insane. But isn’t the difference between beleiving in God or believing in a 300 pound Easter bunny in your back yard… isn’t the difference that we have an explanation for religious beliefs… that we are incolcated culturally in these beliefs and it is not the same as being insane. In the case of insane people we have no other explanation then that there mind has somehow gone wrong. We don’t say that just because you believe in god it is a function of insanity.”

Harris: “Yeah, and that really is a function of how many people subscribe to these beliefs and the taboo in the culture around criticizing these beliefs… what I say in my book at one point is that religion allows people by the millions to believe things that only a crazy person could believe on his own. So I agree with you that religious people do not tend to be insane… they tend to be as sane as anyone else, but if anyone woke up tomorrow morning thinking that a cracker turned into the body of Jesus (if he said the right Latin words over it), and he was the first person to think this - he didn’t have millions of other catholics supporting him in this idea - that would be a belief sunonomous with schizophrenia very likely. I think the thing to point out is that we have beliefs every bit as crazy and unsupportable as they would be in the minds of lunatics and they are massively well subscribed in our culture because we have created this system of inheritance and no cultural pressure to resist this inheritance… we have every person on mommies knee deranged by the myths of our ancestors.”

Freedom From Religion Foundation national convention is October 10-12, 2008 in Chicago. Details: http://ffrf.org/events/2008/  It will have Daniel Dennett amongst many other great speakers.

Atheist Alliance national convention is September 25-28th in California. Details: http://www.atheistalliance.org/conventions/2008/AAIConventionDescription2008.pdf  It will have Christopher Hitchens along with many other great speakers.

The American Atheist event in Minneapolis went very well.  I especially liked Dawkins & PZ Myers talking about the adventure they had trying to see Expelled. 

I’d encourage anyone reading this to consider attending one or both of the events above.  I will likely be at both.

I want Christianity to receive the same respect astrology, alchemy, and Greek Mythology receive.  Consider this:

1.  The catholic church stance that “Aids is bad, but Condoms are worse” is really, truly, non-metaphorically killing thousands of Africans every year.  

2.  There are millions of American Christians who reject global warming on the basis of it not being prophesied in the bible.

3.  Stem cell research is being delayed by the Christian right.  Will the number of people who die before a treatment is discovered be in the hundreds or thousands? 

4. Without religion, what society would decide it is moral to slice a child’s genitals (without reasonable medical evidence to do so)?  

“I don’t know how we are going to get a future where Muslims believing in martyrdom and Christians believing in the rapture will be a good recipe for good neighbors… I’m simply arguing we need to cease to reward people for pretending to know things they do not know. The only area of discourse we do this is on the subject of god.” (Sam Harris Source)

Hey everybody, go see the movie Expelled in theaters this Friday. We’ll be blogging about it