August 2008 - I’m turning my secular parable, “How to Recognize the Signs of an Imaginary Friend“, into a new webcomic.

Let’s face it. Despite all the other cool and exciting stuff I’m involved with the primary aspect of my background which is interesting to a large fraction of you is an explanation of why I’m so outspokenly positive about not being religious. That’s OK; I’m very comfortable talking about it. I hope you’ll find it constructive. I’m responsible for working on me, not working on you, but someone may find it helpful anyway. I encourage those who don’t find it helpful to think of it as looking over my shoulder into my own journey of self-criticism rather than an attempt to criticize them. Beyond that, the only way I could control how religious believers react emotionally would be if I watered down my criticism of myself to remove its important content.

Here’s the short version. Using faith as a way to arrive at knowledge, I was using it as a blatantly self-serving double standard. Faith can only lead to actions, not knowledge. In this respect, faith is no different from courage, optimism or a coin toss. All second-hand testimony, such as that in the bible, ought be held accountable to first-hand observations. And yet all experiences requiring God for an explanation are second-hand testimony from those who are not alive to question. A believer has to do all the work reinterpreting their first-hand experiences to see god interact with them, they give god all the credit for it, and take all the blame when they don’t see him. The hypothesis that god is interacting with us is empty of practical implications. Superfluous. But a deity is the last thing you’d expect to be superfluous! Do you believe God exists and he is also pointless? I don’t know about you, but I don’t. Other supporting arguments and evidences of God’s nonexistence are plentiful, but if you want the quick version, that pretty much wraps it up.

I grew up the eldest son of a fire-and-brimstone preaching Baptist pastor. It was a childhood of tent revivals, horror movies about the “rapture,” and winning first place for bible memorization in Vacation Bible School. Frequently I would lie awake at night wondering why I was not experiencing and becoming what a true bible-believer is supposed to be. I envisioned a 50-foot tall Jesus parting the clouds and taking away everybody I loved, leaving me behind. He was like Godzilla, only real.

Instead of attending an animation school and pursuing my dreams, I believed it was God’s will that I get a useless art degree at Pensacola Christian College in Florida, a school so rigidly fundamentalist that it calls Bob Jones University compromising liberals.

The Double Standard

During this time I had an insatiable appetite for reading and debating Christian apologetics. Ironically, I believe this was the root of my eventual apostasy! It helped me to regard reason as an ally, not an enemy. I started spouting about how those secularists need to become objective and see the evidence of creation science, fulfilled prophecy and the historical evidence for a literal resurrection. But shouting “bias” is a double-edged sword because the bible teaches faith. I could no longer in good conscience use faith as a blatantly self-serving double standard, and I didn’t want to be a hypocrite that way. If I could have faith, then I couldn’t complain about anybody from other religions having it too.

Not Working As Advertised

The actual Christian life was problematic. “Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” - 2 Corinthians 5:17

There is no reasonable interpretation of 2 Corinthians 5:17 which holds up under the scrutiny of anyone who is paying attention. After someone has been a Christian for a while, it cannot escape their notice that they are not a “new creature”. They can blame themselves for a while, until they’ve been around other bible-believers for long enough. Behold, all things have not become new. They’re just people. Not heroes, not monsters, just people. People are people.

Sure, we hear stories occasionally of a life turning around in a dramatic fashion, at least for a while. But the “any man” and “all things” parts of the verse were poor word choices, if the author wanted to keep credible deniability. Most of the Bible has Clintonian slipperiness: “no, what I said didn’t really mean what you thought it meant”. That accounts for its undying popularity; you can always come up with an excuse when it doesn’t come true. But this verse? Not so much.

This is no problem for liberal Christians who feel inspired by many things from scripture but can admit it’s not perfect. It is a serious problem for literalists. Possibly the most serious problem. Historical and scientific errors are abstract, long ago and far away, so they’re easy to dismiss. It’s tough to dismiss when God’s promises don’t come true in your own life or the lives of those around you. Forget evolution, forget textual criticism– the Christian life collapses itself with no help from them. Like Scientology, it doesn’t work on you as advertised, and like Scientology, you get blamed when the product fails.

This has nothing to do with “Christians were mean to me so I don’t want to be in their group.” It has to do with the things you expect to happen to your own heart through the supernatural influence of God. Are you in a church where saved people constantly get re-saved? Why do you think that happens so much? It happens because they take the Bible’s promises seriously and are wondering why it’s not working, so they assume they aren’t really “in Christ”. Worst of all, fundamentalists teach they are saved by faith, not works, so the transformation into a new creature in Christ doesn’t happen by your own effort. God has to do it. And he doesn’t. That’s a Catch-22.

Ironically I lost my faith in God because I really was sincere about it– I expected him to act like God and instead he had a suspicious tendency to act just like I would expect from his complete nonexistence. I noticed that the devotional program and state of mind prescribed in the bible was in fact perfectly adapted to the purpose of getting people to accept statements even if they are not true. I became self-aware enough to suspect that I was generating a “personal relationship” with Jesus through mental sleight-of-hand. Once I started noticing how I was doing it, the illusion no longer functioned. When I stopped putting my hand in God’s puppet head, my attempts to connect with him or open myself to a contact from him became a masochistic exercise in frustration.

So I started searching to find out how people perceive god interacting with them: leading, guidance, nurture, etc. Have you noticed how ambiguous people are about it? Eventually I realized that, throughout all my memories of my Christian walk and the lives of all the Christians around me, the presence and the absence of this god were experientially indistinguishable.

Long ago and far away

At the time, I was quite puzzled because I still believed in creationism, and the perfect fulfillment of Bible prophecy, and the historical evidence for the literal resurrection. I was wondering, where did this god go if he doesn’t seem to have done anything but watch in the past two thousand years? It took a long time to figure out just what was so dissatisfying, but when I found it it was the fatal flaw in the reasoning of biblical evidencers. There are no sources of information more open to interpretation and misinterpretation than forensics and ancient human literature. And yet the most unreliable sources are the ones that carry all weight with the faithful.

All the experiences for which we needed the supernatural for an explanation were pushed off to the ancient past (such as creation or other supposed miracles) and the indeterminate future (such as the “rapture”). It is just too fishy that we are to expect nothing within the lifetimes of anyone alive to question.

Making these carry all the weight seems to do an end run around the question, “What does this worldview predict that I will experience, or never experience, here and now?” All we get are ad-hoc hypotheses for this, like “we must be going through a silent period,” and “god must only work through his followers.” It is also restricted in location: believers console themselves that at least there must be some undeniably supernatural experiences happening to someone else, somewhere else. In order for a worldview to be fruitful, it must be possible to distinguish between the truth and untruth of the worldview here and now. Otherwise, there is no better way for intelligent and sincere people to perpetuate error from generation to generation.

Another source of apologetics proof was pure a- priori deductive reasoning, which can be carried out in an armchair with one’s eyes closed, without reference to empirical observation. And yet all good existence claims can be checked out empirically without restriction to pure a- priori reasoning. This suggested strongly that somewhere in the deduction a wrong turn was probably taken. Observation is a crucial means to check if we have made a mistake in deduction, even if we do not yet know what the mistake is. I began to be suspicious of the accuracy of my deductions about God when I began to see myself removing observational accountability in order to justify them.

I continued in a disillusioned state for a few years because I assumed the only alternative to theism was nihilism and existential despair. Then I read the story of Carl Sagan’s death written by Ann Druyan. It could have been at that moment I began to lose the fear instilled by a religious background. Here was an atheist in a foxhole. Here was someone for whom untrammeled sight was no threat. It was only then that I began a serious investigation of non-supernatural alternatives. I discovered counter-apologetics existed and was devastatingly effective against a Christian apologist’s evidence for creationism, prophecy fulfillment, and the resurrection.

As I discovered the fallacies in the proofs, god was more and more standing in a cosmic unemployment line. The world became totally consistent with a world which has no supernatural forces. Perhaps it is a closed system in no need of an explanation and sufficient unto itself- I can’t say entirely for sure.

You might say I have learned that I need to put my ontology on a diet. If I can get along without believing in the existence of something, I will go without. It depends how much I need it for an explanation of my first-hand experiences. For instance, there is nothing in my first-hand experiences that needs the existence of pink unicorns for an explanation. So even though I can’t prove there are no pink unicorns, they are superfluous. So I can do without believing in them.

Today

Since then, I’ve been trying to learn to practice a world view as consistent as possible with the extension of reason and critical thinking skills to every area of decision-making.

The latest thing I’ve realized is that, all too often, a focus on abstractions is just a smokescreen to keep from having to engage the empathy part of your brain during difficult conversations with the people in your life.

That having been said, if you still want to know how much I agree or disagree with you about ivory-tower philosophical abstractions, here it is.

I believe one true version of objective reality exists; that is, there exists a set of conditions outside my mind that are the way they are, whether I know it or not, whether I believe it or not, whether I like it or not. I believe there is a level of probability and fallibility to knowledge, no matter how small. That does not make knowledge useless or futile– in fact, some of it I even stake my life on. It’s just that I believe in listening and maybe finding out I am wrong. That’s what I mean when I say that, although there is absolute truth in the sense of absolute reality, there is no absolute knowledge. Faith is no more a test of truth than a coin toss. In my experience, faith has mostly been abused as a mental block.

This much I know, after careful study:

1. The universe is knowable through its reliable consistencies. Its consistencies are not just a ruse played on us by a god.
2. Every single experiment that has ever been performed in the entire 300-year-old scientific enterprise contributed to a gradual confirmation of the hypothesis that inductive reasoning works. After three centuries of evidence, I think we can safely say that we are not jumping to conclusions when we do not expect an exception such as a miracle.
3. If there are any deities, they do not seem to have done anything but watch in the lifetimes of anyone who is alive to question. Therefore it is superfluous to believe in them.
4. Further, there does not seem to be any transcendent realm “higher” than the natural world we experience in this life. The supernatural is a groundless conjecture.
5. Morality is objective, not subjective. It is observable without being handed down from a supernatural source.
6. There will not come infinite justice on a cosmic scale.
7. Biological evolution- that is, a change in the genetic characteristics of a population over time- and the common descent of living organisms from shared ancestors, is almost as firm a conclusion as gravity.
8. The brain is a pattern of matter and energy. The process that this runs is consciousness, the mind. Asking where it goes at death is like asking where the juggling goes when the balls stop moving. It does not go anywhere, it just stops.
9. The only way in which a mind is able to induce material changes at a remote location in the outside world is through the body. A mere state of mind alone is insufficient, including prayer or telepathy.
10. The only ways a mind comes under influence from external events is observation and communication. There is no “spiritual sixth sense” or ESP.
11. What is the meaning of the universe? Things mean what they cause.
12. What is the meaning of life? The meaning of your life is the sum total of all the effects you’ve ever had on anything, directly or indirectly. Although some people’s lives are more meaningful than others, no person has a meaningless life. Even if you are comatose all your life, your loved ones would wish you were not, and that’s an effect you are having on them. Be careful to make your life mean what you want it to.
13. Why am I here? (”Why” as in “what cause”) My parents are the proximal cause of me. I am the inevitable deterministic outcome of a random dance of subatomic particles. It is like the falling of dominos whose placement was set up by the roll of dice. I am responsible for my choices because I am the dominos and dice.
14. Why am I here? (”Why” as in “what purpose”) People ought to be their own purpose: the individual should be valued, not the group or the authority. You don’t need to get your justification to live imposed on you from outside. Your existence is its own justification.
15. What should I do? The most important thing to learn is how to think critically. Constantly question your beliefs, avoid inconsistency, and act rationally. Create a meaningful life by influencing the world around you.
16. We are not alone in the universe as long as we have each other.
17. And most importantly, these are good things to celebrate and take hope in. If you don’t think so, examine your unquestioned assumptions.