deconversion

We buried Dan last Saturday. The funeral was okay I guess. There were two preachers that gave little homilies about salvation, but not really much about Dan. 

It made me think that I don't want that. I want people to remember ME.  I hope they tell each other stories about great or funny or stupid things I did. I hope they laugh until they get headaches. 

One thing I can't decide is if I want to be buried, cremated or both. As a Christian-no brainer, buried. It showed hope of the resurrection. Now, I don't know. While some may view that as sad, I don't. I've always been pretty pragmatic about things, so I can't see making my family spend thousands of dollars for a casket and a grave plot. But, as a genealogist, I appreciate having something to see. There have been many occasions when I have visited and photographed graves for others who can't get to my area. There's just something about it, something I can't explain. Hence my hesitation to opt for cremation and scattering.

On the other hand, the funeral isn't really for me-I'm dead. It's for those still here. Should I opt (as if it is my decision!) to have a church funeral for their sake?  Let them grieve (assuming they do!) in surroundings most comfortable to them? Since most of my friends don't know of my deconversion, they would assume that I died as a believer. Is there any harm in letting them think that? 

This is bugging me because of Dan's age. He was 49. 49! I'm already 2 years past that! So I keep thinking that I don't want my wife to get a phone call or visit from the police telling her that I'm gone and this is one more thing she has to deal with. 

What to do, what to do...

As I got to work this morning, before I could get to my desk, I was met by a coworker who told me that another coworker had suddenly died last night. He was only 49, so this took us all by surprise. 

This is my first brush with death since deconverting so I was curious about how I would feel. Would I suddenly reconsider my deconversion? Would I have doubts about leaving Christianity? Where did I think my coworker was now? Etc. 

The short answer is, "no". I didn't, for more than a microsecond, have any misgivings about deconverting and leaving Christianity behind. As to "where my coworker is now?", he's just dead. He's not anywhere, except of course whichever funeral home his family had him taken to.

Furthermore, I found myself put off by other (Christian) coworkers who said things like, "You never know when your time is up. That's why you have to be ready". I know what they meant because I used to say the same thing.

Unfortunately, they didn't mean that we need to live life to the fullest because we never knows when it will end. We may not have tomorrow to do those things we could/should have done today.

One other thing. It did cause me to begin thinking about final instructions. As a believer, I assumed that I would have a church-based funeral with all the trappings. That is gone now. What to do?

Has anyone considered this subject since your deconversion? 

Since I have an opinion about everything, I was surprised to see that it has been about 6 weeks since I've written anything. This morning I'm looking for some guidance, maybe some affirmation. 

I'm beginning to feel like I'm ready to move on in my life. I've deconverted. I am an atheist. I've spent many hours (almost every waking hour)/days (every day)/weeks (all week)/months (for months on end!) thinking about these things, studying various topics as they relate to the bible and Christianity. I'm tired.

And while I enjoy encouraging others who are not as far along as I am, I'm getting tired of most of the "ex-christian" sites. Not because they don't serve a purpose, but because they cause me to continually look back. I don't really know how to state what I'm feeling. I don't want to say, "Thanks guys! See ya!", but I feel like I'm spinning my wheels. 

At some point one has to bury the body and move on with life. While I know that since my life was defined by Christianity for 30 years, I have many residual issues to deal with, I want to find something to put in front of me, to look forward to.

I'm hoping to get re-enrolled in college this fall. Maybe just being in a learning environment will spark some interest, some passion that I can throw myself into. We'll see.

So. Those of you who are further along this path: How did you redefine your life? What gives you "purpose" now? What excites you?  

Rocky sent me a private message with some good questions.  I asked permission to post it here, so he can get feedback from more than one person.  So here's what he wrote.  I'll post my responses to him as a reply, so as not to be confusing.

Rocky Said:
Ubi, first of all I want to thank you very much for your willing spirit and second for your time. I will not preach. I will tell you a little of myself. I am from the US, more specifically from N.C. I am in Law Enforcement, so much of what I see is the bad side of life. I see alot of tregedy, alot of lives lost, even before my eyes. I do question the meaning of life.
My childhood was spent in a cult, I missed much of life, became bitter. I was a violent young man. There was much turmoil in my childhood,later I became a professional fighter, possibly to vent my anger and turmoil. I left the cult, since my roots were deep in the cult I did not know how to live life outside the structure of religion, never did I know the peace contained in scripture, much less of Christ. Law Enforcement gave me the structure I needed. I know what it means to have your foundation shaken with the loss of faith. Leaving the cult lead me to explore other religions eventually becoming an agnostic. Yet this left me with a few problems.
First, whithout a creator, what is the meaning of life? Second, is there absolute truth? Laslty, was Christ a real person in history and did Christ actually rise from the grave, overcoming death? It is this last point that eventually lead me to Christianity? Do you have input to these questions?
Again thanks for your time and if any of this is offensive ignore it.
Rocky

I just picked up a copy of a Michael Shermer book from the public library (How We Beleive).  There, tucked between the pages were two tracts!  Little cheapo ones.  One we titled "Salvation in 30 sincere seconds" and the other was "The Burning Hell".  Somebody is stuffing snake oil and threats into my library books.

Now I don't come from a fungidelical background, so I am trying to puzzle out just what the person who stuck these things in this book thought they were going to accomplish.  Did they honestly think they were going to save somebody's soul with a pathetic five-cent flyer stuck in a skeptical book?  (As if the kind of person who would read a book like that would never have heard that message before!)  Did they think that someone with honest questions was going to be brought back into the fold by hearing  one more threat?  Were they just  trying to score brownie points with their god? 

Can those of you who came from this kind of background shed some light on the fundie mindset here?

Back in the 19th century, there was a notorious piece of anti-Catholic propaganda called "The Awful Adventures of Maria Monk", which purported to tell the "truth" about what went on behind the scenes in convents.  It spawned a whole genre that was eagerly lapped up by a public willing to hear the worst about priests and nuns--secret tunnels, buried babies--and even now these stories keep popping up in anti-Catholic circles.   More than once I found myself having to defend the Church when these accusations would come up (usually in a fundamentalist Protestant setting).  It baffled me how anyone could believe such nonsense.  Obviously, they had never had any contact with nuns or monks or priests.  Because there was not a shred of truth to any of these stories--right?

Now flash forward to the last 20 or so years, where a scandal of even greater proportions than Maria Monk and her ilk is sweeping the Catholic Church.   I watched, dumbfounded as the revelations of sexual abuse and coverup started coming in, little by little, and snowballing to include the entire world-wide Church.  And again, it baffled me.  Maybe one or two priests might be guilty but no way could all of them?

But as the revelations and coverup continued, my bewilderment and dismay turned to anger.  How dare these men tell anyone how to conduct their sex lives, when they themselves were blatantly breaking their PUBLIC vows of chastity by raping children, and being sheltered from the consequences by their superiors who knew full well what was going on?  How dare they?   What they had done and are still doing is a slap in the face to every Catholic who still lives by the Church's rules regarding sex.  Especially those Catholics, like myself, who ended up unmarried because we would not compromise and who endured a lot of abuse because of it.  I took no vows of chastity.  But I can honestly say that I have never forced myself on another human being.

Now I pick up the paper and read where the Pope is upset because Belgian police have seized computers and detained bishops as part of an investigation into clergy abuse.  His Not-So-Holiness has even issued a statement of solidarity to the bishops.  Where is the statement of solidarity towards the victims?  Where is the statement of solidarity towards the faithful?  There was a time when I once defended the Church.  No longer.

If the Church wants to regain its credibility, it must stop impeding investigations and start cooperating.   It needs to stop sheltering those that have been accused of sexual abuse and let the law take care of them.  It needs to stop making lame excuses and come right out and say, we blew it.  It needs to apologize to the victims and to the faithful.  The guilty parties and the bishops need to publicly explain to the public WHY they did what they did, and WHY they covered it up.  Then, and only then, can the Church speak on sexual matters.

But I am not holding my breath . . .

I was reading Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett's collection "The Mind's I", which I heartily recommend.  One small part of one of the essays in it, by Raymond Smullyan, called "Is God a Taoist?", set some ideas spinning in my head. 

So often we get this same inane thing from the godbots: "You just hate god" or "Why do you hate god?".  And our usual answer of "We don't, any more than we hate the tooth fairy" never seems to get through.

Here's my new follow-up to that response, which I look forward to trying out sometime: "You are carrying a mental image of your god around in your head.  That mental image definitely exists.  That mental image is not the same thing as "god".  But your mental image of your god is what you are worshipping.  Your mental image of your god is what you are telling me I have to believe, in order to be saved from "hell"  And your mental image, since it actually exists, is something that I can hate."

Thoughts?  Revisions?

Readers of my posts know that from time to time I have wavered in my deconversion. I've thought about going back to Christianity, embracing Deism or exploring various eastern religious practices. Many would say, "what's the big deal?", but for me, identifying what I am (labeling) is important. 

So I've settled on a soft (some call it weak, but I don't like that word) atheism. I don't believe in god because I don't see any real evidence that god exists, but I freely admit that I don't know everything so I allow for the possibility that god may exist. 

I found out how far I've come (or gone depending on your point of view) a few days ago when I watched a program on the History channel entitled, "The First Jesus". It was about a messiah figure named Simeon who predated Jesus and who some think that Jesus modeled his ministry on.

What struck me was that I wasn't offended by the program. As a believer I would have thought, "another attempt to minimize Jesus". But not any more.

Partly due to the fact that in my research that led to my deconversion, I learned those very facts on my own! Something I would have never done as a believer.

Funny what facts will do.

 

4: DIVINE DESIGN

I want to restate that I am more agnostic when it comes to Deism. Perhaps because of that, I find it rather off-putting when the author starts equating the unknown designer with the god of the Bible in the middle of the chapter without establishing any argument that they are one and the same except self-evidence.

There has been so much written on this topic that I don’t expect to be adding anything new to the conversation, so I hope to keep it brief. The thing that is pointed out in response to the Teleological Argument time and again is that since it’s entirely impossible for us to experience the universe in any other way but the way it is, it will necessarily seem as if it were designed perfectly for us to live in. It also tends to give humanity a position of privilege, as if the existence of humans is a necessity. Daniel Dennett discusses the flaw in the anthropic principle:

In the "weak form" it is a sound, harmless, and on occasion useful application of elementary logic: if x is a necessary condition for the existence of y, and y exists, then x exists. If consciousness depends on complex physical structures, and complex physical structures depend on large molecules composed of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, then, since we are conscious, the world must contain such elements.

"But notice that there is a loose cannon on the deck in the previous sentence: the wandering "must". I have followed the common practice in English of couching a claim of necessity in a technically incorrect way. As any student in logic class soon learns, what I really should have written is: It must be the case that: if consciousness depends ... then, since we are conscious, the world contains such elements.

The conclusion that can be validly drawn is only that the world does contain such elements, not that it had to contain such elements. It has to contain such elements for us to exist, we may grant, but it might not have contained such elements, and if that had been the case, we wouldn't be here to be dismayed. It's as simple as that (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 165-166).

The author writes that there is no evidence for a multiple universe theory and that it is nothing more than a metaphysical concoction (p 107). Yet nothing more about the posited designer is known either, and outside space-time, either seems equally likely or unlikely. To show that a designer is more likely than a multiverse, the author should be able to identify ways that a designer has affected the universe beyond asserting that the universe appears to have design. If he has no idea about the mechanism by which the designer affects the physical universe, and no experiment can identify which aspects of nature were specifically designed and which were not, then intelligent design falls into the same category as other speculations concerning things outside of space-time, that is, unprovable. Separated from religion, there need be no particular reason to choose one speculation over another or to choose any at all; and again, to involve religion necessitates investigating the claims of the particular religion.

Analogously, his fourth objection that the multiple universe theory is so broad that any event can be explained away by it also applies to his infinite, all-powerful god. There are several laws of reaction and effect, such that any change within a system such as the universe will have ramifications. If a designer is intervening in the physical universe, through changing events in a way that they would not otherwise have occurred, but even more so through miracles, then the rules of the universe are fundamentally different when these things happen. It’s possible to define the designer as having such absolute power over everything in the universe that he can negate the laws of reaction and conversation at the point where he makes a change, but such an assumption would need some backing evidence to be believable.

As I mentioned earlier, the most disturbing thing in the chapter is the way that the author turns to sermonizing near the end. He claims to be building a philosophical and scientific case, but with no prelude, he declares that God is the unlimited limited – the uncreated Creator – of all things and then describes God’s attributes as power knowledge, justice and love (p 109). Ostensibly, I don’t object to a book being written to a Christian audience to confirm what the readers are already inclined to believe, but as a reader investigating an argument, this sort of conclusion is entirely unacceptable. The author proclaims that he has presented impressive evidence for a designer and the atheist who rejects these findings simply does not want to admit to a designer, as well as implying that such an atheist is emotional and unobjective (p 112), and I find it arrogant that he cannot admit that a designer that he cannot observe in any way is not an undeniable fact, but a metaphysical speculation that he considers to have a high probability of likelihood.

I often  talk about how many times each day something that is a one-in-a million shot could happen, but doesn't.  With all the possible things that could happen, every once in awhile one of them should.  It's just something you should expect, and certainly not evidence of anything supernatural.

Today I hit one.  I was commenting over on ex-christian.net, about the picture of Vlad the Impaler the post had used, and so I was curious about whether Vlad was very religious. I clicked on Wikipedia, wondering whether I could remember how to spell his last name, and found that I needn't have worried.  There he was in the lead article of the day, with a picture and everything.

"OOOOHH, spooky" a typical non-skeptic might comment.  What were the odds?  But when I consider the number of times I have clicked on Wikipedia in the last year or so, and the number of pictures and links that are on the front page, it would be spookier if this sort of thing never happened.  AND - perhaps the person writing the post had also been to Wikipedia today, and that's where they got the idea to reference Vlad,  which would make the odds of running into this sort of coincidence much higher.

Perhaps I should start keeping track of how many times I click on Wikipedia and don't see what I was looking for on the front page.  (And the number of times I don't find $20 on the sidewalk.  And the number of times I think about an old friend and they don't call.  And how many times I think about a song I have not heard for a long time and the radio doesn't play it. And...)