deconversion

So I decided to read Josh McDowell's book Evidence That Demands A Verdict.

Is he for real? I've read half way through chapter 2 (34 pages) and I can't believe he is making such absurd claims (I started to say "arguments" but he hasn't made an argument yet!). Is he serious about his claim that the number of copies of the new testament is proof of its authenticity? Please tell me that he's not serious (I know, I know. He is.).

He brags and brags how the bible influenced society, governments, history, etc. Well, of course it has! Well, since the 4th century, believers have been told that it is the WORD OF GOD (thunder, please). When people believe it is the word of god, they tend to let themselves be influenced by it. What's so amazing about that? Furthermore, how does that prove anything about the authenticity of the bible?

Is the rest of the book going to be like this?

Well, I finished the book after all.

I am speechless. At no time did Aling ever really try to validate the bible stories of Joseph, Moses or the exodus. He just took them as fact and moved on. In fact, he went so far as to disallow anything that disputed the bible and went with the bible. I thought about listing my 25 objections, but I think that would be preaching to the choir.

Two things come to mind:
1) This pretty well drives the nail in the coffin for me concerning the bible. I purposely read a book from a believer to see if he would reasonably prove what the bible claims. He didn't even try. In fact, as I have said, he admitted that there is no archeological nor historical data to back up the bible's claims. And this guy has a Phd in Egyptology!

2) This experience shows me the power of belief. I read this same book 25 years ago and accepted every excuse Aling offered. Now I just hang my head in shame that I did so. Did I really just take it all? Yes I did. I refused to listen to REASON! I attributed my doubts to the devil instead of realizing that they were from my BRAIN hollering, "Wake up, stupid! Wake up!"

It's funny, I am a skeptic by nature, but I wasn't here. I accepted the bible without real question. I accepted the lame-ass "proof of the infallibility" of the bible without question. Even though I was skeptical about various claims made by various people, various doctrines taught, etc, I never questioned the entire world-view!

Man, what an eye-opener! The emperor has no clothes. I'm just sorry it took me 30 years to see it.

I'm not sure I'll finish Aling's book Egypt and Bible History.

I read the first 4 chapters and I'm just dumbfounded. All I have read so far is a survey of pre-biblical history and the Joseph story. Thus far, I have 20+ objections to his arguments (I hesitate to call them arguments for they are really just assertions). Aling doesn't even make a genuine effort to prove his case. He simply states it as if it were fact (I guess I was right the other day) and goes about validating it. In every instance where there is a question of biblical accuracy, he manages (he thinks) to explain it away.

I've been keeping a journal of my notes and objections, but I am tired of not being able to read a single page of his book without having to stop to write something down.

Is the rest of the bible this false? Is it really this easy (if the village idiot can do it, anyone can!) to disprove the bible?

I have to share something from the last chapter I read.

I had never realized that there was a contradiction in the bible concerning how long the Israelites were in Egypt. I had always thought 430 years. Aling himself brings up the fact that the bible contradicts itself (although he doesn't call it that. We're just reading it wrong!) by pointing out that based on Galatians 3, the law was given 430 years after the promise was made to Abraham in Genesis 12. Since it was 215 years from Abraham's time to the time Jacob went into Egypt, then the longest the Israelites could have been in Egypt is 215 years to make the 430 years of Galations 3. BUT Exodus 12 says that they were in Egypt 430 years.

Who to believe? Was the law given 430 years after the promise to Abraham or were the Israelites actually in Egypt for 430 years? One way they were in Egypt 215 years, the other, it was 645 years from the giving of the promise until the law.

Does this bother Aling? Not in the least. You see the promise was to Abraham's seed. So, if we count from Abraham's seed (Jacob), we find that we can correct our obvious misunderstanding!

Problem solved. NEXT!

I just sat there thinking, "No he didn't." But, yes he did. If this had been the only discrepancy, I might be willing to give him a pass on this. But after the 20th objection, passes are a thing of the past.

I'm curious about how he adresses Moses, so I'll probably at least read the next couple of chapters.

I'll keep you posted!

Everyone,
     The following was posted to my blog July 10th (and was fed into my facebook account, which my family, friends and former churchgoers read) and has since received varied reactions, the most emotional of which, obviously, have come from my family. I post it here so that it might help or give comfort or insight to someone. It's been a hard road, but one that was inescapable for me. I could not deal with the insincerity, or hypocrisy, of the life I was living, so like a detonation, the roof had to come off. It's unfortunate, and I'm saddened, that this epistle has hurt the ones I love the most, but their feelings are understandable given what they believe. I hold no ill-will toward anyone, and wish that they continue to believe if it works for them. But it didn't for me, and here's why:

The God question: My testimony
The debate on the God question has come up recently on Facebook between a couple friends of mine, and I thought it might be interesting if I laid out and clarified a few points about my own experiences regarding this matter to attempt to come around to an overall theory. Some family, friends, former church members of mine have probably noticed peculiar posting of mine regarding religion and God, and I thought an explanation was in order. This post took me a couple weeks to write (Thus the reason for no other recent posts), so bear with me. I’m not saying my conclusion won’t or can’t change, but my thoughts right now as they stand are recorded in this post. To borrow a religious term, here is my “testimony:”

First, as I have stated to a couple people in the last year, I set about in Oct. 2008 or so to the task of trying to figure out precisely why I believed what I proclaimed to believe. I will say here that I was raised in the Christian tradition, as most people in the southeastern United States are, and spent many years performing musically and otherwise toward that end. I sang with my grandfather, whom I miss to this day, in more than one Southern gospel group. I played acoustic and electric guitar for seven or more years in a contemporary-style church in Upstate, South Carolina. Until I reached college, I knew little of teachings other than what was in the Bible. Despite taking and passing a philosophy class and many English classes which served to, at least, introduce certain issues that would later challenge my faith, I maintained my core beliefs through college and even through numerous years after college.

Like so many with physical ailments who have wanted desperately to believe in a god who had the power to, not only save souls, but to physically heal, I tried my best to read the Bible and believe. In the years after college, my life was largely dominated by loneliness and despair over various issues, the most immediate of which would be emphysema.

I had heard stories that many people back home prayed me out of certain death when I was a baby hospitalized for 3 1/2 years in New York City, apparently saving me from dying from a critical immune system disorder. I don’t want to discredit or marginalize family members’ and friends’ efforts or concerns back home. They were doing what they thought was best.

So, poof, after much research and after three years of testing and poking and prodding at me, doctors came up with a way to give me an unprecedented unmatched bone marrow transplant to set my immune system on the right course. In the early 1980s, this was no small thing.

Now, I’m wise enough to recognize that science and research saved me in my infancy. I’m wise enough to know that, had I been lying in a crib inside my home in South Carolina, with the same prayers but without the same science and medical treatment, I would be a memory, and would probably not have even made it past my first year. So, at 4 1/2 years old, with medical research providing and setting my path toward adulthood, I set out on a vast world that I had never known cramped inside my little, sterile hospital-world.

And, of course, my parents not only gave me life … but a second life. I was a dead man, but they packed up their things in their early 20s at the time (I’m now 32 and can’t imagine doing such a thing at their age) and moved 900 miles north to a cockroach-ridden Manhattan apartment with their young daughter … all for me. For all my hard-boiled, emotional determinism, the thought of what they went through to keep me alive still brings a lump to my throat … and I’m thankful beyond words.

Back to religion, I decided a year or so back that it would be the most insincere and dishonest thing that I could imagine if I were to continue to lead the people in church worship without believing myself in the words of the songs I was playing (I think even believers can agree with me on that point.) I surmised that it would also be distasteful to not know full well why I believed in what the folks around me were singing, and not be able to articulate what I believed, and why I believed it. I concluded, even before I began questioning faith, that to believe and live my entire life and then die some day without knowing precisely why I believed such and such, without evidence and without a good explanation for any of it, essentially giving my entire life to something, sheepishly, was a most foolish and tragic thing (In fact, the word “tragic” probably represents an understatement).

Believing simply based on a “feeling” that we get on Sunday morning in the presence of nice music and other believers — which is all it is, since there’s not a stitch of evidence for any of it — was not good enough for me, and this was the realization that hit me between the eyes at some point last year. I can, perhaps, pinpoint the precise time. It may have been during a long car ride to Boston with my wife, when I had a fantastically long time to do a lot of thinking.

To catalog a few of the works I’ve studied thus far that have influenced me one way or the other since and before that particular trip:

• “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
• “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles
• “Mere Christianity” “Surprised by Joy,” “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis
• “The Case for Christ” and “The Case for Faith” by Lee Strobel
• “Godless” by Dan Barker
• “Why I Became An Atheist” by John Loftus
• “The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
• “The End of Faith” by Sam Harris
• “The Stranger” and “The Myth of Sisyphus” By Albert Camus
• “Notes from the Underground” By Fyodor Dostoevsky (To a lesser degree, “The Brothers Karamzov” and “Crime and Punishment”
• This does not mention, of course, most of the Old and New testaments, numerous Christian commentaries, two decades of Christian teaching from various workshops, sermons and classes, and many of the gospels and texts that did not make it into the “official” King James Bible as pieced together by various church officials centuries ago.

I’m under no illusion that my recent thoughts and studies are crushing to any possibility, or any fraction of a possibility, that I might supernaturally be made better physically some day (For I deny even the possibility of a being capable of such things … nothwithstanding his unwillingness). I dare say no one has called out more to God than I for answers, even for answers about his own existence. No one has pleaded more with God for help. No one has been on their knees more than me. But I’ve heard nothing. Not one thing but my own voice, until eventually I got the impression that my prayers were merely floating to the ceiling and falling back down like stillborn stars. So, I got off my knees and determined, like the human that I am, to find the truth.

Believers will probably question this, saying something like, “Well, you can’t just give up. God is faithful to answer prayer in his time on his watch” or with, “God answers all prayer with either a ‘No,’ ‘Yes,’ or ‘Maybe.’” But those are the only three possible options, aren’t they? We can write off or explain away any unanswered prayer (or perceived answered prayer) by that logic to help God escape an explanation for his own silence.

We have, indeed, for centuries, received nothing at all but silence from the God of the Old Testament, just as we have received no recent word from Jesus or Zeus or Apollo or Allah or Osiris. Thousands of years have passed and not an utterance. Does that not strike anyone else as peculiar? Believers, again, will say the Bible is God’s revealed word or his instruction manual and that he exists in the hearts and minds of those who are filled with the Holy Spirit because they have believed in him. Well, I have believed — I have with all my heart — and other than some hormones jostled around, stimulated by some inspiring tune in the company of believers, have felt or heard nothing but my own voice.

So, I know there will be those to whom these words are very troubling — family, friends, former churchgoers, etc. but please know that I expect none of the same thoughts from any of you and am not trying to convince anyone of anything. I’m merely stating my experiences, and don’t particularly want this to meltdown into a large debate. Again, I did not set out at the start to disprove anything. I set out to find the truth. And these truths we can’t escape: Earth is billions of years old, Earth exists on a spiral arm of our galaxy, an insignificant spot, and not the center of the galaxy as many of our forebearers thought (which, by the way, gave creedance to the argument that we are the special planet, and a special species, in all of creation). The Earth will one day be uninhabited by people once again, not by a rapture, but either by a wayward asteroid or gamma ray burst or by the sun losing power. The truth is the canonical Bible contains many irreparable self-contradictions; condones slavery, mass slaughter, rape, the mutilation or altering of children’s genitalia, among other things; and cannot even get the details straight about the events surrounding Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Again, when I set about my studies, I was not seeking hope or spiritualism or miracles or wishful-thinking, I was seeking the truth, which in the 17th century when John Milton was alive, “a wicked race of deceivers … took the virgin Truth (and) hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds.” But they are not at the four winds anymore. Truth is much closer to us in modern America. So, at least at this juncture, I have concluded that the ancient, contradictory books of the Old and New testaments, written in a time of widespread myth and legend, are not good enough to make me, first, believe, and second, to base my entire life on such things contained therein.

I feel compelled to say that I apologize to certain people (of whom I still hold a great deal of respect) for that statement, whom I know, would want me to conclude differently, but that’s how I feel. The Christian tradition is so embedded in this part of the country (the Southeast), that to say such things, is almost like seceding a second time from the Union. But again, I ask, what’s more important? The truth or wishful thinking? When I set out about this, I resolved to be comfortable with whatever philosophical pathway on which my studies took me down. And that’s what we all must do.

And at some point, all us of have to make a similar choice: Do we want to be complacent in living our lives for a faith that may or may not, in reality, be true, or can we mentally and emotionally handle another possibility: that we are an insignificant dot in a vast, vast universe. As a friend of mine was saying, we need religion. We do indeed. But can’t we be strong enough to move past it and accept our place in the cosmos? As one writer, John Loftus, said that we humans think we are so special that we can’t imagine a fate that would see us go extinct like all the rest of life on Earth. Yet, that is our fate. Our extreme intelligence compels us to think of other worlds or other dimensions like heaven or hell, but our humanity also compels us to surmise that we are on a small planet in an insignificant galaxy, of which, there are millions. It is quite believable to think other species in some undiscovered galaxy thought themselves self-important, like us, and then, saw their own existence come to a crashing hault.

Of course, we may never know 100 percent if there is a god or not and we may never know 100 percent how life began, but I think we can be pretty sure it did not happen as the Bible, with its self-contradictions, recounts. (Note: I do not cite examples of the Bible’s contradictions here because they are well documented and this post is long as is. Search Google for “bible contradictions” and you can view them for yourself.)

For me, the option that we are an insignificant dot in a vast universe, takes much more wherewithall, and frankly, is a quite liberating axiom, to know that we are, at the core, connected and interconnected with the universe, not just Earth, and everything in the universe is quite a beautiful thing, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has noted.

Thus, again, I did not seek hope (specifically for my health conditions or otherwise) or karma or spirituality or wishful thinking. I sought the truth. For truth, should we reference the record of science, which says this planet has existed for billions of years and will again be vanquished or a book authored by superstitious people thousands of years ago during a time consumed with myth and legend? I have to side with the former.

A common topic discussed on non-religious or post-religious sites is the subject of morality. Many religions, particularly those who consider Abraham the father of their faith – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – believe they have the corner on morality and that “God” though his “holy book” is the source of morality in the world.

For many, the 10 Commandments set the foundation on which morality is based. The 10 Commandments are found in Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21. Depending on your religion or denomination, there are 12 commandments used to make up some version of the 10 Commandments. They are:

1. I am the Lord your God
2. You shall have no other gods before me
3. You shall not make for yourself an idol
4. You shall not take the Lord’s name in vain
5. Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy
6. Honor your Father and Mother
7. You shall not kill
8. You shall not commit adultery
9. You shall not steal
10. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor
11. You shall not covet your neighbor’s house
12. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.

To be inclusive of everyone, let’s assume that there are 12 Commandments and consider whether or not these commandments serve as a good base for morality.

The first 4 commandments provide nothing more than an egotistical nod to the supremacy of the Moses’ God and contain no guidance for morality. The 5th is really nothing more than a very strange ritual. Thank goodness Jesus, his disciples, and Paul decided that this ‘jot and tittle’ could pass away and that it is no longer relevant.

The remaining 6 (or 5 or 4 depending on how you’re counting), are a bit more relevant to morality. However, why was there an emphasis on bearing false witness and coveting and no mention of rape, bigotry, slavery, incest, torture, or abuse?

In addition, one has to question whether these are absolutes when the Bible itself condoned many acts of killing, lying, and stealing depending on the circumstance (Examples: The story of Jacob and Esau, etc.  For killings, see this link).

Jesus, the supposed God-man, openly violated the 10 commandments and definitely was not a big fan of the “honor your father and mother” commandment as evident by his thoughts about family values:

Luke 14:26 “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.”

Luke 9:59 He said to another man, “Follow me.” But the man replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father. Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”

Matthew 12:46-50 While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.” He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”

Overall, I do not believe this list is a good basis for morality. If I had the pleasure of being the omniscient creator of the universe, I would spent time carving a different set of commandments in the stone for my creation to use as a basis for morality. You can bet it would include commands against terrible acts such as rape, torture, child abuse, slavery and bigotry.

- The de-Convert