A Testimony

I'm happy to say that, for the foreseeable future at least, this isn't going to be one of those current events blogs where I riff on the latest headlines, so my topics are going to have to come from other sources. My last post left a number of dangling threads. I might as well pick one of them up.

I said in that post that I was raised Lutheran but decided at some point to stop being one. It might be worthwhile to explain why.

This is something I rarely talk about in detail in my religious discussions. One of the reasons is that, while there are many religious subjects that can be discussed without incurring anyone's wrath, the question of whether a specific god exists or not tends to be more provocative. The existence of God is extremely important to a great many people, and openly doubting the validity of a given religious belief takes some measure of caution if you want to avoid pissing everyone off. So to be on the safe side, I generally try to present my point of view without explicitly arguing why I think other beliefs are wrong.

Nonetheless, I do have reasons for not being a Christian, and I think they're fairly decent ones. For the most part, they're not the stereotypical reasons you frequently hear from bandwagon atheists or from Christians attempting to catalog the justifications people give for not believing.

My loss of faith had nothing to do with the so-called "problem of evil," which is often used to argue that an all-good, all-powerful god would never allow evil and suffering to persist. Though it may be a bit callous of me to say so, I never lost much sleep over that one. I was accustomed to viewing evil solely as the outcome of human decisions.

It also had nothing to do with the hypocritical actions of religious followers, and I still think that's a dumb reason for not believing in God.

It had nothing to do with the supposedly excessive behavioral restraints required by a religious worldview. My life had little in the way of debauchery and depravity while I was believer and, sadly, not much has changed since.

It had nothing to do with the theory of evolution. I lost my faith around the end of high school but I didn't get a decent explanation of what evolution was until my third year of college.

Hell, it even had nothing to do with Richard Dawkins. The God Delusion was still years away from being published when I stopped believing, so I was not seduced into godlessness by Richard's dazzling displays of reason and logic.

My loss of faith was slow and gradual and probably had many subconscious factors that I'm not even aware of. At the heart of it, though, was my expanding perception of God and my inability to see Christianity's exclusive validity when compared to all the other world religions. In the interest of laying all my cards on the table, what follows is, to the best of my memory, the story of how I got to where I am today and the reasons why I continue to hold this position. I present it not under the naive assumption that it'll convince anyone of anything, but simply to chronicle my own personal rationale for not being a Christian, and perhaps to better understand my own thoughts on this issue.

To begin, I should mention that religion played a big role in my youth. I was enrolled in a private Lutheran school the moment I turned three and stayed there until my eight grade graduation. It's fair to say that my school promoted a fairly conservative theology. Lutherans are big on biblical literalism, and the particular denomination that I was raised in--Missouri Synod--is among the most conservative of the many Lutheran denominations. For instance, it's a matter of doctrine that you reject evolutionary explanations for the origin of species. Indeed, my school made sure to point out that evolution was false and that God created the universe exactly as described in Genesis, complete with six twenty-four-hour days. You attained salvation through Christ alone and everyone who didn't accept Christ was going to hell. And while I'm not sure they taught this explicitly, I also got it into my head at some point that only Lutherans go to heaven.

I believed all of this and more for a good ten years of my life, beginning when I achieved complete sentience somewhere around the age of two or three. Things began to change somewhat when I started high school, my first three years of which were spent at a private Catholic school. This may not sound like a big change, but it was. Though private and religious, my high school had a large student body with many different faiths represented among them. Because of the relative diversity, the school was obligated to take a more religiously open-minded stance. True, most students were Catholic, but there were plenty of Protestants as well, along with some Muslims, Buddhists, and even a few angsty teenage atheists.

The religious courses I took during those first three years of high school were noticeably different from the ones taught at my previous school. They discussed a number of historical details about the scriptures that I had not previously known, such as when the books were written and by whom. They were more likely to note the humanity of the Biblical authors rather than simply describe the whole thing as the inerrant word of God. They also introduced a number of less literal ways of interpreting Bible passages. They were still a solidly Christian school, of course, but the theology was a bit more nuanced and appealing than what I had been exposed to before, their god slightly more open to compromise. By the end of my first year, I was convinced that all Christians, not just Lutherans, went to heaven.

During my sophomore year I was able to take a class on world religions. This was something I had always wanted to do, ever since I first heard that other religions existed several years prior. Back then my interest was more like that of a sleazy tabloid reporter. I didn't want to understand the other religions so much as hear the scandalous details of their crazy sacrilegious beliefs. By the start of my second year of high school, however, I was genuinely interested. Surprisingly, I found a lot to like in the major religions that we discussed. My teacher presented them without bias or ridicule, so I gained a good deal of valuable insight. I found Hinduism to be particularly appealing, perceiving a certain logic in its doctrines of karma and reincarnation. It got to a point where I kind of wished I had been raised Hindu instead of Christian. That I had such thoughts at all probably says a lot about what I was thinking regarding the exclusivity of the Christian faith. I still considered myself a Christian, but I had a new found openness to other religions. I recognized that the mutually exclusive teachings between the various faiths meant they couldn't all be right, but I began to think that maybe being "right" wasn't what was important. There was something vaguely noble about each religion's unique search for God, and it became tempting to see them all as possessing some degree of validity or a piece of some greater truth, kind of like that analogy of the blind men and the elephant. Perhaps God was big enough to accommodate all of them. By the end of my second year, I was convinced that all religious people went to heaven.

But that world religions class put another idea into my head, too. It took a while for the implications to really hit me, but eventually it turned into what was probably the strongest intellectual reason I had for leaving Christianity. Though the class focused mainly on the beliefs held by each of the religions, we were also taught their respective histories. Most religions have their own creation myth which typically places their origins way back at the beginning of time itself. But they also have historical beginnings here on Earth, when like-minded human beings first began organizing themselves into groups according to their beliefs. Before, I had been used to thinking of Christianity as the only religion of genuinely divine inspiration, but as I thought about the historical details of all the major religions, it became harder to see how this could be the case. Yes, as Christians we believed that our version of the supernatural world was the correct one, but every religion had believers who thought the exact same thing about their own faith. They all had mythical histories embellished with supernatural events meant to establish their credibility. They couldn't all be right, and given the difficulties with piecing together ancient history, how could we ever be sure which, if any, was the one true faith? It was the first time I had really thought about this question and I didn't have a good answer.

This was perhaps the first true hint of doubt to enter my mind and it only got stronger from there. Over time, I began thinking about religions with their historical contexts in mind. I started to wonder whether they might simply be products of the cultures that "discovered" them, their individual details determined by the location, people, and circumstances from which they emerged. Given that my belief in God was still relatively intact at this point, these thoughts translated into a sense that all religions were equally valid, that they were all reaching for God in their own way. At the same time, these ideas were having an influence on how I thought about God. What used to be a small, personal and knowable God grew increasingly large and incomprehensible. I considered other forms that God might take, many of them contrary to how the Bible tends to describe him. God was becoming too big for the Bible alone.

What happened towards the end of high school and immediately afterward I can only write about in a general sense. The reason is because it becomes increasingly difficult for me to sort out exactly what I thought and when after my sophomore year. As I said, my loss of faith was very gradual. Though there were some diversions along the way, the basic trends I've described above more or less continued as time went on. There was no one defining moment when I decided once and for all to stop being a Christian. In the years following my world religions class, my perception of God simply became increasingly grand but more abstract and nonreligious. Eventually, God became so vague that I wasn't sure he existed at all. I eased into a sort of theistic agnosticism for a while, then just agnosticism. The historical circumstances of each religion now told me that they were all equally invalid, at least as far as their claims on divine knowledge were concerned. By the time I started college, there was no heaven.

Now, it may be that I simply didn't try hard enough to keep my faith. I'm sure there were authors I could have read or youth groups I could have joined had I really wanted to. But the fact that I didn't put up a strong fight, that I lost my faith without really feeling like I was losing anything, suggests it just wasn't that important to me anymore. There were probably psychological issues at work too, but I won't speculate on those now. The willingness with which I allowed my original perception of God to be so thoroughly amended and ultimately abolished indicates that, in the end, the God of Martin Luther just wasn't right for me. Nor was any other god, for that matter. The more I thought of it, the more sense it made to claim ignorance of God's ultimate nature and existence. In other words, I didn't choose agnosticism; agnosticism chose me.

Since then, I've read and thought a lot more about the subject. In recent years I've attempted to flesh out the reasons for my admittedly hazy position in more detail, figuring out exactly what I think and why. I've even familiarized myself with various religious authors and their arguments to make sure I didn't miss anything. Unfortunately, I've seen no reason to abandon that initial feeling of doubt.

For all the hysteria over evolution, the big bang and all the other scientific theories that supposedly conflict with religious teachings, I think the strongest case to be made against any religion as divine revelation is a historical one. One of the big reasons I've never seriously considered taking up my faith again is that I still fail to see what makes Christianity unique among all the other religions. Yes, there are a number of beliefs within Christianity that no other faith holds, but the same can be said of every religion. All religions have something that makes them different from the rest. But is there a good reason to think that Christianity's claims are uniquely true? Did God really make a covenant with a man named Abram thousands of years ago? Did he really lead someone named Moses and 600,000 Israelites out of Egypt? Did Jesus really raise from the dead? Or, like the stories found in Hinduism or Greek mythology, are the Biblical stories inspiring myths tailored to a specific people at a specific time? In my view, the later is infinitely more likely.

That, in the end, is the biggest problem for me. If I were to summarize the major obstacle preventing me from embracing any of the three great Western religions, I would say simply that I can find no compelling reason to think the Bible is divinely inspired, or that its stories are an accurate account of a god and his people. As challenging as it is to piece together a complete history from the ambiguous archaeological scraps left by ancient civilizations, what little we do have makes it increasingly difficult to read the Bible as a representation of actual events. It has undoubtedly enriched the lives of many millions of people over thousands of years, occasionally providing its adherents with the strength needed to endure unimaginable turmoil. It even offers some fundamental truths about human nature. But I do not believe that the god it describes exists anywhere outside its pages. I am ever more convinced that if there is a god, he or she or it is grander than anything humanity has yet imagined.

A Statement of Belief

I didn't start paying attention to politics until after the September 11 attacks. I quickly developed fairly-to-quite liberal views on most issues, although I rarely referred to myself as liberal then and do so even less frequently now, despite the fact that I still hold many of those same views. I'm a registered independent and have never belonged to a political party.

For the most part, I've tried to avoid labeling myself as one thing or another. Partly because I'm sort of attracted to the idea of ideological independence and partly because labels are often conversation killers. One of the things I noticed about political discourse in the Bush Era was how quick people were to pigeonhole their opponents and ignore them, so to avoid that, I tended to shun specific labels.

The problem with this approach is that it can create confusion if you're not clear about what you do think. Now that my interest has shifted more towards larger philosophical issues, I find myself occasionally running into this problem. I was baptized as a Lutheran and proudly referred to myself as such for a good chunk of my life. At some point, however, I decided I wasn't a Christian anymore and started calling myself an agnostic, which really doesn't say a whole lot. Agnosticism is simply one particular view regarding the validity of spiritual claims, not a complete philosophical package.

Most of the people I discuss this stuff with have reasonably clear systems of belief. I know whether or not they believe in God, which god they do or don't believe in, and how this belief affects their worldview in a general sort of way. Being a wishy-washy agnostic who refuses to align himself with any one philosophical or political ideology, I feel that I'm sometimes less clear about what I believe than I ought to be. This lack of clarity once led one of my friends to ask me if I could write down exactly what I believe. I said Yeah, I could probably do that. That was nine months ago. Tonight I'm going to make good on that commitment.

So what, briefly, do I believe? I think I'll start by asking myself two questions.

Question 1: Do any of the gods described in any of the human religions exist?
Answer: Probably not.

Question 2: Does a god or god-like thing exist, one that is perhaps above and beyond anything yet described by human beings?
Answer: Maybe, but I don't know for sure.

In short, I don't know, so I usually just say I'm an agnostic. Granted, based on these two answers alone I'd probably fit into some definitions of atheism as well. I guess the reason I don't call myself an atheist is that I place a larger emphasis on that second question than many of them seem to. I think the question of why there is something rather than nothing is a very good one, and one that we're not ready to answer yet. According to Wikipedia, there's a strong version of agnosticism claiming that the answers to spiritual questions are inherently unknowable, but I don't know if I'd go that far. It may be that once we learn enough about the universe we'll find something that we can call god or, alternatively, be able to prove definitively that all of existence came about through purely natural means. But we're not there yet and it's possible that we never will be.

There are a couple other issues that usually come along with the God one that I should probably touch on as well. First, although I'm not religious, I'm not a science supremacist either. I think scientists and scientific thinking are subject to a lot of undue romanticism by a lot of people who see science as sort of the opposite of religion, and that the scientific process is perfectly vulnerable to human abuse and politics. That said, I think the scientific process is still the best tool we have for discovering how the universe works and that it is slowly helping us piece together an accurate picture of the physical world. As for its supposed conflict with religion, I see no reason why certain kinds of religious belief can't be reconciled with science.

The other thing I want to address is morality. Discussions of God's existence often lead to the question of what basis we have for morality, especially if there is no god. My own thoughts are that while I don't see any obvious signs of an objective, divine basis for morality, I don't think that's as big a problem as some people think. There may not be an objective basis for moral law, but I would say that there's a biological one. Without going into the details, there is good reason to think that our moral tendencies are built into us and I don't think you necessarily need to invoke a god to explain this.

I'll most likely discuss these in more detail in future posts. My goal here is more to summarize my positions rather than give thorough justifications for them. Given that this blog will function largely as a self-indulgent vehicle for my opinions on important things, I thought it'd be good to start by providing a rough sense of where I stand as of now.

Prelude to a Weblog

I've decided the world needs another blog. If that sounds scary, don't worry. I'm going to try not to impose myself onto the internet the way so many other blogs do. In fact, most people won't even know I'm here, and I'm okay with that.

Before I get into things, I should probably tell you what I'm doing here. The overarching purpose of this blog is practice. I want to get better at discussing matters that I think are important. Admittedly, many of the things I think are important are things I haven't spent enough time writing, reading, or thinking about, so this is one of the steps I'm taking to fix that. I freely admit that I don't know everything about the topics that interest me, and I hope to use this space to develop them into something more substantial, or at the very least, profitable.

I certainly welcome comments, criticism and feedback so long as they're above the current internet standard of lame misspelled bumper-sticker. I'm not going to be advertising this thing, so I don't expect many visitors beyond some real-world friends and maybe the occasional drifter. Again, that's okay with me. The last thing I want is an unwieldy horde of e-rabble belligerently deflowering my comments section.

That's about it for now. Assuming I don't immediately get bored with blogging, there should be more posts in the future.

By the way, I'll be talking about God and stuff.