Inventing Government

I like to invent things (even if only on paper) and I do so in spurts of enthusiam for different things.  For the last year or so, my enthusiam has been about religion and government.

General, cultural Christianity as well as my personal upbringing, instilled in me the paradoxical idea that government is (omnipresent) God in abstentia, along with some other conflicting ideas like freedom being a gift from God, but only for good people not for undesirables like homosexuals or the inner-city poor.   These ideas were among the many that burned off like fog in the sun when I de-converted.

But it left me with a ticklish problem.  If the purpose of government wasn’t the “or else” in the statement “Obey God’s rules, or else!” what was it? I studied different ideologies and rejected them one by one.  Some ideologies contained more truth than others, but ultimately I found a lot of them were based on false premises, and unconfirmable or unconfirmed data.

Since I’ve been fascinated by revolutionary movements since I was child (When I was 9, I planned out an eloborate and violent coup of my school giving it up not out of moral qualms  but because I realized ultimately, any resistance I offered adults would not result in children being granted our constititional rights, but serve as pretext to steal the few we had.) I had decent working knowledge of revolutionary movements, further enhanced by some pretty hard reveiw of revoltionary movements I undertook to offer advice to my so called “revolutionary church”.

This knowledge served me well, as world history is the story of the revolutionary movements that worked.   Even within the scope of revolutions that effectively won, most revolutionary movements struggle enormously with the task of switching from David to Goliath.

War represents a reversal of normal values.  Normally killing people and taking their stuff is socially condemned, in war, it is applauded.  Civil war is worse because it is more specific.  Normally killing your neighbor is socially condemned, in civil war, it is applauded.  The same key that increases a revolutionary movements’ chance to succeed increases the revolutionary movements’ chance to successfully transition for revolutionary movement to rule. That key is how the members respond to the entrenched ideology of the existing government.

People gather together around ideologies, from NASCAR tailgating parties, to the ritual cannibalism of the Eucharist.  If a revolutionary movement gathers under hating the existing system, it is gathering around hate and no change of system will change the organized , systemic, rage.  Most likely the hate will destroy unit discipline within the revolutionary cabal and it will collapse into organized crime and terrorism. (Al-qaeda and the Tamil Tigers). Should the the hate-based group stay organized under a strong and ruthless leader (such as Lenin) as well as defeat the existing government, it will transition to power by entrenching the existing system at the point of a gun.  This is why so many revolutionary movements become everything they abhor.

Contrariwise,  if a revolutionary movement gathers around the postive change that it wants to make, it can often become a competeing voice in the existing system, growing in legitimacy and power.  Should it succesfully overthrow the incumbent government, it has a post-revolution plan.  Since the people revolting were gathered around something besides destruction they tend to have better idea of what to do with power once they have it.  For an object lesson on this,  juxtipose the American to the French revolution.

The government classes I had studied as outstanding young Christian gentleman were centered on what was wrong with the existant American system.  They offered no plan, no system, no roadmap for post-change improvement.  It was believed, I think, that no roadmap was nessisary.  When things were “made right” God would magically make everything work.  Question: Why did terrorists attack? Answer: Because we we’re too soft on queers and babykillers.   When we stopped allowing shows like “Will and Grace” to be broadcast and made abortion illegal, or at worst difficult to get, then the terrorism situation would improve in the total absence of systemic change.

So I addressed my desire to understand government, and the flaws I percieved in various ideolgeous by trying to invent a new government.  I won’t make any argument against the componants of the existant system until I can offer a better peice.  Not a peice I feel better about, mind you, but one that does the componants’ function better.

And finally, it must be remembered we speak of a system here.  By definition, systems are interconnected.  If 3 foot rail gauge is better than Standard for a rail system, you can’t make one line narrow gauge and expect improvement.  Systems must be integrated fully to function at all.  Thus, I can’t offer a single better peice to governmental theory.  In the absence of total systemic improvement, individual peicemeal improvements are actively destructive.

I’m trying to invent a whole new government from the ground up, with consistancy and reason throughout.  It’s the largest, and most encompassing inventing I’ve tried.

Super Athiest

I have an online acquaintance who is disabled.  She speaks often of a struggle she has, which she calls the “Super Cripple” complex.  (Read her blog here).  Are you familiar with positive stereotypes? A positive stereotype is a belief which infers imaginary abilities to a group or subgroup, such as black people being better at sports or Asians being better at math, etc.

She deals daily with the struggle to accept herself as she is, rather than a Hallmark Movie caricature of herself crafted of positive stereotypes. She calls this caricature “Super Cripple”.  SC never gets tired of campaigning for human rights. SC can wheel-up gradual stairs.  SC is super, she doesn’t need help from ANYBODY!  The reality, of course, is that disabled means “less able” and she does need help.  The real strength is accepting the reality of needing help, rather than trying to pretend she doesn’t by playing the fictional part of SC.   Accepting this every day remains a challenge for her.

My struggle, or one of them, is to not be Super Atheist.  Super Atheist finds purpose and joy without God or religion.  Super Atheist doesn’t need faith; Super Atheist has reason!  Super Atheist never believes sincerely with one part of his mind something that another part of his mind knows is actually false.  Super Atheist finds happiness in holidays like Easter and Christmas, because even though he knows there is no God to celebrate, he is with his family and that is what really counts.  Super Atheist never wants to go to church, or take communion, or pray for the broken of the world. Super Atheist can do anything!

But the thing is, I’m not Super Atheist.  I miss the comfort of the God hypothesis.  The idea that I am here for a capital “P,” Purpose, a participant in a grand narrative.  I miss the afterlife hypothesis.  The idea that what we do on earth has a greater meaning than the handful of lives we touch, and that evil which is not caught in the here and now, will someday be punished in the after life.

I miss crappy church.  I miss getting dressed up and going and singing once a week.  I miss real church…a lot.  I miss sitting in a room full of adopted family, and singing and praying and feeling loving and loved.

I miss speaking in tongues and the emotional high that it brings.  Actually, come to mention that, I really miss it.  Someone would come forward and we would all put them in a group hug.  We’d all go around the circle and “pray a message of God’s heart for that person” which amounted to telling the person how valuable they were, how loved, how special.  It felt great to do and to have done to you. Then we’d pray in tongues.  The reason part of the brain idles down, and the emotional part revs up.   I’ve never taken 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine (Ecstasy) but speaking in tongues seems to have the exact same effects.   From wikipedia:

• Mental and physical euphoria
• A sense of general well-being and contentedness
• Decreased negative emotion and behavior such as stress, anxiety, fear, and paranoia
• Increased sociability and feelings of communication being easy or simple
• Increased urge to communicate with others.
• Increased empathy and feelings of closeness or connection with others
• Reduced insecurity, defensiveness, and fear of emotional injury
• Decreased irritability, aggression, anger, and jealousy
• A sense of increased insightfulness and introspection
• Mild psychedelia (colors and sounds are enhanced, mild closed-eye visuals, improved pattern recognition, etc)
• Enhanced tactile sensations (touching, hugging, and sex for example all feel better) Ask any married Pentecostal if you don’t believe me, by the way, sex after praying in tongues is an amazing spiri-sexual experience.)

And I miss them all.  Above all I miss feeling like I was apart of something really special:  a 2000 year old Royal guard, still fighting the rebels to have the kingship of the true and most high King recognized.  There is a romance to words like “Kingdom”, “Knight of the Cross”, “Sacred purpose”, “Most High”  that words like “country”, “community advocate”, “special reason”, and “President” simply cannot match.  Though administratively identical, they are rhetorically worlds apart.

I am not Super Atheist.  I confess, I have a desire in my heart to gather with believers, to sing songs of worship, reverence, sorrow, penitence, and heroic victory.  I long to kneel, to dip the broken crust in the wine, to speak the words of my heart to a friend and Lord.  My only caveat is that he not be imaginary.  I desperately want to sing, worship, kneel and gather my community around a real God.

I long for a god, a religion, a purpose, and grand narrative.  I long for everything worthy religion gives man.  My disbelief in God is not the result of a lack of longing, but a lack of God.

Jesus Suicide (Trigger warning)

I stumbled onto a blog the other day called Textual Fury.  It’s the daily musing of a woman named Kateryna.  I wish I could say the blog is great, but I’m afraid that if I just said it’s great, you might get the wrong idea.  Kat is a truth speaker.  Sometimes truth is beautiful, sometimes it’s as ugly as death.  Because she just writes the truth, the subject matter is occasionally ghastly.

I’ve written about my parents before.  I spent about three blogs attacking them.  Upon reflection, I realized that wasn’t fair or right and publicly apologized.  I’ve said before my parents never abused me, not verbally, not emotionally, not physically, not sexually.  Kat’s parents did, frequently and regularly.  While my parents weren’t perfect (none are), anything my parents did wrong was well meaning harm, rooted in sincere love.  Kat’s father was a monster, and her mother both enabled the physical and sexual abuse as well as actively pursuing her own emotional abuse.  I was never anywhere near anything that compares.

Yet when Kat talks about how she felt about herself and what she did to herself, self loathing, self harm, suicidal thoughts, suicidal actions, she could be reading my journal entries from not so many years ago.  She is survivor and a victim of abuse of a kind I could not even imagine had I not read her blog.  I try to wrap my mind around this.  I carry almost none of the scars that she does, yet had the same level of self hatred and self destruction.  I, with my basically good family, her with her sick one, both came to believe that we were trash.  What possible environmental condition could we have shared?

We were raised in Christian homes.  Her father wanted her raised in a Christian home to make her easier to control and harm.  My parents wanted me raised in a Christian home because they love me and wanted to protect me.  I think most people who are Christians and want their kids to be Christians do so with true hearts of love.  It is this love, and not scripture, which is good for children.

The beauty that can be made of  Christianity in spite of scripture, does not, however, change what scripture says.  It says first that you are worthy of eternal torture.  Let’s look at the torture first.  Burns are one of the most painful things the body can experience.  The Bible, in too many places to mention, says hell is a place of eternal fire.  Imagine being doused in gas and lit on fire.  Now imagine that it never stops.  Imagine as your flesh burns away, it is healed so you can keep enduring it forever.  As you scream and cry and besoil yourself…remember, you deserve this.

The most foundational aspect of Christianity is that you deserve to be burned alive forever.  What do you suppose truly believing such a thing does to a person?  You can’t believe that you are valuable, special, or worthy of love and believe such a thing.

Ah, the Christian contends, surely not.  You accept that Jesus loved you before you were even born.  So, to accept that, you must accept the fact that love can include torturing someone almost to the edge of death, then stopping at death so you can torture them some more.  After all God said you had to go there and he loves you.

Having accepted that, you may now rejoice! If you believe that Jesus is God you are saved, accept you’re not.  Because the demons in hell believe that and tremble at the mention of His name.  Faith must be shown in works (James 2).  Do works save?  No.  They reveal what is inside.  Real salvation is accompanied by a real change.  But how much change is “real change”.  The Bible says that people have raised the dead in Jesus name and still had to go to Hell.   You’ll never know, so you will have to keep working and working, constantly asking yourself, “Is this enough?”

So, you are a horrible disgusting murderer (you killed Christ), the greatest love includes the threat “Or I’ll burn you alive for ever.”  And finally, you will live under the constant threat of hell.  You will never know if the actions you are taking are personally costly enough (actions taken in God’s name to advance yourself rather than God are punishable by death).  You will keep suffering and suffering, waiting for God to pour out his promised blessings upon you.

This is a recipe for madness.  Convincing people of a horrible guilt, twisting the meanings of common concepts like “love” or “justice” until they mean the opposite, and creating constant stress of never knowing what is going to happen next are text book methods of control.  It worked for Stalin.

Does this mean all Christians are evil?  Not at all.  Most Christians are wonderful people who really want to the make the world a better place.  They subconsciously focus on the best parts of scripture, the savability of man, universal love, and the siblinghood of all people.  But Christian doctrine in its raw state, rather than sanitized for mass consumption, is a road of worthlessness and self harm to the individual and manifesto of abuse to the predator.

Accidentally and in spite of the hard work and compassion of rank and file believers, the doctrine of the Bible when practiced literally, rather then re-written by modern psychological norms, is a doctrine of violence and abuse.

Rape 1

I’ve wanted to write a post about rape for awhile now, but it’s a pretty hard topic to write about. I’ve never been raped though I have been sexually assaulted a few times. I want to write about it because I want some discussion on it from my readers. If you never comment on anything else, this is the blog. Unfortunately, I have my usual problem of with holisticness. I can’t talk about rape without talking about gender, sex, feminism, and society. This means a lot of variables which introduce a lot more chance for me to accidentally spew bullshit.

(The purpose of my blog is to purge myself of bullshit. I am out here, saying to the whole world, “Hey, call my bullshit.” So, readers, if I say some total crap, be gentle. I’m here to learn.) Now that that’s out of the way…

When I was in high school, it was incredibly important to me to develop my world view. I’m not sure if my experiences are unique to me, if all young Christian me, all young Christians, or all teens in general feel this pressure to have an opinion on everything. I think because of Christianity, I was in a group of people who believed that they had special revelation about how the world should work, the pre-packaged world view I and other de-cons have mentioned before. The church calls this having a ready answer. I also believe that the rationality that my father taught me as a method for interpreting scripture helped me to be a rational thinker. It was important to me to have an answer that was really defensible.

I believed that rape was a crime, a terrible one that should be punished with death, but only in the case of real rape. A wonderful American girl with good clean hobbies, perfect teeth and and well earned scholarship to a small, but challenging private college, is snatched out of parking garage and raped after a prolonged fight with her assailant.

But in the news a lot was something called date rape. A woman would dress like a prostitute, let a man get her drunk, take her home, get her naked, and then say no. Well, that wasn’t rape at all, she acted like she wanted sex, then got upset when she got what she had, through her actions, asked for all night. I wasn’t sure how this should be treated, but certainly it didn’t deserve the death penalty. This could not be what God intended when he said that a rapist should be killed. If fact, the Torah says that a woman who is raped where others can hear her, and doesn’t yell for help must herself be stoned. (Deuteronomy 22:24)

I remember the scuff about Clarence Thomas, and similar stories, and the consensus among my peers was that these girls hadn’t really been raped, because they were asking for what they got. I remember the humorous incredulity in regard to news story of prostitute who had been raped. You can’t rape a prostitute, we reasoned, you can only rob her by not paying her afterward.

So, now I am an atheist. One of the things I have done is try to examine the claims of people who’s view I rejected outright before. Some I have found that I still reject their ultimate thesis, Muslims, for instance. But feminists surprised me. I found that while I don’t agree with everything they say, I can test many of the basic theories of feminists with a skeptical eye and burden of evidence, and that these theories pass.

You might notice I said “girls” in reference to the alleged victims of rape. I know that they were over 18. Yet, they are called girl, for the same reason that a 50 year old black man is called boy. An unconscious display of power, a statement of the hierarchy, a re-establishment of pecking order. I know now that what this is, and I try to eliminate such patterns from my writing and speech. And the feminist taught me a lot about rape.

First, most rapes are not what I described above as “real” rape (though it too is real). That would more appropriately be called “Hollywood rape.” It’s quite rare. The place where most rape happens: a woman’s own bedroom. The person most commonly raping them? Someone they trust; how do you think they got in the bedroom? Now, I know some people will read this and think to themselves, oh well that’s not real rape.

Rape by someone they trust in their own bed? That can’t possibly be real rape because that wouldn’t happen to nice girls. Whether you realize it or not, if you are going to be really honest with yourself, if you think that sort of rape isn’t real, it is because you have decided that a girl in her bedroom with a man she trusts is already guilty of wanting sex, so she can’t be upset about the man giving it to her. I used to believe that, so it is with some authority that I say, how mind bogglingly stupid.

Imagine going to a hospital and saying you are interested in a vasectomy. You talk to the doc for about an hour, you take the brochure, and you get up to walk out. At the door, the doctor shoves a needle into your left buttock. You instantly don’t feel right, you turn around and fall. As the world goes black and you become increasing powerless you feel the doctor pulling your pants off. You wake up, and you have a vasectomy. You’re not going to sue are you? After all, you’d been asking for it for an hour.

Two women both go to Applebee’s. They both go with someone they trust and care about. They both dress quite revealingly for the pleasure of being seen. They both get quite tipsy. They both get taken home and carried to their bed by their date. One is raped. One is not. What’s the difference between the two situations? The addition of a fucking rapist.

It’s not the way they dressed. It’s not the way they talked. It’s not the drinks they had. The only thing that got one women raped, the only thing that made the situation something terrifying and twisted was the addition of rapist. The problem is not the victim, the problem is the rapist.

Not every man is a rapist, in fact most aren’t.  The problem is not the woman.  The problem is not men.  The problem is rapists.

An athiests friends.

It’s rare that I write so little.  I’m so ridiculously busy of late.  Full time student and full time employment.  Yesterday I was switched from 12 hour nights to 12 hour days.  I was so tired when I got home I could barely eat supper.  Then instead of playing with my daughter I let her watch a movie while I slept on the couch.  Then I got up, put her to bed, and went to bed.  I slept 11 hrs and 45 minutes.  Now, it’s breakfast and I could eat a horse raw.

I’m coming out on the other side of arguing atheism with my parents.  I mean, obviously, they think I’m wrong, but it’s not quite as painfull as it was before.  I’ve only got 2.5 more weeks of class and then I’m done with class for a month.  (I messed up signing up for the next session.)  I’m thinking about friendship.  Becoming an atheist and telling my friends has really been a tough row to hoe.  It means talking the total honesty that I give my wife and expanding it to the rest of the people I care about.  It means being really vulnerable to people.

And some friends have responded really well.  Some haven’t.  Some have responded so well, actaully, that I am closer to them then ever before, my brother and sisters for instance and my friend Jason.  Others have responded with fear and a sort of emotional hardshell.  They’re there, but they’re not.

And it makes me think about heaven.  I wish I could believe that there is this perfect place that we could go to when we die.  I wish over didn’t have to mean over, but honestly I think when your gone, your just gone.  So am gentler to my wife, and more cuddly with my kid.  I wonder though, I sat and tried to work through something with an old friend yesterday, is it worth it?

When my life on earth is a just short few years do I really want to work through stuff with people who only tolerate me, when they’re are people who really love know me and I really love knowing?  And why don’t I work harder to make new friends?  Why can’t have more friends like my wife, like Jason, like Alex?  People who love me from who I am instead of inspite of it?

A last letter to my fundamentalist parents.

Dear Mom and Dad,

This is, I think, the last blog about this. I don’t blog everything, just things that I need extra eyes on to see if I am communicating clearly, and properly understanding the responses. I never intended this blog to become the huge issue it did. The great advantage to blogging, and why I started in the first place, is that I have a written record of my thoughts. I didn’t have a direction when I wrote the first blog about you guys, and it certainly wasn’t supposed to be a personal attack, though now reading a week later, I can see that it very clearly seems to be a personal attack.

My point (though I didn’t know it at the time) was not to say “OH you bad people! You HURT me.” My point was only that I was that I hurt. I don’t want you to apologize for hurting me, because I never thought it was intentional. Really, all I wanted was for you to agree with me that you had done something wrong. You don’t have to feel bad for doing something wrong, what good would that do? I mean, some of this stuff was almost two decades ago. But when you didn’t write back and say something to the effect of “You’re right. We messed those things up.” Then, I did want to say “You bad people!” because I was pissed at you for not doing what I wanted. Reasonable response to frustration, but not really helpful. Buried in these things I did really want to say were some pointless little stabs that I really didn’t mean to say, I was just mad. I’m sorry about that.

It doesn’t really answer the question of why it was so important to me to have you know that you hurt me. I had to think about that for awhile. See, I want to be your friend. I’ll always be your son, and I’m proud to be. But unlike being your child, which will never change and is just the way things are, friendship is a choice. I came to the conclusion that we are not friends, which hurt a lot. That was first blog. (My beloved…). For us to be friends, we have to start off afresh, and so I wanted to prove that we were never friends, which was the second blog (A letter to my fundamentalist parents). It was the process of writing those and reading your response that brings me to this blog.

You guys did your best as parents. I plan on making some improvements as I raise mine, but you did the best you could and that’s all a person can ever ask. I’m able to make these improvements because you did a significantly better job raising me than your parents did raising you, so as I said, you did good. I’m an adult now and I want to be your friend. To do that you’ve got to know me, or at least want to. I complain that you never knew me and put the responsibility entirely on you. Some of it is your fault, but some of it is honestly mine. I began hiding the parts of my personality that you would find less palatable around the time I was 9. Now, I can rail against you for not creating an environment where I felt comfortable being myself, but it was 20 years ago. Me carping will not change anything. I don’t need you to apologize, I only need you to agree that you did create an environment where I was uncomfortable being myself.

I need that, because if you don’t think you did anything wrong, I can’t be your friend. If someone hurts you and says “That didn’t hurt, you just think it did” you can’t trust them. Dad, I feel like your response to my last blog said “Yup, we understand that we hurt you, and we understand that wasn’t OK.” That’s all I need from your side. Mom, I love you, and I will continue to tell you so, but I have a hard time trusting you, for a totally different reason. I know that hurts, but here’s why. (edit: Mom, I wish I hadn’t brought this up in the first place.  I bring it up now only because by since I already said it I am sort of committed now.   I love you and I’m sorry about this.) You told me that your dad repeatedly “spanked” you till you passed blood had bloodied welts.  And you told me that’s OK because you deserved it. And you told me that if front of other people. I’ll always be your son, but it’s hard to really be your friend. Friends, good ones at least, love each other, and when I tell you I love you, I know that to you, part of loving you can include beating the hell out of you. You being OK with that makes loving you feel a little cheaper to me. There will always be little hole in our relationship, not because you told me you were abused, but because you told me you deserved it. Until you can tell me that what happened to you wasn’t OK, it’s hard for me think that your definition of a relationship being OK is going to be good for you and me being friends.

That’s your side, and it just leaves mine. I’ve doubted Christianity since I was about 9. Not because of you and dad, but because the way my brain works. My brain doesn’t run on faith, it never has. My brain is wired for evidence, either by an evolutionary process or by a God with a deeply ironic sense of humor. I never believed I was saved for more than a few hours after my conversion, which I did many times. I never had any experience which I though God was the most likely explanation of. Deep down, I knew that, but I wouldn’t let it up.

I didn’t realize I was lying to myself of course, I thought I was being a good Christian and pushing away my doubts. But I was lying to myself, and in the process, I lied to the people closest to me. Despite the Bible’s teachings, Christian does not just mean one who has faith in Christ. “Christian” today means a slew of likes and dislikes, and political leanings, and generally, really bad music. I was never good at the faith part, but I was awful at the other part. If you want to be my friend, you are going to have to accept all of me, not just the parts that turned out like you hoped. A child is respectfully silent when you are wrong. A friend isn’t. A child hides the things that you disapprove of. A friend doesn’t. I like to have a glass of wine, or a beer once in awhile, I enjoy a cigar occasionally, and from time to time I enjoy looking at pornagraphy. When I feel it is the best method of communication, I curse like a sailor. These are things which I know my liking makes you uncomfortable, but I am a package deal . This is what I am, and I will make no apology for being me, and it is your choice to be friends with me or not.

If not, I will still call, I will love you. You’re my family. But personally, I’d like more. I don’t ever expect you to agree with me about atheism. Nor would I wish it. I got here by a process. I don’t want you believe in atheism because I like it, nor would I wish that process upon anyone, though I am glad I went through it. I don’t ever expect you to respect my destination. I hope someday we’ll be good enough friends that you respect my journey.

You Son, Israel

Letter to my fundementalist parents.

My Beloved, the Whore

This is going to be a deeply personal post, sort of a public “Dear diary”, so if that’s not your thing, please don’t read it.  All others, I post this publicly to receive a public review of my thoughts and keep a record of the process.  Feel free to comment.

I have recently told my parents  I am an atheist.  Now, I know that this is very painful for them, but I’m finding the post closet experience particularly frustrating (and ultimately painful) for several reasons.

They don’t really know what an atheist is, so they alternately (a.) don’t think I am really an atheist or (b.) ascribe to me the beliefs that they think an atheist has.   They (c.) don’t really understand why I became an atheist, and as such (d.) think it is because they were bad parents.

(a.) They see that I am still spiritual, ethical, and looking for truth and they assume that it is a vestige of Christianity.   Number one, wouldn’t that mean any moral person was some sort of a partial Christan?  “Christian” is not, last time I checked, a substitute for “moral”.  Ideally, yes, all Christians would be bastions of morality.  Some are, many aren’t.  Further, ideally, all Muslims, Buddhists, and Pagans would be intensely ethical people.  Some are, many aren’t. Number two, it says “All those years that you were moral?  Yeah, that doesn’t count, because that wasn’t the authentic you, the authentic you is incapable of morality without Christ.”  And as a logical extension of that belief, then all the emotions I had were inauthentic as well.  Morality isn’t free.  Sometimes we want to do immoral things, and there is a cost to being moral instead.  Moral means desires differed, sometimes forever, and to have the work I put into being moral just written off kinda sucks.   To be told either the “Christian me” or the “atheist me” is less than the authentic me is very insulting.

(b.)To a Christian, atheist means one who wishes to reject God.   So they ascribe to me the beliefs of one who, in their heart, believes in God, but desires not to.  It’s not that I wish to reject the God hypothesis; it’s that evidence compels me to reject God.  Working from the assumption that I wish to reject God they think I believe things that I don’t.   They make assumptions about why I became an atheist and what atheist means.  Which goes right to (c.)  I publicly profess atheism because it is the cry of my heart and mind.  I can no more just wake up a Christian that I could just wake up gay.  This is what I am.  To public state otherwise is to live a lie.  I expected a lot more “Good job, son.”  It takes a huge amount of courage to challenge everything you were ever told and disagree with 96% of the population.  I thought the attitude would be a lot more, “Well, we disagree with you of course, but we understand why you believe what you believe, and we’re proud of you for having the cojones to admit it.”   I am proud of having this courage, and I feel like someone who really knows me and loves me would feel the same way.

It leads me to believe that my parents aren’t responding to who I am, but rather to who they think I am.  Which is terrifying because it leads me to ask the question, “Did they ever…?”  Did my parents ever really understand who I am?  I think, sadly, but reasonably, no.  It wasn’t even their fault exactly.  Even I didn’t believe the evidence of who I was. I was suicidal in high school.  My usual day consisted of waking up, putting a loaded gun to my head and trying to find the courage to kill myself.   Accepting my total failure of inner strength, I could then find a reason to eat breakfast and shower: maybe I would get laid that day, and then I would either go crazy with lust and die in a whore house in a few years (suicide on the installment plan) or I would be so disappointed for pointlessly giving my virginity away that I could pull the trigger and, of course, I would have gotten laid.   This is not the thoughtscape of a Christian.

Several thoughts prevented me.  Putting a hollow point in your brain is an ungodly mess.  It didn’t seem fair to have my parents come home to find my head inside out, running on the wall.  I didn’t want to make them suffer, I just wanted to not hurt inside anymore.  It didn’t seem right to kill myself in some odd way that hid the body either, because I heard from people whose kids were never found, that the not knowing is horrible.  I was a little concerned about hell, because no “real Christian” would want to kill themselves for years on end, but I predominately worried about two things.  One, that I would give myself a traumatic brain injury (TBI) and make myself a quadriplegic.  Two, that there was no sex in heaven.  I was worried about TBI for two reasons: one, I’d never get another chance to kill myself because no one would kill me just because I asked, and two, I wouldn’t be able to feel my penis anymore, again preventing sex forever.  For probably 3 years or so, I couldn’t make myself get out of bed without holding a 9mm and saying something like, ” I can get up today, because no matter how much this day hurts, I am in control.  I can always end it”…and they never noticed.

Which leads me neatly to (d.) They think I am an atheist because they were bad parents…

Ok, in several ways my folks were not bad parents.  I was never sexually abused.  I was never physically abused (though I did see some in our home).  I was never verbally abused.  They made sure I knew the Bible.  That’s a fantastic start. The world needs more parents who don’t rape, hit, or ridicule their kids.  I no longer believe the Bible is inspired, but they did, and I understand and respect their motivation, if not their application.   The thing is….um….that was sort of… it.   When I was 8 years old, I told my mom that I was planning on killing my sister because she was sadistic bitch.  My mom told I loved my sister and I didn’t mean that and made no effort to put away any of the loaded guns littering the house. I mean, I’m not a perfect dad, but I’m pretty sure if my daughter said she was going to kill someone, I might, oh, I don’t know, put away the guns (if I had any).

Number of times my dad played catch with me? Asked me what I was doing in piano? Asked me who my hero was? What I wanted to be when I grew up? Asked me what I learning in school?  Yeah…never.  Number of times my Mom taught me to cook?  She didn’t. I taught myself (much to her surprise).   She never asked me why I wanted to play piano (because I wanted to play jazz).    Neither parent ever asked me what I planned on after high-school, where I wanted to go to school, what I wanted to do with my life.   They made sure I was fed, clean, and educated.  They made sure that certain tests (my ACT) were done, and paid for my health care.   They were the best foster parents the state could have appointed.  Except, they weren’t foster parents.  They are my blood parents who brought me into this world at least partially on purpose.  And as far as what makes me, well me, they never gave a damn.  Some of this is explainable by the fact that my dad was pretty invested into drugs and my mom into codependency in my early life.  Fair enough.  But why, my senior year did they not say “Hey, where do you want to go to college?”  They never asked.  They never asked where I wanted to go, what my major might be, never asked a whole lot of things.  Nothing that would really mark me as me, my dreams, my hopes, was ever talked about.   They had no interest in knowing me at all.

For years, I’ve struggled with these memories of my first girlfriend.  Which, honestly, makes me feel like a doofus.  28 year old men do not pine away for the 18 year old they dated 10 years ago, at least healthy ones don’t.   She and I were both very lonely, very sexual people, but because we were Christians, we never slept together.  A lot of the obsession went away when I called her a few years ago.  We talked about the breakup and the relationship and how we had both hurt each other.  We parted not-quite-as-hurt anymore and accepting that we had other lives now that couldn’t reasonablely include each other.  But, I still think wistfully about making love to her more than I am comfortable with, and I’ve never understood why.

Then this week I got it.  I did a lot of the things I did to impress my parents.  I read Brave New World as a nine year old so I could impress my parents with how smart I was.  In fact, reading was about the only thing I ever got positive feedback for, and read like crazy.  I read to find something smart to say, so I could get some parental approval.   I aced algebra because my mom said her kids weren’t good at math.  I graduated with a 4.0.  I went to bible college instead of a engineering school because I wanted my parents to be proud of decisions, and nothing else I wanted to do would have pleased them as much. So what happened when I brought the woman I wanted to marry home from Bible college, the woman that I loved sacrificially as Christ loved the church (I wanted to marry her to redeem her reputation)?  They called my beloved a slut, said she dressed like prostitute (she wore silk pajama pants and a camisole to bed), and refused to leave us alone together so we wouldn’t have sex.   When I went to stay with her in her hotel (She was fairly offended and left) they commanded me to come back home.  I could have disobeyed, but I did not, because my father was appointed over me by god.  To disobey him was to disobey God himself, and he told me so when he commanded me to come back home.  They called my beloved a whore and told me it would be best if I broke off my engagement.   So I did.  10 years later, it still hurts because I showed them the one thing in the world it was most important to me for them to be proud of and they said….nah, she’s a whore.  It’s the rejection by the people I loved most in the world that made the wound so deep.

So, am I an atheist because my parents were bad parents?  Absolutely not.  Had my parents been really great supportive people instead of emotionally distant and judgemental people I probably would have realized I was an atheist by the time I started high school. I can’t and do not blame them for any of the really stupid decisions I made after I was 18.  But up to 18, they were my life, and I do blame them for a lot of the guilt I felt and the stupid things believed.  They asked me recently to forgive them for “any harm we caused”.  Which, I can’t really do.   A bit because an open ended request for forgiveness is worthless: “I’m sorry that vague things I don’t care to understand and refuse to accept responsibility for hurt you for some odd reason.”   Ahhhhh, no.

But mostly, because a request for forgiveness is saying to someone “Teach me to treat you better”.  I really should carefully and lovingly delineate to them how they messed up and how this doesn’t relate to atheism, the opposite really, but I don’t believe them yet.  They didn’t care about my core identity for 28 years.  Now they respond to me the way they think an atheist feels instead of the way they think a Christian feels, but they still seem to have no real interest in understanding what makes up my core, my true self.   They ask me no questions about why I believe, or even the specifics of what I believe. Instead of talking to me about what I believe, they would rather to talk to to others about what they think I might believe.   They knew I was blogging, and that my blogs were asking hard questions, yet were completely surprised by my confessions of non-faith.  Why?  Because my blogs made them uncomfortable they stopped reading them.

There is a chance that they will read this, and  feel they must ask me questions about myself.  Then they will most likely be offended when I don’t want to answer.  A date you have to tell to compliment you isn’t much of a date, is it?  The time to care about what made me me was a good quarter a century ago.   I’m very selective about my friends, and they don’t make the cut.  I will continue to be kind and friendly, and call at appropriate holidays, but I no longer care about their approval one way or the other, and I could care less about really trying to have relationship with them.  Perhaps most tragically of all, since they never knew what a constitutes a real relationship to me they will probably never notice the difference.

How to Prevent Atheism

My parents right now are really hurting over me becoming an atheist.  I feel bad.  I don’t like hurting them.  I considered not telling them at all so it wouldn’t hurt them.  But I knew it would come up sooner or later, and that they would have to be told.  I, personally, would rather be told that someone disagrees with my core beliefs at the beginning, rather than have it hidden from me  for years.  I think that the distrust and lies of omission hurt more than the disagreement.  For them, we’ll see.

But having grown up a Bible thumping fundamentalist and now being an atheist, I would like to prevent other parents suffering the way my parents are right now.  And I think I know how.  I offer the following in total seriousness, my guide to people in the Church on preventing atheism in her members.

I know that if some pastor reads this, he could very offended.  This is not a joke me.  I am not saying it to be offensive.  I am truly offering this as advice to pastors and evangelists.  If you don’t want people to de-convert like I did, listen to me.  Some of these things are going to be hard for you to read, because they are very irreverent. Remember the person you are attempting to save has no idea what you hold reverent.

(1.) I can’t stress this enough.  You must truly believe that some people are called to be God’s and some aren’t.  No, seriously, you have to accept that.  (Romans 11:7, Acts 13:48,)

(2.) As such, you must accept that fact that witnessing consists of laying the facts on the table.  If the person is called by God, they believe them, if they’re not, they don’t.  (Romans 11, Acts 4:4, Ephesians 1:13)

(3.) Accept the fact that the “facts” are ridiculous.  Talking donkeys (Numbers 2:28), the sun stopping in the sky (Joshua 10:13), floating cities (Revelations 21).   Don’t pretend that they make sense on their own, because they don’t.  They make sense only to the Chosen.    Don’t pretend it’s all about Jesus. It’s not.  Jesus only matters if the Bible is true.  If it’s true when it says “Jesus Saves”; it’s true when it says sheep copulating  in front of spotted sticks makes spotted sheep. (Genesis 30:38-39)  Pretending this sort of thing is rational will make someone doubt their sanity.  Admit frankly that these things are irrational, on purpose, because God has chosen the foolish things to confound the wise.  (First Corinthians 1:27, First Corinthians 2:14)

(4.) Don’t lie when you witness.  Make it clear that you are going to have to believe the whole Bible to be a Christian.  (2nd Timothy 3:16) When it says that a woman who files a false rape report must be beaten to death (According to Deuteronomy 22:25, the penalty for rape is death. According to Deuteronomy 18:18-19 a false witness must face the punishment that would have been given to the accused.)  or that priests can’t have bruised testicles (Leviticus 21:20) you must accept that and believe that it is really important or it wouldn’t be in there.  The ideal witnessing method would include every odd claim and bizarre thing in the Bible.  Let new believers know what they are getting into so that when someone presents them with this data, they aren’t surprised. Surprised believers feel betrayed by the church.

(5.) Don’t explain God in terms of personal relationship.  A reasonable person would expect a personal relationship with supernatural being to involve supernatural actions.  But that’s not how God works. Many believers will go their whole life and never see a single “New Testament” style miracle, like a regeneration of a limb, or reanimation of the dead.    “Personal relationship” misleads people into thinking that God shows up regularly on human terms.  He doesn’t, and people who expect it will become disillusioned.   It takes several years of normalization in the church before the phrase “personal relationship” means “vague feelings in response to readings of scripture or singing of hyms”

(6.) Don’t explain God in terms of love.  Love to normal people does not include the statement “…or I’ll roast you alive forever.”    Explain God purely in terms of salvation from deserved misery.   People who think they are sinners will get it.  People who don’t consider themselves deserving of eternal damnation when they are presented with the idea are NOT savable, because they don’t accept the truth of God.   It takes years of time in the Church before people accept the idea that the Divine death threat “Love me, or I’ll kill you.” is a moral highpoint, not low point.  You can’t protect new converts from this truth, so tell it up front and don’t evangelize in terms of “love”.

(7.) Accept that fact that God says “Love me, or I’ll burn you alive forever.”  (Romans 6:23, Mathew 5:22, Mark 9:43, and many, many more.) Yes, that is a gross oversimplification.  It’s still what he says.  If you disagree, you’re not savable; it’s that simple.  Either you don’t believe that God commands you to love him, or you don’t believe that he cast those who don’t in to hell.  Both are basic doctrine.

(8.) Accept the fact that God can do whatever he wants.  Do not pretend that God is held to any standard, even the standard he reveals in scripture for himself. (Job and Eccleisaties) He can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants.  He has ordered the slaughter of woman and children (Deuteronomy 3:6).  It was holy, and if you disagree that all the actions of God are Holy, then you don’t accept him as fully God.  In which case, you aren’t savable.

(9.) Do not reason with the converting, it makes lousy converts.  If a person can be argued into belief, they can argued out of it.  Further, it creates a false expectation that the faith can be reasoned through.  It can’t.  By definition, the supernatural does not follow the rules of the natural.  As such, tools of analysis like reason or science won’t work on it.

(10.) Science is the universe in the absence of God.  Science is the study of nature.  God is supernatural.  Accept the fact that science is merely the absence of the miraculous or demonic.   Studies, science, and reason cannot be trusted.  They are rough approximations of the universe that are accurate only because God does not manifest miracles all the time, and the Devil, unlike God, is not everywhere at once.

(11.) Going from that, only studies which confirm the church’s point of view are true, all others are false.  This is called data mining.  Make it clear to the converting, that data mining, like homicide is bad only when people besides God do it.  In this way, Christians can trained to see data mining as bad and spot it (as they have on the global warming debate), but are not left with the idea that it would wrong for the church to do it.  If they thought data mining was intrinsically bad, they will be disillusioned when they find how much the church does it.

(12.) Don’t teach apologetics. Ever.  Most De-cons were trained apologists.  Apologetics teaches people that God can be found with reason.  Any god that could be found through human facility is not much of God.  It encourages people to think that the Bible is true because of evidence instead of authorship.  Elevating evidence over God is idolatry.  Further still, where there is evidence, there is no faith.   The conversion of people with an interest in apologetics or converted by apologetics cannot be trusted.  They believe that God is reasonable.  God isn’t.   They aren’t savable if they don’t repent of  this false belief about God.

(13.) Don’t teach them to witness to people of other faiths.  It seems like a good idea: teach believers about other religions so they can witness to people of those faiths.  But it’s a terrible idea. (Exodus 23:13, Deuteronomy 13:1 through 8. ) First, it works from the idea that there are specific arguments that can talk people out of specific faiths into believing the true faith.  But as said before, those reasoned in, can be reasoned out.  Reason is an idol.  Second,  since there is only one way to God, all other ways are tricks of Satan, and meditating on them is meditating on the Satanic.   The usual approach to this is to data mine the information about these religions, but this is not a perfect strategy.  Should the believer meet a person of a different faith and find that Church data mined the information on that religion they will feel hurt and betrayed.

My Deconversion

My De-conversion.

An atheist is person who does not find compelling reason to accept the God hypothesis.  De-converts are special, I think, because most of us became atheists not because we disbelieved in God, but because we believed so much.  One cannot be disappointed by a fictional character.  The God hypothesis broke our hearts because we believed it, not because we doubted it.   I searched out God.  I looked for him desperately, searched the Scriptures, searched the great works of Christian literature, searched everything, everywhere for God.   Because I believed God to be real, his enormous contradictions of character and schizophrenic mood swings terrified me.  I began to increasingly doubt that God was real.  There didn’t seem to be objective evidence for him.  With all the blessings of God which relate to material things, (healing for instance) there should be objective measures of Christian health which would prove this blessing, and thus serve as objective proof of God.  Yet there was none.  If fact, the more I thought about it, the more Christians were just like everyone else, showing no blessing that made them special.

I decided that to heal my flagging faith I would read the Bible again, cover to cover.  I wanted to do it in a short time, so that I could remember my thoughts  from the beginning when I got to end.  I read  it in 3 months.  But instead of healing my faith, it shredded it.  When the Bible is read as a continuous narrative, not dissected bit by bit into numerous sermons, the full humanity and the total lack of the divine cries out in every page.   The Bible, when read like a book, instead of read with the assumption that it is the book of God, it is indeed just another book.   Desperate to believe in God, I decided that perhaps the Bible had been corrupted. I began to search out the history of the Bible itself.  Again, nothing relating to the canonicity of the Bible gave me any compelling reason to believe in God.  I told myself this was because of God’s deep seated love of freewill.  He allowed errors in because he loved freewill so much he would let his perfect message get lost.  I began to search out the history of the early church, hoping that maybe God had revealed himself to those people, given them something special, only the message had been twisted.  Tragically, a search of the early Church did not yield the results I’d hopped.

Reading the Bible cover to cover had revealed gaps in doctrine I was unaware off.  Studying the history of its translation revealed ghastly, purposeful mistranslations.  Studying the canonicity had revealed a far deeper commitment to contemporary orthodoxy than to truth.   So, for the first time, I no longer implicitly trusted Christian authors.  They were, as Acts said, “men of like passions”, and had no more guarantee to be right than I.  Everything I read about early church history, I source checked.  I went through the bibliographies of the books, and read the oldest books that came up the most often.  Or, I did as long as I could stand it.  Church history, not properly sanitized to fit post Victorian Christian norms, was appalling.

Oh, I knew about the Crusades and the Inquisition. What shocked me was the total fluidity of doctrine.   Church doctrine was not a solid thing, but a sickly, taffy like mass.  The early Church was the measuring stick of Christianity, the Holy standard which all churches tried to adhere too, and their doctrine was not, by any normal sense of the word, Christian.  I didn’t know this because I had never read Church history from any perspective other than supporting an argument for doing church a certain way.  Pre-Constantine Christianity is a lot like pre-Ford automobile manufacture.  Before the Model T, cars could have 3 wheels or 4, levers or steering wheels, engines could be anywhere.  Ford created the standard, what we think of as “car”.   Before Constantine, Christian doctrine could be whatever you wanted.  The Gospel could be whatever good news you liked.   You didn’t like a trinity? No problem.  Open marriage? We’ve got that.  Nudism? Go for it. Communism? Why not?  Jesus was purely spirit? Got that too.  Heresy did not exist. It was not until the Church had political power to harm heretics that suddenly it had the will.  Heresy suddenly became very important, because it made it acceptable to kill people and take their stuff.   The road to orthodoxy is apparently paved with tombstones.

I studied more, hoping desperately to find God.  The church had lied.  Over and over again.  She had claimed things as truth which were wrong. Unbiblical organizations, unbiblical norms, based in unbiblical doctrine, based on imaginary standards of canon.  I got mad at God.  He didn’t seem to do anything about the atrocities committed in his name, and didn’t even seem to have much a hand  in witting the Bible.  God just didn’t seem to give a damn.  I  wanted to be wrong. I wanted to believe.  I wanted every hurt I had ever been given in Christ’s name to have been a mistake.  So I told my Christian friends what was going on in my heart.  How hurt I’d been by God and by the Church for lying to me about him. It seemed as if I was an abused wife, finally finding the courage to talk with the police, expecting help, but horribly wrong.  They would look sympathetically at each bruise and gently explain, as if to a child, that it really was my fault and didn’t I know, if I would just do what he told me, this wouldn’t happen anymore?  It was terribly painful.

And then I got it.  I didn’t matter what evidence I had.   To Christians, the sickness of the things that surround God could never be God’s fault.  Christianity was not at fault, I was. It was all my fault.  God is not accountable to anyone, that’s Christian Doctrine 101.   No evidence, no source, no study, nothing would change their minds because nothing bad is God’s fault.  “Blameless” is not beautiful; “blameless” is as ugly as death.  When I was a Pizza Hut shift manager, if a cashier’s drawer was off by a dollar, I was accountable.  It was on my watch, I had the power to do something about it, I did nothing, and I was responsible.  Yet, the immortal, all knowing, all powerful master of the universe was “the blameless one” who stood watching every atrocity, or worse, stood by wanting to stop it, but waiting for more prayer.  That was Holiness and if I didn’t like, well I could just burn in Hell.

I used to tell the people I was evangelizing to,  trying to convince them of the personal nature of a relationship with God, “There is no difference between a God who will not act and cannot act because he isn’t real.”  I swallowed the bitterest pill of my own advice I had ever given: I reluctantly accepted the fact that I was an atheist.   Surprisingly, the world did not end.  I was pleasantly surprised to find I was still capable of basic acts of morality.  I didn’t cheat on my wife.  If fact, I loved her more.  Without the pressure to be “Christ to the Church” to her, I enjoyed spending time with her more.  Without wondering if I was enjoying sex from fleshly desire instead of Holy love, martial relations were delightful.  Between wanting to spend more time talking to her and wanting to spend more time with her in bed, our relationship blossomed.

Not believing in Hell changed how I treat people.  Never realizing I was afraid to truly love non-believers because it would hurt so much to know they were burning in hell, I’d never had a non-Christian friend in my adult life.   Now, I had non-christian friends.  Because I didn’t spend half an hour in prayer for them before they came over, I invited them over more often. Since I no longer looked in the mirror and saw a filthy disgusting sinner, I had a lot more confidence.   I made new friends quicker.   Because I didn’t think I had to “life style evangelize” them, I was free to be myself when they were around, something I had never felt with most Christians.

I no longer constantly questioned whether or not I was “pursing God’s will” in my education, which made me stress less about college, and in turn,  get better grades.  In fact, the lack of worrying about God’s will allowed me to effectively plan my life for the first time.  I’d never been able to make long term plans out of the terror I would do so out of God’s will and derail my life.  Believing that perhaps I didn’t know everything I needed to know about parenting from a few sentences in a very old book, I read books on parenting, and became a better father.

After my marriage and my daughter, atheism is the single greatest thing that has ever happened to me.  I have done more to achieve my dreams and experienced more joy and peace in the year or so that I’ve been an atheist than the prior twenty-seven.   I love more deeply. I make better decisions. I have better friends.  My only regret is that I waited so long.  I feel like a grown man who finally realizes that there is no Santa.  I’m a little embarrassed that my disbelief in an imaginary character was this healing, because it only reveals how emotionally, morally, and intellectually bankrupt I was before, a fault I cannot place on Christianity, but rather my adherence to it.