I met two Jehovah's witnesses the other day. They came to my door, a man and his mother. They were nice and we talked for 45 minutes. The man called me an interesting person. I don’t know if that’s good, but at least we had an engaging and respectful discussion. His mother was sweet. I felt compelled to be gracious because I believed she believed she was sharing something very important with me. I remember those days of knocking on doors and sharing my faith, hoping to convince but one person to say the sinner’s prayer with me and come to church.
About every other week, I am asked to accept a Watchtower magazine in downtown Portland. Occasionally a Mormon comes to my door or rides by on his bike. Even less often, an Evangelical Christian comes by to chat about how God is so good and wouldn’t I want to know Him? I honestly cannot recall a Catholic or someone of the Jewish faith stopping by to win me over. For that matter, of all the religions that have come to my door, they are usually made up of the three I have already mentioned. When I was an Evangelical Christian, I believed all religions except mine were mistaken and unbelievers were going to hell. Now I just think they are all mistaken, but none are going to hell -- or heaven for that matter. It's ironic, for most of us, how life, perspective, beliefs and values change with age. What I was once ready to die for and live for, now means very little to me.
I was reading the results from a Pew survey the other day. It showed that half of all American adults change religions during their lifetime, most before the age of 24. The reasons Americans drift away are many and researchers stated there was no discernable pattern. One would expect the recent disclosure of sex abuse scandals among religious leaders to play a part, or the claims of science over religion, but in truth people just drift away for much more mundane reasons.
Apparently, it's not a carefully thought-out process when leaving one religion for another. Much of the time it's as simple as a move to a new community, marrying someone of a different faith or finding a religion that fits better. Some simply leave because they like the minister at another church.
As I mentioned in a previous posting, I fit in with the 16% of people in this country who do not affiliate with any religion. Among those 16%, about a third probably believe in a god or just haven't found the right religion yet. I can honestly tell you that I didn't intend to become a non-believer; it just seemed a natural evolution of sorts. I've always been someone who followed a train of thought to its logical conclusion. In my mind, logically, if God loves us and wants us to know His love, then why would I sit on my butt and not spend my life’s blood telling everyone about Him? At the young age of 11, I dedicated my life to serve God as I understood Him. This is why I became so dedicated to my faith in the first place . . . I follow the thinking to its inevitable conclusion. I don’t care to just know it, I want to live it.
I was watching TV the other day and a commercial for The 700 Club got me thinking. Kurt Warner and his "search for truth" was the headline. I started thinking about the "search for truth" phrase. I've heard this many times in religious meetings and testimonies. I used to talk about truth and the search for it when I was a Christian. But what does the search for truth really mean? If truth is objective, as I always assumed, then how come I called my Christian beliefs truth?
My simple observations of people like Kurt Warner, and people who claim to seek the truth, have led me to believe that the search for truth really means the search for identity, security, purpose, hope and ultimately a belief system one can invest in. If I step back and look at my reasons for becoming a Christian, I notice that these issues definitely motivated me. I called it truth, but it wasn't objective, or something I could prove that got me into religion. What I found was more about my personal needs at that time in my life. Later I went to a Christian College to learn more about my faith. I studied the evidences of our faith, or what they call apologetics, which was supposed to help me understand why my belief is the truth. What I learned served to strengthen my faith and continued to inspire me to know my god and share the truth with whomever would listen. I was receiving confirmation of truth by well known Christian leaders and it helped me feel even more confident, secure, loved and hopeful. I found meaning and purpose and it inspired me. It gave me what I lacked internally -- or what I thought I lacked.
Does anyone really believe that other religions function differently? Maybe a few take a broader approach and are more accepting of different religions, but most seem to believe they have the right truth and the only truth. Why are their truths so compelling to them and not to you? I think this is due to a number of factors, the same factors which motivated me to accept Christianity -- like my need for confidence, security, purpose and love, but also because of the culture I grew up in and my friends and family. Our needs motivate us to search for something that will empower us, and our environment directs us to choose what is available and familiar. It's a simple reality, but it is an undeniable fact: just as many people change religions for mundane or practical reasons. People often become religious believers for the simple need to gain identity and feel empowered in life.
Love makes us feel secure, gives us hope in dark times and drives home this simple message: when we are loved, we have meaning and this type of meaning and identity empowers us to deal with the unknowable, uncontrollable and uncertainty that comes with being human. When I worked with survivors of childhood sexual abuse, the question ultimately voiced, in some form or another was "Am I loved?" With love comes value and most of us know the power of feeling valued. It takes away fear and anxiety and it gives us the power to overcome the shame we feel for not measuring up to what we think we should be. Our many failures, insecurities or wrongs done to us often lose their hold over us when we feel loved, cared for, purposeful and needed. In my opinion, many of our gods have failed to remain in the human psyche because they lacked the power of the current gods to meet these basic human needs.
The power of our current religions does not lie in the articulation of evidence, or a well thought-out rational outline of all the evidence proving one or the other religion is true. It is in its message of love, personal meaning, togetherness vs. aloneness, hope for a better future and justice for the wicked. It is also about reward for obedience and service. In the afterlife, according to my former Christian beliefs, everyone will have healthcare, value, purpose and probably no more 9 to 5 jobs followed by dinner in front of the TV, followed by bedtime, then up again to repeat the cycle until retirement. Even the lowliest of believers will be blessed with abundance. What's not to like about this idea of right thinking and obedience equals an eternity of happiness and punishment for bad people?
In my opinion, our nature is to seek community and protect it at all costs and sometimes to our own detriment. Our biological and sociological development seems to have produced in us a tribal instinct to belong to something greater than the one. Being part of a tribe certainly had its benefits just as it does today; we just call it something different. Our modern world gives us options we never had in our historical development as a species. Our creative mind stands apart from the instinctual drive of animals, but our own developmental instincts still drive us even when our cognitive abilities challenge us. Some of us still find meaning in embracing our tribal instincts or ancient practices, as I think they should, if we truly developed that way.
Eventually I came to question what I felt was true because it didn't actually make me feel secure anymore. I lost hope when I realized that truth was not what I had invested my life in. I found solace in leaving the realm of faith, but I didn't find anything to replace it, at least not in the religious sense. I am, by some definitions, an atheist, but lest you write me off as an angry exchristian aching to pick a fight, I still value anything that brings us together. I am often amazed when religions of a different stripe get along or agree to work together. I do question their sincerity, simply because my experiences as an Evangelical Christian always taught me to doubt the other person's faith, to see them as someone fooled by the enemy or as a future prospect for conversion. I was friendly or loving because this is what Jesus wanted me to do. I did this to reach people with my version of the truth and eventually convert them to it.
We can not dictate life on our terms, but religion, at the least, gives us the illusion of control by giving us hope, meaning and the belief that we are loved. Religion seems a human tendency to find meaning in the unexplainable, to find love that doesn't fail us, and to find security in an otherwise insecure world. Leaving this system of thought wasn’t easy for me. I found it unnerving at times, vague, and directionless. I left my security, my concept for living and my reason to love. I was a man without a god.
Psychologists tell us that we go through many stages of change in our lifetime. With the help of neuroscience, we know that our brain also changes over time. One of the biggest changes occurs when our pre-frontal cortex reaches full development around 23 years of age. For this reason we know that adolescents cannot reason as well as adults, because they lack a fully developed brain capable of the higher functions we adults have. If I am correct, most people are taught religion before this development in the brain takes place. I certainly was taught religion at an early age and had no trouble believing that a god existed.
I also find it interesting that the majority of people who changed religions did so before the age of 24. I’d be interested to know if this switch coincided with the brain's development of higher reasoning faculties in the pre-frontal and frontal lobes. Certainly the law takes into account the capacity of a child or adolescent to understand the consequences of her actions as opposed to a fully developed adult. Science understands that a child and an adolescent can not fully comprehend or process information as efficiently as an adult brain, and limitations in judgment, reasoning, organization and impulse control are to be expected.
Not so in religion. We teach our children to believe without evidence, without solid facts or proof of what we call truth. I used to think that I went to church to find truth when in actuality all I was doing was reinforcing my beliefs, conforming to the groupthink and confirming my own religious biases. As a former minister, I regularly heard my fellow clergy talk about our need to focus on the children because they were easier to reach with the Gospel. We never considered the science behind it. We just did what worked best and got people into the kingdom. If you look back at your own religious development or concept of God, I’ll bet you developed some sense of God in childhood or adolescence. I doubt you suddenly woke up one day and thought “I believe in God”, or sat down and did a thorough and reasonable study to find God. Most likely you developed this concept in your youth or through the pairing up with someone you cared about or who cared about you. We don’t come to God out of reason. That much is obvious if we are truthful or care to admit it. We find God through a much more powerful drive; one I like to think is rooted in instinct rather than reason.
With age comes change. Change in perspective, change in friendships, change in employment and yes, even change in which god we worship or religion with which we side. We change both physically and mentally and our values shift with time, experience, friendships, influence and practicality. Finding what matters deep down and what appeals to your gut is one way to search for truth, but truth be told, that is how teenagers often make judgment calls and decisions. It’s why teenagers often make poor choices without a loving adult mentoring them (and even with a loving adult mentoring them they still manage to worry us to death!)
For me, religion became yet another way to find definition, but certainly not truth. One cannot boil down faith to something as objective and scrutable as truth. No, in the end one must simply trust that what one believes is true even if it is based on a gut-level sense of rightness. Mix in some prayerful requests seemingly answered by God, or a measure of good fortune, or a spiritual experience you can’t explain and you have personal evidence of God’s existence. Even this measure of faith is hardly capable of moving mountains as foretold in the New Testament. But faith is not about holding a book to the promises of power and miracles. No, faith is something deeper than reason. Faith is something that I no longer possess, not unlike a child who grows up and (at first somewhat sadly) leaves his toys behind.
I assert, much to the chagrin of my Christian friends, that faith is far easier, in my experience, then non-belief. Losing a support system made up of Christian friends, church, theology, family, employment and my marriage came at a very high cost. Learning to re-evaluate life, purpose, friendships, family relationships, hopes, goals, and employment is scary and not something my Christian friends can relate to. I suspect that they can't fathom a born-again Christian leaving a good god unless there is a flaw within the Christian. The easiest assumption is that the exchristian is a bitter person or angry over some perceived hurt. Although anger and hurt can happen, it speaks of a shallow understanding over why someone they knew and cared about would drop all they aspired to be. It's an easy way to avoid the deeper questions or the honesty required to be a good friend.
I’ve changed and I can’t go back. I tried for years, following my departure from ministry, to continue believing in my original faith or at least in a god, but I am more or less a skeptic of all things faith-related or supernatural. Nothing and no one was capable of holding me back from exploring all that I doubted or questioned. At first, leaving the ministry, and the community of friends I relied on, made me feel terrible, guilty and lonely. But eventually my departure helped free me from the biases and groupthink I had grown accustomed to. I was free to evaluate my marriage, my family, my faith and my direction in life. I stopped looking for things to confirm my beliefs and started looking for reasonable alternative explanations for life. Thinking back, from my former Christian perspective, I’d have said my departure from the fold was the worst thing that could have happened to me, but today I am glad it happened.
I like to think my departure from faith was as a positive step, a step toward personal responsibility, and a step toward discovering who I am without the thoughts of someone’s religion intruding into my mind. For a time I wandered, aimless and lost, but I eventually realized that life goes on with or without a belief system. In spite of my own seemingly instinctual desire to establish security, meaning and hope, I decided to see where life takes me without relying on any belief system. I decided to make my own path, discover what I really love and make choices based on their own merit, and not the interpretation of someone else’s ancient history.
Like it or not, life brings change. You never know what life will do, or where you will end up, but one thing you can be certain of... change is inevitable. It may be a surprise where you end up, it certainly was for me. Life is the greatest irony, it is the incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs. It's in the gap between expectations and reality that personal truth is found, and it's often where the deepest lessons of life are learned.
Sincerely,
Bill Jeffreys
No comments:
Post a Comment