When people finally ask why I left Christianity, I often discover that their first response is to try and poke holes in my story. In my opinion, most deeply religious minded people aren't asking to understand you, they are looking for reasons to disprove you, to distance themselves from your reasons, or confirm their own suspicions. This is called confirmation bias. It is a tendency to search for or interpret new information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions and to avoid information and interpretations which contradict prior beliefs.
There are many control mechanisms in religion which seem to work at keeping you from questioning your faith. The biggest is the threat of hell, or simply punishment from Allah, God, or whichever supernatural being you believe in. Belonging to a community, like a church can keep you from challenging your beliefs because the threat of losing the community is too great. IMO even the Bible is full of statements that are control mechanisms. Consider the verses that condem you if you rely on reason, conventional wisdom or question the ways of God. Consider the insults like, "a fool says in his/her heart there is no god".
What I've noticed in people of faith is their inedibility to acknowledge their own doubts, or their refusal to consider that they could be wrong. This is the case with any form of brainwashing. Lest I be misunderstood, I also consider being born into your culture a form of brainwashing.
We adopt cultural beliefs often without questioning their worth, truthfulness, or helpfulness. We see things only from our cultural perspective and lack the ability to understand how another culture could see things differently. This often lends itself toward ethnocentric kinds of thinking. An ethnocentric view is the belief in the superiority of one's own ethnic group. Nationalism is another form of brainwashing, which I consider as lacking the ability to question one's own government.
If my friends and I had been born in the Middle East we may very well be arguing about faith in Allah vs. faith in Jesus Christ. The brain is an amazing organ with quite a few capabilities, but one thing it struggles to do is consider multiple viewpoints, facts, ideas and information at once. It tends to draw on the previously formed templates and funds of knowledge it has in its store house. That is why people can make decisions that someone else, someone with more knowledge or different cultural understanding, etc. thinks is absurd or puzzling.
Religious believers are no exception. They draw their understanding of their god from whatever sources they previously studied, were taught, or acquired from their family, or culture. It reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect "...which is an example of cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the meta-cognitive ability to realize it." "They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own abilities as above average."
* Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
* Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
* Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
* If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can
recognize and acknowledge their previous lack of skill.
(cited from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
I'm not suggesting that religious believers are incompetent, just controlled by their religious beliefs and the need to believe in them, which makes it hard to acknowledge their own lack of understanding. It also makes it hard to understand why someone would not believe as they do.
Religion gives people a feeling of control, sense of understanding by which to evaluate the world and a sense of hope after death. In my opinion, believing in something beyond the self can have a hugely beneficial psychological impact, even if the belief is fallacious. Predominant among the reasons for belief in a given paranormal claim is ‘credo consoles’, believing because the belief comforts or satisfies a need.
James Randi said, "What makes skeptics special is not what they believe in, or what they DON'T believe in, but that they're always willing to change their opinions in the light of new evidence". I'm the farthest thing from being an angry ex-Christian who just wants to avoid being accountable for my actions. My past anger at religion, which my brother can attest too was about feeling & realizing that I had been duped and realizing how much time I wasted chasing after a ghost. Kind of reminds me of the show Ghost Hunters. They run all over the world chasing ghosts at haunted houses but they never find any. I am constantly amazed that the show is still going strong year after year even though they never see, or find a real ghost. Do you see the parallel?
For all the good religion does, it also does harm by preventing otherwise rational people from discovering what really works in life, what is accurate and what is really helpful. Consider the prejudice religion has against homosexuality. There is absolutely no evidence that being gay is harmful, yet, the three Abrahamic religions teach that it is immoral and being homosexual is worthy of eternal hell fire and damnation. Many religious people even try and convert homosexuals to heterosexuality simply based on their faith, not based on evidence, or scientific research.
If religion was just about love, acceptance and helping people it would be a truly powerful force of good, but it's not. Believing in any of the Abrahamic faiths comes at a price, both personal and societal. Consider the belief that God answers prayer. How many prayers have you made? How many have been answered by a god? I recall a recent study about prayer and non-prayer. The study concluded that people who prayed for everyday situations counted just as many answers to their prayers as the person who never prayed and just wished that things would go a certain way. In other words, there is no significant increase in fulfillment of a religious person’s prayers vs. a non-religious person's wishes.
I heard Dan Barker, a former Evangelical minister, say that nothing fails like prayer. That was true in my life and I continue to observe that result in the lives of my Christian friends. Just think of all the Christians, Muslims, and Jews who are losing their houses during this economic mess. Does anyone see a difference between their economic problems and the non-believers? You'd think that all those religious people, who are loved by their God, would have miraculous answers to their financial needs in a statistically significant way which would be observable by the world, or at least the local news.
Prayers work when we believe they work, meaning, people tend to see what they want to believe. I’ve never seen a documented miracle like an arm re-grow as a result of prayer, or a developmentally disabled person suddenly become un-disabled. In all my studies, observations of debates (pitting one religion against another or an atheist against a person of faith), I've never really discovered anything that proves that any one god, or religious claim is superior to another, or that any one religion is truer than another. They all rely on faith; meaning a belief in something that no one can prove or demonstrate. Even the holy books people claim as actual words from their god are clearly a hodge podge of writings from ancient and modern man.
Yes, I know what the apologists claim. I read most of them and took under-graduate and graduate classes at Christian schools, so I know the arguments. I even remember the feeling I had when I was in those classes. I recall thinking to myself, wow, these smart college professors are really telling me the truth, because they are college professors and they wouldn't be duped. Wow, now I really have proof that what I believe is real and true. Wow, I am never going to doubt anything in my Bible or faith ever again. Wow, was I duped! I later learned that what my college apologetics professor believed, regarding a young earth was actually bizarre and very right wing extreme in the Christian faith world.
When I was in seminary, my professor believed that his god used evolution to bring about creation. He even brought in a Christian scientist who worked in a secular institution to talk about how faith and science can co-exist. He too believed in evolution as a mechanism that his god used. He gave evidence and made it seem bizarre that any Christian would dispute the evidence for evolution. I asked him many questions about the evidence against an old earth and what I had been taught about dating methods and how I had been taught at my Christian College that they were wrong and so on. I even brought up the famous, carbon dating of a live mollusk, which according to my college professor was dated at something like 33,000 years old. Or how does evolution work if the laws of thermodynamics contradict it (they don't). He explained all that in very rational terms and totally discredited my previous education.
All apologetics boil down to one thing, the Bible says it happened and we believe the Bible is the word of our god. You know, its funny when Christians talk about their beliefs, they come across completely confident that their version of Christianity is absolutely true, yet even Christians don't agree that the Bible is inerrant, or that faith is all that is necessary to enter heaven or what Jesus' central message was and on and on. I remember my Bible professor teaching me in college that a person really needs an education to read and interpret the Bible correctly. I remember thinking, why is God's word so hard to understand? Why didn't He make it clear and easily understood? Christians don't agree on eschatology, Christology, theology, doctrines and even church policies and proceedures, etc.
In my studies on how the Bible came to be, I quickly realized how I'd never really looked at the process of how Christianity came to believe in Jesus' divinity. I just assumed they always had thought of Jesus as divine. Apparently, early Christian's never fully agreed on the divinity of Christ. In fact, they went to war over it.
Starting in the 4th century and continuing on in the 6th century, the civil war, regarding the diety of Jesus, was causing problems for Emperor Constantine. Arius, a Christian priest from Egypt believed that Jesus was at some point non-existent, but created by God. This philosophy was called Arianism. "Arius taught that God the Father and the Son did not exist together eternally. He taught that the pre-incarnate Jesus was a divine being created by (and therefore inferior to) God the Father at some point, before which the Son did not exist." (M'Clintock and Strong's Cyclopedia, Volume 7, page 45a.)
Long story short, as I understand it, Constantine gathered the major players, got a majority opinion and commanded that all books questioning Jesus' divinity be burned and anyone found keeping them would be put to death. The counsel also voted on a host of other things like when was Easter to be celebrated (They basically changed the Jewish version of events to a Christian one) and they did away with castrating yourself. Jesus became fully divine and equal to God the Father based on a vote.
The beliefs, holy writings and organizations of religions are exactly what we'd expect if they'd all been made by men.
No comments:
Post a Comment