I hope this note finds you well.

I assumed you were offline long ago, so I have not checked in for months. For some odd reason I visited today; I’ve no idea what I was doing. But here I am, and it seems much has changed.

You will get no stones thrown your way by me. I am not that sort of Christian. I’ve been known to call myself a Christian atheist, a devout one at that. But I will leave off any explanations of that seemingly oxymoronic term.

You’ve said a couple of things here that I would like to reply to, if you don’t mind. Granted, I realize that this thread is essentially abandoned. My words are like cigarette ashes in a coal mine.

First, the idea that a Christian has no free will once he or she follows Christ is simply untrue. I will not overtax you with a big argument, I will merely state a couple of things. St. Paul, for example, urged Christians this way: “Whatsoever YOU do, do as if unto the Lord.” To whom was Paul referring? Anyone who “followed” Christ. There is no writer in the NT who suggests there is a blue-print or schematic one must follow; there is no sense whatsoever that a believer has lost freedom. And I am amazed at how many Christians miss this passage from St. Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi: “God is at work in YOU so that YOU will ACT and CHOOSE according to his good purpose.” Isn’t that at least a philosophically curious locution, that God is at work in a Christian, not so that GOD will ACT and CHOOSE according to His good purpose, but that the Christian, the free person, will ACT and CHOOSE for himself? Of course, people confuse the freedom associated with human autonomy with the freedom to choose ANYTHING; that NOT being able to choose ANYTHING one wills is tantamount to denying freedom altogether, or so critics of Christianity often argue. But the content of one’s choices matters: One is not particularly free if one chooses the pillory. Christianity’s message, at least in part, is that God is helping US to make the choices that keep us free.

I know you have children. Do you tie your children’s shoes in order to tie them the rest of their lives? Do you teach them ethical behavior so you can monitor them every step of the way; do you inculcate values in your children so you can make EVERY ethical choice for them? No. You do all these things so that they will FREELY choose to tie their shoes for themselves, and act and choose in ways that keep them free. Your will is done when your children do the right things for themselves when you’re absent or even dead.

Sadly, cruder Protestant theologies generally over-protect God’s “sovereignty.” Hence, they tend to make extreme statements about God’s will, as if it is an absolute PLAN, inflexible, intransigent, deterministic. But God’s will is not a quantity — what you MUST do — but a quality — HOW you do what you choose to do.

Also, no truly orthodox Christian bases his or her belief in Christ simply on the Bible. As I’ve written elsewhere, such thinking leads to absurdities: If belief in the inerrancy and infallibility of the New Testament is a prerequisite belief, then it follows that the FIRST act of evangelism is to testify not that “Jesus is Risen!” but “The Bible is the word of God.” Imagine the scene: St. John, running from an empty tomb, first runs home and writes down what he witnessed; he then reads it and, in a leap of faith declares, “Now that I’ve read it, it is indeed true!” Nowhere in the entire Bible, Old Testament or New, is there any suggestion that belief in the Bible’s inerrancy is a prerequisite for belief in Christ.

Since Protestants, because they broke from the Catholic Church in a fit of pique and in a rush for power, removed themselves from the Church’s authority, they IMPOSED on the Bible an authority it NEVER claimed to possess. Protestants the world over say things like this: “The Bible is the final authority in all matters of faith.” But they don’t even realize what they’re saying, for if the Bible IS the final authority in all matters of faith, then the Bible itself would tell believers which books of the Bible belong in the canon and which do not. Where in the Bible does it tell us Matthew and Mark belong in the Synoptics? You get the picture.

The primary vehicle of faith throughout Christian history has been the church’s VERBAL witness: Christ has risen! The Catholic Church has ALWAYS said this. The primary question, then, is whether the testimony is trustworthy. There are countless other questions, of course, but the primary one is simple: Do I trust what I hear?

And note, too, that this is essentially a rational question, rooted in a simple either/or: Jesus either rose from the dead, or he didn’t.

I am not attempting to convince you that you’ve made the wrong decision. You haven’t. I am merely trying to highlight what I see are pervasive problems in Protestantism. It is my belief that Protestantism, when analyzed deeply, tends a soul toward agnosticism and atheism.

(And I am not so obtuse that I am unaware of Catholics who have lost their faith. But let me add this one thing: I was the only non-Catholic on a softball team I played for. Everyone of my teammates had gone through parochial school; everyone of them — EVERYONE! — was a lapsed, disillusioned Catholic. And one day after practice, I asked them all what they thought of the Immaculate Conception. You know what I discovered? EVERYONE of them did not understand that most-Catholic of dogmas.)

Here’s a plain fact. There is no distinction between those who have faith and those who do not. That distinction is utterly false. There is no person on this planet whose primary, axiomatic premise for experiencing “truth” or “existence” is not based on faith. I don’t know if that means a thing in this discussion. I share it simply because it is true. But it does follow that, in the most rudimentary sense of the word, everyone is a “religious” person, holding to primary and basal beliefs that are not provable.

Lastly, let me add one more thing. Our experience of the world, and our knowledge of it and our understanding of who we are, individually and collectively, are not perfectly and completely reducible to language, or even thoughts. There is part of every psyche, every mind, that is pre-lingual; there is something pre- and meta-cognitive in each of us where language has no place: our words grope about, grasping at symbols, analogies, metaphors, similes, all in an imperfect attempt not to bridge the chasm between the human and the divine, but merely the gap between the person and any thought, or any feeling, or any thing. Have you not heard that “words cannot express,” that “words fall short”? Clearly they do. Does “I love you” not seem insipid, weak, to those who truly love?

If they words didn’t fall short, then when I say or write “I am eating an apple,” the words and the act of eating an apple would be identical. Obviously, they are not, nor do such words EVEN COME CLOSE to the act of eating an apple. If I say, your eyes are blue, as a statement of fact that might be true, but they are not even REMOTELY the same as YOUR BLUE EYES.

All this to say that we don’t walk in a world of words. The universe is not words; your family is not a composition of words. God is not a proposition, and Christianity is not a set of propositions. It’s easy, of course, to reject and obfuscate and deride and analyze and defend words. But reality is far more than what can be said about it. It will always be that way.

When the Church testifies to something, it may be using words — what choice does it have? — but it is testifying to something that not only is not a word, it is testifying to something words cannot perfectly or fully describe. Not that such a fact is unique. It isn’t. It’s just that we tend to forget we walk in mystery, not clarity. And our language, symbolic as it is, reflects that mystery. Oh, yes. Sometimes the right words bring some clarity. But not always, and not nearly often enough.

Peace to you, dear soul.

Bill Gnade

This takes some real courage.

I suspect, though, that doing so leaves a huge gap, especially for someone who did not go directly to atheism, but instead proclaims agnosticism.

I suspect you have become a seeker.

To give some contrary perspective to JDs thoughts, I will present some of mine.

While I do not believe in the Supernatural, I am not an atheist: in fact some have accused me of being an atheist, but it is not true.

Nor am I an agnostic. You can not be an agnostic when you have direct experience with a “higher power”.

And while I believe that Jesus Christ existed and had an exceptionally profound spiritual life, I am not a Christian. To be a Christian you would have to believe in the Resurrection and recall that I do not believe in the Supernatural.

If you are ever interested in exploring spirituality, I could give you some avenues to pursue, including some interesting aspects of Christianity that people tend to gloss over.

But for now, just know that is possible to agree with JD 98% of the time, while neither being an atheist nor an agnostic.

An agnostic is someone who believes that God’s existence is unknowable. From my perspective such is not unknowable, but neither is it a person-like being that stands apart from Nature.

An atheist declares that there is no God, but of course the absence of evidence that a scientist would accept is not evidence of absence.

Anyway, Charity, you are in a generally select category, in my experience: Someone who has walked away from a significant social network as a result of intellectual honesty.

Amazing.

“All I do know is that for the past four years, I gave my power over to god based on a theology that I no longer believe is true. Now, I have taken back control and things have never been better.”

It is hard to explain those things. I’m glad to see this also: “He kind of freaked out for the first couple of days, but now things are going very well.” My wife took more like 12 months to get to that point rather than a couple of days, and it is still a struggle, but we’re still trucking along. Thanks for posting this.

I thought, according to JD, you were already cracked-up. Well, as Howard Roark might have put it: “Why should I worship a God who is nothing but a second-hander parasite collectivist nitwit. Look at the World this God of yours has given us: As a creator, God just followed the mob.”

“Arrest me,” said M. Colby. “I’ll talk at the trial.”

I do tend to be a bit binary in my thinking, but let me explain what I was saying here. When I used the word “true” in that context, I meant “entirely true.” So, when I said, “The Bible is either true or it is not,” I was not saying “The Bible is either true or it is false.” I was simply stating that it is either entirely true, or not entirely true. (It can only be one.) The latter case leaves open the possibility for the Bible to contain some truth, which I believe it does. I was not excluding that possibility.

What I was trying to explain in that comment was why I called myself an agnostic, rather than just becoming a more liberal Christian. I was a conservative Christian, which I define as one who believes the Bible is the (entirely) true word of God. I have now rejected that. I no longer have the certainty with which to boldly make that claim.

The appeal of conservative Christianity, to me, was that we can know who God is and what his promises are, as well as what he expects of us. That gives one something unchanging to hold on to in an ever-changing and unsure world. That is what provides comfort – God is always there; he loves us the way we are, even when we screw up; he has a plan that is ultimately good, even when bad things happen to us; etc.

If I acknowledge that the Bible is not entirely true, then it calls into question the truth of any assertion contained therein. I am not one to discard the parts I don’t like and then have trust in the parts I do like. Why? I have absolutely no assurance that any of it is true as long as I know that some of it is not, without some sort of objective standard.

I learned a lot of things that made me a better person in the time that I studied and practiced Christianity, and will continue to do so. But the same goes for other sources of truth.

I was pretty much always agnostic, or at least non-dogmatic in my beliefs. Christianity lends itself to dogmatism. You have to be sure of its truth to really believe it and practice it the way I was. (I was, admittedly, for better or worse, pretty hard core about it.)

It’s very freeing. It allows me to look at the shades of gray in everything. The last thing I would do is jump to some other extreme.

I like knowing that I don’t know everything. I never thought I would say that.

And if it comes down to it, I’m atheistic about the big religions. Looking at the history, the science, etc, there’s really no way they could be true and I say that certain of myself. As to everything else, I’d say I’m an apathetic agnostic, meaning I don’t think there is anything else there, but even if there was, it doesn’t seem to affect me in any way (or anything else as far as I can see) so why even give a shit? I certainly don’t see any necessity for it.