Background - why this blog, why "Atheist Christian", and why there will be posts about stuff that happened years ago...

I was raised Evangelical, and was that weirdly intense religious kid who actually took it seriously. I took it so seriously that I went to an expensive Evangelical college, minored in Bible and Christian education, seriously considered majoring in them and becoming a youth pastor. 

Eventually, real life knocked me around enough to make me realize the Evangelicals had a lot of things wrong, but I still believed in God so I became an Episcopalian. That was a much better fit, and more consistent with the things that Jesus said were actually important. And even though I don't believe in God anymore, I still go to that church. Partly, to be honest, because my wife wants me to; but partly because I really do believe in the moral principles that community tries to live by, and that having the story and image of a perfectly moral human to emulate makes it easier to try and emulate perfect morality. That's why religion exists - HUMANS NEED STORIES IN ORDER TO LEARN HOW TO BE HUMAN. That's why it still feels right to be a Christian even as an atheist.

Think about when and how you were taught that lying is wrong, when you were a child. Were you given a 12-point lecture on the nature of truth and the ethics of honesty? Or were you told about the boy who cried wolf? I know that many atheists will say that you can't use lies in the service of truth, and they're not entirely wrong. But they aren't taking into account this piece of human nature so fundamental that we often don't even notice it's there. A metaphor can be true without being factual, and we're more likely to understand the facts if they're wrapped in a metaphor. It's not factual that a talking hen ran around telling other barnyard animals the sky was falling until a fox ate them all; but it's true that people who are afraid can lead others into fear, and from there into danger and death. It's not factual that Robert Burns' love was like a red, red rose - unless she really did have spikes growing out of her, generate energy via photosynthesis, and have hips that could be eaten to ward off scurvy - but I'll bet it's true that she was beautiful, a little bit wild, and a little bit dangerous if not handled carefully. And it's not factual that God became a human and sacrificed himself to himself to save humanity from his righteous wrath, but it is true that the willingness of a good person to sacrifice themselves for a cause more important than themselves, and refusing to use immoral tools like violence in the service of a moral cause like love, is the height of human morality. 

So when you see the Bible as a series of useful metaphors and visual aids that can be used to illustrate truths, the lack of fact need not be a lie. 

Unless you're a dumbass literalist who thinks it has to all be treated as unquestionable fact, not only by you but also by everyone else. That's where the Evangelicals always go wrong, and why they are so easy to fool in so many other ways.

For years, I've been increasingly angry at the Evangelical sub-culture that raised me for abandoning and betraying the values that they raised me to have. And while I do talk to my Evangelical family and friends about that to some extent, there's a lot that I haven't wanted to say under my own name because I haven't wanted to risk alienating them. 

I've had several posts I wanted to put on my other blog under my own name, but didn't. And that, too, has been an increasing source of frustration. Evangelicals are so committed to the idea that anyone who contradicts them is persecuting them, that they've actually got me censoring myself. Something they got me to do all through my childhood when I was under their absolute control. And it pisses me off that even though I no longer believe their bullshit, I have to pretend their bullshit deserves to be treated with respect.

But: thank non-existent God for the Internet. It's ridiculously easy to just create a blog without my name attached, and get my thoughts out there for whoever wants/ needs to hear them without having to risk alienating anyone I know. 

So the next several posts are from previous things I wanted to say to the world in general, and Christians (especially American Evangelicals) in particular, ever since November of 2016 when the sub-culture that raised me to follow Jesus decided to vote for the incarnation of everything Jesus told his followers NOT to be.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Baby in the bathwater?

Image
A Christian minister asked a Christian president, who was elected by Christians for Christian reasons, to behave in accordance with Christian principles. And yet, the majority of the country's Christians are mad about it. And despite that, the rest of the nation's Christians continue to insist that there's a "real" Christianity that somehow the majority of Christians are failing to practice despite the fact that those Christians make their whole personality about how Christian they are. The decent humans that still adhere to Christianity - who are very much the minority of Christians - continue to believe that Christianity has an actual moral core and a message that can make its adherents behave in a more moral way. They continue to tell me that there's a baby I've thrown out with the bathwater by rejecting Christianity in its entirety.  And I get it. I used to think the same, for decades. I would "no true Scotsman" every Christian who behaved im...
Read more

On Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Evangelical Republicans, and Judas Iscariot

Earlier today, I posted this on Facebook: "Tonight, for Maundy Thursday, Christians all over the world will commemorate a time when an innocent man who had done nothing more than criticize people in power was imprisoned and ultimately executed without due process, due in large part to a mob of religious people demanding his destruction and claiming he was a danger to the rule of the emperor. And 80 percent of American Evangelicals will never, EVER realize that they are the Judas in this story." But on further reflection, I realized that this was unnecessarily harsh and insulting. ... ...to Judas. After all, Judas realized almost immediately that he had done something monstrous, something unforgiveable, and felt such remorse at the enormity of his betrayal that he could no longer live with himself. But Evangelical Republicans lack the moral clarity of JUDAS FUCKING ISCARIOT. No, they're something far worse. They're the crowd chanting "Crucify him!" and "...
Read more

A matter of principle

Ever since November of 2016, the question has haunted me: How did the conservative Evangelicals I grew up with so thoroughly lose their principles? And the correct answer is: They never had principles.  But for once, I don't intend that as an insult. I mean this as a distinction between two different ways of looking at morality. Evangelicals never had principles; they had RULES. Because that's how their churches train them to think. They (along with the Catholics, who have fallen into the same error) are religious fundamentalists. They don't treat morality as a set of flexible guidelines that can and should change over time; they treat morality as a set of rules that are "the same yesterday, today, and forever". If the Bible said it in 2000 BCE, then it's still binding 4 millennia later (except if there's another rule that negates it, such as the "no bacon" thing being negated by Peter's vision in Acts).  But there wasn't a "That wa...
Read more