Evangelical atheism?

 I was talking with an agnostic Jewish friend today about conversion and de-conversion and realized something:


I feel a lot more urgency to try and convert people FROM Christianity than I ever did to try and convert them TO Christianity. 

Even though I used to believe eternity was on the line, a bit of me still felt that if there was a god who truly was perfectly just, he wouldn't ACTUALLY consign a decent person to everlasting hellfire just because they didn't believe in him. As long as they BEHAVED the way Jesus would have wanted. After all, even some Biblical verses implied that there would be people who professed belief yet would not be saved, and people who would be surprised to find themselves saved.

But knowing that we only have this one life, and Christians are wasting theirs - at best, by simply wasting their Sunday mornings, and at worst, by using their time to make everyone else's lives worse by their actions and especially by their votes - makes it feel much more urgent. We have real problems that need real solutions, and the more people rely on bullshit solutions the further we get from real ones. 

And there's a time limit on these problems before it's too late and they destroy us. Climate change needs to be addressed twenty years ago, and religion is one of the primary reasons people can keep pretending it's not a real problem. Bigotry needs to be addressed tens of thousands of years ago, and religion is one of the primary reasons we still have so much of it. Religion is the reason AIDS is still killing more people in religious countries than secular ones, and the longer it does that the more the disease spreads. Religion is the reason that Israel won't consider the two-state solution that is the only realistic solution to the problem of two nations trying to exist in the same space at the same time, and the longer that continues the closer we get to the kind of war that could annihilate all nations. Religion is the albatross around the neck of reason, and until we can get rid of the albatross we're never getting to where we need to be. And we don't have the option of just letting the chips fall and let god sort 'em out, because there is no god to sort 'em out. If there's going to be any solution to any problem anywhere, it has to be done by humans, and religion is the single biggest obstacle to the process of problem-solving.

So, I find myself more driven to talk and write about the importance of dropping religion, than I ever did to talk or write about the importance of joining it. 

Ironically, I'm more tempted to be an obnoxious new convert trying to convert everyone else now that I'm trying to convert people to "not bullshit"... than I was when I believed I had a divine mandate to convert people to The Truth of Christianity.

And unfortunately, the only model I had for trying to change people's beliefs was the Evangelical one, so I don't have a whole lot of practice at non-obnoxious ways to do it. I'll have to reflect on that and work on it.



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