rationalism | deconversion

Posts tagged ‘rationalism’

Belonging

Some readers at my personal blog have asked me why it took me so long to come to my senses about religion. I’ve given the question a lot of thought, and I think the title of this piece summarizes it best.

When I was a teen, most of my friends and I were apathetic believers in the Judeo-Christian version of god. We believed in a deity, but we weren’t the least bit interested in surrendering to him or finding his perfect will for our lives. In fact, as a preacher’s kid, I may have been more overtly anti-religious and rebellious than my peers. This was my basic attitude until I was sixteen years old, when I underwent two major life changes.

The first change took place over the summer, when I had an opportunity to travel with an evangelistic team for ten weeks. Even though my faith was apathetic, at best, I was enticed by the glamor of traveling with a group of teens and young adults and actually getting paid for the privilege! What a blast! And it was. The team consisted of eleven members, ten of whom were actually committed Christians. I was the odd person out. I didn’t let on that I wasn’t saved and, since I could easily talk the talk, I breezed through the summer and, to all outward appearances, fit right in with the rest of the group. I really liked these people: even though they were on fire for Jesus, they were friendly, fun and funny.

Notwithstanding the close relationships that developed in that ten weeks, had I simply returned home to my usual peer group of apatheists, I likely would have fit right back in with them too…

Continue Reading November 24, 2008 at 3:20 pm the chaplain 14 comments

Null Hypothesis ≠ Presuppositionalism

It was just over a year ago that I seriously considered a range of theological, philosophical and empirical data regarding the existence of God and the likelihood that any theistic religion, particularly Christianity, was true. As I read books, blogs and web sites, I occasionally stumbled across the term, presuppositionalism. I quickly gathered that this is a branch of Christian apologetics that starts with the premises that God is real and that Christianity is true, and then seeks to find rational support for those premises. I probably don’t need to point out to you that this method of reasoning is circular. Presuppositionalists try to weasel out of that charge by claiming that there are different types of circularity, that their method does not rely on mere vicious circularity (which they agree is a logical fallacy) and that all methods of inquiry rely, to some degree, on presuppositionalism. Therefore, even if they are guilty, so is everyone else.

Presuppositionalists claim that their presuppositions – 1. that God exists and 2. that the Christian version of God is the correct one – are not unreasonable and are, in fact, the only ones by which humans can make any sense of the world. Naturalists, on the other hand, claim that humans are capable of observing and testing data in the world and drawing sound conclusions about the nature of the universe on the bases of their tests and observations…

Continue Reading September 3, 2008 at 9:57 pm the chaplain 13 comments

What’s So Bad About Religion?

I’ve been debating with myself for several days about whether I should write this post. Since some others bloggers have dealt with this question quite effectively recently, I haven’t felt that I would have anything useful to add to the conversation. I changed my mind when I read Brian’s recent heart wrenching post. For the religious folks who wonder why nonbelievers care at all about religion and why we can’t we just respect believers’ beliefs and leave them alone, I offer the following thoughts.

The first problem that I have with religious beliefs is that, as Greta Christina pointed out recently, acting on the basis of false beliefs can lead to ill-conceived, even harmful, behavior and decisions. Take, for example, cases of snake handlers who die from snakebites, or Jehovah’s Witnesses who die for want of blood transfusions – both of which have occurred in the USA within the past several months. One may argue that such beliefs are misunderstandings of scriptural injunctions, but to so argue merely cedes my point. Yes, I agree, such beliefs are misunderstandings, but those misunderstandings are founded upon what believers have read in scriptures and they are founded upon traditions that have been passed down to successive generations for millennia. Quite simply, the misunderstood scriptures would not be taken so seriously, and the errant teachings that have been transmitted through the ages would not exist, were it not for the religious contexts that gave birth to them and continue to nourish them…

Continue Reading February 17, 2008 at 10:07 pm the chaplain 68 comments