What if I had been with progressive Christians instead of conservatives?

[physeterParticipant]

After that “Nashville Statement”, a friend pointed me to Rachel Held Evans’s very effective essay of Christian history, titled “The Bible was ‘clear’…”

You know, I’m happy overall being an atheist, I think it’s the most accurate worldview for the world we are living in. It’s not without its hardships though. And sometimes–often, really–I think if I had stayed around Christians like this I never would have left the faith.

What do you think? I was raised to be more fundamentalist–to believe that my way of interpreting the bible was the only way, and these “liberal” interpretations were deception by Satan. I was taught that there was no point in having a wishy-washy, watered down faith. I really believed that; so when I discovered my rigid literal faith could no longer stand, I went the whole way and became an atheist.

And yet if Christians today can believe women have the right to vote… And Christians can believe slavery is wrong… And Christians can believe the “races” are equal… And Christians can believe the earth goes around the sun…in spite of scripture, tradition, and history all suggesting the opposite, who am I to say what “Real” Christianity can or can’t accept?

What do you think?

 

• This topic was modified 7 years ago by  physeter.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

I feel a bit sorry for “progressive” Christians – there’s just nothing they can do about the fact that the Bible is flat-out anti-gay.  It presents conventional Christians with an uncomfortable logical impossibility.

That Nashville Statement is honest, at least.  But it seems a bit silly to focus on that one thing – males, females, fluid gender and sexuality.  It makes the evangelicals look silly.

It does raise a larger issue – that strange anomaly of the human race, that there is a widespread prejudice against homosexuality, when in the animal kingdom, they’re all as gay as you like.  I think it must be linked to that other strange anomaly of the human race: monogamous pair-bonding for the purpose of raising children.  This also would explain the preoccupation of religion with “sexual sin”.

“I was taught that there was no point in having a wishy-washy, watered down faith.”

– it seems that most ideologies suffer from this problem: that to be a better person, you have to be more extreme and conservative.  The only exception I can really think of is “classical liberalism” which is explicitly moderate and pluralistic.

[Simon PayntonParticipant]

“monogamous pair-bonding for the purpose of raising children”

– if you think about it, that’s quite an unstable situation, given all the various pressures to undo it or compromise it.  So it needs a lot of defending.

[.Spectator]

Honestly Physeter I think that Christianity varies a lot across the United States. I personally found that a lot about atheism didn’t add up for me.

[Dang MartinParticipant]

Belle Rose wrote:

Honestly Physeter I think that Christianity varies a lot across the United States. I personally found that a lot about atheism didn’t add up for me.

There are over 50,000 brands of Christianity available for purchase, and yes they do vary. One thing they have in common is that each believes that THEY are correct, while the majority of the others are wrong.

But I’m here because I think people let you skate by comfortably on something else you said here that I think is important to address. That is the SECOND half of what you wrote, which is, “I personally found that a lot about atheism did not add up for me.”

What did not add up? It can’t be the dogma, for there is none. It couldn’t be a bible-equivalent book, because there isn’t one. It couldn’t be a strict belief system, because there isn’t one. It couldn’t be the post-life rewards, because there aren’t any.

That’s because Atheism is not a belief system. It’s a label that borders on worthless. The only value it has is to bring others who do not believe together because for TOO LONG they’ve been told to shut their mouths, to be quiet about their non-belief, if they know what’s good for them.

A lot, eh? Well, then, list some of those things that “did not add up” for you. I would accept that you cannot conceive of being an Atheist because you are a Theist. That’s completely understandable.

I think some additional detail would add some context to understanding what you mean here.

• This reply was modified 7 years ago by  Dang Martin.

[StregaModerator]

Physter I don’t think I can imagine what it was like to come from a fundamentalist background and arrive at atheism.  Did things just drift away from reality for you, or was there a radical awakening?

I had categorized God and Santa together, and angels were grown up fairies when I was a child.  When I stopped believing, I stopped believing in all of it.  It just fell away like a child’s blanket.  It was never discussed in my family, in the same way that golf was not discussed.  It was of no interest to any of us.

[physeterParticipant]

Strega it was a long process. I had to spend four years at a non-fundamentalist Christian college challenging my views in a non-threatening way. I questioned everything I thought I knew, and I really struggled with how I could “hear god’s voice” and how to trust my intellect without being “deceived by Satan.”

I was a missionary in Africa after college, and spent eight months in a remote village truly believing, and trusting in God and the Holy Spirit for everything. My experience there helped me see just how empty so many Christian promises are. I learned how people who say they are “hearing God” are taught to fool themselves with mental tricks. I saw how God’s power didn’t really make any change in people’s lives like you’d expect. And I realized, if I’m a missionary that means I want people to set aside their comfortable ideas they grew up with, and accept the real truth–which I thought was Christianity–and not base their lives on comfortable excuses. This made me wonder if my own beliefs were actually based on reality, or if I was doing the same thing Muslims do, for instance, when they falsely claim the Bible foretold Muhammad. I wrote my story in more detail in three posts a few years ago.

In fact, I think that’s why I get so troubled when atheists criticize liberal Christians so harshly, as if only fundamentalists can be true Christians. If I had never studied the Bible from a liberal Christian perspective, I may have never ultimately come to find the truth. It challenged my faith, but didn’t directly contradict it; and I had to wrestle with the fact that people who reached these conclusions about the Bible still called themselves followers of Jesus. If it had just been atheists claiming the Bible was composited of multiple unreliable sources, for instance, I may have just blown them off completely.

[StregaModerator]

So many of our members reached atheism via ‘fire and brimstone’ – their stories always touch my heart.  I don’t know whether it might have been different for you if you’d been with gentle Christians- and as long as you have found a worldview that suits you, I’m happy for you.

The major thing I like about the atheist communities, is they don’t go door knocking to deconvert people (well most don’t, although I do remember one bloke who came to TA at one stage and claimed to have made over 2,000 deconversions – which bearing in mind his age, meant he had to be running at 5 per day, miminum).

My care for this site is that it gives a safe place for persecuted atheists who just need to breathe unpolluted air before they have to plunge back into the murky pool of interfering religious people in their locality.

For me, becoming an atheist was a matter of putting away childish things and learning to become an adult.  That’s a self-perception, I’m not calling other people childish, just describing my own experience.

[Dang MartinParticipant]

Strega wrote:

For me, becoming an atheist was a matter of putting away childish things and learning to become an adult. That’s a self-perception, I’m not calling other people childish, just describing my own experience.

This reminded me of an audio book I got a while back called “Letting Go of God” by Julia Sweeney. She tells her story of how she goes from a believer to a non-believer. Her struggle is illustrated so clearly and cleverly. Having never been indoctrinated or a believer myself, it really helped me to understand the difficult that would come with making that decision, and then acting upon it. There are parts of it that sound silly, but then you realize that the silliness is a coping mechanism for the fear and terror that comes with this act of letting go.

[physeterParticipant]

After my visit to a liberal church today, I think I might know what would have happened. I might have never become an atheist.

 

I’ve told you how I grew up Mennonite, went to Mennonite college, and then was a Mennonite missionary before ultimately concluding my god wasn’t real. Mennonites are so varied. Some are much more liberal, and some are conservative. Some are fighting for gay rights, and some are fighting against. Some are focused on social justice, peace, and other humanist concerns instead of more traditional “evangelical” issues; others are the opposite.

 

I went to a liberal Mennonite college that taught me a new way of reading the Bible. But then I went to a much more conservative Mennonite mission organization. It was very “spirit-led” (i.e. superstitious) and spent a lot of time trying to teach us how to “hear God” and be ready to do miracles. Then I came home from that and went back to the Mennonite church I grew up in, which is so evangelical these days I don’t even know why they kept the name.

 

That experience got me questioning the faith.

 

But the Mennonite Church in this new city is so different.

 

The guest speaker (since their pastor has retired and wasn’t replaced yet) was preaching on the parable of the workers in the vineyard—you know, the one where some workers are hired early in the day, then more hired later, and some near the end of the day, and then the owner pays them all the same. Jesus talks about compassion instead of justice, and says many of the last shall be first.

 

I heard how she was preaching on the meaning of this, and I thought, it sounds like this applies to DACA, to the dreamers. And you know what? SHE FUCKING WENT THERE. She said so right from the pulpit. She said God calls us to be as loving as possible, not so worried about enforcing the rules; and she didn’t stop there, she also said she was going to call all her congresspeople and urge them to do the right thing.

 

And everything else at the church was also wonderful. They did an adult Sunday School discussion about the Sabbath, but it morphed from just talking about spiritual things to talking about how American imperialism and materialism is harmful—using the Sabbath as a metaphor going against the prevailing glorification of work. Outside the church, there’s one of those signs that says “No matter where you are from, we’re glad you’re our neighbor,” in English, Spanish and Arabic. It was put up specifically in response to an Emperor who says that neighbors who speak Spanish or Arabic are to be feared. In fact, it was a Mennonite church which originated this sign in the first place.

 

And the people there knew me. They knew my folks. They knew my relatives used to attend that church years ago. They gave me a homemade slice of strawberry rhubarb pie when I walked in the door, and a bag of chocolate chip cookies when I left.

 

I love this place. If I was looking for a Christian Church to attend, I would be knocking down their door next week. For the first time in ages, while I was in church I wasn’t debunking it in my head—ah, this is wrong, that is wrong. Instead I was actually daydreaming how I could help the church if I were to join it! You know, how can we reach out to Arab neighbors and Hispanic neighbors and partner with people doing the good works, rather than just put up signs…

 

I think if I had gone straight from college to this kind of church I might have never become an atheist. And I’m not sure how I should really feel about that. If nothing else I guess it reminds me to have more empathy with my liberal Christian friends, whenever I’m tempted to be frustrated with them for not joining us freethinkers.

 

[Dang MartinParticipant]

physeter wrote:

I heard how she was preaching on the meaning of this, and I thought, it sounds like this applies to DACA, to the dreamers. And you know what? SHE FUCKING WENT THERE. She said so right from the pulpit. She said God calls us to be as loving as possible, not so worried about enforcing the rules; and she didn’t stop there, she also said she was going to call all her congresspeople and urge them to do the right thing.

It’s a strange thing, but if one reads the bible, and then simply observes the Conservative Republicans, you cannot actually see how anything they’re doing is even remotely Christian. The religion itself sounds very Liberal, and yet the Conservative factions have taken it and made it their own, to the point that “getting rich” is a-okay.

Many don’t seem interested in caring for the poor, healing the sick, and feeding the hungry.

And it seems to me that one big recurring theme throughout the entire bible revolves around how a Christian is supposed to treat the homeless, the immigrants, and the sojourners. You won’t catch ANY American Christians doing as the bible says.

They just call themselves Christians, and do nothing much for others. I’m sure there are SOME churches out there who do help others, and that’s great. But I think those who are hard-core Conservative Republicans do NOTHING to help anyone other than themselves.

Jesus talks about compassion instead of justice, and says many of the last shall be first.

He does, up until that part in Revelations, where he’s floating around with a giant sword coming out of his mouth [Rev. 19:15].

When I ask myself “What would Jesus do?” I realize that flipping over tables and chasing people around with a whip are options that are now on the table.

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