The Slapdash Godliness of a Good Girl

Answered Prayers?

2011-02-04T13:55:00.005-05:00

I suppose I will pick up where my last post left off: I was newly engaged and starting to build a life (and home!) with my future husband. At the time, my biggest stress was whether and how to tell my mom about our impending cohabitation.

Fast forward a few months: it's late September and I go in for my annual "womanly" exam. This exam kicks off a series of events that culminates in me learning, three days before our wedding, that I have breast cancer. At this point, we don't really know how bad it is: it's ductal carcinoma in situ (which, as far as cancer goes, that's good), but it's big (9.5 cm) and the cells are aggressive (that's bad).

Mr. Slapdash and I keep this to ourselves over the wedding weekend because we don't want to dampen the celebration. It's a fabulous wedding and we have a great time (and I'm now Mrs. Slapdash, thanks!). We tell family and friends our cancer news upon return from our honeymoon in Hawaii (which I spent wondering whether I was going to die like my sister's sister-in-law who died of BC at age 39). A couple of weeks later, I go under the knife. Mastectomy.

Then we get some great news with the pathology report: despite its size and despite the nefarious aggressiveness of the cells, it hasn't spread anywhere and they got it all out. No chemo, no radiation, no hormonal therapies needed. Whew!!! Even my surgeon was surprised that there was no invasive disease found.

My family, friends, and colleagues have been just great, support-wise, and of course Mr. Slap has been incredible. And today, I am recovering nicely from surgery and recently went back to work, where it is as though none of this happened.

So here is where this is all getting funky for me: I can't tell you how many of these supportive people who love me have commented on how God has "answered their prayers"; how "blessed" I was to have found Mr. Slap when I did; how almost-miraculous it was that no invasive cells were found. A lot of these people seem to have a narrative going in their heads about what a grand miracle of timing this all was: God brought my life partner around just in time to help me through this trial as my husband.

The snarky side of me thinks that "God's providence" would have been a more compelling argument if God had clearly prevented me from getting cancer to begin with. Yes, I'm going to live, but I became a one-boobed wonder at age 36 -- not exactly a dream-come-true. I am at risk of lymphedema in my right arm - if I ever develop it, there's no cure. And despite being cancer-free today, I am still at risk for a recurrence and I have a greater-than-average risk of getting another primary cancer in my lifetime. So yeah, things could have been way worse, but damn. It's not like I escaped it unscathed.

BUT, there is a bigger side of me that is like "whoa - that was pretty crazy timing" and I am very thankful for it - like I feel a general "Thanks, Universe!" sentiment quite frequently and am very aware that things really could have been much, much, much worse. It was also very awesome to have Mr. Slap by my side; I really could not have asked for more, partner-wise.

Still. I'm skeptical of any God role in any of it, particularly because merely having good things happen is no kind of proof of God. It was a lot of bad stuff happening in the world that made me start questioning God in the first place...and I'm pretty sure that a series of good, even seemingly divine, events in my life still can't undo all of that doubt. Right?

Updates!

2010-07-27T09:27:00.003-04:00

Oh, my poor, dormant blog...!

What an eventful year-plus it has been since my last entry. The headlines:

I am engaged to a fantastic man and we're getting married in October. :)
I am still, well, I suppose "agnostic" is the best description.
My fiance is not agnostic, though he would say he's a "deist" more than a Christian.
We are having a Jewish chaplain friend of his marry us. We haven't told our parents yet (mine: Protestant; his: Catholic).
We are trying to figure out how to tell my mom that we are moving into our newly-purchased condo together next month - before the wedding.
Five weeks ago, my mom was diagnosed with breast cancer, which sucks of course, and also makes telling her about our impending "living in sin" that much harder.

I still occasionally check out the de-Conversion blog, but it doesn't hold the same interest that it did a couple of years ago. For the most part, I have settled into a pleasant way of "being" that is not concerned with the existence or nature of god. To be sure, I get irritable and grouchy when I feel pressured by people of faith to think, do, or "be" differently, but those episodes are few and far between these days.

That said, when my fiance and I start a family, we will have to think through what we want to teach our children, and how we will handle it when one or both sets of grandparents wishes to impart their faith systems to their grandkids. But...one thing at a time!

Christ is risen indeed

2009-04-12T13:33:00.004-04:00

There are no less than 15 "Happy Easter" and "Hallelujah! Christ is risen!" greetings on my Facebook homepage today.

Today also marks the first time in my life I have not celebrated Easter in any way. For the last two years I have nominally celebrated it by going to church and having a big Easter meal with family or friends. And before that? Easter was one of my favorite holidays, ushering in spring, bringing with it a sense of renewal, life, resurrection (duh). Today? Nothing. Nada. I have not done a single thing to mark the occasion.

Granted, this is partly because I am sick with some bronchial crapitis that has had me laid out for almost a week. If I weren't sick, I suppose the question is: would I have done something?

A big part of me thinks yes. It's always been a great excuse to spend a day with people you love. I would probably have skipped churchiness but would have joined in to any big banquets I might have been invited to (ahem, not that I was...) or might have organized myself.

But maybe I wouldn't have skipped churchiness: recently I have been contemplating dropping in on a local Friends meeting. Friends of mine go there and have really enjoyed its non-preachy, non-doctrinal liberalism (apparently there are Jews, Buddhists, and atheists who attend and nobody's trying to push anything on anybody). I think I do miss some kind of spiritualism in my life. I don't want God back, in particular, but I would like to find a way to nurture and attend to the values that always felt valuable and important. In recent years I've become a lot more open to meditative practices, thanks in part to yoga, so I'm thinking that spending an hour in a Quaker meeting might be a way to feed that little part of me that still wants nurturing in some way.

Oh well - time will tell.

Neither Here Nor There, But...

2009-03-29T21:46:00.003-04:00

I encourage you to watch a documentary called Arusi Persian Wedding, airing these days on PBS's Independent Lens show. Check listings to see if it's playing again in your area. It follows the visit of an Iranian-American man and his American wife to Iran to meet/visit his family.

I know one of the writers/producers, and it reminds me of my own trips to Iran, now 9 and 10 years ago. (!) The scenes from Esfahan strike such a nostalgic chord with me - I've been to every place they have filmed there.

In a subtle way, my own visits to Iran played a role in my de-conversion, if only in the exposure to a people largely unfamiliar with Christian tenets. Subconsciously, it became harder to hew to a conservative theology after spending time with warm, hospitable people considered heathens (at best) and terrorists (at worst) by certain Christian groups.

Things that make you go hmmm.

2009-02-22T09:29:00.003-05:00

Through the wonders of Facebook, last night I found my 2004 ex-boyfriend's now-wife. He got married about two years after we broke up and they've since had a child. By all appearances (on FB and her linked blog) they seem very happy.

I was madly in love with this guy, and crushed when he broke up with me for no discernable reason. The failure of that relationship was a major triggering event in my de-conversion, because I spent months afterward praying for reconciliation, and 100% convinced (for a number of reasons) that God was leading me to pray for reconciliation. When it didn't happen, I couldn't help but question the entire prayer experience. Et voila, my de-conversion kicked into high gear.

So what would have happened had we not broken up? Would my faith have remained intact? If so, I sure wonder why God would just sit back, not answer my prayers, and watch my faith implode.

But maybe if we hadn't broken up, some other disappointing event would have led to my de-conversion. In that case, it was surely better for my ex (and for me) that we didn't wind up together; in fact, it was almost...providential that we broke up. Except, wait, I don't think I believe in that stuff anymore.

It's an odd thing to ponder.

Maybe I'm Wrong: Part Two

2009-01-14T19:17:00.002-05:00

I had two conversations over the holidays that made me really, really wistful for that good old time religion.

The first was with an old friend that I had lost track of about six years ago. About eight years ago we lived in the same city and were in the same large circle of people involved with a local church’s young adult group. At the time, we were both contemplating Catholicism. Like me, he had an evangelical type of upbringing but was finding the theology to be lacking in some ways. So we would sometimes trade notes and talk about various Catholic-Protestant topics.

When we caught up again last month, I learned that he had indeed converted to Catholicism. I asked him why, and he paused for a moment, looked off toward the ceiling thoughtfully, then said, “Beauty and truth. I could say more, but that’s pretty much it. Beauty and truth.” We proceeded to have a longer conversation about it, which left me ultimately envying the sense of certainty he had. Of safety, almost. He said he ultimately decided that he didn’t want to keep fighting Rome and while he wasn’t on board with everything, he had ultimately decided to put aside his pride and choose to trust the authority of the church. And he seemed confident, sure, and at peace.

The second conversation was with my high school friend who has remained quite evangelical and conservative over the years. Somehow, our friendship has survived my de-conversion even if we have had some difficult conversations along the way. This year over Christmas we spent an afternoon together, and in her typical way, she cut straight to the heart of things. We started talking about my breakup (which I am still really struggling to get past, to be quite honest about it) and wound our way around to what it was that really caused my crisis of faith. She then described her own crisis of faith, which happened a couple of years ago when her husband was plucked out of his National Guard unit and sent to Iraq. It was a scary time for them given the danger he was in, and she fought with God for a very long time about why he would allow this to happen. She grew up in a broken home and her entire life’s dream was to have an intact, loving family. She had it - happily married with two young kids - but then God seemed to take her husband away, possibly permanently.

She said at that moment of crisis, she faced a fork in the road: either God wasn’t at all who she had thought him to be, and perhaps he didn’t exist at all; or God wasn’t at all who she had thought him to be, and she needed to be open to a new, deeper understanding of who God is. She said as she faced down those two decision paths, she couldn’t fathom her life making sense without God in it. Her life would have no meaning whatsoever, and ultimately, she couldn’t face that life. So she decided that she just didn’t understand God’s purposes well enough and that this was a window to draw even closer to Him. [Conveniently, her story has a happy ending because her hubby is back safe and sound and is retired from the military now. I wonder what would have happened to her faith if he had been killed in action.]

My friend started asking me what meaning life holds for me now. And I couldn’t answer her. I had to be honest: it’s a huge loss in my life that I no longer have this narrative, this story, this Great Commission style purpose that directs and orders everything. I’m struggling to cobble something together that feels as coherent, as moving, as inspiring, as that once was to me.

Yet it’s not like I can simply back up the train and hop back on. If it makes me feel good, but isn't true, what's the point? I almost feel like a cursed person for asking so many questions and not being content with simple answers. It’s led me to this place that might well be impossible to recover any kind of faith from. At this point, I truly doubt the existence of any divine presence. And I’m not even sure it’s faith that I want back, so much as a sense of purpose in life – something bigger than myself that I can grab hold of with gusto – and a community within which to live out that purpose.

Maybe I'm Wrong!

2009-01-01T19:59:00.001-05:00

Recently, I’ve had flashes of “I wonder if I’m just wrong. Prideful. Just angry at God that my life hasn’t gone how I wanted it to.” Maybe all my blogging is just that of an exceptionally angry person who is rebelling against God in an elaborate and drawn out way.

Two things have triggered this kind of thinking.

One is the general sense of aimlessness I’ve had over the last year or two. Life used to make so much sense – my (divine) purpose in life was clear, and it was the touchstone by which I measured everything I said and did. Obviously there were some big down sides to that (it didn’t necessarily bear a close relationship to truth, and there was a lot of guilt/fear involved)… but there were some up-sides that I miss. Namely, I am a much more selfish person these days. Maybe some of that is simple backlash after not having paid much attention to my own needs and wants for so long. All the same, I don’t have the same sense of altruism (for lack of a better word) or “others-focus” that I once had. That feels like a huge loss and I’m not sure how to recapture it without also taking back on board the unhelpful theological baggage I’ve been trying to get rid of. I don’t have much of a concept of God at all anymore – not just a Christian god. ANY god. Or a benevolent, loving one, anyway. Yet how do you cultivate deep care for your fellow man without some overarching bigger “story” about what life is all about? Maybe I’d be better off trying to cobble some kind of faith back together. Or maybe I’ve been really wrong about all of this de-conversion stuff, and this is my conscience (or “the holy spirit” as some might say) telling me so? I don’t know. I just know I feel restless and not-yet-settled in my theological thoughts and views.

I’ll write about the second one in the coming days… I am still trying to sort it out and put it into words.

Forgive.

2008-10-28T23:56:00.001-04:00

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover the prisoner was YOU. (Lewis B. Smedes)

I think I am living the above. It may be why I feel so bleak about things – I am carrying around these heavy chains of pain and upset that keep dragging my thoughts and feelings backward, ruminating on the months-ago breakup – it hums as background noise when it's not occupying my conscious thoughts. I’m a prisoner to this relationship gone bad.

I need to forgive him… and it is damn hard to contemplate it when he isn’t remorseful, isn’t asking for forgiveness, isn’t sorry. But I also need to forgive myself, for making the decision to date him in the first place. There were red flags waving from the first day we met - I knew better than to get involved. But I did anyway – scorching hot chemistry – and, ultimately, got scorched. I pride myself on my ability to make good decisions. And I utterly failed to in this case. For nearly six months now, my head has been stuck looping around these parallel stories – of the pain he caused me, and of the pain I inflicted on myself.

So. I could use some inspiration, some wisdom, some quotes, some stories, some advice, about forgiveness. Anyone?

Happenings and Updates

2008-10-19T21:22:00.002-04:00

My sisters and I ran a half-marathon last weekend… which turned out to be both a bonding event and a fundraising one. (We raised almost $6000 for cancer research!)

To cheer us on, my parents came to town too. Now I am still seeing a counselor, something I started doing after the breakup, and in which I am untangling my family history and patterns. My dad came to one of my sessions in May.

And last week, my mom came.

It was a shocking, intense, upsetting, and relieving experience all at once. The highlights:

My mom unknowingly confirmed my counselor’s theory that she had leaned on me religiously and treated me differently than my older sisters, like a spiritual twin/sister/support instead of a daughter. Mom said I was her “prayer baby” and that she did come to rely on me in some ways instead of Dad… that I provided her with spiritual intimacy that is totally missing between the two of them. She said she always believed I was destined for something special, that because of my faith she knew God had forgiven her for marrying my dad (a non-christian). She said she had ‘given up’ on my sisters as far as their faith went (basically channeling all her energy and hopes on me) and that it was hard on her when I left for college.

So it’s no wonder I felt so much pressure not to go astray when I was growing up. None of these messages was explicit when I was a kid, but at some level I think I knew I was my mom’s ‘salvation’ and that to step outside the Christian lines would be to disappoint her tremendously, at an almost existential level. I think that’s why it has taken me until my late twenties and thirties to openly question my faith – I’ve been terrified of letting her down. For her part, I don't think she realized the burden she was placing on me. But she did. It's like I've been carrying my mom's cross for the last 30+ years.

At one point in the session I said that I couldn’t talk to her about religion anymore. That it was an impossible conversation because she wasn’t the least bit open to, or curious about, how I’ve gotten to where I am. I didn’t choose to lose my faith and I never imagined I would be on this side of the “us-them” faith divide, but now that I was I knew everything she was thinking, all the answers she was stockpiling, and all the explanations she would use to comfort herself as to what had happened to me. And none of them would fit or actually be true.

At that point she admitted that she was afraid to hear what happened or what I now believe, and that’s why she doesn’t ask. She also said that she thought I was too smart for my own good, and that I took after my dad in that respect. (To which I wanted to pull my hair out – the anti-intellectualism of evangelicalism makes me c r a z y. If God didn’t want me to think, he shouldn’t have created me with the capacity to do so. I can no more stop my brain from asking questions than I can instruct my heart to stop beating.)

BUT. I should add that she was tearful at various times, and she very much tried to assure me that she and Dad love me and she didn’t mean to hurt me along the way. For my part, I hate that the path my life has taken is upsetting to her, and that she worries for my eternal salvation. I hate to be the cause of that angst. But the toothpaste is out of the tube now and I can't go back. Nor should I, just to make her life more comfortable. In all events, I am not sure I want to have a longer sit-down conversation with her where I pour out all the reasons I came to doubt Christianity. I don’t actually want to cause a crisis of faith for her. She would probably wind up feeling she had to choose between me and (her evangelical) God and the stress of that might be too much to bear.

So I am not sure what will happen next between me and my mom. It was a terribly uncomfortable conversation and we have not had the guts to revisit any of it since. She has tried to reach out more (with phone calls and expressing being proud of me for the race), especially after I explained feeling invisible in my family--being the person who goes along and rarely asks for attention or for others to follow my agenda--and how I thought that was linked to my patterns in picking men who don’t seem to see me either.

But I'm really not sure what the next steps are on the path to healing some of my crummy family patterns. I suppose time will tell.

***
On a somewhat different note, I am still experiencing quite a lack of hope/optimism/idealism in life. I think the confluence of losing my faith moorings and then being betrayed by my ex-boyfriend has caused a certain cynicism to settle in. I wish I felt that rush of optimism that other de-converts describe – the loosening of bindings, of chains, of obligation, and a subsequent discovery of just how beautiful and meaningful life and people are without needing a religious back story to make it so.

Instead, I feel bleak. Not depressed… but bleak. My walls are up. Sky high these days. I used to trust others easily, almost blindly, always believing the best of them and believing that God could/would/did act to bring about Good. Now I mostly feel like people act crappy toward each other all the time, you can't predict who or when or how, nobody and nothing can change that reality, and there’s certainly no big sky daddy who’s going to bring about divine change or healing.

I’d prefer not to stay in this mental space. I don’t want to have these stupid walls or be so cynical about things, but I’m not sure how to deconstruct them and reclaim my optimism about life and people. Any ideas?

Sarah Palin.

2008-09-01T20:06:00.002-04:00

As a pretty-much-deconverted Christian, Sarah Palin holds absolutely no appeal to me as a candidate for elected office. I have long since moved away from traditional evangelical political views and registered as a Democrat for the first time about two years ago. I have a boatload of issues with her potentially stepping into the highest office in the United States (and arguably the most powerful position on this planet) should McCain croak. But that's not the point of my post.

On first glance, Sarah Palin seems to be a slam dunk for McCain and the GOP in terms of shoring up the religious right vote.

But I wonder about that, especially in light of today’s news of her 17-year old unwed daughter being preggers. Namely, Palin is a working mother of 5 children, one an infant with special needs and, now, another who is in crisis.

Don’t most religious righters favor “family values” aka “traditional gender roles” and therefore won’t they have some kind of problem with her taking on such a high-profile 24/7 job? In any other context that same woman would be, I suspect, highly criticized from the conservative ranks for putting personal ambition above family responsibilities. More than that, that same mother would probably be blamed for the daughter’s pregnancy, for not being enough of a “hands on” mom.

I suspect, however, that the religious right may put on the “our faith is about forgiveness” face and make a virtue out of even this aspect of Palin’s candidacy.

Discuss.

An unexpected legacy of my god-belief

2008-07-22T10:55:00.002-04:00

I think I internalized some fundamentally messed up ideas about love and relationships with men, thanks to my years of fundamentalist belief.

Here’s what I mean: my relationship with God over the years seems to have taught me that love is a relationship in which:

I show up consistently and give it my all;
I am faithful and devoted no matter what;
if anything seems ‘off’ or wrong, I scour myself for flaws, sins, and shortcomings (and assume it’s my fault);
I accept silence, absence, and/or general lack of tangible reciprocation from the object of my affections as normal;
I thus get supremely excited over any small crumb of attention I receive (and take it as evidence of deep love on their side);
I generally take an attitude of self-sacrifice and self-deprivation toward my beloved – I give, give, give and don’t worry about what I receive back.

During my devout years, if I didn’t “feel” God’s love, it was clearly my fault and I needed to do more to put myself back in God’s good graces. Or I just needed to accept that sometimes God is silent or is teaching me something. My job was to hang on, keep loving Him even if He wasn't showing love toward me in any recognizable or specific or direct way. My job was to believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that God really does love me. My job was to accept that a one-way relationship was okay. My job was to believe that there would ultimately be a huge payoff for hanging on when I wasn’t getting much out of it - I would be rewarded for my patience and longsuffering. My job was to interpret some vague or diffuse event or circumstance as clear evidence of God’s involvement in my life and deep care for me. And it was presumptuous and wrong of me to ask God for more. He operates on his timetable, not mine. I am puny and little; God is infinite and not obligated to do anything for me.

But don’t doubt for a second that God is love.

So guess what? My boyfriends have been just as aloof, inscrutable, silent, and untouchable as God seemed to be.

I’ve chosen distant men who are inconsistent in their affections, and I have poured my love and devotion into them, never really expecting reciprocation, and being (subconsciously) terrified that if I ask or demand anything more or better, I will be chastised, rejected, abandoned. It has been normal for me to feel a consistent longing and sense of loneliness in all of my romantic relationships.

And when things have gone to hell with these guys, I have inevitably blamed myself and scoured everything that happened in the relationship to figure out where I went wrong and thus caused things to fall apart. It is incredibly difficult for me to look at these guys and see that they were lacking something, that they were broken, hurting, inadequate, selfish, or whatever. Just like with God, I find it extremely difficult to critique them in any meaningful way - a residual sense of faithfulness, idealism, optimism, I guess. It’s even true with this ex, who hurt me more than anyone before him: he lied and cheated, yet I still feel as though I did something wrong to make him want to betray me.

I am doing a lot of work in counseling to understand these patterns, because I have have have to change them if I am ever going to form a healthy, mutually loving, relationship with a worthy partner.

But damn, those are some messed up ‘love lessons’ I took away, huh?

Yes, I'm still here.

2008-07-05T13:21:00.003-04:00

As you all know, I’ve been pretty quiet lately. This has been a hard time for me, particularly as I try to come to grips with the betrayal of having been cheated on. It’s made me question so many things, and at times I have wished for that old faith I used to have… somehow I feel like a cosmic hug or a divine promise that everything will be okay would help. Which is quite a reversal from the initial relief I felt at not trying to figure out why God had allowed (or caused) yet another heartbreak to occur.

But I feel so far removed from that old faith, that old belief in god, that I am left with “only” a very human-level coming-to-grips process to help me get through this.

Sure, I have plenty on that plane to help. In retrospect, I had been suppressing a lot of my own doubts in the relationship: namely, I had a persistent feeling of loneliness in being with someone who not only couldn’t relate to my faith struggles (my biochemist ex is an atheist and is fairly antagonistic toward religion) but made no efforts to understand or support me. I sent him the link to this blog but he never read it. I needed him for comfort when dealing with my mom and he couldn’t provide it. He saw no value or relevance in anything spiritual – the entirety of his life is in the material world, and to be honest, even though part of me is drawn to materialist/secular/scientific understandings of the world, there is simultaneously, for me, a bit of emptiness in a completely secular life. Or at least the version of it that my ex lived and represented. He saw no value or use in discussing morality and ethics – he thought it all to be “self-evident” and that people inherently know the right thing to do. He felt no drive or impetus to give back to the world, to use our tremendous material blessings to help others. He had no independent interest in connecting with others and be part of a real community. Perhaps this secular emptiness is most clearly evident in his decision to cheat on me, and subsequently cover it up and minimize it when I finally confronted him.

Perhaps the biggest struggle I'm having is with that sense of unfairness that he is waltzing forward with his shiny, happy, new relationship. It really, deeply hurts that he could throw me away so carelessly and prance away with no repercussions, no consequences, no pain and evidently, no regret. This is when I could really use a cosmic skydaddy to comfort me, to assure me that somehow, some way, justice will be done.

Edited to add: I know the above sounds like I am bloodthirsty or something. I don't think I'm that bad, but it really hurts to think about him "getting away" with such hurtful behavior. I do know that, in the grand scheme of things, others have suffered much greater injustices than me. But this still hurts.

Back to church?

2008-05-26T19:19:00.003-04:00

In the wake of my breakup I am doing some major (ahem) soul-searching. Not so much of the "who/where is God" variety as much as "whoa, I need to do some work on ME" variety.

As part of that work, I'm digging in to some childhood issues that I never knew I had but which have deeply affected the choices I make in men. It's a scary, hard process that feels a little hopeless right now, like I've just gotten a glimpse of myself as this incredibly broken person and who knows, really, if I can be fixed. I have started to get panicky that I am 34 and my mate-picker is all screwed up. So there's that. Yuck.

But another angle I am tackling is the hole, the gap, the existential loneliness that I have to admit I feel as I've let go of God. I miss community, I miss a sense of purpose, I miss connecting with people around questions of "how to be" in the world.

So I started wondering today if I might enjoy going to a Unitarian Universalist church. I'm not interested in dogma or theology. I'm not interested in the trappings of religion. I *am* interested in finding people who are trying to live meaningfully, whatever their concept of God is (and even if they have none, kinda like me right now). I'm a little afraid of finding a bunch of boring duds there. But I sort of think I have nothing to lose at this point. I just don't know where else to find that kind of community in real life.

Back to the books!

2008-05-12T14:21:00.002-04:00

I just ordered Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. I'm so excited to read it!

It's kind of weird that I haven't read any of the books one might have expected a de-convert to pick up (you know, the Dawkins etc stuff out there). I bought and started Karen Armstrong's The Bible but I only made it 75 or 100 pages before I got distracted by other stuff. To be sure, what I read was great and really blew away any remaining notion I might have had that there might be a 'right' interpretation of the scriptures. But mostly I've been wrasslin' this stuff out online.

So I'm excited to see what Ehrman has to say. Has anyone read Misquoting Jesus and/or have other titles to recommend?

Breakups and God

2008-05-04T12:27:00.002-04:00

This morning, my boyfriend of 1 1/2 years broke up with me. It's a long story, and not really worth hashing out on my de-conversion blog.

I'm devastated. No question. My head is swarming with the "what ifs" and "buts" and "this isn't really happening, is it?" questions. But you know what's NOT going on in my head right now? "God, where were you in all this? God, why is this incredible pain part of your plan for me? God, why are you so determined to see me fail in all my relationships?"*

And that, in itself, makes this so much easier to cope with.

*Folks, I realize these aren't theologically 'correct' questions to ask God so I would ask you to kindly refrain from trying to set me straight on that count. My point is that it feels incredibly freeing not to worry about what kind of eternal lesson I am supposed to learn from this, or to wonder what kind of all-loving God would continually put me through this kind of shit.

Geography and Faith

2008-04-30T23:18:00.004-04:00

I have been pondering a disturbing question in recent weeks.

Have I gone through this massive transformation from devout, conservative evangelical to, well, practically an atheist because my eyes are open, I'm willing to question things I was always scared to question, etc etc, or is it simply an expected outcome given my geography?

My Christian years --> spent entirely in the midwest (cradle of Christianity)

My doubting/skeptical/agnostic years --> spent almost entirely on the eastern seaboard, esp New England (bastion of liberalism)

Am I just really really suggestible to whatever influences are around me? If I lived somewhere else, would I eventually adopt whatever the dominant local spirituality/religion was?

Have I Arrived?

2008-04-28T10:25:00.002-04:00

I don't quite know what kind of turn I've taken recently, but now whenever I hear (or read, online) apologetic-type arguments from Christians, they just sound ridiculous. Sophomoric. Foolish even. And I get angry and part of me wants to peel the blinders away from their own eyes. Now, it could be that I am running into people that have a hard time articulating their thoughts, or people who aren't interested in rationally critiquing their own views, I don't know. What I do know is that I don't have a lot of respect for Christians who have never faced their own dark night of the soul and been forced to step outside their faith to try to figure out whether what they believe is really true. I don't feel like I have anything to learn from Christians who are nicely swaddled in their beliefs, and in turn I tend to tune them out pretty fast.

So does this mean I'm now officially a cynical agnostic? Or worse?

Zoroaster and the Devil

2008-04-04T11:11:00.005-04:00

Did you know that we have the Zoroastrians to thank for the good/evil polarity that most Christians now ascribe to God and Satan (i.e. God is only and all good, Satan is only and all evil)? Most of the Pentateuch was written between 900 and 540 BCE; Zoroas ter lived around 600 BCE and was influential in shaping Christian theology in later centuries.

So here's the thing about the Pentateuch: as this website puts it, "There are no passages within the older parts of the Hebrew Scriptures where Satan is portrayed as an evil devil - the arch enemy of God and of humanity. At most, he is described as a henchman who carries out God's evil instructions. There is no dualism here between two powerful supernatural entities: an all-good God and an all-evil Satan. God is portrayed as performing, directly and indirectly, both kind and evil deeds." (See especially Isaiah 45:6-7 and Lamentations 3:37-38.)

Then Zoroaster came along, with remarkable similarities to Jesus' story. From the same website: "Like Jesus, he was recorded as having been tempted by Satan; he performed many miracles and healings and was considered a supernatural being by his followers. He introduced a major spiritual reform and created what is generally regarded as the first established monotheistic religion in the world."

Zoroaster promulgated the idea that God was all good and had a twin brother who was the "God of Evil." It seems that the polarity of God and Satan developed within the Hebrew/Christian religion only after Zoroaster's time, and has today become a cornerstone of the Christian story.

I find this historical arc of what is a major tenet of modern Christianity totally fascinating. And it really discredits, for me, the idea that the Bible contains "eternal truths" and shows us the "unchanging nature" of God. Think of how modern Christians bend over backwards to justify and otherwise explain how God ordering genocide in the OT is fundamentally a "good" act. Those who wrote the Hebrew scriptures apparently didn't believe the nature of God to be fundamentally or wholly good, and they were okay with it.

So why are modern Christians trying to "rewrite" who God is? How is their version of who God is any closer to the truth when you consider that it seems to be borrowed from another religion altogether? If it's not a "rewriting" of God's character and is instead a revelation or development in our understanding of God, the obvious question to me is: why would God 'reveal' himself to one group of people as author of both good and evil, but 'reveal' himself to another group as only good?

I used to be a huge believer in a literal Satan and for a time was into book series like Left Behind. C.S. Lewis's Screwtape Letters scared the bejeezus out of me. But when I experienced some mental illness (depression), it just didn't ring true to believe that it was because of sin or because Satan was trying to distract me from God. My depression had its roots in chemical and emotional problems that, once treated, disappeared.

It seems that when Christians try to pin stuff on Satan, medical science or technology or even basic knowledge later exposes the 'thing' to not be supernatural at all. A (conservative) Christian then has to argue either that "well, Satan might have manipulated your emotions or your chemical makeup to produce the depression" or "okay, maybe Satan wasn't involved in that, but he still totally tempts or even possesses people in these other kinds of situations..." Neither of which sounds convincing to me today. If Christians weren't already invested in a specific theology of Satan and felt compelled to defend it despite evidence to the contrary, would it really hold up under their own scrutiny?

More broadly, can Christianity stand on its own two feet without Satan as a major theological construct? What happens to the Christian story without an evil archenemy?

Why a blood sacrifice?

2008-03-25T16:52:00.000-04:00

Seriously. This is one question no Christian, no pastor, and no church has ever been able to satisfactorily answer for me – and it was a question on my mind even during my most devout years. Why is God so bloodthirsty?

More and more it just seems like a reflection of dominant cultural norms at the time of the writing of the Bible. Think about it: if the Bible were penned today, would anyone write a sin/salvation story that required a blood sacrifice?

Maybe this is really all about... my mom.

2008-03-16T12:21:00.003-04:00

Mom, this morning: "You need to know that when you come home or come on the family vacation, you two are not sleeping together."

*****

My mom has been in town visiting my sister and me for the last week or so. Last night, my boyfriend and I invited her to join a dinner party we were hosting with three other couples. The plan was for her to stay overnight because it was too long a drive back to my sister's.

It occurred to me only after I extended the dinner invitation that I had a decision to make: would I sleep in my boyfriend's bedroom (as I always do), or on the couch so as not to upset my mother, who would be sleeping in the guest room? My mom, as you might know from other blog entries on here, is a conservative evangelical, i.e. very very very against premarital sex.

Well, for better or worse I decided to go with honesty as the best policy even though it would be uncomfortable for both of us. My logic was that I shouldn't pretend to live by a moral code or set of rules that I don't actually live by, and that it was more egregious to deceive my mother than to upset her with the truth.

I knew after the guests left and the three of us were left that she was upset with the arrangements. She kept trying to wash the dishes, which we were planning to leave til the morning. "C'mon Mom, we'll do them in the morning. You were a guest tonight - go to sleep!" To which she responded "How am I supposed to sleep?"

Cue the daughter really and truly falling off the good-Christian-pedestal.

This morning she left early to meet my sister for church (the "good" sister who takes all the kids to church and has basically had a nice revival of faith after her own wayward period which included sleeping with boyfriends). In the awkward quietness of her drinking cranberry juice at the dining table still covered in dishes from last night's party, Mom looked me in the eye and said: "You need to know that when you come home or come on the family vacation, you two are not sleeping together."

She went on to say how disrespectful of her values it was for me to sleep with my boyfriend (in his house where she was a guest), even though she has known, tacitly, that we have been sleeping together for months.

I didn't quite know what to say except that I was sorry for being such a disappointment and that of course we would respect her rules when in her house. "I didn't want to deceive you," I said. "When you're a parent, you'll understand," she replied. "I still love you," she said on the way out the door.

I couldn't help but start crying when she left because it feels so incredibly shitty to let down your mom. And to still feel like a child when I am 34 years old. And to feel like all she sees and thinks about now is how morally corrupt I am because I am having sex with my 36-year old boyfriend. Never mind all the other things I am; the only brush that matters now is the one that paints me as a slut in her eyes.

A June Wedding

2008-03-13T13:46:00.003-04:00

A good friend of mine is getting married in June. They are getting married in the church that I attended for several years (some of them happily as I “worked out my faith”, others of them miserable and struggling as my faith started to crumble).

I’m anxious about being in that church the day of her wedding. Especially if my (atheist) boyfriend is with me. Because as much as I love my boyfriend, I still struggle with the loss of my faith community and roots.

For many of my adult years, I saw myself getting married in that church, with a clerical blessing and community pledge to support my God-centered marriage. I won’t quite know what to do with the sadness, nostalgia, and worry that I think I’m going to experience once I walk through those doors. To wit: am I making a mistake planning a future with a man who is not spiritually wired and who can’t really relate to my faith background except in an intellectual way? Is my anticipated anxiety really a call from the Holy Spirit to turn back to God (as some will surely argue)?

And what about my envy of my friend? If God had only answered my prayers for a mate sooner, more obviously, more directly, maybe my faith would not have unraveled as it did. My friend’s romance is one of those miraculous-sounding stories where the 30-something “old maid” Christian woman waits on God. For years God appears to be doing nothing. And then one day He delivers, like a lightning bolt, her husband-to-be.

But me? God didn’t answer my prayers. And when I reflected on why he hadn’t answered my prayers, the foundations started to crack. I’ve documented much of that falling apart here on this blog. It has been an excruciating process in which I lost the safety and security of a faith-based world view, I lost the moorings on which my morals and values rested, I lost the “faith-kinship” closeness that had previously marked many of my friendships.

Sometimes I wish I could put the pieces back together. But I don’t think I can. Now that I fundamentally question the whole salvation storyline, there’s no way to simply reverse the clock and settle myself back into a pew comfortably. But I feel like a part of me is missing, or empty, or nostalgic, or scared, or something. I don’t know exactly what it is or what to do with it. Agnosticism or even atheism rings more true to me intellectually, but emotionally, something in me still wants there to be a God.

I know I will go to the wedding, and be joyful for my friend, who has wanted nothing more than to be married for as long as I’ve known her. But the whole thing begs the question: why has God been so seemingly present to her, and so glaringly absent to me?

Songs 4 Worship

2008-01-03T21:04:00.000-05:00

Weird! I'm watching Forrest Gump on cable and a commercial came on for a 3-CD set of the "greatest worship songs of all time." It was so surreal - I could sing along to 90% of the titles, and I very nearly picked up the phone to order my own copy for $9.95.

I don't know what to make of that urge.

I'm Back!

2008-01-03T15:34:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year! I have been quiet for some time now, thanks to a busy travel schedule and, honestly, not a lot of thought put toward my faith crisis.

But I’m back, with a few musings and questions. Would love others’ input (assuming anyone still comes around to check things out here). :)

First, I think I have really underestimated my Christian friends. My recent entries dealt with my fear of "coming out" to various people who have previously known me as a dedicated Christian. So far they have all responded much better than I expected. The most recent conversation occurred just after Christmas, with one of my oldest high school friends. She is still a very fervent, conservative Christian and last year at Christmas we had a really rough conversation in which we argued about politics and homosexuality. This time around, I dreaded filling her in on my lack-of-faith and my atheist boyfriend who I’m crazy about.

But we got to talking, and she is one of my oldest friends so I wound up not really being able to hold it all in. I was pretty gut-level honest with where I’m at, and to my surprise she took it really well. No judgment, no criticism, some bewilderment and questions, but overall she took it in stride. My guess is that her current theology helped with that – she’s a “once-saved-always-saved” adherent so she doesn’t fear me going to hell. She just fears me missing out on a life of fellowship with Christ.

So maybe I am learning to stop fearing the reactions of these folks. Our friendships seem to be stronger than the faith ties that bind (or once bound) us. Maybe it’s my mom’s disappointment and judgment I most fear, and am projecting that onto all the other Christians in my life. So there's that.

Second, I have been reflecting a lot on the kind of person I have become since throwing off most of the shackles of my faith. There have been some really good things – like no longer feeling the pressure, guilt, and obligation of putting on the good Christian “show” when it no longer resonates. I am a much more relaxed person today with much less of a need to judge others for their own belief systems or world views.

But there is also a weird darker side: the fervent idealism that drove much of my personal and professional life as a Christian has also subsided. And with it, some of my sense of obligation to serve and sacrifice for others has gone away. I am a more selfish person today: I am not guilt-ridden when I buy an iPod or new clothes. I don’t tithe 10% of my income. I live a fairly comfortable life. True, I try to do some volunteer work and I do contribute to a few causes I believe in. But that gut-level desire to really sacrifice for my fellow man has dissipated. Maybe I’ve become cynical: I no longer believe God is going to swoop down and save Darfur. It is up to us, but beyond signing a petition here and there I am powerless to stop shit like that. So I have lost the thirst, the fire, to make major sacrifices when I know that those sacrifices aren’t going to turn the tide.

That shift in perspective feels like a real loss. I’d like to recapture the fire somehow… but how?

Wish Me Luck: I May Be Coming Out Today

2007-11-16T08:46:00.000-05:00

Today is the dreaded lunch date with my college discipler "Janet", whom I blogged about a few weeks ago. I am no closer to knowing what, or how much, I will tell her about my de-conversion. I will probably avoid the topic until it becomes unavoidable, and then say as little as possible. In that sense, I relate very much to Notabarbie's entry last month on Fear or Self-Preservation.

Speaking of Coming Out, last week I got two emails from college friends that I haven't been in touch with for years and years. They saw my Facebook profile in which I self-identify as "agnostic" and, naturally, out of Christian concern for my spiritual well-being, they got in touch. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, given that I have now publicly announced my lack of faith, but it was a bit weird to hear from people that I am not the least bit close to anymore.

To their credit, they weren't jerks about it. The first friend simply noted that she had seen it, and offered to chat if I ever felt like it (but no pressure to). She asked if it was related to me having dated a gay man (!). The second friend started blaming himself for my downfall, recalling a mailing list email exchange years ago in which some conservative Christian on the list made some obnoxious statements to which I responded, to which he responded criticizing me and defending his original obnoxious views. The friend who emailed me blamed himself for not stepping into the email exchange to confront the obnoxious guy, thereby letting me believe that Christians all believe the obnoxious tripe and driving me away from the faith. Kind of a sweet thought, actually, but it was truly laughable to me that he would think my faith could be dismantled by one unsavory email exchange.

Still, so far the Christians who have been my friends at some point over the years have been more gracious than I expected. As I mentioned in a comment on a previous blog entry, I went to a wedding last weekend with a lot of old Christian friends - and to their credit, none of them treated me differently or badly or tried to reconvert me or even tried to discuss faith with me. Then again, it was a wedding and not exactly the time or place for such conversation. I may not be so lucky next week when I see some of those same friends in a non-wedding setting.

I guess the only truly upsetting reaction I've gotten to my agnosticism--apart from my mom--is one I heard about second-hand: an acquaintance of mine (Jen) was chatting recently with a mutual friend. Somehow they got on the subject of me and the mutual friend, who is Jewish, asked Jen what her Christian faith makes of people like me, who were once devout but now question their faith. Apparently without blinking an eye, Jen said that I was being deceived by Satan. (This shocked the mutual friend, by the way.)

Jen's words hit me really, really hard. Had she seen the countless nights that I prayed, crying, for God to show me the truth, to reveal himself, to help me understand the things I don't understand, would she be so certain that it was of Satan? If she saw the number of books on my shelf; the hours upon hours I spent reading them, trying to find answers; the number of people I consulted and discussed these issues with, would she be so certain that it was of Satan?

It was doubly insulting when I thought about how disempowering the "Satan" card is. Do I not own my own thoughts? I came to God with as open a heart and mind that I could, and I still didn't get any satisfaction or answers. In fact, my questions only multiplied. When and how did Satan get involved in this?

But I guess Jen has been praying for me a lot, which I suppose is good. I mean, I'm pretty sure it won't do any harm. But I've come to believe it won't do much good either, as I've long since stopped believing in the efficacy of prayer.

Anyway: back to the lunch date. It's in 3 hours. Wish me luck.

There’s Something Fishy About Truth Seeking

2007-11-15T15:22:00.000-05:00

I’m trying to work out a funny irony – maybe you all can help.

A number of Christians I have known seem to think that asking questions about the faith is okay: if God is Truth, and the questions stem from a genuine desire to know the Truth, then God will lead the questioner to Himself. Seek and ye shall find, knock and the door shall be opened unto you, etc.

Yet if one’s questions lead them away from the faith, the story seems to change. In that case, the same Christians seem to think that the questioner hasn’t found the Truth; they’ve been blinded by Satan or their own sin.

So…it seems that it’s only really okay to ask questions if they lead the questioner back to the original answers and back into the fold.

That doesn't make any sense to me. But what's weirder is that it made total sense to me when I was a devout believer.

Happy November

2007-11-03T19:59:00.000-04:00

Hello readers:

My post volume is down lately thanks to my travel schedule. And, to be honest, I have settled into quite a comfortable church-slash-religion-free life these days. I was consumed with theological questions earlier in the summer; for whatever reason, I don't feel the same urgency to figure out the answers rightthisveryminute.

That being said, I just picked up a title by Karen Armstrong - The Bible. I started reading it on my flight home last night, but quickly encountered one of the pitfalls of visibly contemplating spiritual matters: the guy in the seat next to me tried to start a conversation, inspired by the book. "Is that the Bible?" he asked. No, it's a book about the bible, I replied. "Are you a Christian?" Oh jeez. ? Apart from being an introvert and antisocial on flights, I'm exhausted from a long work week. So, what to say to this total stranger that won't spark up a conversation? He is either a Christian who wants to discuss faith and/or evangelize me; or he is the first flesh-and-blood non-Christian "seeker" to ever voluntarily try to get evangelized by me.

Here's what I came up with: More or less. I said it nicely, but it effectively shut down the budding conversation.

I'm off for more overseas travel so will be quiet again for a bit - but I am going to a wedding on November 10 that might provide some new fodder: it's one of my Christian friends who is getting married, and many of our mutual (still-Christian) friends will likely be there. That will be a fun one both for me and for my scientist-atheist boyfriend. He asked if he could introduce himself as an islamo-fascist, just to keep things interesting.

I am fucking pissed off.

2007-10-23T10:36:00.000-04:00

I got robbed yesterday.

Again.

The second time in less than a year.

Most likely both times by neighborhood junkies looking for electronic gadgets to convert to cash to feed their heroin habits.

First time, he (they?) ransacked my place - it was a complete mess - but all he took was a digital camera and a jar of change. The detective traced a trail of change to a known junkie's house a block away... but this apparently wasn't enough evidence to really go after him.

This time, the asshole(s) took two laptops - I had just bought a Mac to replace my 4-year old Dell. Both were gone, as was my iPod.

I slept like shit last night, with lights on and too much adrenaline in my system to get any sleep.

I started praying, the first time anything remotely like a prayer has passed my lips in months. But I was praying revenge prayers. "Dear God, let those asshats die horrible premature deaths." No, no, that's a bit extreme. It's just stuff they took. "Dear God, let those asshats break a leg in a compound fracture that is excruciatingly painful and which inhibits their criminal activities." Better.

After all, it's not like the police in my city are going to do much about it.

But that's a rant for another day.

This is the YouTube video...

2007-10-22T14:28:00.001-04:00

[Can anyone help me figure out how to embed it into the post below?]

For the first time, I can sympathize!

2007-10-22T14:24:00.001-04:00

I am not ready to self-identify as an atheist, not by a long shot. Still, I have a strange, and new sympathetic perspective toward stuff like this YouTube video.

I also "get" this rant, even though one little part of it really rankled me. I'll let you guess which part...

Me? Avoidant?

2007-10-19T13:19:00.001-04:00

Among my abundant flaws is my at-times intense need for privacy. During my teenage years, if mom or dad asked how my day went, I would get all indignant at their egregious attempt to invade my privacy. This is not normal behavior, I realize. I've gotten better.

But still. I crave privacy. I like working out all of my theological demons anonymously online. I like exploring and challenging ideas and putting some of my internal "stuff" out there for examination...by strangers. By people I can't disappoint or upset.

To get to the point: my college discipler/mentor in Campus Crusade was a woman named "Janet". She and I have stayed in touch since then; for awhile I supported her when she went abroad as a missionary for CCC. In recent years I have mostly stopped supporting her financially (as I am just no longer a fan of CCC theology) but we still exchange Christmas cards and I saw her a year or two ago in Asia during one of my business trips. I believe on that trip I told her some of my struggles with faith, my waning prayer life, lack of enthusiasm for God. Okay, fine she more or less handled that okay, but I am certain she has been concerned and praying for me ever since.

It turns out she is in my city for the next month or two while she raises support, and she has been trying to contact me to get together. So far I have been ignoring her. I'm not proud, but I don't want to see her! I'm afraid conversation is going to turn spiritual, and I just don't feel like explaining/defending/discussing where I am spiritually these days. She is no longer a confidante of mine, and I don't feel like opening myself up at that level.

I know I am being rude by not returning her emails and IM pings... but our entire relationship has been predicated on this spiritual/Christian connection that is just not there for me anymore. What kind of friendship can it possibly turn into when I have turned away from the thing that is at the core, the center of her life? What on earth will we talk about? We used to have these deep conversations about our faith. I don't have those kinds of conversations anymore, nor do I want to.

So what should I do?

On the “stain of original sin”

2007-10-10T14:45:00.000-04:00

For many years I never really questioned the conservative Christian story of how sin was introduced into the world: the disobedience of Eve and Adam creating the oh-so-permanent-and-inescapable stain of original sin on all of humankind to follow. Somehow it made sense, or enough sense that I didn’t really think twice about it.

Today I think the Genesis story just doesn’t hang together.

When conservative Christians are asked how they explain the devastation of natural disasters, a common response is that it’s because of sin. What do you mean? Like, someone brought the wrath of God on themselves in the form of a forest fire set alight by a bolt of lightning because they sinned against Him? "No," a lot of them would respond. Most don’t want to go the punishment route anymore – it’s too hard to justify Katrina or the Asian tsunami with such an argument. Instead, they might say something like: "Not only are all humans born with the stain of original sin, all of creation itself is sinful, which explains random natural phenomena that hurt or kill people. God didn’t create devastating natural disasters - it’s not God’s fault." In other words, it still goes back to Adam and Eve and their decision to disobey God.

Hmm. So by what mechanism and what logic did Adam and Eve’s disobedience “infect” nature itself? I suppose one might argue that it was the serpent’s behavior that God cursed, and that somehow that animal’s curse extended throughout the animal (and plant?) kingdom. But that leaves a bloody big black box for how the serpent’s behavior could possibly have affected (or infected) cloud formations or weather patterns, which according to the Christian explanation above, would have had to be “perfect” before the Fall.

I thus have big questions about what mechanisms got set in motion to infect all of creation following the disobedience of eating the forbidden fruit. It couldn't have been some kind of genetic transmission from human to...weather patterns; arguably God had to actively make some or all of his non-human creation imperfect and sinful after the Fall. And if that's the case, then how benign is God, really, in this creation story?

But the other big question I have revolves around the fairness of that stain of original sin getting passed down to every human being. It’s the classic question: "What makes it fair to make someone pay for the sins of their ancestors?" How do I have anything to do with Adam and Eve’s choices? And therefore why, according to conservative Christian theology, am I consigned to hell for their actions before I’ve even taken my first sweet breath of air outside the womb?

I haven’t really heard a convincing argument for why this is just, right, fair, okay, legitimate, or righteous. “Life just isn’t fair, that’s just the way it is” (or “the Bible says it, I believe it”) really doesn’t cut it for me on this matter.

Take a single, African-American mother stuck in the inner city, who can’t find good employment, education, or housing: is it fair that she’s stuck where she is? Hell no. And, it is probably true that she is the victim of a long legacy of abuses, neglect, racism, sexism, and economic discrimination against those African-Americans who came before her. In a way, she is living with the legacy and consequences of the sins committed against her fore bearers.

At first glance, this might seem like an analogy for original sin. Except for this: we as limited human beings can't snap our fingers and instantaneously change the circumstances this inner city woman lives with.

But God can. Or could if he wanted to. Similarly, God could have chosen to create a system in which Adam and Eve’s offspring got to start with a clean slate, not burdened by the spiritual ramifications of their parents. And if they 'messed up' and sinned against God, then they could deal with the consequences.

I guess my point is that the stain of original sin is not the only obvious and inevitable consequence of the Fall. God didn't have to make "original sin" an automatic transmission from one generation of humans to the next. Kind of like with Satan: Lucifer was an angel who rebelled against God. The other angels weren't thrown out of heaven or otherwise condemned - they weren't punished for Lucifer's sin. So why are we punished for Adam and Eve's sin?

And really, on a practical level, I’d like to meet the Christian who would feel PERFECTLY OKAY paying up in the following scenario: Imagine you are a white American. You are approached by the federal government, which has finally decided that white Americans should make reparations for the awful legacy of slavery in the U.S. The Feds tell you that your great-great-great-great-great grandparent owned slaves. And they have calculated that you, as the direct descendant of that slave-owner, owe the direct descendants of the slaves $50,000.

If this scenario makes conservative Christians uncomfortable, or inspires a defensive “that’s not fair!” or some other argument against ponying up, I would hope they would stop to consider why, then, they feel so comfortable with a theology that automatically makes all humans dirty, stained, and responsible for the choices of two people who lived thousands of years ago.

The Sex Entry

2007-10-01T15:33:00.000-04:00

This is the kind of post that I get nervous about putting out there. But here goes.

I’ve been thinking about sex. And thinking, more specifically, about what I was taught and what I internalized, for decades, about sex. And what I think about it today.

Here were some of the formative teachings and moments in my upbringing re sex: my mom handing me audio tapes to listen to on my own, as her way of teaching me about the birds & bees; Elisabeth Elliot’s book Passion & Purity, in which she talks about it feeling sinful to let her fiancé run his fingers through her hair or hold her hand; the whole I Kissed Dating Goodbye movement; my youth groups and college fellowships talking about “leaving room for the Holy Spirit” and the “36-inch rule” (referring to how much space there should be between you and your date at all times), deciding on your physical “limits” long before you ever get into a relationship; the sanctity and spirituality of the act of sex, reflecting the union between Christ and the Church and therefore reserved for marriage; masturbation as a very definitely wrong and sinful thing to do, etc. I could go on.

Basically I grew up with a fear of physicality, and no matter what anybody said about all sins being equal in the eyes of God, having premarital sex was obviously the worst sin anybody could commit.

For a long time, though, that was okay. I wasn’t a very active dater in high school or college, and I had a pretty calm and quiet libido. I pretty much assumed that anybody who had premarital sex just couldn’t control themselves – it was a character flaw or failure.

When I had my first real boyfriend, at 26, I still wasn’t terribly tempted to have sex with him, though my libido was starting to wake up. In that case, two things really kept our sexual appetites at bay: we were dating long-distance so rarely saw each other; and, well, he was gay. At the time I just thought he was being a good Catholic.

Fast forward a few years. I’m 30 and suddenly I am thinking about sex a lot. My next serious boyfriend and I have a much harder time keeping our clothes on, but both wanting to be good Christians, we draw at least a few lines that we don’t cross.

But now I’m in my thirties and all the purity/abstinence messages I’ve heard since junior high aren’t very satisfying anymore. Good Lord, in biblical times was anybody expected to live as a chaste person for a decade or more after they’ve physically matured? People were married off at 14 or something back then… does that stuff still apply today, when people are putting off marriage longer and longer, and when church demographics are skewing toward women so much that it’s noticeably harder than ever to find a husband?

I started to think that the church really doesn’t know how to handle singles who haven’t married off by age 25. So how do they handle it? They call singleness a “gift”. And by “they” I mean married people. If a single person says it, they are probably trying to convince themselves as much as anyone else. ("Singleness is a gift" is complete horse shit to nearly every single Christian I have ever known.) They have talks reminding us of the great gift our virginity will be to our spouse. (Really? I am not sure I care that much… the gift I would want is for my spouse to be disease-free, not necessarily sex-free.) They call on the Apostle Paul, who eschewed marriage as a distraction from serving the Lord, as a model for us singles. (Nice…the same Apostle Paul who says women should obey their husbands and not speak in church.) They talk of Jesus being our spouse. (Yuck!) They claim Song of Solomon is a spiritual ode to God’s love for us. (Really? It reads like down and dirty medieval porn.) They say that God is getting us ready to meet our spouse – cleaning our internal house, so to speak. (Whatever. I have a lot of friends whose lives were messes when they met their spouses.)

Then I look around the room at the other adult leaders and friends I have at church, and count off the number of them that I know have had, or are having, sex with their boyfriends and girlfriends. And none of them is being rained upon with fire and brimstone. They haven’t become degenerates. Their lives haven’t gone to hell.

And I start thinking that this whole adult abstinence bit is really a crock of shit. The last straw comes when a close friend gives me Lauren Winner’s book Real Sex: The Naked Truth about Chastity as encouragement for me to continue being abstinent, and then four months later has sex with her new boyfriend. Given all the mounting theological doubts I am entertaining by this time, I decide right then and there that holding out on sex to please a God I’m no longer sure exists is an act of legalistic futility.

This is a big moment for me.

But to be clear, chucking out my lifelong ban on sex doesn’t mean that I started cruising the streets for someone to have sex with. It was more that I decided I would let the pace of my next relationship proceed unhindered by my previous boundaries and limits: I would let sex become part of the fabric of our relationship if it made sense.

For awhile I was terrified that I would be wracked with guilt over committing a sin that I can’t undo: I feared that the stain and stigma of having sex outside of marriage would trail behind me forever, like toilet paper stuck on my shoe.

But as I’ve loosened my hold on the legalistic, judgmental, guilt-ridden faith of my upbringing, I have actually found that I experience none of the guilt, terror, or self-recrimination that I thought I would. Though I don’t discuss it with my Christian friends, sex is a really easy and natural part of my current relationship (hi sweetie, if you're reading this).

I look back on all the fear-based teachings about sex that I learned growing up with mixed feelings. I think for me, it was good to put off sex for so long: I was definitely ready for it emotionally as well as physically when it happened. But to instill in people such a deep fear of physically connecting with another person seems off, wrongheaded, unhealthy.

Discuss.

A silence borne of censorship?

2007-09-08T12:16:00.000-04:00

So I have been in China for the last week (Shanghai) and suffered a surprising amount of withdrawal when I discovered that I couldn't access any of my bookmarked blogs on my favorite topic these days, deconversion.

Which surprises me, frankly, since I would think that an atheist/communist China would enjoy having its people read stories of previously faithful adherents leaving the Christian fold. But perhaps the censorship software, or people, or whoever restricts access to websites in China (I wonder if this is a job people aspire to?), just blocks sites that mention Christianity. Who knows.

Anyway, I haven't had a lot of time lately for contemplating my feckless faith so all I've got for you are a few loose, semi-random thoughts.

Thought 1: China has, what, over 1 billion people, the vast majority of whom do not lose sleep and tears over Jesus. Even with missionaries going there undercover and stuff (I know a couple, used to support them even), I doubt they'll make much of a dent. That's a lot of people for Jesus/God/HS to let go to hell.

Thought 2: For being such a 'godless' place as some Christians I know might put it, what I've seen of China doesn't feel or look godless. You know, people are still people -- some are good, some are bad. It doesn't seem related to knowing Jesus as much as some Christians would like to think.

Thought 3: I went rock climbing in New Hampshire just before I left for China - my boyfriend decided I was ready for one of these "classic" routes on Cathedral Ledge that I...uh...let's just say...struggled on. I fell a lot - big long swinging falls in which I would have smashed into the rock face if my feet hadn't been out in front of me. I banged up my knees, cut up my hands, and cried during the last pitch because I was so f***ing tired. But I made it ("sent" the route in climbing parlance)... and am now so proud of myself and so glad I took the risk. This sounds dumb, but it kind of encourages me to keep questioning all of this stuff, because even though it's hard and it hurts and I can't entirely see where it's going, I think this is probably all still worth it.

Thought 4: The whole climbing analogy thing helped me feel better when I got a friend request on Facebook from an old roommate and when I scrolled through all of her friends - all fresh-faced, happy shiny good married-off Christians from the adult group I used to go to - I got really depressed. (How come their faith is still intact? How much happier/easier/better are their lives because they still have Jesus? How come Jesus doesn't seem to have let them down the way he's let me down? etc.)

And a closing news item/update: I am now in South Africa and my boyfriend is flying over tomorrow to join me for a week in Cape Town (I am sooooooo excited!!). As a result, I'll be offline for a week or so starting Monday.

I’m Okay, You’re Okay

2007-08-29T08:53:00.000-04:00

Are you an absolutist or a relativist?

My freshman year of college, I heard Ravi Zacharias speak one night. While I don’t remember his talking points with much precision, I do remember that he railed against relativism, ‘proving’ that there are absolute truths by pointing out that a relativist’s premise that “there is no truth” is an absolute statement in itself.

I thought that was very clever, and I also adopted that worry that our society was moving toward relativism as the dominant worldview or ethic, and that God, faith, Christianity itself was quite directly threatened by this perspective. So for many years I concerned myself with knowing Truth (capital “T”!) and with evangelizing others to believe that same Truth.

Today, I would say I am functionally a relativist, but mostly because once I really started examining my faith, I had trouble discerning what the Truth is. My theological wrestling to try to uncover Truth as between various strands of Protestantism and Catholicism led me to more questions, not less – yet most of those same denominations clamored loudly that they have the corner on Truth – they are right! Their interpretations are correct, they understand the context properly!

But how was I supposed to know who was right, and therefore who to join up with?

It eventually dawned on me that all of us humans bring our filters and biases to the task of discerning Truth. And that spiritual-realm Truth is always mediated, and therefore interpreted, by finite and fallible humans. So even if Truth is out there, what are the chances that we humans have figured it out, and how would we determine which humans really had got it right?

Eventually, I threw up my hands at the impossibility of ever truly knowing Truth, at least as it relates to God, to matters beyond the physical realm. And that’s when my whole faith foundation started crumbling away.

Today, I would say that I am still open to there being an absolute Truth, and I would say that in matters of morals or ethics, I still hold to fairly firm lines as to what behaviors are okay and not okay. But I have come to a place of granting others much more space and leeway to believe as they wish because I certainly can't claim to know the Truth in spiritual matters.

Polonious's adage "To thine own self be true", which leaders in my college fellowship used to skewer with criticism, has become a meaningful touchstone. And I am absolutely okay with that.

Mother Teresa’s Dark Night of the Soul

2007-08-24T15:06:00.000-04:00

Wow: this article is astonishing – apparently Mother Teresa spent most of her life in a deep spiritual depression, in which she felt no presence of God and came to doubt his very existence, even while she persevered in this calling she had to serve the poor in India. Consider this prayer of hers, for instance:

So many unanswered questions live within me afraid to uncover them — because of the blasphemy — If there be God — please forgive me — When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven — there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives & hurt my very soul. — I am told God loves me — and yet the reality of darkness & coldness & emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?— addressed to Jesus, at the suggestion of a confessor, undated

If you haven’t already read the article, please do so. I’d be interested in others’ views of it – there are no shortage of opinions in the article on what her perseverance through the darkness meant! I am still digesting it...

Ahhhh, this is what it’s about…

2007-08-22T23:55:00.000-04:00

Tonight I had dinner with old friends from Iran. I worked on US-Iran relations for a few years and during that time, traveled to Iran twice. While there, I made several Persian friends that I stayed in touch with after my trips ended. One of those friends emailed me out of the blue last week to say he was in town with his family on vacation, and was I available for dinner?

So tonight I had dinner with the whole family – him, his wife, and their two daughters, 22 and 25 year old. He and his wife live in Tehran; their two daughters are in school in the U.S., both studying to be scientists.

It was a really wonderful reunion with an engaging, fun, warm, loving family…that, in years past would have been tainted by my quiet worries that, as secular Iranians, they definitely didn’t know Christ.

In years past, I would have felt a bit of reserve toward them, toward others like them – that inevitable sense that we’re different, that one of us knows Truth and the other, however nice or smart or kind they may be, just doesn’t. And I would have wondered, “should I be trying to evangelize them?” “And what does it say about me if I don’t want to bust open my Bible or share the Four Spiritual Laws?”

So tonight, free from the burden of worrying about their eternal souls, I simply enjoyed a great evening with people I care about. This was the kind of evening that makes me feel good about leaving the fold.

I’m nostalgic about the kids I don’t even have yet.

2007-08-20T12:47:00.000-04:00

To raise kids with instruction/teaching/exposure to the idea of God, or not? That is the question on my mind today.

In my Christian heydays, it was always vexing to me and to most Christians I knew to think about “mixed marriage” couples – you know where one person was a Christian and the other was, well, you name it: the wrong kind of Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or (worst of all) atheist.

Apart from the “it’s sinful to be unequally yoked” protest, the second objection to mixed marriages that I heard most often was concern for the existing or future kids: it would be terribly confusing to hear conflicting messages about who God is or to be raised with mixed religious traditions or worse, no tradition at all. In my Christian world, kids needed to be raised with consistent and firm teachings of who God is.

Now on the other side of the coin, some people are very vociferously against teaching kids anything about religion. Was it Dawkins who said that raising kids with religion is worse than physically abusing them? (Whoa. Strong words and for the record, I vehemently disagree.)

Right. Back on point: I am slowly developing a bit of paranoia around how I will raise any kids I may have in the future. Right now I couldn’t in good conscience teach them exactly what I learned as a kid. But what would I teach them instead? Right now, I have no idea.

And I have this nostalgia for the bedtime prayers I used to offer up at night. I got such a sense of comfort and trust through that nightly ritual that it’s something that still appeals to me even though my rational side thinks God completely sucks at answering prayers (i.e. doesn’t answer prayers). Yeah, so there’s a bit of a contradiction still working itself out.

Maybe I teach my kids to offer up gratitude to…to…the universe? To a possible God who might be out there? That I teach them that prayer is a way for them to figure out solutions to some of their own problems? (As in “Protect me from the bully at school, God” becomes a way for a kid to brainstorm how to deal with it, not a reason to sit back and wait for God to do something?)

And what's the story I tell my kids about why something is right or wrong? "Well kids, through billions of years of evolution, we learned that we do better in survival terms if we cooperate instead of compete. Now be nice and share your toy with Billy." Eh. That leaves me a little cold.

Here’s the other piece that worries me: my mom will undoubtedly view any godless or “watered-down god” childrearing I may do as seriously harming my kids’ ability to know and love and serve Jesus. And I imagine she will find ways to expose my kids to her evangelical brand of the faith, with or without my knowledge. The last thing I want to do is get into a row with my mom over this stuff, but I can definitely envision a bad scene in which I get mad that she tries to usurp my decisions not to expose them to certain kinds of teachings.

I realize this is really cart-before-the-horse kind of stuff to be worrying about, seeing as how I have no plans to procreate in the near future. I could imagine becoming a parent in the next 3-8 years, but that's a ways away. I guess it's just that I’m a planner, and like to strategize well ahead of time.

So: is there anyone out there with kids who has struggled through similar issues of (a) what to teach kids and (b) how to handle family members who want to teach them something else?

A Random Monday Post

2007-08-20T11:30:00.000-04:00

I don’t pray anymore. I don’t read my Bible. I write posts that question, criticize, and doubt God and Jesus. I’ve been pissed at God, at Christians, at the Religious Right. I experienced a noticeable lift in my mood and health when I stopped going to church. Sometimes I forget it’s Sunday because it doesn’t even occur to me anymore that I skipped church. I don’t feel guilty anymore and that feels awesome.

But I am not entirely comfortable declaring that God doesn’t exist or that I am ready to leave the church, religion, and/or spirituality behind altogether. Even though I know that atheists and agnostics can lead perfectly fulfilling, meaningful lives without concepts of divinity, eternity or even a soul to underpin those meaningful lives….I’m not sure I want to try to understand my life without spirituality as some kind of touchstone.

But then I think – well, what does my desire to maintain some spirituality have to do with the truth of whether a spiritual realm exists? It seems like it’s all boiling down to my feelings, my past experience, and my comfort zone…none of which necessarily has any bearing on Truth. And what is Truth, again? Oh jeez, I don’t know anymore!

When I get all tangled up in my thoughts like that, I try to remember this quote from the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke: “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”

Then I take a deep breath, and try to articulate one thing, just one thing, that I want to be true of my life: that I treat everyone with the human dignity they deserve, even if I disagree with or dislike them.

God, that’s noble. Kind of spiritual, too.

I was feeling really good about it, patting myself on the back, really, especially after I spent the morning Saturday working on an organic farm, where they give away 100% of the produce to needy individuals and families. It was a beautiful day; I harvested beans and planted fennel and pulled weeds, and was feeling very “one” with the earth and my fellow man. And I met a really interesting woman my age that I hit it off with.

But later, my brother-in-law criticized the whole effort: “Here’s the problem. That’s not a very efficient way to feed the hungry. Why does it make sense to expend all that energy feeding people the way that wealthy yuppies eat? Seems like it’s more a way for rich lawyers and consultants who volunteer there to feel good about themselves...much more so than to actually make a dent in hunger issues.”

$%@#$!!

Nice. Thanks for throwing for cold water on my warm fuzzy “we are one” community service moment. I didn’t feel like treating him with human dignity in that moment, that’s for sure. I felt like saying: “Who the **** are you to talk? Are you forgetting that you’re a yuppie lawyer living on 6 acres in the most expensive community in the state?” But that wouldn't really convey respect for his human dignity, which I just got done saying I wanted to extend even to those I disagree with. So I bit my tongue.

But then, on the way home, I got stuck behind someone driving 20 mph on a 35 mph street near my house. And I'm sorry, but these effing slow drivers – this is Boston for Christ’s sake! Learn how to drive!

In that moment, I forgot my noble raison d’etre (human dignity for all!) altogether and laid on my horn. Damn.

I wish I had something more profound for you today, but that's all I got: it seems that I don't need a Christian worldview to still feel guilty for not living up to my aspirations for myself!

A Morality Tale

2007-08-15T11:38:00.000-04:00

For most of my life, my sense of morality, of “right living”, of “how and why to be a good person” has been embedded in, explained by, and supported through my Christian faith. It always seemed important to understand and explain the foundations of this moral sensibility: we model our lives after Jesus, and we do it out of love for, and in response to, God’s love for us. I think I took for granted that there was a (seemingly) coherent story about where my morals came from and on what basis I can/should lead my daily life.

Okay. So now I am in this agnostic place, unsure of God’s existence in the first place, and definitely questioning the theologies, the foundations, I have based my life on for decades. And it feels really unsettling to no longer feel like I can rely on the Christian story as the underpinnings of my morality.

But then I think, do I really need a coherent back story (a la Christianity) to help me choose between right and wrong? My boyfriend said the other day that he thinks true morality is something you don’t need to discuss: we inherently know what’s right and wrong to do in any given circumstance, and we learn it through life experience.

And another atheist friend once said that he chooses to do good not to gain some heavenly reward, and not to avoid punishment in hell, but simply because it’s the right thing to do. I thought that was pretty powerful: choosing to do good as its own reward, not to please God and not out of fear of God’s wrath.

But the main point is this: neither of them feels a need to have an elaborate back story of why something is right and wrong; they both seem to think that we simply know and can make moral choices without a specific or articulated philosophy/theology.

I’m not sure what I think about this – is it just my introspective, reflective personality that craves a story I can latch on to and be inspired by? Is it dangerous not to have one? Does it matter?

I think I am still trying to get my head around these morality questions, so if any of you can help me clarify what I’m even trying to sort out, I’m all ears...

I ruined my mom’s vacation, and maybe life.

2007-08-09T15:26:00.000-04:00

Or that how it feels, anyway. I accidentally “came out” to her as an agnostic during our family vacation last week. On the first day of our vacation, no less.

For months I have more or less managed to avoid getting into any kind of direct, explicit conversation with my mom about my growing doubts. As you may have gathered from other posts of mine, she is a conservative evangelical Christian. She was raised in a First Evangelical Free church in Iowa, and she raised us in the same church in our hometown. So Mom has a very well developed, and fairly black-and-white world view based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

I love my mom very much. She is a role model in lots of ways, and the last thing I want to do is hurt or disappoint her. Which is why I have been trying to shield her from much of what I’m going through. This is not to say she’s been completely in the dark, though: she knew I wasn’t going to church regularly and that I have been dating non-Christians in the last couple of years. And I know she has been concerned about me.

But other than that, whenever spiritual topics have come up between us, I have for the most part deflected, given an ambiguous reply, or changed the subject. Not entirely honest, I suppose, but I imagine that others of you who have gone through a de-conversion process understand it – it’s really, really hard to tell people in your faith community that you’re having serious doubts and/or you no longer believe it all. Now magnify that anxiety by 100 times when it’s your family members.

It accidentally tumbled out. Mom and I were on the way to meet the family for lunch. I’m not even sure now how the conversation started: Mom was saying something about her concerns about me and my choices in life. I guess I just lost my cool. I said that I just don’t believe things the same way I used to, which led to Mom asking incredulously “so you’re saying you’re not a Christian anymore?” Followed shortly afterward with “I don’t want to talk about it anymore” as she started crying.

It was awful. And it was weird, too, because this unbidden prayer suddenly popped in my mind: “God, please help her feel better.” Force of habit maybe, or a continuing hope that God is somehow still out there, and hears our prayers? (Even though my own prayer experience is much more consistent with the idea that God doesn't really answer prayer…)

I still feel awful about the whole thing. I really don’t want my mom to spend time worrying about my soul and my eternal destiny.

But it has also spurred a lot of doubts about what I am going through: Mom said I’m just rebelling against God right now. What if she’s right? What if I am just reaping exactly what Christians say you’ll reap if you stop going to church? Stop hanging out in Christian community, stop reading your Bible, and gee, don’t be surprised if your heart hardens and you turn away from God. ...and then don't be surprised when God turns away from you. (And say hello to hell, which is what you deserve, you horrible apostate!)

My emotions and history in the faith community get so jumbled into all of this… when I write about the various things I’m questioning, I think “Yeah! This thing has never made sense to me, and the big picture doesn’t really hang together.” But then I get into conversations like this with my mom or other Christian friends and suddenly I get scared, I get nostalgic, I get wistful, I feel confused, I get defensive...

I guess all of this is to say that I’m still very much in the middle of the process, and still unsure where it’s going to lead. It also helps explain why I chickened out of inviting my sister to contribute to my blog: I'm not ready to come out to the rest of my family.

What’s the point of “faith in things unseen”?

2007-08-06T11:02:00.000-04:00

What is the purpose of God requiring his followers to trust in One they can’t directly see, touch, feel, smell, or talk to?

This has become a real head scratcher for me. I know of no intimate human relationships in which one person deliberately makes himself or herself scarce, doesn’t return calls, goes away for long periods of time, and sends ambiguous or mixed messages via courier - as a way of deepening their partner’s faith and trust in them. The chief effects of such behaviors – which amount to neglect, when you come right down to it – are usually a loss of trust, love, affection, and ultimately the breakup of the relationship itself. Yet somehow in a relationship with God, the very same behaviors on God’s part are expected to (and sometimes do!) increase the adherent’s faith.

But how and why is faith such a big operative in God’s economy to begin with? Does it have something to do with our free will and ability to choose God on our own volition? In other words, if we all regularly encountered God in a burning bush, might we be so overwhelmed by the Almighty that we could do nothing other than choose him? And because God values our free will that much, he does not want to skew our ability to choose by visibly revealing himself to us? I don’t know…that seems pretty shaky given that Satan got to hang out with God in heaven yet he was still able to deploy his free will to rebel against God.

I also wonder about the fact that in Old Testament times God did seem to reveal himself to man on occasion… but after Jesus any truly personal, tangible, earthly, direct encounters with the Divine pretty much disappeared. How come? Has faith in things unseen become more valuable, more important to God somehow in New Testament Christianity? If so, why?

Which circles back to the question I started with: what is the point of having "faith in things unseen"?

A Note to Readers...

2007-07-20T17:49:00.000-04:00

Thanks so much to everyone who has been reading and contributing to my blog. I really, really appreciate it.

My post frequency has slowed down in the last week or two because I am traveling for work. That trend is going to continue for a little bit, as I am going to South Africa next week, and then on a family vacation the week after. I will try to keep up with the comments and encourage you all to keep writing and debating and considering these questions.

While I'm away, I am thinking about inviting my sister to write a "guest" entry or two. Stay tuned!

Personality and Faith

2007-07-18T20:53:00.000-04:00

Are you a: Golden Retriever, Otter, Beaver, or Lion? How about: Negotiator, Explorer, Architect, or Builder? Are you an: INTP, ISTP, INTF, ISTF, INFP, INTP, INTF, INFP, ENTP, ESTP, ENTF, ESTF, ENFP, ENTP, ENTF, or ENFP? What does your Enneagram look like?

Okay, you get the point. Or in case you don't, it's this: we have developed all kinds of systems to categorize our personality types. And I seem to keep running across new ones all the time (the most recent one I've learned about? The FIRO-B personality assessment tool). People devote entire careers to developing this stuff.

I am fascinated by personality tests, myself. Often because I never quite fall straight into one box. Or I fall into one box one year, then I take the test again a year later and I come out as something else. Which I suppose is a good indicator that we can never quite capture and put in a box beings as complex as us humans. (Plus, I love defying categorization!)

But here's the thing: no matter which system of categorization you look at, each personality type has strengths and weaknesses, is well suited for some things, and less well suited for others. So I started wondering recently if there are specific personality types that are drawn to, and thrive in, religious/faith systems. And if there are, by extension, other personality types that are repelled by the same.

For instance, I am someone who generally doesn't like authority or otherwise being bossed around. Given that, I'm a little surprised that I spent so many years not questioning the church authority that taught me things like "girls can't be pastors." (I guess I'm making up for all of that compliance now!) And I am dating someone whose personality is very logic-driven; he rejects that which cannot be explained logically or for which there is not hard evidence. Sorta like Special Agent Fox Mulder on The X Files.

Yet there are also personality types out there that really appreciate hierarchy and authority; that respond to and thrive within clearly delineated power structures; that are more driven by feelings than by logic; that are willing to believe in the supernatural or who regularly report having had experiences with the supernatural. Like Special Agent Dana Scully, perhaps.

Now: if the Christian argument is that God created each of us uniquely (and by implication imbued us with our basic personality characteristics), why would he have created some portion of the population with personalities that are hard wired to have a hard time believing in Him? That, thanks to genetics, tend to reject things that cannot be directly observed or tested?

I suppose this is another take on the question of why God would create beings that he knows will reject him and therefore go to hell. But instead of rehashing that conversation (at least for the time being), let me pose this question: which, if any, personality types do you think are more drawn toward belief in God, and which ones are repelled by it? Is there anything in your basic personality that draws you toward, or repels you away from God?

How Guilty Should We Feel…And What Should We Do About It?

2007-07-11T13:19:00.000-04:00

I came across a fascinating piece called "On Guilt and Social Responsibility" the other day by a guy named PoserorProphet. He argues that guilt is something Christians ought to feel, yet some (many?) Christians think they shouldn’t feel. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:

“So, do I believe that others should feel guilty for living lives that are, in general, apathetic, self-absorbed, and damaging to others? Sure I do. I really do wonder about this aversion to guilt that we have -- it is as though we believe that "accepting Jesus into our hearts" absolves us from all responsibility. But that is not the case. I am well aware of the fact that I am God's beloved, indeed, I have vividly experienced that love, but I am also aware of how complicit I am in corrupt social structures and lifestyles, just as I am aware of the responsibility I have towards my neighbour. Indeed, it is precisely the awareness of ourselves as God's beloved that empowers us to confront, and admit, how guilty we are. That so few Christians seem able to confront or admit their guilt, especially as it relates to social issues, suggests to me that very few Christians actually have been transformed by encounters with God's love.”

Oh, I have felt this guilt. I wrote about it here. It was a horrifying, overwhelming burden that I ultimately realized I couldn’t bear. It led to a debilitating depression in which I literally lost an ability to function day-to-day for a year. It also fueled my ever-increasing pleas and questions to God as to why he doesn’t do more -- because it seemed that no matter what effort I put forth to ease someone else’s suffering, it wouldn’t ultimately make a difference. It would be a drop in the bucket.

Some years later, I have enough distance from the circumstances I witnessed in India (and elsewhere) that I don’t carry this burden, this guilt, in quite the same visceral, close-to-the-surface way. Yet I still feel responsible; I know that I am part of the structures of violence that wind up oppressing others. I remain very aware of how privileged I am; and I do very much feel a call to social responsibility and social justice. But, short of a call to literally live in solidarity with the poor and oppressed (which I don’t have and feel (yep, you guessed it) guilty about), what does it look like in daily life to do something about that call? Is it some set of “think globally, act locally” actions? Is it being kind to the people I encounter? Is it signing political petitions to save Darfur? Is it biking instead of driving my car? Is it serving a meal at a homeless shelter once a month? Joining the ONE campaign? Is it doing pro bono public sector work every now and then?

I do such things now. I want to do more and think I should do more. But I struggle very much with the question of how much is enough? I fear I can never do enough, ever. In that sense, then, I do feel constantly guilty; yet this guilt tends to drive me back toward legalism, obligation, and self-recrimination...not at all toward grace and love.

I wanted to be able to rest in the bosom of God and know that he would take care of all the crap that I couldn’t. But if God isn’t taking care of all the crap that I/we can’t, where does that actually leave us? In short: how guilty should we feel… and what should we do about it?

To The De-Converted Out There: How Has It Affected Your SO's?

2007-07-08T21:44:00.001-04:00

For years and years and years, I believed that marrying a nonbeliever was sinful - “do not be unequally yoked” and all that. So for years and years and years, my first dating requirement was that the guy be a believer.

Today, I would probably be classified as the kind of lukewarm/backslidden/cultural Christian (or heretic!) that a good Christian man would be cautioned to avoid. This is actually fine with me, because I would certainly not be happy married to a conservative or orthodox Christian. I wouldn’t enjoy dating such a man, either.

So I have started wondering what a person’s faith struggles do to their relationships, and the kinds of qualities they want or need in a mate. To that end, I have a couple of specific questions for the skeptics and de-converted out there:

1. If you are married to a Christian and you are now skeptical/agnostic/atheist: how has it affected your marriage? What does your mate think?

2. If you are single and skeptical/agnostic/atheist, how has it affected what you look for in a mate? Do you need someone who can relate to your Christian past? Do you want someone sympathetic, at all, to Christianity?

Other observations or experiences are, of course, welcome.

Relief, Jealousy, Wistfulness

2007-07-08T20:57:00.000-04:00

I spent more time with Christians this weekend than I have in months. And it stirred a lot of feelings that I am still processing.

Saturday night, I went to a housewarming party where the bulk of the guests were friends of the hosts through church or Christian NGOs. Such friendly, nice couples…most with that fresh-scrubbed, yuppie look about them.

As the evening wore on, one guy started to set off a few of my alarm bells. He and his wife live in an ‘intentional community’ with eight other people. (Which I actually admire.)

Still, he was just a little “off”… almost like he wasn’t tracking the conversation: he somehow found ways to relate everything the group talked about back to faith and religion. He was a milder version of the "Praise Jesus" Dave I wrote about a few weeks ago: someone for whom the touchstone at every moment in time is Jesus or God regardless of what everybody else is thinking or talking about.

One woman there was clearly not religious… at one point, this guy took it upon himself to ask what her “religious heritage” was. I could almost feel him gearing up for an evangelistic moment, though thankfully he didn’t take it any further (I admit, I could have been projecting). Later, there was an awkward silence when he excitedly described how the Hebrew letters of YAHWEH, when printed backwards and vertically, resemble a human figure. (And the relevance of this is... ?) He also injected a few “religion and politics jokes” which went over like a lead balloon – to the point that I started feeling bad for him. Mostly, though, I felt a cascade of relief at no longer being around such earnest, self-serious evangelists.

So that was last night.

Today, I went to a goodbye BBQ for a couple who started the Christian non-profit I had once been involved with. I hadn’t seen them for almost a year, and I hadn’t seen many of the other leaders in the group for months. I was a little anxious about how I would answer the inevitable “What's new with you?” question, for two reasons. One, I didn’t really want to discuss my growing doubts about my faith at someone else’s party – the day was not about me. Two, I didn’t really want to discuss my growing doubts with people who are positively on fire for God – it would invite too much scrutiny, questions, pity, and/or prayers.

So when the question did come, I answered generically and deflected conversation back to the asker ASAP. “I’m doing well…work is good…I’ve been doing a lot of rock climbing lately. Oh, yep, bought a car last month. And how are you?” I felt bad being something less than totally open – after all, I had been very open with these folks a year or two ago when the organization was just getting started. But I just couldn’t go there.

Yet, at a deeper level, I knew I was giving a really flat answer. The people at the BBQ had that infectious love that my faith had once given me but I no longer have, as well as that deliciously certain sense of mission and purpose in the world…something else I no longer have. I felt a weird pressure to prove that I'm doing just as well as anybody there - that I need to justify my choices, questions, and decisions to move away from faith. That felt crummy.

I also started to feel jealous – how come these guys still have their faith and optimism that God is acting in the world? What is God doing for them that he didn’t for me? What daily evidence are they seeing that God exists, that he cares, that he’s as invested in his relationship with them as they are with him?

My thoughts then turned in another direction: I don't want to go back into that milieu, exactly. Among other things, my beliefs are so broken right now, I’m not sure it would be possible.

But I started to wonder what other communities in this world so unite people in purpose and love to serve others the way churches do? That is the seduction of the faith that still remains with me. There is something about the bond that forms between Christians who join a service project or who plant a new church. It goes beyond the activity they have in common: it’s an immediate unity – maybe an assumed unity – of thinking, belief, vocabulary, practices, world view. It's comforting, provides a sense of belonging, and imbues the activity in question with a sense of purpose that I know can exist among agnostics and atheists, but haven't yet experienced myself.

So while I don't miss God, I do miss that. And don't quite know what to do about it.

Free at Last, Free at Last!

2007-07-06T16:46:00.000-04:00

One of the most life-affirming, uplifting, joy-returning, burden-lifting things I have done in the last two years is stopping going to church. I also quit my Bible study and stepped down from a fledgling leadership position I had in a faith-based nonprofit, but the most impactful decision, by far, was no longer scheduling worship into my Sundays.

I was positively guilt-wracked the first few Sundays I deliberately slept in, even though I had been attending church out of nothing more than obligation and habit for months. I hated the evening rock band service at my congregational church, but neither did I get much out of the traditional morning service with the long-winded preacher exegeting Hosea five weeks in a row. I hated my friend’s Vineyard church, and Catholic Mass was hollow to me as well since I couldn’t partake of the Eucharist and wasn’t a total fan of their theology anyway. I was definitely a spiritual orphan, and it manifested very concretely in my extreme discomfort and sense of banality at virtually every church I attended.

Still, I felt guilty about no longer going to church. So one week early after I stopped going to church, I tuned in to the public radio broadcast of a local church service (bleah); another week I watched Joel Osteen (he has really white teeth!); yet another week, I tried to read my Bible some, but that felt flat too.

When I realized I wasn’t getting much out of these church surrogates, it hit me that I mainly felt guilty for letting down friends and family who saw me as a “Good” Christian. I realized, like a bolt of lightning one day that I didn’t actually miss God.

And I started to notice that heavy, heavy layers of obligation, legalism, expectation, and duty had settled around my shoulders. Quite physically, too: I carry stress in my shoulders and my back was positively a thicket of knots.

I came to realize that everything about my faith had devolved into being about me cultivating the right beliefs and actions; it never seemed okay to wonder “well when is God going to bend down and carry part of this? What happened to the light burden and easy yoke of Jesus?” The answer always seemed to be: do more in order to get closer to God and hear his still, small voice (which is there, you just have to somehow be in the right frame of mind to hear it). Read your Bible more. Join another Bible study – better, lead a Bible study. Do more service projects. Pray more. Confess your sins. Go to church every Sunday even if you don’t feel like it – faith isn’t about feelings, you know. Do the right thing and the feelings will follow. Jesus will meet you where you are.

I did all the right things, earnestly, sincerely, genuinely, for years. And you know what? The feelings did not follow. God did not stoop down to meet me, to lift me up, to answer my questions. Jesus did not meet me. The two-way “personal relationship” we are to cultivate with Jesus was oh-so-one-way: I was doing all the work. I didn’t hear from Jesus, cosmic hug or otherwise. It was indeed a “one-way mirror”, described so eloquently here on Memoirs of an Ex-Christian’s blog.

Well-meaning Christians make things worse by asking questions like “are you keeping up your end of the relationship?” (Oh. My. God. Are you kidding me? What else am I supposed to do here?) When you are sincerely trying to find God, this line of questioning tends to fuel ever-deepening spirals of self-recrimination, as well as increasingly frantic efforts to “do” the right things so that God will finally respond. It is in this kind of environment that grace loses all meaning.

So I walked away from church, hanging onto the thinnest hope that God’s grace would somehow be bigger than whatever sins I was committing by leaving the fold.

And I have not been so happy or burden-free in years.

I have not become an amoral hedonist; I have become someone unburdened by guilt and obligation. The knots in my back have receded. I am healthier physically and emotionally. I have become someone who is no longer afraid to ask the big questions – the really really big questions – and I am becoming less afraid of the answers.

I do not plan to go back to church on any kind of regular basis. I went on Easter Sunday and realized that I still didn’t miss it. When friends or family invite me to come to church with them, I inevitably shudder. I have come to associate church – any church, any denomination – with the legalism that had me trapped so desperately for so long. I refuse to put myself back into that environment. I have come to believe that whoever God is (if God is), he does not intend for us to live fear-based, guilt-ridden lives of perfunctory service.

I am finally learning to extend grace to myself. Now I simply hope that God does too.

The Reality Of Hell

2007-07-06T13:16:00.001-04:00

This is a great illustration of what I don't believe anymore.

That said, I can totally see this at a Campus Crusade spring break rally in Daytona Beach... being shown at the evening service to psych up college kids to go evangelize using the Four Spiritual Laws...

Let's Talk About Justice

2007-07-05T22:40:00.000-04:00

Over on the Stupid Church People blog, I got into quite the discussion over God’s reprehensible behavior in the Old Testament. At one point I said:

"God himself ordered genocide in the Old Testament (Deut 20:16-20; Joshua 6; Joshua 10:40-41), including the murder of women and children; and yet most thinking Christians today condemn genocide. How do you (general you, not specific you) make sense of this?"

Here is one response this prompted:

The Bible is clear, all have sinned and have fallen short of the glory (perfection) of God. The word "all" is pretty clear and inclusive. This idea is reinforced by the scripture that says "there is no one who is righteous, no not one." If you are one of those people, and I'm not saying you are, that thinks you're a good person, run yourself through the 10 Commandments. And answer the next question for yourself, have you kept all 10 always, without fail? If you haven't, you have a sin problem. The Bible says "for the wages of sin is death". To me that means if you sin, you have earned death from God. Why do we freak out when God pays us what we're due, like He did the people in the account in Deuteronomy? Why do we think it's massively unfair?

This is not an unfamiliar response – it’s not like I’ve never heard Romans 3:23 and 6:23 before. And I’m used to hearing that we humans are infested with sin, depraved, and separated from God (here’s a shout out to all you Calvinists out there!). But it begs the fundamental premise that most conservative Christians don’t question: why have we earned death (i.e. eternal punishment) through our inability to lead perfect, spotless lives?

Now when I ask this question, people seem to think I want some kind of blank slate, or want God to turn a blind eye to all the nasty stuff we do, individually and collectively. That is not what I am saying. I am a big proponent of personal accountability.

But I am a big proponent of appropriate personal accountability; in other words, making reparation or payment commensurate with the wrongs I committed. I am not a fan of punishments exceeding the crime. And I am certainly not alone in this. Consider:

1. Our US criminal system operates with the same underlying assumption of appropriateness: to determine what the punishment ought to be, we distinguish between type and severity of crime (misdemeanor or felony), the motivation behind the crime (1st degree vs. 3rd degree murder) and the person’s fitness to face the consequences (“not guilty by reason of insanity”);

2. The 8th Amendment of the US Constitution reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”

3. Outside the US, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 5), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 7), and the UN Convention Against Torture (preamble) all affirm and stipulate that no one “be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”.

Our modern human sense of justice is all about appropriateness and assuming a modicum of human dignity no matter how severe the wrong that has been committed. We recoil when we hear Abu Ghraib horror stories. We react to the commutation of Scooter Libby’s sentence based on our sense of appropriateness (for some, a prison sentence was excessive; for others, eliminating the prison sentence was letting him off too easy). We strive for fairness in our legal and civil affairs wherever possible, even if we don’t achieve it perfectly or agree on what a fair sentence might be. (Think about it: no serious person thinks Scooter Libby deserves the death penalty for his crimes.)

So I just can’t see how God’s divine justice is served by annihilating, obliterating, and otherwise eternally punishing us for having screwed up here on earth. Why does God see fit to punish humans infinitely, for finite crimes on earth? Does that not fall under every definition of cruel and unusual punishment?

Typical response: “Well, God’s justice is different from ours.” But wait. God is omnipotent, no? So he could overlook sin if he wanted to. "No, he is perfectly just. That would go against his nature." But he's also perfectly merciful and perfectly loving, and fiery eternal hell doesn't fit with that. "Yes, he is those things. But you see, we have chosen hell through our disobedience." But how is it a choice when the way is so narrow that some of us might miss it altogether? "Jesus invites us all to the throne of God. It is our own fault if we don't accept the invitation." What exactly is the invitation? (See this post at de-Conversion.com for a great discussion of how confusing the Good News can be.) What if we don't get it just right?

*sigh*

Okay, let me try a different angle: Jesus commands us in Matthew 18:21-22 to forgive our brothers when they sin against us “seventy times seven” times. So how can God demand one kind of justice (forgiveness) from us, but exempt himself from the same command? He doesn’t put conditions on our forgiving others: “only forgive them if they are appropriately contrite.” “Only forgive them if they say the right words or profess the right belief.”

But somehow, somehow that escapes every possible working part of my brain, it is okay for God to withhold forgiveness, and punish us eternally.

Look, I could get on board with hell as a temporary purification, as a way of burning off our sins and sin nature, so we can then join God in paradise. In fact the rest of the Matthew 18 passage (verses 23-35) seem to support this notion of appropriate responsibility: at the end of the parable of the king and the servants, the servant who does not forgive the debt of his fellow servant is punished “until he should pay back all he owed” (verse 34). (emphasis added)

In fact, one of the most appealing aspects of Catholic theology, when I was exploring it, was the way they approached sin: they have the whole venial and mortal sin distinction, penance, and purgatory to help deal with this question of satisfying God’s sense of justice…well…justly.

But conservative, Biblical literalists don’t go there. It’s outside their paradigm to think that God’s justice might well be satisfied by something less than eternal fiery hell for those who don’t profess the name of Jesus as Lord.

Quite simply, that is a piece of theology I can no longer live with. If God exists, I will continue to hope that God forgives all of us seventy times seven times, regardless of our confessed creed, regardless of whether we believe exactly the right thing about Jesus, regardless of whether our "personal relationship" with Jesus is up to snuff. Beyond that, I will continue to hope that God holds us accountable in the afterlife for our deeds only to an appropriate degree.

Summing up, then: to hell with hell.

Malleable Memories and the Gospel

2007-07-03T13:55:00.000-04:00

I was listening to NPR Sunday afternoon. They were doing an utterly fascinating piece on memory, and how we construct and tell the stories of our lives. I am completely bummed out that I can’t find a summary of the program anywhere on the NPR website, so I will recall what I can.

The gist of the story was that the more we re-tell a memory, the less accurate it tends to become, and the more removed it becomes from the actual event. Take a couple who shares a first kiss. Except for the first time one of them describes it, that person’s subsequent re-tellings of the first kiss are built, neurologically speaking, on the previous memory of the kiss, not the event itself! What this means is that if any details from the actual event are embellished, left out, or otherwise altered in the memory, they become imprinted and part of the event itself.

Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist at UC-Irvine and UW who has done a lot of writing on memory and its “malleability”. She is particularly interested in applications to the legal system; a 2003 article she wrote in Nature begins as follows:

"The malleability of memory is becoming increasingly clear. Many influences can cause memories to change or even be created anew, including our imaginations and the leading questions or different recollections of others. The knowledge that we cannot rely on our memories, however compelling they might be, leads to questions about the validity of criminal convictions that are based largely on the testimony of victims or witnesses. Our scientific understanding of memory should be used to help the legal system to navigate this minefield."

Among other things, she has run experiments showing how easy it is to manipulate peoples’ memories, including implanting false memories of events that never took place. Subjects recounting those events, however, were firmly convinced that they had. Fascinating stuff, and much more that I plan to read up on.

Here’s what it got me thinking: I have heard the gospel stories about Jesus be defended as being historically accurate in several ways, including: because they were written by eye witnesses to the events; because they were written within the lifetimes of people who would be able to refute their truth (40-70 years after the fact) [thanks Heather for the correction]; because the written records of the events of Jesus’ life were merely formalizing what was a strong oral tradition at the time.

I don’t know much about oral tradition, though I have heard that it was a very serious discipline of exactly passing on a story, verbatim, from one person to another. (Does anyone know more about this?)

Loftus’s research seems to suggest that it is possible that, over the course of probably countless verbal re-tellings of the events of Jesus’ life, the “memories” could have changed and morphed, either by altering details of the story or even adding events that literally never happened.

Loftus is apparently quite a controversial figure – not everyone agrees with or likes her research. But hers is a pretty interesting research thread that could have implications for how much stock Christians put in the “eye witness account” defense of the gospels.

De-Conversion: Done Online, Done Anonymously

2007-07-02T23:30:00.000-04:00

The church, broadly speaking, has lots of practice and ideas for how to bring the unchurched or seekers to the Lord, among them: Alpha classes, seeker services, Bible studies, tracts, traditional evangelism, apologetics books.

These approaches, by and large, focus on sharing the basics of the faith – who God is, who Jesus is, what the Bible says, what we must do to believe. What the church seems to have less comfort, willingness, or ability to engage seriously, are believers who know these answers but have one foot out the door because their doubts or disappointments are starting to outweigh their faith.

The predominant response, at least in my experience, seems to be some version of (1) you’re overthinking things – faith can’t be proven and you just need to trust the Lord with your questions, (2) you have either already sinned badly and are becoming hardened to the Lord or you want to sin and are looking for justification; or (3) your doubts mean you were probably never a Christian in the first place, and thus what you really need is to have a real conversion to the Lord.

It’s funny: the church can be great at extending grace and mercy to unbelievers, but rotten at doing so for those who may be falling away.

When I was a solid believer, and heard of people backsliding (nice pejorative term) or leaving the church, I was horrified and saddened for them – and fearful for myself. What did my faith mean if someone else who had had a genuine conversion experience to Jesus could later leave Him? Was it really the Truth if people who had known and experienced God could completely walk away? In those moments, I was thus driven to find ways to invalidate their faith experience – through their sin, their pride, or by virtue of them never having had a relationship with Jesus to begin with. Otherwise it meant that I could fall away, and/or that God would let me.

I imagine this is a similar thought pattern among other Christians when confronted with serious doubters from within their ranks, and explains why those of us who doubt are so often marginalized, ignored, or made to feel like we are the devil incarnate for asking the questions that we do. It also explains why most of us go through this upsetting de-conversion process silently, and why Christians only hear about it when we have made a final decision to leave Christianity behind.

This is not how it should be. Several Christians I have known espouse the idea that God can handle our questions – that nothing is too tough for Him. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and the door will be opened unto you. Etc. I want to believe that, myself. A God who could not suffer people asking Him questions or who requires blind allegiance isn’t really a God I want to worship or be in relationship with.

And yet, God has so far not responded to this desperately seeking child of his. Over the last several years, I have wet a lot of pillow cases with my tears, trying to figure out God's Truth as between Protestant and Catholic teachings; trying to understand God's lack of intervention in this world to lift up the poorest, sickest, and most downtrodden among us; trying to make sense of why so many of my prayers have gone so silently unanswered. I begged God to answer me. I scoured my soul to confess any unconfessed sin in case that was blocking God's response. Still, nothing.

And so I blog about it, anonymously. I blog to try to figure out some answers that I can live with. I blog so I can avoid dealing with Christians in real life who are not willing to come alongside me, to take my questions seriously, to refrain from judging me (as though that is their job). I blog so I do not cause other Christians to stumble in their own faith. I blog so that I don't upset my mom, who would spend the rest of her days wracked with worry about my spiritual health and eternal destination. I blog so I can explore these questions freely with others who are wondering similar things.

Context is everything!

2007-07-02T14:49:00.000-04:00

This blog spurred some interesting thoughts:

http://mysteryofiniquity.wordpress.com/2007/06/27/christianity-and-women/

I’ll reiterate the jist of what I said in my comments. In short, Christians usually try to make sense of the Bible by saying that to properly interpret it, you need to understand the context properly (and then whoever has just said that to you will proceed to tell you the proper way to understand whatever verse or passage you’re looking at).

What is implied in such a statement is that today’s interpretation is somehow the right one - that God finally cut through the clutter and misunderstandings of countless generations of earlier Christians, and now we've finally got it.

Under this view, Christians of older generations who justified slavery or the oppression of women somehow got it wrong. Yet, how can this be? How can today’s Christian who is full of love and compassion be so sure that God, throughout history, has always opposed slavery? And if he did, why did he allow his Word to be written in such a way that slavery could very very easily be justified for hundreds or thousands of years? How could he allow his Word to include a lot of “women must be silent and submit to their husbands” rants from Paul if what God really meant for us to understand is that women are absolutely equal to men, and he wants it to be mutual submission, no hierarchy involved?

I’ll repeat here a comment I made on MOI’s entry above:

I used to be a big fan of the “but you must understand the context” explanation. Used to offer it up, myself, sometimes with that slightly patronizing smile of ‘I know better than you; now let me help you understand’.

But the more I think about it, the more I think “context” is a thin excuse to re-interpret the Scriptures to fit the contemporary mores. It’s the work-around so the Bible doesn’t sound so awful; it’s like arguing what “is” is. “No, no, genocide in the OT was okay because God was justified in wiping those people out. That’s divine justice. What we have today is manmade genocide - clearly very bad and wrong.”

I would love to see a longitudinal study of how messages from the pulpit have changed over the years in explaining the proper “context” of a given passage of Scripture.

Agnosticism / Atheism: Destination, or Point on a Journey?

2007-07-01T23:43:00.000-04:00

This question came to mind after reading this:

http://byzantium.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/why-i-am-not-an-atheist/

For readers who have de-converted, do you think you have arrived at your spiritual/religious "destination"? Or do you think where you are today is part of a broader ebb-and-flow arc of spirituality/belief?

I wonder whether I am: in an angry backlash phase (and will eventually settle back into the faith of my upbringing), making a permanent exodus from belief in god, or am simply at a waypoint along the way to a different kind of spirituality.

The blindness of the abused

2007-06-30T11:05:00.000-04:00

Let’s start with this: Christians defend God. As you’d expect, right? They love God. They’ve been redeemed by Jesus. They’re in a relationship in which they’re getting something out of it (eternal life, of course, but also a day-to-day presence & guidance).

In such a loving relationship, Christians will not blame God when disappointing or unexpected or bad things happen. “It was God’s will.” “I needed to crucify my desires, anyway.” “It was selfish, what I wanted, it wasn't what God wanted.” “God is trying to teach us something through this suffering.” “We just can’t understand…God’s ways are higher than our ways.”

In other words, God always gets let off the hook. Always, always, always. It’s the assumed stance: God can simply do no wrong. So it is always the human’s fault, the human’s misunderstanding, the human’s limited pea-sized brain that can’t understand the perfect workings of an infinite, and infinitely good, God.

And let me be clear: I believed this myself, for decades. So I am not saying it lightly, and I am not saying it from an outsider’s perspective. I lived this for 20+ years.

At risk of offending the Christians that read this blog: isn’t this pretty much the same dynamic you see play out in abusive human relationships?

A woman falls in love with a man. He treats her well, at least at the beginning. She feels loved, she gets attention…she’s getting something out of it. But over time, the abuse begins. Maybe it’s verbal abuse at first…but it eventually escalates to physical abuse.

Yet, when a woman is way deep in the relationship, she will defend her man no matter what he’s done: “He just had a bad day.” “I interrupted his ball game, so really, I don’t blame him for getting mad.” “You don’t know him the way I do – he is actually very tender and loving.” “He had told me twenty times not to hang out with this friend, but I did it anyway. I had it coming.” “He’s big and strong and understands the world better than I do…I need him!”

When you’re inside an abusive relationship, you are brainwashed to actually believe that you’re at fault, you deserve the abuse, he’s justified in doing it, he’s still a good man. I have watched women make these kinds of justifications for men who yelled at them or hit them. I lived through a milder version of it with a narcissistic boyfriend some years ago.

Any person outside of this relationship can clearly see it for what it is: the woman is obviously trapped and brainwashed, unable to even consider the possibility that what her man is doing is wrong, unable to even conceive of leaving him, unable to imagine having any kind of different life.

A Christian reading this entry might well be offended that I’ve just compared God to an abuser, and thus immediately dismiss the whole idea. But what I am trying to describe is a dynamic in which Christians repeatedly, consistently, and perpetually try to explain away clearly terrible things that don’t square with their notions of who God is – because those notions of who God is are inviolable. Psychologically, I don’t see any difference from that which happens in an abused woman’s mind. And I am finally in a place where I have stepped outside of my faith and my church to examine who it is I have believed in all these years. To allow for the possibility that maybe my notion of who God is isn’t inviolable. That maybe there are other explanations for why all the things that don’t add up in the faith don’t add up, including the possibility that God doesn't actually exist.

I did not arrive in this place overnight. As I mentioned in one of my comments to Bible Student, I have struggled for 6 or 7 years to reconcile my God with what I saw happening around me in the world. I have not stepped out of the faith lightly, and I don’t make this comparison lightly.

Someone early on read my blog and said that she doubted I was ever a believer, based on what I am saying today about God…an accusation I will probably have to get used to hearing.

To the commenter I will say this: it’s not terribly unlike an abused woman who finally does leave the bad relationship. As the scales fall off her eyes and she sees her man for who he truly was, she gets angry. She may cut him down, criticize him, get angry with herself for not seeing it earlier, may even try to warn others off from getting involved with him. But it doesn’t mean that she didn’t love him while she was in the relationship. It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t devoted to him. And it doesn’t mean that there weren’t occasionally good times.

But most of us would say that any human who would deliberately harm, or allow significant or long-lasting harm, to come to their loved one doesn’t actually love them. We usually call them sick.

So why we don’t apply the same reasoning to God, who supposedly has a supernatural-awesome-cosmic-everlasting-deep-deep-overpowering-love for us?

Jesus: "Let's Cuddle!"

2007-06-29T11:17:00.000-04:00

“Yes, but do you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ?”

How many times have you heard this, or if you are or were formerly a Christian, uttered it yourself?

In the Christian communities I have been part of, this seems to be the ultimate point of the faith. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, then you’re just going through the motions. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, what you have isn’t faith, it’s “religion” (bad!). If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, you are missing out on the abundant life. If you don’t have a personal relationship with Jesus, you are probably not a Christian.

From a historical perspective, when and why and how did the idea of a “personal relationship” with Jesus come to the fore? The phrase itself appears nowhere in the Bible, and I feel pretty certain that Luther & Calvin weren’t tossing it around back in the day. Anybody know?

I must admit that cultivating this personal relationship with Jesus has always, always been a struggle for me. How can you have a personal relationship with an invisible God? Humans in relationship are, first of all, in physical and verbal contact with each other. There is a very clear two-way directionality about it; you say something, and the other person speaks back to you. You have conversations. You make eye contact. Maybe you hug each other. But I can’t cuddle with Jesus. When I have a bad day, or am crying, there’s no Gentle Shepherd waiting at home to make me dinner, talk me through my upset, give me advice, or just listen to me.

When I was a Christian and heard this argument from someone else, I would argue (patiently, perhaps patronizingly) that Jesus does listen to us, does draw close to us. And that he uses other people and circumstances in our lives to provide comfort – friends and family become instruments of Jesus’ love. This sounded beautiful, at the time.

But I now see at least two problems with it. One, in that model, Jesus is using surrogates – substitutes – for himself. It would be like me having a boyfriend but telling him to go to my friend Lydia with his needs, because I’ve set her up to be my eyes, ears, and arms for him. What’s the point of that? If my boyfriend has even half a brain, eventually he’ll dump me and just start dating Lydia.

Two, non-Christians get comfort and succor and love from other people and circumstances all the time, without benefit of a personal relationship with Jesus. For all intents and purposes, what they “get” from these truly human relationships is indistinguishable from what Christians get from their surrogate-Jesus-human relationships. So again, what exactly is Jesus doing that’s special or different?

The idealist in me wants to believe that a mystical, beautiful personal relationship with God-slash-Jesus is possible. That said, I have always thought the idea of being "married to" Christ (a la Song of Solomon) as extremely creepy. Plus, in all the years I've tried to get closer to Jesus, I just haven't sensed him personally coming closer to me. Which is strange given how much Jesus supposedly loves me.

So what am I missing out on by not cultivating a personal relationship with Jesus? Sadly, I’ve come to believe, not much.

Tagged!

2007-06-29T10:51:00.000-04:00

Cragar tagged me. Thanks, Cragar!

Here are the rules:

* We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.

* Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

* People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

* At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

* Don’t forget to leave them each a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

1. I am the youngest of three girls. I am a typical youngest child in many ways (attention seeking, entertainer, adventurous), but I also confound the stereotype in others (I hold more academic degrees than a person needs, and can be super competitive at times).

2. I am addicted to Carolyn Hax columns, the Washington Post advice columnist. No matter where I am in the world, if it’s a Sunday, Wednesday, or Friday, and I’m online, I will look her up.

3. I have four nephews and a niece and I love being an aunt. I’m a damn good aunt, too, or so I keep telling them. We make up games like Tickle Monster and the Pillow Game. I melt whenever I hold my 1-year old niece and she puts her head on my shoulder, body completely relaxed, and sighs. Next best thing to being a parent, I imagine. Though actually, it’s quite possibly better because I still get a full night’s sleep, and when they’re grouchy I give ‘em back to Mom & Dad.

4. I am on my second passport – I love to travel! I am still proud of going on a solo backpacking trip in France and Italy when I was a mere 22-year old college graduate. I have visited about 25 countries so far.

5. I am opinionated and can be stubborn, just like my dad. At the end of the day, even if I ask others for advice or input on some decision I need to make, I will make the decision for me and nobody else. (Which works out just fine for now, since I don’t have a husband or kids to take into consideration.)

6. I live close enough to my job that I can walk, bike, or take the bus. A long commute to work would kill me.

7. On a related note, I hate suburbs. I have degrees in architecture and urban planning, and I have serious issues with our car-centric approach to sprawl-style development in the United States. It is dehumanizing, isolating, damaging to the environment, and, quite simply, depressing (I believe I have also called it “soul sucking”). Gated communities make my blood boil; in our built environment, we keep separating ourselves more and more from others who are not like us, both reflecting and exacerbating our irrational fears about the “other”.

8. I am an idealist and often long for what “ought” to be. But I can also flip a switch and be a pragmatic realist. I think this latter tendency may have prompted the faith questions that are now tumbling out, one after another. Quite simply, the empirical, real-life “data” as it relates to God doesn’t match up to the ideals about God that I have believed most of my life.

I’m new enough to the blogging world that I don’t have people to tag yet, or they have already been tagged by cragar or others...

Is God an Anarchist?

2007-06-28T14:44:00.000-04:00

This thought occurred to me after reading this entry (and the comments) on Marie's blog.

So it's not a new idea that part of the explanation for evil/sin in the world and God's apparent reluctance to stop it is that God loves us so much that he has given us free will. Our free will to choose him is the most important thing, in fact, more important than protecting an innocent from the evil free will of an attacker or criminal. God, empirically speaking, seems unwilling to restrict anyone's freedom, even the Hitlers and janjaweeds and rapists of the world, because of this overriding, loving, value of free will.

But does this not make God a kind of divine or spiritual anarchist?

an·ar·chy (ăn'ər-kē) n., pl. -chies.

Absence of any form of political authority.
Political disorder and confusion.
Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.

Hearing God's Still, Small Voice

2007-06-28T12:23:00.000-04:00

Discerning when we are hearing from God and when we aren’t (i.e. when we’re making it up ourselves or when it is actually Satan is speaking to us) is one of the central dilemmas that has brought my faith crashing down.

I was in a Bible study a year or two ago where we were discussing God’s leading, and the process of discernment therein. I think I was probably that annoying person in the group who raises the questions that people don’t really want to talk about in the middle of a study on I John. But I dove in anyway: “But how do you really know it’s God speaking to you? Is it a warm, fuzzy feeling? Is it a sense of peace about something that you haven’t had up until that moment? Do you know it’s God if it’s a leading to do kind, loving things? Can it be God if it’s a leading to do bad things – like kill your kids?”

One of the women in my Bible study said, flat out, that if God told her to kill someone, she would do it. It would be wrong to hold that person as more important than God, to make an idol out of that person or their right to life over God’s commandment to end their life. Like Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, we have to be willing to follow God wherever he leads, even if it is unpopular, illegal or even (to our limited, mortal eyes) immoral.

Which threw the rest of us in a frenzy: Whoa! Jesus is about love and forgiveness, not murder. How would you be sure it’s God telling you to do that? What about all the wackos out there who have murdered in the name of God? Do you believe God actually told them to do that?

In my memory, this woman’s response was something less than satisfying – she was reluctant to condemn their actions, shrugging and saying that it was possible God had in fact spoken to them in that way. In her own case, she would just know if it was from God because she’s been in a close relationship with Jesus for many years and she knows his voice. She didn’t say whether God’s still, small voice would manifest in her as a warm fuzzy feeling, a set of thoughts that keep coming back even after trying to dismiss them, an explicit and audible voice, and/or some set of external signs or coincidences that seem to confirm the individual message. I wondered about that later.

But that day was the start of the end for me in simply accepting, prima facie, that we can discern God’s voice – or that God speaks to us at all. As I noted in an early blog entry, I had a very difficult prayer experience a few years ago in which I was convinced God had led me to pray in a certain direction. (I should note that, like the woman from Bible study, I had been in a close relationship with Jesus for a long time, and I was pretty sure I knew God's voice.) But when it didn’t go as expected, I had to question whether I had really heard God or just made it up. Either way left very troubling implications for how we relate to God, and made me question the much bigger idea of why God speaks so quietly in the first place. Why is this quietness a virtue? Why does he make it so hard to find him, to hear him, to know whether it’s him at all?

Our Gracious Father's Most Amazing Grace In Jesus

2007-06-27T11:31:00.000-04:00

My older sister has an old high school friend who has always been "on fire" for Jesus, even way back in the day when we all went to the public high school together. Seriously. The amount of enthusiasm he carried around was unmatched by anyone else I knew at church. He was even more in love with Jesus than my youth pastor. I was never terribly close to "Dave" though I did go to his wedding with my sister some 10 years ago. But he is the kind of person who, if I saw him today, would envelop me in a gigantic bear hug and ask how my spiritual life is going. Perhaps you know similar people.

Somehow, years ago, I got on his mailing list and every month or two I get a kind of "Jesus Pep Talk" email in my inbox. It usually includes an opening anecdote that Dave then ties to some scripture to remind us that Jesus is our All in All. He then invites us to pray with him. This is a typical prayer:

Gracious Father, we are humbled by Your Most Amazing Grace in JESUS that invites & makes it possible for us to be a part of Your Winning Team! Lord, we acknowledge that we often lack the “Winning Attitude” of Your Son. You gave us Your Mighty Holy Spirit to empower us with JESUS’ Winning Attitude that surrenders to You & seeks to glorify You in all things. O Lord, forgive us for not submitting to the Spirit & not trusting in You at times. In 2007, bless each of us with an overriding knowledge & awareness of Your Victory at Calvary. O Lord, You are the Eternal Victor & we are so grateful that You so graciously shared Your Victory with us through JESUS. We submit to Your Purpose & Plan for 2007. Let us not be distracted by the circumstances. Help us to be about abiding in You & being completely Yours! May we be instruments that You can use in any circumstances to glorify Your Son in the Highest!!! It’s in the Name of the One Who is FOREVER VICTORIOUS, JESUS CHRIST, we pray. AMEN.

My sister at some point changed her email address and made it a point not to tell Dave - and made me swear not to give it to him. Now every so often I will forward her Dave's emails and we will share a giggle over it, and she will express relief that she no longer receives them.

But here is the thing: I know this comes from a very heartfelt and sincere place, and I know Dave is just trying to encourage his brothers and sisters in Christ. So why do his missives make me so uncomfortable?

Gender Roles, Schmender Roles

2007-06-26T18:34:00.000-04:00

When I was growing up, a "feminist" was a very bad, man-hating, prideful woman who was trying to push her agenda (which was, obviously, to be a man!) and confuse the natural order of things. We tossed around the term "feminazi" casually, jokingly, anytime we encountered one of these liberals.

Today, I can't believe I bought into that view so thoroughly. And I don't know how to explain it except to say that when you grow up in a church that teaches you that you can do certain things but not others because you're a girl, you kind of just accept it as truth. You think: they're good people, they wouldn't lie to me. And I should be clear: I wasn't even part of one of those ultra-fundamentalist churches that made women cover their hair or not speak in church. Just your basic Bible-based non-denominational evangelical church.

But I remember dreaming of becoming a pastor one day - after all, I loved Jesus and wanted to preach about Him - and telling my mom about it. Mom informed me that as a woman, I just couldn't be a pastor. Something about it not being right for a woman to teach men. I was a little indignant about it, but I was also a fairly young kid so I think I just accepted it and went on with my life. I think Mom said I could be a missionary, though. (Wait - what? I can't teach men in my own church, but I could go far, far away and teach foreign men?)

Anyway, that's what I grew up with: men were in charge. And I mostly accepted it - the whole headship of man, the whole symbolism of Christ and the church modeling the husband-wife relationship, and vice versa...there was a strange mystical appeal to it.

Even so, I didn't completely accept it. I started having issues with "wives submitting to their husbands" many years ago, though at first I attributed it to my stubbornness and obviously selfish desire to "rule" over my husband. (Another example of, if I disagree with something my faith teaches me, obviously I am in the wrong and need to examine my heart for my real (sinful) motives.) I have since developed a real disdain for marriages where men act as the spiritual "head" (and the 'head' in all other matters) and the wives act as support. Or, perhaps I should say: no way in hell do I want a marriage like that. For one thing, the simple truth for most of my twenties was that I was more spiritually mature than most of the men in my local Christian dating pool. For another thing, I had a lot of opinions about things, and made a lot of decisions about my own life, so the idea that I would have to delegate decision making to someone else made me squirm. I wanted to be treated as an equal in my own marriage, and had no interest in a husband who might abuse the notion of his headship, and get controlling on me. (A close friend of mine got into exactly that kind of marriage, which was very emotionally abusive.)

Over time, my marital role discomfort broadened to become a more generalized discomfort with how women are allowed to participate (or not participate) in their church communities. When I was exploring Catholicism, it really bothered me that my boyfriend was against any potential daughter of ours being an altar girl. (I guess that wasn't allowed until semi-recently (?), and the boyfriend was super old school on that kind of thing.) I know now that that was just him, but his attitude made me take a step back and observe how most churches view women and women in leadership.

So it has taken a very long time for me to see the sexism that permeates the doctrine and practice of Christianity, and the power dynamics that relegate women largely to sitting in the pew (unless they are running the nursery and childrens' ministries). Isn't it odd that, at the same time, there's this funny critique out there that the church is becoming feminized, and men are leaving, or staying away, from the church in droves? How can this be, when women still aren't running the show?!

Basically my views have undergone a big 180. Today, I would say I'm a feminist... but not because I signed up on the list, but because I fundamentally believe that half of the human population needs to stop being shut out of the centers of power and decision-making, where those in control get to decide things that affect them.

But here's the funny thing: even today I feel slightly uncomfortable listening to women pastors preach. I have been so conditioned to see it as wrong and unnatural, that even if I am thinking "yes! you go, pulpit woman, follow the call God has put on your heart!", emotionally and physically I still feel a little ill at ease. (Ugh. I am still working that particular piece of conditioning out of my system.)

I will say this: I give my parents a ton of credit for never putting gender-based limits on what I could or couldn't do - even my mom, who inadvertently crushed my dream of being a pastor. I am one of three girls, and we did everything from cooking and sewing to mowing the lawn, taking care of all of our pets, and cleaning Dad's boat. Mom and Dad pushed us in our academics and fully expected us to go to college. Dad in particular did not want us ever to be dependent on a man so he encouraged us to pursue whatever we wanted, as long as we could make a living at it. I credit my parents with giving me an independence and self-confidence that allowed me eventually to question what my church was teaching me about what I could and couldn't do or be.

Suffering: Why Them? Why Not Me?

2007-06-26T12:28:00.000-04:00

I've mentioned my foray into Catholicism a few times now. As part of that exploration, I decided one summer to take some time off of work and go to India. My boyfriend at the time had some Catholic friends who were going to work in Mother Teresa's homes in Calcutta for a couple of weeks, so I decided to join them.

Now, to be clear, I have traveled a lot. At that point in my life, I had seen poverty in the border towns of Mexico (thanks to high school missions trips); I had backpacked solo in Europe for 6 weeks; I had traveled to Iran for crying out loud. I was no travel virgin; I'd seen a lot of crazy stuff.

Still, I am hard pressed to describe the intensity of my trip to India. Anyone who has been there can probably relate to the sheer overwhelming-ness of the place. Every sense of mine was assaulted from the moment the plane touched down in Calcutta. The stench! Seriously, I have never smelled anything so awful, before or since. It's a horrible combination of human and animal waste, exacerbated by the humidity and constant dampness of typhoon season. The masses! The population density is unbelievable in Calcutta. I've never seen anything like it. The streets! Cars, trucks, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles, pedestrians, and cows all vying for real estate. Only in Iran have I feared for my life on the streets as much as I did in Calcutta - I kept looking the wrong way to cross the street, only to have an angry rickshaw driver shout something at me in Hindi as he barreled past.

Still, all of that paled in comparison to the work I did with poor, sick, and diseased women and orphans. Our first day there we worked at Kalighat, the home for the dying and I believe Mother Teresa's first home/center in Calcutta. The place is separated into a men's wing and a women's wing. In the women's wing, the patients are in two different rows of beds: on the lower row are women who are expected to eventually recover. On the upper row? Women who were dying and for whom there is no hope of a medical cure. Most of Kalighat's residents were found on the street, the dying destitute who were often kicked out of their homes and shunned by their families when it was learned that they had, for example, leprosy.

I can't quite put into words what the experience was like. The Missionaries of Charity nuns were these amazing examples of love. They saw their job as being present to these dying men and women, literally becoming Jesus' hands, demonstrating Jesus' love to people who were denied that love from their own families. The nuns knew they couldn't save many of these men and women, and they didn't try.

I realized later in the day that I couldn't handle working at Kalighat: the other woman in our foursome had assisted the doctor on duty with cleaning a new patient's leg wound, which was filled with maggots; the two men in our foursome had already been pressed into service carrying the bodies of dead men to the crematory. I had gotten off relatively easy, but this was way more than I could handle.

So I decided to work at one of the orphanages also run by the Missionaries of Charity. The particular orphanage I worked at had a "healthy" ward of children and a "sick" ward. The healthy ward was woefully understaffed, and we spent all of our time trying to play with and love toddlers who were in constant need of diaper changes, food, and drink. These poor kids were so starved for attention that if you sat on the floor to play with one child, four more would try to climb in your lap. It was challenging, but nothing like working in the sick ward, where there was this unspoken assumption that these kids would never be adopted and would likely live out their entire lives in the orphanage. Working on this side absolutely broke my heart.

Two kids stand out in my memory on the sick side: one girl who must have been 7 or 8 years old, with spina bifida. Her spine was so crooked that she she was effectively immobile. She laid on her side in a bed near the second floor entrance and followed you with her eyes - the only part of her body she could really move.

Like on the healthy side of the orphanage, the sick ward was understaffed and so this poor girl was often overlooked in favor of the mobile kids who were shouting for attention. When I did sit with her, or feed her some gruel, I felt there wasn't much else I could do to comfort her or show her love. She couldn't understand me, and couldn't speak to me. Apart from such small gestures as feeding her or holding her hand, I felt incredibly helpless and totally heartbroken. Spina bifida is correctible with surgery, but of course it was too late for surgery for her, and given the lack of resources in India and with the Missionaries of Charity, she would likely never benefit from other medical treatments either.

The other child I remember vividly from the sick ward had had some kind of operation - a colonoscopy? - in which she had to have one of those bags attached to her intestines to evacuate her bowels. She must have been 3 or 4 years old. Well. Somehow in her crib the bag had gotten disconnected from her body, and she was positively covered from head to foot in her own waste. I think it was meal time or something, as everyone else was preoccupied. I must have been the first person to notice what had happened to her. If memory serves, I cleaned her up as best I could, and then found a nurse because clearly she needed medical attention.

So much more stuff happened on that trip, but hopefully I've painted enough of a picture to explain why the experience shook me to the core, and led to a debilitating depression that lasted for over a year once I went back home.

While I was thrilled to be back home and able to wash my clothes in a real washing machine, I was also immediately overwhelmed by a sense of guilt. Why did I get to have such luxuries at my fingertips? Why are all of my basic human needs more than adequately met? Why did I have almost no obstacles or barriers to pursuing my life dreams? Why was I was born into an affluent, full-of-opportunity, white family in the United States?

It seemed unfair that I had such an easy life, while the adults and children I worked with in India led such excruciating, painful, lonely, suffering lives. And yet, if I believed what the Bible said, it was actually no accident of fate that I was born into my circumstances and they into theirs. I mean, God has numbered the hairs on my head, and is supposedly in control of everything, right?

So if God is in control of everything, and he has given me so much, then obviously he expects much from me. But what, exactly? Should I sell all my possessions and live like a pauper? Should I become a full-time missionary? Should I move into the inner city and live in solidarity with the poor?

I prayed, and prayed, and prayed for direction. But what I got back wasn't really direction. I started to feel a weight of obligation descend upon me. I couldn't discern whether the obligation was God's leading, or if it was me getting legalistic and thinking I had to make either a radical change or none at all. I started to feel guilty and selfish and, no matter what I decided to do, not good enough. I felt like I would fail God no matter what because I knew I still carried around a lot of selfishness.

I also felt confused at how God could allow such suffering to exist. It was all well and good for the nuns to be Jesus' hands and show Jesus' love to dying people... but I had to wonder: is that all there is? Is that all Jesus can offer these people? The cynic in me wondered why Jesus said that the poor would always be with us: is that because God had already decided not to help them out? That God knows we're going to fail miserably at it too? That, no matter how much we as individual sacrifice of ourselves to try to better someone else's life, that it's still only going to be a drop in the bucket?

During this period someone said to me that what I was going through was actually really good: that I was learning to be heartbroken by the things that broke Jesus' heart. I remember eventually thinking - screw that! I'm heartbroken because I can't actually solve these huge problems. But Jesus can, can't he? So why the hell doesn't he?

Can God Learn?

2007-06-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

The Old Testament seems to paint God as very human-like: he gets mad at people, overreacts and wipes them out, regrets it, makes new promises, acts surprised when his people stray again, punishes them again, makes bets with the devil to try to tempt one of his righteous dudes, and can get talked out of following through on his plan by a mere mortal. Oh, and demands total unquestioning obedience and worship. In short, the OT paints a picture of an insecure, manic-depressive, egomaniacal, and definitely not omniscient deity (after all, how could he be surprised or angry if he knew all along that that stuff would happen?).

Painted in that light, God seems to be a deity who, over time, seems to adjust his approach to us...and perhaps finally realizing that he might attract more bees with honey than vinegar, he sends us gentle, humble Jesus, full of love and hope.

This view of God flies in the face of what I learned growing up: which is that God is omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly just, perfectly loving, and most importantly, he never, ever changes (and thus I can trust him!).

But what if God does exist but isn't omniscient/omnipotent/just/loving/unchanging after all? What if he is tempermental? What if he is unpredictable? What if he holds grudges? What if he overreacts at times? What if he is powerless to intervene at times? What if God is on a journey of learning how to relate to us, as much as we are on a journey of learning how to relate to him?

The question that springs to my mind is this: is this a God worth knowing, following, worshiping? What makes a deity worth knowing, following, and worshiping in the first place?

The Universe Is Rigged

2007-06-24T22:22:00.000-04:00

Tonight I overheard my brother-in-law (BIL) explaining the role of science and the Bible in understanding the origins of the world to my 7-year old nephew.

The long and short of his explanation was that, well, yeah: science helps us understand things about how the world came about, but it isn't the same story we hear in Genesis (2 different times). But you know, that God is a clever God, and he could have set the world up to look like it was really, really old, such that there's not necessarily a conflict between science and the creation accounts. You know, God could have made Adam with a belly button, even though as the first man he naturally wouldn't have had one. Just for kicks or something.

That seemed to satisfy my nephew, who looked off into the distance, pondering it. Then nodded his head and wandered off to find his brother.

Later, out of earshot of the kids, I asked him about it. "I know God could have done it that way - I've heard that argument before - but why would God have done it that way?" I asked.

"Why wouldn't he?" was BIL's answer. Ugh.

So basically the argument is either that God is completely random and unpredictable, or that God could have purposely confused us, purposely set before us a lot of scientific evidence on which we spend a lot of time and energy, really just to f*** with us. To make sure we don't figure his ways out.

Yet I Cor. 14:33 begins "For God is not a God of disorder but of peace..." Of course the context of that verse has to do with speaking in tongues... but is it not appropriate to extrapolate from there to assume that God is not a God of disorder in other matters as well? ...such as, us understanding how the heck the world came to be? Why would God deliberately plant false evidence?

So the argument isn't really washing for me.

At the same time, my BIL did make what I thought was a decent point. He said: "Look, the universe is obviously rigged. No two ways about it: the odds of carbon-based life fluorishing on earth are like, what - what's bigger than a trillion, a quatrillion? Yeah, a quatrillion to one. It would be like me flying over the Pacific to China and al Qaeda blowing up my plane. I'm falling into the ocean, about to die a horrible death. It would be like me somehow falling onto an island, into a barcolounger, to find a margarita in my hand and a mermaid giving me a blow job. At that point, you gotta admit something is up. That kind of sh** just doesn't happen out of nowhere."

Which, of course, is the clock designer argument, though I must admit that I like my BIL's salty version of it better (I'm not too reverent, in case you can't tell). I think I am still at a point of believing there is a God of some kind behind the scenes. But I am confused as all get out as to who this God is.

Becoming A Spiritual Orphan

2007-06-24T13:35:00.000-04:00

I left off my last post with the questions that started pooling in my mind around Truth. Given the huge number of Protestant denominations that exist today (I don't know this number exactly, but something like 20,000 is in my head. (?) Anyway, a LOT.), how could I be sure that my childhood church had a lock on The Truth?

So began an incredibly painful and difficult period of time as I began to question some of the bedrock truths I had known my whole life. I kept a journal during that time, though unfortunately on a computer that has since died. So while I can't quote anymore the exact questions I was asking, I do remember spending tortured hours hunched over the computer, reading stories of evangelicals like me on the same search for the Truth -- and, incredibly, finding it in the Catholic church. I spent countless more hours reading books and praying earnestly for clarity and direction.

I was reading a lot of Catholic theology at the time (thanks to my Catholic boyfriend and his conversion ultimatum) and remember being both surprised and impressed with the depth and nuance of thinking within the RCC. In particular, I thought they fit faith and works together in a way more persuasive way than evangelicals do (who basically try to ignore works, though strangely they sure seem good at coming up with lots of rules to follow). And the Catholics seemed way, way, way closer to the Truth on the heaven/hell question. I was so happy the day I came across what seemed like the "loophole" that was totally absent in Protestantism: in Catholicism, it seemed that someone who had never heard the gospel might still have a chance of getting to heaven. It had something to do with a person believing as best they can, and God basically having mercy if their beliefs end up not being quite right. Something about it being okay, or forgiveable, if someone's conscience was malformed or they didn't hear the message of Christ, or couldn't understand it.

In evangelical Protestantism, you get stuck with these unanswerable and uncomfortable questions: if someone who professes Christ later renounces Him, what can that mean other than he/she was never a believer to begin with ("once saved, always saved")? What of those who never heard the gospel message? Well, the Bible is very clear on this matter: they are going to hell (except an evangelical is quite loathe to admit that, so they fall back on "well, God is perfectly loving and perfectly just, and only He knows our hearts.").

Oy. My brain by this time was really hurting, because I came to see that evangelical theology was too bound up in sola scriptura, too bound up in having to interpret everything literally, except you couldn't interpret everything literally, exactly, so you had to figure out all these work-arounds to make the stories fit. You couldn't admit that there actually are inconsistencies in the Scriptures, you couldn't admit that Genesis doesn't contain accurate creation accounts, you couldn't admit that God is a major monster in the Old Testament. "We are under the law of grace now - we no longer follow the old law" would be a typical response to any doubts about the OT God. Yet, how could that be, if God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow? If he was so terrible to people back then, what is stopping him from being so today? Why is the NT God painted primarily as our "loving heavenly Father" when that is not at all how one might describe the God of the Old Testament?

So I thought the Catholics were really onto something. And they had the weight of history behind them. But I couldn't sign on to all the Mary stuff and I couldn't sign on to papal infallibility. And because I couldn't say I really believed those two pieces of Catholic theology, I couldn't convert. Or so I believed, because to convert I had to get up in front of the church and say that I affirmed everything the Catholic church teaches. I couldn't do that honestly, and so I couldn't do it at all. And I carried around a chip on my shoulder for quite awhile on that front, because it seemed so unfair that all of these cradle Catholics could do their faith cafeteria-style, not even knowing what their church teaches, but in effect signing on to some stuff but not other stuff (eg using artificial birth control), but someone who was honestly seeking and who read and understood, in depth, the core theology of the church but had honest and deep disagreement on a couple of fronts, couldn't get into the club.

This all took place between 2000-2002, and by the end of the whole process I was exhausted, confused, alone, and very much feeling like a spiritual orphan. I could no longer attend my evangelical church because I had developed way too many problems with their approach to Scripture, but neither could I participate in Mass - which seemed like the only other logical place to go - because I had problems with some of their theology as well. I felt at sea, with no land in sight, and no guidance from God himself as to what direction I should go.

The First Chink in the (Spiritual) Armor...

2007-06-22T23:07:00.001-04:00

...occurred when the doctrine of sola scriptura got wobbly.

Truth be told, until sometime in the fall of 2000, I had never even heard of the Latin name for "scripture alone." I had simply grown up, la-di-da, in my evangelical, Bible-based church and later my (conservative) college fellowship group, believing that the only way to understand or approach the Bible was to believe that it was inerrant, inspired by the Holy Spirit, and God's revelation to the world. It was the ultimate--and only--authority on how to live our lives and be Christ-like, and everything in it could be trusted to be (literally) true. It was Truth.

For over 20 years the entirety of what I believed about God, the world, me, and my life's purpose, was based on that premise. It never occured to me to suspect, question, wonder, ponder, or consider sola scriptura to be potentially flawed - or (God forbid) unBiblical.

Closely tied to sola scriptura, by the way, was the idea that there is Absolute Truth out there...and it can be known. Ravi Zacarias gave eloquent talks at Harvard University's Veritas Forum when I was in college, trouncing with his impeccable logic the idea that relativism had any merit.

So for decades I lived my life, comfortable and secure in the knowledge that I knew the Truth (Jesus), was living the Truth (the commands of the Bible), that the interpretations and applications of the Bible passed down to me through my evangelical church (and pastor) were the Truth.

Like many of my life lessons and epiphanies, my "a-ha" moment around sola scriptura occurred thanks to a boy (why so many of my life lessons and epiphanies revolve around boys is a subject for another post). During my relationship with the first man I truly loved, I began looking into Catholic theology because he was a diehard, dyed-in-the-wool Italian Catholic, and firmly stated early in our dating life that if we were to ever marry, I would have to convert.

*Gulp*

As a good Protestant I believed Catholics largely to be going to hell in a handbasket. But Bill was such a Christ-like, enthusiastic, charismatic, Bible-studying Christian that I agreed to start reading Catholic theology to see what their deal was. It seemed like the Whore of Babylon couldn't possibly have produced a real Christian like Bill...so the devilish nature of Catholicism was suddenly up for grabs. Maybe it wasn't 100% bad, after all. During that phase - which lasted well over a year - I came upon the testimonies of a number of evangelical Christians who had "crossed the Tiber" - become Catholic. Many of these converts' stories revolved around the realization that the splintering of the church via Protestantism, first at the Reformation, but later as the number of Protestant denominations proliferated, raised a very serious question about who really does "own" the Truth. Which denomination is right?

To my great horror, I began to see that my founded-in-1884-by-Swedes-in-Minneapolis denomination's insistence that they understood the Scriptures correctly, better than Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and definitely better than Catholics was a patently ridiculous idea. Why on earth could or would God let everybody else calling on His name understand his Word incorrectly, but He would preserve His truth and real teachings through a 120-year old denomination started in the Great Plains of the United States?

It's All Falling Down

2007-06-22T16:31:00.000-04:00

I felt confused a year ago, when I started this blog. But man, things are really falling apart now. I think I am experiencing a deconversion from Christianity, though I hesitate to even tap that out because I am not sure I am ready to admit it.

In the last week I have gone poking around the internet looking for others who have gone through something similar. I have been surprised, and surprisingly comforted, to have stumbled across so many blogs of people whose stories and struggles are eerily similar to my own.

In the coming days I will try to add links to some of these' folks blogs. I'm at a point where I need to hash out some of my thoughts with the input and reactions of a few other like-minded people.

Easter Lies and Old Boyfriends

2006-07-11T00:22:00.000-04:00

I told a lie on Easter, of all days. I might as well have poked the risen triumphant Jesus in the eye. I was in a foreign country for work. Friends living there invited me to go to church with them. I am a Christian and therefore of course I wanted to go. It is what Christians do on Easter Sunday: we go to church and we celebrate Jesus. I have been a Christian for almost thirty years. That is saying a lot because I am only 32.

The 100-minute Easter service featured a 30-minute CCM-inspired musical tribute to the passion of Christ, clips from the “Jesus Film” in which our Savior was, naturally, white (did I mention I was in east Asia at the time?), and a 20-minute altar call during which an unfortunately timed movement of my head made the pastor think I had just accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I hardly breathed for the rest of the altar call for fear that the pastor would invite me onstage to share my newfound joy in the Lord.

It was when my friend asked what I thought of the white-Jesus Easter service in Asia that the lie spilled across my lips: “I liked it,” I said brightly. “Just like at home.”

Obviously I hated it (and on reflection, she probably knew that). Every pore of my body was screaming to get out of that oversize auditorium with oversize banners and oversize preacher personalities making oversize statements about the boundless joy, everlasting hope, and unquenchable life that Jesus rising from the dead gives us.

It’s not just that this was a supremely cheesy Easter service (though it was). This is the deal: I don't have boundless joy or everlasting hope; I am tired and disappointed and unsure of who the Alpha and Omega is. For me this is a very unsettling thing to say because until about two years ago, I had problems, sure, but God himself was never really in question. And now he/she/it is. And we know God is really in question because I just now went back and added the “slash-she-slash-it” to the pronoun he in that last sentence and I used to be very traditional and comfortable just calling God “he”.

But you can’t really say any of this serious doubting stuff to people, or at least not the people in my church/faith/religion community. If you do, you immediately set off marathon prayer sessions, friends ask if they can lay hands on you, people suggest seeing a Christian counselor (God forbid you should go see a secular counselor) and above all, they gaze at you with concern in their eyes and wonder what you’ve done (read: sin) to create distance between yourself and God. I am reminded here of a joke that goes like this: an old married couple is driving down the road in an old truck with one of those bench seats that extends all the way across the cab. The wife looks at her husband and says: “Earl, how come we sit so far apart in the truck these days? We didn’t used to. We used to cuddle up!” Earl responds: “I don’t know, Edith…but I’m not the one who moved.” This is how most (conservative) Christians view other Christians who are having a hard time with God: it’s always the Christian’s fault because, as we all know, God doesn’t change.

In my younger, more zealous and certain Christian days I prayed fervently that I would never become what I think I am becoming: a doubting, unsure, frustrated, person who is disillusioned with what life handed her and is blaming God for it. Apparently I have changed.

I know I sound like a bad after-school special, or just very cliché. But I have been carrying around a load, a burden, about the size of a house on my back for some time now. I’d like to thank my ex-ex-heartbreaker-boyfriend (not the gay one – a later one) for helping me notice it. We dated for 7 months before he unexpectedly dumped me, and I have finally found the perfect way to describe our relationship: he was like Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. Willoughby courts Maryann like mad and it’s magical and happy and the chemistry is palpable and nobody sees it coming when Willoughby breaks things off. Maryann almost dies of heartache. In Jane Austin’s story it of course comes to light that Willoughby is a shallow bastard who knocked up some other girl and marries rich in order to pay child support. I am still waiting for confirmation that my ex-ex-boyfriend has done the same thing, but I draw a certain comfort from the otherwise strong parallel to my relationship.

Anyhoo: Heartbreaker helped me notice the house on my back because for a long time after we broke up I prayed that we would get back together. And I swear that God himself was telling me to pray for that, and he was sending all these weird signs to confirm that that’s what he wanted me to pray for. And, duh, we didn’t get back together. The guy never spoke to me again, in fact. So I got all disillusioned with my prayer life, and how I must have only imagined that God wanted me to pray all that stuff, but then I thought that that doesn’t make any sense because it felt exactly like other times when I’ve been convinced God wanted me to pray a certain way (and that the things came to pass afterward that I had prayed for) and so how could I retroactively say that God must not have been leading me in that way, and how could I tell the difference anyway, and what kind of God would be so cruel as to make one of his Children all hopeful and then crush the hope in a big fell swoop? And what’s with this God that had His Old Testament People smite all their enemies, killing women and children and basically committing genocide, when now good Christians say that’s wrong and terrible and we should stop Rwanda and Sudan? Who the crap is this God?

And this is the load I've been carrying around: I've been assuming that, by following the "rules" (oh, but we're not legalistic around here, are we?) and being an exceptional example of the (Accomplished) Good Girl, that God would do his part and give me what I want. Probably, this is very obviously not true to most readers, and it even sounds ridiculous when I say it because theologically of course it's not true, we're not promised anything like that in any version of Conservative Christianity except for the Prosperity Gospel people who have that whole "name it and claim it" idea, which almost everybody else within Conservative Christianity recognizes as a load of hooey.

But there you have it: that idea has been wired into my subconscious for many, many years, and only now am I pulling it out of its dark little place in my brain to turn it around, play with it, figure out how it got there, and decide what to do with it now.

I've never lived a slapdash (adj.: careless, haphazard) life

2006-07-10T17:45:00.000-04:00

My mom praised me the other day for being the easiest child in the world to raise: I never caused trouble or seriously crossed any lines. I didn’t need a pesky curfew like my sisters did – mom and dad knew I’d never go out drinking or go necking with a strange boy. I was allowed to watch TV while I did my homework because I brought home straight A’s. I could have friends over when M&D were gone because my friends were trustworthy, wholesome, from church. My worst offense as a kid seems to have been that my bedroom was always a mess. I didn’t drink before I was 21. I didn’t have a real boyfriend until I was 26. And we didn’t have sex. Partly because he was gay.

But still. I was a major Good Girl. And where has it gotten me? Things haven’t quite panned out as I thought they would (more on that to come). I need to sort some stuff out. Do a little self-examination, if you will. Comments and questions are most welcome.

It will probably get ugly, in part because there’s a lot of Conservative Christianity in the story. Although what’s kooky about that is that I’m not going to be bashing it, exactly. But I’m not going to be praising Focus on the Family either, which is going to make at least one good friend of mine unhappy since she used to work for them and still harbors a fantasy that I’m going to marry this evangelical state senator she knows, move back to the Midwest where we grew up, and raise babies with her.

My blog experiment is probably going to be a time-delimited thing. As in, once I figure stuff out, I might stop writing. But who knows. Like every single other blogger I know, I have a secret dream of being published someday.

I hope my mom doesn’t find my blog.