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David Hayward 1 year, 3 months ago.
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One of the things I found out when I revealed my atheism is Christian community has an almost complete lack of intellectual honesty. On a sincerity level Christians are quite honest, but when considering modern methods of truth many Christians are poorly versed in the concept of intellectual honesty. Our modern scientific method has revealed that we live in a highly ordered cause and effect world. The disappointing fact for humans is that the universe is not made for us. We would not survive in most places in the universe. We have to adapt to the universe. We don’t get to vote on when gravity works and when it doesn’t work. Gravity is no respecter of persons. If you jump off a cliff it doesn’t matter if you are a king or a peasant, the result is the same. The Christian narrative says the universe was made for us and when it doesn’t work out in our favor then it must be Satan creating chaos.
This makes it very difficult for atheists to find common ground with true believers who tend to think that the way they believe is how god must think.
Jesus stated that by a person’s fruits you could tell if what they claimed to believe spiritually was true. This is a very basic cause and effect basis of truth. The problem is humans are incredibly complex. Some one can do good things motivated by fear as much as by love. If I’m on the receiving end of those good things it makes little difference what motivated them, but if I’m the one on the giving side of things I would much prefer to do things from love. I discovered the Christian narrative inhibits the ability to do things from love because there is a rathe complex set of mental gymnastics required to make sure you are going to heaven. Once I gave up the idea of a heaven my immediate experience became far more important. And I found that I wasn’t depraved and bent on continual evil like my Christian upbringing had taught me about non-believers. I found out that I really liked to give to others and I enjoyed the connection that doing things from love brings.
Intellectual honesty is based on a rational mental discipline. If this discipline is informed by empathy it is quite easy to understand complex human values without a religion. Unfortunately there is an anti-intellectualism within much of Christianity and what I call a mental laziness that is motivated by a comfortableness with believing that one has THE truth. All you need is a few offensive sound bytes to maintain it and a few bullies to keep the more questioning under control.
I think this is why I am glad to see articulate voices for atheism emerging in the popular culture. There is an education process going on that will help many people develop a rational mental discipline.
I view it like any system of thought must have a set of unproven axioms (accepted on faith if you will). From these axioms, a whole system of thought can be developed. Systems get in trouble when they have unnecessary extra axioms especially when some of them contradict others. It is also necessary to be able to jump out of the system at times to see the whole situation. A fear-based system that doesn’t allow jumping out and improving its set of axioms will become brittle and eventually fail for what the system was originally put in place for.
In addition to what you said, I think atheism can serve as a jumping out point for the various religions so the religions can be seen from outside and hopefully they can clean up their underlying axioms a bit.
Jeff Prideaux Systems get in trouble when they have unnecessary extra axioms especially when some of them contradict others.
I agree that internal consistency would go a long way to make conversation easier.
I know that when we “left” the church (some could say “were shown the door”), our closest friends felt that we judged them as not thinking – and we were all of a sudden thinking. It wasn’t that we said so (or even thought so, for that matter). We had just begun to feel that it was intellectually dishonest, for us, to deny certain scientific theories (big bang, evolution, gender issues) and pretend that the Bible is completely on top of modern understandings of the world/universe, etc. Since the Bible was/is wrong about the (flat) earth and the cosmos (geo-centrism), why couldn’t it be wrong about other things? I tried to explain to someone how I thought that evolution and Christianity could co-exist and they were very binary about it. It could only be A or B for them. We had a hard time understanding the resistance to modern science. In our thinking, the Bible was written by people who had a worldview and reflected their knowledge at that time. Some of what it has to say is timeless; some is bound to a time. We were OK with dropping ancient understandings of the world/universe and holding onto those ideas which are more timeless. The difficulty, I guess, is where do you stop? Work it back far enough and you get yourself right to the garden of eden and original sin. If Adam and Eve weren’t real people who talked with a real snake, was there ever an “original sin” and is human-kind born under a “curse” from which they have to be saved?
It’s almost like the paradigm we’ve been given and developed is the packaging holding the ideas. When the paradigm is challenged or goes then there is the fear that everything spills and disappears like water into the sand.
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