Posted by Mike O on: 04.12.2007 /
Last year, I read a book called The Barbarian Way by Erwin McManus. In it, he talks about a new breed of Christian - a Christian less bound by the shackles of religion. He compares us to the Barbarians, but in a good way (at least from my perspective).
The intended audience for his book is a new type of Christian who feels an uneasiness deep down inside that something is missing - that there must be a grander purpose to all of this than just “be good till Jesus comes.”
But then I started reading it again last week, and an odd thought occurred to me. I wonder if non-Christians see Christianity the same way these “barbarian Christians” do.
Check out this excerpt …
Strangely enough, though, some who come to Jesus Christ seem to immediately and fully embrace this barbarian way. [...] They are not about religion or position. They have little patience for institutions or bureaucracies. Their lack of respect for tradition or ritual makes them seem uncivilized to those who love religion. When asked if they are Christians, their answer might surprisingly be no, they are passionate followers of Jesus Christ. They see Christianity as a world religion, in many ways no different from any other religious system. Whether Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Christianity, they’re not about religion; they’re about advancing the revolution Jesus started two thousand years ago.
When Christianity becomes just another religion, it focuses on what God requires. Just to keep people in line, we build our own Christian civilization and then demand that everyone who believes in Jesus become a good citizen. It’s hard to imagine that Jesus would endure the agony of the cross just to keep us in line.
Reading this as a Christian, I see exactly what he’s put his finger on. We’ve gotten distracted by rules and religion.
As a non-Christian, do you see it? Do you see something missing in Christianity, somehow a pointlessness or distractedness that has made it of little or no value to you?
There are many here who used to be Christians and now are not, and I see an opportunity to learn from you. What was it that brought you to the conclusion that Christianity was not all it was cracked up to be? My premise as a life-long believer is that it probably had something to do with boredom, meaningless rules, pointless lifestyles, stupid or mean people and maybe even bad theology. And since that has not even remotely been my experience, I wonder that if the Christians you knew and/or the Christianity you believed were somehow more relevant, useful and effective, you may still number yourselves among us. But somehow, it wasn’t the life-changing experience it was made out to be. It was unsatisfying, so you left.
Could it be that Christians are missing the point and if we weren’t so civilized, formalized and phony - if we were more “barbarian,” you wouldn’t have left us? Could it be that you left us because you *are* barbarian (in this sense) and couldn’t stand the civilization of the religion?
Here’s one more excerpt. Do you, as non-Christians, see this in Christians?
Somewhere along the way the movement of Jesus Christ became civilized as Christianity. We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing.
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Comment by: Ir (Helen)
1 04/12/07 1:09 PM | Comment Link |Mike, I stopped believing because I…stopped believing.
It’s a bit like this: suppose I used to go out with an umbrella up every day (well, I AM English, after all). A few years after moving to Chicagoland I think “Hmmm…I wonder if it’s actually raining?” So I do an experiment - I think “I’ll try not taking my umbrella and see if I get wet! If I do, then I can start taking it again. If not then there’s no reason to.” And it turned out, I didn’t get wet, so, that was the end of going out with my umbrella up every day.
You could ask me later “Did you stop taking it because it was heavy? Or you felt silly because your umbrella didn’t have a cool design?” No - it was just because I thought “maybe it isn’t raining - why don’t I go out without my umbrella and see if I get wet or not.”
That’s sort of how it was when I stopped praying. I figured I might start again if I noticed some adverse effects - but, I didn’t, so, that was that.
My issues were with the heart of all except the most liberal Christianity i.e. are the basic beliefs TRUE? Does God exist?
Comment by: Mike O
2 04/12/07 2:06 PM | Comment Link |That’s a great insight. It’s doesn’t quite map right, but I understand what you’re saying.
A better comparison would be that there’s some guy in England who will give you a billion dollars if you carry your umbrella every day. Eventually you begin to wonder whether that guy is really there and you try not carrying your umbrella and things go just fine. And come to think of it, there’s no proof that there ever was a guy with a billion dollars. So you try living without the umbrella, and you’ve found that it’s not so bad.
It’s different than just finding out it isn’t raining.
Comment by: Mike O
3 04/12/07 2:07 PM | Comment Link |Here’s my question, though. Do you see something lacking in Christianity? Did it turn out to be less than you had hoped for?
Comment by: Karen
4 04/12/07 2:11 PM | Comment Link |I find Christianity is of little value to me now because I don’t believe its central premises are true.
It wasn’t one thing that brought me to that conclusion, it was a whole series of intellectual realizations
that occurred to me over a period of several years and would be way too complicated to go into here.
Let me give you just one turning point I remember specifically: I had worked my way systematically through the standard Christian apologetics and found them lacking. I still clung to Christianity, however, due to personal spiritual experiences. Then I read something that shocked my socks off: People in all religions claim to have spiritual experiences, not just Christians. I know this sounds ridiculously naive, but I honestly had never realized that.
I simply could not bring myself to conclude that Christian spiritual experiences were authentic, but Jewish spiritual experiences, Muslim spiritual experiences, Hindu spiritual experiences, etc. were not authentic. That felt impossibly arrogant to me.
Either all subjective experiences of god are true, I concluded, or none of them are. At that point, I could no longer adhere to fundamentalist Christian doctrine that said only “our brand” of spiritual encounters were authentic.
Your premise couldn’t be more wrong, for me and the majority of former Christians I know. It wasn’t people, or rules or theology or even boredom that turned me off. (And yes, there was plenty of all of that over the years and I found ways to ignore it. It’s only after the fact that I went back and got pissed about all that, too.)
That’s not what motivated me. It was primarily an intellectual journey, and it was for the most part involuntary. I reached a point where I could no longer squelch my questions and I almost had to pursue them. Either that or repress myself into potential mental problems.
Absolutely not. My experience had nothing whatsoever to do with civility or formality of church. Aside from my early Presbyterian upbringing, I was in churches with very informal settings.
Mike, you might find it helpful to read some deconversion stories of ex-Christians. I think you’d get a more realistic understanding of where they/we are coming from. Here’s an excerpt from Dan Barker’s book, “Losing Faith in Faith.”
Comment by: Miko
5 04/12/07 3:24 PM | Comment Link |I’d agree with Ir (Helen) that the central problem is Christianity is that it is lacking in truth. If there is no god and Jesus never actually lived, there’s not much point in squabbling over the smaller details.
I think that Christians tend to focus on one small thread in their doctrine that begins with the birth of Jesus and ends with John 3:16 promising them eternal life. Since that sounds like a nice promise, most aren’t motivated to look further. When I look at the complete tapestry, I see claims that directly contradict scientific observation, brutal immorality in the Old Testament and to some extent the New, and an overarching antagonism towards rationality. Then the beatiful thread is suddenly buried by the ugly whole and its promise looks like nothing more than wishful thinking or a sardonic lie.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
6 04/12/07 4:22 PM | Comment Link |Mike - fair enough; but I think it was when I found out it didn’t seem to be raining that I began to question the guy with a billion dollar’s existence.
It was the disconnect between my beliefs and my experience which forced the issue. I won’t deny there was some emotional disconnect but the primary disconnect was intellectual. I wasn’t mad at the guy with a billion dollars; I just wasn’t able to deny that it really wasn’t raining in any way I could detect.
Mike, if weird versions of Christianity never put you off, why would they have been enough to put us off?
Comment by: Mike O
7 04/13/07 7:11 PM | Comment Link |Thanks for your candor, Karen. You said a couple of interesting things
That seems like a stretch. I can see how you would wonder if Christianity was true, but how does that get you to the “all or none” position? Isn’t that a bit like Pascal’s wager, in that only two options are presented when in actuality there are tons?
And now that you’re an atheist, you apparently came to the final conclusion that none of them are true. How did you get there?
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
8 04/14/07 11:12 AM | Comment Link |Mike, I’d be interested to hear your response to Karen’s comment that it felt impossibly arrogant to her that Christian spiritual experiences were authentic, but no-one else’s were.
Comment by: Karen
9 04/15/07 11:13 AM | Comment Link |Good question. I thought about it for a while and realized that if spiritual experiences are inherently subjective, there’s no good standard for judging which are authentic and which are not. So, what would allow me to decide something like, ‘All spiritual experiences that portray Jesus Christ as the son of God are authentic and all other spiritual experiences are not authentic”?
In other words, if spiritual experiences inherently cannot be verified and must be relied upon solely from personal accounts and individual interpretations of what happened, how could I humbly question the validity of a non-Christian’s spiritual experience? As I said, it felt uncomfortably arrogant to assume that MY inherently unverifiable, personal spiritual experiences were accurate, but a Buddhist’s experiences, or a Muslim’s experiences, or a Jew’s experiences were not.
Do you see what I mean? What’s the standard for coming to an objective conclusion about something that’s not amenable to objective evaluation? I couldn’t find one.
That left me in the uncomfortable position of saying, 1) “My upbringing in Christianity, which is heavily dependent on my family history and my geographic location, tells me that me and mine are right and the rest of the religions are wrong,” OR 2) “Hey, if they’re all based on subjective interpretations than I have to honestly conclude that they’re all equally true or they’re all equally false.”
Hmmm. I don’t have a problem with Pascal’s wager presenting only two options on the god question (though I do have other problems with Pascal’s wager). Pascal posited that there either is a god or there is not. I’m not sure that I see tons of other options on that question, but maybe I’m not thinking hard enough. What other options do you see?
Long, long complicated story, Mike O. I tried to suss out some of it a few months ago in this thread over on the DB.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
10 04/15/07 3:07 PM | Comment Link |[Irrelevant aside] Hey, that’s the first time I’ve heard ’suss out’ from an American!
I used to say that when I hadn’t lived here so long and people never understood so I dropped it from my vocabulary. It’s fun to see someone use it again - thanks Karen :)
Comment by: Karen
11 04/15/07 7:16 PM | Comment Link |Hee, hee. I’m a big Joss Whedon fan (Buffy, Angel, Firefly). He’s an American but grew up in England, so his characters use British-isms like “suss out” all the time. I guess I’ve picked up a few, too!
;-)
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
12 04/16/07 5:58 AM | Comment Link |Karen, somehow I thought you might have picked it up from a British author or TV show :)
Comment by: Mike O
13 04/17/07 11:18 AM | Comment Link |Regarding this …
and this …
Arrogance is an attitude, not a belief system. Think, instead, of a country club where you have to fit some criteria to be a member. Are the members arrogant simply because they belong to an exclusive country club? Are people who fly 1st class arrogant simply because they fly 1st class? No, and neither are Christians arrogant simply because we believe we are right. Arrogance is an attitude.
I believe that if someone is arrogant, they will be arrogant regardless of whether they’re a christian or not.
Interestingly, I saw this bumper sticker just yesterday on my way home from work
I didn’t think of it yesterday, but I think the thing that bumper sticker is railing against is arrogant people, not an arrogant belief system.
Karen, you make it sound like arrogance is a byproduct of Christianity, when really it’s just a byproduct of some of it’s adherants. Again, arrogance is an attitude.
I can’t speak for all Christians (that would be mighty arrogant of me, woudln’t it :)), but I don’t believe Christians are any better than anyone else. While I do believe all the teachings of our faith and we are “saved” and all that, Christians are not “better people” than non-Christians.
I just read this verse the other day and I think it applies here.
To me, this is saying “Look, here are the qualities I want my people to have. And while you’re at it, don’t forget where I found you.”
We’re the same. Christianity is made up of good people and bad people. Non-Christianity is made up of good people and bad people. Atheism is made up of good people and bad people.
The difference between Christians and everyone else isn’t that we’re better than everyone else(there’s your arrogance), we’re not. We just believe God has a single, specific path to heaven and we want to be on it.
But that doesn’t make me a better person in my eyes or His. He wants us all to follow him (I believe). Arrogance would be for me to say he wants me to follow him, but not you because you’re not good enough, and nothing could be further from the truth.
Christians can be arrogant, yes. For sure. But that’s because of their nature, not Christ’s.
Comment by: Stephan
14 04/17/07 1:40 PM | Comment Link |I find it curious that atheists in general will say that a negative church experience was not what drove them away from Christianity, but almost every one of them here has come from a self-described fundamentalist background. They follow the same credo I hear from fundamentalists - “Either it’s all true, or none of it is true!”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again - atheists have more in common with fundamentalist Christians than I do.
Maybe a great number of spiritual experiences, whether they be Hindu, Moslem, Jewish, Christian or whatever, are valid. Maybe God is trying to speak to everyone in the language most suited to their experience. After all, if God can’t speak through Islam, how will He speak to most people is the Middle East? If God can’t speak through Hinduism, how will He speak to those in the Far East? If God can’t speak through Christianity, how will He speak to most in the West? Maybe His goal is not to signify which one is the right, but to point everyone in the most right direction.
And Helen, if it starts raining again I hope you remember where you left your umbrella.
Comment by: Karen
15 04/17/07 4:18 PM | Comment Link |Thanks for your response, Mike O. I think you’ve misunderstood one of my points here, and it’s likely because I perhaps used confusing terminology:
I was not talking about personal, individual arrogance, but rather about institutional arrogance.
Yes, there are personally arrogant theists and personally arrogant atheists. There are humble theists and humble atheists. That’s not what I’m talking about here.
When I say “it felt too arrogant” for me to believe Christian spiritual experiences while disbelieving non-Christian spiritual experiences I mean that I felt Christianity (and I as a Christian) had no rational basis for excluding some self-reported religious experiences while accepting others. Doing that - with no real justification other than my own spiritual background and bias - feels wrong, and arrogant, to me. That’s not to say I’m an arrogant person (I hope I’m not), it’s to say that’s an arrogant claim on the part of one institutional religion, and one I could no longer accept.
By the way, I am not limiting this criticism to Christianity. Any religion that claims exclusivity for its own beliefs and experiences - despite the fact that there’s no real evidence for any one position over another - is guilty of insitutional arrogance, in my view.
And how do you know for sure that you’re on that single, specific path? After all, religious belief is heavily dependent on family background and geography, right? So if you’d been born in Pakistan to a Muslim family and raised with the Islamic faith, wouldn’t you believe exactly the same thing - except you’d be following the prophet, praying five times a day and dreaming of making the hajj, right?
Why conclude that because you were born in a Christian country where you were exposed most heavily to Christianity during your formative years, that yours is the single “right” way to god and the others are wrong?
Comment by: Karen
16 04/17/07 4:26 PM | Comment Link |Stephan
I don’t think that’s accurate. MTran, who I think posts here occasionally, came from a liberal Christian background. I don’t recall that Siamang came from a fundamentalist background. I actually know several atheists who started out life in moderate or liberal churches and eventually concluded they did not believe in god, so fundamentalism isn’t the only factor involved.
Exactly. Which is why I said above that I finally reached the point where I considered that all spiritual experiences could be equally true. While I eventually rejected that proposition, I did consider it to be a logically valid possibility.
It was the “we’re totally right and you guys are deceived by Satan” belief that I rejected.
Given Helen’s commitment to dialoguing with believers 24/7, I’m sure she’s got plenty of access to her “umbrella” in case of a storm. :-)
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
17 04/17/07 6:03 PM | Comment Link |Stephan and Mike, regarding ‘all or nothing’ - God’s existence is an all or nothing; God cannot ‘half’ exist.
It doesn’t matter how much you say to atheists “Maybe there’s a better form of Christianity out there that you missed” - if you don’t do something that changes their lack of belief in God, it’s not going to be something they can ascribe to.
Stephan and Karen: yes, I’m sure I could find my umbrella. It’s probably right next to my two big bookshelves of Bibles and Christian books ;-)
Comment by: Stephan
18 04/18/07 10:28 AM | Comment Link |Helen, I am not saying that there is room for grey when it comes to God’s existence, but there is room for how God might exist.
It seems like fundamentalists and atheists both make a list of attributes God must have, and if he meet all of these expectations He cannot exist. isaone is great at this. He defines God as A+B+C, then proves and A cannot be true, therefore there is no God.
But what if the list is incomplete? Or only partially correct? Atheists and fundamentalists do not allow for this. I am pretty confident that my image of God is incomplete and incorrect in many ways, but that does not make me think He does not exist. And if I find out some of my assumptions are untrue it will not destroy my faith. On the contrary, it will build my faith to be pointed in a more true direction.
I can respect a seeking agnostic - someone who does not know the truth but is at least willing to explore possibilities. I have a problem with atheists who have simply given up the search. They have either determined that God does not exist (which is a faith claim) or that it’s too hard to figure out so they’re just not going to try anymore. That strikes me as being intellectually and spiritually lazy on a matter of extreme importance.
The fact that you continue to communicate with Christians here makes me think that you have not totally given up. You seem to still believe there might be some value in personal religious experience, but you just don’t see it for yourself right now. Is that close to being accurate?
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
19 04/18/07 11:18 AM | Comment Link |Stephan wrote:
Ummm…I don’t have an opinion whether religious experience per se has value. That’s why I’m neither on a crusade to encourage or discourage it.
I talk to people, Christians, atheists and people in-between because I find them interesting.
I find that Christians don’t generally have anything new to say to me about their faith - and since it didn’t make any difference to my own doubts last time I heard it, I don’t have high expectations that it will if they say it again. I’m not going to put my fingers in my ears if a Christian comes along who has something different to say but in practice that doesn’t seem to be happening.
I see what’s wrong with the logic of “this very specific portrayal of God is wrong, therefore God cannot exist”.
Here’s where I’m at: I’ve found no concept of a personal God (i.e. God is a person with thoughts etc) which a) I can resolve into what makes coherent sense to me b) I see substantive evidence for.
Am I right in assuming that rules out any form of Christianity that you or Mike would accept as real/true Christianity?
Or is there some form of Christianity you accept as real/true which has no personal God in it?
Comment by: Stephan
20 04/18/07 1:43 PM | Comment Link |Helen asked:
I think this is possible. I personally believe God is far more distant that most Christians believe. I think this is both what necessitated the incarnation and also what makes the incarnation even more amazing. An infinitely unreachable God became a finite human being in order to communicate His nature to us. The only reasonable way God could find to relate to us was to become one of us.
Of course, this requires you to believe in the incarnation, which is a stretch for some people. It requires a belief in some form on conscious deity which desires a response from its creation.
I don’t think it requires a belief in the inerrancy of scripture or even a great many of the church’s historical teachings.
It requires a focus on the person of Jesus Christ and the principles he embodied, most notably grace.
Comment by: Karen
21 04/18/07 2:54 PM | Comment Link |We must know very different atheists. I don’t know any atheists who have conclusively “given up the search.” They are all open to evidence of god if it is found; they just don’t see any as of now.
I certainly don’t know any atheists - online or offline - that I’d call “intellectually lazy.” Indeed, the atheists I know are among the most intellectually vigorous and curious and questioning people I’ve ever met!
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
22 04/18/07 3:37 PM | Comment Link |But Stephan, you just described a God who is absolutely a person. I was asking if there’s such a thing in your view as Christianity which doesn’t include a personal God.
By personal I didn’t mean ‘not distant’ - I meant, ‘a person’.
And anyway if God is Jesus then that means God is a person.
So I still want to know, is there any form of Christianity you accept as real/true which doesn’t have a God who is a person in it?
Comment by: Stephan
23 04/19/07 8:34 AM | Comment Link |Well, since Christianity has the word “Christ” in it, I don’t see how you could be a Christian without a belief in the incarnation.
You could certainly try to be a follower of Jesus and live by the principles that He taught, but without a belief that He was God it’s just philosophy, not religion. It would be similar to being a follower of Abraham Lincoln or Ghandi or Martin Luther King, Jr.. It might be a good thing, but it does not require faith, and I don’t think you could call it Christianity.
Why do you ask?
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
24 04/19/07 10:38 AM | Comment Link |Stephan wrote;
I asked because of your comments about people who have problems with one thing and unnecessarily throw out more than that.
And so I was asking, given what I have problems with, if I just throw that out (or rather, put it away in a safe place in case I need it back again someday), is it possible for me to be left with anything you would call Christianity? I was thinking your answer was ‘no’ and your most recent response does seems to indicate ‘no’.
And Mike’s original post implied a similar question (imo): is it possible to reject what we reject but keep true Christianity?
Again, I don’t think it’s possible given what I reject - or to say it in the way I prefer, am unable to affirm.
Comment by: Stephan
25 04/19/07 11:09 AM | Comment Link |Helen, I think that difference is important, but I think most atheists I have talked to here have seen “unable to affirm” as a step toward “reject”. The longer they have been an atheist the more firmly the reject anything theistic.
Karen, regarding your being open to new evidence, I would say that there is plenty there. Enough for me and many other people, and enough for you at one point in your life. If you don’t react to what is already in front of you, I don’t see that anything else short of a flaming message in the sky would do it.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
26 04/19/07 3:23 PM | Comment Link |Stephan, the reality is that the same things which are sufficient evidence for you are not sufficient evidence for Karen or me or the other atheists here.
We’re not telling you that you are closed to evidence so please don’t say it about us.
Comment by: Stephan
27 04/23/07 8:51 AM | Comment Link |Helen, I calls ‘em and I sees ‘em. Most atheists I have conversed with here require a pretty high level of proof, along the lines of something for which there could be no possible natural explanation. That sets the bar pretty high. I’m sure God could provide that evidence if He wanted to, but why should He, when he has put enough out there for people to decide for themselves. Millions of people find it convincing, as did you and Karen at one time.
God laid out some pretty conclusive proof in the life of Jesus but the Pharisees were not convinced. They had reasons (power, pride, community standing) not to believe. What are your reasons?
Comment by: Karen
28 04/23/07 9:15 AM | Comment Link |Um … because he’s supposedly done it before, during bible times, and it apparently worked then?
… because he “so loved the world” that he sacrificed himself to save it (which is a pretty big investment)?
… because some people are natural skeptics and analyzers (Eliza comes to mind) and need real evidence in order to believe?
Surely, as you mention, he could easily provide that if he truly wanted everyone to believe. So why doesn’t he? You make it sound like he’s too busy or can’t be bothered or he’s annoyed with people who require a higher standard of proof.
That’s an odd portrait of a loving god.
Comment by: Stephan
29 04/23/07 11:27 AM | Comment Link |Karen,
That level of proof no longer requires faith and messes with free will, both areas that God (in my opinion) tries to avoid.
I say that realizing that you have heard it before and that you won’t find it at all convincing. You appear to be quite satisfied with your disbelief and I don’t believe there is anything I could say to change that.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
30 04/24/07 6:33 AM | Comment Link |Stephan wrote
“Why should I?” doesn’t seem to me like something a God who is “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” would say; those sound more like the words of a petulant kid to me.
I did my best to include reasons in the following - feel free to read them (maybe you already have read some of them) if you’d like to know more about my change in faith.