It's a miracle!

One of the downsides of turning 50 years old is the mysterious aches and pains in my body.  I am getting them more often.  I was out on my usual 11km desert run on Monday afternoon.  About midway through, there is a small hill that I have to struggle up.  Every time I hit the top, I touch a large rock that I use as a landmark, then lift my arms and give a victory yell.  Hey, it’s a tough run, and it’s my way of celebrating.

Monday, I ran up the troublesome hill, panted for air, lifted my arms and, before I gave my victory yell I felt a sudden, sharp pain in my left shoulder.  My victory yell was more of a surprised grunt.  I injured my arm by just lifting it?  You gotta be kidding me!  Most runners get injured in the knees and hips.  Not the shoulders!

The pain was too intense for me to get much sleep that night.  I went for another shorter run on Tuesday night, just because I am a creature of habit.  Big mistake.  That night, the pain went up the left side of my neck, down my left shoulder blade and all the way down to my left elbow.  Finding a comfortable sleeping position that night was impossible.

I hesitated going to the doctor because the pain was not severe enough to incapacitate me.  Besides, I knew what the doctor would say.  Just rest the arm, do not strain it, and here is something to ease the pain.  Rosemary convinced me to at least get it X-rayed to see if something was torn.  I went to a doctor that specialized in sports medicine.  I was right.  He told me, “Nothing is torn.  Just rest the arm, do not strain it, and here is some good stuff for the pain.”  Not a big deal.  The biggest hindrance for me is getting comfortable sleep.  The layoff from my usual exercise routine is difficult for me, but I was not able to run.  Running hurts.

Well, it did until this morning.  I woke up with the same nagging pain in my shoulder.  I took a hot shower.  Then, in an instant, the pain vanished.  It simply vanished as quickly and mysteriously as it appeared.  I rotated my arm and turned my shoulder around its full range of motion.  Amazing – the pain is gone!  Now 10 hours later, the pain has still not returned.  I plan on running again tomorrow if I remain free from pain.

Back when I was a believing Christian, how many times did I pray for relief from my headaches, sore backs and common colds?  How many times did I take aspirin, antihistamine and pain killers, and attribute any sign of the drug’s power to my all-mighty Great Physician?  How many times did I thank God for His miraculous power and healing touch?  I did these more times than I can remember.

If I were still a Christian, I know I would have prayed just as fervently for relief from my strained shoulder.  I would have taken any mild relief as assurance of answered prayer.  But a sudden cessation of all pain as I have experienced just this morning?  I would have believed that to have been a miracle.  No doubt about it.  I admit that I have no explanation for why my shoulder is suddenly pain free, just as I have no explanation for why it got hurt in the first place.  But to the Christian, no explanation is the same as a miraculous explanation.  There is no explanation for why this happened!  So Jesus is the only explanation!  Miracles do exist, and I can prove it!  One happened to me just this morning!  I will stand up in church and testify when the pastor asks for a Praise Report.

Now what do I think as a non-believer?  I have no idea, but I called my mom this morning for Mother’s Day, and I think she had the best answer.  “Sudden aches and pains that come and go?  Well, you are 50 years old now…”

Who needs miracles when you have mom?

Conversions and De-converions - Slash and Burn

Penchansky’s Twilight of the Gods: Polytheism in the Hebrew Bible was the first book in my new journey.  It was exhilarating.  I was reading things about my Bible that I never could have imagined.  Polytheism?  The Bible has more than one god?  Absolutely – Penchansky just had to show me where to look, and I definitely found that polytheism is in there.  Inconceivable!  I was not convinced by everything Penchansky or anybody else said for the sake of it being counter to anything I had known before.  But I came to understand that there was a possibility that everything I had understood about God, about Jesus, the Bible, everything had another side to the story.  I was discovering that there was so much more that I had never learned from a single pastor or Bible teacher, and that I would never learn unless I ignored all the warnings of ‘worldly wisdom’ from Pastor Skip, went to the library myself and did my own digging.

I was 42 years old, and I was as enthused as any youngster who was on the verge of an exciting intellectual discovery.  I remember the thrill of first reading about and understanding Chaos Theory or Quantum Mechanics some fifteen years before.  There was once a time when I had stayed up late into the night reading and pondering on this newly discovered knowledge that few other people could claim to understand.  It was more than any of my family, friends or anybody I had grown up with had ever known before, and that had made anything that challenged what I thought I knew about the world to be a thrilling intellectual adventure.  It was the thrill of having my mind expanded, my vistas broadened, and learning something that only a privileged few who put forth the effort could know.  I felt that thrill again in early 2006, when everything I thought I knew about my religious beliefs was rattled from the foundation.  I felt the pull of my own ignorance.  The more I learned, the more insignificant I felt.  There was more out there in the world than I could ever hope to absorb.  I simply could not get enough.

I was not a young, angry rebel who was looking for a way to shake off the confines of my religion.  I had no desire to start ‘living a life of sin’, as so many offended Christians would imagine of me.  None of these supposed motivations were anywhere on my radar.  ‘Sinning’ was not my motivation.  I had just turned 42 years old.  It was my first year of marriage to a woman I desperately loved.  I was attending two different churches, keeping close to my Fundamentalist faith, and learning to appreciate Rosemary’s Catholic traditions.  We were hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, and I loved all the people we met from the two churches we attended.  I had no reason to rebel against anything in my life.  But I had to face the fact that Christianity, as I knew it, was not working in my life anymore.   As much as I had tried to deny it, it had not worked in years.   I could no longer naively accept what I was being told from the pulpit, as I once had.  But to cut my skepticism even deeper, I now could no longer naively accept what was even in the Bible itself!  The very Fountainhead of my Faith, the Holy Scriptures, also had to come under my intense scrutiny. 

Penchansky challenged me to try reading the Genesis story of Adam and Eve, not as a historical or theological description of mankind’s Fall into a state of Original Sin, but as mythology no different from any other mythology of antiquity.  Instead of accepting my religion’s official interpretation of this sacred story as the origin of mankind’s eternal and defiant separation from God Almighty and the corruption of the natural order, I tried reading the story only as it stood in the text.  Try imagining Yahweh as only one in a pantheon of deities who created humans for the tending of His garden.  Inside His garden is a magical tree, the fruit of which gives the innocent couple a sense of self-aware morality.  The curses that Yahweh inflicts on his creatures are myths to explain why men must work and toil in life, why women must labor in childbirth and be subservient to men, and why snakes crawl around with no legs.  I had fought for years to somehow interpret the Adam and Eve story in a way that would not violate either my imposed religious dogma of Original Sin, or my scientific understanding of evolution and the origins of Homo Sapiens.  Each attempt at reconciliation was so unsuccessful, that over time I simply resorted to the ‘somehow – someway’ interpretation that they both must be simultaneously true.  Penchansky challenged me to look at the same story as ancient, polytheistic myth, no different from the fantastic myths of the Greeks and Romans.  I had long thought that the story fell in some genre of inspired myth, but one that ultimately pointed to Christian doctrine.  But if I tried, even just for the sake of argument, not to impose later Christian dogma onto the ancient story of Adam and Eve, and just let the story speak for itself, the interpretation of the text became simple and obvious.  Suddenly, the story made sense.  It worked.  It fit perfectly within a pre-scientific world that routinely generated myths to explain natural phenomena.  So much the worse for that part of Christian dogma.  Christian dogma was what I was scrutinizing.  If it was not working, I figured – tough luck.  It had to go.  If I could find a simpler model, a less contrived explanation to what had been impossible to put together, I figured that one was more likely to be true. 

So, one chip at a time, inspiration and inerrancy was removed from the Bible.  From here, it seemed that everything about my Christian religion collapsed all at once.  The doctrine of the Biblical Inerrancy was very fast to go.  I had seen ‘alleged’ contradictions in the Bible, but I had been trained with plenty of apologetic talking points that would save my Bible from embarrassment.  It was not until I started reading library books, then buying them for myself, that I discovered just how many problems there really were with the Biblical text, and just how ludicrous most of my canned responses to them were.  Biblical inerrancy went fast.  I was still a Christian, at least I still felt like one, but I knew my Faith was going to go through a rapid transformation.  I was vaguely aware by this time that I might even have to discard my Faith completely.  For some reason, I do not remember being particularly afraid.  I knew that my intentions were honest and sincere.  I knew that I was not looking for an excuse to sin.  I knew that I did not hate God.  I was just fed up with being confused, miserable, and forcing myself to settle with unsatisfactory answers.  I just wanted to get to the bottom of what my religion was really all about and to cut through the lies that I knew I was being fed from the pulpit.

I was more afraid of my friends and family than I was of God.  Rosemary was certainly concerned.  Since she was a Catholic, I don’t think she ever understood my bizarre obsession with understanding the Bible.  It seemed that every day, my reading and research led me to some new unsolvable problem with Biblical inerrancy.  After enumerating everything I had just discovered about the contradictions, for instance, between the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ trail and crucifixion, my suffering wife would just seek to make peace rather than argue. 

Rosemary could tell me, “Yes, yes, they wrote their gospel stories differently, didn’t they?  Maybe they just wrote from their own perspectives, and could never get all the tiny details exactly the same.  I am sure those were busy times with lots of confusion and intrigues.  Nobody could have gotten it exactly right!”  I had by then learned that there were plenty of reasons why the differences between the four Gospels should be concerning to a person trying to preserve inerrancy, but I never argued with her.  I just did my best to listen to her point of view, and take from it what I could.  But she really did not know what to say to me.  She did not know what it would take to ease my doubts.  She had been raised in a religious environment that emphasized Faith as the ultimate virtue, and unlike my tradition, never looked to the Bible for evidence of her Faith.  Looking for evidence would make her a doubter.  If she was to be a Catholic, she was to believe, Bible or no Bible, evidence or no evidence, and that was all there was to it.  She did not understand why I would begin doubting after finding Biblical discrepancies or contradictions.  To her, such things were unimportant and irrelevant.  I did my best to explain to her that I was on my own religious and spiritual quest.  I needed to find out what was best for me, and what I could understand as truth to my best satisfaction.  I believed that to be the best husband that I could be, I needed to be honest with my convictions and with her.  Although she was concerned for me, I tried to reassure her that my beliefs were mine alone, and I would never force her to believe exactly as I did.  Rosemary was incredibly patient with me during this time.  I am sure it was a stressful situation for her.  We had married with different religious traditions from the start.  Now less than a year into our marriage, she could tell I was headed for some kind of drastic change.

We continued hosting weekly Bible studies in our home, but I think everybody in the room was feeling the tensions of my changing beliefs.  I never kept any thought or doubt secret from Rosemary.  I was not ashamed to show her the books that I was then reading.  But I kept everything secret from my Bible study group and anybody else at La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church.  Instead of venting my doubts to my Bible study group, I presented them with some challenges that I had suddenly been made aware of to see how any one of them would react.  Many Fundamentalists are particularly sensitive to the charge that their Scriptures contain contradictions, so every now and again I thought I would challenge the members of my Bible study group with a bit of a problem.  Inevitably, the only person who responded to my challenges was our group leader, Dave.  Everybody else sat in tense silence.  A typical challenge would go something like:

Me: I know that there are no real contradictions in the Bible, only ‘seeming’ contradictions, so what is your opinion of salvation by grace versus salvation by works.  I grew up believing in Grace Alone, but Rosemary grew up as a Catholic, and that God’s grace allows us to do good works, but ultimately we have to work out our own salvation.  So who is right?

John: The Bible says that we are saved by grace alone.

Me: What about the problem between Paul in Romans and James.  I read both, and it really like they are saying two different things.

John:  No.  Paul is saying that we are saved by God’s grace.  James is saying that our works are the evidence that we are saved through God’s grace.

Of course I had heard this apologetic countless times before, but I did not want to needlessly press the issue with my study group.  I was not trying to cause problems with them, or cause any of them to doubt with me.  I was just interested to see if they had anything new or more compelling to offer than the usual apologetics that I was finding increasingly unconvincing.  I never told my group that I had noticed the common strategy of ironing over contradictions by inserting things into the Biblical text that were not there.  I figured that the doubts swimming in my head were far beyond anything my poor group was equipped to deal with.  Both Paul and James reference Abraham as a model of salvation, but Paul uses that model to say, explicitly, that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:24).  James uses that same model to say, explicitly, that we “see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only.” (James 2:24).   My study group responded to this nasty theological problem with the common apologetic tactic of making James say things that I did not see in the text of his epistle. 

I felt that if there was this much controversy, with my Fundamentalist traditions interpreting these texts one way, and Rosemary’s Catholic traditions interpreting them differently, then what good reason did I have to choose one interpretation over the other?  What good reason did anybody have to choose a favored interpretation of ambiguous texts, except by appealing to a favored religious tradition?  But even if my friends were right, and James said that works were only an evidence that we were in fact saved by Faith alone, how do we Christians know how many good works are enough to count as evidence of our own salvation?  I knew plenty of non-Christians, especially in my university years, who were definitely not Christians, but whose outward actions made them indistinguishable from Christians.  So if works are the evidence of salvation in a Christian, and the Christian finds himself not performing enough works that he feels would be a manifest result of his Faith, he will be forced to perform more good works, just to prove he is in fact saved!  I had struggled with this problem many times over the years.  I had to believe that I was saved only through my Faith in Jesus, and not to rely on my good works for salvation.  But if I did not do enough good works, I did not have solid evidence that I was in fact being sanctified into the image of Christ.  So I would have to perform more good works to demonstrate my sanctification.  As a result chasing my tail like this, I could not tell the difference between works and faith.  It was all just ridiculous semantics that I was basing my salvation on.  I feared that my home Bible study group would suspect my doubts had increased to an unacceptable level.

But what about my Christian friends?  If they wanted to say they were saved, and that their good works were evidence of salvation, I should have expected to see that evidence manifest in how they lived their lives.  But from what I saw, their morality was nothing markedly different from anything saw in the typical, non-believing heathen.  If anybody stood out as moral paragons, it was some of my Catholic friends who had devoted enormous amounts of effort and sacrifice into border justice, all done in the name of Christ.  These were the same Christians who criticized my strong focus on the Bible.  Yet, my Fundamentalist friends constantly spoke of grace, faith, and our works manifesting the sanctifying work of the Spirit, yet they evidenced nothing that demonstrated some supernatural Force compelling them to divine service.  Outside of church and Bible study, they acted pretty much the same as anybody else.  Where was this ‘works as evidence’ of divine grace?  If Christians were in fact indistinguishable from non-Christians, how could their works be any evidence of their supposed salvation? 

Our home Bible study had stagnated into a half hour or so of exploring a theme in the Bible, asking everybody to volunteer their opinions on a few selected scriptures, then gather group prayer.  How many decades had I spent repeating this same material over and over again?  How many different ways can we repeat the constant refrain – we are sinners, Jesus is the Savior, He died to bare our sins, and we now need to accept His salvation?  How many times must we dredge up Scriptures that convict us to love our neighbor, to seek His higher glory, to pray without ceasing, etc, etc?  I felt that there were only so many ways to express the same things over and over again, and I was afraid that some of the more, shall we say, emotionally needy believers in our small study group were leaning far too heavily on the wisdom of our group leader, John.  With a limited number of scriptures that could be referred to in a finite book like the Bible, I felt that stagnation was inevitable, and these people had become complacent in constantly hearing the same thing.  They asked questions of our group leader, but I suspect they knew what the answers were before they asked, and would have been disappointed if they received an answer that they did not expect.  Complacency in my Faith was the one thing that I was trying to escape from.  Fed up and frustrated with this seeming over-reliance on Faith at the expense of Works, I decided to test my home study group with another kind of challenge.  

Martin Luther King Day had just passed, so I decided to read a small excerpt from Dr. King’s classic of activist literature, his powerful Letter from Birmingham Jail.  I had just recently finished reading a biography of his life, and I was gripped by how much he had sacrificed for the cause of racial justice, and by how powerfully he was empowered by his religious beliefs.  In 1963, King was arrested for protesting segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama.  While he was in jail, eight white pastors from around the state wrote the local Birmingham newspaper, and editorialized against King’s activism.  They figured he should be a good preacher, stay behind the pulpit, and keep his nose out of racial justice and activism.  In response, King wrote from solitary confinement what came to be known as Letter from Birmingham Jail on scraps of paper, and smuggled out by his lawyer bit by bit.  King’s letter detailed his commitment to using the Church as an empowered vehicle that I thought made our comfortable Christian apathy pathetic in comparison.   Would my fellow Christians be as affected by Dr. King’s letter as I was?  I gave my study group a short background of the history behind Dr. King’s letter, then read to them this excerpt:

There was a time when the church was very powerful in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside agitators”‘ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “a colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

I told them that this letter had a powerful effect on me, and I waited for their response.  I was not expecting an instant moral commitment to social justice.  I was just expecting a comment for discussion.  Perhaps somebody in my group could tell me what Dr. King’s letter and message had to say about our modern church, specifically ours, who had the same concerns of falling into apathy and irrelevance.  What I did not expect was the room full of blank stares and tepid nods of accent and agreement.  I could not even get an honest opinion from these people who believed that their morality and works were manifest evidence of their personal salvation.  These people had no desire or intention to have their convictions challenged, even by a fellow Christian like Martin Luther King!  They clearly were not interested in Spiritual growth or any kind of moral challenge.  My spiritually empowered and sanctified Christian brethren only wanted to coddle themselves up to the same familiar, warm and simmering pot of stewed ingredients that they had been born and raised with.  I loved them all, but I had to be honest with what I was seeing.  The evidence of works that the Spirit had made manifest in these fellow Christians was nothing more than a pathetic dependence on comfort food.  These people had nothing to offer me, and I did not want to be content with their spiritual complacency.  I was searching because I was no longer satisfied with living a spiritual life of doubts, concerns and questions.  The familiar Fundamentalism of my home Bible study group and La Puerta del Cielo Baptist Church had nothing more to offer me.

Simultaneous with these events was my discovery of the Internet.  I have never been especially enamored of electronic gadgets in my house.  I did have a boom-box to listen to music, but that is about where the technology ended.  In 2006, I still had my rotary telephone and no television.  I certainly did not have a home computer!  Rosemary would have none of my aversion to technology, and had the Internet installed in our house around the time we started hosting the weekly Bible studies.  I had used the Internet quite a bit as a research tool at work and when I was attending university.  I had no intention or desire of ever using it for personal use, until I saw a need to do some personally important research.  I discovered that there was an endless supply of the apologetics that I had come to despise.  I discovered that Chuck Missler was still around, and still selling the ‘briefing packages’ that I had practically memorized back in the early ‘90s.  I already knew that stuff.  I needed to be challenged with something different.  I remember naively typing ‘Bible Contradictions’ into the search engine.  What a mammoth mistake that was!  I discovered that there were a lot of irrational and unwarranted criticisms of Christianity that seemed to come from very angry people.  I did my best to avoid emotional ranting that contained obvious lies.  But I eventually found two sites that were instrumental in my ultimate departure from Christianity.

Infidels.org introduced me to the works of Robert Ingersoll.  I had never heard of Ingersoll, and had no idea who he was when I started browsing the lectures stored at infidels.org.  Robert Ingersoll, polemicist and orator, toured the United States during the turn of the century, back during the time when public lectures were a form of entertainment.  I opened something from Ingersoll called Heretics and Hericies, only one of dozens of his public lectures in print, and started reading:

Whoever has an opinion of his own, and honestly expresses it, will be guilty of heresy. Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak. This word was born of the hatred, arrogance and cruelty of those who love their enemies, and who, when smitten on one cheek, turn the other. This word was born of intellectual slavery in the feudal ages of thought. It was an epithet used in the place of argument. From the commencement of the Christian era, every art has been exhausted and every conceivable punishment inflicted to force all people to hold the same religious opinions. This effort was born of the idea that a certain belief was necessary to the salvation of the soul. Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes. God is supposed to hate with an infinite and implacable hatred, every heretic upon the earth, and the heretics who have died are supposed at this moment to be suffering the agonies of the damned. The church persecutes the living and her God burns, for all eternity, the dead…

I had a visceral gut reaction to what I was reading.  It felt like an emotional gag reflex.  It was one of the very few times that I was offended by the blasphemy of what I was reading.  I felt the strong urge to choke on what I was reading, to look away from the horrors of heresy.  No!  I had to force myself to override the instinct to look away from what was on the page before me, and rather ask myself if there was anything in Ingersoll’s shocking words that were not accurate.  Was my revulsion due to reading lies and distortions, or was I reading ugly truth?  Is it not true that, for instance, “Christ taught, and the church still teaches that unbelief is the blackest of crimes”?  Was Ingersoll correct when he said, “Heresy is what the minority believe; it is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the weak”?  I knew very well about purges and inquisitions of the past.  But even if heretics are not now persecuted to the extent that they were in the past, Ingersoll was still correct about the Church’s hatred of heresies.  After all, why was I hiding my own heretical thoughts and opinions from my small Bible study group?  Was I not afraid of their hatred of my unorthodox thoughts?  I had to accept that Ingersoll was not stretching the truth.  He was expressing Christianity’s hatred of heresies and originality and freethought in highly charged and polemical prose.  This is what public speakers do.  It did not make it any less true.  I was fascinated with what critical evaluation of Christian texts and traditions had to offer, and how it expanded my mind to new ideas about my Faith.  But the bluntness of Ingersoll’s polemics forced me not to sugar-coat what the outcomes of my changing Faith really were, and where I was headed.  I was becoming the subject of countless condemning sermons from the pulpit.  I was becoming a heretic.  I may have been intimidated by my fellow Christians, but I was no longer afraid of God.  Was I becoming hard of heart, like Pharaoh’s defiance against God?  Was I in the process of being handed over to a reprobate mind?  Perhaps, but I had lost all my guilt and fear of Divine judges.  I was not afraid of Him because I knew I was being honest.  If anything, I knew that my integrity was intact.

One other website that I must mention, pummeled my senses with a blunt question - Why won't God heal amputees?  Reading in particular a long article which addressed this question, brought me back nearly twenty years before to a Calvary Chapel service in which believers were sharing their stories of miraculous healing.  As I have written about in a previous article of this series, one man shared how he had prayed for the healing of a friend’s severed hand.  When he shared with us that he had seen that hand grow back with his very eyes, Pastor Skip quickly intervened to quiet his obviously deluded testimony and end the sharing of miraculous stories.  It seemed strange to me at the time why everybody would believe stories of healed colds, bad backs, even cancer remission, or anything else that had one thing in common - that any testimony could conceivably occur with no miraculous intervention.  But nobody, not me, not even Pastor Skip, believed a sincere, faithful and enthusiastic story that involved something truly miraculous.  I was finally ready to confront the question of why Christians never pray for the healing of amputees, the mentally retarded, the Alzheimer patient, or any other person in which there was no chance of natural remission.  When the question was raised in Calvary Chapel, I ignored the obvious implications, and brushed them under a rug.  But fifteen years later, I was finally ready to examine those questions again.  I pulled them back out from the rug and the answers were immediately obvious to me.  Christians, at least every Christian I had ever personally encountered, only prayed for things that would take no faith to believe would be answered.  Nobody prayed for the healing of our Bible study leader’s autistic son.  Nobody ever prays for the regeneration of severed limbs.  Nobody ever prays for new skin on a 3^rd degree burn patient.  We all know that those prayers will never be answered.  But why shouldn’t they be answered?  The entire Universe will be just as insignificant as a speck of lint to a Being of infinite scope.   Healing a head cold and healing a congenital birth defect should be pretty much the same thing to a Creature of unlimited power.  So why, why did we never pray for those miraculous things that would unquestionably demonstrate His existence and majesty?  Why shouldn’t a prayer for the resurrection of a still-born fetus be just as common as a prayer for the relief of an aching back?  

I knew the answer why.  I think that deep down, we all knew the answer why, and we always knew it.  But it took me decades to accept that grim fact of my Faith in the Almighty.  We never prayed those prayers because we knew they would never be answered.  We only prayed for those things which would not make a mockery of our magical genie in the bottle.  We only prayed for those things that take no faith at all.  We even append each prayer with ‘…but Your will be done’ just in case, because we also know that even pathetic, faithless prayers are only answered with no greater certainty than random chance.

Looking back at the year 2006, I am shocked at how fast my Christian Faith collapsed.  I never intended to stop believing.  I was not out to look for an excuse to stop believing.  I did not know this intense ‘spiritual quest’ of skepticism and scrutiny of my religious beliefs would lead to my eventual abandonment of those beliefs.  I caught myself by surprise when I realized that I no longer believed.  I knew that my beliefs were changing, and I knew that I would not come out of this skeptical period with the same Fundamentalist beliefs I had held before.  I initially welcomed that change and I was not afraid of where it would eventually end up.  I had no idea it would end in non-belief!  I was expecting to wind up, perhaps, as an enlightened Catholic Christian, which was just fine by me.  All I wanted was to believe in something that I could be honest with, and not have to lie about or tie my brain into logical knots to justify.  Finally, I wanted to believe in something that would be attractive to my wife and hopefully be compatible with her beliefs.  I wanted a happy and successful marriage, and I needed some religious framework that would make our relationship stronger in the coming years.  So I merrily went along, reading everything I could get my hands on that looked intelligent and skeptical, yet fair to my Christian Faith.  I did not know until it was too late how quickly my Faith had completely eroded away.

The shock of what I was doing to myself finally came early one morning sometime in summer 2006.  Rosemary was asleep next to me in bed.  I was up early, reading a book that gripped me like a best-selling suspense novel.  I remember reading in that book about the various forms of early Christian beliefs that existed in the first centuries after Jesus walked the earth.  Bart Ehrman’s book Lost Christianities demonstrated to me that the ancient Mediterranean was a cornucopia of religions, mythologies, saviors, miracles, god-men and pagan beliefs.  Ehrman demonstrated from the numerous writings that are preserved from the ancient Mediteranean world, including the New Testament itself, that the Christian milieu was awash in various types of Gnostics, Marcionites, Encratites, Docetics, Ebionites, and other extinct forms of Christian heresies.  Ehrman showed that what later became Orthodox Christianity most likely sprung out of this syncretistic stew like the first strands of primitive DNA had once steamed out of chemical reactions in thermal vents and magma flows.

I lay next to my sleeping wife.  I put the book down momentarily, dumbstruck at what I had just then realized.  “Oh no,” I whispered to myself.  “Joe, what are you going to believe?  What are you going to believe?”  It was a stunning moment.  I knew then where I was.  Rather, I knew where I was not. 

One evening in 1988, I had walked behind the Calvary Chapel stage in Albuquerque, New Mexico to make a firm commitment to Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  I had cried and slobbered my way through the Sinner’s Prayer, convicted and repentant of my sins, and ready to live a new life for Jesus.  F there is any such thing as an ‘Apostate’s Prayer’, I said it to myself that morning in 2006, with Ehrman’s Lost Christianities open in front of me. 

“Joe, what are you going to believe?” 

I did not know quite what to believe.  But I knew, right then and there, that I did not believe a single thing I had once thought was true of God, Jesus, The Bible.  Heaven or Hell.  The sanctification of the saints and the inherent virtues of holding to the Christian Faith.  In that moment, it was gone.  All gone.  Slash and burn and start all over again.  All those years – all that time and effort and expense of holding up a belief system to mold everything in my life into – all of that was gone.  I realized it all at in just that moment.

I momentarily panicked.  But it did not last long.  I guess that was how it felt to be abandoned by God and “given up unto vile affections” (Romans 1:26).  I felt the breathing of my sleeping wife lying next to me, and I turned the page to expose myself to more damnable heresies.

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Conversions and De-conversions - Too much information

About the time I was forced to repeat my senior year of high school was the first time I began to doubt my Christian Faith. I did not doubt the truthfulness of Jesus, but I did doubt what role, if any, he really played in our lives. It was also a time of great adolescent insecurity and confusion for me. I was physically leaving childhood and becoming a young man, but I was emotionally still a very young child. Nearly every Christian who was involved with my life had a failure of Faith during these years. Either they left the Faith, revealed themselves to be hypocrites in their Faith, or failed in some profound way in their walk with Jesus. I did not understand how the Holy Spirit could fail in his empowerment of all our lives, but in the end I just chalked it up to our own human faithlessness. I graduated from high school in 1982, thoroughly confused about every aspect of my life, not just my Christian Faith.

Cape Baptist Christian School was located in the three-room basement of Cape Baptist Christian Church. When I enrolled, the student body consisted of 35 youngsters in grades 1 through 12. To keep things simple in my family, my younger brother and sister enrolled at the same time that I did, although their grades were much better than mine. The school followed the Accelerated Christian Education curriculum, which in the years since has become very popular with Fundamentalist homeschoolers. At the time, ACE was a new and revolutionary method of education, which incorporated Holy Scripture into our learning environment. The entirety of my ACE education consisted of me sitting in a small study carrel, reading selections from my student workbook, and answering quiz questions at the end of each section. Each workbook, called a PACE, contained a reading assignment, written from the perspective of Christian Fundamentalism. In hindsight, it was the most ineffective form of education imaginable. Not only were the assignments in history and science heavily slanted to favor Fundamentalism, but the questions were designed to be answered by merely repeating something we had just read. The education I received at this school was nothing but the chore of repeating what I had earlier read. It was nothing but call and response. We were taught no better than parrots. We had no teachers to give us lessons. Everything we needed was contained in the PACE. The ACE curriculum was nothing but glorified homeschooling. If I had a question, I would raise my little American flag over my study carrel, and an eager and untrained volunteer would come to answer our questions. There were 3 or 4 volunteers who helped us with our PACEs. I have forgotten most of their names, but I do remember Miss Betty, Brother Bert, Brother Dave and the school Principal, Brother Ed. The education and instruction was inane, but when I enrolled and learned about the workbooks, all mom and I thought at the time was, “this seems easy. I should be able to graduate from here.” It astounds me that the school was in fact recognized and accredited by the state of Missouri, so my diploma was valid.

Cape Baptist Christian School was my first encounter with the Baptist Church. The Jesus Movement of southern California heavily influenced my family’s earlier Pentecostal beliefs, and we were not at all used to all the rules that we suddenly encountered. First, I had to cut my hair. So much for that Peter Frampton look that most of us young teenage boys were going for. Second I had to shave every day. So much for that patchy peach fuzz I was becoming proud of. I had to wear a uniform. The boys wore a blue shirt with an American Flag clip-on tie, and the girls wore blue, ankle length dresses with white blouses and blue vests. I actually grew to appreciate the uniforms and short hair, because I had learned that much of my school bullying came from class distinctions brought on by clothing, hair and fashion. As much bad as I have to say about Cape Baptist Christian School, I will give them this to their credit – the constant bullying I encountered in public school vanished, and I actually grew to like nearly all my fellow Christian students.

We were not allowed to listen to secular music. I think this rule affected me the most personally. I could understand why they did not want us listening to KISS (Knights in Satan’s Service), Donna Summer (love to love ya, baby!) or God forbid, the Village People (disgusting homosexuals). But I did not personally enjoy most of those forms of popular music. At the time I was paying regular visits to the local used record shop, and learning about jazz, classical and British progressive rock – not exactly sensual music that you could grind your hips to.

I don’t know how many times I argued with Brother Ed regarding music. He told me that rock music was evil because African tribes pounded their drums with the same rhythmic patterns that were used in rock music during their Satanic human sacrifices! I told Brother Ed to hide all his kitchen knives. Since they were used to carve human hearts out of innocent victims of African human sacrifices, those must also tools of Satan!

Brother Ed told me that I could not listen to jazz since it is purely secular and not glorifying to God! I told him that by this logic I could not do anything – play sports, read a book, watch a TV show, or go for a hike, because these did not glorify God either! He told me I was right. Ooops - that argument sure backfired.

I also loved Handel’s Messiah. I had the complete oratorio on a 4 LP box set. Fortunately, I was allowed to listen to that! Of course, I listened to whatever I wanted when I was in my own bedroom, even though I could be expelled if I was caught. Mom certainly did not care what I listened to, and even enjoyed most of the same music I did. Michael mostly enjoyed country Gospel music and had many LPs in that genre.

Girls were not allowed to wear pants or make-up. Some girls belonged to a very strict denomination that did not allow their women to cut their hair at all. I remember one young girl, cute as could be and a year younger than myself, who had hair to rival cousin It from the Addams Family. She was allowed one pin to hold it all in place, since more pins than that would have been too ostentatious a display of feminine wiles. My younger sister hated wearing ankle length dresses, especially during Missouri’s cold winter months. The school was so emphatic about their students following Biblical standards of dress both on and off campus, that she nearly panicked when she saw brother Ed at the grocery store while she had her pants on! Brother Ed did stress that Christian values must be followed outside of school hours or we could be expelled.

We were not allowed to go to the movies. We could not even see ‘Disney’ movies, as family friendly movies were called back then. Everybody knew that movies were sinful and not glorifying to God, but even viewing Disney movies would fund movie studios with more money to make what they really wanted – movies that mocked God. Movies were out. Mom did not like us seeing movies either, although she did allow us to see some family friendly fare. And of course, she did cave in and allow us to see Star Wars. Television was also becoming a sticky point, and there were many television programs we were not allowed to watch. It was a different time and the boundaries that were being pushed back then are trivial compared with our modern shock and awe media. I still remember the hot flushed embarrassment I felt one evening while watching MASH. In a dramatic moment, Hawkeye Pierce called an evil Korean soldier a ‘son of a bitch”. I really was shocked, which I am sure was the program’s intent. Such language coming from the television really concerned my mother.

At Cape Baptist Christian School, my classes included New Testament Survey, Old Testament Survey, Collectivism (a sample test question from this class: “Where is Mao Tse Tung at this moment?” The answer, which I got correct, was “Hell”) and the subject I dreaded most – algebra. The algebra PACE was nothing but page after page of algebra problems. All I had to do was solve for x several thousand times and I could earn my high school diploma.

It was around this time that most of the Christians in my life had some failing or another in their Faith. My spirit empowered stepdad Michael Wagner began to drink. His drinking got heavier and heavier, and he would occasionally do stupid things like lock mom out of the house and threaten us if we opened the door for her. I remember what alcohol did to my real dad, and although Michael never physically harmed me, his drunkenness sometimes frightened me. He started going to AA, and had mixed success with that fellowship of struggling alcoholics. Despite our weekly prayers for him when he missed church, Jesus seemed to play no part in his recovery.

Mom was clearly backsliding. Her Holy Ghost inspired worship and daily devotionals vanished in the home. She prayed only on Sunday mornings, and although she still believed that Jesus was the only way to her salvation, it was clear to me that the fervor of her Pentecostal years in New Mexico were gone.

The members of the Wagner Family church were scattered about southeastern Missouri, and were all in some kind of trouble. All the children from that church, all the kids who used to roam the New Mexico desert with me, were growing older. We sometimes went to visit my friends, the Johnsons, who lived in a tiny farmhouse outside of Perryville, Missouri. The oldest daughter in that family was becoming a real beauty. Not quite an adult, but clearly not a young girl anymore. I knew there was trouble when I saw that her dad playfully let her sit on her lap, wrestle and giggle with her as if she were a toddler, and clearly ooze hormonal lust as she wore her Daisy Duke shorts around the house. This man, who I remembered from New Mexico as a fire breathing hellfire preacher was, to my disgust, clearly showing signs of lusting after his own daughter. I struggled with my own sexual sin, but he did not think us teenagers could pick up on his.

I occasionally spent the night with them. It was not unusual for us to sleep in the same bed together (I grew up with 3 of us crammed in the same bed). The oldest boy, E----, was teaching me about a great new fantasy dice game called Dungeons and Dragons. He told me not to play it around anybody from church, and he had already seen his fair share of trouble from it. Paradoxically, E---- sometimes placed convictions on me to take the Bible more seriously than I did.

“The Bible is like God’s answer book. I know you are having problems with school, with girls, things like that. But the Bible is the only book you need. You have a problem, you just look up the right passage in that book, and God will have an answer for you right there.” I found him convincing, and did my best to read and learn the Bible on my own.

Once when I was spending the night with E----, as I lay in bed with him, the lights were out, and were talking about things boys talk about. Then he asked me, “Have you ever heard about how the French people kiss? They place their tongues in each other’s mouths when they kiss. Sounds weird huh? Do you want to try it?

I told him “no”. I remember not being shocked, just confused.

“Can I rub my dick against your butt? It feels good. I know it sounds weird, but you will never know if you will like it until you try it.”

Again, I rejected his advance. It is strange that I did not move out of his bed. I just lay and went to sleep. He never spoke to me like that again. Perhaps it was just adolescent curiosity, I don’t know. Perhaps he was just a confused teenager, who spoke about the truth of the Bible from one side of his mouth and anal sex from the other. But his Christian convictions, and those of his Spirit empowered family were certainly not what they used to be.

I saw it again and again. Professed Christians, many of whom I had grown up with, were betraying their Faith. I had seen the miracle working power of Jesus in action! I had seen, with my own eyes, people being healed of all manner of sickness and deformity! I had seen people speaking in tongues, and being Slain in the Spirit! All these Signs and Wonders seemed to vanish as I grew older. It changed my own Faith. For the first time in my life, I doubted. I did not doubt Christianity, or the Salvation brought by Jesus, or the “plan” that he had for my life. I doubted the true power of Jesus to keep us under his protective wing. I doubted his power to give us the strength necessary to overcome temptation. Was it our failing human faithlessness? I had previously seen the evidence faith in all these people, even my own mother, and yet we were forgetting Jesus. At the time, I did not know who or what to blame for the hypocrisy.

I had my own hypocrisy to deal with, my own sins, and my own struggles. I know that I struggled mightily with my own sexual sin. I know I did my best to be Faithful to Jesus, and to allow his Spirit to empower me in the face of temptation. But like my friends and family, I could see the power of Jesus wane even in my own life. As faithful and as prayerful as I tried to be, I always submitted to my lustful thoughts. I was taught that it was never the fault of Jesus. He was giving me the strength. Rather, it was always my own fault. I believed that the fault always fell on my shoulders when I could not resist sexual temptation. But I simply did not know how to be any more Faithful! I prayed, I read my Bible, I meditated, I gave to the church from my meager lawn mowing earnings, I did everything I could think of! Yet it never seemed to be enough. The guilt and shame that continually ran through my mind during this time was a terrible burden.

At school, we boys were allowed to talk to girls, but we could not touch them or sit near them on the bus. If we had to take a bus to a school function, usually a basketball game, and sitting near a girl was unavoidable, we had to place a bible between us so as not to make physical contact. Sex was never discussed, only dismissed. This school never educated us about Sex, they only wished it away and pretended that it did not exist. We were told that sex outside the bounds of matrimony was Evil and Sinful, and that lust of a woman’s body was a grave sin and something for us to be shameful of. That was about the extent of our sexual education. But these rules and attitudes about sex were being pushed into my head when I was 17 years old – a time when my body was changing, a time when I was craving the attention of girls, a time when I needed that education the most! Since I had come from a background of hippie communal living, I had a better understanding of sexuality than most, yet it was still something that was never discussed in our home, church or school! I was at that age when I would long to talk to unreachable girls, to attract their attention and get to know them. When I could not, I had to go home and try not thinking about them – which was easier said than done when I was 17. But this led me to think of avoiding the temptation to commit the most shameful sin that I could commit as an adolescent, one I fought mightily to control, and nearly always lost.

“No. I will not. I will not. Lord Jesus give me strength. Give me strength. Give me strength against this temptation!”

I would imagine Jesus, looking down in disapproval from his Heavenly throne.

“No. I will not. Please give me strength Lord Jesus!”

I knew Jesus hated my Sin. I could not get the thought out of my head though. I know that Jesus told me that to look upon a woman with lust was already to commit adultery with her, and I knew that just thinking about her, pondering, entertaining the idea of being with her was just as sinful as fornication. I also knew that masturbation was simply the act of giving in to that most heinous temptation. I might as well be a rapist!

This act of shame and disgust happened very frequently in my high school years. Every time it was the same. I would pray for strength. I would ask Jesus for strength against temptation. I would wash my face. I would try thinking of something else. Eventually and inevitably my raging hormones, conditioned by millennia of evolutionary processes, would finally win. I would ultimately just give up, and give in to temptation while alone in my bedroom, and commit the most foul of lustful Sins in the presence of the Savior of my soul. Sometimes while wiping up the resulting mess, I would cry in shame and disgust. I prayed for forgiveness. “Jesus, I am sorry, I am sorry. I repent of my lust. I repent of my lust. I ask that you give me strength to never do it again, never do it again.” I would feel a sudden surge of moral strength that would usually last about two days before temptation struck again.

What was I to do? It was a terrible catch-22! I figured that I was losing to temptation because I was not Faithful enough to Jesus. But I did not know how to be more Faithful, except by praying to Jesus empower me with the Holy Spirit. But I did not think that Jesus was honoring that prayer because of my continued sexual sin!

It was this never-ending cycle of lust, sexual sin, guilt, and repentance that kept me in a state of religious anxiety. I remember once when a special guest was to come visit our church. It was said that he was a prophet, and some people told me, in awe, how he could look into a person’s eyes and discern all their secret sins. I somehow managed to skip that Sunday service. I feared being called out in front of the entire New Hope congregation.

I was not the only one. Again and again, I saw Christians give in to sin. Some continued to profess Christianity, others did not. In the surrounding years, I think I saw everybody fall to some extent. Our Christian summer camp, Camp Penuel, was a sanctuary for Bible reading and prayer by day, and a hotbed of teenage Christian sex by night. The dichotomy confused both my brother and me. One of our teachers at Cape Baptist Christian School, Brother Dave, was fired for inviting some of us teenagers to a party at Cape Rock. It included rock music and alcohol. Not that our principal Brother Ed was innocent, he was just more subtle in his approach. He practiced corporal punishment on only two girls during the time I was there, both were by paddle, and both were 18 years old. In the years since, both women have told me that he made a habit of paddling them, alone, in his office. They knew it was strange and creepy, but it was allowed by school policy, their parents had signed a waiver which allowed paddling, and the young women were left powerless to his obvious but secret fantasies.

Christian morality was crumbling in my mind. Sex was an abomination, yet it was everywhere. It was pervasive, yet it was never discussed. Everybody seemed to be engaged in it, yet it was wished away and repented of. It was only allowed if it was kept quiet and subtle. It seemed to be allowed if we were just sneaky enough.

I finally graduated high school in 1982. I had a graduating class of 3, the two aforementioned girls and myself. I never did finish my algebra PACE. Brother Ed gave me my diploma, on the condition that I would finish my algebra PACE over the summer, a condition I never fulfilled. I was conditioned to think that I would never be good at math, so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Mom and Michael gave me a Thompson Chain Reference study Bible for a graduation gift. I loved it! It had a brown leather cover, with my name, in tiny gold print, embossed on the lower right corner. I still own my Thompson Chain Reference.

I had no prospects for the future. I had no skills, no desire, no direction. I had heard of college, but I was never directed towards it. That was something that rich kids did. Other kids got scholarships, whatever those were, and went to college. My dad was a lumberjack. Michael was a house painter. Mom picked up whatever odd jobs that she could. I was doomed to a life of low-wage manual labor, and I never questioned that destiny. I spent a very difficult summer with dad in a logging camp, and decided that logging was too physically demanding for me. I took the only route I could see open to me. I enrolled in the Air Force and became a telecommunications operator.

To my shock, mom divorced Michael. The drinking became too much. Mom told me that there were many things I did not understand. She told me that she did not know if she ever really loved Michael Wagner after all. It was then that I realized that she had married Michael, not for love, but just for the sole purpose of taking care of her children. She married him at a time in her life when she was penniless and desperate. Still, in my young adulthood, in my naiveté about the world, I did not understand. All those sermons I had heard over the years, all that talk about Christian marriage, the sinfulness of divorce and Holy matrimony was betrayed. I remember crying when mom gave me the news of the divorce. The last time I saw Michael was in 1985. Apparently, this Holy Ghost filled preacher’s son was running from the law. He had hit his new girlfriend with a hot iron and was attempting to skip on his bail. He somehow found me and asked for money. I had none to give, so he left. I was stunned at his hypocrisy! He drank too much, he was divorced from my mother, he beat up another girl, and he was trying to get money from me so he could hide from the law. I was so angry at bogus Christian morality, at Michael, at mom, at my own frustration, that I kicked the first thing that I saw. Unfortunately, the brick wall was harder than my foot, and I had to drive myself to the emergency room with a broken toe. I never saw or heard from Michael Wagner ever again.

OH! I nearly forgot to mention this. It was also about this time that I last saw the cute girl with the huge mop of religiously required hair. I did not recognize her. She had a pixie cut, modest makeup and looked as happy as could be!

This was a particularly difficult article for me to write. Dear Reader, I hope you will excuse my ending it with that happy memory.

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Christian Apologetics and "Presuppositional Biases"

In a recent exchange over at Clay Jones’ apologetics blog, I was again told that the reason I was not accepting the arguments presented for the resurrection of Jesus was my “presuppositional bias against miracles”. Since that particular article contains over 130 comments, I felt I had said all I could say against the arguments presented, and decided to comment no further. Since the only real response to my arguments was that regarding my “presuppositional bias”, and since most of these kinds of debates eventually come to this charge of “bias”, I thought I would briefly address that issue here.

We have all heard it. Those of us who occasionally engage in online debate have all heard, “you do not believe because of your prepositional bias against the miraculous” at some point. Back when I was a Christian, I heard it from various Calvary Chapel pulpits when the likes of Skip Heitzig or Chuck Missler trained us in Apologetics. They sometimes used the word “worldview” or addressed the issue of the “worldview” of the Christian versus that of the non-Christian. I personally cannot stand the word “worldview”, and only use it now because I know it is a familiar word in the Apologetic lingo. Calvary Chapel pastors and other Christian apologists taught me that unbelievers do not disbelieve the evidence in favor of Christian dogma because of the poor quality of the evidence, but because of their own stubborn will. Since unbelievers were unwilling to accept the existence of miracles, they were therefore unwilling, a priori, to accept the existence of God. Therefore, I was taught to think and argue, rejecting Jesus Christ was not a matter of the Intellect, but a matter of the Will.

After hearing this charge, both as a Christian and as a non-Christian, for literally decades, I have come to the conclusion that this charge is, simply put, a copout from the apologist. It is nothing more than a more sophisticated way of saying “You need Faith to believe, and without Faith you cannot please God”, and just like the Faith argument, it is a conversation stopper.

From now on, when I am confronted with this charge against me, I will not accept it. I will not agree with the Christian that “we all have biases”, and I will not accept it as a valid point. Arguing against my supposed philosophical predispositions, presuppositions or biases are lazy, presumptuous, arrogant, dishonest, and an admission that there are no sound rational arguments to present.

When a Christian uses this argument against me, they are, in essence, saying that their arguments are so solid, so airtight, that there is no possible way I could not be convinced. But since I am not convinced, the problem must lie elsewhere besides the actual argument of the Christian. The only option available is to claim that I have “biases”, that I come into the argument already believing what I want to believe, that not accepting the obviously unbeatable Christian argument is a matter of my Will not to accept it. Counter arguments from me simply do not matter and do not need to be addressed, since the Christian has already made a charge against my “biases”.

The Christian who assumes that their apologetic argument is so solid that rejecting the argument must be chalked up to my supposed “presupposition”, is saying exactly this: “My arguments are not good enough to convince you? Fine. Simple solution – you don’t want to be convinced by my arguments, because I know I am correct. End of discussion.”

This is both arrogant and lazy. It is lazy because it ends the discussion. It is lazy because it is an admission by the Christian that they are not willing to engage my counter-argument. It is arrogant because the Christian assumes that there is no valid counter-argument against their apologetic, so supposed “presuppositions” must be resorted to. It is also arrogant because the Christian assumes they can somehow divine, even as an anonymous poster on an Internet blog, my inner-most philosophical leanings, personal convictions, level of open-mindedness and mode of approaching arguments. They do not know, nor do they ask, what I currently believe, why I believe and don’t believe what I do, my history as a believing Christian, and how I currently view the world. None of that matters, because the Christian apologetic is so unbreakable that obviously no pathetic argument I make can possibly stand a chance, and from that arrogant assumption alone, all my philosophical leanings can somehow be perceived with the Christian’s uncanny empathy and intuition.

In order to make the charge against “bias” seem less arrogant, the Apologist will often say, “we all approach these debates with biases, both the Christian and the non-Christian alike. We all have biases that we bring to the table and that colors our decisions!” I am personally shocked at how many non-Christians accept this as a valid point! I do not accept it. I do not believe it to be valid, at least amongst mature, open-minded adults, which I presume most people interested in these theistic topics are.

I work in an environment in which I must daily make decisions that affect the lives of my colleagues and that can carry millions of dollars in ramifications. It is a heavy responsibility, but fortunately I work amongst professionals who help carry the load. We advise each other. We debate. We argue. We bring in new information and unforeseen data to the table. We passionately try to change each other’s minds, because of the large stakes involved. But because we are professionals, we (usually) concede when a colleague makes an argument that makes the most valid points and ends up winning the day. We never assume that a colleague who is unwilling to budge on an issue is doing so because of “presuppositional bias”. Instead, it is our duty to, not only listen to their points, but to put ourselves in their shoes, and as best as we can see things from the other’s perspective. In other words, we try our best to remove any “bias” that we may have, and to listen and empathize with the other viewpoints being offered.

And because of the heavy stakes involved, and because of the burden of responsibility that I must carry, frankly I want to be proven wrong! I want somebody who knows something that I do not, or who views issues in ways I never thought of, or has information, even if unsavory, that will show that I am wrong and lead me down the correct path.

The mature person who is weighing argumentation is usually able and capable of empathizing with an opponent. We can see things in others’ eyes. And the mature person is willing to use this empathy to perhaps learn something new, and alter their view of the world.

We all do it! Be it an employer, a landlord, a politician, a lawyer, a judge, a supervisor of any kind – we must empathize with others, we must try to view things as they do in order to make smart decisions that affect them, along with ourselves and others. We do it with loved ones who see things in their unique way. A parent must adopt the viewpoint of their children to try and understand them. I must adopt the philosophical viewpoints of my wife, as hard as it may sometimes be, in order to understand her – and believe me, it has definitely affected my way of thinking! When I began to seriously doubt and question my Christian Faith, I adopted all viewpoints I encountered as my own, and tried my best to take the apologetic arguments on their own terms.

We all do this. Anybody can do this. With enough insight, education and honesty, I believe we can, to a reasonable degree, adopt and empathize with any philosophical “bias” or “presupposition” and engage with it, and accept or reject it on its own terms, and I think that we can do a reasonable job of it. For this reason I think the charge of “presuppositional bias” that “we all have and cannot overcome” is not just false, it is a simple-minded copout. It is an excuse that is used, and all too frequently accepted in debate that I personally think is bogus. If an argument is to be presented, we are all capable of putting aside biases, at least long enough to empathize and engage in the argument.

So Christian Apologist, I am predisposed not to believe your apologetic argument because I deny the existence of the miraculous?

No Christian. I am not buying it. If you have an apologetic argument to make, then make it and stop with the excuses. I promise to do my best to engage your side of the debate, and to listen to any points you may make. I do acknowledge when an Apologist makes a good point. I hope the Apologist will show me wrong on occasion, because only by showing that I am wrong in some regard am I able to learn anything new. But I also promise not to make any resort to your “preconceived biases”. In return, I ask that you address any counter-argument I may have. Do not resort to my “presumptions”. As far as I am concerned, any Christian who declares that I do not accept an apologetic argument because of my “presuppositions” has just conceded the argument. I will now view such an argument no differently than I do to a Christian who tells me, after all options have been argued, that I just need Faith to believe. Whether the Christian uses the word “presupposition” or “Faith”, the meaning is the same, the argument is just as vacuous, and the conversation is just as finished.