On Being a Skeptical Christian

Um, I'd like to talk to you about my grade?

When I was a young student in college working on my BA, I had a computer science professor with the last name of Smith.  Coincidentally, during my time in school the movie "The Matrix" was released, which as you can imagine was a very popular movie amongst a classroom full of computer nerds, and was even appreciated by Professor Smith.  One day, Professor Smith was speaking directly to one of the students in the classroom with the last name of Anderson, and the professor did his impression of Agent Smith when he addressed "Mr. Anderson", and at that moment the entire class simultaneously realized the irony of Professor Smith doing an Agent Smith impression while addressing Mr. Anderson.

Professor Smith had a tendency to repetitiously use certain techniques in his exams in order to drive home a lesson that he felt was very important for a computer programmer.  Two such lessons come to mind for the purpose of this post.  One of these lessons was on the importance of acknowledging our assumptions.  Often in Professor Smith's exams, he would give us a word problem that we needed to provide the solution for, but he would leave out some key piece of information.  Without this piece of information, the correct way to address the problem could be "A" or it could be "B" (or possibly, there might be many other letters you could add after these options).  If a student answered the question simply with method "A" or "B", Professor Smith would mark down their answer to this question.  However, if the student began the exact same answer with the words "assuming [some assumption] is true...", there would be no markdown.

This is what I do all day.

Another lesson Professor Smith taught through his exam questions was called "be the computer".  Such questions would start out by instructing us to answer with what would be displayed on the screen of a computer at the end of executing a block of code that followed.  The method of answering such problems would be to "get inside the mind" of the computer and understand what happened in the logical "brain" of the computer as the result of each line of code.  Professor Smith was very tricky, however, and the students had to keep in mind that every single line of code was very important, and if you messed up on one line you would very likely come out with a completely different answer than the "correct" one - so in order to try to earn mercy, it was advisable to "show your work", much like in math tests.

Now one might question why I bring up these analogies in a post titled "On Being a Skeptical Christian".  I am going to answer this, however I must start by stating the problem which I am attempting to solve.  To do this, I must first remind my readers of a phenomena I have written on before titled the "Rise of the Nones".  Simply stated, the "Rise of the Nones" is a statistical phenomena researchers have noticed where there is a very sharp rise from generation to generation of people who self-identify on religious surveys as "none" (meaning that they do not identify with any of the other religious affiliations provided).  More recently, there are some whom have begun to add nuance to this phenomena as they've discovered that a significant number of these "nones" are actually "dones" - they are formerly highly active members of churches whom for whatever reason left the fold, usually due to frustrations or not having certain needs met through their religious group.  As you can imagine, many churches would like to figure out how to bring these "nones" and "dones" back. 

Unfortunately, I feel that all too often they are going about it in the completely wrong way - and the reason for this is that they are refusing to acknowledge their assumptions.  This can be demonstrated very nicely in the following video from the documentary "Lord, Save Us From Your Followers":

One of the reasons I think Christians refuse to acknowledge their assumptions is that it puts them in a vulnerable position.  It is much easier to insist that a certain assumption is true than to start in a very basic position and work your way up, and additionally it is a scary experience to consider that your assumptions might be incorrect and to try to imagine other possibilities and where they might lead.  And so what all too often happens with the "nones" and "dones" when a Christian enters into a discussion with one is that the Christian makes a number of assumptions as to why this person has become a "none" or a "done" without having ever sat down with this particular person and listened to them describe how this occurred in their own words.  So the Christian instead sits down and begins an argument with a number of assumptions in their head and is baffled when they discover that the "none" or "done" finds none of the arguments satisfying.  But the reason why this occurs is very simple: Christians must learn to recognize and challenge their own assumptions before they seek to challenge (or assume that they know) the assumptions others are making no matter how vulnerable this makes us feel.

To further illustrate what happens in an argument between a Christian who is refusing to acknowledge their assumptions and a "none" or "done", I would like to go back to the "be the computer" problems I described.  I would like you to imagine that the problem on the exam was written in such a way that the code could have been written in more than one language.  For those of you familiar with computer code, try to imagine a problem that could be either javascript or some .NET code (VB or C# perhaps).  For those of you who are unfamiliar with computer code, try to imagine a sentence that is written in such a way that it could be either Spanish or French (these two languages, sharing the common ancestor of Latin, are quite similar at times).  If we assume the script is written in one language, it might mean one thing, but if we assume that it was written in another the meaning might be completely different. 

This is an extremely useful analogy, not just for imagining how a Christian should try to communicate with non-Christians who do not share their assumptions, but also for understanding how a Christian of one denomination who makes certain assumptions when interpreting the Bible should try to communicate with a Christian of another denomination who has come to completely different conclusions about the same passages based on a different set of assumptions.  One of the biggest problems I think is contributing to the endless division within the church is the fact that we've bought into the lie of the "plain reading of scripture", where we pretend that it is possible to enter into reading scripture without any assumptions at all, and that this results in "pure" conclusions without any interpretation at all.  One of the difficult lessons I feel Christians must learn is that they are only and always interpreting everything they see, hear, and read, and that this interpretation is always the result of assumptions they are making.

One idea I'd like my Christian readers to try to understand is that when you refuse to acknowledge and/or challenge your own assumptions, you are engaging in what I would call the Imperial version of Christianity - perhaps we could call this "post Constantine Christianity".  You see, prior to Constantine, Christianity was a small minority of outcasts and rebels that stood in defiance of the dominant culture of their day.  They did not have the luxury of insisting their assumptions must be treated as self-evident truth like Western Christians (who are the dominant culture of our day) do.  So when dealing with non-Christians, the early Christians would often appeal to popular non-Christian philosophers, much like Paul did on Mars Hill.  In this manner, Christians would "speak the language" of non-Christians by finding common ground and then leveraging it in order to understand each other. 

Western Christians have a very hard time understanding how to do this because we live in an environment where Christians (or at least people who self-identify as Christians) represent the vast majority of our society.  And so, because of our very priviledged status we feel that we can plow on through with our assumptions without ever acknowledging or challenging them and simply disregard those who refuse to do the same.  This is, I feel, one of the main contributing factors to the "rise of the nones", and the answer for a Christian to combating this problem would be, to paraphrase in summary form Philippians 2:5-8, to take on the attitude of Jesus by humbling ourselves and emptying ourselves of all assumptions in order to serve those who do not share our own assumptions.

Learning the lesson of acknowledging and challenging our assumptions, and the lesson of "be the computer" are, I believe, the first step in communication not only between Christians and non-Christians, but between Christians and former Christians, as well as between Christians of one denomination and another.  And the solution to the problem of challenging all assumptions lies in learning how to become a skeptic.

Now the word "skeptic" often has negative connotations within certain Christian circles - namely ones whom really do not like to challenge or even acknowledge their own assumptions.  And in some circles, the term has been quite misunderstood and misappropriated.  So I must start by defining what a skeptic is not - a skeptic is not someone whom arrogantly insists that all their own assumptions are self-evident truths while insisting that all your assumptions are self-evident falsehoods (the word "lies" would often be used by such a "skeptic").  Rather, a skeptic is someone who comes to a discussion between parties with differing views with the goal of discovering all the assumptions and challenging all the assumptions as equals.  This means not only discovering and challenging the assumptions of those you disagree with, but it also means applying the same vigorous standards in discovering, acknowledging, and challenging your own assumptions.  This is very difficult for an "Imperial Christian" who is used to entering into a discussion with an athoritative stance - a "trump card" that can be used to end the discussion in the favor of that "Christian".  "Imperial Christians" are used to being able to quote chapter and verse (usually preceded by "THE WORD OF GOD SAYS...", spoken in a very sanctimonious tone) and having disagreement shut up instantly.  But we must remind ourselves that this was not how Jesus acted, as Philippians 2:5-8 says.  Jesus did not expect everyone to bow to his tyrannical authority and to shut up and listen without providing any objections.  Jesus was not part of the authority structure of his day, but rather he challenged the authority structures of his day as an outcast.

Likewise, I believe that if Christians want to offer any solution to the "Rise of the Nones", they must first acknowledge that for many years we have not been outsiders, but have been part of the Imperial structures of our day - in other words, we've forgotten what it is like to be an outsider.  And as a response, we must humble ourselves and seek to understand the outsider.  In order to be able to communicate to the outsider - whether he or she be an atheist (either formerly Christian or never Christian), agnostic, Hindu, Buddhist, Jew, or any other religious affiliation - we must first understand the outsider's point of view with such familiarity that we can "be the Atheist/Agnostic/Christian of another denomination/Hindu/Buddhist/Jew/Muslim/whatever", as it were, and thus understand what words and ideas mean to them. 

Coincidentally, immediately after I had finished writing the first version of this post, someone shared a post from the atheist/former Christian Neil Carter's blog that echoed many of the sentiments I had just written down, and one part really stuck out:

It’s not really a conversation if nothing I say is being heard.  It’s not a conversation if they keep spouting off programmed sentences and quoting Bible verses as if the words have the same magic for me that they have for them.

If we want to be able to communicate with people who are not like us, we've got to stop pretending that everything that was magical for us will be just as magical for them, and we've got to understand their point of view first.  This is why I have sought to be a Christian Skeptic and to challenge my own assumptions, and this is why so often other Christians have accused me of being more merciful to Atheists than fellow Christians (I've even been accused of being a secret Atheist before).  But in my mind, because of the humility of Jesus as outlined in the Philippians passage I've been referring to, I believe it is inherently part of being his follower that we "become the outsider", and to me this involves "being the computer" and "acknowledging the assumptions".

The Tower of Babel and Christianity

Before I close, I would like my readers to consider one final analogy.  I would like you to try to understand the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel as a parable - a word picture that teaches a moral.  I would like you to consider it as a parable about Empire.

The human race has always been diverse, and will most likely always be.  Empire occurs when one group within that diversity is able to set up structures that allow them to dominate others.  And for a time, these Domination Systems seem to be a success.  So those who are part of the structures of domination seek even more power - like the builders of the Tower of Babel, they seek to reach the heavens themselves through might and power.  But along the way, they discover that they are not so unified as they believed.  They discover that even within their own group, there is diversity.  And as the habit has always been to cast out and/or destroy diversity, the insiders of the Domination System begin to fight amongst themselves for control.  This is, I believe, what the picture of the confusion of language in the story of the Tower of Babel points to.

And this is an important picture for Christians today.  With Constantine, Christianity began to resemble the Domination System of Rome.  We created creeds and cast out those who did not completely agree with every little thing that the insiders decreed to be truth.  In this way, Christianity sought to destroy diversity and became another Domination System.  And this worked for a long time, until Christianity discovered that not all of the insiders agreed with one another.  Since then, Christianity has experienced division after division, and now there is an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 denominations.  We are discovering that when we use certain language with the assumption that everyone around agrees on what that language means, we are mistaken.  Our language has been confused, much like the builders of the Tower of Babel, and now our tower is falling with the "Rise of the Nones".  And the answer is not for one group to dominate all the others, but to learn to stop acting like the Insiders who are far to used to their control - we must give up our control and become outsiders.  This is the lesson Jesus exemplified, summarized in Philippians 2:5-8.

In closing, I'd like my readers to consider these words by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian who died in Nazi prison, from his book "Life Together":

The first service that one owes to others in the fellowship consists in listening to them. Just as love to God begins with listening to His Word, so the beginning of love for the brethren is learning to listen to them. It is God’s love for us that He not only gives us His Word but also lends us His ear.  So it is His work that we do for our brother when we learn to listen to him. Christians, especially ministers, so often think they must always contribute something when they are in the company of others, that this is the one service they have to render. They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.  Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too.  This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words. One who cannot listen long and patiently will presently be talking beside the point and be never really speaking to others, albeit he be not conscious of it. Anyone who thinks that his time is too valuable to spend keeping quiet will eventually have no time for God and his brother, but only for himself and for his own follies.

The next post explores a practical application of the principles explored regarding skepticism and Christian theology.

The Trinity, Creeds, and the major problem that's killing the church

To those of you who've been wondering about my inactivity on the blog - I've been slowly working on a massive project.  This is a project that will probably be bigger than my hell project and most likely even bigger than my Satan project.  To give you an idea of how big this might end up being, I had about 50 pages of notes for my Satan project before I wrote it, and I have over 100 pages for this one.  I think this project will be called "Judaism and the Mystical Christ", to wet your appetite.

But in the meantime, I wanted to write some quick thoughts I had on a phenomenon that upsets me.  I've written before about the statistical phenomenon dubbed the "Rise of the Nones", as well as writing a post about what I felt at the time was The Greatest Problem Western Christianity Faces.

What I want to write about now is building on those ideas.  To put it very simply, I think the issue that's really at the heart of just about all of the Church's problems (and when I say "the Church" here I'm talking about the church universal) is the idea that what we call "beliefs" are the most important thing that determines whether a person is good or not.  And the reason I put "beliefs" in quotes is because I think that the way we use this word today - speaking of ideas that one insists with their mouth (or keyboard) to be true whether or not they can back that up with reasoning or any kind of scientific evidence - is a distortion of what the word originally meant.  The original meaning of the word was "to be-love" (coming from the Old English "be loef", which meant to hold dear).  And we can illustrate the difference between the modern meaning and the pre-modern meaning of this word by thinking of the simple difference between believing someone and believing in someone.  Believing in Jesus means that we believe that the way he lived is a demonstration of "the Way" - the way which will heal the problems the world faces.  This is very different from insisting on ideas about Jesus.

But we've hammered into people's heads that what being Christian is all about is insisting on ideas - even if you act like a jerk when you do it.  Having the right ideas is what separates the good and the bad - or to put it the way a certain documentary is titled, "Good People Go to Hell, Saved People Go to Heaven".  This is, to put it bluntly, complete bullshit.  Insisting that right ideas is what separates the good from the bad is like saying: the sun is approximately 92,955,807 miles from the earth, and anyone who disagrees, quotes a different number (even if it's off by a single digit), or didn't know this fact is a bad person.

And Jesus couldn't have cared less if you had all the right ideas.  This is demonstrated by the fact that in the parable of the sheep and the goats, the only difference between the sheep and the goats was in the way they treated other people - not their ideas!  Jesus told another parable to demonstrate how a "neighbor" acted in which the person who best demonstrated this way of life was a Samaritan - someone of another religion!  Not only that, but someone that the majority of the Jews of Jesus' day would have considered an enemy!  If he told that story today, I daresay it would be called "the Good Muslim"!  And Jesus said that the defining characteristic of someone who was his disciple was love!  Jesus also said that the entirety of scripture was summed up in love (see Mt. 22:40), so if you want to still insist that theological ideas are important, than you're going to have to demonstrate to me how those ideas make you more loving before I'll accept that you've got the right ideas. 

This whole idea of "the Bible said it, I believe it, that settles it" has got to go - it's unrealistic and turns people into jerks, as well as lifting up ignorance and thoughtlessness and pretending that this is righteousness and intelligence.  What we call "the Bible" says things in a translation of a translation of a version of a collection of documents that have all gone through many many revisions and often we have no clue who wrote these things down in the first place (the statement you are looking at may not have even been a part of the original document); we interpret these sayings through our modern lens which all too often distorts the original meaning and intention of the sayings as they would have been heard within their historical context; and that definitely doesn't settle it - there's plenty of room for discussion.

I've seen this problem at work in the reactions on various web forums to an article recently published by Pastor Mark Sandlin - reactions like being told he's a heretic, isn't a Christian, etc.  In this article, Sandlin outlines some problems with the doctrine of the Trinity - mainly that there is no place in the Bible that even explicitly states this idea.  Oh, you might point out that in certain translations of the Bible, I John 5:7-8 says "the Father, the Word, and the Spirit" - but this was a later modification made by overzealous translators who wanted to "settle" this debate.  The phrase was added in during the debate within the church, and all the original version talked about was "the Spirit, the water, and the blood".  This shows you what length people will go to in order to win an argument about ideas, and it's disgusting to be honest. 

It's actually interesting to look into the history of the debate over the doctrine of the Trinity and find out just how ugly this history was!  You find out ugly little details like how the Emperor Constantine was pushing the church to come to a decision as soon as possible and exclude anyone who didn't agree with this idea, and he really didn't care what side won - he just wanted a unified church, in order to make it easier for him to control his empire.  You find out that during the debates over these issues, people were not only excommunicated from their church, but thrown out of their towns!  Character assassinations were rampantly used in order to make these expulsions easier to justify.  Secret meetings were held and people were kept from attending these by military force.  During the course of a debate over an issue, sometimes a bishop would say one thing, then later on say the opposite, and then insist this was what they had been saying all along.  This history is ugly!

Let me put this to you bluntly - believing in the Trinity or not has no bearing on whether you're a good person.  The way you treat other people does.  You want to believe in the Trinity, that's fine!  But don't think that this gives you a license to immediately dismiss people who don't!  You need to hear them out - actually listen to them and pay attention to their arguments, particularly if they've been well thought out - before you gently and humbly tell them you disagree with them.  And when you're doing that, make sure you've got a plan of action for explaining why you disagree with someone, and it better not be full of logical fallacies like appeals to authority and tradition!  Use evidence and logic!  And if you're going to use scripture or other writings, be open to considering other ways of interpreting ancient language - metaphor is not a bad word and is a device that was used all the time by ancient writers!

Please notice that I haven't said that I don't believe in the Trinity.  I would actually claim belief in the Trinity for myself, though I want to be given a chance to explain what I mean by the Trinity and explore the imagery, showing how a certain way of thinking about it meshes well with modern scientific views - and this is a topic I plan to explore in my upcoming series "Judaism and the Mystical Christ".  But I'm so tired of seeing people jump on the views of others and use them as a litmus test for "Christianity" without being willing or able to defend - using scientific methods of any kind - the reasons why their own views are correct!  I've had it with this refusal amongst Christians to use the brains that they supposedly believe God gave them!


The Problem with the Creeds
I think the issue I have been outlining is exasperated by the fact that the creeds reinforce this idea that the most important thing for a Christian is to affirm certain ideas.  It is astounding to me that the Apostle's Creed and Nicene Creed - and many churches have all their members say one of these every single Sunday - say absolutely nothing about Jesus' life and/or teachings!  They focus completely on affirming the Trinity and Jesus' divinity - neither of which are doctrines that Jesus himself taught!  These were not issues which he felt had to be pressed!  There were much more important issues at hand as far as Jesus was concerned, and yet his followers seem to think that following him means insisting that these doctrines are more important than the life he led which demonstrated the principles he taught!  And I don't hear many people questioning why these creeds that we say every Sunday do this - and I find that very, very disturbing!

As far as the Nicene Creed and the Apostle's Creed are concerned, the only reason Jesus lived was so that he could die!  They say he was born of a virgin (and that's questionable, unless you take it metaphorically) and then he died - that's it.  Nothing in between.  Born then died.  It's as if nothing else about Jesus mattered!

This is why I think modern churches should write their own creeds.  This is what the Maasai people did in 1960 when the missionaries who came to them realized that the language of the creeds had different meanings within their culture - meanings that didn't necessarily convey what the creeds were supposed to be about.  This isn't the only instance of an African tribe writing their own creed, either - I've read that South Africans as well will use the phrase "eldest brother" instead of "only son" or "only begotten son" about Jesus, because in their culture an only son was not as high of a social status as an eldest brother.  To them, an only son is an isolate, whereas an eldest brother was someone you had access to.

Missionaries tend to recognize that when you are a stranger in a strange land, you have to use the people's language the way they use it rather than insisting that they learn to understand you.  And they also recognized that because we are not living in the context in which the creeds were written, there may be other issues which are more important in our time.  The creeds were written as a response to debates that were going on inside of the church at the time, and so they were a way of enforcing the idea that the "true orthodox" were separated from the false believers by certain ideas - namely how one conceives of the divinity of Jesus and the Trinity.  But defining a "Christian" this way is not how Jesus defined the marking characteristics of his disciples - as I've mentioned earlier in this post!  So why should we continue to reinforce this idea Sunday after Sunday?  I think that if you're going to say a creed, at least put something in there about Jesus' life! 

Below is an English translation of the Masai Creed I've mentioned.  Besides the fact that it actually mentions some things about Jesus' life, I also appreciate that it mentions that God created out of love, loves the world and every nation and tribe, and wants Man to be happy in the world.  It also mentions in the final section that a Christian is supposed to live according to love - which you should already know is a must have for any creed in my book.  I'm not saying that this creed should become the new thing - I'm saying it should be considered as each church seeks to define their own statement of belief.  I'm saying we should stop exclusively saying creeds that were written hundreds of years ago in order to strike the final blow of a long and costly debate between factions of the church, and start trying to define what the important issues of being a follower of Jesus are in our context.


The Maasai Creed
We believe in the one High God, who out of love created the beautiful world and everything good in it. He created Man and wanted Man to be happy in the world. God loves the world and every nation and tribe on the Earth. We have known this High God in darkness, and now we know Him in the light. God promised in the book of His word, the Bible, that He would save the world and all the nations and tribes.

We believe that God made good His promise by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, a man in the flesh, a Jew by tribe, born poor in a little village, who left His home and was always on safari doing good, curing people by the power of God, teaching about God and man, showing the meaning of religion is love. He was rejected by his people, tortured and nailed hands and feet to a cross, and died. He lay buried in the grave, but the hyenas did not touch him, and on the third day, He rose from the grave. He ascended to the skies. He is the Lord.

We believe that all our sins are forgiven through Him. All who have faith in Him must be sorry for their sins, be baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, live the rules of love and share the bread together in love, to announce the Good News to others until Jesus comes again. We are waiting for Him. He is alive. He lives. This we believe. Amen.