How I Became A Humanist: Determinism and Hell

 What religion would you most likely believe if you'd been born in Saudi Arabia? What about if you'd been born in India? Do you believe in the same god your parents do? Have you read the religious texts of other religions? Have you been to centers of worship? Have you spent as much time in them as you have your own? Enough to adequately compare their truth claims to your own?

Like most Americans, I grew up believing in a rather robust and what I now consider to be a Disney-esque view of Free Will. I believed that we freely chose our actions, our beliefs, who we are and where we were going. 

My studies in history, theology and the rest began to challenge these views. Now, obviously, if I had been born on the American continent in the 1300s, I couldn't have been a Christian. This goes without saying, but what we often ignore is that almost all of us believe about God more or less whatever our parents believed, maybe with some slight variations. Are we so sure that we choose our religion? Are we so sure that the Virgin Birth makes sense but Golden Tablets don't? 

Never mind that. Instead, consider this. Did you choose your primary language? Did you choose your parents? Your genetic make-up? Did you choose your innate intellectual or emotional intelligence? Did you choose your first grade teacher? Your first grade classmates? 

Okay. Maybe not. But you still chose WHO YOU ARE, didn't you? You've had free will since... since when? Did you have free will when you were in the womb? What about day one out of the womb? I think most of us would say that we did not have free will in the womb or the first day out of it, but those of us who are parents will acknowledge that babies have personalities on their first day out of the womb. Mothers will say that babies have personalities when they're in the womb. And if this is true, then we have personalities before we have free will. That is to say that we are making choices that cause the interactions that lead to learning that cause us to grow into who we will be at the point of our next decisions... and we're doing this before we have what we might call free will. 

And this leads us to a problem that we don't generally consider when we think about free will. We don't choose the chooser. I didn't choose to be Jon Noble Day 1. But Jon Noble Day 1 lived a life of interactions that led to Jon Noble Day 2. Jon Noble Day one neither chose to be Jon Noble Day 1 nor chose the participants who were present for Day 1, nor the scenes of Day 1, nor even what Jon Noble Day 1 was and wasn't aware of...

And this creates a problem. Because not only do we not choose the religious perspective of our parents, we don't choose whether or not we're likely to be the sort of people who are willing to investigate outside of that perspective should that perspective be the incorrect one. 

But let me come at this from another angle. All of our choices are decisions made at particular points in time. Those decisions derive from who we were in those particular moments and what we were aware of at the specific decision point. That is to say that faced with a similar situation tomorrow as today, I might not be inclined to make the same decision because I might not be the same person in a way that might affect my decision. Change one variable about me, about my awareness, about whatever and the outcome potentially changes in a way that looks more like a billiards table than it does 'freedom.'

And when we look it it like this, the objections people usually raise about our decision not being predictable or us not making the same decisions today as yesterday vanish. Of course, we don't make the same decisions today as yesterday. The situations aren't identical and even if they are, we aren't. And of course, it's not predictable. Neither is the weather, really. I don't suspect anyone is attributing the weather's unpredictability to free will. 

To put it plainly, being determines doing and everything is. It's not that I couldn't choose otherwise, it's that me being me means that I wouldn't. For me to choose something different would mean that something about me or the situation or my awareness of it would have to be different from what it is. Why else would I be inclined to choose other than what I am choosing. And this is as true of frogs as it is of humans. Might it not also be true of Gods? Are Gods not whatever Gods are with whatever goals, awareness, etc. that those Gods have? Who is to say, really? 

And it was these thoughts that led me to Determinism and to question the justice of an idea like hell. 

My First Three Weeks as a Humanist

     I walked away from that spot on the campus of Abilene Christian University where my lay dying under the hot West Texas sun to my car, which was parked on Washington street, by my friend David's house, which I usually parked it. My head was spinning with questions for the next several weeks. What do I do with my life now? How do I tell my wife? Will she still love me? What about the rest of my family? What about my friends? I'm a minister... Do I tell my church? Do I step down? What do I believe now? Where do I find morality? How do I find meaning? I was so confused. I was so afraid. The only thing I knew was that the belief I'd based my whole life, including my career up until that point, was a lie. 

I was, believe it or not, terrified that I wouldn't have any reason to be moral and that my life wouldn't have any meaning. A book I'd read during my tenure as a youth minister had convinced me that without faith in God, people didn't have these things.  So many of my religious friends believed this too. It was something people said in church. It something people said to atheists. It was something I'd said to Atheists! Now, it's something people say to me... It's absurd looking back, but I truly believed it. And I was truly terrified. 

I you know me, I probably don't have to tell you that I did lose friends. My wife was initially unsupportive, hostile even, but she came around. And my career... I guess these are all stories for another time.

What I can talk about is how my fears concerning meaning and morality were resolved, at least partially, within the first few weeks of my becoming an Atheist. I no longer remember the exact order of the events, so I will tell them thematically rather than chronologically.

A thing about me, I'm more or less always in motion. I walk, run, whatever more or less constantly. When I'm sitting still, I fidget. So, one evening after my deconversion, I was walking around the block. I stumbled upon a wallet that contained both cash and cards. It was my first real moral dilemma as an Atheist. No one would know if I simply pocketed the money. But I didn't. Instead, I turned it into the local police station, because that's what I'd have wanted someone to do for me. 

This moment was reassuring for me, but I have to say that I really struggled with what to do. Up until that point, I'd used my religion as my moral compass. Instead, I had to think through the morality myself and my personal moral muscles felt weak. 

It was a little bit later that I was driving to the  newer side of town (probably to Walmart) when all of the sudden, it began to pour one of those drenching Texas rains you get west of I-35. Sitting outside on an island alongside the road was an elderly homeless woman. She was getting soaked. Immediately, I pulled over, grabbed my umbrella ran and handed it to her. I didn't about - I just did it. 

It was later, walking and thinking again that I realized that I didn't need to act as a representative of some other figure. MY LOVE for my fellow humans was enough to guide MY ACTIONS. I still feel the power of that realization. I'm not someone else's emissary. I have my own love to give. And as weak and imperfect as that love is - its mine. It comes from me. I had been taught to share someone else's love, not my own. I had been taught to treat other people as potential converts - rather than as fellow humans. 

My revelation concerning meaning was similar, but came about in a much less dramatic was. Sarah and I used to live in this huge old house. We inhabited this room that was brightly lit with several large windows. One morning, I woke up before Sarah to the sunlight coming in through the windows. I watched my pretty wife sleep while I took in the morning light. And it hit me, I didn't need universal meaning. I had all the meaning my tiny self needed right here, in nature, in my relationships. 

I don't know what the preachers try to sell us on a the need for a universal purpose. I don't know why we buy it. The universe is so big, so vast, so billions of years old. I'm not any of those things. I have no meaning on Mars. And I'm okay with that. My morality isn't just limited to a human morality. It's limited to a middle-aged American working class father morality. That's not to say that it's completely relative. Is relativism the opposite of universality? That's what they say. I think they're wrong. Particularity is the opposite of universality. My morality is particular. I want to say that this should be obvious - that the apologists I grew up with knew that they were lying. But then, this just occurred to me, so maybe they didn't know they were lying either. 

Anyway... that's how I overcame the false beliefs that without religion, I wouldn't have meaning or morality

How I Became a Humanist #16: Who Wrote the Bible?

You're probably sitting in a chair reading these words.  There's a good chance that this isn't the first essay of mine you've read.  If you've read all the essays in this series up to this point, you've probably picked up on my tone.  You know how my paragraphs flow.  You might have noticed that I break paragraphs up for ease of reading, rather than keeping large chunks of text together.  You have a sense that there will be a picture somewhere between the top of the page and the third paragraph.

If I inserted a paragraph from another person somewhere in this essay, you might notice.  You'd be more likely to notice if that person was from a different part of the country or a different part of the world.  If the person were much older or younger than me, he or she might use language differently from me.  Education would play a factor too.  If you had some question about whether or not I was the writer, you could even observe how I use commas.  Or you could put my essays from this series in a word cloud generator and see if the author frequently uses the same verbiage that I do.  There are any number of ways that you could figure out whether or I not I was the author. If the essay were written by someone else, you'd probably guess it.

Probably a German Bible

Scholars use this same sort of analysis to determine who wrote particular books of the Bible.  They look at the words they use in the Greek.  "Does this person write like they're from around 100 CE or from 300 CE?"  "Does the original manuscript look like it was written by someone who was born in Tarsus or from someone born in Alexandria?"  Dialects change with time and location.

Of course, this only concerns who wrote the books as a whole and not whether or not additions have been made to the books over time.  Consider the game of telephone you might have played as a child only now the game is being played with the written word.  Remember that the Bible was copied by hand for about 1400 years of Christian history.  Scribes sometimes wrote notes in the margins of their texts and sometimes those notes were mistaken for scripture by subsequent scribes (remember that for a time the Bible didn't have chapters or verses and the copy the scribe was working with was likely the only copy the scribe would have had.  He couldn't cross-reference with another copy.  He had to make his best guess.)

How do scholars know what belongs and what doesn't?  First, they take the earliest manuscripts we have and compare them.  They compare them for age, but also compare them for location and lineage to the degree that's possible.  When they see differences between the various manuscripts they try to discern when the difference took place and where the divergence began.

One of the most interesting cases of this, to me, is the case of John 8 - the story of the adulterous woman who nearly gets stoned.  This is the beloved story in which Jesus says, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone."  The problem is that this story didn't start showing up in copies of John until several centuries after Christianity had begun and it's wasn't in the majority of copies until about the tenth century.  We even have evidence of church leaders arguing over whether or not the story should be in the Bible.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that it doesn't belong in the John 8 is that when the early manuscripts include it in the Bible, they sometimes place the story later in John.  Other times they actually place the story in the book of Luke.  If you remove the story from John, the text flows just fine.  I'll add, it's a weird story for John.  John isn't concerned about grace for the disenfranchised in the way the other Gospel writers are.

Mark Twain's writing from less than 200 years ago is easily distinguishable from writing from this century

You might think that learning all of these thing would have destroyed my faith immediately.  It didn't.  While the evidence is overwhelming and the methods not what I had expected before my studies, the Bible is still a powerful book.  Moreover the New Testament is not adulterated in the way its detractors sometimes suggest.  There are only a few changes from the original manuscripts and they don't change the overall message of the New Testament.

The same this is true of authorship of various books.  We don't really know who wrote much of the New Testament.  We have confidence that Paul didn't write all of the books ascribed to him, but those other books do reflect Pauline theology.  Maybe they were written by a secretary.  Maybe they were written by a student.  Perhaps they are apocryphal.  Here, I'm mostly talking about the pastoral letters, 1 & 2 Timothy and Titus and also Ephesians.  The other books ascribed to Paul are generally considered to have been written by him.  And again, the central message of these other texts coheres with the New Testament as whole.

While this information was troubling to me in some ways, it never made me question my faith in God
.  It did lead me away from certain kinds of Evangelical theology.  When I look back, I have to admit that these things were difficult to digest even if they didn't quite challenge my faith.  It's hard letting go of one understanding and picking up a new one when the belief in question is central.  Heavens, we even resist admitting that we were wrong about a referee's call during a sporting event.

How I Became a Humanist #14: The End of Church of Christ Dogma

Over the last several posts, I've discussed events and education that challenged my Church of Christ upbringing.  At the advice of David Fleer, I remained associated with the fellowship.  "Every fellowship has it's problems.  You understand ours," he told me.  Looking back, I should have listened to Mel Storm who knew me better.  He'd told me that I should consider attending grad school at a Disciples school.

In any case, the experiences and education caused me to question other Church of Christ doctrines that don't neatly fit in any other essay.  Our churches have a view of early church leadership that doesn't quite cohere with what historians know.  The Bible makes it clear that the early church met in houses.  There seem to have been several houses in the big cities.  Those houses, of course, would have had leaders, but those leaders would have worked with leaders who coordinated between houses.  In this way, there may have been a difference between elders and overseers - a difference the Churches of Christ do not recognize.

Moreover, the Apostles (and the elders in Jerusalem) clearly functioned as a council for the churches.  Several churches answer to Paul's authority when their local leaders can't resolve issues - and Paul seems to answer to Jerusalem.  The Bible doesn't suggest that no one should fill the slots of these council members or of people like Paul once they die.  In fact, we see in Acts that when a slot is emptied by Judas, that the slot is filled.  James the brother of Jesus ends up sitting on the council.  In other words, it doesn't look like congregations in the early church are run independently in the way that the Churches of Christ suggest.  One could still question the development of church leadership structure in later centuries, especially the pomp and circumstance surrounding it.  Nevertheless, I came to believe that the Church of Christ's primitivism concerning church leadership reflects a misunderstanding of scripture.

Learning everything I've explained so far and many other things I don't have time to explain caused me to turn Church of Christ rhetoric on it's head as a way of testing it's viability.  I wanted to know whether we took our own rhetoric seriously.  We say that we don't use instruments because they're not in the Bible, but our women pray with uncovered heads.  Paul is pretty explicit about the head covering, but says nothing clear about instruments.  Why are the pianos the doctrinal priority?  We have pulpit ministers when the early church was taught by its elders and bishops.  We have youth ministers, youth groups and church buildings - none of which are in the Bible.  We don't speak where the Bible speaks and keep silent where the Bible is silent.  Instead, we search the scriptures to justify what we already believe and ignore counter-testimony.

At the time that I realized this, I became reactive to Church of Christ doctrine.  I probably wasn't always very kind.

As I matured, more and more I realized that this is just how people usually search for information.  We're so damn sure of ourselves.  It really condemn us, perhaps not to hell, but to whatever ignorance we were born into. I wish I could say that this general knowledge of human behavior has made me more gracious. It probably has, but not as much as it ought to. I suppose that's a part of human behavior too. I'm as flawed as the people I'm inclined to criticize.

How I Became a Humanist #13: The Bible, the Churches of Christ and Christian Unity

The Bible and the Churches of Christ

In a recent post, I talked about how understanding chapters, verses, concordances and the printing press challenged my faith in Church of Christ dogma - and most Evangelical dogma.  It all appeared anachronistic (the view didn't make sense from a historical perspective).

As I continued to learn how to read the Bible, my faith in Church of Christ dogma was challenged in other ways.  Most importantly, I realized that the foundation assumption of the Churches of Christ was false.  We teach that the First Century Church was a perfect church.  They believed the right things.  They practiced ritual correctly.  And God was happy.  We seek to mirror their beliefs and practices.  We do this largely by reading Paul's letters to those churches.

Here's the big problem with all of that.  Paul is usually writing to these churches because of their imperfections.  He's writing to correct them.  If they needed correction, then the First Century Church wasn't perfect.  And if we're going to be like them, we're also going to be imperfect and need to be corrected.

What's more, when Paul writes these letters, he addresses the imperfect believers as brothers and sisters.  He doesn't assume that imperfection equals disunity.  Church of Christ founders would have agreed with that perspective.  While they emphasized doctrinal correctness, they fellowshiped ecumenically.  For the last century though, this hasn't been the norm.  Instead, the Churches of Christ excommunicate not only other denominations, but also churches within their own community for disagreements over how best to share communion or whether or not Power Point is biblical.  I wish I were making this up.  Oddly, the church obsessed with doing things in Bible ways is approaching unity and division unbiblically.

The Bible and Christianity

When I learned to read the Bible with a focus on books rather than specific messages, I also began to see that different books in the Bible contain different, even competing theological perspectives.  I recently discussed how Genesis tells us to welcome foreigners.  Ruth has a similar message.  Nehemiah has a competing message - "don't intermingle with those who aren't your kind."  Most of the Bible isn't all that concerned with women as people, Luke is almost obsessed.  He was the 1st Century version of a Marxist Feminist.  I'm not kidding.  Is there a Gospel story about a poor person? There's a 80% chance it's in Luke.  Is there a story about a woman?  There's a 90% chance.  Is there a story about a woman who gives her two pennies?  That's definitely going to be in Luke.  Obviously, I like Luke.  The other Gospels, however, don't have the same emphasis on women.  The Gospel of John isn't even all that concerned about the poor.

This may not seem like that big a deal.  If one Gospel omits a perspective, the others have it.  But, that wouldn't have always been true.  In the earliest centuries of Christianity, the church in a particular city might not have all of the Gospels.  They might only have Mark and Luke, but not Matthew and John, for example.  Each of these books was on a scroll.  The earliest churches didn't have whole books of the New Testament.

Knowing all of this, I read the Bible differently.  I saw a variety of nuances not only in the messages given by a single author in a single book, but in the complexity of the messages within the Bible as a whole.  I began to understand that the messages aren't simple black and white rules.  The Bible isn't a rule book or a constitution.  It's a multitude of genres of literature written by a variety of people who didn't always agree about the nature of God.  They disagreed not only about what was most important to God, but even whether God wanted one thing or another from us.  The Bible often raises as many questions as it does provide answers.  It might be easy to look at Genesis or the words of Jesus and say, "we should welcome the stranger."  But the Bible also warns us about people who are different from us.  The Bible as a whole forces us to take both perspectives seriously.  Used well, it shouldn't be used to beat each other up.  It should be used to facilitate conversation and understanding that might lead to consensus.  And when that doesn't happen, we should at least be reassured by the text that the people who came before us didn't always agree either.

How I became a Humanist #10: How to Read and Understand the Bible #2

Before studying theology, I think I read the Bible the way most Christians do.  If I read a section about Jesus healing a leper, I thought of it as history.  If I read a story about Jesus' geneology, I read it as history.  I looked at most the Bible as a sort of text book with stories that were more or less chronologically related.  It didn't occur to me that instead the stories might be theologically related, which is why the stories don't always occur in the same order in the various Gospels.  It's also why the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew differs from the one in Luke.  The two authors are making different points.  (I'll explain the difference between the theological difference between the genealogies if someone asks.)

Jesus Heals the Leper

One of the most common ways to see theology at play in the Bible is to observe how stories are placed alongside one another, that is, how they contrast and compare with one another (You don't need to know Greek to do this).  I'll use two examples.  Let's first start with the Gospel of Mark 1:40 - 3:6.  If you want to get the most out of this, read the text before continuing (If you can, read from a text that has no subtitles.)

Notice the following themes in several of the stories.

• Faith: 
• The leper demonstrates faith by saying, "if you will, you can make me clean."
• The friends of the paralytic man demonstrate faith by going out of their way to get to Jesus
• Mercy
• Jesus touches the leper before he heals him (this is technically against the law).  The man probably hasn't been touched by a clean person for years.  Jesus dignifies his humanity before he heals his body.
• Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic man before healing him (again, treating the soul).
• Jesus recruits a tax collector (who worked for the Romans - they were hated as traitors).  Jesus recognizes the outcast (same with the paralytic and the leper).
• Jesus chills with tax collectors and sinners.  He's ridiculed for this - these people haven't straightened out their lives yet.  They're not the picture of charity work that you would put on a poster.  They're sinners.  He dignifies their humanity before they get it right.  He spends time with them before he heals them. 
• Jesus heals on the Sabbath.  Again, he's breaking the law, kind of.  What he's saying is "this person's humanity is more important than protecting our most sacred laws, even the Sabbath."

Jesus Heals the Paralytic (By Jan Luyken)

• Jesus Power
  If you go back even further in the text to 1:21 you see a theme of Jesus' power permeate each story.
• Jesus has power over demons
• He has power over illness
• He has power to forgive
• He has power over the Sabbath
• He even has authority to interpret scripture that the scribes don't.

When we split the Bible up into memory verses and subsections with neat little headlines, we can miss these themes.  We also miss them because we haven't been taught to look for them.  The stories tie together and are generally told alongside one another to bring about a variety of nuanced theological points.

On account of the lengthy section of scripture, I'll continue this topic next week.

Church of Christ Scientists: How Honesty Gains Respect

In my early 20s, I had the opportunity to stop by the Church of Christ Scientist in Rochester, MI.  Here's what I remember.

I walked into an auditorium.  There were two aisles on either side of the auditorium.  Upon the stage in the front of the room stood two podiums, one on the left and one on the right.  The congregation was mostly elderly.  This is true in many churches, but it was more profoundly true here than in most churches.  There were probably about 70 people in attendance.

The church service was predominantly led by women who read from two books.  One was the Bible.  I think the other was Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy.  Up to this point, I've not taken the time to read the other book.  Aside from the additional text and strong female leadership the service didn't strike me as anything particularly out of the ordinary.  I remember enjoying it in a dull sort of way.

Mary Baker Eddy "Discovered" Christian Science

When it was over, I found myself talking to a woman in her mid fifties.  She wore a red dress.  We introduced ourselves and chatted politely about the service.  I explained that I was a theology student from Rochester College down the street.  Eventually, we got around to discussing the Church of Christ Scientist doctrine concerning faith and health.  It went something like this:

Me: Correct me if I'm wrong.  As I understand it, your church teaches that if people have faith that they will not suffer from illness.
Her: Yes, that's true.
Me: Would you also agree that people who have practiced the faith longest tend to be the most mature in it?
Her: I would say that this tends to be true, yes.
Me: It also seems to me that the oldest people in your congregation seem to be in the weakest health.  Does your fellowship have a theological explanation as to why this is?
Her: I don't know.  Honestly, I've never considered it.  Let me tell you something though.  When our denomination was founded, most Christians didn't believe that God acted in people's lives directly.  It wasn't even typical to ask for God to heal people.

Christian Science's Mother Church in Boston, MA (I hope to visit in April!)

I don't remember how the rest of the conversation went.  It was pleasant.  I don't know if that comes out in text, but I could tell that she knew that I was seeking understanding rather than challenging her.

For my part, I was and am impressed by her answer.  She answered kindly and undefensively.  This isn't an easy thing to do when one of the key assumptions of our faith has just been challenged.  My direct questions don't always get kind responses.  More impressively, she explained the historical context of her movement and the value she thought it had given to Christianity as a whole.  It seemed like a mature perspective that reflected not only on her but on her denomination as well.

How I Became a Humanist #7: Dan's Death

Dan was a member of our prayer group.  I didn't know him well, but we prayed together every week. We also confessed our sins to one another....

Joe, myself and a few others had just come back from a Skillet concert.  As we drove towards Barbier parking lot, we noticed several cars parked haphazardly around Dearborn Commons.  Through the window of the building I could see people quivering and hugging.  They looked to be crying.  Joe parked his car in Barbier and I headed over to Dearborn Commons.  There had been an accident.  Some of the students from the school had died.  Rochester College is small enough that all of the students tend to know each other - this is especially true of the students who live on campus.  You get to a point where you can recognize a person from half-way across campus, in the dark, simply by observing their gait.  Students from small liberal arts colleges will understand.

Ferndale/Hoggatt Halls and Dearborn Commons

Seeing one's own mortality in another's death affects everyone differently.  All the students and faculty were moved by the event in their own ways.  I'd had some things happen in my life over the last year or so that made me believe that following God as a Christian was the only thing that really mattered.  With Dan's death, I took religion to a whole new level.  Within about a month of Dan's death, I'd changed my major to religious studies/communication.  I began spending all of my spare time studying religion and doing spiritual things.  I read the Bible cover-to-cover three times over the next year.  This doesn't include the readings I did for classes or sermons.  It also doesn't include the readings I did with whatever young woman I happened to be dating.  Yeah, I was a hot date.

This was all happening at about the same time Emanuel's House was being born.  I was surrounded by people who were experiencing similar things.  It all fed on itself.  When the next semester hit and I began taking Bible, theology and church history classes, I went from being a sub-par student to finding myself with over a 3.0 GPA.  Soon after I was on the Dean's List.  This was a big deal for me.  Academic achievement was not a concern growing up.  The truth is, I didn't care about it even then.  I just happened to love my studies so much that an evening in the library was anything but a chore.

Like this Bible is highlighted, mine were always highlighted with comments written in the margins.  

Over the next three years, several things grew out of my religious intensity and my studies.  At first, I became something of a Charismatic Christian.  I began to ditch most of concern for Church of Christ doctrines, minus the sacraments and a preference for taking the first century Christianity seriously.  I became obsessed with biblical studies, Church history and with understanding the various expressions of Christianity.  This curiosity eventually led me to study both philosophy and other religions.  I'll write about all of these things and their affect on my faith in subsequent posts. 

How I Became a Humanist #6: Emanuel's House: How a Good Church Experience Ruins All Others

Between the year 2000 and 2003, I learned and experienced many things that challenged both my faith in Church of Christ doctrine, and led to me questioning Christianity as a whole.  The next several posts in this series are dedicated to those years.  Attending Emanuel's House was one of the key experiences.

Emanuel's House was by far the best church I have ever had.  Although the church no longer exists, I still consider myself a member; I'm not alone in this.  Emanuel's House (Ehouse) grew out of a prayer group that was started in Luke's house in the fall of 1999.  The group grew and formed a church the following spring.

It was a small church led and attended mostly by college students.  We met in the afternoons, which allowed me to lead a retirement home ministry with my friend Mal and to visit different kinds of churches.  Our members came from a variety of different Christian theological traditions.  The diversity within the group was fertile ground for my curious mind.

This wasn't the only thing that was unique about Ehouse.  Several of us were ministry or theology students.  The role of preaching and teaching was shared between a handful of talented and thoughtful people.  We often discussed the message as a group after the sermon was over, finding life application, adding nuance and sometimes even debating.  The exercise created community, inspired tolerance and taught critical thinking.

A Typical Emanuel's House Fellowship, well, kind of

After service, we went to someone's house for fellowship.  We'd play games, worship or do some kind of service together.  Often all three things would be going on at once.  We became part of each other's daily lives.  If one of us was in the hospital, members showed up in droves.  We got each other jobs, paid each other's bills and helped each other move.  We were family.  Many of us still are.

For me, Ehouse was something of a playground.  We had several theologians.  Among them, I was the one always pressing the envelop in some form or fashion.  I've always been both something of a zealot and a moving target.  I latch onto big ideas, dice them up, and synthesize them with what I already know before moving onto something else.  This gives me both multi-perspectival depth on a wide range of issues.  It's also a bit taxing to the people around me.  (Thought slightly less zealous, I can't say that I've changed #ENTP).

Ehouse gave me a fair amount of leeway when it came to trying new things.  Sometimes they worked; sometimes they didn't.

It also gave me plenty of people with whom I could work out new ideas: people who challenged me, fed me new information and experiences, and people who teased out different ideas through intense and ongoing conversations.

The bad thing about Ehouse is that after leaving, I never was able to find anything like it again.  I sometimes had the opportunity to work with amazing people, but the sort of community and openness to new ideas was something I was unable to find.  

How I Became a Humanist #5: Visiting the Disciples of Christ (Christian Church)

One summer, while working security, I saw a young woman walking out of the apartment complex holding a Bible.  We struck up a conversation.  She was headed to a Disciples of Christ church.  On account of my Church of Christ background, I was instantly curious.

The two denominations had originally been part of the same movement.  They began dividing after the American Civil War, mostly along the lines of north and south.  Like most northern churches, the Disciples of Christ were more liberal, both theologically and politically.  The southern Churches of Christ were more conservative.

The young woman invited me to come out one Sunday.  I took her up on the offer.  It would be my first time visiting a church outside the Churches of Christ.

I had expected the Disciples of Christ to differ only slightly from the Churches of Christ.  I knew, for example, that they used instruments and had missionary societies.  These were the main doctrinally contentious issues in the late 1800s that eventually caused the split.  It hadn't occurred to me that the churches had evolved since.

I stepped in to hear a pipe organ playing.  While I wasn't opposed to instrumental music any more, I didn't care for the organ.  The church had a female minister who shared the ministry with her husband.  I was slightly unnerved by their being a female minister.  The Churches of Christ teach that women are not supposed to teach or hold leadership in the church.

Like the Churches of Christ, the Disciples have their Communion Table Front and Center

If this had been all that had happened, I would have left the church an unchanged man.  But it wasn't.  During the service, the church read about 2 whole chapters of scripture. I'd never experienced anything like it.  Our churches read a few verses in support of the sermon.  This church read scripture for it's own sake.

The whole experience was a slap in the face to my Church of Christ upbringing.  I'd been taught that our churches were the only ones that read the Bible.  If that was true, why were they reading so much more of it in their services than we were?  Why were they reading it for its own sake when we weren't?  I admired the practice and was curious what others I might be missing out on.  I began to question my beliefs about other churches.  My faith in Church of Christ rhetoric had suffered a significant blow.  It would not recover.

How I Became a Humanist #3: A Brief Period of Atheism

At the same time that I was questioning Church of Christ doctrinal priorities, I was also questioning Christian behavior.  In church we were taught that Christians were loving, good and kind and that non-Christians were immoral.

I'd grown up poorer than most of my peers.  I was familiar with spam, government cheese, and government grapefruit juice.  I wore clothes from resale shops and hand-me-downs from people at church -  I sometimes got other kids clothes without them knowing that their parents had given them away.  This was incredibly embarrassing.

Me (front and center) with my adopted brothers and sisters.  We're standing on the deck outside the house.  The house siding is made of shingles.  The haircuts, glasses, clothes and even appearance of the house in the background are indications of poverty - though certainly not of desperation.  

On top of that, my family suffered a great deal when I was young.  My 4 year-old brother died when I was 7, less than 2 years after my parents' divorce.  After the divorce, my father almost never came around.  This was harder on me than he realized.  About a year after my brother's death, it looked like my grandmother would pass too.  She had breast cancer and a series of cardiac issues.  She was in and out of the hospital constantly even beyond the point when our house burned down, when I was 12.  From there I struggled a great deal with depression often to the point of being delusional.  The only other thing you need to know is that kids can be mean - this was true both at school and at church.

My brother's headstone

Around age 14, I started to grow out of my depression and actively fought my social awkwardness.  By 16, I was becoming well-liked at school.  The people at church, however, didn't change their behavior towards me.  The contrast between the two environments made me feel that Christians were more judgmental than non-Christians.  It wasn't only how they treated me, it was their attitudes towards others.  (I wonder if I would have noticed had they treated me well).

The truth is that I went to an odd high school.  Our class president was a young woman, and the vice president was a gay fellow.  Our school government had a Mexican woman, a black dude and a Muslim girl too.  This was in a predominately white school.  It was a school where I'd go to school activities like basketball games in black clothes and combat boots.  Admittedly, I was somewhat unique myself, but East Detroit High School was a place where anyone who wanted to get along with others pretty much could.

East Detroit High School

 The perception that Christians might be less moral than non-Christians followed me to Rochester College (a Church of Christ school).  My first year there was a social adjustment.  I was even poorer than most of the students there than I had been to my peers in high school, and my social upbringing didn't prepare me to get along with my classmates.  I was comparatively rough around the edges.  I felt ostracized and alone.  I deeply missed being in a non-Christian environment where who I was mattered more than what I could afford to wear.

I decided that if this was how Christians acted that I didn't want to be one.  By the end of my freshman year, I rarely attended church.  I was beginning to consider myself an atheist.  Then one night, I came home late to my mom pacing the floor.... (To be continued)

How I Became a Humanist #2: Pianos, Water and Doubt

The baptismal is elevated above the pulpit representing it's place in Church of Christ theology.  The prominence and sanctuary-like status is typical of Church of Christ architecture. (Roseville Church of Christ)  Notice, also, the lack of a piano or any other instrument.

When I was 11 years old, I declared Jesus to be the Lord of my life through baptism.  This is considered to be the moment of salvation in the Churches of Christ (CofC).  For my age, I was knowledgeable both concerning my church's doctrines and the scriptures.  From the age of 8, I had a habit of reading the Bible while laying on the floor next my nightlight.

I was also familiar with other CofC literature, both books and pamphlets - these were generally apologetic in nature.  They explained why the Churches of Christ were the truth church and all other churches were in error.  The assumption was that any doctrinal error could lead to damnation.

I believed this without reservation.  Logically, I tried to convert others to the CofC, classmates, teachers, even clergy from other churches including the Baptist minister where my grandfather worked as a janitor, and the priest at St. Veronica Catholic Church.

In my early teen years, however, I began to question the Churches of Christ's doctrinal priorities.  Having read the Gospels, I thought it was odd to place so much value on ritual and so little value on loving each other.  By the time I was 16, I was becoming skeptical about our certainty that we were the only one's going to heaven, especially over something as trivial as instruments - which, I didn't think the New Testament was so strict about.

By the time I graduated high school, I was developing a cynical attitude towards Church of Christ legalism.  I was even beginning to turn our basic logic against itself - a logical tool I've been fond of using ever since.  See, the CofC teach that if something related to worship or church organization isn't in the Bible, that we shouldn't do it.  Nevertheless, we had pulpit ministers, youth ministers, Sunday school, hymnals and a whole host of other things that clearly weren't Biblical.  In other words, we only applied our own logic only when it was beneficial.

I still thought that the Churches of Christ were the closest churches to the true church and I still assumed that, our goal should be to emulate the first century church.  At the same time that all this was working itself out, I was noticing other things about Christians and non-Christians that I will discuss in my next post in this series.

How I became a Humanist #1: Jesus Freaks in the Churches of Christ

Much of early moral development can be framed by two seemingly non-contradictory value systems.  I was (1) raised by Jesus Freaks (2) in the Churches of Christ.  When I was young, it seemed to me that the moral lessons taught at home were the same as those taught in the church.  It wasn't until I left Christianity that I realized the moral tensions between the two environments and how that tension ultimately led to me ditching Christianity as I was familiar with it.

Roseville Church of Christ Pulpit, Lord's Supper Table and Baptistry (notice the lack of a piano).

My family went to church at  the Roseville Church of Christ at least three times a week, Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings and Wednesday nights.  If the Church had an activity that the family was able to participate in, we participated in it, whether it was a youth camp, Vacation Bible School or charity related event.  At home, we prayed before every meal, and were encouraged to read the Bible on our own.  From age 8, I did.

At church we learned typical moral lessons, don't cheat or steal,
etc.  But we were also taught that members of the Churches of Christ were probably the only people going to heaven.  The reason for us believing this was because the other churches were full of doctrinal errors.  They worshiped incorrectly.  They believed the wrong things.  And their churches were organized improperly.  While I never heard anyone say it overtly, the message delivered was that performing rituals like baptism and communion properly was more important to God than whether or not we were racists or spouse abusers.  In any case, it was adherence to the rituals and beliefs that made us Christians, even if the behaviors were considered important.

At home, on the other hand, I was taught to love all people.  My mom and grandparents both took in foster children with a wide variety of needs.  They took in kids of every race, too.  My grandparents visited the sick, and often gave more than they could afford to help those in need.  What's more, they didn't hate anyone.  We never made jokes about race, hair color or ethnicity.  We didn't even make fun of gays.  I didn't grow up with sexism either.  Additionally, my family put high stock in education and critical thinking.  My mom rarely said, "because I said so," for the things I was supposed to believe.  I was not instructed not to ask why, the way that many children are.  At home, compassion and reason were central to morality over anything else.

When I was young, the two moralities were intertwined in my mind.  I assumed that everyone at church believed the same things about loving one's neighbor and asking questions as I did.  I also assumed that my family believed the same things about God's priorities.  It didn't seem to me that the two value systems were in conflict.  During my teenage years, friction developed.  More on that later.