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. 

Better Life Community: An Introduction

 Earlier this week, I started a Meet-up group called "Better Life Community - Roseville." Starting this community, or something like it, is something I've been thinking about since I left Christianity, or in some ways, before I left Christianity. I wasn't particularly happy with the way I saw most Christian communities doing church.

I decided to start it now both because I need this community now and also because I think my life is more or less stable enough that I can handle getting it going. If you're reading this, you probably doing care much about my personal story getting here and even if you do, that's probably something better for a conversation over coffee than it is a blog post....

So, what are my goals with this community? What am I trying to create? And how do I plan to get it off the ground?

First, let's talk about goals. I want a community that encourages people to be their best selves, to improve their local community and also to enjoy life. The group would facilitate educational opportunities and discussions. It would create space for identifying goals of individual members and encourage those members to achieve those goals. It would identify opportunities to improve the local community and act on them. And - it would be fun and encourage people to have fun.

Also, it wouldn't be dogmatic. This is very important to me. I happen to be a practicing Stoic, a Humanist and am influenced by all sorts of other ideas and lenses, but... I'm not interested in forming a group to create replicas of myself. I don't even want an insular group. Instead, I want to create something that is always bringing in new ideas and interacting with various groups on the outside. While I think every community needs a core, I think that communities where the lines between insiders and outsiders is too clearly delineated or where the line between ideas we accept and ideas we don't it too strict... well, I think that can be a bad thing. 

How do I get it off the ground? Well, I think every successful community like this develops with a good mix of direct leadership and organic growth. You someone with vision and I've definitely got one, but the implementation of that vision needs to be guided, often altered, by the community sharing it. The visionary is often wrong, particularly about implementation. 

Nevertheless, here are my current ideas. I'm starting three separate groups, Roseville Runners, Better Life Community and Roseville Beautification Volunteer Core (not quite sure on the name here yet). The groups are separate, but have overlapping goals. The runners group will help people improve their fitness levels and hopefully increase use of public parks. The Beautification group will improve those parks. And the Better Life Community will be more about philosophy, philanthropy and fun, but will also encourage an active life. 

All three groups are intended both to work together from time to time and also to collaborate with outside entities, both other Meet-ups and also Civic organizations. 

And that brings me to my philosophy on leadership and collaboration with other groups. While I believe that self-improvement, community improvement and life enjoyment are uncontroversially good goals, my views on how best to achieve this, my methods and even those of the communities of which I am a part, will not always be best. Even when they're great, they will be incomplete in both the knowledge informing their approach and the talents and skills enabling their implementation. On account of this, I can't successfully achieve my goals without both the cooperation and even leadership of others. 

Let's take the running group as an example. A good running group should have a good stretch routine. Now, I do know quite a bit about stretching, both because I'm a Soldier and we do a stretch routine after our workouts and also because I happen to have fairly tight hamstrings. But, I don't have a strong history with yoga. Over time, no doubt, someone who joins the running group will have that background. It only makes sense for that person to lead us in stretching. If we don't find such a person, and even if we do, it might only make sense for the Roseville Runners, once and a while to collaborate with a group that focuses on yoga or stretching for the obvious reason that we'll learn new things and meet new people, but also because this sort of cross-pollination enriches the community at large. 

If this sounds interesting to you and you're in the area, here's a link to our Meet-up group
https://www.meetup.com/better-life-community-of-macomb-county/

A Life Without Religion: Lack of Community

The day I became an atheist was terrifying. I had really taken to heart some nonsense that had been preached by a well-meaning fellow named Rick Warren. He'd told me that without faith, I wouldn't have either meaning in life or a reason to be moral. It only took about two weeks of not being religious for these fears to abate so much that the articulation of them soon became an obvious absurdity.

But that's to say that the transition to secular humanism was without it's costs. One of the things I've come to miss most since leaving religion is the sense of community one of has when part of a religious organization. 

A healthy religious community functions a lot like an extended family. It's a place for mutual encourage, the pooling of resources and a place to find deep friendships. To is so true that many of my most valued friendships are those I found through my religious associations, even those most of these friends are no longer religious. 

When I first realized my need for this kind of community, I started looking for secular humanist communities in which to participate. I found the Universalist Unitarians to be too traditionally religious for my liking and generally found other groups to be sectarian about their atheism in a way that reminded me too much of the religious cult I'd grown up in. I didn't leave one form of toxic community in order to join another - even if I my ideas were more aligned with the new community.

Only, maybe they never were. I think that one of the main problems with both communities was the idea that we're justified by our beliefs concerning the nature of the universe. I couldn't have articulated this all those years ago, but I think that being justified by one beliefs is the exact opposite of virtue. Most people can make themselves believe just about anything if they believe that belief will be advantageous to them somehow.

This has left me in an unfortunate place. I want the sort of community one tends to find as a member of a religious organization, without the extra baggage associated with religion.

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 #9: Understanding the Bible and How to Use It #1

I was brought up to believe that Christians have a duty to read the Bible.  From age 8, I read it regularly.  The funny thing is, no one ever told me how to read the Bible.  In church, we sometimes went through books, but often we had lessons in which the teacher would bounce around the Bible from verse to verse.  In my preteen years, when I was taught how to preach, I was given a concordance and told that I could look up topics and words to support what I had to say.  This way of reading the Bible is common in churches that grew up on American soil during the 1800s and afterward.

One of the first serious Bible classes I took in undergrad was a course in how to read the Bible.  In it, we learned a lot of things that changed the way I saw scripture and how Christians ought to use it.

One of the first things I learned was the Bible was not originally written with chapters and verses.  Admittedly, I already knew this, but I'd never taken the time to think about what it meant.  I'd also never taken the time to consider the fact that most of the Bibles we read don't just have those additions, they also have labeled subheadings.  Sometimes the subheadings explain the meaning of the scripture.  Even when they don't, they separate one story from another in a way that the author of the text might not have intended.

Matthew Chatper 5 - 6 NIV (Notice the Subtitles)

It will surprise some readers to know that chapters were not commonplace in the Bible until the 900s (though versions with chapters showed up in the 4th century), and that verses didn't become commonplace around the 1500s, which is why there are a few places in the Bible where Catholics and Protestants separate verses differently (the process hadn't completed when the Reformation started). (More Information)

Obviously, concordances like the ones we use today couldn't exist without verses.  The Bible wasn't written to be used in the way that Evangelicals use it - topically.  It was written book by book, and the books were meant to be read as wholes.  Imagine for a moment that a friend of yours is trying to convince you of something I want to say to you, but instead of giving you several paragraphs from me, he takes a sentence from my writing here, a sentence there and combines them to support his intended message.  Can you be sure that I would agree with his message?  Taking time to think about how the Bible was written and originally delivered to us forced me to think about how to read it well and to not force it to say whatever I might want it to.

One of the other things I learned, probably in a history class, is that the printing press didn't exist in a form useful to the masses before the mid 1400s.  In order to copy books, you needed a scribe to write down every single letter of every single word.  Imagine how long it would take to write a copy of the whole Bible - and that would be just one copy.  If you wanted another copy, the scribe would have to repeat the entire process.  Books were really expensive.  A copy of the Bible could cost more than the average person would make in his entire life.

Early Christians didn't own copies of the Bible.  In fact, since books were inaccessible to most people, the average person had no reason to learn how to read.  And so, he didn't.  Instead, just like there were scribes to make copies of books, there were professional readers who would read texts to audiences.  This is why Mark 13:14 says, "Let the reader understand."  Mark wants to make sure that the reader, obviously not you or I, understands.  For the first 1500 years of Christianity, the Bible was inaccessible to the average Christian not simply because of persecution from the Catholic Church, but because a single book was too expensive to buy and the average person couldn't read anyway.

The people who taught this to me rarely questioned what this meant for the Churches of Christ and other Evangelical Churches, but I did.  It occurred to me that if our churches couldn't have even existed in their current form with their current assumptions for the first 75% of Christian history, then we must have some false assumptions about what is required to be Christian.  Clearly, reading the Bible regularly isn't something God expected of the average Christian, otherwise he would have waited to send Jesus until the 1500s, or somehow inspired society with an efficient printing press much earlier.  God saw no need to intervene.

The Bible was originally handwritten.  This is a cleaned up version of Koine Greek.  The earliest versions didn't have dots or spaces between the words, which sometimes created confusion for copying or translating scribes.

I knew this was a problem for the Churches of Christ, but I didn't realize how much this information changed my perspective.  Looking back, I realize that I no longer trusted the Churches of Christ to interpret scripture.  Our founding assumption that God wanted us to all interpret it personally seemed to be false.  Moreover, we were using it in a way that early Christians couldn't have, with chapters, verses, concordances and cherry-picking.  

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.

Human Behavior versus Faith in God

 20Whoever claims to love God yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God, whom they have not seen. 21And he has given us this command: Anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. 
1 John 4:20-21 

Human behavior was a recurring theme in my struggle with faith. It's wasn't just that Christians hurt or disappointed me; it was that I often found non-Christians morally impressive by comparison. While many of my Christian friends claim that this shouldn't cast doubt on Christianity, I've never been convinced.

A Common Internet Meme on the Subject

 One of the main reasons for this comes from Christian scripture.  Paul claims that the fruits of the Spirit are moral in nature.  Jesus claims that "you will know them by their fruits," and "they will know you are my disciples by the love you have for one another."  Christianity claims that it's adherents will be more moral than non-Christians through their faith and the power of the Holy Spirit.

Reason supports this too.  Christianity is an ethical religion, one that claims to help make you a more moral person.  Therefore, if Christians do not tend to be more moral than their non-Christian counterparts, the religion is suspect.  How can a religion's claims about God or the afterlife be trusted if the present appear to be false?

My point is not necessarily that Christians are less moral than non-Christians.  How would one even quantify the variables necessary to prove such a statement?  What does one mean by Christian?  Should we take our meaning from the Gospel of John or from the Gospel of Luke?  Should we defer to Walter Rauschenbusch or Billy Graham?  The Latter Day Saints or the Greek Orthodox?  Is Christianity about following Jesus, or is it a set of beliefs?  If you identify as Christian, you'll have to determine these things for yourself.

Billy Graham: American Evangelist

My point is this.  Your behavior testifies about the value of your way of life, whatever that way of life is.  It doesn't matter if you're Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Pastafarian.  If the way of life you claim isn't producing the results it claims to, then your philosophy will be scrutinized.  Of course, others will do some of that scrutinizing.  But we should be doing this ourselves.  We should be testing our ways of life to ensure that we are either getting what we want from them, or becoming who we want to be.  We should be asking the following questions.

• Does my philosophy of life give me the things it promises? 
• On average, do I have these things/attributes more than people who follow a different way of life?  
• If not, why not?
  
  This reflection is based on my series How I Became a Humanist Part 3
  
  
  (All Christian Scriptures taken from the NIV)

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.

My Neighbor's Faith #3: Baha'i Center in Washington DC (Part 2): The People

The Baha'i Temple in Haifa, Israel

A WARM FELLOWSHIP

When I entered the Baha'i Center, I was greeted by a man who showed me to a place to sit where we chatted until other people began to arrive.  As they did, I met and chatted with more and more people.  They were so easy to talk to that one fellow and I were actually late to the beginning of the service.

This chatting continued for some time after the service adjourned.  By the end of it, I was rather well acquainted with 10 people.  I remember their names, know where some of them work and have email contact with three of them.  I've emailed all three, and all three have responded.  Needless to say, I spent a lot of time talking with people there.  Hours flew by socializing on chairs and cushioned benches.  I would have stayed longer if circumstances had allowed.

A DIVERSE COMMUNITY

It was, without any doubt, the most racially diverse group of people I'd ever seen in any location ever.  This is not an exaggeration.  And when I think of the fact that there were almost certainly less than 70 people present, I am still in shock as to how this is possible.  The number of men and women seemed about equal - as did their status within the group.  The attendees were a rainbow of different skin colors and no one pigment seemed to dominate.  Even the age of those present varied with plenty of children in attendance.  I've never seen anything quite like it.

RELAXED

Like most lively religious groups, the Bahais were happy to share their religion with another person, but it wasn't forceful.  "It's not our job to convert people," I was told.  They weren't even mildly condescending when I described myself as a Humanist - not a single one of them.  There are theological reasons for why this is so -

1.  They seem to see spiritual development as more important than dogma.  
2. he highest act of worship is service to humanity, what Christians call "Loving one's neighbor."  
3. They don't believe one person ought to control another.  It's their job to love, not to compel others into belief.  (Ironically, I found this rather compelling). 

Interacting with the Baha'i Community was refreshing to the point of it almost being weird.  I felt warm inside.

Growing Past Condescension

When I look over the first essay in my series How I became a Humanist: Jesus Freaks in the Churches of Christ, I think it would be easy for a reader to assume that I look down on members of the Churches of Christ for holding different values than I do.  At one time I certainly did.

For whatever reason, it's natural for us to look down on people who think differently from ourselves.  This is true not only in matters of religion and politics, but even in sports, hobbies and music where the issue of taste is almost completely arbitrary.

The fact that we look down on one another for disagreement over arbitrary things is odd enough.  What's odder is that we often look down on people who believe things we up until recently believed ourselves.  As an example, ten years ago most Americans opposed gay marriage.  Today, most Americans support it.  That's all very well.  What's not is that many of the people who've changed their minds look down on those who haven't yet adopted the new perspective.

The problem is that by looking down on people who think differently from us, we are often looking down either on our past or future selves.  We are also ignoring the fact that we have all been very wrong about things we felt very strongly about in the past and likely will be again in the future.  When I think back at some of the things I used to believe, I sometimes cringe, but I don't think this is the right response.  Past me only knew what past me knew.  He didn't deserve to be judged harshly by other then, or to be judged harshly by me today.  I don't deserve to be judged harshly for the things I don't yet know today, and neither do the people who may not know what I do about one topic or another.  This is all the more true since it is often possible that they're right even though I'm so damn sure that they're wrong.

One of the things I will tell you today is that the Roseville Church of Christ is an amazing church full of kindness and warmth.  It easy as a young person to see all the various faults in a particular ideology.  It's as easy to criticize a church, country or political party as it is to criticize your parents.  And since those behaviors are a healthy part of young adulthood, I'm glad to have gone through them.  I'm also glad to have grown past them.   Today, I realize that my teachers, preachers and fellow Church of Christ members were doing the best they could.  They were great people who were practicing and teaching those things they believed would make me a better person and the world a better place.  I love that church and its members more than I can say.  

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.