Existential Angst

This post is about the anxiety of existence. An acquaintance of mine at a message board I go to asked the following questions (reproduced, as is):

Do you think satire was correct that knowledge of ones own freedom brings despair?
I ask because from his perspective (atheist existentilism) we define ourselves by what limitations we put on ourselves in the face of absolute freedom. when you deconverted did it feel as if you lost a part of yourself because you lost some of the self imposed limitations that serving God requires?

I responded there, but I thought that a more complete answer would make a good post here.

The paragraph above is a mix of issues, questions, and assumptions each of which I intend to address. The first is how did I feel when I deconverted. Didn't I feel a loss? The second is: Shouldn't I have felt a loss? That is, was Sartre correct? (Sartre is what the correspondent meant by “satire”.) Another question: Is there such a thing as “absolute freedom”. And lastly, how do we or should we define ourselves.

Note: I am not an existentialist, so far as I know, and as such I do not intend to speak for that philosophical position.

How did I feel when I deconverted? Relieved. Loss and incompleteness simply weren't among the panoply of feelings I had. In the years leading up to my deconversion, most of my waking moments were consumed with reconciling my beliefs with my perceptions of reality. I had developed quite an extensive theology where I tried to reconcile the existence of evil with the goodness of God, the transcendence of God without an attendant arbitrariness, the immanence of God with the personalness of God, etc. Every day was a struggle to pull in a new piece of the puzzle without losing something gained earlier.

Once I realized that I didn't actually believe any of it—that I had neither inductive nor deductive reasons to believe any of the original propositions or my reformulated ones—the the struggle vanished. (Now, I vacillate between finding something else to do and playing with Theology simply because I enjoy it. I must say it is easier to go with inertia.)

This feeling I've experienced I'd say is akin to freedom. But it is different than the sense of the original question. My freedom is a freedom from struggle and other things. It is a freedom from not a freedom to. In that sense, this freedom from cannot bring anxiety. However, the freedom to choose to do something can be overwhelming in the face of too many options. Anyone who has raised children has had an opportunity to see this in a somewhat safe environment. My wife would ask my daughter what she wanted as a snack before bedtime. She'd ask, "Do you want eggs, Cheerios, Cap'n Crunch, toast, apple sauce ..." and the list would go on. My daughter (I'm thinking of when she was about 4) simply could not handle the array of choices. If you said, "Your choices are: Cheerios or Apple sauce or nothing", she'd make a choice almost immediately. Too much freedom creates a deadlock in the brain.

If then there were such a thing as absolute freedom, one can imagine that it would bring a certain sort of paralysis. The question is what would one mean by absolute freedom. It is difficult to know what anyone might mean by that. In debates on the question of Free Will, some will assert that there is no Free Will if we cannot fly unaided simply by willing to do so. I find such requirements unhelpful. I think that if absolute freedom entails the freedom to do impossible things, then it is a useless term in the pursuit of knowledge. All one can do with that requirement is to say, “OK, I agree that that doesn't exist. Can we now discuss something practical?”

Rather than worry about what “absolute freedom” might mean, let me focus on our limitations. By doing so, I think we can agree that we are not unlimited and that those limitations give us sufficient freedom to act—assuming we acknowledge those limitations. In other words, for a philosophical thinker there need not be paralysis.

I contend that my disbelief brought with it a more secure sense of who I am--and the constraints that go with it. I am free to be who I am. I am free to know who I am. But I am not free to be who I am not. For example, I cannot (should not) be an entrepreneur—I simply lack the imagination. I could work for one. I can make things happen. But I can't imagine a product or service that someone needs that doesn't yet exist. To be able to understand who I am is to define who I am. To define is to limit. If I am 6 feet tall, then I am not 7 feet tall. If I am male, I am not female. If I am an atheist, I do not believe in God. If I am human, I cannot fly unaided. What defines me, limits me. Understanding those limitations enables me to act as I can without attempting to act as I cannot.

This I hold is both healthy and in contrast to theism in general and Christianity in particular. In giving up Christianity, I gave up despair of the idea that I had to be something other than what I am—to be "like Jesus". I gave up feeling guilty about not being perfect. The idea of personal perfection in Christianity entails "dying to self", the renunciation of what you truly are. Repentance entails that one thinks one can get rid of flaws simply by pushing them aside.

I am a lazy person. I cannot simply deny this and have the laziness vanish. I must own it. I must acknowledge that I can be active and motivated only when I act in the face of what I am—lazy. I must ask myself, am I not doing X simply because I am giving in to my nature or do I really have a good reason—and does it matter in this case? As a theist, I'd find myself saying "I must not be lazy. Therefore I should X simply to show that I am not lazy; that my sanctification is well under way."

Christianity, for me, was the ultimate slavery of deluding myself and denying myself and a failure to truly grow. There is an inherent dishonesty in it. I lie to myself that I am not the way I am and can be other by saying to a god that I'm sorry. If I truly repent, then sin will leave me—because it isn't really me anyway.

The freedom to be who you are and accept it is achievable for both the atheist and the theist. However, Christianity entails a desire to be other than what you are—a sadness that you are not other than you are; that you are utterly worthless; that you are worthy only of eternal punishment. A theist is free only to the extent he or she denies these premises.

Leaving faith did not cause despair for me. It didn't create an array of options too vast to cope with. Rather it provided a framework for living more realistic than any I had before.

I am free and unparalyzed.

Emotions and Manipulation

My daughter called me this week. She is at a mission thing for almost six months. The first half of this is training. The second half is a trip abroad to share the gospel.

I'm at work attempting to resolve some programming design issues with a colleague when the call comes. She never calls me. So naturally I think this could be bad: someone died, she decided to marry someone she's now known for a month, something.

It was none of these things though it involved a lot of tears on her part and befuddlement on mine. In essence, she called to confess to me her short comings towards me. The gist of her confession was this: She was sorry she hadn't lived her life honestly before me; that she hadn't shared the things that were important to her; that she should have shared how she saw God working in her life and just how important God was to her. This was important to confess because if she couldn't share all this with me how then could she share God in the country she was going to.

So did anyone else in the family get this phone call? Nope, just me. Why would that be? Because I am the only non-believer in the family? Yeah, I think so. I don't honestly know what she was thinking. The phone call lasted less than 10 minutes and I had work to do. I just wanted to say the right things and get back to work. This may sound a little cold but I was under a lot of stress at work and the last thing I really needed was this emotionally overwrought daughter confessing imaginary sins. And, too, what could I say? I suppose I could have responded with caustic remarks about her imaginary friend. I did tell her that if she imagined a lack of honesty in her life, it must be toward herself since I had no particular expectations. I know she is a committed Christian. I know she has an interest in long term missions. Though I am against such things, I wrote a sizable check to finance this trip. Why? I'll have to think about an answer to that, but for now we can say that I acknowledge that each person's journey is his or her own.

So here is my theory as to what was happening noting that for the purpose of this post that it doesn't actually matter whether I am right: The group she was with created this environment in which it was possible to believe that she was unworthy for various short comings but also one in which she could be redeemed. If it sounds a little cult like, it is because it is. The group isn't particularly dangerous; it's just that this is the way all religious groups work. Hell, it's the way that all groups operate in which membership and belonging are highly prized. Perhaps my daughter decided that my loss of faith was her fault like a child who thinks that its parents' divorce is its fault. Perhaps she imagined that if she said all these things and professed strongly that “My God is everything” that maybe I would become a Christian.

My befuddlement comes from this. I had been a Christian for 44 years before I changed my mind. I, I, raised my daughter to be a Christian. She sat as a preteen and teenager under my teaching of adults so she could get the deeper, more intellectual, components of Christian thought. Though my wife was very important to answering tough questions, I got the toughest. Why is it she would think these things? Doesn't she know I have thought her thoughts? Doesn't she know I've had her doubts? Doesn't she know I've prayed until my tears dried up? Doesn't she know I wanted to save the world? “Daddy, I've seen lives changed!” Yeah, kiddo, so have I ... and lived long enough to see through the illusion. She wants to be come from church and tell me what profound new thing she's learned. Well, that's fine. I want my children to be able to talk to me. Nevertheless, in the context of the confession one supposes that she wants to use each and every opportunity to convert me. Not only is that a nuisance, it is offensive. Am I prize to be won? Am I an object? How about treating me like a person who does not wish to be importuned? This desire of hers (however, temporary I may hope it to be) doesn't seem to be about connecting with her father, but rather to absolve guilt.

The first time I remember becoming aware of emotional manipulation I was a freshman in high school. I attended a Christian school. They actually took the better part of a week off from classes to have a team from some conservative college come and minister to us. (It might have been Bob Jones University or Pensacola Bible College; I don't quite recall but it would have been a school very much like these.) For the entire time, they had rooms set aside where people could go to pray and be ministered to by those team members who weren't singing, acting, or preaching. On the last day or perhaps the next to last day, I felt the call to go and get right with God. The pressure was intense. One of my fellow sympathetic students commented after we were dismissed that he could see my conflict. I rocked back and forth in my seat trying to decide whether to go or to stay seated. Eventually, I went to one of the rooms. As it happened, nobody came to minister to me. I was on my own. I cried out to God. I confessed sins I had confessed many years before though we are reassured that once forgiven, always forgiven. I confessed real sins those that I might possibly be guilty of though I had never thought of them before that very moment. Eventually, I was worn out. I had managed to catch my breath and feel like I had re-established an equilibrium. So I returned to the auditorium. Immediately, immediately(!), I felt the pressure return. I interpreted this as a sign I needed to go forward and share my experience. (They had a microphone set aside for people to do that.) Almost as soon as I decided to do that, the service was over. And, as quickly as it came, the pressure left.

This all was very odd to me. I'm glad I was mature enough to grasp what was occurring, though it took me a few years to articulate it. In a setting with my peers who were responding to the message, I felt intense pressure. I would leave and the feeling would leave. (Yes, it left the first time too; I just felt the need to follow through with the decision to call out to God.) I would enter and the pressure came again. Time to go? Pressure gone again. Now one would think that if God were talking to me, he would continue to do so as I walked out for some privacy. However even as I called out to God in one of the back rooms, I was met with cold, dead silence. You would think if I were “convicted,” God would give guidance as to what was expected of me. Nothing. Nada. Silence. Yet when I returned to the auditorium, the feeling returned too. As the day and even weeks progressed, there was no internal sense that there was anything real about the spiritualness of the experience. You would think that the touch of the hand of God would persist beyond the moment.

I suppose that there are those for whom the experience persists. Nevertheless, it did not for me. So what conclusion could I draw from this but that emotions are illusory. I mean, surely God could communicate to me outside the auditorium, couldn't he? Was I manipulated? I think so. Emotions do not seem to be an indication of a should or ought but rather are a barometer of one's response to one's environment. I would not suggest that one should ignore one's emotions, but rather that one should pay attention to them as a means of self assessment.

I imagine that all of us have witnessed people's feelings manipulated by an experience only to have them dissolve when removed from the experience. Movies are made of people who make decisions based on passionate feelings only to have disastrous consequences. Movies are also made of those who follow their brains only to have that backfire, too. I am not suggesting that movies are an indication of importance, but rather it is an indication of the human experience.

Since that time, years ago, I have distrusted environments that are designed or contrived to make you feel something. I don't like movies architected to make you feel a particular way. (Of late, I've grown sympathetic to movies that make me feel—if and only if I am convinced that people would really behave that way and that the movie isn't artificial in telling the story. Fiddler On The Roof moves me to tears sometimes. It feels authentic to me.) When I was a Christian, I could get involved in the music but I disliked services that seemed designed to work people up emotionally. It always seemed to me that if one didn't feel the emotion, then you weren't truly worshiping. Such a perspective always seem to favor a particular kind of person. Those of us who were born to respond to our environment as rationally as we can muster are defined into the class of the unspiritual. Though that doesn't bother me now, the implication of being a lesser person still makes me angry. Those that are supposed to understand people best completely fail to understand the range of personality types this world has.

These days, though I try not to be cocky, I feel somewhat immune to being emotionally manipulated into doing something I would not otherwise do. It is probable that I can be manipulated into doing something that doesn't inherently violate my integrity.

I'll have to think longer on what I may do or say with respect to my daughter. I think she was manipulated into feeling guilt about who she was. In turn, I think she was manipulating me. I don't think that this is necessarily a conscious thing that Christians (or any religionists) do, though for some it certainly calculated. It is however a natural tool in the human arsenal to get what we want.

Awareness of this tactic, I think, is the single most effective way to disarm the manipulator. If someone is manipulating you with emotions, take a cold hard look at the situation and then act according to your integrity.

First Steps to Disbelief

In this post, I'd like to recount what, as best I can recall, were my first steps toward disbelief. I call these first steps baby steps since these events did not immediately make me a non-believer. In fact, it took another 5 or 6 years.

Isaac Asimov said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” Indeed, this was how my journey to my current state began.

Around 2000 or 2001, I went to a men's retreat wherein the pastor recounted a story of a young man (a teen, I think) read the entire Bible in one month. Now I had read the Bible before in its entirety—at least twice—but, I'd never read it with the intensity I'd usually reserved for a good novel. So I resolved I would try to read the Bible in one month. I almost made it. If it hadn't been for the Thanksgiving holiday, I would made it. With the wind out of my sails, it took me another couple of months to finish. However, the damage had been done.

It was in someways an unremarkable experience: long genealogies, lots of laws, depressing psalms and prophetical rants about how Israel disappoints God. Nevertheless, when you attempt to read the Bible as a single unit and quickly enough, you notice things you didn't notice before. For example, in Job one of the speakers says how God is able to make man eat grass like a beast of the field. Plowing on ahead, within a day or two you read that Daniel tells of Nebuchadnezzar's insanity using almost exactly the same phrase: making man eat grass like a beast of the field.

This seems trivial and in some ways it is, but growing up I was told that Job was probably the oldest book in the Bible. The reason for this seems to be that the places associated with Job's friends have no archaeological evidence for existing. The problem seems less troubling if we assume that the book is older than Moses and the places have been ground into dust. Finding the similarity in language usage suggested to me that perhaps the book was comparatively recent and was written during the Babylonian period. For some, this may be a problem but it needn't be. The story could have been maintained by oral tradition. It may not have happened at all, but rather the book was a play written to explain evil. After all, since Jesus told parables perhaps the author of Job was inspired to write this parable. Oddly, you rarely hear of a religionist taking the position that the Song of Solomon is a literal retelling of someone's sex life. Obviously, it is a metaphor for the relationship between God and Israel or the church depending on whether the theologian is representing Judaism or Christianity, respectively. (Incidentally, there is works explaining just how graphic this book is.) If one insists on the Song of Solomon being a metaphor, then certainly one should allow that Job is a parable. Does being a parable reduce the meaning of Job? If so, should Jesus have told stories of real people instead of telling parables?

As it turned out, my guess was right. That is, many modern Bible scholars consider Job a rather recent work. Their reasons probably don't include mine which is just as well since my guess is probably just a spurious correlation of text. I may be right on my example, but I haven't researched it.

What I learned from this that there are those that will impose an explanation to preserve a preconception. In this example, this is where we need as literal a translation as possible and therefore insist on an ancient dating for Job contrary to whatever evidence exists. (Ironically, the need to avoid the suggestion that sex can be sexy overrides literalness of the Song of Solomon.)

The second discovery was the almost complete absence of Satan in the old testament (the Hebrew Bible for our Jewish friends). In fact, he is explicitly referenced 3 times: 1) in 1 Chronicles 21:1 where he is said to tempt David to number the people, 2) in Job where he bargains with God to torture Job, and 3) and Zechariah 3, where he argues against Joshua (not the Joshua) becoming high priest. Conspicuously absent here is Genesis chapter 1 where the serpent tempts Adam and Eve. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible is Satan accused of tempting in the Garden. In fact, Jewish tradition has Satan as a functionary in God's court carrying out the role analogous to Prosecuting Attorney. The word satan means accuser.

In Zechariah, Satan accuses Joshua. In Job, he accuses Job. I Chronicles is a little bit of a mystery, but even Christians in attempting to harmonize this passage with 2 Samuel 24 will rely on Satan being the instrument of God's punishment of David. (2 Samuel 24 say God moved David to number the people.)

Typically, Isaiah 14 is used as a description of the fall of Lucifer along with Ezekiel 28. Interestingly, the Rabbis associate these passages with who the passages reference (Imagine!), those being the King of Babylon (Nebuchadnezzar) and the Prince of Tyre, respectively. (The name Lucifer was the name of the morning star and modern translations have no reference to Lucifer anywhere. So Satan has no name given in the Bible, although I'm told in Jewish tradition his name is Samael.) Ezekiel, interestingly, refers to the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, as noted the Jews have no trouble understanding this as metaphor.

It would seem that to the Jewish mind that God is an absolute sovereign. This is more consistent with the omnipotent God of Christianity. Nothing including evil happened without God's say so. I don't want to speculate too much on the Jewish mindset since it would only be gleanings. Still here are some references that support this position:

1. “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” Isaiah 45:7
2. “Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?” Amos 3:6
3. “Out of the mouth of the most High proceedeth not evil and good?” Lamentations 3:38

Alright, so what? The question that arose for me was how did Satan arise to such prominence in the New Testament. Or why? After all, if Satan is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour and if Satan “hath desired thee that he might sift thee like wheat”, where are the warnings that seem necessary to our survival in the Old Testament? Didn't the Jews require them? Didn't they need warnings? As noted above, this apparently wouldn't have been consistent with the Jewish mindset, but if Satan were real and really evil seeking our destruction, why wouldn't there be warnings?

So where did Satan come from? One could suppose the Jesus invented him. However, of the many things that the Pharisees and Sadducees argued with Jesus about, the doctrine of Satan wasn't one of them. The disciples questioned Jesus on many things but not the teachings about Satan. It seems, therefore, a reasonable guess that Satan became a notable personage before Jesus was born.

This is another place where the dating of the documents is useful. All of the documents that reference Satan date from the Babylonian exile. In the intervening years between then and Christ, the Jews were captive in Babylon, the Medo-Persians, the Greeks and then the Romans. Sometime after the beginning of the Babylonian captivity, the Zoroastrian religion started. In this religion, Ahura Mazda is the all-good god. Evil originates from Angra Mainyu. At the end of all things, those souls that were banished will be reunited with Ahura Mazda. Note that we see God and Satan, heaven and hell with universalism thrown in for good measure.

I don't know if my speculations are valid about the source, but my point is that it certainly is plausible that these “Jewish” belief originated with the Pagan with whom they were forced to associate.

So we have that Judaism arrives in the first century CE having been corrupted by the pagan religions they came in contact with. Jesus, however, in his many corrections of Judaism doesn't correct these perceptions. Nobody questions his teachings on hell. Nobody questions his teachings on heaven. Nobody questions his teachings on Satan. And yet, today's Judaism has none of these things nor does the Hebrew Bible from which it has its grounding.

If this is right, Jesus' teachings are pagan. Either God revealed information to the pagans so that it might purposefully seep into Jewish teaching, or Jesus was subject to the culture in which he found himself. This in and of itself wasn't too troubling to this budding theologian. The book of Philippians (2:7) has it that Jesus emptied himself of the God head. From this we get the fancy theological term, kenosis. We use this to say that Jesus didn't know everything. If Jesus was to be tempted in every way “such as we”, then it is only fair that he faces that on the same terms else it would be a pointless exercise. C. S. Lewis uses this when he says not only is it evident that Jesus didn't know when the second coming would be (actually Jesus says this explicitly) but Jesus was wrong when he says it would be soon. Here is the reference:

The apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, "This generation shall not pass till all these things be done." And He was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else. This is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible. (Essay "The World's Last Night" (1960), found in The Essential C.S. Lewis, p. 385)

It is to Lewis' credit that he admits this. In addition, I admire his unwillingness to equivocate on the straightforward meaning of Jesus' words.

So I found myself with this weird emphasis on Satan and confronted by fellow Christians who find him hiding behind every rock. I found this strange evidence that Satan was invented after the Babylonian captivity and that this invention was uncorrected by Jesus or Christianity—though oddly, Judaism itself dropped the teaching assuming I'm correct that it had had it.

This then was the beginning as I remember it of my journey to discover what the truth was. It was the beginnings of understanding that our beliefs are often habitual and unquestioned. It was the beginning of the conviction that we should not hold unquestioned beliefs. This is the beginning of my understanding that beliefs without evidence should not be entertained.