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Hey Z,

 

So this week my entire office team is at a conference in Indiana and left me to pretty much answer phones for two days and hold down the fort until they return. This gives me an excellent opportunity to study some, and catch up on some work and emails I owe, and you are high on that list.

 

 

A brief note before I begin. I realize that religious people can have a tendency, quite more than atheists, agnostics, or general skeptics and the like, to deal with their faith on very personal and emotional levels. It can be the very nature of their faith to do so. Some of what I’ll bring up in this and ensuing emails might be a bit harsher than how I would speak to someone such as my mother or my sisters about faith, partly because I see that in this point in their journey if they lost their faith they would have so little to hold on to and I don’t want to overwhelm them with the nonchalance that I can bring to the table in regards to such intimate matters.  So generally speaking, I don’t ever mean to cause offence or harm to what you and your family hold so dear, but I think you are mentally and emotionally prepared for such a conversation of topics and, well, you asked me.

 

 

Has it really been four weeks since you told me you believe Christianity to be the “most intellectually sound” viewpoint out there? Both the extra time I’ve forced you to wait for an adequate response, as well as the belief and, I assume, fervor, with which you make such a statement both leave me dis-heartened.

 

 

I would agree on one thing, that I also really enjoy healthy, mature and respectable (to a point…there must come a line that one cannot respect another’s beliefs of ‘faith’ due to how wacko they might be “I believe that God told me I have the right to commit acts of genocide upon you) debates and discussions, and they are something that I lack in great quantity and quality from my motus aparandi of daily life. Some days I feel as if I don’t just enjoy it, I crave it and desire it is intense ways, always looking for a way to non-annoyingly work topics of religion, faith, life origins, purpose, meaning, etc. into daily life. If a Theistic God exists, I think She cries for our generation hearing us talk about “who got voted off last night” instead of “why are we here?”

 

So we must be similar in more ways than one if we are both able and willing to have such a conversation, even on vast opposite ends of the spectrum.

 

 

In an effort to get our conversation underway, I briefly mentioned to you I had a problem with how Christianity, as I understand it, presents the origins of humanity. Now, I don’t know where your opinions lay on the situation, nor do I wish to attack a straw man by denouncing claims that you don’t hold as your own. I think it is self-evident that since very close to its origins, Christianity has been so diverse and furcated that it has always been nearly impossible to come to a collective, ecumenical agreement of creed or teaching.

 
With that knowledge, I see myself as unable to take every theory or cousin-faith and respond to them all. What I am able to do, however, is refute, thoughtfully and with as much respect as is due, the faith that I was raised to believe in as a young boy. For our purposes I chose to spell out, as best I can, what I believed about life at the age of 16, and now ten years later, what I don’t. Since I am aware there are many Protestants and the like, who never shared my pubescent beliefs (what I would come to learn years later as the “Young Earth Theory”), I also want to briefly touch on what would be a second iteration, the Old Earth Theory. And that’s where I’ll end and let you and your powerfully wielded gauntlet strike back with every amount of grace-filled force, intellectual wit and severity that one can muster. And hopefully, it will be a really good time.

 

 

To start:

 

As far as I remember,  the conservative fundamentalist Christianity that I was taught, which has its origins only in the last 100 years or so in response to Darwinism, teaches that the planet that we live on was created by a Deity somewhere around four to six thousand years ago, by first placing just two human beings in a park somewhere around present day Iraq, and keeping them busy by having them name all the animals and not eat from a tree that didn’t really have to be there in the first place. Those who take this story literally believe that a snake started speaking human, or Arabic, or whatever dialect God bestowed upon the primordial couple, that the creator of the universe played some sort of literal hide-and-seek game with his friends, and that because of these circumstances childbirth is painful (what did it look like before?). This is the story of how God created a perfect pre-sin world without death, which evidenced itself in a recent funeral I attended where the pastor spoke of death as a foreign entity that was never meant to be paired with mankind. This seems to be a slap in the face of basic biology. From the moment we are born our bodies begin to deteriorate. If there is one certainty granted us all, it is finality. Can one picture a world without death? The world would not function. Would we be more than hyper sensitive Hindus never walking on grass so as to not kill thousands of insects, microbes and bacteria?

 

 

It is hard to tell the Genesis story without mentioning the ever-famous worldwide flood, where God pretty much decided the caliber of human beings that had been spit out so far just wasn’t up to par with his ideal world, almost a beta version for a product that didn’t turn out the way He had hoped. So He scrapped all of humanity, killing presumably thousands upon thousands if not millions of human beings, parents, toddlers, elderly, unborn babies, in order to start fresh with the Noah family, who, in retrospect, might not have been the perfect candidates seeing as to their occasional propensity to get really drunk and pass out naked (Genesis 9). If God creates another flood today, I’ll know a couple frat boys who could make excellent candidates, ha. Ok, ok, but really, upon a re-reading of this story, if meant to be taken literally, I ask the questions staring most in the face, where in the world did all the water come from? And where did it go? How did kangaroos make it on the ark? What about llamas? What about the extremely large turtles that are only found on the Galapagos Islands? How did the second-first family make a boat big enough for the five million species that inhabit the world today?

 

 

Part of me doesn’t even want to spend time arguing against something that to many civilized people seems like such an obtuse concept, but even more head-spinning ensues when I meet rational people who have great jobs and great educations but still believe some of these Hebraic fables and stories as if they belong in a science book, or endeavor to put them in their science books! I could go on page by page through the Old Testament if time and your patience allowed me: the alignment of the planets is altered as the sun stops moving so that a tribe of herdsmen warriors can kill other herdsmen warriors? A river stops flowing at a precise moment? God doesn’t like the world’s first skyscraper so he invents distinct languages? An entire city is knocked down by blowing of some ram’s horns? (In regards to the last example, I recently heard a Radiolab pod-cast testing just this subject. Everything these guys do is interesting: http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2010/oct/04/walls-jericho/). Any linguist would be shocked to hear such a primitive answer taken seriously to explain the development of diversity in speech, or tell any astronomer the earth’s rotation stopped and he’ll explain to you the fundamentals of gravity.

 

 

In short, a literal understanding of the Biblical Old Testament falls far too short for any intellectual thinker to take seriously. To do so means throwing out all of our modern research on other humanoids (homo erectus, ardipithicus ramicus, Lucy, etc.), as well as everything we know about the fossil record and carbon dating which prove themselves accurate time and time again.  It also means eliminating what we know about our relationships with other species, most specifically the great apes,  ignoring the massive biological similarities we share as relatively recent cousins because, according to traditional teachings we are not related at all, just surprisingly similar in DNA structure, intellect and mobility. It ignores scientific research that most all respected thinkers and shapers, including  some of the leading Christian scientists (see Francis Collins, decoder of the human genome (http://www.amazon.com/Language-God-Scientist-Presents-Evidence/dp/0743286391) have come to accept as truth, such as the ages of the earth (around 3 billion Y.O.) or the universe (14.5 billion Y.O.) and encourages reliance on moral fables and poetry.

 

 

So that’s that. I don’t even know if that’s what you believe or not, but those are just snip-its of the mockery of truth that I was raised to believe as a easily-influenced child, and a Gallup poll less than ten years ago presented data that 45% or so of North Americans believed similarly as I.

 

 

Well clearly, more than 45% of Americans hold some claim to their own version of Christianity, (I believe in the US the numbers are around 75%, and in Mexico upwards of 90%!), so this leaves me with another prevalent and influential brand of Christianity, what some might call an “Old Earth Theory”, or perhaps Intelligent Design. While I make no claims to possess intimate knowledge on a level as the Y.E.T., I understand it to be an agreement with most modern scientists as to the age of the earth, universe and basic origins of Homo sapiens as African descendants of other apes. What makes these thinkers distinct, as far as I can tell, is that they still accept the basic tenets of Christianity, namely that mankind is special and made in the image of the God they follow, that sin is real in the world and brought about by Satan, and God was forced to ship his own son off to earth to tell us these things and let us know that if we believe in him as God we can enter the right Kingdom of God, both in this life and the next.

 

 

What I find most confusing about this train of thought is that it admits the gradual changing and evolving of species into what we are today, but then still holds to the truth taught in the scriptures that mankind is different than the rest of the species, in that we have souls and our choices have eternal consequences and when we die we will either go to heaven or hell. This boggles my mind. How can one believe in one moment that every human is an ancestor of another species that didn’t have souls, then next that very human has a soul. When did souls, consciousness, self-awareness, sin, etc evolve? 10,000 BCE, 100,000 BCE?  There is just no logic to it. And to make things worse, any human that doesn’t rely on what Jesus Christ did on the cross for all of mankind, due to his own ignorance or arrogance, is destined for a life of damnation. This means that for tens of thousands of years, men and women from every part of the world were born, grew up, had children of their own whom they loved and taught and nurtured, and then died and went to a very dark and lonely place, “full of weeping and gnashing of teeth” because the creator of the universe sat by with his hands on his hips, choosing not to save the Aztecs or the Incas, nor the Native Americans who cared for and nurtured the land they lived on, nor the Chinese with advanced writing ability, but found particular favor in a tribe of once-powerful middle easterners in a remote corner of the Roman world. That’s where the Creator of every galaxy, quark, gluon and species of bacteria chose to manifest itself. It’s absurd. And not in a “oh, it’s so peculiar it just makes sense” sort of attitude. Limiting a God of unbelievable power and creativity to one people group in one moment in history with one dogma that the entire world needs to follow presents itself as so contained and so limited, that to an outsider it comes across as downright arrogant and preposterous.

 

 

I briefly mentioned Marcus Borg to you, and I just finished my third book by him, entitled ‘Reading the Bible Again for the First Time”. I both cling to and get fed up with Borg and his companions (John Shelby Spong, Frank Schaeffer) in the emergent church with their new ways of thinking about scripture and what faith means. But I would encourage anyone to read some of it. To Borg, the OT and NT, from Creation to Revelation, can be seen as stories that are ‘more than true’, that is to say although the facts may not be accurate “ok, ok, we’ll admit that Peter didn’t actually defy gravity and the buoyancy of h2o by walking on water”, but that doesn’t mean the take away is any different for them. I’d be happy to talk more about him at any time, but you should pick up something by him and let me know what you think.

 

 

I know too often I take the position of attacking Christianity as a whole, and this shouldn’t be my premise, although a couple of my literary heroes take upon themselves that precise responsibility. I’ll admit frankly that often religious people can be on the fore-ground of humanitarian aid throughout the world, as well as domestically. Not only that I see the hope that it gives people that I don’t think they would know where to find elsewhere.

 

 

The Christianity that I struggle against and want to see dissolve away as soon as possible is the Christianity that claims to have all the keys.

 

The Christianity, and the Christians that see all other faiths and walks of life as foreign, evil, and from, gulp…SATAN… are indeed more similar to the fundamentalists on the other side of the ocean, or neighborhood, than they realize. The Christianity that is too closed-minded to see people living full, meaningful, emotion and love-filled lives of purpose and significance without ever looking at a Bible, the Christianity that cannot recognize the positive teachings in their Holy Scriptures as universal mores that can be shared across faith-lines, the Christianity that spends billions of dollars annually in culture wars against other monotheistic religions in parts of the world that just can’t handle more bloodshed, (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: http://www.amazon.com/Tenth-Parallel-Dispatches-Between-Christianity/dp/0374273189), the Christianity that is dedicated to converting what they classify as “unreached”, the Christianity that won’t stop until every ancient religion with deep cultural roots is wiped out in every remote tribe and village , the Christianity that stirs up religious xenophobia and daily reinforces an “us vs. them” mentality in its followers, this is the Christianity that I reject.

 

 

Happy Holidays

 

Steven.