Genesis 22 (RSV)

After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." 2He said, "Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you." 3So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. 4On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. 5Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you." 6Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. . . . .   9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to killa his son. 11But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." 12He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."

“21 Was not our ancestor Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar?  22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. 23 And the scripture was fulfilled that says, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness, and he was called God's friend.”

Awakening Part 2

. . . I lay weeping in the hot sun on a filthy New York barrio street, my face buried in my hands.  The message of the play that we had just performed for a group of street children had finally burrowed its way into and struck home in my 14 year old heart – God, the King of the Universe, without sin or guilt, had come to Earth to die for me.  He would have come if it were only me, suffered unimaginable torture and rejection, and gladly met His fate; His love for me was so great.  I would have happily, with my head held high, died for Him or His message – any deprivation, pain, or act of sacrifice on my part could never even to begin to repay the debt that I owed Him or His cause.  It was so real to me – His love and His sacrifice were so present to me in that moment that I could practically feel His great hands comforting me.  While the rest of the drama troupe packed up to head back to the New York School of Urban Ministry, I just sat and quietly talked to Him, telling Him of my love.

I had known this when I accepted Christ at 13 while reading C.S. Lewis’s classic Perelandra,  but the reality of it fell out of the sky like an anvil that day.  

I arrived in the world in the year of 1970, the product of the improbable union of two unlikely parents – a 17 year old enforcer for the Pagan motorcycle gang and a 15 year old runaway.  Although my parents loved me as best they could, their marriage dissolved rapidly and violently culminated in a particularly messy divorce in about 1975.  My mother, who became a Christian, retained my custody and remarried a few years later into a relationship that was in some ways a repeat of her marriage with my father.  My stepfather was a good man in his own way, but their marriage was marred by spectacular violence and upheaval that eventually led to its dissolution in about 1983 – when I was 13.

I was a quiet, and dare I say intelligent, child whose greatest love was reading.  During summer recess, I would often be waiting in the morning at the library for the doors to open and, much to the annoyance of the librarian, have to be bodily thrown out at closing time.  The library was my escape from a world gone completely mad – my doorway onto an island of peace and rationality in a sea of insanity.  In some ways due to my perceptive mind and in other ways due to the instability of my early life, I had a difficult time making friends and maintaining relationships with children my age.  I felt that I spent most of my childhood alone, wrapped in a world of imagination and thought.

At 13, during the most difficult time of my mother and stepfather’s divorce, I was introduced to a man who was to become both a mentor and a second father to me – the youth pastor of the church that my mother had began to attend.  He introduced me to a group of youth and young adults that was to form the nucleus of almost every meaningful relationship that I had up until I left for college.

These people were Christians – believers in the power of the death and resurrection of Christ.  As an Assemblies of God church, but relatively non-denominational, we were a small ripple that grew into the evangelical tidal wave that is now so socially dominant in the United States.  Socially conservative, openly charismatic, and both socially and theologically evangelical they pulled me into their group when I was in the midst of one of the most difficult times of my young life.  Hungry for human contact and desperately needing any kind of acceptance, I quickly found myself accepting their beliefs.

Accepting Christ made me part of a diverse group of youth bound together by a common set of beliefs that we learned were accepted and vindicated through faith.  Looking back, I can still see the unconditional acceptance of the others within that group – kindness and love that I am still grateful for even in light of the disillusionments to come.  On my own as a child, I had come to believe in a very naturalistic universe, without a god of any sort, ruled by the blind chance of evolution.  The system that these people professed required that I reject that and instead accept a mostly literal and inerrant view of the Christian scriptures.  I happily shrugged off my beliefs – I had found a place to belong and I would have moved heaven and earth to maintain my place there.

I’m not sure if any of you, my gentle readers, have or are possibly still enmeshed in a system of unconditional faith.  If not let me attempt to describe it to you, to let you live for a moment in my young adult shoes.  We truly believed.   We were joined together in a belief that was so strong and real that we actually sat and planned together our Heavenly mansions that we would win after the drudgery of this life was over, casting our crowns of glory at His feet.  We would always say at parting “See you there - or in the air” – a reference to the imminent Rapture of the Saints that we expected literally at any moment.  As a band of brothers and sisters following the ways of our Lord, we were led by our earthly leader who we respected above all men.  Doubts would always gnaw around the edges of my faith, but by immersing myself in Christian culture and reading I found a safe haven from the “world” that I was taught to despise and distrust.  

What I learned was faith.  "Faith is the evidence of things hoped for, the substance of things not seen" according to the author of Hebrews.  It was only through faith that God could be known, that his goodness could be expressed, that his salvation could save you.  It was by setting your eyes upon Jesus and turning away from the world that truth could be found.   To believe in his salvation in the face of the absence of any empirical evidence was not only the norm, but it was considered to be the highest virtue.  

What I am painting a picture of in these words is the almost absolute belief that I held in my faith.  I totally and absolutely had accepted and integrated the Christian worldview as my own.  The reality of sin, the atoning work of Christ, His indwelling presence, and His imminent revelation were as real to me as the sun and air.  As an older teen I partied a bit and experimented with drugs (much to my guilt), but my base belief system was not effected.  These beliefs bent my worldview in ways that I am only now discovering.  The ideas that all men are innately and unrecoverably evil, that Jesus came to die to save those who would accept his message, that there was a definite end that was soon to come, that God was a loving yet stern judge who would condemn the wicked to eternal torment were an integral part of my worldview.  It shaped my every thought, my view of politics, my view of history, and most of all my view of myself.  

How do you convince people to believe with this kind of faith?  Let me propose a method.  Take children, as young as humanly possible, and convince them using emotionally driven, simplistic arguments that the earth is flat.   This should be simple – children and youth are idealistic creatures and easily led through emotion, especially those who are already physically or spiritually hungry.  Introduce them to and have them memorize the writings of men that believed in the blessed flatness of the earth thousands of years ago, telling them authoritatively that the words of these documents are directly inspired by the hand of God and without error.  If a contradiction, an error of fact, is found then certainly the translation or the context is in error for the true text is inerrant.  Surround them with a cadre of well meaning and loving people who have the same beliefs.  Let them go on “mission’s trips” where they publicly pronounce their belief in the flat earth and the godlessness of the present Copernican system and attempt to convert others to their worldview.  As they grow a bit older, teach complex apologetics that support their beliefs and present them with simplistic arguments for use against any opposing system.  Tell them that to be good and moral the truth of the flat earth must be held absolutely.  Take it all a step farther and tell them that to deviate from this belief is to court eternal damnation in a real and literal hell that was constructed originally for the arch-Copernicans, but because of the false belief in a round earth has become the final resting place for the majority of mankind.  When you are done, have an outsider try to convince them of the error of their beliefs.  No fact, no evidence, no NASA photographs will dissuade them from their belief – they have been safely inoculated against the hellishly deceptive round earth.  Replace the flat earth with belief in Allah and you have just reinvented the madrasah – replace it with Jesus and you will find a perfect picture of the state of religious education within the Western evangelical church.

“Let me ask you a question” I said to a friend of mine.  We sat in his living room in downtown Richmond, bare feet on well-worn hardwood floors.  

“If you saw a man with a gun walking into a building to shoot a child, what would you do?”

“I would try to stop him” my friend replied.

“How?  If you had a gun would you shoot him?” I asked.
“Of course . . . who wouldn’t” he answered rhetorically.

“How is an abortionist’s execution of unborn children any different from murdering newborn children with a gun?  Why shouldn’t we try to stop them . . . just because something is illegal doesn’t mean that it’s wrong Johnny.  Why don’t we do something?”

Johnny just looked at me.  After a minutes thought he said “If you ever want to do something - really do something, give me a call”

Thankfully, we never did anything.

I remember another specific time that I found a short article in the newspaper that sent me scrambling for my Bible – Turkey was planning a series of dams on the Euphrates – a river that was mentioned in Revelations 16:22.  I remembered from reading Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth that the hordes of the Antichrist were supposed to come across land from the East and I saw this dam as the mechanism that would allow the “Kings of the East” to cross on dry land when the Sixth Angel poured out his Vial of judgment upon the Earth during the Tribulation.  I remember trembling with excitement – I had found one more proof of the veracity of the eschatology that so shaped my youth.   Hands sweating, I read the passage from the pulpit of my church and exulted with my fellow believers in the coming of the end.   Every news clipping, every story of turmoil and pain was one more sign of the apocalypse that we so fervently hoped for.  Our faith demanded it.

Finding God’s purpose for my life was an obsession.  There was a constant undercurrent of internal pressure to discover precisely what we were created to accomplish – our great work to press forward the mission of the Kingdom of God.  The idea of a “normal life” was not included in this – our models were the Apostle Paul, Russian Bible smugglers, and of course the characters of C.S. Lewis.   We were looking for an adventure that would connect us back to the great events of the Bible; we wanted to win the world for Christ.  Our youth leader studied the bible with us and purchased books for us to read that would increase our faith – garbage in/garbage out was our motto, so we tried to avoid “worldly” knowledge and filled ourselves with the knowledge of Christ and His teachings.

I remember one book that we read especially clearly.  Like a Mighty Wind by Mel Tari chronicled the miraculous events that were taking place in the revivals of Indonesia – the dead were being raised, the sick were being healed, the lame were leaping with joy.  We so desperately wanted to experience a “revival” of God’s power.  As Evangelicals and Pentecostals, we fervently believed in miracles and the miraculous.  After all, didn’t God create the entire Universe in six literal days by His word alone?  If He could do that, anything was possible.

I especially wanted to see the miraculous, but for a different reason than most.  Unfortunately for my developing spiritual life, I was cursed with a relentlessly empirical mind.  My greatest (and guiltiest) earthy love was science – I had chemistry sets, microscopes, telescopes, and electronic parts always scattered about my lab bench at home.  I was always fascinated by the Universe around me, especially by astronomy.  Many cold winter nights were spent lying on my back in the yard, looking at the stars through an old pair of binoculars or my little refractor.  The sheer magnificence of the Orion Nebula or the awesome wonder of the Andromeda galaxy would captivate me for hours; I loved to read astronomy books to learn more about what I saw in the sky.  Unfortunately, most of what I read there directly contradicted my religious worldview so I desperately wanted some empirical evidence for my beliefs.  I felt the Lord’s indwelling power, but my weak human nature demanded physical proof of my Creators existence. I wanted to see the lame walk, the blind to see – the dead to rise – to prove that my beliefs were correct and that science was misguided by turning its eyes away from its maker.   I was taught that “blessed are those who do not see, yet believe”, but I always secretly wanted to see.  I wanted a miracle – but never received one.  I had rejected evolution as part of my faith, so instead I turned to Young Earth Creationist authors, especially Henry Morris and AE Wilder-Smith.  No one in public school or outside of it ever attempted to challenge my understanding of the Universe in a meaningful way, so I moved forward comfortable in my beliefs.  The fact that the vast majority of scientists whose works I read disagreed with me on almost every point was a source of irritation but not challenge.  I willingly closed my eyes – in the name of faith.

Carl Sagan especially frustrated me – his beautiful prose and amazing knowledge of the inner workings of the Universe were squandered in a vain attempt to construct a Universe without a Creator.  I had, in some ways, almost worshipped him before my acceptance of Christ which made it an even bitterer pill to swallow when I felt that I had to disagree with him on theological grounds.  I specifically remember praying for him often, that God would show him the error of his ways and save him.  When he died in 1996 I spent an hour praying for his soul, that God would have mercy on him.  I was convinced that Sagan was being tortured for his unbelief in a literal hell of fire and brimstone – a place so horrible that it could not even be described in the English language.  These torments would continue for eternity – if only he had turned to Christ in his life!  Unfortunately, his vain human arrogance had silenced the call of God in his heart.  He was condemned to an eternity of hideous, vile, and unspeakable anguish because of the unregenerated state of his soul at death.  Through faith, I was a believer in the original sin of man and the efficacious work of Christ – to die without it was to be doomed.  I remember that I was particularly bothered by this at Sagan’s death; the punishment didn’t seem to fit the crime in my mind.

When I graduated from high school in 1988, I still didn’t have a firm grasp on what I felt God’s call was for my life.  I never had any visions or dreams like some of my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ to lead them, so I decided to study Chemistry in college.  In some ways, I think that I chose this subconsciously as a “safe” science that would not bring me into conflict with my faith.  So, I spent a year each at the Virginia Military Institute and the Virginia Commonwealth University working on my BS in chemistry.  But all along, I just didn’t feel in my heart that this was God’s call for my life.  Chemistry was far too pedestrian and unimportant in the larger scheme of the Universe for a “real” Christian – who cares about Markonikov’s Rule when there are billions of souls at stake?  I decided, with regret, to quit science and go into the ministry.

. . . and it was in Bible school that my faith was first ever truly challenged, in a way that almost inevitably led to a certain warm fall afternoon that was related in the beginning of this narrative.

End Awakening 2

Awakening Part 3

I entered Bible school as a committed, idealist, and dare I say naïve, young man.   I enrolled in the schedule of courses that would lead me into a BS in Bible with a concentration in Youth – I wanted to be a youth minister just like the heroic youth pastor of my teen years.  I renounced dating for the first semester and completely focused my energies on studying scripture and prayer.  Everything was exactly as I had foreseen; God had foreordained my life and I was eager to fulfill my role as His agent of forgiveness and love.

Valley Forge Christian College was built on the grounds of the old Valley Forge Army Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. The last time that I drove through the campus in 2004 I literally could barely recognize it with all of the brand new buildings and Frank Lloyd Wright inspired architecture, but in 1990 when I began to attend the college it was a dilapidated trash heap.  We literally had rooms where the floors were nearly falling into the basement, the heat was often off during the cold Pennsylvania nights, and the food in the cafeteria was beyond horrific.  I remember a specific example where I kept a piece of liver from dinner one night on my dorm desk for nearly a year – it never attracted flora or fauna; even bacteria were too discriminating to attempt to colonize it. My wife’s parents, upon first seeing the facility, begged her to come back home with them.  But I didn’t care, because I was preordained by the will of God to be there, to receive training, and go out to preach the good news to a dying world.

I met the woman that was to become my wife on the first day while in line for class registration.  We ended up sitting a couple of seats from one another in chapel, where I spent most of my first year in that room attempting to stare at her out of the corner of my eye.  We began to date in the second semester of my freshman year and were wed in the summer of 1992.  

I was attending the school with the intention to become a youth minister, so I jumped at the opportunity when a local pastor invited me to join his church as youth pastor.  Finally, I was a pastor with a flock of my own!  I also preached from the pulpit and helped the senior pastor to manage the small church.  It should have been an ideal situation – I was in school for youth ministry and I had the ideal laboratory to test all of the ideas that I had begun to formulate after my experiences as a young adult and my time in Valley Forge.

Unfortunately, I soon found myself in philosophical and social conflict with the senior pastor and the church board.   I was bringing in large numbers of inner-city kids to the church and I could see that the regular rank and file of the church felt threatened by the increasing urbanization of their youth program, especially those with children that were already in the youth group.  I also found myself becoming less interested in pastoral work and more interested in teaching and theology.  My wife and I tried desperately to save the ministry that we had founded; but I resigned after about a year and a half of service.   I knew after the dissolution of that ministry that youth ministry was not God’s plan for my life, though I stayed in school working on my degree.  I knew that God had something else up his celestial sleeve; all I had to do was to wait for it and to continue studying.

My favorite instructor in college was Dr. Bruce Marino, a professor of Biblical and Theological studies that taught almost all of my theology courses.  Dr. Marino was a unique character at Valley Forge; he actually encouraged intelligent discussion and would tolerate dissention from the party line of the Assemblies of God.  He would tell us tales of his libertine college years; LSD and comparative religions seemed to have been a heady mix for him.  He was approachable, erudite, and intelligent – one of the first Christian men that I had ever met that I felt actually used their mind to perceive the world.  It was in one of these theology courses that an event occurred that was to shape my future in ways that I could not foresee.

Dr. Marino was one of the few professors at Valley Forge that appreciated academic rigor and he would assign us a thesis project for each class.  Sometimes the topic was assigned directly, other times he would allow us to choose a topic of our choice within a range of study.  For my Theology II class I chose to defend the Young Earth literal view of Creationism from a scientific viewpoint.  I thought it would be a simple trouncing of the idiotic concept of the “Big Bang” – surely all of the concepts that I had read as a youth from men such as Henry Morris would allow me to make logical mincemeat out of something as silly and “unscientific” as a universe created from nothing.  What I found instead would rock my world to its core.

In writing this thesis, I decided that I would start with three basic assumptions.  First, that with the correct interpretation, Scripture is the revelation of God to man. Secondly, that with the correct interpretation, data reveals God’s actions in creation.  Lastly, God does not “trick” us (miracles excluded).  These assumptions were, and still are, rationally and theologically foundational to any study of science from a theist perspective.  With these three basic assumptions in hand I, for the first time, really began to lay out the evidences for what I believed to be true and to rationally compare them to modern science.  

. . . and deep in the dimly lit library, I knew that the numbers simply did not work.  I prayed, I sweated, I doodled copious notes, but no matter how I thought about it, no matter which angle I approached it, there was no escape from the conclusion that faced me – I was wrong and Carl Sagan was right.  

As I studied the data that was available, in light of my basic assumptions, I almost immediately ran into a simple, unassailable problem with the Young Earth – the visible event horizon.  I had considered this problem before, but never with the assumptions that I had logically chosen.  If light travels at a finite speed, then objects appear as they did in the past due to the transit time of light.  We can see objects that are empirically and scientifically provably billions of light years away which inescapably means that they are at least that old.  This left me with only three possible scenarios – God created the light in transit (which violated my third assumption), the speed of light is not constant (which would invalidate almost all astrophysical data and partially invalidate assumption two and three), or the Universe was billions of years old.  All of the data pointed to an old, inflationary Universe that began with a high energy event – all of the Young Earth data was obviously created presupposing the literal account of Genesis.  No greater violation of the scientific method or simple rationality was imaginable and in my mind the theory fell to dust.  Carl had been right all along and I wrote my thesis in light of that new view.  I still have the document and I treasure it as a monument to my reascendant rationality.

I can still remember both the shame and exultation of my discovery.  I felt a deep shame in that I had believed such errant nonsense so such a long period of my life, but I can remember the feeling of power that came from my first attempt to understand the world through reason since my conversion.  I felt that a door that had closed in 1983 was reopened a crack – I could see the sunlight streaming in.

My view was not a popular one at Valley Forge.  After I graduated, I spent a short period of time as a professor teaching what passed for science in the Christian institution.  From the beginning, I made it clear that I held a slightly different cosmological view than most and that I would not disguise my beliefs in the name of orthodoxy.  Word of my beliefs spread and a few students contacted me to offer their support to my position, while others contacted the administration to express their disapproval.  After I finished the semester, I was never asked to return.  

Understand, if you will, that my faith in God was not shaken in the least.  There were and still are many writers in the Christian community who believe in a “Big Bang” event and this idea in no way invalidates their faith.  My newly found ideas were not antithetical to my Christian worldview; in fact they reinforced it in a vaguely Newtonian way.  The breaking point for me though was the application of reason and rationality to an object of previous faith.  For the first time since my conversion I examined a faith based belief outside of a religiously conceived frame of reference in a rational way.  The die was cast, the Rubicon was crossed - and my life could and would not be the same.

End Awakenings Part 3

Awakening Part 4

I will condense years into sentences, but the next 10 years were quite eventful.  I graduated from Valley Forge with my BS in Bible and soon found that knowledge of scripture and theology does not immediately translate into food and rent payments.  While waiting for the Lord to show us what He wanted us to do in lieu of youth ministry, I found an unexpected talent in the computer sciences and gained employment as a network engineer (like almost every minister that I know that didn’t go directly into the ministry – there is an interesting correlation here).  Eventually, we moved back to Richmond Virginia to be closer to my family and to start a family of my own.  

I began to work in my church in the worship ministry, playing guitar for Sunday morning worship.  Our church was musically very progressive, so I was able to pour my heart out through my electric guitar to about 4,000 people a week.  At the request of my senior pastor, I began to create a ministry to appeal to post-modern young adults, which I relished.  I just slid back into my role in the church, better educated and ready to do whatever God set before me.

In an extremely unexpected way, the death of Pope John Paul II in April of 2005 was to be the final beginning of the end for my faith.  As a Protestant, I had never given any thought to the Papacy or ever learned much about Catholic beliefs or tenants outside of a couple of Chick tracts that even the majority of my fellow church members recognized as insane.  Watching the ceremonies on CNN sparked an interest in me to discover what these Mary-worshipping idolaters really believed – once again, in my hubris, I figured that my Protestantism would certainly prove to be superior in every way – for goodness sake, the maniacs believed in transubstantiation!  So I began to investigate the claims of the Catholic Church and compare their arguments for their beliefs to mine.  What I found astounded me.

On a point by point basis, the Catholic theology was in every way as scripturally supported and in some ways more rational than the beliefs that I held.  Sola Scriptura and Sola Fides were the hinge points that most of the disagreements revolved around and to my amazement, the Catholic answers were persuasive.  For the first time in my life, I actually began to realize that it was possible that the faith that I had been raised in and had built my world around was not the correct one.  My presumptions and hubris had kept me from ever reading or hearing any arguments could have changed my mind or even honestly challenge my faith.  If you have ever faced this moment, you will agree how shattering it is – all of the innate superiority and bigotry that you have ever produced within yourself turns on you, pointing back at you like the finger of Charon.  For the first time, I allowed myself to think that perhaps I had been taught incorrectly – and if they were wrong about this, what else in my mind was waiting to be overthrown?  Was my faith simply an accident of birth?  If my mother had become a Muslim, would I be asking my questions to Allah instead?

This was both an intensely frightening and paradoxically exhilarating time in my intellectual life.  I knew that no person, no book, no website could solve this problem for me because every person, book, or website that I consulted presented the rationale of the scriptures from their own presumed point of view.  I, for the first time in my life of faith, could not lean on presumptive authority to determine truth from fiction – I had to believe that I could trust my mind and opinions in a way that would have been unthinkable before this revelation.   As an engineer I had been responsible for multi-billion dollar financial assets, all under the direct control of my hand and mind, yet I was horrified to discover that I did not have the confidence to judge simple matters of truth and fiction in my own faith.  I now know this to be a direct result of the most dangerous kind of belief – the unreasoned and irrational faith.  

At the end of the same April, my wife and I attended a 3 day conference that was the culmination of months of preparation in small group meetings, study, and prayer.  The name of the program was “Cleansing Streams” and its purpose was to heal wounds from the past through the power of Christ in a sort of prayer based regression therapy.  It was our second trip in two years; in fact, we led a small group this time because we felt that our first experience had been so deeply impacting.  We went looking for a touch in our lives, a healing that could only come through the awesome power of Christ.  I went looking for a miracle to help me to discern the truth that I was seeking.

Instead, I found myself sitting outside on the sidewalk, fighting for breath, my mind filled with confusion and revulsion.  The pavement was warm beneath me as I sat with my back against the building – I could still hear the speaker through the wall and all that I wanted was to get away from that voice.  What he had said and the context that he had said it in had offended me in a way that I could not begin to describe.  Something awesome had awoken in me that day - I was disgusted, my moral sense was affronted, and I was finding it difficult not to go inside and drag my wife out to the car.  If I had remained in the room I would have either have screamed defiance or succumbed to his will; there was no way that I could have remained without breaking myself or my mind.  I sat until the voice stopped and then I slowly walked back in, purposeful and defiant.

I’m sure that the second conference was no different than the first, but my perceptions certainly had changed.  Maybe it was from my age or my present struggle with my questions concerning my faith, but I was overwhelmed by the anti-rational, anti-thought, anti-personal, and overly emotional atmosphere.  We were told to pray, to line up, and to recite prayers specifically without thought or reflection.  We were specifically told not to think, but to do and that God would take care of the details.  In the hyper-charged emotional air of the meeting, I was immediately struck by the unhesitant willingness of all of the participants to do what ever they were told to do.  I told my wife later that if they had started handing out grape Kool-aid a la Jonestown, everyone in the room would have immediately lined up and gone to their deaths.  The horrifying unthinking faith of the participants to do what ever they were told struck me as demeaning and in some deep way evil.  

Had I followed such a voice without thought?  Had I willingly given up my personal moral integrity in the name of faith?  Was I one of those who simply followed without reason or rationality?  These questions burned in my mind, demanding an answer.   In confusion, I remember praying for God to please answer me, to give me some understanding of what I was feeling – to just respond.  There was no answer; the sky was shut.

When we left to return to Richmond, I carried with me a cold emptiness and confusion that I was determined to conquer.  My method was plain before me – I would rationally and without presupposition start to read the scriptures and determine the truth about my faith.   I would seek God and His heart to determine the truth no matter what the cost.

In a last attempt to find the answers that I sought within my childhood faith, I arranged a special prayer meeting with some trusted leaders in my church to specifically address my concerns.   I simply poured my heart out to them, communicating my doubts and fears.  We began to pray, fervently seeking God – and I could feel the same unconscious manipulation of being told to say certain words, to not think, to in effect give up myself in the name of healing.  I remember disappointment building into tears – tears that drove me to my knees in pure anguish.   Not anger at the people I was praying with, for they were and still are well intentioned, but at the unthinking belief that had brought me to this place.   I determined that night that whatever I had believed in the past, I would never again reject the power of my own mind or the simplicity of my innate moral sense.  That night I became an individual, much to the detriment of my faith.

After the meeting I remember getting into my car and telling God that I simply needed him to show up.  I needed him; I begged him to reveal himself to me, to please help me find the answers to my doubts and questions.  I needed a touch from heaven – and I never received it.

I was determined to find the truth.  Why was my innate self pressing back so furiously against my experiences?  My religious teaching told me that it was simply rebellion against God and his working in my life, but I knew in my heart of hearts that this was simply false.  I knew that I sincerely wanted to know God and experience him, but it seemed that every avenue of faith led to a dead end, to an abandonment of my true self; an abandonment of my mind.  I was even more determined to prayerfully search the scriptures and find the truth – to find my path.  

And I would find my path, though it would lie in a completely unexpected direction.

This, my gentle reader, brings me full circle back to that certain warm fall day.

End Awakening Part 4

Awakening Part 5

I began my search in a similar way that I began a certain thesis from 10 years before – with a set of presuppositions that were derived from my experiences.  I would trust my mind and my ability to make correct decisions, I would trust my innate moral sense, and I would reject presumptive authority.  I would read the scriptures that I had been taught were the inerrant words of an omnipotent, infinite, all-loving God.  I would prayerfully and intently search for the truth that I so desperately needed.

With much difficulty I was forced to reprogram my view of the words that I read – to interpret them for the first time free from presuppositions.  The difficulty in this is that part of religious education is the inculcation of a certain point of view in scriptural interpretation.  At its most successful, the victim simply no longer reads; he or she simply sees the words and the mind automatically provides a narrative that supports the view that the person was taught to be inerrantly correct.  Fighting this, I began reading the Old Testament.

What I found shocked and disgusted me. The more that I read, the more I was horrified.  The horror of Abraham and Isaac, the contradictions and foolishness of Creation and the Flood, and genocides of the Old Testament, best exemplified in Numbers 31, revealed to me a God that was neither loving nor kind.  Rapine and murder were the word of the day, all by the absolute command of God.   This same being commanded men to kill, to lie and to steal – to break all of the morality that I had been taught as a Christian.  According to the God of the Old Testament it is OK to sell your own daughter into slavery (Exodus 21) or rape prisoners of war (Deuteronomy 21).  This certainly could not be the God that I had so fervently worshipped.  

Let’s take a moment to quickly examine the mentioned passage in Numbers. Here are portions of it in the NIV translation:

The LORD said to Moses, 2 "Take vengeance on the Midianites for the Israelites. After that, you will be gathered to your people."
3 So Moses said to the people, "Arm some of your men to go to war against the Midianites and to carry out the LORD's vengeance on them. 4 Send into battle a thousand men from each of the tribes of Israel."
7 They fought against Midian, as the LORD commanded Moses, and killed every man.
15 "Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. 16 "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. 17 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.
32 The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 33 72,000 cattle, 34 61,000 donkeys 35 and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.
In this one passage we see genocide, horrific rape (why else would you want the virgins?), and slavery – all commanded and approved by God himself.  I read apologetic passages that spoke of the Midianite’s fate being due to their women attempting to lead the children of God away to false idols, but was Jehovah’s hold on his people so weak that a couple of idols moved him to destroy an entire culture? Also, what had the children done?  Imagine being a young Midianite girl and seeing your father, your pregnant mother, and your infant brother all murdered viciously by an invading army.  The men, hands still dripping with the blood of your family, bind you and carry you off to a nightmare of bondage and sexual slavery all at the command of the supposed God of the Universe.  There are some consequences to a belief in the truth of this event: If this story is real, then it was directly commanded by God and must be accepted as morally correct and good.  If you can justify this, you are as much of a monster as those who committed these atrocities. I thought about my own wife and children being brutally murdered for religious reasons.  Does not your own moral sense quail at this? This is the work of God?  I did not find God, I found a demon.  I did not find enlightenment; I found the signed confession of a psychopathic mass murderer.

I began to see that by the eyes of faith it was perfectly tolerable to burn a witch, to torture and kill inoffensive scholars whose conclusions you feel heretical – to sack and burn towns and put the inhabitants to the sword as was common in Medieval Christian Europe.  The Inquisition, the Crusades, the casual contempt for the value of human life that we see in Christian history are perfectly valid and rational if you accept that the Old Testament is truly the inspired word of God.  You see, the men and women of the Middle Ages really believed in the scriptures in a way that our post-Enlightment tempered churches cannot.  They faithfully believed then like the fanatical Muslim believes today – with the same tragic results.

I found slavery, degradation, and immorality every where I looked.  So, I moved on.

The New Testament actually spoke of love and peace, but I found several huge problems that I could not surmount.  I cannot in this short space go into detail, but here are a few glaring points.  

Slavery was common in those days – so why did Jesus, as the real presence of an all-loving God, never oppose it?  Where were the ideas of individual freedom?  

What about democracy?  No, The Son of Man would rule in the coming kingdom with a rod of iron.  

Do we find the scientific method?  No, those that believed and do not see would be even more blessed.  

What about family values?  Not here, Jesus tells us that we are to abandon our families and follow him.  

How about sexual fulfillment and normal human intimacies?  Nope, Jesus never married and Paul tells us that it is best to stay single.  The wives of the apostles are never mentioned meaningfully.

In almost every case I could not find the values that I as a human being found to be vital to my happiness and well being. All of the ideas that have truly helped man to live longer and happier lives were not there.  All I could find was a poisonous faith.

Every apologetic that I read was like salt in the wound – they tried to explain but they could never negate the actual words of the texts.  This is the best that an omnipotent, omnipresent, all-loving God could do?  His words should burst forth with light and truth – instead I found explicit support for slavery; His words should be full of knowledge and depth of thought – instead I found mounting contradictions and simple errors in fact that any elementary school age child can perceive.  His words should be captivating and morally clear – instead I found moral ambivalence and ethical confusion.  Shouldn’t a book written by God be at least as interesting as a Harlequin Romance?   What I found instead was a Bronze Age document full of justifications for horrific crimes many times worse than that of Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic – on par with Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin.  These were not the words of any God – they were the words of particularly corrupt and offensive men.

I began to read the history of Christianity that is never taught in churches or Bible Colleges.  I found the innumerable persecutions and tortures that were committed in the name of God.  One would think that people that were indwelt by the presence of a living God, saved by the power of Christ, would have a modicum of forgiveness and mercy, especially to fellow Christians.  Instead, I found the rack and the gallows, the breaking on the wheel and the question extraordinaire.  I found ignorance, hatred, and racism at every turn – this was the heritage of my faith?  All of the tolerance and love that I found in today’s church was an aberration, a historical anomaly, in the history of Christianity – the product of the humanist Enlightenment of the 18th century and Christianity’s inability to completely control a Western nation due to laws put in place by great men who saw with their own eyes the destruction that faith can wreak when it holds the reigns of power.

I remembered listening to Bart Ehrman’s historical analysis of the New Testament.  All of the hours and days of my teaching concerning the New Testament were not as clear and logical as just five minutes of a true historical analysis of what we rationally know about the events of that time.  For the first time, I saw someone approach the historicity of the scriptures from a scientific viewpoint free from faith – with devastating results.  These were obviously the works of men, how had I missed all of the simple inescapable facts?

If scripture does not reflect the God that I grew up believing, then was I to believe?  Without scripture, I had no basis for any knowledge of any God or superior being.  The crumbling of that foundation revealed the sand that the entire structure was built upon – the sand of faith.

As a techno-geek, I found several websites that challenged my faith in ways that I had never considered.  A site that struck me particularly forcefully was http://whydoesgodhateamputees.com/ .  This site presents a lucid, empirical, and rational method for testing the existence of God that simply blew me away with its clarity.  Why didn’t I think of this?  The wall of faith prevented me, but as a seeker after truth I would not be deterred.  If God was real, he needed to answer these charges – but never once did he answer even one of real, honest questions that I asked of him.  

Hurt and confused, I began to pray desperately, begging God for relief.  I spent all of my time in my car in conversation with God, trying to find a reason – ANY reason to believe in his existence.  Finally, I came to the end of my rope and the end of my faith.  I gave God one more chance to reveal himself, to defend himself, and he simply never showed up.  

Amazed, I found solace in the works of Bertrand Russell, Ayn Rand, Richard Carrier, Richard Dawkins, Robert Price, Hyam Maccoby, George Smith, and the incomparable Robert Ingersoll.  Their works showed me a world that I had never imagined – a world of peace, happiness, morality, and joy without God.  I initially fought against it; this couldn’t be true!  Their arguments supported my every supposition, every precept, every innate moral sense that I felt was rationally and logically explained by a beautiful mechanistic world that needed no creator.  But still I fought, terrified of the consequences of disbelief.

I will never forget it.  It was late one night and I had been reading Anthem by Ayn Rand.  I read the last paragraph, leaned back in my chair, breathed a sigh of relief, and gave it up.  I gave up my faith in any supernatural being, power, or existence.  I surrendered to reality.

And like a dream that passes as you wake, my faith evaporated and I was free.

End Awakenings Part 5

Awakenings Part 6

A postscript

I sit writing these words on a warm summer night in my living room as my children sleep, tucked into their beds.  My wife is asleep, leaving me with time for a couple of my thoughts which I would like to share with you as a postscript to my experiences.

The realization that I came to that night in October, my surrender to reality and rationality, has led me to places that I cannot even begin to explain or truly understand.  There have been consequences to my decision, a few of which that have been truly heartbreaking.  

I have had life long relationships simply dry up and blow away, seemingly forgotten and rejected.  Even those who have accepted my decision still maintain a distance from me that no amount of reassurance can wholly cure.  Many of those who were known have become alien; in many ways, I am alone again as I search for a new group of friends that are less demanding in their theological orthodoxy.  

My extended family simply cannot and will not accept my decision.  I must just be “going through a phase” or “having a spiritual breakdown”; certainly no one could ever really question their faith and find it wanting!  It amazes me that my decision is perceived in some way to be dishonest or the product of a rejection of what I still believe to be right; I must want to commit some great sin.  They do not believe that someone can be intellectually honest and reject the faith.  No amount of humility or argument can convince them so I do not bother trying any more – in many ways it is painful to even be around them.

My wife on the other hand, who remains a believer, has been a friend and a partner through this entire process.  Never have I met a human being with such compassion or dignity in the difficult circumstances that my decisions have thrust upon her.  Although my deconversion still causes her heartache, I feel that our relationship has grown even deeper and fundamentally more loving in ways that neither of us expected or understand.  I know many men and women who have chosen the path of rationality that have been abandoned by their spouses; I can only celebrate the great spirit of the human that I have chosen to spend my life with.  I have no regret for my choice of a partner regardless of belief or creed.  She remains my shining light.

Let me explain what it means to be free.  It must be understood that the greatest bondage that a human can face is that of the mind.  The body can be coerced and enslaved, the will can be broken, but the mind can only be given.  To enslave the mind requires the willing participation of the slave – the chains are actually forged by those who will wear them.  The grave that is dug by the condemned is a comfortable place where many people find a sense of well-being and belonging.  Unfortunately, this comes with a price – the ability of the believer to truly perceive reality and act on it rationally.

Since I have rejected the false veil of religious faith my life has truly, in the deepest way that can be perceived, become free.  I would not trade one ounce of my newfound freedom for a pound of my previous irrational certainty.   I am free from superstition, guilt, and original sin – I am free from fear and free to hope.

Faith taught me that I am the product of an original sin and though loved by God, I have not the ability to do anything truly good for my very nature is innately evil; a product of a fall that I held no personal responsibility for but carried within me the burden of its rebellion.  Faith taught me that there is no good apart from God – but now I know that to be, quite simply, a lie.  I have good within me and I can celebrate the awesome wonder of simply being human.  I need not the moral judgment of a God whose own catalog of horrors is unmatched in human history to bestow dignity and value upon my life.

The amazing complexity of the Universe astonishes me now more than ever.  As I think of the billions of years of probability and randomness that leads to my life, I am both humbled and filled with awe that I live.  I have found a value in life that I cannot explain.  Every sunset, breeze, and blade of grass is a wonder to me for now I understand the amazing fragility of life in a chaotic Universe that cares nothing for any living creature.  I have found a deep spirituality in the Cosmos that I never saw before.  Not the empty spirituality of sin and redemption or angelic perfection, but the awesome wonder that is the immensity of the Universe and my true place in it, free from rank superstition.  In my eyes, a Universe that is the result of sublime physical law is vastly superior to one that somehow requires the interaction of some external force to maintain it.    Carl Sagan was right all along . . . much to my wonder and delight.

I find that I place a far greater value on human life than I did before my deconversion.  If there is no afterlife and here and now is the totality of each human life, then anything which threatens this gift is the deepest evil.  The believer fatalistically accepts war, pestilence, and death as simply part of the ongoing battle between good and evil; as an inevitable part of life in a fallen and unredeemed world.  I now know that it is this belief itself that helps to perpetuate the inhumanity of man towards man.  

To my amazement I have become a “humanist” – one who is concerned for the well being of the human race.   I was taught that humanism was a dirty word; a creed of atheistic fanatics that were bent on destroying all that was good and holy in the world.  This is the darkest of all of the lies that I willingly accepted - to believe that the highest and greatest good of man was not man, but God.  Rick Warren’s work The Purpose Driven Life stated that the very reason for mans existence is to worship and glorify God, to surrender the human for the divine.  This is the vile nonsense that drove the Inquisition, the rack, the heretics flame, and today the young suicide bomber.  I can honestly think of no more destructive creed – mans’ greatest concern should be for his fellow man, not some incorporeal being for whom our worship is neither needed nor required.  

I am also beginning to rediscover a hope for the future that was ripped from me as a child.  As a Christian who was taught a fundamentalist eschatological worldview, I knew that the world was inevitably heading towards chaos and conflict no matter what humanity tried to accomplish.  For every step toward peace, three were taken toward anarchy and death.  Humanity simply had no hope; we were to wait for the return of Christ to wipe out the evils of this earth and to establish his kingdom.  Can you imagine a more depressing worldview for an adolescent to accept?  Young folks thrive on optimism and I am finally starting to recapture the hope that I lost as a young man.  I can envision peace on Earth and good will towards men, something all religions seems to strangely lack.

Strangely, much of my fear of death has left me.  There is no celestial judgment; no throne room where my every action and inaction will be reviewed.  There is simply the nothingness of dreamless sleep – as in the immortal words of Epicurus "Where I am, death is not, and where death is, I am not."   How can we fear nothingness?  Lack of existence has no fear; only the theist need fear death.

I am free to look at reality and evaluate it with my senses and my innate morality; I can find truth – untouched by dogma or Bronze Age savagery.  Science and philosophy, which use to be a spiritual minefield of challenge to my faith, have become wells of inspiration and knowledge.  I can read again and see within the word the great truths that have burst from some of the greatest minds in the history of humanity.   Theology and revealed “truths” are a cloudy, stagnant mere fed by the twin streams of presumptive authority and irrational faith.  Try instead the refreshing depth of Hume, the towering power of Rand, the laughter of Voltaire, the childlike wonder of Sagan, the icy clarity of Russell, or the certainty of Dawkins and choose for yourself which better uplifts the human soul and quenches the human heart.  


Look within you and believe that you have the ability to judge right and wrong.  Trust your innate morality.  If something disturbs you, ask why and do not accept an answer of “just because”.

Reject unproven assumptions and presumptive authority.  Seek to know the world with your own senses and mind; know that you are capable of properly perceiving reality without the interpretation of an external authority.  Trust yourself.


If you are presently a believer, I beg you to consider my words.  If God is real, then He should be powerful enough to draw you even as you question.  If you are the product of divine creation, then certainly your intellect was created for use to judge the world in a rational way.  If God exists, then there is no risk for those who honestly question.  Anyone or any God who demands that you do not question is simply revealing the implicit weakness of their own irrational belief system.  Question the assumptions that you hold concerning the world, believe in yourself, and look clearly at your beliefs.  Perhaps you will walk away with an even greater faith – or perhaps you will find yourself sharing my experience of a certain warm fall day.

I would like to thank you for reading this short series of scenes from my life.  I will be continuing this column, based upon the feedback and messages that I receive.  In effect I want this to become your column, a place where you can express your own stories of lost faith, doubts, and challenges to my assertions about faith.  I need you – without your stories, this column will be nothing but my (rather boring) story.  Please, write me at [email protected] and tell me your about your experiences of faith, remembering that any vitriolic email with be sent directly to the trash unread and responded to with my favorite collection of choice Robert Ingersoll quotes.  Respect, humanity, and humility – these are the watchwords that will guide us on our journey as we discover our own paths in a world of reason, rationality, and faith.

Awakenings, by Disconnector AKA Rich Barlow