In addition to the risks of psychological damage, indoctrination with a faith-based belief system risks turning down the volume knob of critical thinking to a level where it plays no role in certain decisions and undermines the baseline, natural cognitive ability to identify and evaluate threats. In the case of Christianity, it also normalizes the in-group, out-group mentality embedded in the endless splintering into unique denominations and sects. These effects are the result of the psychological installation and maintenance of a supernatural worldview in the brains of believers during development by religious indoctrination. This warped understanding of reality has a direct consequence on the perception of genuine threats, especially those more distant in time or space (i.e. climate change, authoritarianism) and creates the tendency to see invisible beings and forces at work everywhere in the world.

The slide of the United States towards authoritarianism via the Trump administration would not be happening right now if a significant percentage of votes in the most recent presidential election hadn’t been cast based on the belief that the Abrahamic god intended the former reality star to be in charge of the US. This is not speculation. Multiple polls reveal that 25-35% of voters believed that Trump was ordained by their god to be president. The sad irony is that many of those who voted because of this belief are the ones most affected by his policies in terms of Medicaid cuts, ICE activity, costs of living, etc. The fact that they continue to support him today is further evidence of the trumping of any critical thinking skills by belief.

In a democracy, the ‘reality’ on which one bases their decisions matters not just to themselves, but also to the rest of society. If a lone delusional individual believes that a particular candidate is actually Superman, with the ability to fly, fight evil and save humanity, and so votes for that candidate, their one vote would likely matter little in the overall outcome. If, however, 30% of the population has that same delusion and bases their votes directly on that delusion, the entire remainder of the country will be affected by the unsubstantiated belief in an imaginary superhero. The candidate, knowing this, may further increase their chances of winning by claiming to be Superman. While the majority of the voters are able to easily see this as the lies of an unethical politician, it makes the delusion that much more believable to those trapped in the delusion. To be clear, I am not calling all Christians who voted for Trump delusional. Rather, this analogy is meant to highlight the obvious potential for the ‘faith’ of others to influence each and every one of our lives. Obviously, any individual’s reason for voting is based upon a number of competing emotions, rationalizations, psychological predispositions and social narratives. In the US, we have been taught (at least we used to be taught) that a person’s right to vote is sacred, and any challenges to this concept should naturally be met with skepticism and concern; however, when a worldview is based on supernatural fantasy, and that worldview controls the voting behavior of a significant percentage of voters in society, it is necessary for the rational voices in that society to speak up and raise their concerns about the obvious risks associated with belief with the hope that we can avoid further impediments to our future progress.

For those who disagree with my analysis, or who may be moderate Christians unwilling to cede the point that belief should not influence voting, please listen to the insane, Bible-based ideas espoused by Doug Wilson, the pastor of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and a close ally of the current White House administration. Here is a link to an interview by the neuroscientist and writer Sam Harris from earlier this year. As a teaser, he believes: in a Christian theocracy rather than representative democracy, that only Christians should hold office, that women should NOT have the right to vote, that slavery was not wrong and should be re-institutionalized, that sodomy laws should be reinstated, and that adultery should receive the death penalty. The closeness of this individual to the current power structure in Washington is terrifying, and it is inarguably the result of the role of belief in the last election. I typically post articles on Sunday only and no longer write much about politics, but if interested, please check out my other work and consider joining the community of Faith-Free Future.

Please join me on a thought experiment journey. Imagine that a small child, Mia, is taught that touching a green section of the wall of her home will help her feel better. In her room, as in each room in the house, there is a single square-foot box, painted pine green, around waist high. All during childhood, she sees her parents touch one of these green boxes throughout the house any time they are distressed, and they appear to feel better afterwards. Any time there is a financial issue, or work stress, or a major decision to make, they touch the green box. From her earliest memories, Mia’s parents encouraged her to touch the green box when she was upset, and then they would say things like: ‘there, now, don’t you feel better?’ and ‘aren’t we lucky to have the green box.’ In addition to her experience at home, she weekly joins her parents at meetings that include other people that talk about the green box. During these meetings, a man that her parents trust stands before the group and talks about the comfort the green box can provide if one simply believes it. He talks about how special they are to have been allowed to have the box, and how other groups in the world that use orange, blue, or yellow boxes are all wrong, and that they do not receive actual comfort—even if they think they do. During these meetings, they read from a book that describes the use of the green box by people from thousands of years ago. The members of Mia’s group all have their own stories from their lives and can describe times when they received relief by touching the green boxes in their own homes. On occasion during these meetings, a participant will suggest that the green box had not provided relief from a recent distressing event. The answers are immediate and all converge upon the same pronouncement, which is ultimately reiterated by the leader: if you are not feeling relief after touching the green box, you are not believing strongly enough—the problem is not the green box, it’s you. Most of these questioners return the following week proclaiming how they managed to believe more strongly and were once again receiving the promised comfort.

For young Mia, touching the green box becomes a daily routine, and she eventually develops a habit of touching the box multiple times per day. There are particularly stressful days when she devotes a great deal of time to touching the green box, and other, more care-free days that she might only need to touch it once or twice. A few times in her life—during tragedies or major life calamities, she has set a chair next to the box in her room so that she can remain in near constant contact with it. In addition, regardless of the level of stress, she also begins each morning and ends each day with the action of touching the box. This is something she came up with on her own, as it is not described in the book, but she is convinced that it helps her days go a little better, and no one has discouraged her from doing this when she shared the idea at the group meeting. In fact, many others admit to doing the same.

This pattern of behavior follows her into adulthood. Now in her 30s, her home, of course, is decorated by numerous green boxes, at least one per room. When her boyfriend, now her husband, used to tell her it didn’t make sense, she insisted that the experience was real, and she was, in fact, surprised that he had not been raised to touch the green box or even one of the incorrectly colored boxes when he was a child. Trying to be a good partner, but with no previous similar experiences, he tried touching the box when he was stressed on several different occasions, and found that it did nothing for him. She is unsure why it does not work the same way for him, but after consulting with other green box devotees, she has decided that it is because her partner does not believe strongly enough, rather than there being any issues with the box itself or with belief in the box. She wants so badly to be able to prove the truth of the experience of the green box and for him to share in its comfort, but, sadly, there is no way she can do this except to point to the experiences of herself and all of the green box followers she knows. For Mia, imagining a life with no green box is terrifying, and she is grateful for being lucky enough to have been born into a family that had found the green box, rather than another colored box or, even worse, no box at all.

Sadly, the story ends when the group Mia belongs to learns that they have incorrectly read the ancient book about the green box, and the shade was not actually ‘pine,’ but ‘lime’ green. This was apparently an easy mistake to make, as the book had been translated multiple times from the original language, and some of the original words had different meanings to different people throughout history. She spent some months arguing the merit of the lime, rather than the pine green, to whoever of her former friends or her family would listen, but she eventually questioned the new interpretation and currently has decided that she no longer needs her group or family in order to find comfort from the green box. Which is actually a good thing, as she is currently not talking to her family at the time of the end of this thought experiment due to the dispute over shade of green.)

What is happening with Mia and what happened with so many former religious believers like myself can be explained by Pavlovian conditioning (that’s the one where the dog salivates when it hears the bell) early in development. Mia’s brain has been trained through conditioning to briefly feel less anxious when performing a particular action that she was taught to perform, and that was modeled for her, even though there is nothing special about the green box or the act of touching it. The same can be said for prayer, confession, reading the Bible, daily devotions, or any of the other frequently performed rituals performed by the believers in monotheistic religions. Each of these individual acts falls under the umbrella of ‘faith’ and produces a temporary illusion of comfort. A highly active imagination and stronger bond with one’s religious community increase the likelihood of the conditioning taking hold and of one’s worldview becoming entirely ‘faith-based’ or supernatural. Once implanted, the supernatural is usually there for good. So is the case for the vast majority of humans since the beginning of their attempts to understand the cosmos.

Taking the conditioning concept a step further in relation to the psychology of the comfort illusions of faith, the entire process involves something similar to the compulsions of obsessive-compulsive disorder (more often referred to by its acronym, OCD) which temporarily and briefly alleviate immediate worry, but do nothing to treat the underlying anxiety. In the case of religious worldviews, the anxiety is itself created by the religion as the premise for why we need that same religion for comfort: we are born evil or separated from god, and, without faith, will suffer terribly. Christopher Hitchens said it brilliantly: “we are created sick and commanded to be well.” As mentioned earlier, the imagination is also highjacked during development in order to convince young believers that there are actually invisible spiritual beings that are doing the comforting, going so far as to refer to Jesus as a best friend, but that is for another essay. Thus day to day life can become a roller coaster of ups and downs: anxiety, distress, guilt, shame, fear—punctuated by brief periods of relief following confession or prayer. However, whatever comfort prayer brings, it wears off quickly, and the cycle inevitably continues. If prayer actually worked, there would be no need to ever pray more than once; and there would be no such thing as doubt if belief truly described reality.

Based upon my own experience and that of many former believers with whom I have interacted, the cycle of indoctrination during development does the majority of the heavy lifting for the creation of the ‘experience of Christianity’ that Christians point to as validation of their faith when their rational arguments inevitably hit a wall. Reinforcement of the ‘reality’ of this experience during development is accomplished by the work of trusted adults until eventually, mature Christians are able to completely reinforce the reality on their own, projecting their own faith-based interpretation of events onto any aspect of life. Thus, by the end of our story, Mia no longer requires church or family to sustain the illusion and is able to maintain her beliefs entirely on her own—the indoctrination cycle has successfully been completed.

I realize there are many ideas going on at once in this essay. Faith is complex, as is the human brain, and it is impossible to discuss certain aspects discreetly. I hope the analogy served its purpose. As always, thanks for reading. I am very interested in community and in the shared experience of those like myself who have managed to escape belief systems. I encourage you to comment if you have read the Rules of Engagement for Faith-Free Future and have something you would like to contribute, especially if there are other ideas that resonate from the thought experiment. Finally, thanks to so many of you who have my philosophical back in the endless onslaught of responses from believers to what I post in the notes. I’m pretty sure they believe they’re winning brownie points with JC for doing so—I’m sure I would have thought the same--but it gets fairly tiresome, especially as I have no interest in arguing with someone whose mind is still trapped in the supernatural bubble. Until next Sunday, I hope you have a great week.

When someone finally finds the courage to challenge long-held religious beliefs, it can cause significant distress. It is similar to a child learning that Santa isn’t real—only Santa in this case has been deeply engrained into every aspect of life, and death. While this is cognitively and psychologically a positive development because it means that experience can be built on truth rather than fantasy, it can also be deeply unsettling to have assumptions about the world crumble.

Indoctrination does not happen overnight. The typical devout Christian has a lengthy history that includes years of attending services, learning from teachers, daily devotions, reading the Bible, and praying—all pressed upon them before they were of age to develop critical thinking skills. By the time most reach the age to ask objective questions, they have already been trained that questioning is a sign of a lack of faith, and therefore, discouraged if not forbidden. Growing beyond this history is often the final stage of a faith journey, and the first step into the uncharted territory of natural reality. The reasons for leaving faith behind can be, and usually are, many—doubts about salvation can ultimately lead to doubts about the entire faith system; church leaders may too often be revealed as hypocrites; difficulties may arise in the constant cognitive requirement to project spiritual meaning into every aspect of life; constant prayer can become an obviously one-sided conversation; the endless news of confusion and distress in the world can override the imagined idea of an all-controlling and all-loving god; the Bible can be increasingly revealed as simply one more mythology. Everyone that successfully leaves faith behind has a unique story of how they realized belief was failing them. But recognizing that a worldview is not accurate is far different than replacing that worldview with one that is. A profound sense of loss can accompany the need for replacement—a loss of meaning, of having a ‘friend in Jesus,’ of community, of ritual, and of a promised afterlife. Each of these can result from the final realizations that lead to the evaporation of that last drop of belief. A natural-materialist, humanistic worldview offers a far more successful and adaptive alternative than a supernatural worldview, but coming to this realization is not always simple and is rarely without emotional cost. After being implanted, reinforced, and maintained for years, if not decades, the Christian belief system is not easily dislodged from one’s neural underpinnings.

It can be incredibly isolating to abandon faith while those in your immediate family and friend circle continue to believe. Never do Christians congratulate the newly deconverted and wish them well on their new intellectual journey. Many Christians consider even questioning the faith, let alone turning one’s back on it, as one of the worst possible evils, and so the separation that accompanies one’s evolution beyond Christianity becomes even more profound. In this light, it is worth pondering the similarities and differences between a person who abandons the Christianity they have known all their life and someone who abandons a cult that they may have joined as an adult (although the overlap between Christianity and any other cult is arguably complete, outside of the greater acceptance of Christianity by society at large). While both a Christian and someone leaving a cult can learn valuable lessons from therapists or cult deprogrammers about how to deal with power dynamics, belief systems, and thought processing, a person leaving the cult has an additional potential comfort available to them in the form of a return to how things were before they joined the cult—to the welcoming family and friends that are so happy they have once again found reason. Someone leaving Christianity does not often have this solace as a possibility, because there is usually no life before Christianity to return to. In most cases, family and friends are, and have always been, Christian, and they cannot help but see the newly deconverted as ‘infidel’ at best or ‘blasphemer’ at worst. On a side note, there are also many—especially in the US--who are originally indoctrinated with mainstream Christianity and eventually become members of Christian-adjacent cults. They too don’t have the benefit of returning to a ‘normal’ way of life because their pre-cult ‘normal’ was also encapsulated by belief. In fact, they may actually have to deconstruct or deprogram from multiple layers of ideologies and worldviews.

As devastating as the loss of a worldview can be, it does not have to remain ‘the end’ of a previous life. In fact, it is much better framed as the ‘beginning’ of something, and this time, a beginning of something within one’s control and of one’s own choosing. Understanding reality as reality—rather than as the endlessly-adapted projections of a multi-millennial-long line of previous Christian pastors, story-tellers, apologetics, and believers—is naturally grounding. In my own experience, as distressing as it was escaping fundamentalist Christianity decades ago, there was a sense of relief as my day-to-day reality made far more sense to me than it used to, and I realized I no longer had to imagine the workings of invisible beings within every circumstance and coincidence in my life. It was also freeing to let go of the compulsive need to say prayers to the great and powerful Oz-like ‘god,’ somewhere behind the metaphorical curtain, or to his allegedly all-loving, all-comforting son, who never once actually acknowledges gratitude or responds in times of need. This did not happen overnight, but as reality replaced my previous supernatural understanding, it did so in a way that gradually and considerately took up all available psychological space, filling in gaps and answering questions that had for so long been left up to the nebulous ‘we can never know the mind of god’ answer, common in Christian circles for anything that challenges available evidence or remains unanswerable. I felt genuinely and effortlessly grounded for the first time, rather than having to maintain an illusion of grounding—all the while hoping not to unnecessarily upset the invisible beings that controlled the universe behind the scenes. It is possible to achieve an understanding of reality that was not available with belief—an understanding of reality based upon evidence and no longer in doubt, no longer dependent on emotions, imagination, or an ancient book. In all of human history, a relatively small percentage of humans have successfully disentangled themselves from the supernatural. It is a remarkable accomplishment, especially for those who started off in a lane of childhood indoctrination. Be proud of yourself if you are one of these few, not willing to handicap your own critical thinking for illusions of comfort. For those of you not yet there but have doubts about faith, follow the evidence, and be open to the possibility that you may be trapped in a cycle of generation after generation of believers who, with the best of intentions, teach their children that pretending is the answer.

The elements of community and ritual that are associated to Christianity and other faith traditions may still offer benefit to believers in a modern age, but the damage accomplished by faith far outweighs any potential positives. Furthermore, there is no reason to think that these benefits cannot be found without the requirement of belief in things for which there is no evidence, or that psychological comfort requires a suspension of intellect and critical thought. The desire to be better humans is a noble concept with or without the need to call it ‘morality.’ The depth of connection that results from having survived religion and faith far outweighs any superficial connections that can be had from belonging to the same brand of Christianity. Simply put, life is better after religion.

What we should be able to agree on is the active avoidance of anything remotely suggestive of gods or the supernatural when dealing with AI. It occurred to me that the use of the Bible as a training tool for AI may be the single best argument against those that consider it the ‘foundational source of morality.’ Yahweh’s body count in the Old Testament is astronomical, and in the account of the Flood—arguably his most vindictive act—was limited only by the number of his human generations that had had a chance to reproduce since he created them. He literally killed them all (minus the few he liked). And when the 10 commandments are overlaid on all the carnage, there is a very clear message of: Do as I say, not as I do.

The existence of advocates for Divine Command theory and Revealed Truth in a modern era is evidence of failed critical thinking. The inclusion of their input into what may be the most consequential human endeavor in history is sadly the next step in that failure. If religion is the thing that is supposed to keep us safe from our AI overlords, god help us all. (Of course, pun intended—this is faith-free future after all.)

For those interested in the topic of morality, I recommend reading fellow Substacker Graham Lapworth’s posts. He makes a pretty compelling case that ‘morality’ is not even real. This is an unsolicited plug—I find his work answers a lot of questions I’ve had since leaving Christianity and want to share his ideas.

As far as Bible stories go, this is pretty standard, especially for the Old Testament. What sets it apart from the other genocidal behavior found in the Bible, however, is one incredibly important detail: God repeatedly tells Moses to offer the Pharaoh a choice first—a way to avoid the plagues and death—and then God psychologically manipulates Pharaoh into make the wrong choice. The mechanism is unclear, but I like to imagine it as something along the lines of the ‘These are not the droids you’re looking for’ scene from Star Wars, where the Jedi master hypnotizes and tricks the stormtroopers.

The end result of the plot of this story was always written--God was going to torture and kill the Egyptians, regardless. He had already made up his mind. So why pretend to offer them a chance to escape those consequences beforehand? What exactly is gained by this? This is literally what serial killer Ted Bundy did with many of his victims, psychologically toying with them in order to demonstrate his power and to increase the sadistic pleasure of the experience.

Sadly, the story does not end in Exodus. The final part of this story continues today in the form of mountains of excuses from Christian apologists arguing that there is nothing wrong with God’s behavior in this story. Their ability to rationalize this straight-up evil is remarkable, considering that most of them are otherwise good, well-intentioned humans, albeit with tragically flawed critical thinking skills. This is one of the most obvious potential downsides of faith.

If you haven’t already, check out today’s other post: Meditation vs. Prayer

Thanks for reading!

In 2006, a group of medical researchers designed a study evaluating the effects of prayer on patients following cardiac bypass surgery. The study (unsurprisingly) showed that prayer had no effects on medical outcomes, except for those who knew they were being prayed for—they had more complications than those who were not informed (likely due to the anxiety of knowing that the researchers had essentially placed a bet for believers on the speed of their recovery). Of course, Christians have a laundry list of reasons why the study did not prove what they had hoped it would, but as a test of the potential reality of the supernatural, it was a clear failure. Subsequent studies on the effects of prayer on mental health have yielded a mix of positive and negative results.

‘Prayer’ for these purposes describes a broad range of phenomenon, from confessing sins to offering gratitude, with requests for answers, actions, or objects, mixed in. The benefits or prayer are primarily psychological, and fairly intuitive. Prayer can allow distancing from an emotionally charged situation and can increase focus. It can also lead to more thoughtful decision-making in certain situations. It can accentuate feelings of love towards others. Yet something many believers are disinclined to admit--prayer also carries psychological risks. Confessional prayer can actually increase anxiety and lead to compulsion. Prayer can replace altruistic action when the person praying decides that prayer will be of more value than a donation of time or money. For those requesting divine answers or action, it can skew their perception of reality when those actions or answers do not follow, or conversely, when they project meaning on to entirely coincidental events. Regardless of whether the effects are positive or negative for any individual, the greatest downside of prayer is its attachment to the supernatural—prayer requires a wish-granting invisible being(s) to be prayed to, and this being must first be subconsciously projected by the imagination. For multitudes of religious people, prayer is a highly reinforcing mechanism of the indoctrination cycle, helping to train their brains to see the imagined hands of invisible spiritual beings in completely ordinary events.

Meditation can offer all of the positives of prayer without the requirement of an imagined deity and without any of the potential downsides or risks. It has a robust literature that supports its physiological and psychological benefits, which overlap completely with those of prayer. Meditation often carries the baggage of New Ageism or Eastern mysticism, with imagery of a Zen master floating cross-legged through life, however, from a practical standpoint, it is nothing more than a cognitive exercise that can improve well-being and enhance emotional control. It is best thought of as practice--but practice that will never reach perfection. In fact, there is no formal end goal, but meditation practice can move from discreet pockets of time taken out of one’s day, to become one’s normal conscious state. Thus ‘practice’ is akin to training for real life.

And what is that we are meant to practice? Meditation in its simplest form is nothing more than directing our attention.

Given its extensive history, there are numerous names and methods of meditation across the world, but for our purposes, we will limit this topic to two: ‘Mindfulness’ and ‘Metta.’ Mindfulness is a focus of the attention on the here and now. The goal is to actively discard the endless river of chatter in our brains and identify precisely what it is we are experiencing, while we experience it. In this way, mindfulness meditation has the potential psychological byproduct of keeping us from fixating on future worries or past regrets, and with practice, it can allow us to recognize distressing emotional states in the moment in order to let go of them more quickly and easily. Any of the senses, especially sight, sound, and touch, can be utilized for mindfulness, and it is common to switch from one to the other at the start of, or even during, meditative practice. Continuously directing attention to your visual field with eyes closed is common, as is directing attention to the physical sensation of touch at the tips of your opposed fingers. Regardless of the sensory modality used, mindfulness can teach us to recognize what it is that we are feeling, while we feel it—to tap into and remain in, the immediately available stream of Now. Like ‘meditation,’ ‘mindfulness’ is often a loaded term in our culture, but stripped away of all of the magical qualities projected on to it, it is arguably the most useful way to approach conscious awareness day to day and the best way to get the most out of any given experience. Practicing mindfulness can decrease stress, anxiety, and pain, and it has actually become an element of many forms of psychotherapy offered in the mental health space.

Metta is the focus of the attention on feelings of love and good intention towards oneself and toward others. It too can reduce stress, as well as increase positive feelings and prosocial behaviors. Both of these forms of meditation are available at any time, and both are excellent replacements for prayer for those with a religious past or who are interested in replacing the parts of their belief system that they remain attached to. There is nothing embarrassing about missing the act of prayer, especially if it was part of your routine. And there is no reason that it cannot be easily replaced with something more beneficial. I personally like to envision meditation as a replacement for church, where likeminded people get together and spend time in Metta meditation. (I can have dreams, can’t I?)

Breath counting is the most basic technique for mindfulness and is the usual entry point for those interested in starting a practice. It is shockingly difficult to quiet the mind if you’ve never attempted to before. The method asks you to focus your attention on each breath, from start to finish, counting each, from one to four (or one to ten), and then repeating this process for a period of time. The time can vary from one minute, to five minutes, to ten, a half hour, an hour or even more for those with experience. The focus itself can be aimed at the sensation of the breath at the nostrils, at the feeling of the rising and falling of the diaphragm, at the sound of the air entering and exiting the body—any of the multiple sensations that accompany breathing that we normally tune out. This meditation may seem simple, but once started, you quickly become aware of all of the directions your brain will pull you and all of the random thoughts you will suddenly be bombarded with. One. Two…what was it I was supposed to remember to pick up at the store? No, let’s restart: One. Two. Three…is this just a waste of time, why am I sitting here when I could be catching up on emails? They say it’s good for me, I’ll keep going: Four. One. Two. Three…I have that work meeting next week that I need to make the presentation for. I can’t believe I got stuck doing this when it’s not even in my department. I’m fed up with the way she runs her whole team! Should I leave my job? Wait, why am I sitting here again. Shit, okay, let’s try again: One…dammit, I left the yogurt out: One. Two. Three. Four. One. Two. Three. Four. One…Wait a minute, I’m doing it!—I’m actually meditating! That wasn’t so hard, it only took a few tries and I got it, I guess it’s easier than they say. But then, is thinking about breath counting actually breath counting?… God dammit: One. Two. Three…

One of the most fascinating things about the experience of meditation is the countless ways your brain will try and distract you. Even after years of practice it can surprise you.

For beginners, the best way to get started with a guided practice is to take advantage of the widespread online availability of information and apps. The VA has a pretty good guide and resource list for those interested in learning more. In addition, there are several apps that offer guided meditations. The Waking Up app is the best paid app IMO, available for 130$ per year. It is the one I use for my own practice. For those not ready to spend money, Insight Timer has an excellent free meditation app. The Muse app offers a free version for use with its headband, which creates visual and audio feedback, allowing you to see in real time the effect of sustained focus on your brain. The cost runs in the 300-600$ range, so potentially fairly pricey, especially for beginners. I used one of its earlier iterations years ago and found it very cool. I have no financial relationship with any of these apps or companies—I’m simply a huge fan of meditation for everyone and I know that different avenues work for different peeps.

For those escaping a faith-based worldview, the brain is going to be immediately looking for replacements for whatever it received from that worldview, both good and bad, because that is what was familiar. The time period immediately after a worldview shatters can be distressing and overwhelming and leave us vulnerable to slip from one magical way of thinking into another. While meditation is a great alternative for prayer, there is no reason for any given meditation practice not to be grounded in psychology and actual science, so be wary of anyone offering promises of the supernatural, even if they sound non-religious. One of the most rewarding potential experiences of meditation is the glimpses of insight it offers into the illusions of the self and of mind-body duality. Understanding each of these can alter your perspective of reality in exciting ways. This will be covered in upcoming essays on meditation.

For those who already have a meditation practice, feel free to share your experience and any resources you might use that you find particularly helpful. For anyone else, please reach out with any questions.

My interest is to discuss alternatives for many of the assumed benefits of faith, especially regarding meaning, morality, and fears surrounding death. There is nothing that belief in the supernatural offers that cannot also be gleaned from a materialistic understanding of the universe, and exploring potential alternatives is how I prefer to spend my energy.

For this reason, I am not interested in debate with Christians or those who are convinced that a supernatural realm exists. I view the entire historical enterprise of apologetics as an enormous waste of human intellect and have no desire to engage in pointless argument. I cannot help that my notes and posts will inevitably end up in the category that includes religion and spirituality, and therefore, Christian Substack. There are many other venues where you can go to support your belief in Christianity if that is what you want to do, but I ask that you respect the intent of this space. Unlike others I’ve come across on Substack, who are reluctant to block, I am a fan of this aspect of the platform and have no qualms using it to avoid the inevitable wasted time that comes from responding to those who apparently only want to gain points with Jesus by defending Christianity, as if it were somehow under attack. I will block and delete as I see fit.

For everyone else, please feel free to contribute. I am very interested in the ideas of others who have thought about or are willing to think about a world without faith. My escape from faith and subsequent intellectual and spiritual progress is in no small part due to the impact that others’ ideas have had on me. I will protect your input and keep this as a safe place to express ideas that might not be accepted in our wider cultures. If you feel that that is not happening, please message me directly. Otherwise, thanks for your support and input!

Every week, around one third of well-intentioned Americans put on their Sunday best and head to church. The part Bronze Age / part Roman Era book that they reference in order to properly worship requires significant interpretation, and although Christians theoretically all worship the same deity, differences in interpretation of the texts have led to thousands of brands--the denominations and sects--of Christianity in the US alone, and tens of thousands of brands worldwide. This matter of conflicting interpretations is nothing new for Christians. In fact, a significant percentage of early Americans that helped settle the country crossed the ocean so they could practice their own unique brands that were not accepted in their home countries. (Check out Fantasyland for a fascinating read.) A proper understanding of Christianity must take into account this propensity of its followers to divide into separate, exclusionary groups.

The role of any given Christian church today is arguably to serve two functions. The first of these is to help Christians maintain their faith-based worldview in the face of an increasingly modern world. The explanatory value of the ‘revealed truth’ of faith-based worldviews has arguably shrunk since the Enlightenment as science and reason-based worldviews have proven markedly more successful at making sense of the universe. In fact, many of the core Christian beliefs are at odds with the observable world, i.e. virgin birth, resurrection of the dead, miracles, golden palaces somewhere in the sky. For the individual believer, regular reminders that they are not alone in their beliefs, and regular reinforcement of the need to maintain these beliefs for salvation, helps ensure the survival of Christianity as the foundation of a supernatural worldview.

If the first role of the church serves Christianity as a whole, the second role of a church serves each individual brand. Churches owe their existence to the donations of their attendees in the forms of ‘tithes’ or ‘offerings,’ so each particular brand of church is in competition for the attention and wallets of its attendees. To win this competition, each brand of Christianity posits that its unique interpretation of the Bible is the sole source of truth and that all other brands have in some way missed the mark. Each brand’s particular interpretive differences are upheld as better in some way than any other brand’s, as a means of attracting new church members and providing motivation for the existing members to remain with that particular church. Thus, a sense of superiority regarding one’s own brand is inherent in Christian pluralism and is projected towards all other brands in attitudes ranging from mild disapproval to outright contempt. This exclusionary outlook towards believers of other brands is baked into the practice of Christianity in America, so that the divisions between believers are highlighted, at the cost of potential unity.

This description of the American church sets the stage for the premise of this piece. Each Sunday, 100 million Christians separate into distinct groups and gather in a church of their particular brand in order to hear the consistent repetition of the same underlying presuppositions, doctrines and dogmas, protected from outside influence and from any competing ideas from any other brand of church. Thus, the American church is the prototype echo chamber that characterizes modern American politics as well as the rising tide of online conspiracy thinking. After centuries of divisions of Christian believers into their own unique ideological brands, the concept of separating into in-groups and out-groups based solely on ideas is already normal practice for the average American believer. While the outrage-equals-dollars advertising model of social media is no doubt exacerbating the current political hyper-polarization, the culture of competition for attention and money has had an example to follow since the foundation of our country in the form of the American church.

Imagine a world where good faith arguments occurred—not about specific ideological details of a supernatural worldview—but over the best way to live together, find meaning, resolve conflict, and face the unknown. This is a possibility if those of us who have escaped indoctrination are willing to speak up about the risks associated with belief-without-evidence and to help others understand the very real possibility that their desire for experience of the ‘divine’ need not require unsubstantiated faith in nebulous, invisible beings. We can feel whole, and more importantly, we can feel that we are part of a whole by embracing reality, reason, and love. If you haven’t already, please check out Jim Palmer’s Deconstructionology for some of the best writing I’ve ever come across on these topics in his framework of ‘existential health.’ I don’t personally know Jim and only recently discovered his work, but he’s an exceptional writer and thinker, and as a former pastor, he shares insights into this world that are unparalleled IMO.

For the several that joined FFF in the past few weeks, thank you so much for your time and attention. I am genuinely interested in the experiences of others regarding journeys into and out of faith, as well as the world to be imagined post-religion. Always feel free to comment or message me.

There are two very different versions of creation:

In Genesis 1, God ‘speaks’ everything into existence, in the following order:

Plants first, then

Birds,

Land animals, and finally,

Adam and Eve together.

In Genesis 2, God ‘forms’ things from existing matter, in the following order:

Adam alone—first, then

Plants,

Animals, and finally,

Eve (best for last).

As a rational human being with an understanding that the Bible is a series of stories passed down from generation to generation before being written down, organized, translated, reorganized, curated, reorganized again, retranslated again, voted on by committee in the 4^th century 3 different times, and finally retranslated two more times to get to today’s iteration, a couple of different versions of a creation story makes complete sense.

As a former fundamentalist, who thought that every word in the Bible was Absolute Truth— conveying ultimate wisdom, morality, knowledge, and containing the answers to all mysteries of the universe, and who shrugged off any inconsistencies such as the multiple versions of creation—it’s a little embarrassing.

This is merely the first in a very long list of inconsistencies, immoralities, contradictions, and scientific inaccuracies in the ancient book, so it’s a pretty remarkable feat of indoctrination that so many Christians argue the power and inerrancy of this book, often without even reading it.

Check out today’s other post:

The Original Echo Chamber: the American Church

A 19-year-old, we’ll call him Asur, was a member of a local Southern church, the kind that infiltrates abandoned strip malls. He was surrounded, so he thought, by a church family that loved and supported each other. Several months ago, he spoke to his closest friends and decided that he was going to come out to his family and then to his church family. While the pastor occasionally mentioned homosexuality as a sin, he also framed it as something that was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and emphasized that God’s love is greater than any of us could imagine. Asur’s immediate family was very accepting and responded in a genuinely supportive manner.

His church family on the other hand reacted in a way that contributed to his seeking help for his mental health. While he was expecting to be reassured that he was still loved by God and the church, the immediate reaction of his church family ranged from concern to anger. They referred to his revelation to them as his ‘terrible secret’ and some accused him of ‘intentionally misrepresenting’ himself up until then. Two of his friends that had promised support, likely influenced by the greater church body, stopped sitting with him at church and stopped hanging out with him outside of church. Within days, his pastor called him while he was at work. Despite his anxiety, Asur took the call. His pastor was ‘concerned’ and ‘wanted to help.’ Asur asked what ‘help’ the pastor was offering, the pastor seemed surprised and stated that he wanted to help him realize that this was a ‘phase’ and that it was a sign that the Devil was keeping him from his ‘natural’ drives. He told Asur that continuation down this road would ruin his relationship with God and likely ruin his life. Asur tried to explain that homosexuality did not feel like something unnatural to him and that his understanding of God was that he should be able to love whoever he wanted and God would know his heart was pure. The pastor immediately shot back that purity of heart was not possible under the circumstances. The call ended awkwardly.

Since this conversation three months ago, homosexuality became the focus of many services at his church. Given that this is a small evangelical church of around 80 people, everyone has learned that Asur is the target of these services, and he has begun to feel more uncomfortable week to week. By the time I saw him, he was emotionally devastated. He felt lost and confused, experiencing symptoms of depression, insomnia, and hopelessness. He explained that his faith was very important to him, and he felt very conflicted. He wanted to believe that there was nothing wrong with his being gay, but at the same time, he was deeply affected by the words coming from his pastor and friends. He felt guilty for his attraction to other males and shame for any thoughts of a sexual nature. He wished he had never told anyone the truth.

Christianity has had centuries of perfecting its methods of indoctrination. The foundational message is that everyone is born evil, not for anything we did, but because of the Original Sin of Adam and Eve (this alone is hugely morally problematic, but for another time). The only way to escape the eternal tormenting punishment for this sin is to receive ‘Salvation.’ In today’s world, once you receive salvation, you are then supposed to join a church and start helping support it, financially and otherwise.

In order to spread the message and ensure people recognize their need for Salvation, Christianity manufactures and then emphasizes feelings of guilt and shame. One of the most successful methods they have to generate these feelings is to target human sexuality—ordinary human sexuality. This casts the widest possible net, as all humans experience sexual desire to some degree, so renaming sexual desire ‘lust,’ and further implicating masturbation, homosexuality, and premarital sex, paints just about everyone with the tainted brush of sin. This is the pathologization of biology. Imagine being told that your eye color was sinful, or your particular height, or any other naturally occurring genetic variant that describes you. Furthermore, the idea that the choice of who we love can somehow be immoral is a complete absurdity. Despite countless other identified sins in the Bible—killing, stealing, sins related to clothing, food, interactions between family members—modern Christianity has latched onto homosexuality as an evil in its own special category, ignoring biology, in the process, and spreading fear and hatred at a time that we need unity more than ever.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. Even if there were no underlying explanatory biology--which there is--there would still be absolutely nothing wrong with being gay. The only evil related to this topic is that so much of the Christian community continues to encourage bigotry in its effort to manipulate the minds and behavior of Christians, and to support politicians that use hate to win votes, uncaring of the destruction that occurs in the process.

If you are struggling with mental health related to religious trauma, feel free to privately message me. I will do what I can to help and connect you to resources.

If you’ve ever had doubts about Christianity,

That is your brain trying to reach you through the noise of indoctrination.

That is your brain showing you that it still works the way it’s supposed to.

That is the seeds of Critical Thinking.

Don’t ignore those doubts!

So many of us have escaped our belief systems and found reality.

You can too.

If we pare away all of the speculation, hope, despair, and imagined religious baggage that has been projected onto death, it transforms into something much less intimidating, much less terrible, something relatively simple: a return to the state we all shared before we were born, the state of non-being. From the beginning of the universe over 13 billion years ago, all of the matter and energy that currently form you and I, already existed. For all of that time, there was no fear, sadness, distress. Not a semiconscious dreamscape, a dreamless slumber, a stirring of any kind, as each of these implies an eventual wakening; rather, our very reality was the utter lack of reality. There was simply nothing there, no lights on, and further, no lights to turn on. Death, for all the tragic mystique and terrifying power bestowed upon it by religion, is merely the name we give to the restoration of that previous state.

While ‘dying’ can evoke very real fears of physical and emotional pain, death itself has nothing to do with the experience of dying--in fact, it is quite the opposite, as pain and experience evaporate together at the point of death. Pain is a sign that we are alive, a reminder that we are a conglomeration of tiny particles that used to be parts of stars and now briefly exist in just the right combination to allow us to KNOW we are here. Yet all of our matter existed before we were ‘alive’ and all of it will continue to exist after we are ‘dead.’ Modifying a Buddhist analogy, life is a tiny drop of the great ocean that is flung upward to briefly catch the glint of the sun and feel the stark dryness of the air, and yet, all the while yearning to return to the vastness from which it sprang. The ocean was always there and will always be there, and we will always be a part of it, along with all of our loved ones, all the other droplets flung from the ocean and returned to the same. The great ocean is both pre-life and after-life. It preceded us and we will once again become part of it. Life is the exception to the rule, and death, our normal state.

The strategy of reframing of death starts as an intellectual exercise, but it can lead to changes in the typically negative emotional reactions we experience when we think about death. There are many ways to reframe death, ranging from highly poetic to frankly rational, and there is no single correct answer. If death is something that scares you, take a few minutes out of your busy week to allow yourself to think about death. It doesn’t have to be your death that you think about, rather, think about it as a concept. Imagine yourself as an editor with a novel—interested in the story and yet looking for inconsistencies, errors, potential improvements. Familiarity with death is known to decrease existential angst, so there’s no reason we can’t start the process now.

Next up: Reframing the fear of the death of loved ones

The first woman has no problem with this (even more WTF?!) but the second is very upset, thus proving that she is the mother.

This was the wisest guy in the Bible? What would that women do with half a baby and why was she okay with it—and how is it that no one else was concerned about Solomon’s solution? So many questions…How does any of this make sense?

Ohhhhhh, I almost forgot. We traded in our critical thinking for an imaginary best friend.

A 23-year-old female sits in front of me, depressed and anxious, filling in the details of how she ended up in her current state. She first asks me (as many patients do) if I believe in God. I inform her that I was raised in a fundamentalist religion and am very familiar with the Bible and Christianity. She then tells me that she is unsure if she is really ‘saved.’ She states that she knows she asked Jesus into her heart when she was eight but that lately she feels that she is no longer sure—and she desperately wants to feel sure. Otherwise, she is terrified that she will end up in Hell. She lies awake thinking about this every night and has been having trouble sleeping for weeks. It has started interfering with her graduate school as she can’t focus on her thesis. She has even tried ‘getting saved again,’ but this only alleviated the distress for a brief time and caused her to ask more questions. Her family tells her to pray more. Her pastor responded to her concerns with a generic email asking for ministry support. She is not sure why god is not making her feel more at peace. She used to think that she could tell when he answered her prayers, but the same doubts that are nagging her about her salvation are now nagging her about all of her prayers--who is on the other end, why do they have to be silent, why can’t they help with the growing doubt??

I have had versions of this conversation countless times, and I suspect that for each person seeking help, there are many who feel the same but do not recognize this as a mental health issue. Having been on the other side of the table, I know what she is feeling, and I know there is no answer or endpoint to this problem that will permanently calm that anxiety (at least not without a major change in her worldview, and that would likely be even more devastating to her at the moment). Trying to encourage her to dive deeper into her faith may help her temporarily, but it would only be a psychological band-aid, and it is precisely that those band-aids are no longer working that she is in distress. Her expectation that there is something on the other end of her beliefs is repeatedly being met with the reality that there is no response.

The normal therapy modality for anxiety, cognitive behavioral therapy, works well for phobias, generalized worry, and panic attacks, but it can hit the wall when someone believes that an eternity of torment is on the line. While psychiatry residency trains us to be sensitive to different cultures and religions, it is difficult to know how to help in cases like this without it feeling disingenuous at best or risk causing more damage at worst. As a former Christian, I feel anger at the indoctrination that created this problem. As a mental health provider, I feel frustration that that same indoctrination will likely undermine the possibility of genuine healing for my patient until and unless she can undergo a radical revamping of her worldview. While medications can help, they will be unable to erase and re-write the neuronal tracks that were laid in her brain during development (except for possibly psychedelics, but that is for another time). This is one of the most egregious aspects of religious trauma: it lays the foundation for distress and at the same time blunts all the potential tools that would provide relief.

My patient did not decide to walk away from her faith that day—in fact, that would have been a surprising occurrence. She did come away from that interaction recognizing that she was not alone in her experience, which provided a modicum of comfort, and she agreed to try and keep an open mind about the reality and possible non-reality of her worldview as she continued to ask questions and look for evidence. She was also open to the idea of reaching out to online communities of similar seekers.

The takeaway point from her story is that the ‘comfort’ offered by Christianity, and ultimately by any supernatural worldview, is only an illusion. The more one has church friends and church community, the easier this illusion can be maintained, as the real people of the community are stand-ins for the promise of an invisible, silent best friend in Jesus. If one finds themselves outside of their community and isolated, however, and they reach out through prayer to Jesus, to God, to the Holy Spirit, they will only ever be met with projections of their imagination, never an actual response. If they feel relief due to the prayer itself, it is guaranteed to be temporary and is simply the result of Pavlovian conditioning of their brains to feel slightly less anxious following prayer, an event that they witnessed and practiced repeatedly during development. If prayer actually worked, there would only ever be a need to pray once. ‘God, please relieve my doubt from now on’ or something similar would suffice. The fact that prayers always require repeating—in this case asking for relief for doubts--points to the tendency for them to become compulsory. As with any compulsive act, prayer may alleviate anxiety temporarily, but the anxiety will always return again until the next compulsion is performed.

If you have stories that you’d like to share that describe difficulties with faith or with leaving your faith, message me. I will be doing a regular series of God Damage! once a month and may be interested in using your story.

I’ve often wondered why Christians don’t ask this simple question:

Why does Jesus take such good care of his sheep?

LAMB KEBABS!!

If Jesus were The Good Lion-Tamer, at least that would seem to bestow a little respect on to his followers. Sheep exist for selling, shearing, or slaughtering—nothing more, and the shepherd simply keeps them safe to fatten them up. Not to mention, they’re kind of known as not being very bright… Please don’t get huffy, it’s not my analogy—that one came straight from God to his minions.

Now that Sunday Skool is over, Check out the today’s main post ‘God Damage!’ about religious trauma. Otherwise, see you next Sunday for Sunday Skool!!

Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him.

“Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!”

He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled 42 of the boys

(Great job, thanks God!!)

Bears: 42

Kids: 0

THE END

Cannibalism!!

Don’t believe me? Check it out!

Leviticus 26: 27-29

If in spite of this you still do not listen to me but continue to be hostile toward me,

then in my anger I will be hostile toward you, and I myself will punish you for your sins seven times over.

You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.

I remember the day Arthur arrived to the psychiatric unit that I worked in. A little on the short side, wearing hospital scrubs, slightly balding and with John Lennon glasses, he was softspoken and appeared completely shut down. It took some time to get him comfortable enough to talk, not unusual for someone new to inpatient psychiatric care. We moved to a separate room and sat in silence for a bit. While I had read his chart beforehand and had a basic understanding of his medical situation, I started out with the usual question I asked of any new patient: ‘How did you find yourself in a psych hospital and how can we help?’ He paused for several seconds before finally speaking, ‘I was drinking, and I…I imagined throwing myself from the balcony. I went out to the railing and stared down for a good 20 minutes, trying to get the courage. I told my son about it the next day, and I wound up here.’ Arthur, I learned, lived in a high-rise, and a fall from the balcony would have meant certain death. With further prompting, he proceeded to fill in the details. His wife of 35 years passed away last month of brain cancer that had only been detected 3 months previously. She had been the most important thing in his life, and he had not been doing well since. His son is supportive but lives on the other side of the country. His usual small glass of whiskey in the evening had increased in the past few weeks to an entire fifth every 1-2 days. This, no doubt, contributed to the severity and intention of his suicidal thoughts, but it was the overwhelming grief of the loss of his wife that had driven him to want to give up on the remainder of his life. Like so many of my patients, Arthur was Christian, a ‘lapsed Episcopalian’ as he referred to himself. He had not been to church for several years prior to the death of his wife. He informed me that, while he tried to convince himself that she is in Heaven, he had been having trouble believing that an afterlife exists, despite it being a significant part of his belief system since childhood. He said that he had never felt so alone. His despair was palpable.

Arthur is an amalgamation of patients that I have seen over the years; his story, all too common. To be human is to fear death, both for ourselves and—sometimes more profoundly—for our loved ones. There is no escaping the anxiety of the pain and loneliness that can accompany the loss of someone close to us. Religion has long held a monopoly over conversations about death. Indeed, the Afterlife as a concept is a near universal across cultures and religions. For slightly upgraded primates that found ourselves suddenly conscious in an inexplicable world a few hundred thousand years ago, a supernatural understanding of the world provided answers to an endless list of questions about existence, experience, and death; in a modern digital age, a supernatural understanding of the world struggles to compete with the evidence of materialism and science. As the supernatural stories we have told ourselves throughout our human history become increasingly obvious fictions, the questions that they attempted to answer, confront us once again: If there is no Afterlife, what happens after death? What is this all for? How do we go about our daily lives without endlessly fixating on our inevitable end or the deaths of loved ones?

In the US specifically, Americans have managed to maintain a belief in the supernatural more strongly than in any other Western country, and with that, the concept of Heaven—the never-ending, wondrous place with golden streets and endless joy. Despite the hold of Christianity, however, a smaller percentage of Americans today goes to church than at any time in our past, and there is a growing undercurrent of people self-identifying as non-religious. Where do the non-religious turn for comfort in death, or those whose faith has been too tempered by reason and a modern understanding of science? For as much as the supernatural answers to questions about death are seemingly childish and rely on an ability to simply pretend it away (despite all evidence to the contrary), the materialist worldview offers no comfort and provides no easy answer. This series of essays opens a door on this question: How does a materialist--whether atheist, agnostic, or a believer who is simply too rational to accept certain aspects of the supernatural worldview—deal with the inescapable endpoint of the game of life?

Next up: Part 2. Reframing Death

Although not all denominations have been outspoken about their views, there is sufficient data in the media since Trumps’s re-election to highlight that immigration is an extremely divisive topic within Christianity. Many Evangelical groups, including the Southern Baptist Coalition, stand in staunch support of Trump’s immigration policies. Pro-immigration Christians typically reference Romans 13:1-7, a passage written by Paul indicating that Christians should submit to the ruling establishment under which they live. Groups opposed to the current immigration policies, including many Catholic clergy, cite Old Testament verses such as Leviticus 19:33-34, in which God’s chosen people are commanded to treat strangers well, and New Testament verses such as Matthew 25:35,40, in which Jesus tells his followers to treat strangers as well as they would treat him. As with any dispute over Biblical interpretation, both sides have rebuttals against the other’s interpretation, and both sides frequently claim that the particular Bible verses being used by the opposing side are being taken out of context. Most notable of these arguments involves the Pope himself, as rebutted by House Speaker Mike Johnson, an outspoken Southern Baptist.

Given that there are over 200 denominations of Christianity in the US alone and well-over a thousand sects—nearly all claiming to have the exclusively-correct interpretation of the Bible—it is not a surprise that a moral hot potato such as immigration will lead to conflicting views among Christians. This is nothing new in the US, as exemplified by the topic of slavery at the time of the Civil War. Prior to the Civil War, religious groups, primarily from the South, advocated for the continuation of slavery and correctly pointed out that slavery is very clearly and frequently described in the Bible in both Old and New Testaments (Leviticus 25:44-46 and Romans 6: 15-23) and is nowhere condemned. Anti-slavery religious groups, mostly in the North, could not deny that slavery was considered acceptable in the Bible. Rather, they countered that the Southern religious groups were missing the point entirely. More important than the discussion of slavery in the Bible was to understand the ‘spirit’ of the Bible, specifically the love of your fellow man (John 15:12) and treating one another equally (Mark 12:31). As such, slavery could be considered something that does not match that spirit. Interestingly, perhaps the most persuasive and Biblically accurate argument against slavery from that era was to highlight that the Bible did not distinguish slaves on racial makeup alone, and that if slavery were okay for blacks, then it should be equally okay for whites. After the war, neither side gave up on the previous justifications for their positions on slavery. Pro-slavery pastors told their flocks from the pulpit that the loss of the Civil War was the result of God chastising them for not treating their slaves well enough rather than evidence that God was against slavery. Others resorted to the old Christian standby when things in life do not go according to plan: in this case, losing the Civil War, and thereby the slavery debate, was simply a ‘test of faith’ of Southern Christians whose interpretation of the Bible was nonetheless correct. The anti-slavery religious groups pointed to the winning of the war as God’s validation of their cause. (The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark Noll is an excellent resource for more information on this topic.)

The question arises then, what exactly do we make of Christian values when Christian groups have polar opposite definitions and each lay claim to the truth? It seems that, if the Bible were the absolute source of morality and truth, as many Christians claim, its words would lead to agreement among its readers. Given that this does not happen, a far more likely scenario is that humans rely on their own judgment to define the moral answers to questions, and as such are influenced by rationality, emotions, and external incentives. After all, there is no theological reason for the coincidence that the pro-slavery pastors happened to be in the south and vice versa. There is an all-too-human quality to the supposedly divine question of ‘Christian values.’

For the Christians whose rebuttal will be that I misrepresented their particular interpretation of a Bible verse or failed to mention a different Bible verse or passage that applies here, the argument does not change. For any given moral or ethical question of modernity, there is no definition of Christian values that will provide consistent answers from believers across the spectrum of Christianity. It is simply evidence of human beings using the name of their belief system to justify their own particular feelings about a topic, conscious or unconscious.

Given the fervor surrounding the current immigration policies themselves as well as the often-inhumane ways that they are being carried out, in conjunction with a president clearly motivated by his desire for his name to end up in the history books, it is unclear what Christians in the future will think about this particular topic. What is almost guaranteed, however, is that Christians of the future will join Christians today and Christians from the past in the spectacle of voicing entirely contradictory opinions about any given moral question and use the Bible to justify their interpretation. As such, there really is no coherency or substance to ‘Christian Values.’ It is a myth.

Let’s look at a modern example before going to the Scriptures: My paternal grandfather took up the genealogy of our family as a hobby during retirement. This was accomplished before the internet and stands as a fairly impressive feat of detective work. He was able to trace our roots to a mixture of northern European ancestors—primarily German and British, in a lineage fairly typical for white Americans. The result was a list of names tracing back through decades, ultimately spanning well over a century. What if, right before he passed away, instead of one list, he provided two lists of names—independent, non-overlapping lists of names that began diverging from his own father and beyond into the past—and claimed that each list was completely accurate and real? It’s not difficult to find something intellectually concerning about this, and cognitive dissonance ensures that something more needs to be done before I go around declaring that I have two valid sets of ancestors. The most obvious circumstance is that a mistake was made somewhere along the way and that one list, or perhaps even both, are wrong. A second possibility would be that my grandfather was experiencing some level of cognitive decline right before his death and was no longer able to use his rationality hardware effectively. If I wanted to actually believe that they were both correct, however, how might I go about accepting both as reality-based truths?

Speculative but logical answers would ultimately be the only possible way to tamp down the cognitive dissonance of a clear contradiction to a level that would satisfy the rational hardware ­of my brain. Even then, it’s difficult to imagine that a mistake would not outrank any speculation as the most likely reason for the differences in data. If, though, I did not want to dismiss the work of my grandfather and believed him to be in possession of his mental faculties when he prepared and provided the lists, I might find myself asking what answer might suffice as a logical reason for two separate lists of legacies. How about the possibility that my great-grandfather was adopted? Therefore, one list traces the adoptive family’s genealogy, whereas the other traces the biological family’s. This would seem a bit odd given that my grandfather never before mentioned the adoption of his father, but it at least provides a logical answer. How about the possibility that he had actually provided a list of his own ancestors as well as a list of my grandmother’s ancestors? This would make sense of the differences in the list but does not explain why both lists ended with my grandfather and not my grandmother. How about the possibility that both lists actually denote the same people, but the list of one includes only the names of the people that they preferred to use, kind of like nicknames—not their legal names? (Although, it would take quite some time to justify why “Robert DeStefano” is a nickname for “William Nix.”) Or what about the possibility that one list is of biological relations, while the other denotes an unrelated heritage that would allow me to inherit a certain status—say, royal—from my grandfather?

Let’s take this same story, change some characters, and look at it again. The Bible provides two separate lineages for Jesus, both found in the New Testament, one written by Matthew, the other by Luke. The lists actually both begin with Adam (yes—of Adam and Eve fame) and provide identical, overlapping names up until David, the Stone Age Israelite king, after which they converge nearly completely until ending with Joseph, the father of Jesus. Some additional differences are that between David and Joseph: Matthew provides 25 names in the direct lineage between the two, while Luke provides 40. There is essentially no overlap between these lists for the names between David and Joseph, even for the very father of Joseph, the paternal grandfather(s) of Jesus. As in the example story above, a variety of reasons have been postulated for these differences dating back over a thousand years. Even St. Augustine, the early Christian philosopher who specialized in providing pseudo-logical answers—many of which are still maintained today—for countless Biblical contradictions, struggled with this unavoidable challenge to rationality. The variety of speculative answers by Christian scholars to this dilemma was analogized in the preceding story: familial adoption, nicknames, or ‘royal’ vs biological bloodline being the most commonly proffered.

While most self-identified Christians today are not even aware of these Biblical passages, having never read the Bible, those that have read it and actually picked up on the differences in the genealogies have been faced with a glaring contradiction that must have caused some level of cognitive dissonance. Given a high likelihood that an actual reader of the Bible has some intellectual investment in a Christian worldview, many who were warned by their brains about this logical problem have undoubtedly been unable to accept the only reasonable answer: that two different writers with the same idea and same agenda thought they were providing appropriate information to justify Jesus as the King of the Jews, but either mistakes were made, or the agenda proved a more important motivation than accuracy for one of the writers. Rather, true believers—those that accept the Bible as being the direct word of God—are confined by the beliefs of their worldview and must make the claim that both lists are accurate and true, and thus they have to start the game of speculation which has led to the absurdities described above. Of course, many Christians are willing to accept that the contradictions in the Bible are fairly obvious proof of the errancy of the book, yet they continue to maintain beliefs in the invisible, the irrational, and the impossible claims of Christianity that have come directly from this book that they know are problematic. This, too, involves a purposeful avoidance of any legitimate attempt to resolve cognitive dissonance, even if it appears less obvious than the case of those who refuse to acknowledge the mistakes in the first place. As I aim to describe on this site, there are real-world costs to this mismanagement of cognitive faculties, and I hope that we can one day reach a point where ‘belief’ is finally recognized as a failure of our brains to deal appropriately with reality.

Thanks to Oliver Carter at Upwork for editing

https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/editing