Consciencebound

Why I Have Difficulty With Christianity

I have a growing number of things that seem to be a problem for me in fully embracing Christianity:

- I found that I had a serious double standard when it comes to evaluating truth claims of my own beliefs compared to the beliefs of other people. For instance, as I would talk to a coworker or a young man knocking at my door wearing a white shirt and tie about what their beliefs were, I would examine them for logical consistency, historical reliability, and whether or not they seems to make sense of reality. Then as I found internal problems with their belief system I would endeavor to show that they were believing things on insufficient evidence. I used to try and get the person to a point where they would admit that they actually had no good reason for their faith but that they only had some kind of experience that they interpreted in a certain way and that experience is all that they needed to know that their faith was true. There was nothing that anyone could ever show them that the “burning in their bosom” which they experienced was not true.

The problem for me happened when I turned the same big guns of logical consistency and historical reliability on my own beliefs to see if they could withstand the same kind of analysis. It is not as though I was not thinking logically about my beliefs until then, many people can attest to the fact that I have always cared very much for logic. It was that now I was not looking at Christianity as though it was true no matter what the evidence said, I was looking to see if the evidence actually pointed to and required the conclusions that I had come to. There is a big difference between these two positions. I always started with the assumption that Christianity was true and then only looked at the evidence for it when I needed to answer questions that other people had for me about why I believed what I believe. In fact, I believed that this was the only philosophically consistent way that I could argue. If God is true and he has spoken to us in his word the Bible (huge assumption), then who am I to question him or try and use some other “proof” to verify what he has already said? If I use something else to verify God’s words then I am saying that there is an authority higher then God that can be appealed to! Well, this may be actually true, but the difficulty that we are dealing with as humans is that there are competing messages and belief system that purport to be “from God” and so the obvious task for us is to try and discern which one is truly coming from God if indeed any of them are.

When you take a line of reasoning and test it out by applying the reasons that you have for your beliefs to another belief system that is either totally opposite of your beliefs or at least very different, you can see if you are actually proving anything by your arguments. What I found was that if I applied the idea that God’s word cannot be questioned, to Islam, then of course Islam is true as I cannot be found to be fighting against God. If I apply it to Mormonism, then Mormonism is true for the same reasons that I thought I was proving my beliefs. And if I say that Mormonism has logical or historical contradictions, then I show that reports of God speaking really can be questioned and logic really is a standard by which we judge.

- When I started to look at the Bible from a perspective that did not believe at the outset that it was true and when I started asking questions about certain texts to see if they had problems, I saw some very disturbing things. The Bible has contradictions and problems in it in the same way that the book of Mormon and the Koran do. The difference is that I just KNEW that the Bible was true and I just KNEW that the Koran and the Book of Mormon was false. I could look at the “apparent contradictions”, as I called them, in the Bible and I could look at them from a different perspective that would show that it actually COULD be true. But I wasn’t about to give that kind of liberty to the Mormon of Muslim. No, they were held to a strict standard of logic and when they could not deal with the obvious problems of their revelation, their beliefs were rendered false by me. Was I ready to be as consistent about the logical problems that were present in my beliefs and in the Bible itself? If I was really committed to the truth, was I ready to follow the truth even to the point of not believing in parts of Christianity if the facts did not demand it? This is certainly what I would want of a prosecutor who was trying to solve a murder case, especially if I was unjustly convicted of murder. This is what I would expect of a doctor who was treating a family member of a terrible sickness. I would want them to unbiasly follow the facts and act accordingly. Why then when it comes to the most important topics that a person could ever take a belief stance on, was I so quick to believe in things that the facts did not demand my assent to?

- In conjunction with the two posts above, the more that I looked, the more that I saw that people who were Christians were not at all interested in following the facts wherever they may lead, they were interested in their own opinions about God and the Bible being true and they were willing to manipulate the facts in order to fit their position that they already KNEW was true. Now, of course, they were not consciously twisting the Bible to say what they wanted it to say. I firmly believe that most Christians truly believe that the doctrines that they subscribe to are what the text actually says and in turn what God says. What happens though is that they are so convinced that what they already believe is true that they will unwittingly “rethink” the way that the passage “seems to say at first glance” until they find a “possible way of looking at the passage” that makes it fit within their preconceived worldview or confession of faith that they subscribe to.

I am not pointing my finger only at “other” Christians who did these things. The scariest thing was to come to terms with the fact that I was doing these things myself. I was not looking at archeology in an honest way, I looked at it in order to verify my faith and I did not spend much time looking at archaeological evidence that was contrary to what I KNEW archeology SHOULD say. My assumption was always that Christianity as I had conceived of it was true and I did not bear any burden of proof.

- The Canon of Scripture

The Achilles heal of Christianity for me ended up being the historical evidence that we have that the Bible as we know it is complete and that the books in this Bible are supposed to be there and are infallibly inspired by God. Even if you take out the infallibility question, the issue of our certainty of what was written is highly problematic. An article by Richard Carrier illustrates this very well. The more I compared scholarship to the best of my admittedly limited ability, the more that it seems to me that evangelical scholarship is assuming the very thing that they are trying to prove and in many instances they are proud of this fact! It seems that evangelicals are far too quick to assume things that are far from proven and are even far from being probable. We are dealing with an ancient collection of writings, from an ancient culture, written by people who spoke languages that are not even spoken today (First Century Greek in particular). The evidence seems to suggest that the earlier the New Testament manuscripts, the higher the quantity of errors and variations that there are and only as the church was more organized centuries later did the manuscripts start to have a uniformity to them. Only when there were professional scribes (rather then the closest literate person) were texts taken more seriously. Bart Ehrman in his book Misquoting Jesus does a very thorough job (from what i can tell) in showing many of these problems in the text itself. Ehrman also was interviewed on NPR by Terry Gross which will give you an introduction to his book.

In the past, my initial response to a book like Ehrman’s or an article like Carrier’s was that obviously these are liberals who have an axe to grind against the Bible and they are not really interested in the truth. Because I already KNEW what Jesus said (which is every word in red in the New Testament) anything detracting from that was simply suppressing the truth in their unrighteousness. The question that anyone who loves and follows Jesus needs to think about is this: What if Jesus didn’t say some of the things that he is alleged to have said? Is it possible that conservative evangelicals are dishonoring Christ in their attempt to honor Him? What if we, like the pharisees of the New Testament are found to be fighting against God in our attempt to follow him? If God is at all as jealous as the Bible says that he is, then He would be equally angry if we were calling something His Word when in fact it is not. That this is even remotely a possibility should give Evangelicals serious pause when they take such a strong stance on the Bible.

I am in the process of further articulating my thoughts on these issues and as I develop them I will be posting more on this site. This post is simply my current thoughts that are written down in one sitting and are subject to further clarification. It is my hope that I am being as honest as i can in my beliefs on these subjects and I want open to criticism and even to the possibility to these beliefs that I am now suspect of are actually true.

Jeff

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