Once again, you hit it out of the park. I know this journey is painful for you bro, but I believe in you. All you care about is what is true and there is a purity of heart in that that leads me to believe you will see God.
STEVE! I love you and paid $50 just to be able to comment :) Listen, don't punch me in the face for saying "I'm praying for you", because with the 4th mystery of whatever Rosary I am praying, I do pray for "those who say they don't believe...those who say they believe and don't act like it...and for the conversion of sinners (especially ME)" I am thinking of song by Kansas "Carry on my wayward son"
Both positions seem to produce very unhappy people. If a person believes that hell is eternal, and most people go there I don't see how he or she could enjoy life. That is quite the burden to have sitting in the back of their minds. On the other hand if one believes that there is no God and no afterlife, then this life seems ultimately meaningless. What's the point to it all? In other words, what's the point of experiencing something if you won't remember it? I don't have an answer, I just know that the topic seems inescapable, and unanswerable. This is an incredible article that conveys what I think a silent majority of people grapple with daily, but don't talk about it. Top notch.
Speaking as a person who doesn't believe in any gods (though is open to belief) and also believes that when we die, we disappear into nothingness: I am quite happy.
The "point" of my experience is subjective, I don't believe there is such a thing as objective purpose for something like my own consciousness. What is the "point" of dolphins? Trees? We can explain the role they play in the ecosystem or something, but ultimately they just kinda exist and are pretty cool. Same with humans. I think we are more like works of art or natural phenomena than tools.
I'm not too worried about being dead. I didn't exist for billions of years and it wasn't unpleasant at all. It's not as though I will be around to regret not existing. I do feel sad that my friends and family and wife also have to die. It seems so wrong for beautiful and inspiring people to just disappear, but unfortunately that's reality. I do not need to live forever to enjoy the present moment, which is all we ever have regardless of our beliefs. Sometimes life is a thing we endure rather than enjoy, and so death is a kind of comfort in the sense that it puts a limit on the suffering and misery that we may potentially endure. Wouldn't it be great to have all the joy and pleasure of life without the suffering, and to have it endlessly? Sure, but that's just not real, that's not who we are or how we're built.
Each of us can discover and develop our own unique and subjective meaning in our lives. For me, I am here to learn and grow, to help others do the same, to be a husband, brother, son, uncle, etc. This is what makes me happy and motivated to get out of bed, the thought that I have another chance to learn something new, improve something, or journey with someone else toward excellence today.
Now, that said...what about the fact that horribly evil people just get to inflict suffering and pain on everyone and then get off scot-free? How's that fair? How can we tolerate that? How can an innocent child dying of cancer and Stalin end up in the same place? That's certainly an unresolved question for me, but at least I'm not burdened with having to explain to others why an allegedly all-powerful being created and presides over this state of affairs while doing absolutely nothing observable to fix it.
You've certainly put a lot of thought into this, very interesting mindset. I'm not sure I can understand the world without an objective meaning. The question of right or wrong, how do we determine that, by what standard do we measure this? And if we are works of art, who is the artist?
Of course you could be absolutely right. Maybe there is nothing after this life, we did not exist at some point before, and we will not exist at some point in the future. I don't understand the point of the journey, the learning, the building if it is all toppled by nothingness in the end.
In regards to the problem of evil, I have no answers either. You rightly point out how unjust the world can be, how evil can move so freely and cause so much havoc. And if there is a God, why does he sit there and watch while people beg him to intervene, and yet do nothing?
I don't know how to resolve any of this, but I appreciate your thoughts and the fact that you reached out. A lot of what you say makes sense.
The religious can enjoy life because God is the perfect judge, and we all want justice (Revelation 19:1-6).
This theme is explored by T. Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Third Part, Supplement, Question XCIV, “Of the Relations of the Saints Towards the Damned,” First Article):
"In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned."
Jonathan Edwards preached extensively on heaven and hell, and is arguably the source of much of the evangelical thought on the topics. He did a sermon on this specific topic, "The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous:
"But the Scripture seems to hold forth to us, that the saints will not only see the misery of the wicked at the day of judgment, but the forementioned texts imply, that the state of the damned in hell will be in the view of the heavenly inhabitants; that the two worlds of happiness and misery will be in view of each other. ... The saints in glory will see this, and be far more sensible of it than now we can possibly be. They will be far more sensible how dreadful the wrath of God is, and will better understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are; yet this will be no occasion of grief to them. They will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them; but on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises."
So, Catholic/Protestant conclusions are that not only will you see your atheist children tortured for eternity, but you will approve.
I don't know how to agree with Aquinas or Edwards on this point. But you lay it out very well, it just baffles me that a religion rooted in love would produce people rejoicing in other people suffering. It seems to me there is no charity in that zero sum game.
Being "rooted in love" is a relatively modern repackaging of Christianity.
As a single example in Catholicism, consider the Limbo of Infants, the belief that you go to limbo if you die before sin/baptism, that is, neither heaven or hell. The Catholics are trying to square modern sensibilities around God torturing every miscarried baby for eternity, with the Biblical concepts of original sin and flat out requirement that "no one comes to the Father but by me".
There's nothing of which I'm aware in the Bible that indicates infancy or young adulthood is any kind of barrier to hell, but Catholics found away around it. As did Protestants for that matter, see "age of accountability", the belief that God saves all those who die never having possessed the ability to make a decision for or against Christ, based on Romans 1:20.
There are similar attempts to find a way for people who never heard of Christ in their lifetime to go to heaven, usually focused on seeing God's creation is enough for him to fairly judge you (1 Corinthians 11:14).
Anyway, all this is more-or-less modern: the historic church wasn't nearly so concerned with that sort of thing, infants just went to hell, and the saved reveled in the moment.
Limbo was theorized to be part of hell sans “pain of sense” if I recall correctly. Also, I would argue that “original sin” is not really a “biblical” concept but rather a dualist interpolation essentially made up by Augustine. Jews have never had a tradition of “original sin” despite the concept allegedly emanating from their Torah. How strange that they missed such an important idea over thousands of years of reading their own texts. Doubly strange that an African guy who couldn’t read Hebrew figured it out nearly 4 centuries after Jesus forgot to mention it at all!
Yeah it's funny I always assumed original sin was common biblical doctrine. Lately a significant amount of Christians (mostly Orthodox) have been pointing out how Augustine developed this and it became dogma for the western church. It makes me wonder how the Holy spirit could overlook this mistake if it's job is to guide the Church in truth.
"Being rooted and grounded in love" is literally a quote from Scripture, Ephesians 3:17.
As for infants and Divine punishment, Jesus makes unqualified statements about young children belonging to the Kingdom of God (e.g., Matthew 19:14). And after the Exodus in the Old Testament, the adult generation who rebelled against Moses and God were excluded from entering the Promised Land, but not the young of that period (Numbers 14:26-31). So, yes there are obvious biblical justifications for treating children differently.
As Ramelli, Hart and others have shown, Universalism was a common opinion in the ancient Church and either explicitly defended or accepted as a live possibility by numerous Fathers. In this conception, Hell is purgatorial and not to be interpreted as a literal torture chamber.
Making generalisations about Scripture and Tradition that aren't well informed or assume modern questions or concerns simply didn't occur to the ancients is unhelpful. But it is, interestingly, common among both Traditionalists and sceptics.
What are your thoughts on the universalism of some of the ancient Eastern Christians? I'm thinking of Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and Basil. I think they are referred to as "the merciful ones."
I don't know enough about them to have an opinion.
If they are an interest of yours, I ran across "The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks" a few years back (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RI9EWI). I enjoyed it a great deal.
The "fuck you/god bless" dynamic is an intrinsic aspect of Christianity in my opinion. Nietzsche comments on this at length in "The Gay Science" and "Genealogy of Morality." Other thinkers, in a constant stream over the centuries, from Celsus in the 2nd century through Sam Harris last week, have detected the same very odd combination of veiled hostility/hatred alongside allegedly universal "love." Mark Twain offers several humorous explanations for this attitude, having directly experienced the evangelical/southern "bless your heart" style of Christian hate-love.
Most Christians will disavow groups like the Westboro Baptist Church because they have all the hate with none of the love. Similarly, Christians will disavow Quakers and Unitarians and extreme liberal Episcopalians, etc because it's all the love without the hate. Gotta have both to be recognizably Christian in some sense.
"Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." You're sincerely seeking truth and so will not be disappointed.
I really hope you'll write a book as you give a great workout for both faith and reason. So much Catholic writing reads like the Soviet press and literature I read in translation while in university. A lot of banal piety and brushing away of serious questions. The sort of stuff once called "pious piffle". Or worse, simplistic explanations for acknowledged problems that never address their breadth and complexity.
I think one could make a pretty convincing argument for the existence of "gods" ( or djinn, fairies, aliens or whichever of their many guises and manifestations one prefers). As a deep state informant told Agent Mulder in an X File episode "They have been here for very long, long time."
Steve, as a former 'none', I can completely relate to the problem of unknowability. I was a catechumen for 5 years because of the unknowability of the basic tenets of the Christian faith. I could smell and see that there was something good in Christianity; something I was missing and hungering for in the vacuum of my secular upbringing. Still, I could not in good conscience join the Church and recite the creed. It ultimately took an encounter with the name of Christ to give me the knowledge I needed. I don't expect you or anyone else to take my testimony about my own conversion as compelling evidence. You can't know if I am telling the truth, if I am prone to dramatic flights of fancy, or really anything else about what I experienced, but to me, it is the surest knowledge I've ever 'experienced' and that's sort of the point.
So long as we stick with our epistemological assumptions about how we know things, we are fundamentally at an impasse. Reason and empiricism have their limits. Ironically, one of the best explanations I've ever heard regarding our forgotten ways of knowing--perspectival, participatory, etc.--comes from a secular scholar, John Vervaeke.
I want to make one more distinction between infallibility vs. the Holy Spirit. I don't know if this will make sense but, part of the reason I became Orthodox is because the Church is feminine, and she is faithful to the Holy Spirit. She is subject. Her authority is in her obedience to the ultimate authority. She allows room for the mystery, for not knowing or understanding. I know this language of femininity exists in the West to describe the Church, but that is not the character of the Church in the West in my experience. The Church Herself is presented as infallible. The Church Herself is presented as authoritative. The Church Herself is presented as masculine, and it's my own belief that this is fundamentally the cause of what has gone wrong in the Church in the West to whatever extent something has indeed gone wrong.
I hope you and your readers will take my comment as it is intended, not as an argument but just as my attempt to lay out my experience of the Truth.
You said: "It ultimately took an encounter with the name of Christ to give me the knowledge I needed. I don't expect you or anyone else to take my testimony about my own conversion as compelling evidence."
You're zeroing in on one of the really big issues here, and it's why I wrote, "I believe that the alleged higher truths I once professed as a matter of faith, while very important to accurately discern, remain frustratingly unknowable as certainly true by any individual, barring some form of direct revelation from God."
It sounds to me like you got that kind of revelation. I've known others who have, too. Hell, I've *been there* when they got it. But because I can't know what was going on in their mind, it's still not real *to me.* (And it's strange and ephemeral enough not to be dispositive of anything, in my view. I've also seen a guy have a schizophrenic break and think he was getting messages from the Virgin Mary.)
The bigger issue with this is how most people will never have the kind of experience you had, and yet somehow, the rest of this [waves hands around at all the Church stuff] is supposed to be enough. I have serious issues with the idea that the Church we were given is the best an omnipotent, omniscient God could come up with as the proximate instrument of salvation.
You said: "So long as we stick with our epistemological assumptions about how we know things, we are fundamentally at an impasse. Reason and empiricism have their limits."
Exactly. And yet these are the tools we were given. The only tools. To supersede these takes something external to who and what we are. I always chafe when I hear people say, "Well your problem is that you're looking at this thing through strictly human eyes. You need to see it from the perspective of God." They will also tell you that "The mind of God is inscrutable" and make up all kinds of justifications for why when God does something we'd label as psychopathic when a human does it, it's fine, because you know, the rules are all different for him, or something.
But yes, our toolkit is limited. By design. Whether that's the design of nature, or the design of the God of nature, it's impossible to know. Because...the toolkit is too limited to ascertain the difference.
You said: "Ironically, one of the best explanations I've ever heard regarding our forgotten ways of knowing--perspectival, participatory, etc.--comes from a secular scholar, John Vervaeke."
I need to spend more time with his thought. I've listened to a little of him on a podcast before, and was intrigued. It's hard to cram in all the things I want to learn in the time I have.
You said: "I know this language of femininity exists in the West to describe the Church, but that is not the character of the Church in the West in my experience. The Church Herself is presented as infallible. The Church Herself is presented as authoritative. The Church Herself is presented as masculine, and it's my own belief that this is fundamentally the cause of what has gone wrong in the Church in the West to whatever extent something has indeed gone wrong."
This is a really, really interesting theory. Immediate sense of credibility to it.
Thanks again for your comment. This is the kind of discussion we need more of.
Thank you Steve. The only point I want to quibble with is that the only tools in our toolkit are either propositional knowledge or divine revelation. I think there is more. I think my knowledge that there was something really good in Christianity was not propositional. It was an experience of a particular community. It was an experience of beauty. It was tasting and seeing. My need to verify propositionally came at the expense of that knowledge. That's okay. I am a modern person and I really did need to verify propositionally--until suddenly I didn't. I'm not proposing an easy solution--"just believe and be faithful against your better judgment"-- just that we do have other tools which we have forgotten about with the advent of our modern, scientific age.
For instance, you don't learn to ride a bike by propositional knowledge, but by getting on and interacting with the bike, with gravity, with the world beneath the tires. If the bike has a flat tire, or has no breaks, or is a stationary bike, you've got to get off and see what's gone wrong before you get back on, and that requires a different form of epistemology.
My Bishop also talks frequently about Mother Church. At the same time he professes unity with the Holy Father, wicked as the Pope may be, and once gave a sermon about how Jesus said that God wasn't in the temple, and how that is happening now again. I keep meaning to find that verse and reread it...
I followed 1P5 for years and just last week subscribed to your Substack. In all honesty, the way in which your journey over the last year has mirrored my own has served as a great source of inspiration for me.
As a convert to the Catholic faith almost a decade ago, I suffered in Novus Ordo land for a few years before ending up in a very traditionalist environment.
I lived out traditionalist Catholicism to the best of my ability for a while, but certain things always ate at me. In reading your experiences, I've come to understand we reached the same conclusions, although I will admit your ability to put those conclusions into words far exceeds my own.
As you've touched in your writings, I eventually found it impossible to square the circle of traditionalism, both its people (I never found calling people "sodomites" on Twitter was all that effective of an evangelization tactic) and its claims. It became clear the faith of Pope Francis and most of the bishops and clergy was just not the same as mine. More importantly, it is self-evidently not the same faith practiced by Catholics for centuries and the arguments about how a situation like that can possibly sprout up have always felt hollow.
That a pope can do nearly infinite amounts of damage to doctrine and wage a war on the faithful, only to be met with hollow explanations of "well it's not ex cathedra," is a pathetic argument, and a faith-killing one too. I as a Catholic cannot subject myself to a church which cares less about the protection of the faith than I do, and moreover I eventually lost faith in a God that would allow such a state to happen.
So I find myself at a bizarre point in my life. I still view the world through a Catholic lens. I still hold Catholic morality to be, more or less, true. Intellectually, too, I find myself defaulting to Catholic positions, because no other position has even been as convincing.
I've thought about exploring Eastern Orthodoxy. I even considered going to a local conservative Calvinist church. But the intellectual positions I held about how those religions cannot be true, I cannot drop because I'm looking for some sort of "belonging."
In essence, the only religion I've ever been able to believe in was Catholicism as it had been practiced for nearly 2,000 years. That religion no longer exists, and I cannot keep subjecting myself to heartache in a vain attempt to save a religion that appears to have died decades before I was born.
Maybe I am agnostic. I'm hesitant to admit that too (I grew up during the heyday of New Atheism, and agnostic was often a gateway identification before diving right into Dawkins) but maybe that is where my head is at this point in my life.
I respect greatly how you've put this journey out there and what you've gone through. I hope we all find what we are looking for.
I really felt this, Cam. Including the bit about how you can't figure out acceptance of religions you never believed were true out of a desire for belonging.
Nothing makes sense anymore, and it's crazy disorienting.
The reason to choose the label "atheist" is because "agnostic" privileges religion. Nobody is agnostic about unicorns. There's a ton of literature claiming unicorns exist, eye-witness accounts and horns taken from unicorns and so on, so there's "proof" unicorns exist. Regardless, we're all atheistic on unicorns, we don't say it's a "leap of faith" to state with conviction unicorns don't exist even though it is still "unknowable as certainly true" that unicorns don't exist. Why does God get to be a special case? If He shows up, great, until then, I'm an atheist.
-- "common consent" is, IMNSHO, the best religion has. As you say, we're all wired to believe. But we're all also wired for an incredible amount of demonstrably bad ideas: pick your favorite optical illusion, or the myriad examples where our moral sensibilities are wired in stupid ways, or how the brain literally changes every memory you have every time you remember it.
As someone once said, the brain is 3 pounds of soggy bacon with electricity running through it, so it's not terribly surprising that if a bowl of tapioca pudding managed to hallucinate so vividly it invented calculus, it also going "Dude, I heard a weird noise and I'm 100% sure it was the ghost of the neighbor's cat which hasn't actually died yet" would be as expected as anything else. (h/t: https://imgur.com/gallery/nNmW9JY)
Further on "common consent": Mormonism is a great example. While nobody knows what happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, but we absolutely know what was going on in upstate New York in 1830. There's no more obvious grift than Mormonism on the planet, and 20 million people are perfectly happy believing it anyway.
-- As I think you were saying, anecdotally, "angry atheists" are atheists from religious families. Conventionally religious Christian families have a problem at their heart: a sincerely held parental belief means a questioning child is a public parental failure resulting in the eternal damnation of an innocent, and the tools for being a good parent in the culture -- well, shunning doesn't make things better. Combine that with a gay child, the child flees, and yeah, you get a really, really angry atheist. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it doesn't.
The Reddit atheist groups are full of discussions about this. It's also interesting to note the biggest Reddit atheist group's FAQ has a line-item that minors should not tell their parents, because bad stuff will happen. When atheists, as a matter of principle, tell questioning children NOT to talk to their parents, you know something you didn't know before.
Lots to think about here, and I agree with most of it. But I want to push back on the idea that atheism is like non-belief in any other non-demonstrable thing. The fact that every culture throughout the world for all of human history had some kind of theism as a majority view seems more significant than any potential argument you could make about other "unicorns" or the like.
Also, the fact that religious belief is the dominant belief in almost every culture even today means that whether you like it or not, religion has privilege. It's the default state for most people, and is the thing atheism exists in contrast again. The fact that "atheism" is a word means that it was necessary to create a semantic contrast to theism.
So yes, contextually, I think agnosticism does and should privilege religion, and that atheism is an act of faith that nothing beyond the perceptible truly exists, even where science is confounded.
Personally, I've witnessed just enough "spooky" stuff that I have a lot of questions about the realms I cannot see. And if you spend time listening to guys like Donald Hoffman and his thesis that organisms had zero probability of evolving to perceive reality with any degree of accuracy (just enough perception to survive) and that what we experience as "reality" is really just an interface; that space-time is "doomed" as a frame of reference and that there are much deeper frameworks we need to explore, etc., I'm feeling as though atheism might give entirely too much credence to physicality, the senses, etc., in carving out its epistemology.
I have to agree atheism is not like non-belief in any other thing (at least, I can't think of a counter-example), perhaps the privilege has been earned. Which, I suppose, makes me "agnostic". :)
I think it's hard for people to accept scientism, not because it isn't true, but because our brains are explicitly wired for stories, conspiracy and narrative: that's what resonates as "true" for us. Someone points out that mathematically cause doesn't have to precede effect, and our brains just go off the rails.
It might be helpful to distinguish specific concepts of gods from a more general sense of a creator or divine being or whatever. There are also huge differences between very wide god concepts like the Indian Brahman or the American Indigenous "Great Spirit" or the Neo-Platonic "Logos" and specific gods like Poseidon or Shiva or Jesus.
I use the label agnostic to describe myself because I have no beliefs in any gods, but don't have a belief that the very concept of god in some broad sense is logically impossible or something.
That said, I actively do not believe that Ahriman or Mars or John Frum are gods. I'm atheist about specific gods because I have examined the evidence and logic, and am convinced that there is not only not enough or good enough evidence to believe in these particular gods, but that they're self-refuting or logically impossible, or there is evidence to show they are not divine, etc.
This position is often called "weak agnosticism." I do not know if the answer to these questions is even knowable, but I'm willing to examine whatever reason and evidence is presented.
I spent my life going to Protestant churches and was baptized this past Easter at a traditional vigil. I had a "bad" baptism experience in a false church in my early twenties, and I always felt the need to make sure it was done right. so it was a conditional baptism, and it was really beautiful. Maybe I have this advantage of Protestant perspective of a loving and forgiving God, and then realizing that Jesus did not come so we could all just remain in our sin. I have been learning about church history for years, the fathers, the martyrs, the saints and the doctors, the Roman times, the schisms, the holy wars in Europe, as much as I can read/learn. before I decided to do this conditional baptism and also to take my children with me, I had gone around about the pope and infallibility with the (auxiliary) Bishop of the parish, and he kept saying that the pope is infallible when he speaks infallibly. (!!!) Which sounds like nonsense to me - but the thing that got me was when I said, "do I have to believe everything the Church teaches? things that seem like innovations, like limbo and the like? and he said, you have to believe everything that Jesus taught." and THAT convinced me. "the Church" consists of people who believe what Jesus always taught, and I suppose there is one visible head. The Bishop also gave a number of sermons about wicked priests/bishops, and naturally the question is, why would God let that happen? For me, that hasn't led me to believe that God isn't good or possibly doesn't exist. Just looking at my dog or a giraffe or my children is my proof of a creator. If a basketball rolls in front of you, you assume someone created the basketball, right? :) And God is not a cosmic rapist, if people don't love God and want to be with God, then he will not force them into heaven. so the torment of hell is not an active torment by God but rather the torment that comes from being away from the source of all goodness and love. I know some people (and maybe doctors of the church?) have talked about it being an active torment on the part of God, but that is a false teaching. Jesus never taught that, at least not that I can see in scripture of from his apostles. of course there is some aspect of faith which is inherently agnostic, in the sense of being unknowable in any certain terms. and the USCCB putting on their website that we worship the same god as Muslims - um, no. That is FOR SURE not what Jesus taught. the idea that Jesus wasn't the Messiah, it's so totally impossible to me. and then what happened afterwards to his apostles, there's just no way it's a lie or a metaphor or just a nice teaching about loving your neighbor or whatever. And people are assholes, no doubt. All of us.
@Sarah, "I know some people (and maybe doctors of the church?) have talked about it being an active torment on the part of God, but that is a false teaching."
I'd defer to our host on this, but unless I'm mistaken, Catholic doctrine includes active torture. See Aquinas, "Our Lady of Fatima" and so on.
I know, but Jesus never said or taught it, right? I haven't read all volumes of the post-Nicene fathers or anything, but to my knowledge, Jesus never said God actively tortues people in hell.
If the Bible is to be believed, Jesus taught active torture in hell.
See Luke 16:19-21, Jesus' parable on the rich man and Lazarus. From the NIV:
22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
Or, Mark 9:47-48, also from the NIV:
47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, 48 where “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched."
I read that as "was in torment" which is not God with a wicked grin waterboarding people who rejected him, but rather people in torment who willfully rejected God now being in agony because in hell, the image of God is no longer present on anyone, which will be even worse than being on earth without God.
I agree Sarah. Being apart from God may well be torment, and being in the light of God but unable to participare may well be torture. Being line by line literalists isn't likely to bring the Truth into focus. Nobody knows exactly what it's like after we die. Above, we are reading a parable and a figurative description.
The Prodigal seems the more informative to me. The father delights in his son's return, not in his fall into the pig pen. It is inconceivable to me that God delights in our failing to live up to our telos, or that He delights in punishing us for it. Rather he is broken hearted. God does not need to punish. Failing to live up to our telos will be punishment enough and is cause for His grief and our own.
Judgement can be a revelation, not merely a punishment. ''All things will be revealed''. ''That is a goat, that is a sheep'', In the judgement of a jeweller, ''that is a diamond, that is a cubic zirconia'', in the judgement of the medic ''this one is alive, this one is dead''.
I do wish we had a word better than "agnosticism" in English, (and maybe other languages do.) There's a world of difference between the agnostic who looks at faith and says, "I don't know and I don't care," and someone like you who seems to be saying, "I don't know right now, but I DO care!"
I do have to wonder how many priests are going to find their stay in Purgatory prolonged or their sentence in Hell affected by how many people were turned away from the Faith due to stupid tribal baloney over Covid vaccines and stuff like that.
Side-note about Hell, though, because I am an aspie with a theology degree who, while controlling her anal retentiveness better than she did as a teen or young adult, (was I a teen/YA Pharasee? You better believe it...) still can't let one teeny thing slide. (Teeny in the context of this post, rather, since it's not a point you stayed on for very long.) God doesn't send people to Hell, but we do have 2 options, God *on His terms* (and, if I'm reading correctly, it's what His terms are or might be that appears to be the sticking point? Please correct me if I have misread,) or something other than God, and that something other than God is Hell.
Take my sisters, for example: for either of them, *five seconds* with a God who doesn't believe that "Trans rights are human rights" or that Jazz Jennings is anything other than a ghastly tragedy would be sheer torture, let alone all of eternity. They will, most likely, say, "Yeah, I prefer Hell to that," and God's going to give them exactly that. God condemns no one--the person condemns himself or herself.
Example 2, and maybe this one makes my point better now that I think more about it and edit for typos and junk: To be able to even have a five-minute conversation with my middle sister, I have to at least avoid the topic of her claimed "asexuality." (I think she's just repulsed by what constitutes being "sex positive" in her tribe and would rather remain celibate than partake. From what I've seen of this years Sodomy Month "parades," I wouldn't even totally blame her.) Those are her terms. Having a connection to my sister on MY terms just isn't an option; she won't allow it, so it's a connection on her terms or nothing. God created us in His image and likeness and that trait appears to have remained intact down through the millennia.
@muzical, God sends people to hell. There are a lot of different arguments, but let's look at one simple one.
God, being omnipotent, could simply cause anybody headed to hell to not exist. It's a simple change, requires no Christian doctrinal adjustments of any note, and the only change is a bunch of people aren't tortured for eternity. Imagine your Bible said "And after the judgement, it's heaven or you don't wake up."
It seems to me you have two choices: either God is constrained in what he can do (and so hell is somehow forced on him), or God is sending people to hell. Combine that with infant damnation and it gets ugly fast.
I cannot imagine torturing someone for an hour, pretty much no matter what they did to me. Kill one of my children? Unbounded anger, murder sure. But torture? Really? What kind of brokenness is required to want to torture someone? And God set it up that way.
Agree. There's no letting him off the hook for this. I find the argument that people "choose to go to hell" as though they have a clear idea of what hell is, the certitude that they'll go there if they do X, and the choice of X itself to be utterly absurd.
No one, even faced with the most enticing sin, and then being given a clear view of the consequences, would say, "Yeah, that's totally worth being burned alive without ever being consumed in the presence of hellspawn for infinity times infinity." It's such bullshit. People choose what they do because they don't believe those consequences could possibly be real.
We're in a society where people are voluntarily sterilizing themselves, ripping off healthy breasts and more, and plenty'll never feel anything during intimacy as a result. They're choosing suffering in this life due to being too short-sighted about the next few decades; why would the same people magically develop insight and perspective when it pertains to Eternity? If anything, they're going to be less able to conceive of that, as we remain bound to time during our earthly lives.
These people have mental illness and are clearly being enabled by those who don't care they're deluded. They are exploited and often pushed into self-mutilation.
If someone could show them, "this is what you're going to feel like ten years from now," do you really think they'd choose it? Because I've read some of their stories, and all they seem to have is regret.
No, He did not. God didn't want the angels to fall and He did not want man to fall, either, but based on your tone, I'm guessing you're firmly in your camp and God Himself speaking to you wouldn't convince you otherwise. Also, to exist is intrinsically superior to non-existence. The Jehovah's Witnesses tried to get rid of Hell by preaching the anihalation of which you write, and their theology is swiss cheese as a result.
The "God himself" speaking to you wouldn't change your mind" is a common argument. Closely related to "You love your sin too much to give it up."
Honestly, I won't even require God speak to me. How about the stars spell out "Happy New Year" on January 1st, for an hour? For an omnipotent being that doesn't want me to go to hell, he could really be a bit more proactive, don't you think?
And do you truly believe anyone loves any sin enough to keep doing it if they believed God existed and had rules? That feels like a stretch for any rational person.
"I believe that the alleged higher truths I once professed as a matter of faith, while very important to accurately discern, remain frustratingly unknowable as certainly true by any individual, barring some form of direct revelation from God."
Then we must pray you get a direct revelation. Have you? I've had one, and while it was not transforming it was confirming. Perhaps I should email you about it?
Questions:
Besides that crappy priest in AZ, what else went on at that time? Did the hateful lying uncharitable anti-vaxers commenting at 1P5 factor into your current thinking? Honestly, if you said "Yes, a bit" I would not be surprised. I would understand.
Are you still in touch with Kale Zelden? I hope so!
Whenever I hear about a direct revelation, I become resentful.
Why is it belief is defined to "require faith", except for those for which belief doesn't require faith? Cathy gets an exorcism with a demon speaking in languages the afflicted doesn't know. Bob gets a miracle where his blind daughter can see. Thomas sticks his hand into the wound. But not me, I get "faith".
When people accuse me of not wanting to give up my sin, or being unwilling to let God take charge of my life, I've occasionally suggested that if God loves me, he could turn my hand bright blue for the next 30 seconds. That seems like a small ask for a loving, omnipotent being desiring nothing more than to spare me from eternal damnation.
We usually sit in silence for a few seconds, and then it inevitably queues the outraged "God isn't a slot machine!". Which is silly, because if you read your Bible, God is precisely a slot machine. Gideon not only asked God to prove himself once, but repeatedly, and God was happy to oblige.
I am also utterly sincere in my offer: if my hand goes blue, I'm gonna be apologizing my ass off and committing my life in under 10 seconds. I'm not an idiot.
Maybe God loves some of us more than others, to exempt those individuals from the requirement of faith.
What happened to me 30 years ago, and not since, could have been a product of my imagination. I'm pretty skeptical by nature. Except for the last 10 seconds of the event, which massively violated the utter decrepitude of the body God gave me, it was easy to blow off.
And if you have good health, then maybe I'm the one who should be resentful of you?
Seriously, no. I've been condemned to chronic pain already. On a bad day I don't fret about damnation, it feels as if it is here already. All I think about and pray about is God's mercy. I am pretty sure I don't approach the sin of presumption here. But is it presumption to seriously desire an eternity of happiness after getting a 10 second glimpse of it followed by 30 years of its opposite? Is it love to be tantalized in this way? I have to conclude that God is God, I am not God, and I would not make as good a God as God does.
Good comment, across the board. As to the last bit, I think maybe I just want to shove the irony of their behavior down their throat and watch them choke on it. They love to tell folks like me that we're "in danger of hellfire," but seem to have precious little concern that their own behavior places them right into the same soup.
If they believe it, they should act like it. If they don't, they should STFU.
And it's true that only a formerly very observant Catholic could probably have written it the way I did, but in the immortal words of the great poet Popeye, "I yam what I yam."
Once again, you hit it out of the park. I know this journey is painful for you bro, but I believe in you. All you care about is what is true and there is a purity of heart in that that leads me to believe you will see God.
Thank you for your vulnerability.
Great to hear from you, Padre. And thanks!
Wait, I mean, "F You, and God bless!" :D
HAHAHHA F@&$! you too!!
Awe, you guys... the love is saccharine sweet and my cockles are warmed so let me partake a bit. F!@$ you both!!
Group hug!
STEVE! I love you and paid $50 just to be able to comment :) Listen, don't punch me in the face for saying "I'm praying for you", because with the 4th mystery of whatever Rosary I am praying, I do pray for "those who say they don't believe...those who say they believe and don't act like it...and for the conversion of sinners (especially ME)" I am thinking of song by Kansas "Carry on my wayward son"
ditto what Fr. Krupp says!
Thanks, Nancy! If you believe in the power of prayer, how much would you have to hate me (to borrow an idea from Penn Jillette) NOT to pray for me?
I'm not ever going to get upset about that. If it works, it'll do me good; if it doesn't, it's harmless. It's a win-win. Thank you.
Both positions seem to produce very unhappy people. If a person believes that hell is eternal, and most people go there I don't see how he or she could enjoy life. That is quite the burden to have sitting in the back of their minds. On the other hand if one believes that there is no God and no afterlife, then this life seems ultimately meaningless. What's the point to it all? In other words, what's the point of experiencing something if you won't remember it? I don't have an answer, I just know that the topic seems inescapable, and unanswerable. This is an incredible article that conveys what I think a silent majority of people grapple with daily, but don't talk about it. Top notch.
Thanks, buddy. Nice to see you here! Miss you on Twitter.
Speaking as a person who doesn't believe in any gods (though is open to belief) and also believes that when we die, we disappear into nothingness: I am quite happy.
The "point" of my experience is subjective, I don't believe there is such a thing as objective purpose for something like my own consciousness. What is the "point" of dolphins? Trees? We can explain the role they play in the ecosystem or something, but ultimately they just kinda exist and are pretty cool. Same with humans. I think we are more like works of art or natural phenomena than tools.
I'm not too worried about being dead. I didn't exist for billions of years and it wasn't unpleasant at all. It's not as though I will be around to regret not existing. I do feel sad that my friends and family and wife also have to die. It seems so wrong for beautiful and inspiring people to just disappear, but unfortunately that's reality. I do not need to live forever to enjoy the present moment, which is all we ever have regardless of our beliefs. Sometimes life is a thing we endure rather than enjoy, and so death is a kind of comfort in the sense that it puts a limit on the suffering and misery that we may potentially endure. Wouldn't it be great to have all the joy and pleasure of life without the suffering, and to have it endlessly? Sure, but that's just not real, that's not who we are or how we're built.
Each of us can discover and develop our own unique and subjective meaning in our lives. For me, I am here to learn and grow, to help others do the same, to be a husband, brother, son, uncle, etc. This is what makes me happy and motivated to get out of bed, the thought that I have another chance to learn something new, improve something, or journey with someone else toward excellence today.
Now, that said...what about the fact that horribly evil people just get to inflict suffering and pain on everyone and then get off scot-free? How's that fair? How can we tolerate that? How can an innocent child dying of cancer and Stalin end up in the same place? That's certainly an unresolved question for me, but at least I'm not burdened with having to explain to others why an allegedly all-powerful being created and presides over this state of affairs while doing absolutely nothing observable to fix it.
You've certainly put a lot of thought into this, very interesting mindset. I'm not sure I can understand the world without an objective meaning. The question of right or wrong, how do we determine that, by what standard do we measure this? And if we are works of art, who is the artist?
Of course you could be absolutely right. Maybe there is nothing after this life, we did not exist at some point before, and we will not exist at some point in the future. I don't understand the point of the journey, the learning, the building if it is all toppled by nothingness in the end.
In regards to the problem of evil, I have no answers either. You rightly point out how unjust the world can be, how evil can move so freely and cause so much havoc. And if there is a God, why does he sit there and watch while people beg him to intervene, and yet do nothing?
I don't know how to resolve any of this, but I appreciate your thoughts and the fact that you reached out. A lot of what you say makes sense.
The religious can enjoy life because God is the perfect judge, and we all want justice (Revelation 19:1-6).
This theme is explored by T. Aquinas (Summa Theologica, Third Part, Supplement, Question XCIV, “Of the Relations of the Saints Towards the Damned,” First Article):
"In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned."
Jonathan Edwards preached extensively on heaven and hell, and is arguably the source of much of the evangelical thought on the topics. He did a sermon on this specific topic, "The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous:
"But the Scripture seems to hold forth to us, that the saints will not only see the misery of the wicked at the day of judgment, but the forementioned texts imply, that the state of the damned in hell will be in the view of the heavenly inhabitants; that the two worlds of happiness and misery will be in view of each other. ... The saints in glory will see this, and be far more sensible of it than now we can possibly be. They will be far more sensible how dreadful the wrath of God is, and will better understand how terrible the sufferings of the damned are; yet this will be no occasion of grief to them. They will not be sorry for the damned; it will cause no uneasiness or dissatisfaction to them; but on the contrary, when they have this sight, it will excite them to joyful praises."
So, Catholic/Protestant conclusions are that not only will you see your atheist children tortured for eternity, but you will approve.
I don't know how to agree with Aquinas or Edwards on this point. But you lay it out very well, it just baffles me that a religion rooted in love would produce people rejoicing in other people suffering. It seems to me there is no charity in that zero sum game.
Being "rooted in love" is a relatively modern repackaging of Christianity.
As a single example in Catholicism, consider the Limbo of Infants, the belief that you go to limbo if you die before sin/baptism, that is, neither heaven or hell. The Catholics are trying to square modern sensibilities around God torturing every miscarried baby for eternity, with the Biblical concepts of original sin and flat out requirement that "no one comes to the Father but by me".
There's nothing of which I'm aware in the Bible that indicates infancy or young adulthood is any kind of barrier to hell, but Catholics found away around it. As did Protestants for that matter, see "age of accountability", the belief that God saves all those who die never having possessed the ability to make a decision for or against Christ, based on Romans 1:20.
There are similar attempts to find a way for people who never heard of Christ in their lifetime to go to heaven, usually focused on seeing God's creation is enough for him to fairly judge you (1 Corinthians 11:14).
Anyway, all this is more-or-less modern: the historic church wasn't nearly so concerned with that sort of thing, infants just went to hell, and the saved reveled in the moment.
Limbo was theorized to be part of hell sans “pain of sense” if I recall correctly. Also, I would argue that “original sin” is not really a “biblical” concept but rather a dualist interpolation essentially made up by Augustine. Jews have never had a tradition of “original sin” despite the concept allegedly emanating from their Torah. How strange that they missed such an important idea over thousands of years of reading their own texts. Doubly strange that an African guy who couldn’t read Hebrew figured it out nearly 4 centuries after Jesus forgot to mention it at all!
Yeah it's funny I always assumed original sin was common biblical doctrine. Lately a significant amount of Christians (mostly Orthodox) have been pointing out how Augustine developed this and it became dogma for the western church. It makes me wonder how the Holy spirit could overlook this mistake if it's job is to guide the Church in truth.
"Being rooted and grounded in love" is literally a quote from Scripture, Ephesians 3:17.
As for infants and Divine punishment, Jesus makes unqualified statements about young children belonging to the Kingdom of God (e.g., Matthew 19:14). And after the Exodus in the Old Testament, the adult generation who rebelled against Moses and God were excluded from entering the Promised Land, but not the young of that period (Numbers 14:26-31). So, yes there are obvious biblical justifications for treating children differently.
As Ramelli, Hart and others have shown, Universalism was a common opinion in the ancient Church and either explicitly defended or accepted as a live possibility by numerous Fathers. In this conception, Hell is purgatorial and not to be interpreted as a literal torture chamber.
Making generalisations about Scripture and Tradition that aren't well informed or assume modern questions or concerns simply didn't occur to the ancients is unhelpful. But it is, interestingly, common among both Traditionalists and sceptics.
What are your thoughts on the universalism of some of the ancient Eastern Christians? I'm thinking of Gregory of Nyssa, Origen, and Basil. I think they are referred to as "the merciful ones."
I don't know enough about them to have an opinion.
If they are an interest of yours, I ran across "The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks" a few years back (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002RI9EWI). I enjoyed it a great deal.
The "fuck you/god bless" dynamic is an intrinsic aspect of Christianity in my opinion. Nietzsche comments on this at length in "The Gay Science" and "Genealogy of Morality." Other thinkers, in a constant stream over the centuries, from Celsus in the 2nd century through Sam Harris last week, have detected the same very odd combination of veiled hostility/hatred alongside allegedly universal "love." Mark Twain offers several humorous explanations for this attitude, having directly experienced the evangelical/southern "bless your heart" style of Christian hate-love.
Most Christians will disavow groups like the Westboro Baptist Church because they have all the hate with none of the love. Similarly, Christians will disavow Quakers and Unitarians and extreme liberal Episcopalians, etc because it's all the love without the hate. Gotta have both to be recognizably Christian in some sense.
My favorite comical/satirical illustration of this particular absurdity (and most of the others) is here: https://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/hank.htm
"Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened." You're sincerely seeking truth and so will not be disappointed.
I really hope you'll write a book as you give a great workout for both faith and reason. So much Catholic writing reads like the Soviet press and literature I read in translation while in university. A lot of banal piety and brushing away of serious questions. The sort of stuff once called "pious piffle". Or worse, simplistic explanations for acknowledged problems that never address their breadth and complexity.
I think one could make a pretty convincing argument for the existence of "gods" ( or djinn, fairies, aliens or whichever of their many guises and manifestations one prefers). As a deep state informant told Agent Mulder in an X File episode "They have been here for very long, long time."
Steve, as a former 'none', I can completely relate to the problem of unknowability. I was a catechumen for 5 years because of the unknowability of the basic tenets of the Christian faith. I could smell and see that there was something good in Christianity; something I was missing and hungering for in the vacuum of my secular upbringing. Still, I could not in good conscience join the Church and recite the creed. It ultimately took an encounter with the name of Christ to give me the knowledge I needed. I don't expect you or anyone else to take my testimony about my own conversion as compelling evidence. You can't know if I am telling the truth, if I am prone to dramatic flights of fancy, or really anything else about what I experienced, but to me, it is the surest knowledge I've ever 'experienced' and that's sort of the point.
So long as we stick with our epistemological assumptions about how we know things, we are fundamentally at an impasse. Reason and empiricism have their limits. Ironically, one of the best explanations I've ever heard regarding our forgotten ways of knowing--perspectival, participatory, etc.--comes from a secular scholar, John Vervaeke.
I want to make one more distinction between infallibility vs. the Holy Spirit. I don't know if this will make sense but, part of the reason I became Orthodox is because the Church is feminine, and she is faithful to the Holy Spirit. She is subject. Her authority is in her obedience to the ultimate authority. She allows room for the mystery, for not knowing or understanding. I know this language of femininity exists in the West to describe the Church, but that is not the character of the Church in the West in my experience. The Church Herself is presented as infallible. The Church Herself is presented as authoritative. The Church Herself is presented as masculine, and it's my own belief that this is fundamentally the cause of what has gone wrong in the Church in the West to whatever extent something has indeed gone wrong.
I hope you and your readers will take my comment as it is intended, not as an argument but just as my attempt to lay out my experience of the Truth.
Thanks, Daniel, for a really thoughtful comment.
You said: "It ultimately took an encounter with the name of Christ to give me the knowledge I needed. I don't expect you or anyone else to take my testimony about my own conversion as compelling evidence."
You're zeroing in on one of the really big issues here, and it's why I wrote, "I believe that the alleged higher truths I once professed as a matter of faith, while very important to accurately discern, remain frustratingly unknowable as certainly true by any individual, barring some form of direct revelation from God."
It sounds to me like you got that kind of revelation. I've known others who have, too. Hell, I've *been there* when they got it. But because I can't know what was going on in their mind, it's still not real *to me.* (And it's strange and ephemeral enough not to be dispositive of anything, in my view. I've also seen a guy have a schizophrenic break and think he was getting messages from the Virgin Mary.)
The bigger issue with this is how most people will never have the kind of experience you had, and yet somehow, the rest of this [waves hands around at all the Church stuff] is supposed to be enough. I have serious issues with the idea that the Church we were given is the best an omnipotent, omniscient God could come up with as the proximate instrument of salvation.
You said: "So long as we stick with our epistemological assumptions about how we know things, we are fundamentally at an impasse. Reason and empiricism have their limits."
Exactly. And yet these are the tools we were given. The only tools. To supersede these takes something external to who and what we are. I always chafe when I hear people say, "Well your problem is that you're looking at this thing through strictly human eyes. You need to see it from the perspective of God." They will also tell you that "The mind of God is inscrutable" and make up all kinds of justifications for why when God does something we'd label as psychopathic when a human does it, it's fine, because you know, the rules are all different for him, or something.
But yes, our toolkit is limited. By design. Whether that's the design of nature, or the design of the God of nature, it's impossible to know. Because...the toolkit is too limited to ascertain the difference.
You said: "Ironically, one of the best explanations I've ever heard regarding our forgotten ways of knowing--perspectival, participatory, etc.--comes from a secular scholar, John Vervaeke."
I need to spend more time with his thought. I've listened to a little of him on a podcast before, and was intrigued. It's hard to cram in all the things I want to learn in the time I have.
You said: "I know this language of femininity exists in the West to describe the Church, but that is not the character of the Church in the West in my experience. The Church Herself is presented as infallible. The Church Herself is presented as authoritative. The Church Herself is presented as masculine, and it's my own belief that this is fundamentally the cause of what has gone wrong in the Church in the West to whatever extent something has indeed gone wrong."
This is a really, really interesting theory. Immediate sense of credibility to it.
Thanks again for your comment. This is the kind of discussion we need more of.
Thank you Steve. The only point I want to quibble with is that the only tools in our toolkit are either propositional knowledge or divine revelation. I think there is more. I think my knowledge that there was something really good in Christianity was not propositional. It was an experience of a particular community. It was an experience of beauty. It was tasting and seeing. My need to verify propositionally came at the expense of that knowledge. That's okay. I am a modern person and I really did need to verify propositionally--until suddenly I didn't. I'm not proposing an easy solution--"just believe and be faithful against your better judgment"-- just that we do have other tools which we have forgotten about with the advent of our modern, scientific age.
For instance, you don't learn to ride a bike by propositional knowledge, but by getting on and interacting with the bike, with gravity, with the world beneath the tires. If the bike has a flat tire, or has no breaks, or is a stationary bike, you've got to get off and see what's gone wrong before you get back on, and that requires a different form of epistemology.
My Bishop also talks frequently about Mother Church. At the same time he professes unity with the Holy Father, wicked as the Pope may be, and once gave a sermon about how Jesus said that God wasn't in the temple, and how that is happening now again. I keep meaning to find that verse and reread it...
Steve,
I followed 1P5 for years and just last week subscribed to your Substack. In all honesty, the way in which your journey over the last year has mirrored my own has served as a great source of inspiration for me.
As a convert to the Catholic faith almost a decade ago, I suffered in Novus Ordo land for a few years before ending up in a very traditionalist environment.
I lived out traditionalist Catholicism to the best of my ability for a while, but certain things always ate at me. In reading your experiences, I've come to understand we reached the same conclusions, although I will admit your ability to put those conclusions into words far exceeds my own.
As you've touched in your writings, I eventually found it impossible to square the circle of traditionalism, both its people (I never found calling people "sodomites" on Twitter was all that effective of an evangelization tactic) and its claims. It became clear the faith of Pope Francis and most of the bishops and clergy was just not the same as mine. More importantly, it is self-evidently not the same faith practiced by Catholics for centuries and the arguments about how a situation like that can possibly sprout up have always felt hollow.
That a pope can do nearly infinite amounts of damage to doctrine and wage a war on the faithful, only to be met with hollow explanations of "well it's not ex cathedra," is a pathetic argument, and a faith-killing one too. I as a Catholic cannot subject myself to a church which cares less about the protection of the faith than I do, and moreover I eventually lost faith in a God that would allow such a state to happen.
So I find myself at a bizarre point in my life. I still view the world through a Catholic lens. I still hold Catholic morality to be, more or less, true. Intellectually, too, I find myself defaulting to Catholic positions, because no other position has even been as convincing.
I've thought about exploring Eastern Orthodoxy. I even considered going to a local conservative Calvinist church. But the intellectual positions I held about how those religions cannot be true, I cannot drop because I'm looking for some sort of "belonging."
In essence, the only religion I've ever been able to believe in was Catholicism as it had been practiced for nearly 2,000 years. That religion no longer exists, and I cannot keep subjecting myself to heartache in a vain attempt to save a religion that appears to have died decades before I was born.
Maybe I am agnostic. I'm hesitant to admit that too (I grew up during the heyday of New Atheism, and agnostic was often a gateway identification before diving right into Dawkins) but maybe that is where my head is at this point in my life.
I respect greatly how you've put this journey out there and what you've gone through. I hope we all find what we are looking for.
I really felt this, Cam. Including the bit about how you can't figure out acceptance of religions you never believed were true out of a desire for belonging.
Nothing makes sense anymore, and it's crazy disorienting.
The reason to choose the label "atheist" is because "agnostic" privileges religion. Nobody is agnostic about unicorns. There's a ton of literature claiming unicorns exist, eye-witness accounts and horns taken from unicorns and so on, so there's "proof" unicorns exist. Regardless, we're all atheistic on unicorns, we don't say it's a "leap of faith" to state with conviction unicorns don't exist even though it is still "unknowable as certainly true" that unicorns don't exist. Why does God get to be a special case? If He shows up, great, until then, I'm an atheist.
-- "common consent" is, IMNSHO, the best religion has. As you say, we're all wired to believe. But we're all also wired for an incredible amount of demonstrably bad ideas: pick your favorite optical illusion, or the myriad examples where our moral sensibilities are wired in stupid ways, or how the brain literally changes every memory you have every time you remember it.
As someone once said, the brain is 3 pounds of soggy bacon with electricity running through it, so it's not terribly surprising that if a bowl of tapioca pudding managed to hallucinate so vividly it invented calculus, it also going "Dude, I heard a weird noise and I'm 100% sure it was the ghost of the neighbor's cat which hasn't actually died yet" would be as expected as anything else. (h/t: https://imgur.com/gallery/nNmW9JY)
Further on "common consent": Mormonism is a great example. While nobody knows what happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, but we absolutely know what was going on in upstate New York in 1830. There's no more obvious grift than Mormonism on the planet, and 20 million people are perfectly happy believing it anyway.
-- As I think you were saying, anecdotally, "angry atheists" are atheists from religious families. Conventionally religious Christian families have a problem at their heart: a sincerely held parental belief means a questioning child is a public parental failure resulting in the eternal damnation of an innocent, and the tools for being a good parent in the culture -- well, shunning doesn't make things better. Combine that with a gay child, the child flees, and yeah, you get a really, really angry atheist. Sometimes it gets better, sometimes it doesn't.
The Reddit atheist groups are full of discussions about this. It's also interesting to note the biggest Reddit atheist group's FAQ has a line-item that minors should not tell their parents, because bad stuff will happen. When atheists, as a matter of principle, tell questioning children NOT to talk to their parents, you know something you didn't know before.
Lots to think about here, and I agree with most of it. But I want to push back on the idea that atheism is like non-belief in any other non-demonstrable thing. The fact that every culture throughout the world for all of human history had some kind of theism as a majority view seems more significant than any potential argument you could make about other "unicorns" or the like.
Also, the fact that religious belief is the dominant belief in almost every culture even today means that whether you like it or not, religion has privilege. It's the default state for most people, and is the thing atheism exists in contrast again. The fact that "atheism" is a word means that it was necessary to create a semantic contrast to theism.
So yes, contextually, I think agnosticism does and should privilege religion, and that atheism is an act of faith that nothing beyond the perceptible truly exists, even where science is confounded.
Personally, I've witnessed just enough "spooky" stuff that I have a lot of questions about the realms I cannot see. And if you spend time listening to guys like Donald Hoffman and his thesis that organisms had zero probability of evolving to perceive reality with any degree of accuracy (just enough perception to survive) and that what we experience as "reality" is really just an interface; that space-time is "doomed" as a frame of reference and that there are much deeper frameworks we need to explore, etc., I'm feeling as though atheism might give entirely too much credence to physicality, the senses, etc., in carving out its epistemology.
I have to agree atheism is not like non-belief in any other thing (at least, I can't think of a counter-example), perhaps the privilege has been earned. Which, I suppose, makes me "agnostic". :)
I think it's hard for people to accept scientism, not because it isn't true, but because our brains are explicitly wired for stories, conspiracy and narrative: that's what resonates as "true" for us. Someone points out that mathematically cause doesn't have to precede effect, and our brains just go off the rails.
It might be helpful to distinguish specific concepts of gods from a more general sense of a creator or divine being or whatever. There are also huge differences between very wide god concepts like the Indian Brahman or the American Indigenous "Great Spirit" or the Neo-Platonic "Logos" and specific gods like Poseidon or Shiva or Jesus.
I use the label agnostic to describe myself because I have no beliefs in any gods, but don't have a belief that the very concept of god in some broad sense is logically impossible or something.
That said, I actively do not believe that Ahriman or Mars or John Frum are gods. I'm atheist about specific gods because I have examined the evidence and logic, and am convinced that there is not only not enough or good enough evidence to believe in these particular gods, but that they're self-refuting or logically impossible, or there is evidence to show they are not divine, etc.
This position is often called "weak agnosticism." I do not know if the answer to these questions is even knowable, but I'm willing to examine whatever reason and evidence is presented.
I spent my life going to Protestant churches and was baptized this past Easter at a traditional vigil. I had a "bad" baptism experience in a false church in my early twenties, and I always felt the need to make sure it was done right. so it was a conditional baptism, and it was really beautiful. Maybe I have this advantage of Protestant perspective of a loving and forgiving God, and then realizing that Jesus did not come so we could all just remain in our sin. I have been learning about church history for years, the fathers, the martyrs, the saints and the doctors, the Roman times, the schisms, the holy wars in Europe, as much as I can read/learn. before I decided to do this conditional baptism and also to take my children with me, I had gone around about the pope and infallibility with the (auxiliary) Bishop of the parish, and he kept saying that the pope is infallible when he speaks infallibly. (!!!) Which sounds like nonsense to me - but the thing that got me was when I said, "do I have to believe everything the Church teaches? things that seem like innovations, like limbo and the like? and he said, you have to believe everything that Jesus taught." and THAT convinced me. "the Church" consists of people who believe what Jesus always taught, and I suppose there is one visible head. The Bishop also gave a number of sermons about wicked priests/bishops, and naturally the question is, why would God let that happen? For me, that hasn't led me to believe that God isn't good or possibly doesn't exist. Just looking at my dog or a giraffe or my children is my proof of a creator. If a basketball rolls in front of you, you assume someone created the basketball, right? :) And God is not a cosmic rapist, if people don't love God and want to be with God, then he will not force them into heaven. so the torment of hell is not an active torment by God but rather the torment that comes from being away from the source of all goodness and love. I know some people (and maybe doctors of the church?) have talked about it being an active torment on the part of God, but that is a false teaching. Jesus never taught that, at least not that I can see in scripture of from his apostles. of course there is some aspect of faith which is inherently agnostic, in the sense of being unknowable in any certain terms. and the USCCB putting on their website that we worship the same god as Muslims - um, no. That is FOR SURE not what Jesus taught. the idea that Jesus wasn't the Messiah, it's so totally impossible to me. and then what happened afterwards to his apostles, there's just no way it's a lie or a metaphor or just a nice teaching about loving your neighbor or whatever. And people are assholes, no doubt. All of us.
@Sarah, "I know some people (and maybe doctors of the church?) have talked about it being an active torment on the part of God, but that is a false teaching."
I'd defer to our host on this, but unless I'm mistaken, Catholic doctrine includes active torture. See Aquinas, "Our Lady of Fatima" and so on.
I know, but Jesus never said or taught it, right? I haven't read all volumes of the post-Nicene fathers or anything, but to my knowledge, Jesus never said God actively tortues people in hell.
If the Bible is to be believed, Jesus taught active torture in hell.
See Luke 16:19-21, Jesus' parable on the rich man and Lazarus. From the NIV:
22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’
Or, Mark 9:47-48, also from the NIV:
47 And if your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into hell, 48 where “the worms that eat them do not die, and the fire is not quenched."
I read that as "was in torment" which is not God with a wicked grin waterboarding people who rejected him, but rather people in torment who willfully rejected God now being in agony because in hell, the image of God is no longer present on anyone, which will be even worse than being on earth without God.
I agree Sarah. Being apart from God may well be torment, and being in the light of God but unable to participare may well be torture. Being line by line literalists isn't likely to bring the Truth into focus. Nobody knows exactly what it's like after we die. Above, we are reading a parable and a figurative description.
The Prodigal seems the more informative to me. The father delights in his son's return, not in his fall into the pig pen. It is inconceivable to me that God delights in our failing to live up to our telos, or that He delights in punishing us for it. Rather he is broken hearted. God does not need to punish. Failing to live up to our telos will be punishment enough and is cause for His grief and our own.
Judgement can be a revelation, not merely a punishment. ''All things will be revealed''. ''That is a goat, that is a sheep'', In the judgement of a jeweller, ''that is a diamond, that is a cubic zirconia'', in the judgement of the medic ''this one is alive, this one is dead''.
I do wish we had a word better than "agnosticism" in English, (and maybe other languages do.) There's a world of difference between the agnostic who looks at faith and says, "I don't know and I don't care," and someone like you who seems to be saying, "I don't know right now, but I DO care!"
I do have to wonder how many priests are going to find their stay in Purgatory prolonged or their sentence in Hell affected by how many people were turned away from the Faith due to stupid tribal baloney over Covid vaccines and stuff like that.
Side-note about Hell, though, because I am an aspie with a theology degree who, while controlling her anal retentiveness better than she did as a teen or young adult, (was I a teen/YA Pharasee? You better believe it...) still can't let one teeny thing slide. (Teeny in the context of this post, rather, since it's not a point you stayed on for very long.) God doesn't send people to Hell, but we do have 2 options, God *on His terms* (and, if I'm reading correctly, it's what His terms are or might be that appears to be the sticking point? Please correct me if I have misread,) or something other than God, and that something other than God is Hell.
Take my sisters, for example: for either of them, *five seconds* with a God who doesn't believe that "Trans rights are human rights" or that Jazz Jennings is anything other than a ghastly tragedy would be sheer torture, let alone all of eternity. They will, most likely, say, "Yeah, I prefer Hell to that," and God's going to give them exactly that. God condemns no one--the person condemns himself or herself.
Example 2, and maybe this one makes my point better now that I think more about it and edit for typos and junk: To be able to even have a five-minute conversation with my middle sister, I have to at least avoid the topic of her claimed "asexuality." (I think she's just repulsed by what constitutes being "sex positive" in her tribe and would rather remain celibate than partake. From what I've seen of this years Sodomy Month "parades," I wouldn't even totally blame her.) Those are her terms. Having a connection to my sister on MY terms just isn't an option; she won't allow it, so it's a connection on her terms or nothing. God created us in His image and likeness and that trait appears to have remained intact down through the millennia.
@muzical, God sends people to hell. There are a lot of different arguments, but let's look at one simple one.
God, being omnipotent, could simply cause anybody headed to hell to not exist. It's a simple change, requires no Christian doctrinal adjustments of any note, and the only change is a bunch of people aren't tortured for eternity. Imagine your Bible said "And after the judgement, it's heaven or you don't wake up."
It seems to me you have two choices: either God is constrained in what he can do (and so hell is somehow forced on him), or God is sending people to hell. Combine that with infant damnation and it gets ugly fast.
I cannot imagine torturing someone for an hour, pretty much no matter what they did to me. Kill one of my children? Unbounded anger, murder sure. But torture? Really? What kind of brokenness is required to want to torture someone? And God set it up that way.
Agree. There's no letting him off the hook for this. I find the argument that people "choose to go to hell" as though they have a clear idea of what hell is, the certitude that they'll go there if they do X, and the choice of X itself to be utterly absurd.
No one, even faced with the most enticing sin, and then being given a clear view of the consequences, would say, "Yeah, that's totally worth being burned alive without ever being consumed in the presence of hellspawn for infinity times infinity." It's such bullshit. People choose what they do because they don't believe those consequences could possibly be real.
We're in a society where people are voluntarily sterilizing themselves, ripping off healthy breasts and more, and plenty'll never feel anything during intimacy as a result. They're choosing suffering in this life due to being too short-sighted about the next few decades; why would the same people magically develop insight and perspective when it pertains to Eternity? If anything, they're going to be less able to conceive of that, as we remain bound to time during our earthly lives.
These people have mental illness and are clearly being enabled by those who don't care they're deluded. They are exploited and often pushed into self-mutilation.
If someone could show them, "this is what you're going to feel like ten years from now," do you really think they'd choose it? Because I've read some of their stories, and all they seem to have is regret.
No, He did not. God didn't want the angels to fall and He did not want man to fall, either, but based on your tone, I'm guessing you're firmly in your camp and God Himself speaking to you wouldn't convince you otherwise. Also, to exist is intrinsically superior to non-existence. The Jehovah's Witnesses tried to get rid of Hell by preaching the anihalation of which you write, and their theology is swiss cheese as a result.
The "God himself" speaking to you wouldn't change your mind" is a common argument. Closely related to "You love your sin too much to give it up."
Honestly, I won't even require God speak to me. How about the stars spell out "Happy New Year" on January 1st, for an hour? For an omnipotent being that doesn't want me to go to hell, he could really be a bit more proactive, don't you think?
And do you truly believe anyone loves any sin enough to keep doing it if they believed God existed and had rules? That feels like a stretch for any rational person.
"I believe that the alleged higher truths I once professed as a matter of faith, while very important to accurately discern, remain frustratingly unknowable as certainly true by any individual, barring some form of direct revelation from God."
Then we must pray you get a direct revelation. Have you? I've had one, and while it was not transforming it was confirming. Perhaps I should email you about it?
Questions:
Besides that crappy priest in AZ, what else went on at that time? Did the hateful lying uncharitable anti-vaxers commenting at 1P5 factor into your current thinking? Honestly, if you said "Yes, a bit" I would not be surprised. I would understand.
Are you still in touch with Kale Zelden? I hope so!
Whenever I hear about a direct revelation, I become resentful.
Why is it belief is defined to "require faith", except for those for which belief doesn't require faith? Cathy gets an exorcism with a demon speaking in languages the afflicted doesn't know. Bob gets a miracle where his blind daughter can see. Thomas sticks his hand into the wound. But not me, I get "faith".
When people accuse me of not wanting to give up my sin, or being unwilling to let God take charge of my life, I've occasionally suggested that if God loves me, he could turn my hand bright blue for the next 30 seconds. That seems like a small ask for a loving, omnipotent being desiring nothing more than to spare me from eternal damnation.
We usually sit in silence for a few seconds, and then it inevitably queues the outraged "God isn't a slot machine!". Which is silly, because if you read your Bible, God is precisely a slot machine. Gideon not only asked God to prove himself once, but repeatedly, and God was happy to oblige.
I am also utterly sincere in my offer: if my hand goes blue, I'm gonna be apologizing my ass off and committing my life in under 10 seconds. I'm not an idiot.
Maybe God loves some of us more than others, to exempt those individuals from the requirement of faith.
Wait a minute.
What happened to me 30 years ago, and not since, could have been a product of my imagination. I'm pretty skeptical by nature. Except for the last 10 seconds of the event, which massively violated the utter decrepitude of the body God gave me, it was easy to blow off.
And if you have good health, then maybe I'm the one who should be resentful of you?
Seriously, no. I've been condemned to chronic pain already. On a bad day I don't fret about damnation, it feels as if it is here already. All I think about and pray about is God's mercy. I am pretty sure I don't approach the sin of presumption here. But is it presumption to seriously desire an eternity of happiness after getting a 10 second glimpse of it followed by 30 years of its opposite? Is it love to be tantalized in this way? I have to conclude that God is God, I am not God, and I would not make as good a God as God does.
Good comment, across the board. As to the last bit, I think maybe I just want to shove the irony of their behavior down their throat and watch them choke on it. They love to tell folks like me that we're "in danger of hellfire," but seem to have precious little concern that their own behavior places them right into the same soup.
If they believe it, they should act like it. If they don't, they should STFU.
And it's true that only a formerly very observant Catholic could probably have written it the way I did, but in the immortal words of the great poet Popeye, "I yam what I yam."
"Haters go to Hell!"
"I hate haters!"