American Evangelicals

I grew up in Australia, and I was a member of an evangelical church there. I later moved to USA as a graduate student in mathematics, and I left Christianity after a few months there (at around age 23). I originally saw “evangelical” as a theological term, referring to particular theologies — particularly those that arose from Luther’s reformation. At the time of my youth in Australia, that made sense.

In America, I made similar assumptions about the meaning of “evangelical”. But experience has shown me that this was a mistaken view. It turns out that it makes more sense to think of “evangelical”, at least in the USA, a referring to a political and cultural identity. For example, I often hear the news media distinguishing between “evangelicals” and “mainline protestants”. Yet many of the “mainline protestant” churches would fit my original Australian understanding of “evangelical”.

Are evangelicals Christian?

What I see coming from American evangelicals does not fit the understanding of Christianity that I had in my youth. Yes, they call themselves “Christian”. But what, exactly does that mean? To me, it meant following the teachings of Jesus, such as “love thy neighbor”. And that’s where American evangelicals seem to fall short.

Here’s a post written by Rodney Kennedy, who is apparently a progressive Christian in America:

• A White Creationist Evangelical Arrives at the Gates of Heaven

Nonsense about atheism at The Big Think

A recent post at Uncommon Descent mentioned a topic at Big Think:

• Atheism is not as rare or as rational as you think

The title is perhaps what attracted the UD poster. But the title is already absurd. Why would anyone think that atheism is particularly rational?

For starters, atheism isn’t actually a belief system. It is merely a matter of not being committed to theism. So it doesn’t actually make sense to ask whether atheism is rational.

The post lists the author as Will Gervais in partnership with John Templeton Foundation. A google search suggests that Gervais is a professor of psychology at UKY.

Absurdities

I chose to respond to this because of the absurdities that I noticed. The post begins with a subtitle:

Many atheists think of themselves as intellectually gifted individuals, guiding humanity on the path of reason. Scientific data shows otherwise.

This already seems dubious. The first sentence is undoubtedly true, if only because “many” is an undetermined number. Six people could count as many, and I know at least that many myself who match the description. But scientific data is unlikely to counter this. The scientific data more likely reports a statistical probability, which is not the same as “many”.

Does science require faith?

There was a recent post at the heterodox stem substack, arguing that science requires faith. My thanks to Jerry Coyne for the reference. Coyne has already expressed his disagreement with that viewpoint. In this post, I’ll add my own disagreement.

In elementary school, after we learned to use fractions we were taught to use 22/7 for the value of . We did not actually use the symbol at that stage. We were not given any reason for using 22/7. We had to trust the teacher for that. This was for doing what we called “mensuration” problems — finding areas and perimeters. So, yes, you could think of that as a kind of faith. A child needs to trust teachers and parents while growing up.

The next year, we learned decimal fractions. And we began to use 3.14 or 3.1416 for . I quickly worked out that this was not the same as 22/7, so by then I understood that these were approximations.

In high school, we studied physics every year. One of our first physics experiments was to find the value of . We were given wooden cylinders, and wrapped a thread around the cylinder as a way of measuring the perimeter. And we directly measured the diameter. At first this seemed strange. I had done enough reading to know that the value of was usually found mathematically (with an infinite series), so the physics experiment seemed bogus. But then I realized the point being made. We did not need to depend on faith. We could find these things out by ourselves. And that’s what is distinctive about science.

A different kind of Christianity

I don’t often post on religion. But this is one of those times. I came across this video via a post at The Skeptical Zone.

The video is a bit long — 2 hours, though the last 30 minutes is commentary. It describes a church in Oklahoma, which is very different from typical evangelical churches. It sees Christianity as all about action — working to make the world a better place — instead of being all about belief.

This is much closer to what I understood to be Christianity from my own reading of the New Testament. And, in all honesty, if I had come across churches like this, I might never have deconverted from Christianity.

Conservative Christianity

I’m taking a break from my more usual topic. So this is something of a filler.

I was a Christian from around age 11 to around age 23. I’m inclined to say that I was a liberal Christian in a conservative church. I perhaps should add that this was in Australia.

Conservative Christianity never made sense to me. I was a liberal Christian, because that made sense. My pastor encouraged me to read the Bible, so I did. I read the OT and the NT in parallel. When I got to the Adam & Eve story, my reaction was “Surely I am not expected to believe that this is true history!” It seemed so obvious that it had the genre of a fable, that I didn’t even bother to ask my pastor about that. And, of course, I had a similar reaction to the story of Noah and the flood, the story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Jonah. I guess I was already well on my way toward becoming a liberal Christian.

The Gospels

In my reading of the NT, I particularly (but not exclusively) concentrated on the gospels. After all, the religion was supposed to be about Jesus and his teachings. And I thought those teachings were pretty good. I read where Jesus taught that we should love our neighbor (Luke 10:27). And this was followed by the parable of the good Samaritan, which I took to be a lesson that we should care about all humans, even those from different ethnic backgrounds. This idea was reaffirmed in Matt. 25 — the parable of the sheep and the goats.

I guess this is what people mean by “The Social Gospel”. But the conservative churches, particularly so in America, reject that social gospel.

To me, based on what I learned during my period as a Christian, the conservative version of Christianity seems distinctly unchristian to me.

The FBI and me

Well, okay, the title of this post is misleading and I’m having a little fun in using that title.

Yesterday, I saw a blog post by William Dembski, where he used the acronym “FBI” as shorthand for a Fundamentalist Belief Inventory.  So no, in this case “FBI” does not stand for “Federal Bureau of Investigation”.

The inventory consists of 40 pairs of statements.  In each case you are supposed to pick the one that fits best.  And it is a forced choice — you are not allowed to select “none of the above”.  I suggest you follow the link above to Dembski’s post and read the questions.  It will give you an idea as to what fundamentalists believe.

Testing myself

Directly testing myself would not be much fun.  I would probably score a zero on the fundamentalist scale.  So, instead, I tried to answer them as I probably would have answered them back at age 20 — around 3 years before I left Christianity.

National Day of Prayer

President Trump has declared that today (Sep 3, 2017) shall be a national day of prayer.

I pray that Donald J. Trump resign from office, or be removed from office by impeachment.

Review of “Why I left, Why I stayed”

It’s about a month since I listened to a podcast, featuring a discussion with Bart Campolo.  I found that interesting, so I bought the book that was co-authored by Bart Campolo and his father Tony Campolo.  This post is mainly a review of the book.  However, you might want to start by listening to that podcast.

Background

Tony Campolo is well known as part of Evangelical Christianity, specifically the Evangelical left.  Bart, his son, started off in Evangelical Christianity, but reached a point in his life where he could no longer believe.  How he reached that point is discussed in the podcast and in the book.  Although he rejected Christianity, Bart continued with a humanist mission.  Tony, Bart’s father, regretted Bart’s decision but accepted it nontheless.

The book is mostly a sequence of chapters, alternately written by Tony and by Bart, with a final chapter that was jointly written.

My review

I found the book a bit uneven.  But this is to be expected when it consists of an alternation of chapters with two different authors.

American Conservative Christianity has lost the moral argument

They voted, as a block, to elect a moral monster as president.

They own the actions of that president.

Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Matt 25:40).

 

I am not anti-theist

Recently the Patheos blog site renamed it’s “Atheist channel” to “Nonreligious channel”.  The resulted in some comments and blog posts about the change.  For me, it didn’t matter much.  Since I gave up on religion, I have always preferred to call myself “non-religious” rather than “atheist”.

Here, I mainly want to respond to:

• My humanism requires me to be a vocal anti-theist

which argues for anti-theism.

In that post, Dan Arel argues:

Religion is dangerous and hurts real people. I strongly believe that when the world is reasoned out of religious faith, the world will be a much better place.

Some people see atheism as dangerous and as hurting real people.  But that’s not my main concern here.  I just don’t see that it would make the world a better place if religion were to disappear.

We already have non-religious people who are in the anti-vax movement.  We already have non-religious people who are climate change deniers.

The things that Dan objects to in religion are human foibles.  Yes, religion manages to concentrate those into a movement.  But there are plenty of other ways that these human foibles can be concentrated into group-think.

So I just do not see that anti-theism provides some kind of solution for problems that arise out of being human.

For myself, I accept that people can have weird beliefs.  And maybe some folk think that I have weird beliefs.  But we should be able to get along in spite of individual wierdness.