Out of all the correspondence I get, occasionally there's a letter which repays, many times over, all the effort I've put into writing for my websites. This is one of them, which I'm sharing with the author's permission:

Hello Adam,

I wanted to drop you a note to let you know how much your writing has influenced me. I left the church I had been raised in about four years ago and spent about a year studying various religions before looking into atheism. It was very difficult for me to be asked to defend my atheism to friends and family (who had spent decades studying their own faith) when I was still trying to figure out exactly what it was myself.

I found your website about a year ago through a link to "How to Convert an Atheist." I read your essays and have begun working my way through the "Must Read" posts on your blog. Your writing has helped me so much. I can coherently explain and adequately defend many of the ideas that were so new to me so recently because of you. I wanted to thank you for posting such wonderful thoughts on such a wide variety of topics relevant to atheism.

Thank you so much,
Jessa Jackson

From a follow-up letter, Jessa adds:

I was raised Mormon. My family has been in the church for generations (seven on my mother's side), my father is a bishop, I spent most of my childhood in Utah, attended four years of early-morning seminary in high school and went to BYU. So, yeah, I was very Mormon.

As frustrating as it is to debate true believers, as much of an uphill struggle as it seems to be at times, our efforts do make a difference. There are people who can be reached, and who will be better off for it. Don't ever doubt that!

(Author's Note: The following review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

Summary: An outstanding analysis of the flaws of evangelical Christianity, written from an insider's perspective by a former believer. My only complaint is that I wish she'd provided more information about what the next step is!

Although there are lots of atheist books that present a compelling case for atheism or against religion, there are relatively few that I'd recommend giving to a staunch believer as a means of convincing them. It takes more than a strong command of the facts to achieve that difficult goal; it takes a special kind of deft touch, one that makes an airtight case with passion, but without rhetoric that will only cause them to dismiss the author as an angry atheist. Valerie Tarico's book Trusting Doubt, I'm pleased to say, is one of the few books I've found that meet that standard.

Tarico herself is an ex-evangelical, a graduate of the private Christian university Wheaton College. As she recounts in this interview on Debunking Christianity, she spent most of her life immersed in the culture of evangelical Christianity, fervently believing, following all the rules and rituals, preaching to nonbelievers. But she wrestled with persistent doubts throughout her teenage and college years, in addition to struggling with depression and an eating disorder that her faith couldn't heal, as she'd been taught it would be able to. It was around the time she got a graduate degree in counseling psychology that these doubts could no longer be quieted, and she finally walked away and found the peace and freedom of becoming an atheist. Trusting Doubt is her account of what drove her away from faith.

Throughout the book, Tarico shows an impressive command of her subject material, and covers so many areas it's almost impossible not to learn something. There's an account how the Bible came to be, both the Old and New Testaments: how stories like the flood or the exodus were drawn from Babylonian folk tales and Canaanite religious texts, and how rabbinical and church councils decided which books to put into the canon and which to leave out. She contrasts the critical-historical method of scholars with modern evangelical "Bibliolatry" (p.31), worshipping the Bible as a contextless monolith, rather than learning about the twists and turns of the human process by which it came into being.

Following this, Tarico presents a list of biblical stories that contradict science, history, or each other, as well as a list of biblical broken promises and false prophecies. She shows how the Bible encourages prejudice, promoting the racist "chosen people" mythology or commanding the unjust treatment of women. Interspersed with these, she gives some telling quotes from the Christian songs, preachers, and apologists she grew up learning from on how to deal with these difficulties, such as this advice from the apologist Gleason Archer: "Be fully persuaded that an adequate explanation exists, even if you have not yet found it" (p.44).

There are also philosophical sections, critically analyzing the problem of evil and the idea of redemption by blood sacrifice. She discusses whether it's fair to make salvation dependent on a person's time and place of birth, and how religion is unnecessary for morality and how humans have a basic set of moral principles built in. She discusses the bloodshed throughout history in God's name, and the political oppression that's still going on, with a telling observation about the evangelical persecution complex: "When we see ourselves as victims, we cannot see ourselves as victimizers" (p.190). But one of the standout chapters was a superb analysis of religion from the memetic perspective, discussing the characteristics that make a meme successful regardless of its truth value - and then showing that evangelical Christianity embodies all of them!

If I have one complaint about this book, it's that it ends too abruptly. Tarico presents such a sympathetic and articulate case against evangelicalism, I wish she'd spent more time talking about the alternatives, so that people who read her book and come away convinced will have some idea of what the next step is. She clearly holds to a humanist perspective now, and the book would have benefited greatly from a chapter or two summarizing the principles of this view and comparing it with the one she once held. But it's that insider perspective, the sense of having been there and done that, that makes this book so potent and so difficult to dismiss.

A helpful Daylight Atheism reader (thanks, Rowan!) pointed me to this thread on Christian Forums, about a believer who's losing his faith after reading the Bible. From past experience, these threads tend to have the same lifespan as posts on Chinese web forums criticizing the government (and for the same reason), so I advise checking it out while you can. I've also saved a snapshot in case the site's administrators flush it down the memory hole.

The user who started the thread claimed to be a lifelong Christian, but when he sat down and actually read the Bible for himself, he came across some passages that he'd never heard of and that shocked him badly:

like where god hardened the heart of the pharoah, there by obstructing his free will. so that god could show everyone how powerfull he was by killing the first born sons. now i dont understand why god didnt just lighten his heart so that he wouldnt have had to murder children. now i know they had them in slavery, but why would god mess with his free will then still punish him by murdering children , who had no part in the conflict, for a decision god made him make.

now the other issue in there that surpasses everything else is the one of slavery. there was one passage in exodus that completely disgusted me , on how to sell your own daughter as what is basicaly a sex slave... these slaves could be bought and sold as chattel... they could be beaten so badly, that so long as they didnt die within 2 days everything was fine... the other thing i have heard said is that this wasnt gods will but he had to put up with it as its how society was back then. but in many other instances god doesnt put up with things he doesnt like. not even remotely. why was slavery different since slavery is so obviously evil? i cant make myself see how it is right to own another person as property to do with as you will in any age. yes it might have been common back then but that didnt make it right did it?

As you'd expect on a Christian forum, many other commenters jumped in to respond with the usual tortured apologetics about how it was okay for God to harden Pharaoh's heart because that's what Pharaoh wanted (sidestepping the original poster's question about how it could be just to kill all the Egyptian children for a decision they had no part in), or how the laws about slavery were "an expression of thinking in a sinful world" (again, sidestepping the OP's question about why God would choose to tolerate and even encourage it when he clearly outlawed other common practices of the time).

A few apologist responses were especially notable - like this one, which castigates the OP for not shutting his mind off and believing without asking any annoying questions:

So you said that you trust your own intelligence (Tree of Knowledge) more than God (Word of God), as prophecied? So be it.

God hardened your heart sometimes which God allows you (your free will) to decide to walk in the darness, He won't choose to wake you up when you made up your mind to betray Him.

Then there were these chillingly evil remarks about how God is above our puny moral standards (the classic excuse of career criminals and supervillains everywhere).

Basically, first you can't subject God to rules of morality as God is the source of all morality and you are not the judge of God (sorry).

Maybe we can't understand how the killing of the first born sons was compassionate but having learned from the example of Christ we can trust that in actuality it was even if we don't see how this is so.

And finally, there's this brilliant piece of apologist reasoning:

I do believe God ordained slavery. After all, if slavery did not exist, how could we understand being slaves to sin, and now being slaves to righteousness?

See? All those sons and daughters who were sold into bondage, all those foreign prisoners who were enslaved for lives of hard labor, all those slaves who were beaten to death as the Bible allows - that was all so God could make a theological point to people who would live several thousand years later. Now don't you feel silly, atheists, for ever having doubted the inspiration of those words?

The non-replies of all these Christian commentors show that, even after all this time, the apologists really have no satisfying explanation for the cruelties of the Bible - that is, besides the obvious one that the book was the creation of cruel and fallible men without godly involvement. Impugning the sincerity of those who ask or insisting that God isn't bound by standards of morality is really all they have, regardless of how blunt or how flowery the language. Small wonder that so many believers who read the Bible for themselves are shocked into questioning their faith.

Until a few days ago, I'd never heard of Drew Marshall, the host of an Ontario-based radio program that's advertised as Canada's most popular Christian talk show. But when I saw an interesting post about him on Facebook (more on that in a minute), I went and looked him up. From reading the bio on his site, I was favorably impressed by his refusal to toe the party line:

I want to apologize to everyone here for the dumb-ass things which I've done personally that have just been a complete misrepresentation of how Jesus people are supposed to live AND for the dumb-ass things that Christians have done for centuries, in the name of Religion.

The initial things that naturally come to mind, which I should probably apologize for, are the Crusades or the Salem Witch Hunt or for the countless missionaries and explorers and white folks who raped, robbed, and killed in the name of Christianity.

I am really sorry for all that stuff. I don't think that's exactly what Jesus had in mind when He said, "Go into all the world and tell everyone the Good News."

Of course I'd also like to apologize for some of the so-called Christian leaders of today; like Benny Hinn & Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell & Pat Robertson & the pièce de résistance... George W. Bush.

I'm so sorry for the dumb-ass things that have come out of their mouths... Things like; Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment on New Orleans or that HIV/AIDS is God's punishment on the gay community... Or that God is a Republican and he fully supports "their" decision to start a war based on weapons of mass distraction. Please understand people, that the Christian right... is neither!

That's the kind of thing I wish we heard more of. But what pleased me even more was that the post I saw on Facebook was this one from the self-satisfied ignoramus Ray Comfort, bitterly complaining about - wait for it - yet another popular Christian becoming an atheist!

Ater seven seasons as host of Canada's "most listened to spiritual talk show," Drew Marshall announced to his listeners that he is no longer convinced there's a God... The doubting talk show host said that he became a follower of Christ in 1981. But it wasn't until recently that he verbalized that he wasn't convinced that God existed, saying "I feel pretty close to walking away from my faith."

Intrigued, I searched further and found Marshall's own account of his growing doubts. Although he says he'll probably never have the courage to use the "A" word to describe himself, it seems clear that he's drifting in that direction:

All I can say is at this point is that I still consider myself a "Christian" but before I reinvest another 30 years in Jesus I'd just like to know that God is real. I hope there is a God. I'm looking for him. (Wait, should I use a capitol "h" or not?) However, my fear is that if things stay the same as the last 30 years of my spiritual journey, I'll probably become a reluctant agnostic who still has great respect for the teachings of Christ.

...I'd like a nail hole experience. One of the guys who actually got to hang out with Jesus also had a problem with doubt. (For some of us, it might be less about our circumstances and more about our nature or personality – but if anyone knows the best way to work with our individual idiosyncrasies, you'd think it would be God.) So this guy Thomas said he wouldn't believe Jesus had risen from the grave and come back to life (therefore being God) until he could put his finger in the nail hole of his crucified hand. THAT'S WHAT I WANT! Passive Revelation/Rumors Of Glory/Pascal's Wager/Tribal Conditioning has sustained me for years but today my faith is weak. I'm at the point where my soul is crying out for a "super" natural encounter.

For obvious reasons, I think Marshall is going to be disappointed. But it's interesting to see him openly admit that "rumors" and "tribal conditioning" have sustained his faith for years - something we atheists always say, but that most believers staunchly deny. And it's even more interesting that his saying this has struck a chord among his listeners, some of whom are in the same place:

After I let the cat of the bag I asked the listeners if they thought I should just go away and process my crisis of faith privately or is this something that could be done on the show, publicly. I was inundated with listeners who were in a similar spiritual condition, asking me to continue.

This is a commentary on religion's power to stifle honest questioning - that so many of Marshall's listeners are voicing doubts that they never felt they had permission to express, until someone they looked up to did the same. And the reason so many Christians feel constrained from expressing their doubts can be seen in Comfort's reaction. As is usual with small, weak-minded men, Comfort is unable to accept that Marshall's doubts might be genuine, and has to attribute secret, dishonest motives to anyone publicly questioning Christianity and accuse them of never having been a Christian at all:

Spurious converts don't experience the "power" of the gospel (see Romans 1:16). The message they heard didn't come to them "in power, in the Holy Spirit and in much assurance." This is because the cross is the center of the gospel. It is the supreme expression of God's love to the sinner and there is a good reason it was obscured to them... If we haven't personally seen the cross, then we haven't personally experienced the love of God. This is the tragic case of Drew Marshall...

Comfort's polemical mindset treats doubt as an enemy to be suppressed at all costs, including by attacking the character of anyone who expresses it. This defensive, belligerent reaction is typical of apologists who see faith as nothing more substantive than a marker of tribal membership, a weapon to be wielded against any outsider. It's Marshall who took his faith more seriously than Comfort ever has or will, and that's precisely why he's losing it. As with the other Christian artists and entertainers who've deconverted, an honest examination of religious truth claims can only have one result.

The Language of God, Chapter 4

By B.J. Marshall

Collins spends only three pages discussing the history of Darwin's publishing his theory of evolution through natural selection, but there are a few points that I want to discuss concerning how Collins (and apologists in general) lift quotes, provide misinformation, and arrange material to help guide the reader to draw certain conclusions. Now, I'm not saying that atheological counter-apologists - if I may use such a phrase - are immune from committing these same errors. I am saying that, as a critical reader, it is important to notice these things. Or, at least, it's important to ask a few questions.

One such question is, "Did [whomever the author is attributing a quote] actually say that?" One example is when Collin cites Darwin's last sentence in the last chapter (Recapitulations and Conclusions) of "On the Origin of Species":

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved" (p.98-9).

So, I found a copy of the first edition of On the Origin of Species at both TalkOrigins and Project Gutenberg. Neither copy of the first edition contains the words "by the Creator." I was sure to check multiple sources in order to corroborate evidence - I consider Project Gutenberg a neutral source, whereas I'm sure Creationists could argue that Talk Origins is biased. Richard Dawkins mentions the omission of "by the Creator" in this video. There are web sites that mention Darwin being pressured to include "by the Creator," but I cannot substantiate or corroborate those claims yet. I did get a distinct sense that Darwin was writing in a similar vein as Laplace, when the latter told Napoleon he "had no need of that hypothesis [of God]".

While I fully grant that Darwin's subsequent editions of "Origins" included "by the Creator," I found it interesting that Collins simply took this for granted. Honestly, though, I imagine most people take the "by the Creator" part for granted. The concept of natural selection is difficult enough for people to wrestle with; the lay reader probably doesn't know or care about differences among editions. But that raises another point: The reader - at least Collins' intended audience - probably just takes his word for it, thus falling prey to an argument from authority.

Another example of lifting quotes is the dreaded ellipsis (...). Collins uses is when describing how Darwin did not see the conflict between evolution by natural selection and religious belief.

"I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone.... A celebrated author and divine has written to me that 'he has gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws' (p.98)."

The part Collins omits involves a comparison to how the great discovery of the law of gravity was attacked by Leibniz. OK, not a terrible thing to exclude, since a Leibniz attack doesn't affect the context or meaning of the passage being quoted. But it's still good to check. Of course, the "celebrated author" still misses the point. Darwin's point was to show that populations of species change over time. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection doesn't have anything to say about abiogenesis, which is what the "celebrated author" seems to purport. To me, it seems that Collins includes this quote about the "celebrated author" as a red herring.

Finally, Collins talks about how Darwin's personal beliefs "remain ambiguous" and seemed to vary throughout the last years of his life (p.99). First, I'm not sure whether Collins wants to paint Darwin in a bad light here, as if changing one's beliefs is a bad thing. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but a less charitable person might not. Collins drops two quotes here with no context:

"At one time, [Darwin] said, 'Agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.' At another time [Darwin] wrote that he was greatly challenged by 'the extreme difficulty, or rather the impossibility, of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity for looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflect I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man, and I deserve to be called a Theist' (p.99)."

I want to first address the typical misunderstanding between (a)gnosticism and (a)theism. Many videos are around that cover this topic, but here it is in a nutshell. (A)gnosticism is a position about knowledge; (a)theism is a position about belief. Here's how one can break it down:

• Agnostic atheist: I do not believe any gods exist, but I don't know that they don't. Examples include me and Matt Dillihunty, who leave ourselves open to the possibility that a god might exist.
• Gnostic atheist: I know no gods exist.
• Agnostic theist: I believe a god(s) exist, but I don't know that it/he/she/they don't.
• Gnostic theist: I know a god(s) exist. Examples include William Lane Craig, who asserts that the self-authentication of the Holy Spirit is enough to convince him of God's existence even in the face of any possible evidence you could throw at him. (Also mentioned early in his book Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics.)

Now that's out of the way, I want to discuss these two quotes that Collins tosses about. Even if we concede that agnosticism and atheism are not compatible (which I wouldn't normally do), there's no way of telling which quote came first. Was Darwin agnostic/atheistic before or after he was a Theist? I found the Theist quote on page 93 of Darwin's autobiography, but the surrounding context for this quote doesn't look so good for Collins. Immediately following that sentence, Darwin continues:

"This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker. But then arises the doubt - can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animal, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions? May not these be the result of the connection between cause and effect which strikes us as a necessary one, but probably depends merely on inherited experience? Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake."

I encourage you to check out that link because the quote I just provided comes with footnotes. It includes an exhortation by Emma Darwin to her son, Francis, to not include a portion of the above so as to avoid pain to Darwin's religious friends. So, Darwin questioned childhood indoctrination, eh? Why didn't Collins say anything about that?? Interesting.

While this section didn't have much to do with the overall theme of Collins' book - the successful harmonization of science and belief - I'd like to conclude this post with some observations that might help the critical reader:

1. Question sources: I find it very helpful to take an obscure portion of a quote and Google it. I get better results then when I Google themes like "Darwin Agnostic" and "Darwin Theist."
2. Quote mining: I find it helpful not just to find out the correct attribution of a quote, but to also read the surrounding paragraphs or even pages.
3. Corroborate: Similar to what I did to confirm that the first edition of "Origin" did not include "by the Creator," it isn't enough to just find a single source that agrees with your hypothesis. In addition, the source that does agree with your hypothesis might itself be of dubious merit. (For example, I wouldn't give much credence to the evidence for UFOs by looking at a web site entitled "Uncle Bob's Story of His First Sober UFO Encounter.")

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

I've said in the past that the internet is an incredibly beneficial invention for atheists, since it provides a truly global platform for speech. Sometimes, you get a potent reminder of just how true that is. A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a young man in Nigeria - about the same age as me, in fact - who recently became an atheist. I invited him to tell us his story, and he agreed. The following e-mail is reprinted with his permission, and I think you'll agree that it's a powerful and deeply moving testimony.

I was barely 13 when my father fell sick. He was an ex-soldier, retired after sustaining serious bullet wounds during the Nigerian civil war (1967-70). I grew up to witness how he used to complain about body aches and so on which they said was a consequence of some 7 bullets still in his body (it was on the x-ray) resulting from the haphazard treatment one gets during a war. When he eventually fell sick in 1996, it was like we were waiting for that moment: He never fell sick - as much as I can remember. This happened 1 year after he got separated from my mum for no apparent reason. Although he later claimed he was suspecting her for sleeping around with church members, this I knew was not true. I know my mum, she was a good christian, a righteous one - in my own sense of the word. Unlike my father, who as far as I can remember, never went to church. He was popularly known as a church critic (though he believed in god), my mum was a sunday school teacher ever since before I was born and she still is.

I was the only one at home when my father's health suddenly failed: my siblings were either in boarding schools or something. We were surviving through his little pension and my mother's peasant farm. We were ignorant about the hospital. But even if we weren't, it wouldn't make much sense because here, instead of a doctor confessing he lacks the professional skill applicable for an illness, or no appropriate equipment, he would simply advise you to go home and consult a herbalist, unprofessionally claiming that "this sickness is not a hospital type."

As my father's health condition worsened, I cooked his meals from the food stuff my mum will never hesitate to provide, bathed him, changed his clothes - you may not be able to imagine how it was for a 13-year-old child caring for an ailing 70+ year-old father. I'm not trying to be emotional or something, you know, I don't even like being sentimental. Neither am I trying to convince any one on why I rejected the god belief: no, I just don't want to pretend I do. That's it. After weeks with little or no medication, my father's brothers decided to take him to a witch doctor, carrying along my cousin Esau (6-7 yrs old). Two days later they returned with the news that the boy said he saw my mum and my 3 sisters in the calabash (you might be familiar with this type of cases). Indicating they are witches, geting at my dad through me as their agent.

This story was spreading around the village (Raba) without us having an idea about it for some time until - I can't remember how it came to us. Everywhere I go people gave me a look that told me my presence was not welcomed. I would lock myself in my room weeping. Wondering how it came to this, I was confused. One night (past 1:00am) I sneaked out of the village into the forest. Looking for an explanation, I wanted to talk to god. I thought: God doesn't want to appear in public but to a young innocent boy? I thought he would; I read about such things in the bible! At about 1 and 1/2 km from the village, I stood in the footpath and called out to 'god!', crying, I was so loud that my entire body vibrated. But all I had in response was the silent echo of my shrill voice and the distant hum of forest creatures. I wanted god to let the people know I didn't do it. But he disappointed me! I slept under a tree waiting for him all night. In the early hours of the morning, I walked back home so dejected.

In god's absence, my mum was my comforter, with her bible quotations and godly promises which I came to despise. I was never satisfied but pretended I was just to keep her from worrying about me. The day my father died I was the only one with him, my mum and sisters never visited for fear of further accusations (we used to be a happy home). Past 4:00am, I was in his room (his brothers abandoned him when they realised they couldn't help him with their witch medications). I never knew how it was for one to be dead but I knew something was wrong. I ran to my mum's house and described the situation. She started to cry but refused to come with me saying I better let his brothers know about it quickly. Later, he was confirmed dead. He was buried and forgotten.

People saw me as a witch and it bothered me. I became involved in church activities; bible recitation competitions, choir, boys brigade, youth evangelism and and so on: I tried to please god according to how it is said in the scripture. Leaving my mum behind, I moved to the city (Minna), got a job and made new friends. My new pastor seemed to like me; I was upfront, always willing to volunteer. I'm sensitive to lies and I always oppose deceit. I became a sunday school teacher yet, I couldn't reach god, nothing to prove 'he' really cares or tell the people I was falsely accused ('cos that's primarily what I labored for; to clear myself of all charges). Instead, those who seemed to sympathize with me concluded I was seeking for forgiveness. I figured out they pretend to love me but actually don't trust me (once a witch always a witch). And actually as my late father use to say: "only the guilty goes to church" (as in "only the sick goes to the hospital"). I had a series of unbelievable experiences in my quest for "supernatural" evidence. Not to mention how I slapped the chief of my village (the case is presently in court). As my faith dwindled further, I left the church and joined the Jehovah's Witnesses. For 3 years, though they seemed better than my previous churches in terms of response to questions, I was never satisfied. So I quit.

Then, on my own, I felt free to explore my psyche and solve my problems my way. I have 6 million reasons for why not to believe in god anymore but I have virtually none to do the opposite, however, I wanted to know how other people beyond my community view this things so turned to the internet. About 4 months ago I hit Ebon Musings. I read "A Ghost in the Machine" and I couldn't believe what I saw. It felt like the end of the road. You know why? My father was acting exactly the way it was described in the "alien hand syndrome"! At times he would ask me to bring him a cutlass to "chop off this stubborn hand." Each time he wants to eat I had to hold the left hand to stop it from spilling over his meal - oh my! I simply couldn't contain myself, I was so excited: to realize I belong to a community, a people who knows I didn't do it. At the time I was made to understand life had shut down its ears from me, suddenly I bumped into aliens like me - no, I no longer feel like an 'alien', I think am the rightful owner of this beautiful green planet. I feel pure and free untrammelled by religious nonsense. I'm human! I'd stopped worrying, I no longer had to shut myself crying my pains out. Now I close my eyes in tears with a smile on my face; someone, finally, can hear me - at last I found "god" - someone who can materially answer my basic questions that gave me the real meaning of life. Thank you very much.

Guest post by Scotlyn

[Editor's Note: Please welcome our newest guest author! Scotlyn is a long-time DA commenter who's been writing some really superb and well-thought comments lately. I thought it'd be interesting to extend the opportunity to write a guest post and see what else she has to say, and I wasn't disappointed.]

I am delighted to have been invited by Ebon to submit some guest posts on his blog, which to me has become an enjoyable and friendly sort of place to virtually hang out in from time to time. I sincerely hope I do not disappoint. This first post is by way of introducing myself and my background (at Ebon's request), and then, in future posts I hope to get into the really interesting stuff. This post, I hope, will explain how I developed an interest in the nature of "groupthink" and various mechanisms by means of which groupthink can become group tyranny. This can be a powerful feature both within religious groups and within various political and social movements I have been involved with. An important aspect of this phenomenon is the recurrence of certain memes I am naming "fallacies." I have alluded to some of these in recent comments - e.g., what I call the fallacy of the "Righteous Victim," or the fallacy of the "Separatist Paradise." I want to play with the word "fallacy" in this way, because I think that the naming of logical fallacies, such as "Argument from Authority," or "Argument from Incredulity" have been very helpful in the development of sceptical discourse, and have provided us with powerful tools with which to question and improve our own thinking habits. For those of us who share the goal of a more equitable and just society, I hope the identification of such "fallacies" in our framing of the issues will improve the quality of our social, moral and political discourse, so we are not sent down various dead ends instead of travelling the road that will get us where we wish to go.

To introduce myself, having turned 50 years old this year, I find myself in a reflective mood (although, since I boast of a grandmother who reached the age of 101, I am hopeful that this is a mere halfway station...). I was raised in a loving and supportive home, by my evangelical Christian parents, who took the family to live in Costa Rica when I was 4 years. As they saw it, they were called to serve the Lord as missionaries. I was raised there, a bilingual "gringa," and had little reason to question the faith I was raised in throughout my teenage years - years when, for those who remember the "old days" before email and Facebook - I had to resort to spending hours penning handwritten letters to friends and pen pals exhorting them to greater faith. (Does anyone hand-write letters any more?)

My mother does tell the story of my being "born again" at age three (I have no memory of this). She tells how we had a conversation in which she had explained that I needed to ask Jesus to come into my heart. I was then, as I have remained to this day, fascinated by human anatomy, and I apparently asked the logical question: "Will I have to cut off my head so Jesus can get into my heart?" My mother, of course, reassured me that this would not be necessary, and trusting her word (as one does when one is three), I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart. Of course, I do not remember this episode, although it has often been mentioned as part of our family's personal historical canon. I only know that I was a Christian from as far back as I can remember, and that the gospel readings, the prayers, the songs, the prayer meetings, the youth groups, the constant attention to my personal "walk with Jesus," all seemed as natural to me as breathing. It was only later that I realised that my mother (albeit unwittingly) had lied to me. In fact, keeping Jesus in my heart would require me to, at least metaphorically, "cut off my head."

However, it was initially moral dissonance rather than cognitive dissonance that led me to question my faith. My parents, thankfully, are not young earth creationists, and therefore, I found nothing in any of the standard classes I took at school that caused any cognitive dissonance for me. I was particularly good at the sciences and maths, and I took AP Biology in my last year at high school, without ever seeing any conflict between what I was learning and my faith. In fact, the first time I ever encountered a young earth creationist I just thought he was off his head! I had no idea then that young earth creationism could, or would, sweep through the evangelical community to the extent that it has done - even through my own family, "the next generation". In fact, during my high school years, the only dissonance I remember experiencing because of my Christian faith was when I became friends at 16, with a girl who, I was aware, was "living in sin" with her boyfriend. She was lovely, and I did become uncomfortable at the idea that her "sin" was particularly egregious and hell-worthy. Even though I had been taught that "all are sinful, and fall short of the Glory of God," I had still absorbed the sub-text that sexual sins were somehow worse than other sins.

But my version of Christianity, the version I remember best from the years I practiced it as a teenager, was all about "being a light on the hill," about bearing "fruit" that would demonstrate God's love for the world, etc. Living in Latin America, this became bound up with current issues of local concern. During the years 1973 to 1978, these were issues like the US-supported coup against Allende, and the gathering popular uprising against Somoza in Nicaragua. Liberation theology was an important emerging thread in Latin American Catholicism, and since I was a member of an ecumenical youth group at that time, I met people strongly influenced by its reading of the bible, focusing on those verses which demonstrate God's love of and identification with the poor. I was aware, from some of our "furlough" tours of American churches, that many such churchgoers did not see US policies in Latin America as being problematic, but I put that down to poor education and bad quality reporting of the news. But my Latin American Christian friends and I would burn the midnight oil discussing these burning political issues, and trying to figure out what God would wish us to do about it.

In the fall of 1978, I became a freshman at Vassar College. And, like most college students, I was as much concerned to figure out which groups I should join as I was with which classes to enroll in. The groups I was attracted to in my first year were the Christian Fellowship, the college's chapter of Oxfam, and the Divest from South Africa group. And this was where the dissonance began to set in. In the Oxfam group we worked to educate other students about the politics of world hunger and raised funds for Oxfam's work. In the South Africa group, we campaigned to raise awareness among the student body of the nature of apartheid, and we canvassed the college trustees to divest any college endowment funds from companies which supported the South African apartheid government. And both these groups were filled (from my then point of view), with godless and happily "sinning" (drinking, smoking, being openly sexual) people who were yet highly morally concerned with the issues of social justice that I was.

The Christian Fellowship group, on the other hand, consisted of people who were not only ignorant of the plight of the poor, but utterly uninterested. They thought taking the gospel to the poor and needy was a sufficient moral duty of a Christian, that people's spiritual needs were far greater than their physical or material needs. (My own parents had never espoused such a view - they both were and are involved in activities that have merit in their own right, not only from the proselytising point of view). They rejected the idea that we had any responsibility to "this world" of Satan's, and they were also concerned about keeping their virginity to a degree which came to me to seem obsessive, in view of what I considered to be more pressing moral issues of social justice. It did not take the full of my first year to decide that the "godless" people I had met in the more activist groups had much higher moral aspirations than the Christians I was supposed to share a worldview with.

I began to read the Bible in a new way, fervently seeking to retain the roots of a moral worldview that would work for me, and became increasingly convinced that the Bible was anything but a moral book. Stories like the one where Abraham says, "Ok whatever you say," when God tells him to kill his son, like the one where God keeps hardening Pharoah's heart, therefore bringing about the conditions which justify the killings of the Egyptian first born, the one where God promises a new land for his people, but it so happens there are people already living there who need to be exterminated, the idea of eternal punishment for temporal sin, etc. began to convince me that wherever my own moral values came from, it couldn't be the Bible.

For me, it followed that I no longer had any particular reason to keep myself "pure" in the Christian sense, so at age 19-20 I began some of the tentative experimentations that many of my fellow students had begun years ago...and found that life was good... I also joined the women's group - which kept a "women's space" in one of the rooms in the student building, and I became acquainted with the campaign for lesbian and gay rights, which by now seemed completely reasonable to me. At this point, I began to find my trips home full of argument and incident - naturally enough, I was finding my own wings, discovering the shape of the space that would become natural for me to inhabit for my adult life, and all of this was a great shock and disappointment to my parents. To be fair, they have argued with me and prayed for me, but at no point (even when I became more than theoretically involved with another woman) did they ever show the least inclination to disown me - and nor could I ever consider disowning them. I suspect that in their hearts they fear and believe that the sequence of events I outline above occurred in the opposite direction - that I discovered how much fun it was to "sin," and that I then concocted an intellectual opposition to God and my childhood faith in order to justify myself.

To be truthful, I actually understand that their faith makes it almost impossible for them to take a completely neutral interest in what brought me to where I am, and how I could leave my faith, in the end, so easily behind me. They don't actually know how to just ask how things are with me, without another shadow question hovering in the air - "how is your spiritual life, and when are you going to return to your walk with Jesus." Ordinary, nonreligious people, when they ask how things are with you, are reasonably interested in what answer you might give, without prior expectations. They don't have a pre-set right answer (which to the end of my days I will never be able to give). It's sad. And that may be why, when I left college, I found it so easy to travel and end up living in a country at some distance from them. (After a few "gypsy" years, I met and settled down with my partner, in rural Ireland, where we are raising our two sons.) Nevertheless, I always enjoy my visits home, and I still think I am lucky to have come from a fundamentally loving and supportive family, albeit somewhat skewed by the suppression of true curiosity necessitated by faith. (I don't argue as much these days, either - I no longer need to convince myself of anything much).

Nevertheless, despite leaving my faith behind, I remain in many ways the product of my upbringing. For one, I have never lost the urge to give sermons (a long line of clergymen and missionaries testifies to the fact that I did not lick that up off the floor). Also, I think my "moral radar" owes a great deal to the teaching of my parents, who did put forward a broad view of morality, not the narrow focus on sexuality that many of their co-faithful would espouse. Finally, I think I owe a sense of being a "perennial outsider" to our somewhat wandering lifestyle when I was young. I changed schools at least 8 times prior to going to college. I kept having to leave old friends and make new ones (which was why I had so many pen pals). In one way, this has led to an ability to see everyone else's point of view almost too clearly - this is not always a good thing! At the same time, I have found that whenever I find a group of congenial people, there will always be some way in which I will differ, some bit of the groupthink with which I cannot acquiesce. And this fascinates me, and is the territory I hope to start exploring in upcoming posts.

Thanks.

I wrote in my previous post about the creeping spread of fundamentalism in Israel and how ultra-Orthodox Jews are constantly pressing for special privileges and greater political power, even though they're not willing to contribute to the upkeep of the state. The ultra-Orthodox are exempt from Israel's mandatory military service, and as many as two-thirds of ultra-Orthodox men don't work at all; they do nothing with their lives but study scripture, and get welfare payments from the state to do it.

In ultra-Orthodox communities, every waking moment of daily life is governed by a maze of rules invented by rabbis over the millennia. To better isolate themselves from the modern world, the haredim are forbidden to watch TV or movies, read secular newspapers, or use the Internet. As always, women suffer the most - they have no real autonomy or decision-making power, and are kept silent, segregated and invisible. (In one infamous incident, several ultra-Orthodox newspapers digitally altered photographs of the Israeli cabinet to censor out the female members.)

The accumulated weight of all that prohibition, all those centuries of dead words constricting everyday life, must be stifling. And yet, even among the suffocatingly insular world of the haredim, religious dogma and brainwashing doesn't rule the day. Even among the ultra-Orthodox, there are people who see the light of reason - such as in this amazing story:

Yaanki and his wife Miri started questioning the path of the Jewish religion some three years ago, when Miri pointed out to her husband that he would believe in Christianity if he had been born Christian, and would believe in Islam if he had been born Muslim. "If so," she asked him, "Why do we believe in Judaism without examining it?"

For months, Yaanki tried to answer this question. He looked through books, and corresponded with rabbis who specialize in bringing people back to the faith. When they stopped answering him, he connected his home computer to the Internet in hopes of finding answers. "Suddenly I discovered many contradictions. If up until then I had blind faith in the Bible and the Talmud, I suddenly realized it was a lie. I was completely shocked. I felt like a fool for wasting 25 years of my life, and until then I was considered a wise yeshiva student. I wasn't one of those guys whose relationship with religion was by chance."

Although in-the-closet atheists are a familiar phenomenon, the closet for these people is especially deep and secretive. Their religion literally is their life, far more so than is true even in America's Bible Belt. The feeling of loss and dislocation must be enormous, yet some of them seem to have adapted surprisingly well.

"It was a crazy shock. After years of preparing to leave the faith, it happened abruptly. One minute I was religious, and the next, I wasn't. Suddenly I came to the conclusion that there is no proof that religion is truth, while there is endless evidence that it is not truth. I remember the exact moment it hit me. It was when I found a pile of archaeological evidence on the Internet claiming that the description of the Exodus from Egypt was a lie. Then I realized that they were simply selling me lies...

Today I am sure that there is no God. And I don't observe the mitzvoth anymore. I haven't laid tefillin in a year now. I drink and turn on the light on Yom Kippur and use the internet on Shabbat. All in secret, of course."

The article interviews several deconverts, and at least one of these stories ended in tragedy: one of the interviewees committed suicide because he felt so trapped and helpless, unable to tell anyone in his life the truth about himself. Considering that secular and humanistic versions of Judaism have a far more established place than in most other religions, I'm surprised by this. Then again, we shouldn't underestimate the power of peer pressure to make a dissenter feel lonely and isolated, especially when they have to go to such lengths to hide their true selves from others:

At first, they would light candles to warm food on Shabbat, then they turned on lights. Later, they started to watch movies on the computer after the children went to sleep. "We didn't have a television at home, so we watched movies on the computer with headphones, in case, heaven forbid, one of the neighbors would hear. We closed the windows, shut the blinds, and locked the children in their room so they wouldn't wake up and find out," Yaanki says.

What these people need more than anything is a safe place to land, a secular community where they can be their true selves without fear of reprisal. They need, too, to be made aware that they have kindred spirits out in the world, that there's a life outside ultra-Orthodox Judaism. If the worldwide atheist community continues to grow, we may soon be able to offer that to them.

The Language of God, Chapter 2

By B.J. Marshall

Collins continues on his theme of the universal search for the divine with an argument from emotions. He cites his beloved C.S. Lewis, who describes this in his book Surprised by Joy. Lewis relates how this search, this intense longing, is triggered by moments of joy, which he describes as "an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction" (p.35). After reading this line several times, I still have no idea what this is supposed to mean. I desire something because I want to see a certain state of affairs come to fruition; to be continually thwarted, to have that desire permanently unsatisfied - indeed, unsatisfiable - would seem to me to be amazingly depressing. As a simple example, I desire to donate to secular charities because I want to ease the suffering of others. If I had this desire, but no one was willing to help me and I was not able to achieve this goal myself, I would feel very sad to know that there was nothing I - or anyone - could do to ease the suffering of others. I certainly wouldn't think "Gee, this unsatisfied desire is the best thing ever - way better than all other desires I've ever satisfied!!"

Anyway, back to this longing business that Collins sees as so important to transcending the natural realm. He relates a few examples, ranging from gazing through a telescope to hearing emotionally powerful descants in Christmas songs. But his understanding of emotion doesn't run too deeply: "as an atheist graduate student, I surprised myself by experiencing this same sense of awe and longing..." (p.36). Really? Surprised? Reading Collins' surprise at feeling the very natural senses of awe and longing, it made me wonder what other emotions surprised Collins during his stint as a atheist whose views were so "robust" that they completely shattered at the simple question of an elderly woman. I can picture Collins thinking to himself, "Wow. I really love my girlfriend, but how can that be since I am an atheist?" or "Huh - I find this comedian very funny, but I didn't think atheists could feel this sort of mirth!" Oh, but Collins pieces it all together at the end. You see, when he experienced the emotions prompted by the Berlin Philharmonic playing Beethoven's Eroica following the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Olympics, "for a few moments, I was lifted out of my materialist worldview into an indescribable spiritual dimension" (p.36). See, atheists? The reason you get surprised at your emotions is because they transcend you into another realm.

Sadly, this reminded me of an e-mail conversation I had with my Catholic priest. I came out to my family and closest friends as an atheist last year, and I stopped attending church. I e-mailed my priest asking him what he thought the best argument for God was. If you had ever heard his sermons, you would know him to be very intellectual, well-read, and eloquent. I was expecting some reply from him along the lines of what Plantinga might say about warranted belief or W.L.Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument. Instead, here is the response I got:

"I don't think arguments really do it for me. Our training was in Neo-Scholasticism and the Aristotelian arguments. Far be it for me to second guess St. Thomas Aquinas, but for me the flashpoint is pure and simple---LOVE. If there is love there is God. And I've experienced love."

I have a difficult time expressing how incredibly disappointed I was in that response. It's only marginally better than a wise friend who told me that he had doubts about God but came to faith through Pascal's Wager.

So Collins wonders what we are to make of these experiences. He posits that, if it's anything like the Moral Law, maybe these emotions are signposts pointing to something larger than us. He asserts that the atheist view is that we are not to trust these longings as indications of the supernatural, and that ascribing those to God is really just "wishful thinking, inventing an answer because we want it to be true" (p.37). I agree that emotions do not point to the supernatural, but I would not say it's just wishful thinking. In fact, I'd say it's a lack of thinking. Collins, from whom I get the impression he simply thinks humans are uncapable of wonderful emotions without God to anchor them, is content to just punt to God; otherwise, why would he have been surprised at his emotions? But, Collins tries to back up his point by citing Freud, in whose writings this "wishful thinking" view reached its widest audience.

Freud's The Future of an Illusion, published in 1927, interpreted all religious beliefs as illusions or wishful thinking based on childhood dependency. 1927 is a long time ago - Collins couldn't find anything more current than this? Now, clearly, this does not apply to all religions but only the major monotheistic religions. Freud's Totem and Taboo, which Collins quotes, mentions how our view of God and our relationship with God stem from our biological fathers. Funny, then, how I completely believe my biological father exists and that any semblance of a spiritual father does not.

Now, Collins states that he does not agree with the wish-fulfillment idea, but his reasons are arguably equally absurd. Going back to C.S. Lewis, Collins explains that, if wish-fulfillment were true, we would get a very different kind of God than the one we find in the Bible. Instead of "benevolent coddling and indulgence" (yeah, because my father was all the time coddling and spoiling me, wasn't yours?), we find a God who requires us to hold to the Moral Law, throwing in our faces the possibility of being eternally separated from the Law's Author. I agree that we wouldn't find a coddling and indulgent god in the Bible. Rather, we'd find one that condones slavery, genocide, rape, murder, and human sacrifice (unless you're Abraham, in which case God says "PSYCH!!" at the last minute). I also see a god who requires us to uphold the Amoral Law - if anything arbitrarily goes because God says so, that seems amoral to me.

Collins then does something I thought was interesting: attempt to use logic. "If one allows the possibility that God is something humans might wish for, does that rule out the possibility that God is real? Absolutely not. The fact that I have wished for a loving wife does not now make her imaginary. The fact that the farmer wished for rain does not make him question the reality of the subsequent downpour" (p.38). He tries to extend the argument: Why would a desire exist if there were no means by which one could obtain that desire? He gives some examples. A baby feels hunger; well, there is food. A duck wants to swim; well, there is water. Sure, wanting a wife does not make the wife you have imaginary, but it says nothing about whether you'd ever get a wife in the first place. Would my casting bones or stirring tea leaves make me question the reality of a subsequent downpour? No - it is possible to arrive at a truthful conclusion by completely wrong means. As far as desires existing without means of obtaining them: Who, when they were a kid and saw The Never-Ending Story, did not want their own Luck Dragon? I read the DragonLance Chronicles when I was in junior high school, and I distinctly remember wanting to be a wizard. My commute to and from work kind of sucks: I strongly desire the ability to teleport.

Collins wonders why we seem to have a "God-shaped vacuum" in our hearts and minds unless it is meant to be filled. First, I flatly deny that any such void exists. Second, granting for a moment that such a void exists, it seems pretty obvious that any size hole can be filled in with an amorphous concept. Given all the different attributes assigned to God from all different religions, I'm sure anyone who wanted to could find a God to fit any deficit they thought they had.

Other posts in this series:

• Rebutting The Language of God

I know that I haven't updated Ebon Musings very often these past few months, but now that all my wedding-related activities are over and done with, I hope to change that. I have several topics in mind that I intend to write new essays about, probably later this year. In the meantime, as a promissory note, I'm proud to announce that we have three new deconversion stories - all of them excellent. Two came to me courtesy of commenters on Daylight Atheism, while the third was completely unsolicited (but no less welcome for that).

And without further ado, here they are:

• Five Year Mistake, by Anonymous

• The Prodigal Daughter, by Adele

• Finding Freedom in Calculus, by Melissa

Thanks to all three of these brave atheists for writing about their experiences!

As always, new deconversion stories are welcome. If you have one you'd like me to publish, please send it to me (either in e-mail, or even in a comment here) and I'll be glad to consider it.

This is an open thread. What's on your mind?