Theology

Rejecting Jesus

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[This post is in response to a comment by a pastor on my previous post; here’s the link to the comment].

In previous blog posts, I’ve been clear about having a knowledge of Jesus, the Bible, and at least one version of Christianity, Seventh-day Adventism. However, as Christians are sometimes urged to do, I invested great emotion and time seeking more than just knowledge about Jesus, but also a relationship with him, as if he was real. As if he heard my prayers, even all my thoughts. As if he had the power to make that kind of a God–believer communication more than one-sided.

And I fully expected him to do just that. To make himself real to me, in obvious and faith-building ways, or even still, small, subtle yet undeniable ways. Or even just any unambiguous way. The longer I went with no obvious communication from God, I got good at lowering my expectations, lowering the bar for what could pass for the amazing all-powerful Jesus making himself real to me.

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Good Without God, Better Without God

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For whatever reason (I’m not sure I’m willing to guess), in the few years since I’ve come out atheist, I have experienced a motivation to behave ethically and morally far beyond that which two and a half decades of Christianity ever provided.

My denomination was the Seventh-day Adventist Church. I was not your average pew-warmer, either. Within 18 months of my baptism at the tender age of 20, I had embarked on a year-long foreign missionary teaching assignment, been ordained a local elder in that mission’s church (at the ordination ceremony, when the pastor read to his church the biblical requirements of an elder, he literally skipped over the verse in 1 Timothy 3 which states that the elder must not be a recent convert; I swallowed hard and kept smiling), and had preached sermons and taught lessons more than many elderly members who had been Seventh-day Adventists all their lives.

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Philosophy and Theology WAR! What Is It Good For?

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Absolutely NOTHING! Say it again…

Sam Harris in Moral Landscape said:

“Many of my critics fault me for not engaging more directly with the academic literature on moral philosophy. There are two reasons why I haven’t done this: First, while I have read a fair amount of this literature, I did not arrive at my position on the relationship between human values and the rest of human knowledge by reading the work of moral philosophers; I came to it by considering the logical implications of our making continued progress in the sciences of mind. Second, I am convinced that every appearance of terms like “metaethics,” “deontology,” “noncognitivism,” “antirealism,” “emotivism,” etc., directly increases the amount of boredom in the universe. My goal, both in speaking at conferences like TED and in writing this book, is to start a conversation that a wider audience can engage with and find helpful. Few things would make this goal harder to achieve than for me to speak and write like an academic philosopher. Of course, some discussion of philosophy will be unavoidable, but my approach is to generally make an end run around many of the views and conceptual distinctions that make academic discussions of human values so inaccessible. While this is guaranteed to annoy a few people, the professional philosophers I’ve consulted seem to understand and support what I am doing.” (Note 1, Chapter 1; emphasis mine)

Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape

I stood up and applauded when I read that. Well, mentally, anyway; I read most of the book in the break rooms at my job while I ate lunch, which means a literal standing ovation-of-one would’ve been awkward.

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