The Doctrine of ESP September 30, 2010

Do you ever have the naked dream? Where you find yourself naked in a public place in a sea of clothed people? I do. But sometimes it’s fine – I realize I’m naked, but nobody’s looking at me and no one cares. It’s when people start staring, tell me with their hole-drilling eyes that I am doing something wrong, that I feel the need to cover up or disappear.

Almost four years after leaving Christianity, sometimes I still feel like Something can see me in my most nakedest of parts. And if what it sees is too angry, or judgmental, or perverted, or [insert antiquated moral standard here], it is disappointed, and I feel like a failure. It is too simplistic to say that this Something is god. It is a whole Christian doctrine that goes something like this:

1. Thoughts are a natural product of your heart, so that ‘bad’ thoughts mean there is something flawed in the your deepest part,  something that only god can fix. There is no way to know how or when he will do it; you have to trust him.

2. Actions are a natural product of your thoughts, feelings and beliefs, so your internal dialogue must be constantly surveyed so that you’ll do the right thing.

Sound like a recipe for paranoia and defeat? This past week I spent several days mulling over what to do about someone who is harassing me. My biggest fear is that he would know from looking at me what my plans are – that he would have god-like ESP and use the information in my head against me. On top of that, I felt guilty, even though I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of. But I guess I wondered if my thoughts were incriminating me in some way unknown to me. Finally, walking through the quiet majesty of the Joffre Lakes the truth hit me -

I have the final say over my thoughts.

I can stop or start them. I judge them to be helpful or unhelpful. It does not matter where they come from and I determine where they are going. Which leads to:

I decide on my actions.

And I am responsible for them, not spiritual forces or the state of my ‘heart’. There are many steps on the journey of living my life as if it is truly my own. It is only right that this step was witnessed by stunning peaks, awe-inspiring glaciers, and emerald green lakes.

What to Keep August 20, 2010

And what to throw away. It is the decision I’m making every day about accumulated stuff in my cupboards, a mountain of information I’ve received in my training as a therapist, and last but not least, the codes of behaviour (aka morality) that went mostly unquestioned as a Christian. This is just me verbalizing how I’ve come to live differently over the last several years. I have

Taken Out:

Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner – It is naive to think that people can accept love while you stand in judgment over them. Besides, there is no such thing as sin. There are destructive acts and life-giving acts. Instead I want to Embrace Difference. I want to accept that a way of doing things I previously rejected can be okay, depending on its effects on other people.

Do Not Judge – Sounds like the opposite of the first point doesn’t it? To have to hold them simultaneously is one of the crazy-making teachings of Christianity. What it means in practice is to ignore what you actually think and pretend things are okay. Instead I want to Know Where I Stand. Everyone judges, but my standards for judging have to be fair and just.

Hierarchy – In Christianity, adults are above children, men are above women, and humans are above all of creation. I want my interactions with the world to reflect a level playing field. An INFP motto is “Value Every Living Thing.” I might add, “Equally.”

And Kept..

Graciousness – Not the graciousness that sees another person as unworthy and loves her anyway, but loves him because he deserves it. They deserve it because they’re human. That is what merits grace. Grace is not doled out from on high. That kind of grace is insulting. Grace means giving someone one more chance to make a first or second or third impression, and it’s doing it because sometimes I need that chance, and because it takes less time, energy and focus to be gracious than to be calculating. I found myself asking today, who do I need to be more gracious towards? Who has been gracious to me? These thoughts invite in,

Humility – I wouldn’t be a happy, healthy professional woman without the many people along the way that treated me with dignity even though I treated myself and them with disrespect. Ghandi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” I’d rather be the person who opens up new possibilities for how people see themselves.

Love – Christianity, for all its faults, promotes love the best way it knows how. Christians want to win the world through love. I just want to love the world through love. Fortunately, I had a mother who showed me what it means to truly love and not give up on someone. I have a good model for unrelenting love.



Stages of deconversion, Part 2 July 16, 2010

The 5th stage is Anger – I long ago adopted the phrase, “Nothing is wasted” for my life. I believed it before my deconversion, and I believe it about 30 years spent primarily studying one book, and spending hours every day talking to an invisible person and listening to air. There must be a reason for it, even though I don’t yet know what it is. I am able to say that now, but a few months ago I was infuriated when I thought about how I’d spent my whole life:

• believing creationism and knowing nothing about evolution
• studying the Bible to the exclusion of classic literature, art, the natural world
• accepting only those who fit into a narrow definition of gender and sexuality
• missing out on opportunities for relationships with the majority of the population because I thought they would pull me away from God
• spending tens of thousands of dollars on Bible-based education
• being shaped by the male, Eurocentric, heteronormative way of thinking of church leaders
• not taking care of my body and shunning ambition because I thought eternal life was all that mattered

Acceptance – Although every once in awhile a poignant leftover from my religious life comes back to bite me in the butt, on the whole I think I’m hanging out in this stage. I still love my Christian friends and family. To those who choose the safety of delusion and denial over heart-wrenching, mind-blowing self evaluation, I say live and let live. I was there too, for a long time, and a bitter ex-Christian expounding the follies of faith would only have evoked pity and stubbornness. Also, I still have blind spots all over the place, even if I don’t have as many in the religion department.

Paul wrote in Romans about not being able to do the good he wanted to do. Ironically, now that I am not a Christian, I am able to be as good as I want without worrying about being prideful, and can be as immoral as I want without guilt. In other words, I do what I think is best, and in doing so, I get a lot more done. I always longed for this feeling of freedom as a Christian, and found it by making peace with (out) god.

Here are more post-faith accounts.

Stages of Deconversion July 14, 2010

When someone starts therapy, they tell their story over and over in a myriad of creative ways until they feel they are heard. When someone deconverts, they do the same thing. These phases of deconversion are another way to tell my story. (Go here for a complete description of the stages.)

Pre-deconversion – I do not remember a time when I wasn’t a Christian. For all the emphasis in evangelical Christianity on the individual decision (ie, saying the magic prayer), there was no difference between my pre-Christian and post-magic prayer life. Instead, being a Christian was more of an on-again, off-again experience that at the time I would have called ‘falling away.’  The difference between those times and now is that when the falling away happened, I believed that I’d moved away from God and that he was displeased with me. Now I don’t believe that God exists in the way I knew him, or even if he exists at all, so it’s inconsequential how close he is to me or whether I’ve hurt his feelings. This is my decision for my mental, emotional and spiritual health, and God has nothing to do with it. NB: I capitalize God not out of reverence for a divine being but because I knew him/her/it as a divine being at this stage in my life.

Even when I was a Christian, my faith wasn’t ”characterized by the complete lack of questioning about my faith”. This part of the description doesn’t fit for me because since I can remember I’ve been asking what pastors called ‘good questions’. Apparently it is admirable to critically examine your faith until you get too determined to finding an answer. There are just no answers for questions about the schizophrenic God who emerges from the tyranny of the Old Testament into the gentle meekness of the New.

Curiosity Killed the Cat – This is the questioning phase, “when the walls around your faith that protected it from introspection yield”. It’s hard to know when this started. Abusive church experiences and a soul-killing 4 years at Bible college definitely planted seeds, so that when I re-connected with God and church about 10 years ago, I had more questions than ever, which church leaders still couldn’t answer. Then further discrimination (not involving my family this time, but a good friend who was kicked out of the church), a therapy supervisor who taught me how to ask questions about all my most cherished beliefs (not just about God, but about gender, illness, institutions, etc), and further Bible school education added to the toxicity I was coming to associate with Christianity. I went from a conservative evangelical church, to a ‘church for the unchurched’, to a liberal Anglican congregation, to nothing. I didn’t know I was on the way out, but now the progression makes sense to me.

The quest for answers – I stopped reading the Bible 5 years ago, but still called myself a Christian. The time for seeking was over. Cracking the spine made me feel like I was at the bottom of a pile of boulders. I started looking for God outside of Christianity – in nature, in people’s interactions, in media, in anything beautiful. I was content to not know because the freedom just felt so good.

Do I believe? – I didn’t realize the answer was no until someone asked me 9 months ago. My answer then and now is, “I don’t believe in the Christian God.” And I don’t know enough about any other gods to believe in them. I was swept away by the goddess religion described in The Mists of Avalon, but the goddess is a being I can’t believe in because there’s no way to know her, and I have had enough of making gods out of my head.

There are more stages, but this is getting lengthy and I want to comment on Ronna Detrick’s heart-rending post about homesickness. It is hard for non-believers to understand how completely a dedication to religion consumes your life. It is hard to distinguish between myself and Christianity, between my thoughts and god’s. Missing the sense of belonging, trust, safety, purpose and common understanding that I lived with for 30  years is something I’ve kept quiet about, so I’m thankful to know I’m not alone:

“This wilderness experience sets up a real dilemma for some of us, since we know how much we owe to the traditions that shaped us. We would not be who we are without them, and we continue to draw real sustenance from them, but insofar as those same traditions discourage us from being with one another, we cannot go home again.”

Why people are Christians May 29, 2010

I made my last pile of Christian books to give away.  When flipping through them I was surprised to find that I have a critical (as in, skeptical) response to almost every sentence. I realized I could never take these books seriously again, whereas they used to make me feel peaceful and secure. As I was reading I thought of questions I’ve read and that people have been asking me, like, How can any intelligent person be a Christian? And, why do women flock to such an oppressive religion? The beginning of an answer lies in these books.

I picked up a book called God, A Good Father by Michael Phillips. At the beginning he asks the questions, “Do you not long, in your quiet moments, for relief from the restlessness and frustration with which life seems filled?  Would you not rejoice to find that you might enter into a center of calm, where the intensities of today’s frantic pace lose their power to make you tense and anxious? Does not the thought of such a place cause you to sigh, ‘Ah, could such truly be possible..for me? Could such waters – refreshing and cold and invigorating – quench my every thirst, always renewing themselves, never running dry?’” How could any honest person answer no to these questions? Everyone has times when they want to escape life, but in my experience, Christians have them more often. Conservative Christians believe that the world is bad, something to separate themselves from, and that God is perfect. Since Christians believe only they have access to God, the kind of experience described above becomes a dangling carrot, something that must be achieved in order to escape the pain of this world. Henri Nouwen is an honest Christian. He says that after 20 years, “I am still searching for inner peace, for creative relationships with others, and for the experience of God” (Reaching Out), to which any reasonable person would ask, Isn’t it time to try something else? The reason people begin and stay in Christianity is the same reason people chase after the American dream. It’s the promise of a better life with little responsibility on the individual to make it happen.

And why are there so many women willing to be subjugated into being second class citizens? Besides the cultural framework that makes it all too easy to accept that role, there are special promises for women in Christianity. In a healthy relationship people know that they can’t be everything for each other. Not so in Christianity. The promise to women is that you have a perfect lover/husband, father, and friend who is with you 24/7 and loves you no matter what. Each woman brings her own aches and pains from having been hurt or rejected from the male figures in her life to Christianity where she is told, Here is one man will never let you down. In Captivating, John and Stasi Eldredge write, “Every woman has a beauty to unveil…it is God who longs for romance, God who longs to be our ezer [helper], it is God who reveals beauty as essential to life.” (italics theirs). But there is a trade off here. The authors say that a man’s gift is strength; a woman’s gift is beauty. When women don’t accept this they become “dominating”. The images in another book are those of brides and princesses, and love letters written from God to the reader. The discrepancy between this message and how women were treated by men in authority was one of the nails in the coffin on Christianity for me when I worked in a church from 2001 – 2004. There was far more respect shown to men in big and small ways, by both the women and men on staff.

You’ll notice I spoke exclusively about men and women. It is the rare congregation that makes room for GLBT, queer or trans folk. The strict perimeters around maleness and femaleness impoverish Christians who are kept in these roles by depriving them of those who are left out.

The Book of Life May 25, 2010

I have done a lot of school but this may be the first time I’ve taken my learning into my own hands. My teachers are books, blogs, media, overheard conversations, music. My ears pick out the unknown name, word or idea from any sentence and remember it until I can look it up. Wikipedia is my friend, although I try to look at other websites first. I can’t pinpoint what I don’t know, except to say that they’re the things that non-religious culture take for granted that they know, because while my contemporaries were talking about world events and living popular culture, my entire existence was centered around one man and one book, both 2000 years old. I have a lot of catching up to do, not unlike arriving in another country and realizing you can’t take anything for granted. It is invigorating and disheartening all in one.

Today I learned about Salman Rushdie, the difference between atheism and agnosticism, and Kathmandu. This week I read Keats’ poetry for the first time, last week it was Tennyson and Galway Kinnell. I’m amassing a list of books to read (ie A Passage to India, Nature,  anything and everything by Terry Pratchett) Add wars and dictators in the 19th century, and suicidal cult leaders to the list. Mostly I’m being challenged by atheists (not generally a scary group of people after all) and other non-religious types to think differently.

What I am most clear about is what I don’t know. I don’t know if there is a being who is god and what form that being takes. I don’t know how human beings came to be in the form they are now and what implications that has for what is ‘human nature’. I don’t know at what point a group of cells becomes a human being. Karen Armstrong describes the time after she left the convent when she first realized how much she didn’t know:

My problem…  was that I had no thoughts of my own at all. Every time the frail shoots of a potentially subversive idea had broken ground, I had stamped on them so firmly that they tended not to come anymore… It seemed that I could no longer operate as an intellectual free agent… My brain had been bound as tightly as the feet of a Chinese woman, and I had read that when the bandages were taken off, the pain was excruciating. (The Spiral Staircase)

Her story, from what I’ve read so far, ends with her being able to walk and even run, again. That’s good news.

In search of non-religious morality May 17, 2010

I’ve been looking for a universal morality, some kind of proof that there are standards that every people group has had across time and across culture, proof that some version of the 10 commandments stands in every society and that these natural laws are part of human make-up.  I’m not sure why I was doing this, maybe as an effort to retain some of the biblical foundation that has guided my decision making process for so long. I’ve discovered that even though most religions have the same basic do’s and don’t's, I can’t believe that this is transmitted through human nature, or that these laws are enough when making moral decisions. I knew this before, of course, but was looking for an ideology to attach to, seeing as I no longer let the Bible or a preacher’s interpretation of the Bible make my decisions for me.

I was introduced to Jeremy Bentham  while reading The Spiral Staircase by Karen Armstrong. His idea of morality is that an action is judged by its consequences. Sounds both just and pragmatic. The only problem is how to know what the consequences of an action will be? He said that the best decision is that which will cause the most happiness (long term, not short term). That has to work better in a democratic country like Canada, where you can generally count on hard work and fair acts paying off. It might be harder to predict in an unstable country. When it is easy to predict, it still must be a guessing game without some underlying framework to guide people. So now I am back at the beginning, wondering how it is that people are guided to make good decisions.

I know how I try to make decisions, even if I don’t know where it fits. With compassion, justice, equality and generosity in light of power relationships between people, institutions and nature. A messy process compared to the black and white thinking I’ve slowly been moving away from. I’ll leave that to Star Wars.

20 hours May 14, 2010

I’ve been daydreaming about quitting the 9 to 5. Of working as a means of sustenance rather than as a paycheck. If I did high quality work that I enjoyed and lived on only what I needed, I figure I could work ‘part time’ and still be comfortable. All that extra time could be spent learning and creating, some of which would feed back into the sustenance cycle. For example, if I learned how to fix a bike I wouldn’t have to pay someone else to do it. I might even be able to trade my services for someone else’s. Community and minimalism are two sides of the same coin. Although they put more emphasis on freedom and independence as the goal of minimalism, Everett Bogue and Leo Babuata‘s ideas have been the exciting inspiration to wanting something more. Here’s what I would do with 20 extra work hours in my week in which I would work for myself (without getting paid, at least at first):

Garden, forage, pick mushrooms, collect and dry herbs, try out different concoctions, or any other natural, preferably free plant related activities (2 hours)

Practice guitar with the goal of recording one of my own songs (2 hours)

English-Spanish language exchange (I used to be fluent, *sigh*) (1 hour)

Go through all my stuff and come up with a bag of stuff to give away and a few things to sell (1 hour)

Go to a free public lecture, preferably on consumerism, human rights or writing (2 hours)

Learn how to fix a bicycle (1 hour)

Sit in a public place and people watch, write down conversations verbatim and analyze with the goal of completing the research I started on my (unfinished) thesis on discourse analysis (2 hours)

Learn how to build and manage a webpage (2 hours, might take less time than this, never tried it)

Go through transcripts of my work to find good questions, common themes and patterns (2 hours)

Write my novel! (2 hours)

Join a book club and read the book (3 hours)

None of these things feel like work to me. In my corporatized brain I think in terms of a 40 hour work week, but if I’m not being drained by going to work every day I’m sure I’d have more energy to burn in non-w0rk hours, and my free time might reproduce itself. Never know until I try.

How to get rid of a fear of hell May 12, 2010

If you believe in the Bible: I’m not going to try to convince you there’s no hell. The Bible says there’s a hell, so if you believe the Bible, you should believe in hell! But consider these things –  hell is only mentioned in the New Testament. It is mentioned 14 times and here are all the things you can do to earn a ticket there: calling someone a fool, adultery, saying bad things, being a hypocrite, or receiving good things in this life (Remember the story of Lazarus? The other guy in the story was in hell because he had gotten good stuff while living..which I guess means he used up all his tickets and had to go to hell..anyway). Hades is also mentioned 5 times, mostly in Revelation. In that book Hades is personified as someone that kills people, gives over the people it killed at the end of the world, and then ceases to exist. Honestly – Matthew 20:14. We’ll get back to that.

This should bring up some questions in your mind. If we take these verses as they are, without any fancy footwork to cross reference them and look up the Greek and otherwise explain away the obvious, don’t they say that everyone in the world is going to hell? Another question is, is hell in these verses at all related to the concept of Jesus as a personal Saviour? Where is the connection between saying a salvation prayer and going to hell? What about the verse that says that hell is temporary, what happens after it’s over?  

So yes, if you’re a Christian, you believe that hell exists. But it most likely does not exist the way the church says it does – as a place of eternal torment for the unsaved. Good questions to ask your church leader.

If you are a recovering Christian (like I am) but still get that jarring intrusive thought every once in awhile saying, Have I pissed God off so much that he’s going to send me to hell?: This is a problem with believing in a God without being religious; there are so many unanswered questions. Think of it this way – if there is no God, there is no hell, but if there is a God who is worth my time, he must be more loving, generous, and gracious, and less masochistic than I am. I wouldn’t send anyone to hell, and God must be better than me. If not, the earth is ruled by a divine dictator and there’s not much we can do about it.

If you’re an atheist: Yeah, I know, you don’t have to worry about silly supersitions like hell. But although it’s a pain in the ass, I’d rather wrestle with it than let science do all my thinking for me.

Moving on May 10, 2010

It has been said that a fish has no concept of water, meaning that which is closest to it is that which he understands least. I was swimming in Christianity for so long some parts of me must still think I’m there, otherwise why I am surprised when people don’t behave like “nice Christians”? It has been a steep learning curve interacting in a purely secular world (with the exception of my family and friends, who are mostly Christian and love me just the same as they did before), where people don’t live by the unwritten Christian rules, like: 1) If someone gives something to you, you are expected to return the favour even though they’ll never ask you to. 2) Being nice to everyone makes the world go round. 3) Being nice outwardly, that is, no matter what you really think of them or how much you’d really like to stomp on their foot and run away. 4) It is always best to defer and let others go first in every circumstance. 5) If you are a woman and the other is a man, this happens by default, if you are both women, there is a negotiation, with the person willing to make the greatest self-sacrifice coming out the winner. There are many more but I won’t nauseate you any further.

Many, many experiences over the last 4 years have disproved that this is the way the world works. You’d think it would always be liberating (and it is, overall – I would never go back), but often it’s jarring. Even for a fish to realize it’s in water would turn its world upside down, never mind then having to decide if maybe it wants another environment. Sometimes I’ve been tempted to hide behind Christianity’s most pervasive, unspoken tenet which is, “The World Is Scary and People Are Evil”, and to go back to church. This last month has been one of those times when everything has gone wrong and I could really have used a god to give me the illusion that someone else was managing my life, and that I could sit back and wait for things to change. But so many compassionate people and encouraging ideas have reinforced the truth for me –  that The World is Agonizingly Beautiful and People are Truly Lovely Beings.

Here is a poem I got from Kaethe Weingarten at a workshop last weekend:

The bud
stands for all things,
even those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing