Skip to main content

Who Is to Blame?

By John Shores ~

It has been five years since I left Christianity.

My own personal struggle can best be defined as a search for "understanding why." Why did I believe the Christian story? Why did I leave? Why didn't I see the truth sooner? This seems to be a common path for people like me who are trying to cope with a whole new reality.

What I recognized in myself, though, was that I really wasn't looking for an answer to "why." I was looking for someone to blame for not having seen the truth sooner.

So, I sought for the answer to this question instead. What I discovered was surprising.

Where the Blame Does Not Lie

"Christian doctrine" is not the problem. I know this sounds astounding, but that's the long and the short of it.

Here is why.

Religious doctrine has no power of its own. As Reza Aslan said in a recent interview:

Quote
There's this misconception that people derive their values from their scriptures. And the truth is that it's more often the case that people insert their values into their scriptures.

In this country, not two hundred years ago both slave owners and abolitionists not only used the same Bible to justify their viewpoints, they used the same verses to do so.

I think this is a truth that is easy to overlook. When we feel aggrieved and angry, we want to assign blame and there is no easier target then The Bible and the works of Christian theologians. But these are not worthy targets.

We can see this in our own experiences. A person gravitates toward a religion that supports what they already think and feel. A liberal Christian uses the same Bible to support his or her humanistic worldview as the Westborough Baptist Church uses to support their bigotry.

There is nothing transformative about the Bible or so-called "Christian" ideas. A human being holds an idea and then looks for those passages in the Bible (or Koran...) that support that idea.

Christianity did not ruin my life. Nor was it the cause of the abuses that I suffered. It was merely an implement. To blame Christianity is like blaming the belt that Dad used to beat me. The belt was designed to hold one's britches up. It was not designed as an assault weapon. The fact that it was used to inflict pain was not the fault of the belt.

Where Does the Blame Lie?

So who or what is to blame for the experiences that I suffered in the name of Christianity?

I think the primary blame falls to human biology.

We are social animals who need to belong to a group. Validation of our ideas and thoughts is of great importance to us. (That's why we are all here on this site, isn't it?)

Once I realized this, I began to recognize just how much bullshit I was willing to swallow so that I could remain "in good standing" (for want of a better phrase) among the people in my church.

There were many times that I thought "This ain't right" but rather than using that as a foundation for independent thinking, I would instead go on a journey to find sources that agreed with the thing that I struggled against so that I could find some way of making it "OK" to believe it. I held the position that I was wrong and the group was right.

Sad to say, I wasn't as interested in Truth as I was interested in Belonging.

Two other characteristics of human beings also have an impact on this:
  1. We are wired to recognize authority
  2.  

  3. We imitate others
So it is no real surprise that since my parents were strongly religious, I followed their lead.

When I first left the faith, I was tempted to blame my parents for failing me somehow. Upon reflection, however, I don't know that this is really fair. They were happy in their faith and remained so for life. Is it reasonable to expect that they would to teach me how to think independently when they did not know how to do so themselves? Is it realistic for me to demand that they should have presented me with other options?

Even if they had not been particularly happy in their beliefs, going against the herd is contrary to human nature. I don't know that I would be holding any moral high ground by laying at their feet the accusation that they failed to break away from the herd.

Actually, I Am to Blame

I am grateful that I live in a time and place where breaking away from Christianity is not a solo experience.If I'm being honest, I don't know how long I would have lasted on this journey if I didn't have a group like this one to help me. If I lived in the seventeenth century Europe, I am pretty confident that I would have the stones to walk away from Christianity, even if it didn't carry with it the threat of physical torture. I still feel the need to belong somewhere, after all.

I am grateful that I live in a time and place where breaking away from Christianity is not a solo experience. Unlike previous generations, questioning religious belief is a very big topic for mine. There are many sources out there to help people who want to look at Christianity from a non-theist viewpoint. Heck! There are even open debates between non-theists and theists going around.

If anyone is to blame for the decades I spent as a Christian as an adult, it is I. It is my own failure that I did not give any credence to the opponents of theism. It is my fault that I never looked at my faith objectively until I was completely disillusioned.

No matter how loud the voices on either side of the discussion, ultimately I am responsible for thinking and making decisions for myself.

Knowing this, I find it difficult to lay blame elsewhere. And in searching my own motives, I find that the only possible net impact of trying to lay blame anywhere else only serves for me to fuel the angst and distress that I first felt after leaving the faith.

I have no desire to be at odds with other people simply because of their declared belief system. Rather, I am finding that an individual can only be won to my way of thinking when I treat them respectfully and demonstrate that I am a good person.

Personal interactions between theists and atheists are the means by which theism will die away.

Groups clash. Individuals can find common ground. Attacking a group is not only a complete waste of effort but it is unhealthy for each of us. The path to healing, either as individuals or as a society, is not found is blaming and attacking one another. It is found in accepting the role that we played in keeping ourselves bound to the Christian herd and allowing ourselves to move forward with greater understanding and empathy for those who have not yet become brave enough to question their own faith.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

How to come out to your parents as non-religious

By Marlene Winell ~  A fter going through your own deconstruction of religious belief, it can feel like a challenge to reveal your change to your religious parents.   You might have a lot of fear about their reaction – anger, hurt, disappointment in you, and so on.   You might fear being disowned.   This is a common concern because our families mean a lot to us.   It’s natural to want approval from your parents.   When you were young, you depended on them for your life; you absolutely needed their love, care, and approval.   So, even in adulthood, we long for our parents to love us unconditionally.     However, in terms of human development over the life span,  it is necessary for   everyone   to outgrow their parents.   Growing up to maturity involves becoming the authority in your own life and taking on the job of self-care and self-love.   This is true even if you aren’t recovering from religion.   Personal health and well-being, in other words, means that your inner “Adult” is tak

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

Disney, the Creator, and Christ

By Carl S ~ I s Dumbo more real than Jesus? The answer depends on who you ask. Doesn't every culture have fantasy-fabricated individuals, often with lives of heroic proportions? Haven't celebrities with their real/imagined lives, been around forever? In the beginning, man created gods and keeps altering them. My oldest brother was an artist. He could paint a portrait of someone you'd know, and change the character of that person with a couple of brush-strokes, or make a sculpture of a figure and change its proportions daily, even hourly. He made figures out of Silly Putty, and watched each one as it changed form. Eventually each melted into a puddle. All gods are like that, because they're only as "real" as a person's imagination continues to create them, at whim. Humans need outlets for frustrations, anger, fear of the future and the unknown. Ergo, in the beginning, man created entertainment, Those seeking explanations for the origins of nature, death,