| What if I told you that he once was a believer in the traditional apologetic sense ... , became an atheist ... , then he became a Mystic and "found God in the Waves ... . |
As you may recall, I have been an atheist for about 57 years now as a result of having started reading the Bible (made it much of the way through Genesis) and realizing that I simply could not believe what I was reading which was what I was supposed to believe (my naïve literalist approach as a teenager which ironically foreshadowed the Jesus Freak Movement a decade later). Further experience with Jesus Freaks, Dominionists, and creationists served to further define and develop my atheism.
One problem with any claim that a theist "used to be an atheist" is that the term "atheist" is overloaded with so many different definitions and positions, especially when it is a theist who is applying that label.
For example, it seems that most theists, especially the "born again" and other forms of converts, consider their pre-conversion period as being atheism, whereas in reality it was merely indifference. That would lead them to view atheists as just not having been taught their religious "truth", that they are just ignorant about Jesus. That leads to atheists being bombarded by extremely lame and irritating proselytizing attempts that they have heard far too many times before. Though to be honest, that is what I had thought of creationists at first, that they simply were ignorant of the truth behind their claims and that, since they follow The Truth, as soon as they learned their claims were lies they would drop them. Instead, I learned the hard way that their problems run far deeper. Similarly, there is a sickeningly long parade of creationists who claim that they used to be "evolutionists" whereas that was simply before they had become creationists and they had never learned anything about evolution.
In another more pernicious example, there is a local creationist who describes himself as a former atheist, but in his autobiographical sketch of that experience it turns out that he was only pretending to be an atheist as a teenager so that he could feel that he could avoid personal responsibility and service his bubbling hormones without guilt. I know that he was only pretending because elsewhere he adamantly insisted that throughout that entire period of his "atheism" he still believed in God prayed to God every night, which is not characteristic of actual atheists. But as a result of his false claim of having been an atheist, he insists that he knows what motivates all atheists; id est that [verb_mood=subjunctive] they know that God exists but they are fighting against Him and that they are motivated by the desire to sin freely without guilt or responsibility for their actions[/verb_mood].
Therefore, whenever a theist starts talking about "having been an atheist", our first order of business is to find out just what the hell he's talking about. And until we are able to get that answer, the most probable outcome will be that the theist making that claim just has no clue what he's talking about. Kind of like if Trump or his WH makes any kind of statement, the probability that that statement is false is far greater than that it might be true.
{BEGIN NOTE:
In many of our Indo-European languages, we normally use the indicative mood for making factual statements (eg, "My aunt's pen is on the table.") and the imperative mood for issuing commands (eg, "Run, Spot, run!"). The subjunctive mood is used to indicate subjectivity (hard to express in English), a wish (eg, "Long live the King!", "May the wind always be to your back."), a doubt (hard to express in English), indirect discourse (ie, reporting what somebody else said without quoting him directly such that you need to indicate that you are not attesting to the truth of his statements; this is a major use of the subjunctive in German, but it is difficult to indicate in English), contrary-to-fact statements (eg, "If I were a rich man ... ").In the Romance languages (which make extensive use of the subjunctive including most of the examples I just gave above for uses of the subjunctive) and German the subjunctive verb forms are distinctive such that just from the verb's form you know which mood it's in; eg, the famous Puccini aria "Nessun dorma" ("May none sleep.") compared with the indicative "Nessun dorme." ("Nobody is sleeping."), the subjunctive, "¡Viva Zapata!" ("Long live Zapata!"), compared to the indicative, "Zapata vive." ("Zapata is alive."). In English, the verbal forms with which to distinguish between the indicative and subjunctive moods have been lost and what little remains is mostly vestigial. Hence I chose to invent the verb_mood markup tag to indicate which mood I was using.
END NOTE}
In How did your Bible become demonic?, Message 17, FLRW write:
| FLRW writes: People should leave the mythology behind, and learn to think for themselves. Your intellect is a better instrument of spiritual growth than any religious teachings. |
Now to surprise you, I agree with FLRW's statement and I feel that it supports the mystic's approach to religion. As a confirmed atheist for over half a century -- ("confirmed" since that was around the traditional age of religious confirmations, but also because all my subsequent experiences have only confirmed that I had made the right decision so long ago).
Out of Unitarian-Universalists' experiences in the 60's with civil rights and opposition to the Viet Nam War came a catch-phrase, "The Answer is to Question". While I'm sure that it was created in the sense of questioning authority, some of our minister's sermons revealed a deeper meaning. He would point out the true purpose of religion wasn't to simply supply answers, but rather to get us to ask the questions, the important questions.
As you familiar with the British sci-fi spoof, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"? The 1981 BBC TV adaptation is available on Hulu -- I recommend it very highly. A central plot point is that a race of hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings (who manifest in our 4-space as white mice who conduct elaborate experiments on humans in human labs) wanted to finally find the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. After millennia of computation by the most power computer ever built, Deep Thought, they finally get the answer: 42. What was that supposed to mean? Well, to understand the Answer you would need to also know the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Which Deep Thought could not calculate, but instead it could create a much more powerful computer which includes organic life: "And it shall be called The Earth!" "Well, that sounds unnecessarily Messianic!" And since the Earth had just been destroyed to make way for a hyperspatial bypass (a freeway to us Yanks), that triggers much of the actions in the story.
But through humour, Douglas Adams pointed out a problem between answers and questions. We seek answers even though the questions are much more important.
At the lowest level, if you don't know what the question was, then you will not be able to make sense out of the answer. BTW, 42. Now you know why Fox Mulder's apartment number is 42 and why he stated that he has watched "Plan 9 From Outer Space" 42 times.
Going up to the next higher levels, we find that in science questions are much more important than answers, because with every answer we find that answer raises more questions and we need those new questions to know in what direction to direct our further research. That is why ID attempts to "answer" all questions with "goddidit" would not only quite literally answer nothing whatsoever, but it would also kill science. Please refer yet again to my 27 Nov 2007 topic in response to Beretta, So Just How is ID's Supernatural-based Science Supposed to Work? (SUM. MESSAGES ONLY), in which my opening message (Message 1) stated (leaving out a synopsis of how science basically works, which you can read by following the links):
| DWise1 writes: Now, an extremely valuable by-product of all this hypothesis building and testing is questions. In science, the really interesting and valuable discoveries are the ones that raise new questions. Because questions help to direct our research. Because by realizing what we don't know and what we need to find out, we know what to look for and we have some idea of where to find it. Without those questions, science loses its direction and gets stuck. Science cannot use supernaturalistic explanations, because they don't explain anything. We cannot observe the supernatural either directly or indirectly; we cannot even determine whether the supernatural even exists. Supernaturalistic explanations cannot be tested and hence cannot be evaluated nor discarded nor refined. They cannot produce predictions. They cannot be developed into a conceptual model that could even begin to attempt to descibe a natural phenomena nor how it works. And supernaturalistic explanations raise absolutely no questions and so provide absolutely no direction for further research. "Goddidit" explains nothing and closes all paths of investigation. Supernaturalistic explanations bring science to a grinding halt. |
So in science we find that questions are very important, possibly more important that answers. To be more specific, "ultimate" answers that cannot produce new questions are of no practical use.
Now what about that relationship between answers and questions within theism?
Far too often, we encounter theists who "have been given all the answers", but they have never ever spent any time working through the questions. If you have never worked through the questions, then you have gained nothing. For example, late in high school I once expressed the wish to have college degrees just given to me without all the work, whereupon I was sternly informed that the main benefit of a degree was what you learned as you put in the work to earn that degree. That piece of advice was given to me by a fundamentalist Christian. How's that for irony?
So many religions offer you all the "answers" without making you work through the questions. For that reason I consider such religions as worse than useless.
The benefit of mysticism is that it engages you in asking the questions and seeking your own answers. Of course, a mystic's answers are just as worthless as a doctrinaire's, but at the very least the mystic has worked his way through the questions whereas the doctrinaire has not and so has experienced far more spiritual growth as a result.
So to describe my view of religion in short, the only worthy approach to religion is one in which you are constantly thinking about religious questions. If all you do is unthinkingly accept answers, then you are no better than my old naïve wish of being given college degrees without ever having put in the work to earn them.
ABE:
My junior college German teacher retired when I took German 4 from him. To commemorate his retirement, he gave us the "German final exam from Hell" that almost nobody could possibly pass. Mainly, it consisted of three or four pages of text that we were to put into indirect discourse, ie rewrite the entire thing in the subjunctive. I think I did pass it, but there's no telling.
Edited by dwise1, : ABE the German final exam from Hell
Edited by dwise1, : Indented my vital grammatical note
Edited by dwise1, : that Romance languages use the subjunctive in most of the ways that I had listed
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