Diogenes the Cynic

Johntheapostate posted the following in the "Was Paul a Liar?" thread
I think it's an excellent question that deserves its own thread, so here it is.

Diogenes the Cynic

My answer to this question is that personally I feel no animosity towards Christianity. I see it as a study of ancient literature no different than a study of Homer or of the Hindu Vedas. I try to understand it in the context of its culture and time. I see "God" and "Jesus" as characters in the same vein as Zeus and Hercules.

I was raised in a theistic home with a Southern Baptist mother and a Catholic father. I went to Catholic schools but also for a time went to Baptist sunday school. It was in those sunday school classes that I became enchanted with the Bibles stories as pure stories.

I realized very young that I didn't believe in God but I still enjoyed the stories and for a time believed that there may have been a historical core to them. I became fascinated with the origins of the stories as well as trying to learn whatever I could about a possible historical Jesus. My discovery of how purely mythical so much of it is was a disappointment to me but I still never lost interested in the subject. I pursued Religious Studies, Classical languages and ancient history in college and I still read and talk about those subjects all the time because I LIKE them. I feel affectionate about them, not hostile.

One reason I probably don't feel the hostility is probably because my folks were pretty liberal, non-fundamentalist, as they got older, more and more lapsed in their faiths. My father confessed to me a few years ago that he never prayed anymore and wasn't sure if he really believed in God any longer. When my dad was in high school, he was alter boy who wanted to become a priest.

So I was never pressured to believe anything and my parents were always very cool about saying they wanted my brothers and I to think for ourselves and believe whatever we wanted. I guess that lack of an abusive relationship with Christianity is the reason I'm able to study it objectively.



I AM, however, often frustrated and steamed by some Christians themselves, not all of them, or even most of them but definitely by the ones who want to impose their beliefs on others or codify them into law. Fundy apologists can aggravating to try and debate with but I see a lot of them as just being naive and possibly as victims of a controlling upbringing. I also know that I can't count the number of atheists who have told me they used to be fundies and finally just couldn't defend the bullshit anymore, so I realize that some of the dialogues get through to them and they hear me.

Chris Weimer

Actually, I agree with everything Diogenes said. Wow, I've never been at such a loss for words before... :huh:

Oh, except that I did have an abusive past with very fundamental right-winging repugnant parents (I used to get beat if I couldn't memorize two verses a day and then understand what they meant and apply them to my life...no fucking joke). But I haven't ever wished that all of Christianity was suddenly removed.

Vorkosigan

Unlike Diogenes, I am basically hostile to Christianity, which to me is simply another authority belief like Communism and the right-wing Leninist Chinese authoritarianism I've been fighting here in Taiwan. But unlike Johntheapostate, I was never a Christian. Since I've had a cognizant mind, I've been an atheist. I decloaked at 13, and never looked back. If you want to see my thinking on Christinanity, go to this thread on missionaries in GRD.

Must of the questions we discuss here actually don't impinge on Christianity very much. Even a mythical Jesus hasn't stopped people from becoming Christians; according to Barna some 35% of evangelicals believe Jesus was spiritually, not physically, resurrected. Whatever ideas or conclusions we arrive at aren't that important to the atheists here; I can't think of anyone who become a Xtian if they arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Jesus was a real person and not a myth. The only people affected by that are the Christians who show up here committed to a certain kind of Christianity, which is why they struggle against it so mightily.

I think another reason why lots of us can maintain distance is that we've had some training in scholarly analysis, where one learns methodologies for distancing the Self from the object of study -- the use of statistics and mathematical methods, the deployment of logic, the automatic critique of one's own ideas. These are useful in keeping cool when confronting topics one is emotionally involved in.

Perhaps another reason is that many of us are settled in our own minds how we feel. Nothing that happens in this forum is going to threaten my personal beliefs that there is no god and Jesus, if he existed, was an ordinary human being.

Of course, another reason is the heavy-handed moderation ....

Your question is fascinating, though. I had never thought about it until now. Thanks.

Vorkosigan

Toto

I was raised as a liberal Christian, but I think that my parents were non-believers who used the local Methodist church as a cover to avoid getting into trouble with the McCarthyites (I know my father was an agnostic, but I didn't learn that my mother didn't really believe until after her death.) Other relatives were different varieties of Christians; the family was divided between "holy rollers" who fell under the sway of corrupt preachers, and the more materialist side of the family who tried to keep the preachers from taking their money.

During my formative years in college in the 60's, I decided that nobody actually believed in Christianity literally, but it was still a useful vehicle for political action and social and artistic expression. I read a lot of existentialist philosophers and political commentators. My favorite economics professor was a Jesuit priest.

But then leftist religion faded away and the Catholic Church got more conservative and obsessed with controlling people's sex lives, and the religious right started using evangelical churches as recruiting devices. That was when I joined Atheists United and started reading up on Christian recruiting techniques.

My current view is that fundamentalists are evil and follow demented politics and economics, while liberals are too wooly minded and ineffective to stand up to them. But I can appreciate how in some situations, people have to join a church.

I guess I have seen so many varieties of Christianity that I can't get too upset with Christianity in general.

ohwilleke

Personally, Bible study was an important reason I left Christianity. It takes a bedrock principle that was previously sacred and demystified it, which frees you to look as Christianity as a whole from a different perspective.

Bible study also makes a great device for bringing others along the same path that I did. It isn't so much that I have animus towards Christianity per se, as that the Bible is an excellent way to reveal to an insider in Christianity from a source they are comfortable working with, the contradictions of the Christian faith whose claims to be Biblically based don't always hold up under close examination.

One doesn't really have to twist or distort the Bible to get this effect. Simply calling attention to what it has to say, which surprises many of the faithful, is often more than enough.

Also, if, like me, you grew up with a through knowledge of the Bible and theology as part of your religious training, then discussing the Bible is interesting simply because it involves a large, hard won body of knowledge that would otherwise now be totally useless. In the same vein, people with a deep knowledge of Greek mythology try to apply that knowledge, even if they don't believe that pagan gods are real.

Docevil

Like the others, I have no hostility towards Christianity (though, individuals Christians have been known to anger me).

I was raised Catholic, and then spent seven years as a fundie. Personally, I fell away from Christianity intellectually, as I tried (and failed) to match fundamentalist teachings with what was real. The breaking point was when I took in a female roommate who had no place to go, and was pretty much thrown out of my church for it.

I think that most 'Christians' are really culturally so, as opposed to true believers, and thus, can be reasoned with. Personally, I just try to take each person as they come, and make up my mind from there.

Doc