thread: 2005-08-09 : The New Open House 2: Religion
On 2005-08-12, Kevin Heckman wrote:
I was raised in the American Protestant tradition now known as "Evangelical", in the heady days when the Moral Majority was just starting to become a prominent player in the sociopolitical landscape. As I came of age I started getting into apologetics and was pretty slick with it. At one point I had the entire book of James, and most of Proverbs, memorized. I read a lot of books from Christian apologists (Plantinga and W.M. Craig, mostly) but decided that to better "know the enemy" I should read books by non-Christian philosophers, and therein began my downfall. I slowly moved from Christian, to generic theist, to deist, to agnostic, and to atheist. Religion had rarely been a source of emotional or spiritual connection for me, so once the rational side of my belief was gone there was really nothing keeping me there. Nonetheless I still went to church to avoid having "that conversation" with my parents.
Ultimately I decided I was tired of deceiving my family and told them. They were pretty shocked but, contrary to my fears, didn't disown me or anything. Since then it's been a struggle to have a meaningful relationship when we have such wildly divergent views on things. Talking about superficial subjects gets really old after a while.
My own views have transmogrified back and forth over the years. Sometimes I feel pretty atheistic, but usually I don't really care if there's a god or not ("apatheist"). I figure that if he's worthy of the "God" classification, then he's not going to be a complete dick and punish people for sincere nonbelief. If he's not worthy of the title, and is just an insecure metaphysical bully, then I doubt it really matters what anyone does, since his decisions would all be arbitrary anyway.
This makes Lud go "So Familiar"
I could have written that. :)
