My guide to conversion and deconversion
The purpose of this text is to propose my own version and answers to
the famous Theist's
guide to converting atheists : what kind of evidences could there be and should be expected
for a religion; which evidences can be strong, weak, or worthless ;
especially empirical evidences.
Answers on both sides of the challenge, because I have been on both
sides.
Namely: as a former Evangelical Christian, what evidences made me
deconvert; what made it hard for me to deconvert earlier; why I don't
reconvert, and what it would take for a religion to seem, maybe not
clearly the truth, but at least credible and worthy of consideration,
and which I usually don't find.
First, one important thing, that, I think, would help many people
deconvert. Because it was an important obstacle that slowed down my
deconversion.
How Christians could more easily deconvert
One short evidence against Christianity I'm puzzled to not see more
often, and to see so many Christians having seemingly not heard of: the
archeological evidence that has relatively recently been found against
Exodus and explaining how Judaism emerged.
Now let's develop another big one:
It would be to explicitly get out of the dilemma between religion and
naturalism.
When I was Christian, I saw the mere labels of "atheism", tries to
argue against the existence of God, against miracles or afterlife, as
sufficent reasons to stop reading any further what other arguments
these people had to offer against Christianity.
Because I considered (and I still do consider) that many miracles
happen still now, and that denying them, as well as denying the
intuitive ideas that the mind differs from matter and that afterlife
should exist, at least partly an expression of blindness on theoretical
and/or practical levels.
It was not an obvious thing for me to fully develop and show the
consistency of
a worldview that reconciles [rationalism and the rejection of religious
doctrines] with [the mind/matter duality and the existence of
afterlife].
Not because of any logical incompatibility or difficulty (as there do
exist many people whose position
combine these as well without problem
- see also my metaphysics), but just because
of the cultural rumor that assumes that they would be incompatible (the
people who combine these are not usually loud in the media and
blogosphere).
More precisely: I was under the impression that, somehow, rationalism
(the practice of reason as a primary method to truth above faith and
revelation) was misleading because it leads people to the wrong
conclusion, and therefore should not be trusted.
It was hard for me to find out that things were more complex than that.
- That it is not the scientific method which led atheist to
unfortunately happen to deny the existence of miracles and afterlife,
but a sort of accident, that they did not properly examine the
question, and that they focused their study on other issues.
- That despite a possible error from their part on this question,
they have made very wise findings on other issues.
- That they do have otherwise excellent evidences against
religions, and that these evidences are independent of metaphysical
assumptions, and can hold as well in the framework of metaphysical
dualism and the existence of afterlife.
- That religions can very well be left and free rational thinking
be adopted without touching the confidence in afterlife.
- That there can be place in heaven for apostats. And that it is
even a better news of heaven than the religious one, as it does not
make any absurd requirements such as the requirement believing anything
without evidence.
And also: that even more evidences against Christianity and other
religions can specifically be found in a dualist framework.
Namely:
- An extensive study of near death experience testimonies, which
contradicts or at least fails to support the teachings of specific
religions about the afterlife.
- The fact that miracles exist in diverse religions as well, and
none has any more outstanding (fundamentally different) credible ones
than others
- The internal inconsistency of the story of Jesus'miracles which,
if true, would be an awfully wasteful use of God's power, which would
have been much better used otherwise in less efforts, such as writing
from scratch better human (and other species') DNA some hundreds of
million years ago.
- That the sense of Jesus resurrection, as explained in Paul's
epistles, had more to do with materialism that dualism. Namely, that it
was rather motivated by the unability of the people of that time to
have any hope of afterlife without the body. Their unability to
distinguish mind from matter, and to understand that the physical body
is just a thing, an construction of atoms that can be replaced by other
atoms, so that individual atoms making the body don't have any value
for the soul after death, and won't need to be revived by any
resurrection for giving the soul a full new life.
- The presence of people on Earth with rememberings of a past life,
thus refuting any religious teachings that deny all possibility of
reincarnation.
What could could give a religion a good deal of credibility as a
true link to God
- Having received an email message from someone who got the
spiritual revelation to send it together with the address of my future
wife (and/or that he had wrote to her my contact), if that turned out
to be true (that we indeed fit each other). Indeed, for personal
reasons I cannot sum up here, I cannot seriously accept the idea that a
decent God with the ability to inspire someone on Earth by His Will,
could have failed to do this. Now I see the fact of having not received
such a message, as an evidence of absence of anybody currently on Earth
who gets any inspiration from God's will.
- That many people would have independently rediscoved the same
spiritual truths without having been humanly taught them (this is a
very well-know argument, the "argument from locality"). For example from
Near Death Experiences.
- That Jesus or any prophet would have made an announcement of the
form
"In truth I tell you, a new living specie will appear on Earth, it will
look this way, behave this and that way" and then later it would indeed
appear, and now we could not find any fossil trace of this specie from
a time before this announcement, and could not locate it close to any
other branch in the tree of evolution. (Please don't tell me that, if
breads could be multiplied by Jesus and his body be resurrected and
ascended out of Earth's orbital zone then a little piece of DNA can
still resist God's will)
What could make a religion worthy of respect, be a sign of wisdom
from its part
- A religious person presenting to me (or displaying on his web
site) a logically well-structured description of his views on religious
issues; not pretending to have any more fundamental difference with
other religious doctrines than his position really has; debating with
me without
accusing me of having made any mistake I did not make or having had any
wrong attitude I did not have; without overloading his messages with
stupidities and logical fallacies, without holding his arguments as
stronger than they really are; with enough patience and intelligence to
properly understand my own views. (Despite my long experience, first as
a Christian, then trying to bebate with Christians, still never found
one close to satisfying such criteria of intellectual decency).
- A demonstration of genuine, non-trivial wisdom and clues in
moral, economic and political affairs above the too common childishness
of religious views on these issues. See my own clues for example here and there and there, and
whether your spiritual
inspiration could lead you to any clues with comparable or even higher
wisdom on these issues. Indeed, why claim that you have any divine
guidance or special value, and bother promoting them, if it gives you
no more clue or any special means of any kind, to bring any more
significant contribution to the progress of the world, than anyone else
can have without it ?
What is definitely not convincing
Pretty much everything Christians ever told me until now. Example among
many
others: pointing out that the Cathechism of the Catholic church
declares faith to be compatible with reason (one's rationality has to
be demonstrated by effectively behaving rationally, rather than just
claimed and believed on blind faith), or that there exist some
Christian scientists (I was Christian and scientist myself, and I have
yet to see a hint that there exists any Christian scientists that are
neither ignorant of the arguments, as I was, nor practicing specially
flawed illogical thinking when it comes to religious issues).
In
the below debate, a Christian wrote "No amount of outside evidence is
going to be enough for you". Sorry, this accusation is plain false.
Instead, what Christians interpret this way, is in fact the following
fact: no amount of NON-evidence, stupidities, ridiculous fallacies and
vain, blind faith declarations that this or that should be accepted as
evidence while it is in fact clearly empty and illogical, is going to
be enough for me.
More links and references
Greta
Christina's version of the guide
Misconception 1
"Scientists have an atheist agenda"; misconception 2: "theories require faith to believe"
A debate thread "What
empirical evidence could there be for God?" - my shortened testimony of the circumstances that pushed me to conversion and deconversion - a developed version I wrote of one of the above observations
In this site: Some logical refutation of Christianity - section "More evidence against theism" in that page.
If you have more interesting references to suggest, you can write me
(trustforum at gmail com)
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