Why I chose to become an agnostic
After more than a decade of studying the Bible as a Christian, I saw my own bias and chose to prioritize objective facts and my own sense of reason above that which I may wish to be true
Dear friends, family, and random people on the Internet,
On Feb 27, I posted that “…after more than a decade of studying the Bible, I have become an agnostic.”
Since posting that, I have been flooded with hundreds of comments and over a dozen direct messages from Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, agnostics, and atheists. Early on, I did entertain at least one request for interview with someone, but now that I have received additional requests for essentially the same thing, it becomes impractical for me to treat the rest of the interview requests in the same manner. While I have responded to quite a number of the public comments, I believe that it is best for me to write this brief explanation to hopefully clear up some uncertainty regarding what events led up to me renouncing my faith.
As always, feel free to share your thoughts publicly in the comments, even if you may disagree with my analysis.
My faith history
I grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist Christian family, but was not a Christian in the truest sense until my conversion at around the age of 12.
To summarize, my conversion experience toward Christianity helped me to avoid prison and an early grave.
Pre-Salvation
Before my conversion, I had a violent temper, depression, resentment and a terrible academic life.
Because of the property damage which my temper caused, my dad assigned me to read the Book of Proverbs once per month “until this problem stops.” Proverbs has a lot to say about life in general, including about angry people, their folly, and the unnecessary trouble their anger causes them in life. Thanks to me thinking about what Proverbs has to say, over the course of a few years I gained mastery over my temper to the point that it has no longer been an issue.
The reason I was depressed and resentful was because of various people in my life who had contributed to a hostile living environment for me. To speak of one particularly traumatic experience, I went as an underage “camper” to a religious summer camp in California where I basically did not know anyone. Everyone was a stranger. At that camp, I participated in the daytime activities and tried not to get into too much trouble (even though during archery lessons I deliberately shot an arrow into the canopy of a tall tree). Sometimes I would do something that the adults at the camp did not appreciate, but I generally was a good kid, if a bit annoying. When the adult supervisors were not around, however, I was bullied, harassed, threatened, physically wounded, forcibly stripped and nearly drowned by the far bigger and stronger male campers around me. This bullying happened throughout my “hell week” at that camp. Most, if not all of these things happened in the total absence of any real adult supervision. (Now that I have two summers’ worth of experience as a camp staff, I am aware that negligence on the part of my camp counselors is partly to blame for allowing for the circumstances which would make such bullying even possible.) Needless to say, I left that camp as a very traumatized kid.
In addition, at the time, my family lived in a very physically messy house, with far too much clutter for one to reasonably expect good mental health. I kid you not when I say that it was so messy that one sibling secretly ate ice cream under a couch and the empty bucket was not discovered until months later. At any given place within the house there could reasonably be estimated to be clutter measuring about one meter deep, with a few exceptions. It seemed like everyone was going insane. I hated life at home.
I also hated life away from home. At my elementary school, I was trying to achieve a name for myself as “class clown,” in the process ignoring my math lessons. As the courses progressed, I fell hopelessly behind. Even when I did choose to focus, I failed. I also made enemies with a lot of my peers.
During that stage of my life, I pondered suicide on a number of occasions. I also invented my own version of what I have since that point come to recognize as a version of the Simulation Hypothesis.
The Gospel
However, when my family moved from Nevada to Oklahoma, we had the opportunity for a new beginning: a new house, new school, new local church family, new friends and neighbors. By that point I had come to realize that the life I was living prior to that point was not enjoyable. I also recognized that if I personally behaved the same way that I did in Nevada, then I would find myself in basically the same terrible social environment that I had in Nevada.
I knew that I needed to change. But I was struggling to find a way to logically live as a “good” person without attempting to cover up my tumultuous past. The water may have passed under the bridge, but my head was stuck upstream.
Finally, at the new SDA Church congregation, I heard a sermon from the Bible on the steps to divine forgiveness and Salvation. I confessed my sins to God (1 John 1:9), believed in Jesus as my Lord and Savior (John 3:16), and was baptized (Mark 16:16). Additionally, I developed a strong interest in studying the Bible and started putting good-faith effort into everything I did (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
Post-Salvation
Because of that new start, I was able to mentally put my past behind me and focus on the future, which required me to forgive everyone who had harmed me, including the bullies from that summer camp (Matthew 6:15). My daily Bible reading habit also helped me by improving my reading comprehension, which, combined with my dad’s mandatory flash card drills with me, my own newfound individual efforts, and a teacher who actually was willing to teach me from where I was at, eventually resulted in me making all A’s in school.
Eventually, I graduated high school (Maplewood Academy) summa cum laude (4.00 unweighted, cumulative GPA). While at Maplewood, I was one of the most religiously inclined students around. I was involved with Campus Ministries and was considering majoring in religion when I entered college. I went to the ASI Youth for Jesus mission trip to West Virginia, I volunteered for my local Pathfinder Club (“Tulsa Twisters”) and excelled at that, receiving the Pathfinder Excellence Award (which was scarce) twice from them.
Despite choosing to major in political science, when I entered the SDA’s flagship institution of higher learning, Andrews University, I still had the same religious zeal that I had in high school.
I was also a huge fan of Dr. Ben Carson — a fellow Seventh-day Adventist — who wrote his autobiography, “Gifted Hands.” I recognized that there were some key commonalities between my life up to that point and Carson’s. Both of us struggled in school, but overcame and went on to achieve and excel among our peers. Both of us struggled with violent tempers. However, one major difference between my experience and Carson’s was that my own temper (despite my sincere pleadings for God to save me from it) took years to subside, whereas Carson’s temper was gone immediately after the day he almost killed one of his friends.
While I am glad to not struggle with a violent temper, depression, or poor academic performance anymore, the timeline for my own experience does not conclusively indicate that my 180-degree life turnaround was due to anything supernatural.
For those who may not be familiar with how a sincere person may improve because of mindset and in spite of what they think the real cause is, please look up the placebo effect.
My current reasoning…
While in the Andrews University honors program, I was assigned to write a term paper about my worldview, also known as “The Worldview Paper.” I gathered many documents and books that I wanted to cite as having an influence on my personal ideology, which is when I opened a book called “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand.
Rand, an atheist minarchist, affirmed much of my beliefs on the proper role of government, but challenged my beliefs on other things like the morality of selfishness, the existence of God, and the truth of the Bible. When I first read Atlas Shrugged, I firmly rejected those beliefs which challenged my own.
However, last October-ish, I was speaking with a couple of Latter-day Saints (Mormon) missionaries. Upon their request, I read through much of the Book of Mormon and asked them many questions about it, but I did not realize how much that experience with them would force me to ask myself some deep questions about my own religion. While I enjoyed meeting with the Mormons, I politely-but-firmly rejected their book as not being supported by sufficient evidence. For example, it makes significant historical claims about the indigenous Americans, claims which I should think would have more notable empirical discoveries to support them. Also, the Mormons’ primary means of attempting to convince me was to have me pray to God so that He would tell me whether or not to believe the Book of Mormon is true. This is basically an appeal to pathos (emotion) and nothing more. I followed their directions, and…did not feel the pathos that was supposed to validate the Book of Mormon as being true. Even if I had felt it, it would not have been enough for me to know with confidence that it is true, since emotions can be deceptive by their nature.
However, having rejected Mormonism on the basis of its lack of empirical evidence, my sense of intellectual honesty demanded of me that I use a similar standard when considering my own religion.
I was reading my Bible (as I did every morning) when I came across passages that either contradicted reality around me or contradicted other parts of the Bible. Many of these problematic passages I had read before, but had dismissed as only seeming to contradict, blaming my own ignorance and/or lack of having “enough faith” to understand. However, this time I decided to let the text speak for itself. I decided that, if the Bible is true, then it would not need me to constantly make excuses for why issues would appear in the text. At the time I realized this, I also realized that if I had encountered this type of nonsense in any other book, then I would have been far more open about it with myself. Compared to more generic reading material, how much more honest with myself should I be regarding a book that claims to be divinely inspired!
To give just one example (which is really all it takes in order to necessitate a thorough re-evaluation of all possible religions or lacks thereof), Romans 13:1–7 NKJV says the following:
Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. 4 For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. 5 Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. 7 Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor.
I checked the context of both the passage itself and the time period in which it was written. While the Book of Romans may not have been written during the most extreme phase of persecution that was to come from Nero, the scholarly writer Paul still had plenty of reason to put at least some exception in there. Paul surely had to have been aware of Old Testament history and the instances of persecution of the believers of Yahweh by both foreign and domestic governments. With no exceptions put in the passage, the reigns of terror of history’s most hated mass-murderers like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are suddenly elevated to the status of being ordained by God Himself.
According to the principle of Divine Right presented plainly in Romans 13, you are in the wrong if you oppose the government. Such a principle begs the question of whether the morality of the Bible is really based on an objective system of “good” and “evil” other than that which the powerful (both earthly and heavenly) decree to be “good” and “evil.” In fact, the setting of the Biblical universe sets God as both the supreme dictator and the judge of what is “good” and “evil.” Naturally, since the God of the Bible is a person, it is reasonable to conclude that if Christian morality comes from God, then Christian morality is subjective, since it is based on the individual judgement of a particular person — God. In such a case, it would make sense that God may do anything He pleases and declare it to be moral, since His position of supreme power entitles Him to de facto control over what is considered “moral.”
However, just because I dislike the conclusions I come to does not automatically make the evidence or my reasoning false. So, I compared Romans 13 with the rest of the Bible. Not only is the Bible filled with examples of individuals who disobeyed the government in order to do what is “right,” but Peter explicitly states in Acts 5:29 NKJV that “We ought to obey God rather than men.”
Therefore, having recognized that contradiction of the Bible with itself, I concluded that I needed to start again from null, from agnosticism, with the intent of rebuilding my ideology in whichever direction the evidence and reason pointed.
I could have simply chosen to reject Paul’s writings, but, if I were to do that, it would undermine the entire concept of which books rightfully belong in the Canon vs. in the Apocrypha.
If Paul’s writings do not belong in there, then how do I really know that the remainder of the books do belong there?
How do I really know that there are not outside books that should have made it into the Bible?
How do I really know that the Bible is even the book an honest and objective truth-seeker should hold above every other religious or anti-religious book?
I grew up in the SDA Christian Church, so my starting point has been biased in favor of the validity of the Bible. However, I value the truth enough to treat the Bible with the same level of skepticism as I would the Quran, the Vedas, the Book of Mormon, the Origin of Species, the Communist Manifesto, Atlas Shrugged, and every other worldview-bearing text out there.
As Ayn Rand wrote in Atlas Shrugged, with the fictional character John
Galt speaking to crowds of people:
“The restriction [which the collectivists in the story setting] seek to escape is the law of identity. The freedom they seek is freedom from the fact that an A will remain an A, no matter what their tears or tantrums — that a river will not bring them milk, no matter what their hunger — that water will not run uphill, no matter what comforts they could gain if it did, and if they want to lift it to the roof of a skyscraper, they must do it by a process of thought and labor, in which the nature of an inch of pipe line counts, but their feelings do not — that their feelings are impotent to alter the course of a single speck of dust in space or the nature of any action they have committed. “Those who tell you that man is unable to perceive a reality undistorted by his senses, mean that they are unwilling to perceive a reality undistorted by their feelings. ‘Things as they are’ are things as perceived by your mind; divorce them from reason and they become ‘things as perceived by your wishes.’ ”
A is A, regardless of how much I might dislike the implications of that fact. If there is a God or Gods, then I cannot make him/them nonexistent. If there is no God, then I cannot make God existent. I live within reality as either rational or irrational. I choose to be rational.
The reason I am open to the possibility of the existence of a God is because I recognize that even if there were absolutely zero evidence indicating that a God exists, it would be impossible for me to prove the non-existence of God, since, if there is a God, He could easily hide Himself from all human efforts to discover Him.
I reserve the right to change my mind, and categorically refuse to allow another human do my thinking in place of my own brain. I also categorically reject alleged bribes and threats (e.g. Heaven and Hell) as being sufficient cause for belief in a particular religion. Facts don’t care about what you believe you are entitled to. If the facts point me to a belief system that includes bribes and threats, then so be it; but may the facts guide my decision, not the promises. Just because someone promises to send me double the Bitcoin that I send them does not mean that they are telling the truth. If I get scammed and send the Bitcoin, then no matter how disappointing it may be, I am not getting my Bitcoin back, much less the “double” Bitcoins that I was fraudulently promised.
In summary, I saw a contradiction in the Bible, I saw my own bias, and I decided that intellectual honesty compels me to re-start my worldview of God from null and build up again based on objective facts first, then my own reasoning second, then my own wishes a distant third.
By the way, for those of you who argue that life is “meaningless” without God, I say this: I am more at peace with myself and my sense of intellectual honesty now as an agnostic than while I was still a Christian. I find meaning in ethical, long-term-focused self-interest.
Regardless of your beliefs, thanks for your engagement in this public discussion. If you wish to respond to me on this topic, please do so publicly so that we can all be more efficient with the dissemination of knowledge. ⚛️
