I am experimenting with a vlog replacement for this blog. For now, I am doing both. Below is a short accompanying video, as an alternative to the more detailed written blog.

Introduction:

Here’s the deal. We are living in a post-Christian culture where, since 2020, more people are not involved with a church than are. Sure, most people over forty will see churches in their towns as long as they live, but for their kids or grandkids, the churches may become as rare as cigar or soda shops are today. This exit is fueled by several good reasons, the most significant, reason itself. It is not my hope that the organized church fails, but if it is an inevitability, I want to make sure that positive things follow. My heart is for those who have left or are disillusioned, as I once left Christianity. For those new readers, I want to make my purpose clear.

The Titanic Metaphor

Imagine the American Christian culture is the Titanic. The ship may have been a glorious masterpiece, but it is listing and starting a slow-motion descent into the sea. While many onboard enjoy a fine steak dinner in the Dining Saloon, others listen to a Strauss waltz performed by the chamber orchestra in the lounge, all unaware of the gash in the hull below the waterline. On deck, however, with the tilt of the incline increasing each hour, people are falling over the rails into the sea. I see myself as the coxswain (disturber of lifeboats), not the repairer of ships, as I don’t know how. There is no hope of returning to the ship for those in the water. But in this metaphor, the historical Jesus of Galilee is the Steinway, a beautiful sound that resonates deep within a massive iron structure. The jumpers are not doing so because of the piano’s music. This Steinway could fit in a lifeboat if the coxswain shows them how.

In this metaphor, the sea isn’t the cold North Atlantic but the colder Sea of Nihilism. I realize that my atheist friends disagree, but a belief in a personal God has given meaning to our culture for almost two thousand years. Over 48% of Generation Z and later have no religious beliefs, and that number is rapidly increasing. Their only meaning for their lives, existential.

I am the last person to support the postmodernists’ idea, as Indiana Jones stated in The Dial of Destiny, “It doesn’t matter what you believe, but how hard you believe it.” It does matter what you believe. I honestly think there is a logical path to believing in a personal creator of the cosmos and a hope of redemption through the historical Jesus of Galilee. All we really need is a lifeboat . . . and the Baby Grand. But my zeal isn’t saving people from Hell, but from nihilism, which may be a greater torment.

Story Time-How Christians Lost Their Minds, Part Seven

After returning to Christianity in the mid-1990s, I attended a large evangelical church in northern Michigan, where I was a deacon. During one of our deacon meetings, we were all sitting in the board room waiting for the pastor, who was habitually late. One of my fellow deacons said, “Did you hear that the Clinton administration is secretly rounding up Christians by the thousands and putting them into internment prisons? These large warehouses outside of Detroit and Chicago are really prisons. Some of them have smokestacks, which are connected to furnaces for the coming Christian Holocaust.”

The whole group acted amazed . . . but not me. Another deacon said, “Yes, I heard about that.”

“This makes no sense,” I said. “Where’s the evidence? This would be in every paper, and their families at home would be out of their minds with concern.” The group gave me a disgusting look. One said, “Mike, you’re naive. If you are in tune with the spirit of God, you would know these things. Besides, the Clintons control all the press, so this is not being reported.”

I could tell hundreds of such stories from within the evangelical church. They are having a crisis of epistemology. There is no better home for conspiracy theories and lies than in some Christian churches. This is not a moral problem (though it can become one) nor a problem of intelligence, but the wrong assumptions within their culture.

As I’ve said many times, in this age of declining Christian influence, the conservative church has responded by sacrificing truth for political power, and the progressive church has sacrificed truth for harmony. The road to recovery for each is found by those words I said, “Where’s the evidence?”

An Epistemological Problem

The late Carl Sagan coined the statement, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” For evangelicals, personal testimonies are considered the highest level of evidence, along with subjective evidence, “I know x is true because the spirit of God told me.” This leads to a Dunning-Kruger Effect, where those who know the least feel they know the most. Research has shown that testimonies and subjective evidence are the least reliable sources of information. By nature, we exaggerate, embellish, and lie when we tell a story about an experience because of our emotional biases. That’s why eyewitnesses are not always the best source of an event, even in court, while a video of the event is priceless.

The Bible agrees that subjective evidence is untrustworthy. In Jeremiah 17:9, it is written, “The heart is more deceitful than anything else, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” The heart here appears to be the source of feelings. Our emotions are wonderful, but they were never intended to be our way to find truth.

On a positive note, I’ve been writing about this problem for over fifteen years. Dr. Francis Collins’ (A Christian and scientist who directed the human genome project) new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust, says the same things I’ve been saying, but says it better, and has more respect.

Our Present State of National Dysfunction

Time is of the essence as we are witnessing the Christian Right, one of three operatives, along with the “billionaire bros” and those with white supremacist tendencies (Stephen Miller, The Proud Boys), dismantle our government. For the Christian Right, this is the culmination of their epistemology gone awry.

The American historians, Heather Cox Richardson and Steven Hahn (his latest interview is here), have done an excellent job deconstructing what is happening to our country from a historical perspective. However, they both have admitted that they do not have a good handle on the Christian Right’s agenda. Having spent 28 years in that group and almost thirty years studying that movement, I understand it well. So, I will finish the “how we got here” story.

How We Got Here – Continued

Last time, I ended with the Scientific Revolution of the 1500-1700. It was built upon the ideas of the Renaissance, which were made possible by the ideas of Thomas Aquinas two hundred years previously. Aquinas simply returned to the notion that human reason was divine (but not perfect), given by God as a gift for finding truth. Secular research confirms that reason is the brain’s primary instrument for discovering information about the cosmos in which we live.

Aquinas also elevated nature (aka reality) to its rightful place of being glorious because God created it. The notion that nature was dirty, insignificant, or even evil had been carried over from some early Christian ideas shared by the Gnostics and Arians.

In my evangelical world before 1990, we called nature “worldly,” meaning connected to this evil material world. These ideas influenced the church through the Medieval period. To prove my point, I will buy a coffee for anyone who can produce one European painting from the fourth to the thirteenth centuries that features nature as the central theme. A mountain, a waterfall, a flower, or an ordinary person. All paintings were about “supernatural (above nature)” things, the only things that mattered.

In my own journey after leaving evangelicalism, these two issues, putting reason and nature back to their proper places, profoundly changed my life. My relationship with God is so much better than when I was a devoted evangelical . . . Yet, we who value reason and nature can’t dare mention this around a church without someone’s condemnation.

On Nature

Aquinas elevated nature (the reality around us) to equal status as scripture. If the Bible says the sky is polka dot red and yellow, but when you look at nature’s blue sky, you have three options: 1) practice self-delusion by imagining that the sky is polka dot red and yellow, 2) assume the Bible is mistaken, or 3) re-interpret what the Bible means. Since there is no logical re-interpretation of the polka dot sky, the re-interpretation must be of scriptures. Was the polka dot sky a metaphor? Most Christians today will choose self-delusion rather than re-interpret their Bible.

The Apostle Paul compelled the Colossians (in Colossians 2:8) See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. Yet, from its conception, different philosophies and traditions have captivated Christian cultures, including this dualistic notion that the material world is of no use or evil and human reason is not of God. This is not an original Judeo-Christian concept.

History Explains How We Got Here

The Renaissance (14th – 17th centuries), Scientific Revolution (15th -17th centuries), and Enlightenment (17th- 19th centuries) were profoundly successful if you measured it by the reduction in human suffering, happiness, wealth, and longevity. They had found the key to finding truth by eliminating the interference of our emotions (bias) and looking objectively at the evidence. Would the deacons in northern Michigan believe that Bill and Hillary were really arresting tens of thousands of Christians and burning them in ovens without anyone reporting it, even the victims’ families, if they looked carefully at the evidence? Would they believe this baseless conspiracy if they didn’t carry a political bias against the Clintons, and knowing that sharing such a story with fellow biased people would increase their standing with them? This is what I mean by exchanging truth for political power.

The Scientific Revolutions further defined the process for finding truth with the “Scientific Method.” As I said before, our subjective emotions and intuition are wonderful, but were never intended to find truth, and often act as the greatest interference in finding that truth.

Conservative Christians practice revisionist history by believing our country was founded by conservative Christians who thought just like they do. It was founded on ideas from the Enlightenment, celebrating reason and evidential truth. Five of the first six presidents were deists, a brand of theism that doubted all supernatural events without evidence. Deism was a late-Enlightenment perspective, and went too far as observationalism, where only things that can be observed and empirically tested are real. However, the Enlightenment had two other problems: the first was in morals, and the second was conflict with Christian traditions.

Morality

Briefly, the Enlightenment and reason could not equip society morally, for the innovations it was making, from steam-powered textile mills to atomic energy and AI. I will discuss that more next time.

Science’s Dissension with Christian Traditions/Culture

My evangelical friends, as I did when I was an evangelical, practice historical revisionism here too. We saw science and reason of the post-Medieval period as “aggressors against God’s holy word, the Bible.” But that is not true. It was against our culture . . . a good thing.

“Science” is from the Latin word “scientia, ” meaning knowledge. The Greek name for science is epistími, related to epistemology, or how we find truth. It is also kin to the Greek word sophia. When Proverbs (written in old Hebrew) is translated into Greek, the word used for “wisdom” is sophia.

I wrote here two years ago that “I love science,” a friend at my church said that means “You love Satan.” Last year, I led a Sunday school class where I had an incredible video of an atheist scientist, who then realized that abiogenesis was impossible, and then became a Christian through a long process. The only feedback I recall was one individual coming up to me and, in a sneer, saying, “Mike, you should know better, you can’t find God through science. God finds you.” The human mind is not seen by them as a gift from God, but from this nasty material world. Everything is magical.

However, Proverbs is devoted to the praise of sophia, or knowledge and wisdom about the cosmos that God has created. It is the same sophia that Solomon wanted, which pleased God so much that he also made him the richest man in the world. While much of Christianity demonizes science, I see it as the institution most dear to God’s heart, because its purpose is to find truth about the cosmos, God’s other word, and a wonderful gift. I’ve spent a lot of time in science and religion, and I can say confidently that the most honest people among them are scientists.

Religion is about conformity. If you don’t conform, you are morally inferior. In religion, you start with a conclusion (dogma) before you look at the evidence. Then you make up a conspiracy against the evidence if it conflicts with your dogma. They make it a moral problem, too. If you don’t accept the dogma, you are a bad person. This attitude causes many to jump into the water, the cold Nihilist Sea.

I will share three (of many possible) examples of the dissension between science and Christian traditions based on conjecture.

Galileo Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) observed that the Sun was the center of the solar system by direct observation with the newly invented telescope, and mathematical computations. The church held the dogma of a geocentric solar system as its long-held tradition. This was based on (secular) Claudius Ptolemy’s model from circa 130 CE, who had borrowed it from Aristotle. The church then made it an issue of theology via conjecture that if creation is anthropocentric, then the place where humans live must be the center of creation.

The church almost burned Galileo at the stake over his nonconformity to tradition. They did condemn him, though he was devoted to God and the church . . . but he was also devoted to truth, which religion is not.

James Hutton (June 1726 – 26 March 1797), in 1788, while standing in a small boat, studied the rock formation at Siccar Point, Scotland, noticing a great unconformity in the layers, and (rightly) concluded that the earth was millions of years old. That is the only conclusion you could make from those layers with an honest contemplation. This cannot be explained by a worldwide flood if you understand geology. That view has been corroborated by overwhelming evidence. The young-earth-creationist, are delusional and grossly dishonest. They demonize the science community, further eroding away the evangelicals’ trust in science. I’ve listened to many of their lectures and you walk away feeling that secular scientists are all idiots at the best, but working for the devil at the worst.

Hutton’s observation created dissension with the Christian church because it was part of their tradition that the earth was created in 4004 BC. This date came from James Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, who declared that God had created the cosmos at 6 pm on 22 October 4004 BC. This was from his calculations from Biblical genealogies. This (six thousand year old earth) became and has remained Christian dogma, although the Bible says NOTHING about the earth’s age. Many conservative churches make it an essential tenet of faith. If you don’t believe the Earth is six thousand years old, you cannot be a Christian. Many have been forced off the Titanic over this traditional dogma and over the rails.

Where Conservative Christians’ Epistemology Started to Go Off the Rails

When you have no evidence to support your position, despite the experts citing overwhelming evidence to support their dissent, you only have one choice: change your view or make up conspiracy theories and demonize the experts. Make scientists and thinkers the enemy of the church. Make education evil, except for an education that only teaches your traditional views.

This is why our new government today, fashioned by the conservative Christians, is full of idiots. There is no longer respect for smart, good people who have experience and have studied an issue for decades. This is why we are in trouble. I could die from COVID tomorrow, however, I have followed carefully the advice of the experts and I have never had COVID.

Charles Darwin (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) published his On The Origin of Species on November 24, 1859.

I understand many will not agree with me, and that’s fine. However, after decades of honest study, the evidence of evolution, at least on some level, is overwhelming. It is written in the fossil record, our DNA, and many other places. However, purely naturalistic Theory of Evolution has some bottlenecks, abiogenesis being the first. However, the evolution of life over millions of years cannot be disputed.

The Bible says nothing about evolution, but again, it is conjecture by Christians and their traditions that say that evolution cannot be true. For example, they claim that it would be impossible for death to enter the world until after the original sin of Adam, (a member of modern homo sapiens, or so we assume) and the Genesis story must be taken literally. Isn’t this putting God in a box of our own creation by ignoring reality?

I read a book about evolution by a conservative Christian friend. He followed the MO of Christians when they face evidence that conflicts with their assumptions and traditions. Three steps: 1) lie about the dissenting evidence, 2) create conspiracy theories about why the other side believes what they do, and 3) make it a moral issue.

In my friend’s book, the evidence he presents for human evolution is one famous fraudulent jaw and tooth fossil from 1912, where the finder falsely claimed it was the human missing link. That was my friend’s only evidence for evolution. I’ve heard this false narrative many times in Christian settings. My friend omitted over 6,000 pre-Homo sapiens hominin fossils (missing links), found by smart paleontologists who meticulously recorded them, many well preserved, some complete articulated skeletons, and some with their genome mapped. Factual evidence is never dangerous because it draws us closer to the truth. This has left the Christian community with an extreme bias against science and the evidence of reality, over Church traditions, not what the Bible says.

As Thomas Aquinas said, where there is a conflict between what we think the Bible says and what we find in nature, we must resolve it by re-interpreting the side with the least evidence. Since the Bible says nothing about evolution, it must be a Bible misinterpretation issue.

Making this Real

I just learned that my daughter-in-law was fired by the Trump administration, like hundreds of thousands of other scientists, because she is a medical science researcher. Our federal government is being gutted, cut to the bone in all its science research. The new budget will destroy NASA. Cancer research is gutted. This was part of Project 2025’s agenda, written by the Heritage Institution, a conservative Christian think tank. Watch as they destroy the arts and any thinking outside of their Christian subculture traditions. This is a disaster for our culture and our country. But they are doing it because of their low view of nature, their war on science because science has hurt their feelings, and for many, they think that God is going to burn this world up soon anyway, so why give a F—?

Meritocracy

The conservative Christians have also come to believe in a mythological fluidity of personal merit. “Anyone can work hard and be successful,” or “Anyone can study the Bible and become a saint.” Pseudo-meritocracy. Being rich is a sign of being good, therefore, Trump is the best. Their people are morally good, fighting nasty things like transsexuals . . . until they get caught themselves raping a child, because they don’t understand that the best of us and the worst of us are cut from the same cloth.

White men’s success is from merit, everyone else’s DEI. It is the fault of the minority individual who is poor from generational discrimination or from fleeing dysfunctional countries. Dehumanizing the immigrants because we are so much better is the thinking. This is behind their hatred for DEI, a new code term for racism being okay, because we (white men) are superior. This is the opposite view of Jesus of Galilee, who said that how you treat the least in your society defines your Christianity. The beautiful music of the Steinway is getting lost in the bowels of the Titanic’s rusty steel.

The last issue for conservative Christians is a forced Christian dominance (what some call “Christian Nationalism”). It is their unhealthy response to Christianity losing relevance in American culture. They set up a moral economy, determining what is bad sin, what is acceptable, which has no relevance to the teachings of Jesus of history. They assign those on the outside of the Christian culture as bad people and those on the inside as far superior, morally, even if their inside heroes are habitual abusers of women, greedy, arrogant, haters of the poor, racists, and liars. It is their agenda for a new government that applies their traditions onto the masses. One conservative Christian told me he hopes that Trump will enact capital punishment for transexuals and illegal immigrants. He hates them.

This Christian nationalism is a narcissistic endeavor of the church. But it would be half as bad as it is if they were trying to impose the teachings of the historical Jesus, the music of the piano, on the masses. Imagine imposing charity, compassion, empathy, love, beauty, peace, the high esteem of nature, the lust for truth and wisdom, and the concept of redemption on the masses instead of the opposite that the present Christian Right inside our government is attempting to do. Yet, with that said, Jesus was also clear that his kingdom is not material, not political.

The Christian nationals look to the kings of the Old Testament for their models and to the book of Revelation. Revelation references a thousand-year reign of Christ before the end of the earth. These Christians are “post-millennial,” such as many of my friends, who believe that Christians will conquer the Earth for a thousand years, create a theocracy, and impose their concept of God’s law on everyone. The gates of Hell will not prevail against them.

For centuries, the religious world has placed a high value on believing things without evidence. “Faith” is one of the terms used, although I see faith as something entirely different. So, this flawed epistemology has come home to roost. The Christian is now the most likely to be swindled. they have lost their minds.

Dear Heather Cox Richardson and Steven Hahn, this is the mischief that is behind what the Christian Right is doing to our country.

On a Positive Note

I know this is getting long, and I still have one more article to do on this topic. I do not want to leave on a negative note here. Here’s the good news. The reason people are leaving Christianity rarely has anything to do with the music of Jesus. It is cultural things. These things are not caused by intelligence or morality. If they were, a remedy would be hard. But the issue is with a way of thinking as dictated by the Christian subculture.

I wish I had one of those Neuralyzer that the Men in Black used to erase one’s memory. If we could remove or reimagine a way of thinking that has developed over two thousand years, with a healthy view of reason and this material world, things would be much better.

In closing, I will leave you with one of the music sheets for the Titanic’s Steinway. You can read it here.

I will finish this series next time with one more installment about how we got here. Looking at developments from Kant and Kierkegaard and events of the twentieth century. I will try to be more concise and then put this discussion to bed for good.

In Peace, Mike