One of the perks of living on a mountain lake, on a beautiful, and cool (compared to the heat in the rest of the country) island, we have a plethora of friends and family who want to visit us. I am therefore sorry that I’ve been consumed with these wonderful people. I must also add, I’ve done more dancing in the past two weeks than since high school and the happy dancing is definitely connected to the possibility of coming off chemo in two weeks.

On the last post, I had a short vignette about a teenager named Ben and him telling his mother he was not going to church anymore. This time, I want to replay the story, but how I would handle it.

There are a few caveats with this rendition. First of all, I am sure some readers will find my ideas disturbing, while others will find them refreshing. My ideas will contradict established Christian culture in places, but they do not violate any clear scriptural mandate. Secondly, in this conversation below, I share much more than I would in an everyday, one-sitting conversation. However, if I dragged this out in real time, over several weeks, I may lose people. Lastly, while I am candid, as always, this story is fiction.

A Different Conversation with Ben

Mike: Hey, it’s almost time to leave for church. Are you okay?

Ben: I’m okay, but I’m not going to church anymore.

Mike: Really? You must have a good reason. I would love to hear all about it. Let me grab a chair and let’s talk about it… (after sitting in a chair beside the bed) So, did anything happen at church that makes you not want to go?

Ben: No. Not one thing happened, but I just don’t like going. Actually, I hate it. I’ve only been going because I thought you and Mom wanted me to.

Mike: We do want you to go, but honestly, we do for selfish reasons. We love to see our children parade into church and act nice. Christian people then think we are good parents. But this is not about us and our reputation, this is about you. What do you like and dislike about church?

Ben: I guess I like it that most people are nice to me there. But I hate going to Sunday school, It’s so superficial. We are spoken to but we can’t ask hard questions. If we do ask questions, we are ridiculed and are told that being a Christian is about blind faith, so questions show us to be people of lack of faith. I don’t like to sit in boring lectures or sermons every Sunday on hard pews and I hate church music.

Mike: Our pastor is much better than most. I find substance in many of their sermons. But I understand how you might find them boring. I don’t like the style of church music either, although I know we have a very talented music team. But the style of church music is deeply entrenched in the American Christian culture and I don’t think it is going to change anytime soon. What is that music you listen to?

Ben: I like Hip-hop and Rap. I mentioned to Andy, our youth pastor, a couple of years ago that I didn’t like the Sunday morning worship service, and he said it was a spiritual problem; that if I loved Jesus like I should, I would love the Sunday morning worship service like he does.

Mike: That’s manipulative language from Andy and unfortunate. I’m sorry you were ridiculed in Sunday School class for complex questions. Questions are good. Wisdom begins with doubt, and if doubt isn’t respected, there can be no wisdom, only groupthink. If you read the book of Proverbs, God praises wisdom as the greatest of human endeavors. Curiosity about the cosmos that God has created is, in my opinion, the highest form of worship.

Let me be honest about Sunday morning worship, son. This may be hard to understand, but it’s a human, cultural phenomenon. It seems to have worked for two thousand years, but I’m not sure it will work for your generation. Over the years, I’ve suggested many alternatives to the Sunday morning worship service, just for people like you, and my suggestions were met with hostility. It is hard to go against culture, and religious culture is the most entrenched.

Ben: Andy said that the Bible mandates that we go to church every Sunday morning and the worship service is as God has planned it. Are you saying that’s not true.

Mike: If Andy was still around, I would ask him to show me the place in the Bible where it says it mandated to go to Church, or that the worship service as we know it is God’s plan.

There is no commandment in the Bible for such. This idea is traditional and is based on very loose conjecture. We are warned not to make human traditions bigger than God. The Bible is clear. It says that real worship isn’t a ritual or a meeting, but giving your life as a living sacrifice. Paul also told early Christians to avoid going alone, but to be in a Christian group that encourages one another. So, the operative word is encourage. If the Sunday morning worship service is encouraging to someone, helping them to live better, to follow the teachings of Jesus better, absolutely, they should go. But if it isn’t, they need to seek that encouragement wherever they can find it.

Ben: Really? Andy said that going to worship service was part of the Ten Commandments, to keep the Sabbath holy.

Mike: People read into the Bible what they want it to say. Honestly, that commandment is primarily about human rest. God wants us to rest one day per week. That’s keeping it holy. Rest is God’s gift to us. This was written to Jews who had an obvious understanding of how to keep the Sabbath holy. This has nothing to do with the Christian concept of the Sunday worship service. Keeping the Sabbath also isn’t about focusing on God for that day, because it is healthier if we focus on God every day.

I find some encouragement in the Sunday morning church meeting, as well as in some of the pastor’s sermons. Besides the encouragement, I also see the organized church as we have it today as a good platform for good works. Our church is involved in feeding the poor, helping the sick, visiting prisoners, and other things that Jesus taught. It would be hard to have such a ministry without the cooperation of large groups of people.

But I understand if you are not encouraged there. A few of the people there are very discouraging to me, too. I can’t teach or even attend Sunday school classes anymore because every time I share my honest thoughts about thinking or the beautiful reason God has given us, one of these discouraging people will confront me that I’m either an evil person, that my relationship with God is not personal like theirs, that my value of reason eliminates God’s mystery, or my questions are a sign of arrogance. Or they tell me I’m not a Christian at all.

Ben: Really? I thought it was just me.

Mike: Ben, I confess, though, that I don’t get Hip-hop and Rap, but there must be some reason you like it. So, why do you like it more than church music?

Ben: Oh, Dad. Hip-hop and rap are about real life, real emotions. It’s about injustice, suffering, anger, love, sorrow, hate, and so on. Rap is just poetry with a beat. It talks about what it feels like when you want to kill yourself, or when you are so happy, your heart may burst. It expresses feelings without shame. Church music is only about Heaven. Other-worldly. Pretentious. I can’t relate to that.

Mike: I understand. Perhaps hip-hop and rap could serve as more effective Christian music for many people.

Ben, I understand what you mean about being unable to ask hard questions, too. When you were still in elementary school, I tried to lead the youth group for our teens. When I told the pastor I was going to discuss the hard questions, such as how do we know God exists? Why is there suffering if God is a good God? What about evolution? He gave me a video program to follow. It was very dishonest. It said that believing in God was a moral issue. That the Christian God is so evident that only the stupid or immoral don’t believe in Him. So I didn’t use his material. I think I was connecting with the kids, who had brutal questions of their own. However, the pastor became furious when a parent complained about me. He said I will never teach anyone in his church again.

Good, honest questions are a sign of healthy thinking and the pursuit of truth. If you read the Bible honestly, it is full of examples of how God loves that. He was so impressed with Solomon’s hunger for wisdom that he blessed him with riches.

Ben: Yeah, the same thing happened to me in youth group a few years ago, when I would ask hard questions, Andy made it a spiritual problem with me, and that I was morally inferior to the other kids who claimed that they knew God by feeling him in their hearts and never doubting. Even several of those perfect kids, like Eva and Liam don’t believe in God at all anymore. Dad, honestly, I’m not sure I believe in God anymore.

Mike: This avoidance of hard questions isn’t working. You are not alone in your doubt about God. There is a mass exodus of children leaving the church, mainly because these hard questions are deflected. I think it is very healthy for you to question God’s existence. It means that you are curious, a thinker, and not just a follower of the culture. It is not a moral issue or a sign of spiritual inferiority.

Ben, it isn’t essential to me if you go to church or not. But it is crucial which worldview you follow. This is not about going to hell or not, in my opinion. The God I know would not punish those who honestly seek the truth.

While there have been many times during Western civilization that believing in the Christian God was a no-brainer, in the pluralistic world we live in now, and with many of the mysteries of nature solved, believing in God is a challenge for the honest thinker. But don’t be fooled, atheism is not the default position. There are absurdities within all worldviews. As you embark on this journey of finding your own worldview, I’d like to offer you some advice.

(Mike pauses to gather his thoughts)

Most people who believe in God, as I think you correctly observe, do so for the wrong reasons. This applies to all worldviews, including atheism. It is because their family or culture has coerced them into that belief. Following their parents’ expectations. Now, if they believe the right thing, for the wrong reason, it doesn’t matter, except that they might think many other bad things, for the wrong reason, and those things hurt them in the end.

Ben, I want to share with you some very fundamental lessons that has taken me fifty years to learn. Most kids your age would have a hard time following me, but I think you are the exception. You read some heavy books so I know your mind is mature beyond your years. You may not understand all that I will say, but if I can help you find some answers now, it could save you years of confusion. We can discuss these things more in the future.

Is there a God? Is Jesus divine? What does Jesus really teach? These are the core questions, not if you should go to church or not. But first, I must explain the background as to why your questions aren’t welcomed in the church the way it is today. I want to explain how we got here and what is truth.

First of all, you must understand that not just what we think, but how we think is often controlled by our culture. Our culture is not fixed, but evolves over time. The way we think is like the styles of clothes or music. It is good to recognize these ways of thinking as just fads, not being absolute, but to look beyond them.

One of the biggest thinking fads today is subjective truth. That is “truth” (Mike uses air quotes), which is found inside us, regardless of the evidence or rational thinking. The consequences of this type of thinking are that our nation is in a perilous place right now, because there is a complete loss of factual truth. This type of thinking started in the church, and I think it is destructive. It is also the reason that Christianity is in decline.

Ben: I’m not sure what subjective truth is and how this relates to me.

Mike: Subjective means literally, “Arising in one’s mind.” If you were living in a cave without any connection to the outside world, and one day an idea came to you that Morocco was in Europe, not North Africa, or that Polar Bears can fly, without any evidence or rationality, that is subjective. Arising from your mind without any input from the outside world. The church has adopted this view, and they call it “faith” or “spirituality.” But this is not the type of faith I read in the Bible.

Subjective truths are answers that people derive from their feelings, rather than evidence-based reasoning. Reason is now devalued in a very unhealthy way in that system. This was not true when I was a child. Then, you could discuss the reasons and evidence within the church, and it would be viewed as a positive aspect. Hard questions were often discouraged in the church setting over the centuries, but never as much as today because of the idea that subjective truth is so highly valued.

So, inside Christianity, these feelings are called “spiritual” and assumed to be supernatural and “thinking” is seen as something bad, of the flesh or even of the devil. Feeling God in your heart is good, thinking about God with your mind is bad. This is a new idea, just in the past century. This is why Andy wouldn’t answer your hard questions by thinking, but praised those kids who felt God and didn’t ask hard questions or think. But this is not consistent with the Bible’s high regard for wisdom and seeking factual truth from the evidence. Satan is called the father of untruths or misinformation. This new way of thinking also quenches our natural God-given curiosity. A hundred years ago, people thought much differently and this fad is dying, thank goodness.

(Ben still looking a bit confused)

Mike adds: Do you know what a Google Ngram Viewer is?

Ben: No.

Mike: It is a Google program that looks at the use of words in print over the past few hundred years. In the past seventy-five years, there has been an explosion in the use of the word “spiritual.” Here, I will look it up on your laptop.

You will see that people started to make “spirituality” essential around 1970. Before then, the word “spirituality” was most often about the occult. Even atheists now talk about having spiritual experiences or use the word “energy.” I will assert that the words energy, spirituality, and emotions are all interchangeable. Human emotions are glorious. Our emotions make us human. You know I’m a very emotional guy. But our feelings were never intended to be the way we find answers or truth. There have been a thousand studies showing that our emotions, as wonderful as they are, fail miserably in finding truth. Even the Bible calls our emotions the most deceitful thing in creation.

Our way of thinking has real-life consequences. People believe all kinds of nonsense, and politicians–not all of them–live in lies because we have forsaken God-given reason and the search for factual truth. These politicians manufacture “truth” (Mike doing air quotes again), subjective truth, for political reasons, to acquire money, votes, or power. Christians have been doing this for some time, too.

Let’s move on to a simpler concept.

The second lesson I learned is that objective truth is absolute and precise. This was common sense until about two hundred years ago. Then, the Enlightenment, when Western culture’s value of reason was at its highest, threatened Christian traditions. You know the story about Galileo discovering that the sun was the center of the solar system. He was almost killed by the church over that. Then the science of the Enlightenment found that the earth was ancient, which violated the church tradition that it was about six thousand years old. The Bible is entirely silent on the age of the Earth.

A few Christian philosophers responded to these cultural threats by proposing a novel idea: that truth is subjective, not based on evidence or inductive or deductive reasoning, but on feelings. Manufactured within ourselves and claiming that this information is supernatural, given by God. It took two hundred years to mature as a thinking system, but that is what has dominated the American culture in the past seventy-five years, including Christian thinking, or lack thereof.

But there is factual truth, and that truth is absolute. The number of atoms in Neptune is fixed at a given moment in time and with a precise diameter of the planet. Of course, the edge of Neptune is not so exact, as it transitions into empty space gradually. But if you pick a precise boundary of the planet, the number of atoms is accurate, never relative.

Looking at human behavior, the truth is also precise and absolute. Someone either did x behavior or not. You can have proof with the right kind of evidence, such as catching them on film or having witnesses. Human motives is also absolute, although seldom purely a single motive.

In our progressive churches, and other places, you will hear people saying all religions are the same. It is true that many of the major religions share common objectives of peace and kindness. But if you look at the core teachings of these religions, they are very different. For example, Christianity teaches that the cosmos is real, material, and that history is real. Buddhism, while sharing many of the Christian ideas about morals, has a fundamental different metaphysical concept. Metaphysics regards the nature of the material or reality around us. Buddhism teaches that this cosmos is not real, that the world around us is not real, but an illusion. It is like this world is a virtual reality, not a real reality. So, the Christian concept is to change history to reflect the teachings of Jesus of Galilee, the Buddhist primary teaching is more individualistic, to transcend this illusion.

My point here Ben, is that atheism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism all have different fundamental beliefs. While morally, they can have agreement in practice and work together, and certainly have respect for each other, logically, only one can be true and consistent with reality, and it is possible that none are true. Those people who tell you they are the same, do it with a good motive, to create peace and harmony. Most wars in the past four thousand years has been over religious differences and that’s why there is a desire to ignore the differences.

But the problem is, Ben, if you sacrifice objective truth for the sake of harmony, there will be consequences. The only way you can say that Christianity and Buddhism are both true is to say that truth itself is dead. But then, that opens a Pandora’s Box, as we see in society today.

For example, if there is no factual truth, then a white supremacist can claim that it is their subjective truth is that white people are superior to all others. Treating non-whites unjustly, is therefore okay. The Christian who believes in relative truth, while knowing that injustice is not right, will have nothing to say to the white supremacist.

Ben: But I think everyone would agree that white supremacist is bad.

Mike: No, Ben, it is not universally accepted. White supremacist and other vile ideas are on the rise. But the Christian who believes in absolute truth can reject these ideas, based on Jesus’ teaching of loving others as you love yourself, even the least in our society, loving people of all colors and classes. Jesus’s approach to harmony was not saying that there is no truth, that there are no answers to the hard questions. Jesus taught that harmony is reached by loving people despite their differences. Love begs tolerance.

My point here, Ben, is that there is truth, factual truth, and it is a noble pursuit to find that truth.

The third principle that I’ve learned is that our consciousness is made up of three primary functions: memory, reason, and our emotions. I sincerely believe that reason is designed by our creator to process the evidence from the external world and make factual conclusions. It is our lone instrument for finding truth, and it is how we live 99% of our lives. An atheist must conclude that this is a result of evolution alone. But as a Christian, I must conclude that reason is God’s gift. One of the greatest theologians in history, Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century, called it God’s gift.

The fourth principle is that our reason, as excellent as it is, is finite and imperfect. Thomas Aquinas believed that our reason was essential in finding God, but a deeper understanding of the mysteries of God required divine inspiration. Our reason alone cannot determine whether God exists or which religion is true. In other words, you cannot prove God’s existence by reason, nor can you disprove God’s existence. But if you listen to the evidence carefully, you can have a notion which is most true. Following the evidence honestly can build a ramp upon which we can reach enough confidence to choose a world view that we can live by. That is how true faith works.

Today’s subjective religion says that you experience God when you turn off your brain and take a blind leap into the dark. This is the kind of faith that most churches teach and respect. But that blind leap is perilous. Blind faith is what makes people join a cult and drink poisonous Kool-Aid or vote for hideous presidents. It takes you back to the truth arising in your brain out of nothing, or living in a cave and believing that Polar Bears can fly. If blind faith is the essence of Christianity, then the worshiping of a frog is equally good. Christians who center their beliefs on blind faith, as something good, are prone to believe all kinds of baseless lies.

I remember going to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny with you, and in that movie, Indiana Jones said, “I have learned that it doesn’t matter what you believe, but how hard you believe it.” Well, that’s just bullshit. It shows where we are in our culture. But that is changing, and by the time you are my age, I think our culture will feel better, and if Christianity survives, it will be asking and discussing hard questions again, not just looking for emotional feelings.

As you go out into the world, there will be many competing world views. The strongest competing view at this moment in history is this irrational idea that there are no answers, or that all answers are the same. That is not true. There are three possible views: no God, a personal God, or just an energy field, as taught by pantheism. You must search humbly for the truth.

I was an atheist in my younger years. I loved science, and being an atheist in that culture was cool. But as I thought deeper about atheism, I ran into some problems. Now, don’t get me wrong. I have many wonderful atheist friends. But take atheism to its logical conclusion. You cannot have meaning or morals because in that worldview, we arose by chance. It is totally irrational to assign meaning or morals to something that is the result of pure luck.

My last great insight in my life is about human psychology, how we all tick. While there are many grand theories about human behavior, it really boils down to our greatest motivation, and that is the insatiable search for significance. Everything we do can be defined by that motivation. In the movie Saving Private Ryan, in the last scene, Ryan is at the cemetery in Normandy as an old man, looking at all the graves of the men who gave their lives to save him, and in tears, he asks, basically, “Was my life worth it?” Was he significant?

One of the most commonly used tools, for better or worse, for determining our significance is comparison. If there were no Brad Pitts in the world, would men worry about not looking handsome enough to be significant? If there were no Bill Gates or Elon Musk, or even the local millionaire in the world, would people feel that they don’t earn enough to be significant?

The religious world is the same; however, there, the search for significance is based on piety. I define piety here as being acceptable to God. Religious people, likewise, use the tool of comparison to find their footing on the piety ladder. This is why I am often attacked and why you have been attacked.

The conservative Christian builds their comparison model by imagining a plethora of rules or dogmas (most of which are not in the Bible, but inferred) and thinking that they follow them better than others. That’s why they hate so many people, like the gays, the Muslims, and even us who value God-given reason. But pushing down on us, they feel their piety growing.

The progressive Christians do the same thing, but rather than using rules or dogmas, they use spirituality. They assert their spirituality is better than yours, especially if you respect reason. They will call you proud.

So beware, Ben, when Christian people put you down for thinking and searching, understand it is coming from their own insecurities, and don’t take it personally. They’ve called me arrogant for wanting to know answers, as best as I can. However, they have personally attacked me, sometimes brutally. I cannot imagine taking one of them out for coffee and then lambasting them for their “errors of faith” and “moral depravity.” So, who is arrogant? I wouldn’t attack them, because I don’t feel superior in my heart. Another thing that Thomas Aquinas taught was the respect for those with whom we disagree. Not because truth is relative, but because we are all in pursuit of the truth, and the way is not easy.

Ben: Are we done? You’re missing church.

Mike: I’m almost done. This is important. Now for the grand finale. Ben, let me add my honest thoughts about you believing in God and Jesus as the messiah. I do want you to believe in God and follow the simple teachings of Jesus. It doesn’t matter to me if you ever darken the doors of a church again, unless you are missing encouragement there. And I never want you pretending to believe in God only to please your mom and me.

Christianity is straightforward. The New Testament records Jesus saying that to follow him, you must deny yourself, be unselfish, and follow him. To follow him, he says, means to love other people as yourself… full stop. Nothing else is required.

Regarding believing in God, Jesus was divine and his teachings profitable, I think will offer you a better life. But that’s not the only reason to believe those things. I believe them because I believe they are true.

Ben: Nodding his head.

Mike: You will be exposed to many arguments for subjective truth, where there are no answers, and other worldviews such as atheism. Don’t shun those arguments. Listen to them. I have listened for hours to raging atheists such as Richard Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. This has helped my faith because of the shallowness of their arguments. But I’m also going to recommend a few books that have strengthened my Christian faith, besides the Bible.

The first book is about truth itself, by famous scientist Francis Collins, The Road to Wisdom. There is no better book about the evidence for a creator than Stephen Meyers book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe―Discoveries in Physics and Cosmology. Regarding the argument for Jesus being divine, there is no better book than NT Wright’s, The Resurrection of the Son of God.

Ben, you are a wonderful kid and I’m so proud of you. Let’s keep this conversation going. If anyone attacks you for not going to church, let me know and I will defend you.

Respectfully,

Mike