I want to speak truth to power. I turn 71 tomorrow, which feels unbelievable. Not only because the time has flown, but because I wasn’t supposed to live to 65. When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma with associated renal failure, at age 63, my particular type of myeloma had a life expectancy of 11 months. I’ve lost most of my Christian friends for the things I have said and have little else to lose… so I must write. Figuratively speaking, I am only allowed in the church if I stand near the door with one foot outside and say nothing. I think I would have been welcomed in most churches just a generation ago, and certainly in Aquinas’s church. But we are living in different times, aren’t we?

The power I am speaking to is that of culture. Culture, while serving humans in many ways, can be destructive, especially when, as the best-selling author, historian, and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari writes in his latest book, Nexus, there are no self-correcting mechanisms.

Religion and Politics, for the sake of holding on to power, are always attempting to purge the self-correcting mechanisms by codifying their culture as absolute. In Christianity, it does this by creating doctrines (which have nothing to do with the Bible) and tenets of belief and making it a moral problem if you don’t follow them. That’s why my attackers always accuse me of being immoral, but I don’t accuse them of such. The reason, as I’ve stated ad nauseam, that I want to change culture is that this present culture of Christianity is not working, not because those who believe it are bad people but because their culture is inconsistent with reality—how the world really works.

I will focus on Christianity. Although it applies to the broader culture, we are in a strange place where people with confidence and a loud voice (influencers) are valued at the expense of the learned. The rational. I could give a thousand examples, but I will use one headline: the war in Iran. Presidents from Washington through those of recent periods would be (are) appalled that we have entered this war, and we are sending real estate tycoons to try to negotiate a peace. On any other planet, this would be seen as absurd. Yet it is a fruit of this new age, which Christianity has embraced, that learning and reason are pushed aside for the sake of gut feelings and intuition.

There is an attack on science right now, which has brought the quality of our lives from where we lost half our children before they turn twenty, to less than 1% of children dying. And it is the Christians leading this war on education, science, burning books, and trying to close colleges.

I am tempted to go on and on with these examples, but must not digress to keep the flow of this story going forward.

There is an overwhelming belief within Christianity, from the most conservative to the most progressive, that human reason is “of the flesh,” or, as Richard Rohr states (a prophet of the progressive churches like mine), “an exercise in arrogance.”  Or as the popular author Rob Bell states (my paraphrase), “Humans have evolved beyond reason; we are now living in a more mature place of being trans-rational.”

In my next few postings, I am going to do my best to show how we got here, historically. When I left evangelicalism thirty years ago, I found history to be profoundly helpful in making sense of that experience, and I hope it will do the same now. That is why Yuval Noah Harari writes from a historical perspective, with his hopes of saving our culture from destruction.

So, this tenet of anti-science, anti-reason, that the church culture holds, has been codified as reason comes from the human perspective, which is against God. That only the spiritual voice must be listened to, which is from God. This is why, for thirty years, I have been told I’m not a Christian or a good one in every church I have attended, including my present one. They then believe that only the spiritual voice is supernatural, transcending the material and therefore the guide to living and relating to God. I lived half my life that way, and my relationship with God today, as a thinking man, is light-years beyond that old way. It is profoundly rich and emotional. I know the nature of God through my reason, but I experience God through my emotions. In the same way, it was my reason that brought me to Denise and helped me understand her, but it is through my emotions that I enjoy our loving relationship.

But when you reverse-engineer how we were created and how the world works, human reason is the only trusted tool for finding truth. This is how God made us, so it must be their intent. Reason depends on learning and research, not on emotion. If it were true that the inward spiritual emotional voice was the only conduit to God, the creator, then those who rely on this voice would be living in a quality of life far better than the rest, but that has been proven over and over again not to be true.

The secret feeling, rather than reason, gave us superstitious things like the German witch hunt, killing tens of thousands of women and even children by both the Catholic and Protestant churches in the sixteenth century (not to mention our own American witch trials). Then there is slavery, once again, greedy men and women, Christian men and women, believed it was God speaking to them to tell them to create that horrible institution. There were nine crusades, many local inquisitions, cruelties, and a lust for power among Christian peoples who felt the voice of God and acted against reason. Every cult starts with someone “hearing the subjective voice of God,” or so they claim. And they always end up taking people’s money and having sex with their children… God’s voice, really?

The Bible itself calls this subjective voice, which Christianity now champions as the only path to God, “the most deceitful thing in creation” (Jer 17:9). This is why Christians are the most deceived people in our society, the number one voting bloc to put the con-man Donald Trump into power. Christians are the major voice against vaccinations for their children, against combating human-caused climate change, both of which will cause unbelievable suffering and death for our children and grandchildren. Our fault. Christians are the most likely people to believe unfounded conspiracy theories. Christians are the number one consumers of unproven health treatments, often promoted by charlatans. I’ve watched far too many of my dear Christian friends suffer and die, unnecessarily, for rejecting evidence-based, rational treatments and choosing snake oil instead. Christians are the number one consumers of Fox News, which, by their own admission, is not in the business of relaying factual information but of “conservative entertainment.” But here is the sad part: this is not a function of the intelligence of Christians or their morality. These are good people. This is why I still love and respect even those who have attacked me, because I know it is not a character flaw in them. But it is the consequences of their philosophy that will bring so much suffering and death. It is against that philosophy that I write.

Next time, I will start this historical journey by explaining what I have learned about history and why we think the way we do today, and a spoiler: it has NOTHING to do with the Bible. If you listen carefully to my story, it will explain everything.

In Peace,

Mike