A bench in Aspen, Colorado. My picture.
A couple of caveats:
- Heads up: this post is long. You may wanna grab a slice or two of pizza.
- Most pictures I found online require a license, so I took my own.
I spent most of my life as a skeptic. I thought it was the right thing to do. It was simply irresponsible to believe something that could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. While telling us about her Ph.D program at Oxford, a philosophy professor I admired told us a story about the lecturer who welcomed her particular class. He announced, in an impeccable English accent, that the entire objective of their doctoral program would be to learn “how to identify rot.” That impressed me as a great way to live, identifying rot. But that’s not the only reason I became a skeptic.
I’d grown up with a lot of redirecting, obfuscating, deception, and flat out lies. From the earliest age I can remember, I didn’t know who to believe. Nobody let anyone know what they were really feeling because that would give others an angle of attack, a handle to manipulate. I learned to suspect you, me, and anybody who tried to get close to me.
That skepticism came in handy at first. In the old school version of high tech, before offshoring and agile computing and productivity tools (and now artificial intelligence) plus plain old greed ruined what had once been a respectable profession, skepticism was indispensable. It made you take extra care about what you said and the work you delivered. For the simple reason that you had to be able to back it up. If you’ve ever worked with Solaris kernel engineers, you know what I’m talking about.
Nevertheless, what served a good purpose at work left me adrift the rest of the time. No matter how much success I experienced, I was unsatisfied. Some stupid notion that snuck into my brain without my permission told me that getting no satisfaction from life was not actually the problem, but the very trait that enabled the advancement of the human race.
The only problem with that logic is that it left me in a State of Suck. Good for civilization? Maybe. Good for me? Nope. Not sure if it’s the same for others, but by finding fault in everything, and dismissing anything that has a fault, I wound up valuing nothing. Because nothing on Earth is perfect. Everything has faults.
So, while others were finding solace, comfort, guidance, strength, and so on from a faith that I cavalierly discredited as mysticism, mass delusion, guilt trips, fire insurance, and whatnot, I was receiving only emptiness from the skepticism I so highly valued. I was left in a perpetual state of simply not knowing.
I tried lots of things to fix it. Work harder, do more, succeed more. Please more people to gain more respect. Try something new, and succeed at it. Re-read Carlos Castañeda. Read P.D. Ouspensky and other obscure authors that supposedly held the key to enlightenment. Read everything Ayn Rand wrote. I mean e v e r y t h i n g. Exercise more. Exercise a lot more.
None of it worked. It just distracted me for a while.
All around me, Christians were claiming peace, security, joy, contentment. Of course I didn’t believe. I thought they were full of shit. Though I had experienced a compelling but very private conversion to Christianity in my early 20’s, my skepticism had drawn me away from it. And there were so very many examples of Christians living anything but Christian lives.
Besides, Skepticism made it abundantly clear that the most fundamental logic of Christianity, that “the only begotten son of God” was crucified to atone for the sins of the world, was at best a medieval fable and at worst an outlandish example of bad marketing. Anybody in their right mind would see right through it!
Except those pesky Christians, of course. They claimed it was a fact.
“How is it even possible that you believe that?” I practically shouted at them.
They responded with circular logic: “If you believe, you will understand. If you don’t believe, you won’t.”
To a skeptic, this kind of logic is simply too easy to refute. It’s madness. Funny enough, the Bible agrees. This is the first part of 1 Corinthians 2:14 (King James version) …
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto him;
Before I bought my first Harley, I would ask Harley riders what they liked about that slow-ass ancient pile of old-school iron and chrome. They’d answer …
“If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”
I scoffed at that answer until I bought my first Harley.
If you use the wrong faculty, you’ll fail to appreciate Harleys. To any motorcyclist who values price/performance and other logical metrics, Harleys “are foolishness unto him.” But to some of us they are the Deep Truth of motorcycling. And we have a helluva time explaining why. (If, however, you want some insight into why someone like me can love Harleys so much, mosey on over to Ride to the Sun Reunion.)
But the infuriating logic was the same for Christianity as it was for Harleys: if you feel it, you know. If you don’t feel it, it’s foolishness.
Exactly what happened that that led me back to Christianity?
Fire Insurance!
A classic reason for becoming a Christian. Just in case. I mean, horror of horrors, what if they are right?
Problem is, being a fake Christian sucks. You gotta sit through sermons while your brain screams “this is bullshit!” at you. You gotta hang out with people you highly suspect to be delusional, and utter pleasantries that makes your skeptic stomach curl into a knot. You gotta join Church activities that you don’t believe in. You gotta tithe. On top of paying taxes!
If you are a true skeptic, you won’t tolerate that amount of bullshit. You simply can’t.
You are getting soft in your old age!
Well, that’s a reasonable assumption. Staying true to your values is hard work. You get old, you get tired, you start slipping. Pretty soon you just start going with the flow. It’s easier.
Two problems with that assumption. The first is that Christianity demands a lot from a man. There’s nothing about it, that I know of, anyway, that tells me to drop my standards. It’s actually the opposite. For instance, Matthew 22:33-40 describes the answer Jesus gave to a question by one of the Sadducees …
36 Master, which is the great commandment in the law?
37 Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.
38 This is the first and great commandment.
39 And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
40 On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Are you kidding me? Loving God with all of me is a tall order. Much easier to love Harleys with all of me. Burgers. Burgers are easy to love. Jumping headlong into an incoming wave. That too. But God? Whom I have never seen and with whom I have a mysterious relationship I don’t quite understand? No, that’s not slipping. That’s actually raising my game, a lot, trying to live up to only that. And let’s not even talk about the second part.
So No, becoming a Christian is not a way of backsliding or lowering your standards. It’s just the opposite.
You are just trying to belong!
That’s certainly true. Belonging is important. Since I moved around a lot in the first part of my life, I did yearn to belong. But it’s no longer a yearning. I belong to a super terrific motorcycle group named, in an affront to grammar junkies everywhere, Triangle Lone Wolves. In spite of the name, I dig the friends I have there and the activities we engage in. Best motorcycle club I’ve ever belonged to.
And I dig my neighborhood. It’s kinda small, but we gather together on Thursday nights, the men go out to dinner while the women meet for book club, we help each other out, we stop and conversate anytime we run into each other on the street.
For 35 years I’ve been going to a 12-step program, so I have a lot of friends there. Come to think of it, 12-step programs are not rich fodder or skeptics. For two simple reasons. The first is that they don’t entertain any disagreements about the nature of God. They don’t even call Him God. Instead, they refer to God as a higher power that you get to discern on your own. If mine is Thor and yours is Tinkerbell, fine. No argument. This does not leave a skeptic much room to operate.
Second thing is, they have, well, a set of steps that you follow. If you try them and you like the results, great! If you try them and you don’t, OK. Try something else. Not exactly the scientific method, but certainly empirical. And skeptics delight in empiricism.
In addition to all that, I have friends I’m still in touch with from work, from high school, and from other activities I engage in here in town. I have a bunch of friends at the Y, even though I am not currently playing ball with them due to an Achilles injury and my cancer.
Aha! It was the cancer! You chickened out! You got cancer so you went running to a church and drank their kool-aid because you were a scaredy cat. Boo-hoo! You were askiiired. Stay still while I go call the waaaaaaahhhmbulance!
Well Hell. You got me there. Tough to argue against that point. I did get baptized shortly after I got my diagnosis for bladder cancer. So it’s pretty easy to say I only became a Christian because I got cancer. I cannot disprove that assumption. If that’s what you believe, I can’t change your mind.
But what do I believe?
I did not become a Christian because I got cancer. I have been drawn to church for a long time, now. Jesus kept knocking on my door, as my pastor likes to say.
When I went out for a ride, I usually stopped at a church. Not because I wanted to walk inside, but because it had a shady parking lot where I could take a break from the heat. And here in the South, there are lots and lots of churches.
Gradually, the idea of Church got normalized in my head. Here in the South, being a Christian does not get you branded a medieval lunatic. In fact, there are so many Christians and so many churches that Christianity has the opposite problem: people join Christian communities for the wrong reasons, thereby missing the point.
Little by little I got used to conversations about faith. Little by little I became friends with more Christians. Learned what delightful people they really were. They were not like the Christians portrayed in the media. It’s not that the media hates Christians, it’s just that the media breathes, eats, and lives off scandal. A dozen men playing basketball joyfully after praying together, for instance, would not get any media outlet’s attention. Unless they shot up a school afterwards.
In time I found myself, without intending to, saying my own little prayer …
God, if you want me to return to Christianity, change my heart. Because I am incapable of changing my mind.
I did not know at the time, but it turns out that Proberbs 4:23 has something to say about the heart. For this quote, I prefer the New International Version:
23 Above all else, guard your heart,
for everything you do flows from it.
One day, one of my basketball pals invited me to visit his Church. I went, and I fell in love with it. Head over heels. It was irrational. The feeling was overpowering, and I can’t explain it. I wept for four Sundays straight. I was so filled, so happy, so full of love that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Nine months later, I still don’t understand. But I never miss a Sunday. Or a Wednesday Bible study. Or a church event.
Appeals to emotion are cons. You’ve been conned! And you know better!
You are now living your life by the dictates of a delusion.
If I were the victim of a delusion, that delusion would affect other parts of my daily life. But there is no evidence of that. I’m happier. More motivated. More connected than I’ve ever been. I am a Christian, now, for the very simply reason that I love the Lord dearly. In all three manifestations: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
And the skepticism? It’s still there. In other areas of my life, I remain skeptical. When I read the news. When I listen to political opinions. When I read a book. But no longer with my faith. As the second part of 1 Corintians 2:14 says:
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
Old Man Ramsey 