I was a TrueChristian™ for about eight years starting back in 1981. I attended a Pentecostal non-denominational church (Glad Tidings-Boise) back in the first five years of my time as a believer. It was there that I learned to accept the idea that my first duty to God was to tithe to the church. I was absolutely faithful in my giving of tithes and offerings. I was a “happy giver.”

After five years at Glad Tidings I became drawn towards Calvary Chapel of Boise. The vibe at C.C. was way more up my ally. I’m a professional musician and C.C. was just then forming in Boise and I fit perfectly into the youth-oriented fellowship.

Calvary’s Pastor (Bob Caldwell) and I became really good friends. We not only built the C.C. fellowship together, we also did a lot of prison ministry and even had some “leadership retreats” together.

Backsliding

After three years as C.C.’s music minister, I met some other musicians in the church and we decided to start doing some secular gigs just for fun (I even had Pastor Bob’s blessing on it). It wasn’t long before I wanted to get back full time into the professional music club circuit.

Pastor Bob and I parted company at that time … but we parted on the very best of terms. There was no condemnation from him towards me, and, I had no negative feelings for leaving the church. This would turn out to be the key to why he would eventually grant my “request” for a refund of my tithing contributions to Calvary Chapel.

Of course, I soon backslid into partying and wound up getting a divorce. After several years of living the old musician lifestyle, I met my current wife (of twenty years), stopped drinking, settled down and had two daughters. Once I quit drinking (without A.A. or any other “spiritual” assistance) I began to read Thomas Paine and Robert Ingersoll. Once I discovered the internet (Infidel Guy Show) there was no turning back. I found complete freedom from religion.

Giving

After some time, I started to remember an incident that had happened to me way back in my days at Glad Tidings Church. I had been watching the P.T.L. Club on TV and got suckered into believing that the Lord wanted me to send P.T.L. a thousand bucks! I sent the money. When my Pastor’s wife (sister Barnett) found out that I’d sent P.T.L. $1000, she took me aside and scolded me that the Lord wanted his people to give their money to “where they are fed” i.e., Glad Tidings. She suggested that I call P.T.L. and ask for my money back.

So I did. When I asked P.T.L. to return the money they agreed and I allowed them to keep $100.00 for being so understanding. I then gave the remaining $900.00 to Glad Tidings. After all; had I not already given the money to “The Lord”?

Fast forward to 2006. One faith-free day I happened to recall my P.T.L. experience and began to ask myself: “Why not simply ask, not demand or insist, but politely ask for my money back from Calvary Chapel?” All they could say was “no,” right? I had left the church on excellent terms, and Pastor Bob was a very cool, very laid back guy.

Refunding

By that time Calvary Chapel was huge. I knew Bob would remember me, so I wrote him a short email asking if he could help me with some questions that I had involving donations to the fellowship. Bob wrote back almost immediately with a nice letter saying that he had thought about me many times over the years and had meant to contact me and that he was sorry that he had never actually done it. He was very sweet and kind as always.

He then referred me to his Assistant Pastor (Mike Sasso) for help with my questions. I send a courteous response thanking Bob for his kind words and attention. I then connected with Pastor Mike and began writing questions back and forth. I wrote to Mike that my understanding was that when I gave money to the fellowship, I was essentially giving the money to God and that the church was merely “the conduit” between me and Jesus.

At first Mike was very friendly and eager… on his best pastoral behavior. Once my questions began to turn towards a “could the church ever refund money that had been given” type of query, Mike’s language became stiff and defensive. He then referred me to deal directly with Pastor Bob.

In my next email to Pastor Bob I selected my words very carefully.

Dear Bob,

I know that what I am asking is probably a first and highly strange request; even for someone like you who has spent so many years in the ministry. Please always keep in mind that what I am proposing is a request, not a demand. You can deny my request and I give you my promise that there will be absolutely no hard feelings on my part.

Here is my request:

Would you be willing to return to me all or any part of the money that I gave to the ministry at Calvary Chapel during my years in the fellowship?

If you say “no”, I will fully understand. Your choice is final and that will absolutely be the end of my inquiry. I await an answer at your convenience.

Cordially,

Billy….

I did not hear back from Pastor Caldwell. I waited for a couple of weeks, sent another similar letter and included an apology stating that I understood that he (Pastor Bob) must be very busy, but I would really appreciate a response.

Again, there was no response.

I sent a third letter stating (paraphrasing here:) “Thank you for the time and attention that you have already given to this matter. I will assume your silence means ‘no’ to my request.”

Eventually his decision came.

Pastor Bob wrote me back telling me that he was handing the situation over to the church accountant and that he would be authorized to work with me towards a settlement!

I want you to imagine the reaction that Bob’s “concession letter” caused from me and my wife! My jaw dropped and my eyes almost popped out of my head. We were hysterically laughing, jumping and shouting, “It’s a MIRACLE!” We never in a million years seriously expected to see a dime of that money, and now here I was reading a letter from Pastor Bob granting my request for a refund.

After a phone conversation with the accountant at Calvary Chapel, Jim agreed to send me monthly installments of $500 until the agreed amount of $3200 was paid off. The checks came every month and were quickly deposited into my storehouse.

That was the end of my contact with Bob and Calvary Chapel.

Ye Have Not…

I can only speculate what Pastor Bob’s motive was for granting my request for a refund. My circumstances were probably not typical for the way that many people wind up leaving the fold.

Deconversion can be a very difficult and challenging process. I found the action of facing (if only through email contact) my fear of my old authoritative figure (Pastor Bob) very liberating and empowering. Even if things would have turned out differently, I’m proud of myself for standing up to the fear that use to control me.

The moral: “Ye have not, because ye ask not”!

I think it’s a better name — shorter and catchier.

The film is a personal, independent narrative that takes a sensitive but critical look at at religion in America. FAITH follows two different people and the evolution of their belief in god after personal tragedy befalls them both.

Chris is a devout, fundamentalist Christian whose son is bi-polar. When prayer doesn’t work, and his son commits suicide, Chris’s worldview is thrown into disarray.

Betty is a teacher at the local community college who grew up in the church. With a father who was both Pastor and philanderer, Betty dismissed religion as hypocrisy and simplistic fable. But she just found a lump in her breast. As she faces her own mortality, the attraction to some kind of higher power might be too strong to ignore.

FAITH juxtaposes two narratives to uncover the ways we are pulled towards – and away from – God. The film exposes the hypocrisy and arrogance of fundamentalist Christianity while exploring the need to call on a higher power during times of crisis.

The film will be shot in and around California’s Central Valley, which forms the setting and ideological backdrop of the story. Eli Daughdrill, the film’s writer/director, grew up on an Almond ranch in the valley and knows the people and place very well. The characters in the story are fictional but certainly feel like real residents of the valley.

You can support the project through Kickstarter and follow the progress on @themoviefaith.

It’s difficult to take oneself with sufficient seriousness to begin any sentence with the words “Thou shalt not.” But who cannot summon the confidence to say: Do not condemn people on the basis of their ethnicity or color. Do not ever use people as private property. Despise those who use violence or the threat of it in sexual relations. Hide your face and weep if you dare to harm a child. Do not condemn people for their inborn nature—why would God create so many homosexuals only in order to torture and destroy them? Be aware that you too are an animal and dependent on the web of nature, and think and act accordingly. Do not imagine that you can escape judgment if you rob people with a false prospectus rather than with a knife. Turn off that fucking cell phone—you have no idea how unimportant your call is to us. Denounce all jihadists and crusaders for what they are: psychopathic criminals with ugly delusions. Be willing to renounce any god or any religion if any holy commandments should contradict any of the above. In short: Do not swallow your moral code in tablet form.

A dear cousin recently wrote me a note on the internet telling me of his interest in my public atheism and saying that he agrees with my poetic atheism, except for the atheism part.  He had a smart mystic believer’s argument: How can such little things as us know that there is no great mind out there pulling all the strings – especially given how weird the world is (consciousness, for example, and life itself). I wrote back and I like what I wrote back so I’m posting it for your reading pleasure.

I, by the way, am Jennifer Michael Hecht, who wrote Doubt: A History, and The End of the Soul, and I’ve been invited to write you a few posts. BTW, I call the audience reading me whenever I write blog posts, “bleaders,” for a host of obvious reasons. So, dear bleaders, I’ve cut some family chat, but am otherwise sending you what I wrote back.

My Charming Atheist Response to My Cousin’s Clever Statement of Belief

Dear Cuz,

What you wrote here is subtle and beautiful. I’m really delighted by it.

Here are my questions. I agree that the existence of this strange universe and our consciousness and feelings is freaking wacky and amazing. (That’s just plain true.) I also agree to making the choice to see this amazingness as essentially benevolent and beautiful. (That’s poetically true.)

But you go a step farther. You guess that there is a mind out there in some way, in addition to the world we know.

Now, why should that be? I see your point that we can not prove it to be untrue and we can see examples of pawns who seem to think they are making their own decisions.

What I want to ask you is why isn’t the world as it is sufficient? Can’t “meaning” be real in its own right? Does it really have to be backed up by some kind of mind or being or spirit?

I believe that our feelings of meaning are sufficient to the definition of meaning. Meaning is real, it is proved by its existence.

Can I imagine a vaster and more objective “eye” out there who would have more knowledge about what’s really going on than I do (like an ant in a plastic ant farm in my office doesn’t know about me or the history of plastic)? Yes, I can imagine it. But why should I imagine it? What’s wrong with what we seem to actually have?

And if there is some mind out there, why doesn’t it contact us in some clear way? Seriously — dogs can’t talk but they make eye contact they bark they let you know they exist and want your attention. Ants don’t seem to have the kind of mind that allows them to recognize us as fellow beings and possible friends. If they did, they’d wave, dance, follow our line of sight until we noticed we had a little friend.

I think if we had a friend out there, we’d know it. What we do know is that we have friends here. Isn’t that marvelous and isn’t that just as good?

“It means something because it means something” is a statement that is weird but has poetic truth.

“It means something because I think it’s possible there’s a larger mind out there and He knows what it all means, and since I think this is possible I go all the way and choose to believe it is the actual case” is a statement that goes off into untruth. we have no indication of this secondary level of meaning. but why do we even want it?

If we want to be what we truly are, it seems to me we have to believe only things we have clear indications of. If that means we have to bear the burden of meaning ourselves, well that is a great and noble adventure and I think we are up to it.

In a post at Religion in American History, I just learned about an atheist newspaperman who I’d never heard of before. His name was Charles Chilton Moore (1837-1906), an atheist who modeled himself after his contemporary, Robert Ingersoll.

One major difference was region – Moore resided in Lexington, Kentucky, surely one of the holes in the Bible Belt. That’s where Moore started up his paper, The Bluegrass Blade, one of America’s earliest (the earliest?) papers that was explicitly atheist.

Thanks to the Library of Congress, I was able to find a few scans of the Blade online. Having read through a few, I realized that the Blade was very much a personal extension of Moore himself. Articles do not attempt a dispassionate or unbiased voice. Many articles deal directly with Moore’s own experiences.

Then it struck me: Moore was a 19th century blogger.

Consider this selection for the issue dated February 11th, 1900:

Fifteen hundred years ago, Constantine, who murdered his own wife and children, started the Christian religion.

From that day to this that religion has been the greatest curse that ever afflicted the earth.

This religion teaches that 6,000 years ago God made the first man out of dust – not even mud – and the first woman out of a bone; that God cursed the whole human race because a snake made the woman eat an apple; that God had a son by another man’s wife, and that he had this son murdered in order to keep himself from sending all the human race to hell.

This son taught that any man who did not believe that piece of ignorance and priestly lying would go to hell and burn eternally in fire and brimstone.

The Bible, in which these things are taught, favors drunkenness, murder, slavery, lying, stealing and lechery.

So you can see that Moore had mastered that cautious, non-judgmental tone that we bloggers are known for. Incidentally, all of this was just the lead in for his story about the assassination of William Goebel, the Governor of Kentucky.

Under the motto, “Edited by a Heathen in the Interest of Good Morals,” Moore published his paper for over twenty years, despite several stays in jail for blasphemy and related crimes. He advocated atheism, prohibition and women’s rights.

Were he alive today, I’m guessing he’d have a site on blogger that would make PZ Myers say, “You know, maybe you should tone it down a bit…”

One of two East Texas church arson suspects kept books on demon possession and atheism as well as assault rifles and guns, and may have left graffiti offering inside information about one of the attacks in a local store bathroom, according to court records. [...]

A search of Bourque’s home after his arrest recovered books titled Demon Possession and The Atheist’s Way.

In fact the newspaper was so concerned that the headline is “Atheist books, guns found at home of arson suspect.”

First of all, Demon Possession does not sound like an atheist book. That sounds like a religious book. Second, what the hell does an atheist book in his house have to do with arson? Why didn’t they say, “Christian books, guns found at home of arson suspect”? Because it doesn’t matter if he had Christian books in his home. Nor would it matter if he had atheist books.

It seems they’re are trying to casually link atheism with arson… or maybe I am overreacting.

What do you think?

(via Calamities of Nature)

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So I want to say this, and forgive me the strangeness of it. Don’t kill yourself. Life has always been almost too hard to bear, for a lot of the people, a lot of the time. It’s awful. But it isn’t too hard to bear, it’s only almost too hard to bear. Hear me out. [...]

I’m issuing a rule. You are not allowed to kill yourself. You are going to like this, stay with me. When a person kills himself, he does wrenching damage to the community. One of the best predictors of suicide is knowing a suicide. That means that every suicide may be a delayed homicide. You have to stay. The reason I say you are going to like this is twofold. First of all, next time you are seriously considering suicide you can dismiss it quickly. Second, and this one’s a little harder to describe, if you are even a tiny bit staying alive for the sake of the community, as a favor to the rest of us, I need to make it clear to you that we are grateful that you stay. I am grateful that you stay alive.

It’s a powerful piece, read the whole thing.

Just a thought.

One of the advantages of becoming an atheist is that it allows you to recalibrate what you consider “normal” and what is “odd” in regards to human belief. Having given up religion, I can step outside the plausibility structure in which Christianity is the norm and take a fresh look. Is the Church of Latter Day Saints really any stranger than the Roman Catholic Church? Are the beliefs of those who practice Santeria any more odd than High Church Episcopalians?

Atheism leads to equality of the sects.

(I’m mainly testing my wordpress access with this one. If you want, consider it an open thread.)

Overcoming personal bias can be one of the most difficult tasks in searching for the truth. The particular experiences and influences in our lives are – to a large degree – out of our control and yet they play a huge role in shaping our beliefs. And it’s not as though we can reboot our lives, remove the biasing agent, and see what we end up believing (we would also have to do it a few hundred times so we can get a decent confidence interval).

A first step is acknowledging our biasing factors, but how do we wrap our minds around it?  Alicorn at Less Wrong gives a great example:

During one of my epistemology classes, my professor admitted (I can’t recall the context) that his opinions on the topic would probably be different had he attended a different graduate school.

What a peculiar thing for an epistemologist to admit!

Of course, on the one hand, he’s almost certainly right. Schools have their cultures, their traditional views, their favorite literature providers, their set of available teachers…
<snip>
But on the other hand… but… but…

But how can he say that, and look so undubiously at the views he picked up this way?

It’s an uncomfortable position.  Now, for all I know, the professor was discussing preferences and not an objective truth claim. I don’t have as big of a problem with the notion that, had I been raised in the South, I would find grits more delicious than waffles (how absurd!). It’s more of a problem when we acknowledge that personal factors are affecting our so-called universal claims of objective truth.

As usual, my mind took the question to religion.  Most people continue to believe the religion they were taught as a child. As it happens, I was raised in a secular household without much discussion of God and grew up to be an atheist. But let’s revisit the scenario in which I was raised in the South (eating foul grits). If I had been raised by Evangelical Christians would I still be an atheist today? It’s conceivable that I would be a Christian apologist, writing philosophical papers for God’s existence and arguing on blogs. That image troubles me – and not just because it’s at odds with what I think right now. I want to be confident that my beliefs are an accurate reflection of reality, not the result of where I was born. The counter factual makes me wonder.

It’s difficult not to sound hypocritical. I believe that, by coincidence, I was raised by parents who were correct. But I’ve heard religious people of all faiths say similar things. What can we do to cut through the biasing influence of our upbringing? How can I be confident that, unlike them, I really WAS coincidentally born into a household which was correct? Obviously, this question applies to everyone, not just me and not just atheists.

All I can see to do is foster critical thinking skills – the conscious effort to overcome bias. I’m trying my best to keep an open mind, give other views a fair hearing, and pursue the truth. So far, as I’ve done that, I’ve found the evidence for the existence of gods to be pathetically flimsy.  I know I can never fully free myself of bias, but at least I’m doing what I can.  It’s my impression that as people learn critical thinking skills, they’re more likely to become atheists. That certainly boosts my confidence.

I know many of you had religious influences growing up and would have a completely different perspective on the issue. I would love your take.

It has been my complete and utter delight to hear from these people and discover that they are among the kindest, most supportive, most thoughtful people I have ever had the pleasure to receive emails from in my life. I mean, they had to go to some trouble to find my email address and write out a nice letter of encouragement and they don’t even have Jesus in their hearts! It truly borders on the miraculous. And I don’t even believe in miracles anymore!

She has also opened up comments (with moderation) on her blog. So go share with her the love of His Noodleness!