Atheist Turned Believer

When I posted my summary of Hollow Faith , my counter indicated that it was the 99th post I've made on this blog.  A nice, round 100 seems like a good place to stop, so I decided to come up with one more bag of hot air for posterity.  As I type the first draft of this paragraph, I have no idea what I may have left unsaid, so perhaps I should focus on a conspectus of what has gone before. To my non-believing readers: 1. First off, congratulations!  Your skepticism at least implies a certain level of intelligence.  Good for you!  Please go further.  Look inside yourself.  Ferret out any assumptions or biases that may be subconsciously clouding your judgment.  A materialistic or humanistic bias does not represent an improvement over a deistic one.  Don't let it cause you to dismiss the fortuity of a Greater Power out of hand.  Stay open to possibilities.  Even Carl Sagan, quoting Martin Rees and others, famously said that "absence of e...

 In my series on ecclesiology, I commented several times that the Western church is overdo for a reformation.  Throughout my series on Christian life, I have repeated ad nauseam that everything in Western ideology is wrong.  I have, on several occasions, attempted to explain in greater detail what I mean by those statements.  I find now that a small book I initially despaired reading does a far more concise job of doing this than I have been able to achieve.  Within the six short chapters of Hollow Faith: How Andy Griffith, Facebook, and the American Dream Diluted the Gospel , Stephen Ingram, in his own words, summarizes the problems of modern Western ecclesiology thus: 1. "Our culture has influenced the Church and Christianity in such a way that the radical gospel of Jesus Christ, the one who proclaimed that the first shall be last, who ate with prostitutes and tax collectors, and who told us to love our enemies, has been diluted into a loose set of beliefs, t...

 The last century has seen some of the most dramatic shifts in human social interaction in the entirety of our existence.  World War II. The Cold War.  Landing on the moon.  The Internet.  As Dr. Graham Walker (McAfee School of Theology, Mercer University) notes, "We used to think about having to do post-Holocaust theology; now we have to think about what it means to learn to do Google theology." "We are living in a time of great integration, pluralism and change.  We live in a time and place where different cultures, religions, lifestyles, and ways of living are interacting with one another more than ever before.  With this closeness, not only in knowledge but also in proximity, the faith of and the way the modern Christian interacts with the 'other' has to be reconsidered and reevaluated unlike ever before." Many readers will remember the events of 9/11, especially since, as of this writing, the most produced play in North America is currently Come ...

"Mass consumer capitalism constitutes the human self in a very particular way; as an individual, autonomous, rational, self-seeking, cost benefit calculating consumer.  This, of course, is not what human selves have always been, nor what they will inevitably be." - Christian Smith, Soul Searching , on mass consumer capitalism. I believe I've mentioned before in this blog that, when I was between the ages of 1 and 15 years old, my family moved every 18 months on average.  One of the more fascinating aspects about this ongoing process was that, upon each occasion that my father would announce the next move, he and my mother would immediately begin The Purge .  They would go through every room in the house gathering up all the stuff that they didn't want to pack and move.  Then they'd have a garage sale.  Next they'd make a few trips to Goodwill or the Salvation Army.  Finally there would be numerous trips to the city dump.  We'd get ourselves down to the...

I felt a lot of sympathy for Justice and Taylor Swift when their MTV Awards wins were interrupted by Kanye West's impromptu rants designed to upstage their acceptance speeches in 2006 and 2009, respectively.  How rude.  How utterly narcissistic.  My sympathy was somewhat tempered when, in 2014, Swift's "Blank Space" landed on the Rolling Stone's list of "Most Narcissistic Songs of All Time."  Dr. Nathan DeWall, in his paper Tuning in to Psychological Change  (2011), says that narcissism is on the rise in popular music.  However, unlike the PMRC, who attribute the noticeable trends in youth to the influence of popular music, DeWall thinks it's the other way round; that popular music doesn't cause cultural trends in youth but reflects them. Would someone please tell me who the heck Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and Kim Kardashian actually are?  These three women are apparently wildly famous for being wildly famous.  None of them sing, dance, act, ow...

 One of the most fascinating aspects of the modern Western idea of God as wish-granting genie or self-help therapist is how it is completely contrary to another pillar of Western theology - the idea of deism. Ingram uses an amusing metaphor to launch his discussion of deism.  In it, he describes his fondness for brunch, especially the bread course.  The only real problem with the bread serving at brunch is choosing between pancakes and waffles.  Pancakes are great, but he really loves waffles.  Why?  Because they have those deep wells that can hold the fruit, butter, syrup, whipped cream or other topping-of-choice.  By choosing which compartments get the toppings, you can make silly faces or other designs on top of the waffles.  Those compartments can be a lot of fun, to say nothing of the ability to pick and choose between flavors. The concept of deism lets us treat God like syrup on a waffle, compartmentalizing the parts of our lives that God ca...

In this post, I will make several comments that could be construed as disparaging toward the psychological and psychiatric communities,  and I wish to dispel any such misgivings here in the opening paragraph.  Over the years, I have developed friendships with many people suffering from schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, and a number of other psychoses, and I am frequently in awe at what their respective clinicians and doctors are able to achieve in helping them realize their own individual definitions of "normal" lives.  I have a very dear friend who works with autistic clients, and my own sister tutors visually-impaired students.  What I have witnessed through them often falls just short of miraculous. My umbrage is not taken with these remarkable professionals.  However, since the publication of I'm Ok, You're OK in 1967 (Thomas Anthony Harris, Harper & Row), there has arisen a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry in books and television programs filled wit...

As I prepare to launch into an in-depth study of Hollow Faith by Stephen Ingram I remind the reader that what follows in the next few posts will be less of a review of the book and more the thoughts and impressions I had while reading it.  When I do cite Ingram's work, I shall endeavor to denote such with quotation marks. A strange thing happened in America following World War II, or, more precisely, several strange things happened simultaneously to drastically alter our culture's trajectory.  First, the boys came home from the war and immediately started making babies.  Lots of babies.  Second, for the first time in a generation's memory, the economy began to stabilize.  Third, we developed a sense of national pride based on the concept that we and we alone had defeated the Nazis and their allies (after all, the European powers had ten years to fight Nazis before we showed up, and we got the job done in under three).  Fourth - and perhaps most i...

Let us pretend a bit today.  Let's say that we are sales reps for a large manufacturer.  Most studies indicate that we can expect a sales quota of approximately 10% of our total contacts.  This is widely regarded as an acceptable number as there will always be those who neither want nor need our product.  But let's say that the product we are peddling is something like fire extinguishers.  We can now divide our contacts into two broad groups - those who have fire extinguishers and those that need one.  In truth, everybody needs a fire extinguisher in their home or business.  Still, our quotas remain around 10%.  Let's add the idea that our sales manager has already vetted our contact list and is only sending us out to talk about fire extinguishers among people who don't already own one.  We can up the ante once again and say that we represent the only fire extinguisher manufacturer in the world.  I'll even go so far as to say we're not ...

For just at a year and a half now -since Marsh of 2024 - I've been repeating that everything about Western ideology is wrong, but I don't think I've explained myself in this regard particularly well, or, at least, I haven't explained in such a manner so that the typical Western thinker (and, by "Western," we essentially mean "Euro-American") might understand my meaning.  Today, I shall attempt to correct this oversight, and, in so doing, attempt to demonstrate the connection between the three different topics so far discussed in this blog (atheism, ecclesiology and Christian life). Let us begin our examination with the acknowledgement of a fact so basic that it is rarely examined and even more rarely discussed: that the human brain, in being self-aware, is also, by its very nature, self-centered.  I shall be using the phrase "self-centered" frequently throughout this thesis, and it is important that the reader note that I do not use it in a...