You mention that you spent 30 years as a fundamentalist, Pentecostal Christian. You say that now you realize it was all you. You’ve been doing all the things you once credited to God.
What I’ve been saying is that you’ve gone halfway. You’ve done away with the supernatural God, but you haven’t done away with the supernatural view of human beings.
The old view, that has deeply impacted the usual way people think about human beings, said that an eternal Spirit created the material world, and this eternal Spirit gave to human beings the quality of spirit.
This quality of spirit made humans able to rise above instincts and drives and genetics and choose freely to give, to love, to care (even when instincts were pushing the other way). Spirit made humans free creatures. Love, compassion, virtue, courage, soulfulness had their basis in the belief that we were more than our drives, instincts, and genes.
By rejecting God (something outside nature) you reduce reality to nature (including human beings). All you are left with is drives and instincts and genes. Everything a human being does may seem like a choice but now (in your view) it must simply be the result of some prior cause (an evolutionary instinct, genetic predisposition, environmental conditioning, etc.).
Humans as we once understood them (the supernatural view) is now dead and gone (even as God is dead and gone). What you are left with are impersonal programs who do Y (some action) because of X (some prior instinct, conditioning). This is no different than a computer. Humans are qualitatively no different from computers.
As impersonal processes there is no need to care for human life. There’s nothing personal about humans. They’re just things. And we can make these things fairly easily and cheaply (making a baby is easier and cheaper than making a computer). So if a human is not very successful at surviving let it go and make another. There’s no reason we should continue to feed and clothe and waste resources on an unsuccessful bit of programmed matter.
Go ahead and live the illusion that you have a relationship with other people but you’re just one programmed bit of matter reacting off another when you talk, laugh, or cry together. It’s not a real relationship of people (like we’re used to thinking). It was this thinking that led to the holocaust and to the mass killings of the former Soviet Union. What a tragedy! Because it’s not right thinking!
We are spirit! We have choices! We are persons, made in the image of the personal God who has spoken! At Christmas day the soul found it’s worth! God spoke in Jesus Christ and confirmed that we are more than nature. We are spirit!
People who compare Christianity to belief in Thor, the flying spaghetti monster and Zeus reveal a colossal lack of understanding about the nature of the Christian claims. Christianity claims to be a historical religion (unlike those myths). The claims of Christianity can be weighed using the methods of historical scholarship and basic laws of evidence (as used in a court of law). If they don’t hold up to examination, don’t believe them. Fact is they have held up for two thousand years. No one has given a better explanation of the facts than the simple assertion that it’s true.
No one has been able to establish a settled explanation for the person of Christ portrayed in the gospels and the historical realities of an empty tomb and the birth of the church that is more convincing than the simple assertion that it’s true. No one. My prayer is that one day you would rediscover the joy of really knowing that God is and has spoken, but at a minimum I pray you won’t act out the logical conclusions of your current beliefs.
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