BWB Blog

I received this message to my article Why I Quit Christianity. It is a good post so I am answering it here in a new article:

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Hello my friend,

I am very happy with the turn this conversation has taken. You and I share a common background since I once was where you are now (in many respects, not all!). And we seem to have a common interest in being understood and clarifying confusions. This combination is relatively rare on the internet. I think many will benefit from our interaction. I know I find it interesting and satisfying.

The apology was heartfelt, and I rejoice to see the fruit it bears.

I'm glad you understand that "Anyone of us could learn something tomorrow that would trigger a paradigm shift in our world view." That's what happened to me and Rose. In spades! But I understand you are applying that to the problematic verses. And I agree to a degree. For example, it is possible that Paul was replying to false statements he received in a letter when he said "It is good for a man not to touch a woman." If we had the letter we would have known that he was quoting the false statement in the letter and correcting it. That's one approach folks have taken to resolve the sexism in the Bible. But that approach is a piecemeal approach and so does not convince me because it is trumped by the "Big Picture" of sexism that saturates the Bible from beginning to end. The image of God is fundamentally male - indeed, a Trinity of Males. And this is why the emphasis on obedience is so problematic. Who really has an interest in obedience? RULING MALES. The literal "male kings" which are the basis of the primary Biblical metaphor for God. Christianity hinges on the concept of sin as "disobedience" and that is a concept I categorically reject. It has nothing to do with morality. Obedience to religious dogmas is a primary source of evil in the world. Steven Weinberg put it well when he said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion." Even the reference to "good people" collides with the Christian dogma that there are none. It is here that Christian dogma collides with reality. We all know that there are good people in the world, and there is no correlation between goodness and religion.
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This website has been online for over eleven years. I have used it to share my faith and strongly encourage people to believe Christ and the Bible. I have expressed my personal religious beliefs very publicly. But my beliefs have changed a lot in the last couple of years, so it is time to discuss why I came to be a Christian.

Religious beliefs are largely determined by the mere chance event of where you were born. Folks tend to adopt the dominant religion of the region of their birth unless their immediate family follows a different tradition. But neither geography nor family fully determines religious belief. Temperament and life experience play important roles. Not everyone is satisfied with their inherited religion, while others simply have no interest in the big question of "what it's all about." Some are looking for certainty in this disturbingly chaotic world. Religion gives answers, like a parent telling a child "everything will be alright." Others are catapulted into a search for meaning by the traumas of life. Siddhartha, who became the Buddha, left his sheltered home to begin his famous quest for enlightenment after encountering suffering, disease, and death. Though I can't claim to have achieved his goal, my motivations were largely the same.
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Since I began this website back in 2001, and during most of the decade that followed, I identified myself as a “Bible-believing Christian” in no uncertain terms. For example, here is how I described myself in my old FAQ (which remains on the archive of my old site for historical purposes):
Likewise, here is my testimony about the purpose of my website on the old homepage:
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This is the third version of the site I founded on February 11, 2001 to share my discovery of the Bible Wheel, which is a simple two-dimensional representation of the 66 books of the Bible as three wheels within a wheel of 22 Spokes, corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. I was a devout Christian at that time, and spent the next decade writing hundreds of articles to explain my discovery, as well as a 412 page hardbound book. I felt it was proof that God had designed the detailed structure of Scripture. Unfortunately, it also had the deleterious effect of drawing me into a rather conservative form of Christian fundamentalism since I did, after all, feel that I had objectively verifiable proof of the divine inspiration of the Bible. But as the years rolled by, I began to notice that there were problems with the Bible that I just could not ignore and after a couple of years of serious discourse with my wife Rose, we both came to understand that the Bible was not the "Word of God." I explain my reasons in a post called Why I Quit Christianity.
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