A Relationship with Jesus?

It has consistently been my experience that Christian believers who encounter former Christians with objections against Christianity often try to question the former Christians' experience as believers in order to discredit their objections against Christianity as a worldview. The operative presumption in such cases appears to be that, if a former Christian's experience as a Christian can be shown to be in some way illegitimate, then there's reason, it is assumed, to doubt his challenges to the Christian worldview.

Having once been a Christian myself, and now an atheist with a growing inventory of articulated criticisms of the Christian worldview, I have encountered this witnessing strategy a number of times among Christians who take upon themselves the mission to "win me back" to the faith. This tactic is often preferred over examining the issues which are actually in question, such as: can the believer validate his god-beliefs?

Recently, a young Christian woman (to whom I'll refer as Ms. A) paid a visit to my website and read a some of my material. Naturally, she had some comments and questions for me, and so she sent me an e-mail to inquire, primarily in regard to my own experience as a believer. Her message appears below embedded among my responses.

It is true that my experience as a serious Christian did not last long (about 18 months). But that was far more than "long enough" to recognize its many, many serious philosophical errors. As far as how often I went to church in that period, I made no mention, so I must correct you when you state "you didn't go to church that much." Indeed, during my serious pursuit of Christian ideals, I went to church at least 5 days a week, sometimes more than once per day. That's a lot more than I go to the grocery store, and about as much as I'd go to a full time job. (Only, at a job, I produce values, not surrender them. A big difference.) To be sure, my attendance to this church was more than adequate to effect thorough indoctrination.

As far as how old I am, that is irrelevant, Ms. A, and I'm sure you recognize this. My age is not the issue here; the validity of your god-beliefs, however, is. On that all I will say is that I am well past 20, so maybe you can learn from some of my experiences, as I've been standing right where you are now in your life to be sure. Many questions in life are difficult to face at your age, depending on your knowledge and how prepared you are to assume the responsibility of rational thinking. From my experience, most 20 year-olds have little or no idea what rational thinking really is, except perhaps brief snatches of deduction here and there made for the most part in ignorant groping and usually with very little understanding for fundamentals. I cannot blame teenagers for this entirely, for they rarely have the opportunity to find models of rational thinking in our society. (And they certainly won't find it in churches.) It is my sincerest hope that you prove to be a pleasant exception to my experience.

Believers today may deceive themselves into buying the myth that reading these epistles and alleged biographical accounts will give them firsthand knowledge of Jesus, but this is clearly an indulgence in self-deception. As your own words indicate, you can read all you want about a person, but this is not equivalent to knowing that person firsthand and being able to discuss your own questions with him or her directly. If, for instance, you had a particular question for Jesus, how would you seek an answer? If you knew him directly and firsthand, you could ask him point blank, "Jesus, yesterday I was discussing something with my friend, and I was wondering, should I....?" You could invite Jesus over for a cup of coffee, or to spend a whole evening and share a six pack of beer with him, and you could discuss your question all evening long, if you knew him firsthand. But you cannot claim that you know someone firsthand if, in order to answer such questions about that person, you must run to an ancient collection of anonymous biographical narratives and mystical writings as your final source of reference. This would clearly be dishonest.

When I was a believer, I did everything I could to convince myself that such firsthand acquaintance with a person was not necessary in my "walk with Christ." This was what was encouraged, and your question only reinforces my considered opinion that the encouragement of this kind of self-deception is universal to all forms of Christianity to some degree (at least with those variants of Christianity which emphasize the pretense of the "virtues" of a "personal relationship" with Jesus).

The more I sought this firsthand relationship, the more I had to deny the fact that it was not possible (for the reasons I give above). That is how the mind-game works: You con yourself into believing that, if you deny some fact of reality and pursue an irrational end regardless of the fact that reality does not go away simply by denying it "with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul," you just might achieve it anyway! So off the believer goes to spin his wheels of confusion, and self-deception follows as a natural consequence.

Of course, by entertaining the notion that I could seek a relationship with the gospel figure Jesus, I had to take for granted the assumption that Jesus was a real being, an assumption which itself had to assume the New Testament's story lines (e.g., that Jesus lived in 1st cent. Palestine; that Jesus was the "Son of God"; that Jesus had a 3-year ministry and accumulated a mass of believing disciples; that Jesus was condemned to die by crucifixion and later was revived in a tomb, etc.). This was a huge package-deal that I had to accept and assume to be valid in order to grant the idea that a "personal relationship" with Jesus was at all possible.

The believer, to grant this enterprise any validity, must grant validity to a whole series of questionable assumptions, assumptions which he cannot verify or prove, assumptions which he must accept and not question on penalty of the debilitating guilt mentioned above. The cycle is set in motion once this questionable assumption is granted validity. After all, everyone else at church was doing this, so these assumptions must be valid, right? Wouldn't they know? Blank out.

This validity was easy for me to grant, as I was young, and had made my decision to become a Christian in utter ignorance of objectivity and fundamental philosophical issues. I was not unique in this ignorance. None of the believers whom I knew and with whom I "fellowshipped" demonstrated any real knowledge for fundamental philosophical issues. They too, just as I did, had made their decision to become Christian in utter ignorance of these things as well. Furthermore, this ignorance was all the more solidified and fortified by the empty fears and unearned guilt which each was taught to accept unquestioningly. Once these assumptions are taken for granted and these conditions are in place, the evangelical mind-control system of the Bible is set in motion. (See particularly Edmund D. Cohen's The Mind of the Bible-Believer, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1988.)

The mind-game devices of the Bible (there are 7 primary engines of the mind-game; see Cohen, pp. 169-387) provide the raw material which believers need in order to set in motion and perpetuate the delusion of belief. Disbelief is ostracized and the believer is conditioned to experience tremendous fear and guilt at the slightest prospect of unbelief. In terms of essentials, this means that thinking about and questioning the basic assumptions whose validity must be granted unquestioningly for the god-belief program to succeed, should result in guilt. The believer is taught innumerable ways to squelch his disbelief and to uphold the pretense that he really believes, when indeed this is not legitimately possible at all. One cannot consider the arbitrary to be genuine knowledge; one can only pretend to, and the primary aim of the mind-game is to maintain this pretense to oneself. If one believes he is convinced, all the better for his attempts to convince others. As this process replicates itself among new converts, the Christian religion spreads like a viral infection. (See the Christianity Meme website; readers should note that I do not necessarily agree with all the content at this site.)

So, Ms. A, with these points in mind, I can safely say that, yes, I had a relationship with Jesus, just as I had a relationship with an imaginary friend I had in my childhood. The only difference was that, in my relationship with my imaginary friend, I had to fill in all the blanks of our dialogue by myself, completely by my own inventing. In the case of my relationship with Jesus, I had the cues and supports of the evangelical mind-control system to fill in all those blanks for me, so that the pretense of a relationship could be sustained indefinitely.

Have you ever seen Star Trek: The Next Generation? I've seen a few episodes of this imaginative television series, and on the space craft there is something called (I think it's called) a "holodeck." It's essentially a big empty room with a computer interface operating system which allows its users to program any environment they choose. They can input all kinds of details and download an entire realm of appearances to decorate the room, and it appears like they're somewhere else. They could turn it into an early 20th-century lounge with a four-piece jazz band, patrons and a friendly bartender, or they could make it an outdoor scene complete with wildlife and frequented by hostile enemies for combat practice. When the users were done and wanted to exit the holodeck's programmed environment, all they'd have to do is give a verbal command to the computer (like God, you couldn't see it, but it had ears) and the illusory environment completely disappears, and reality returns.

This is sort of like what happens when the believer recognizes the invalidity of the mind-game he's invested himself in while trying to find Jesus: it begins to disappear. The disillusionment may be sudden, but usually those who recover from their self-deceptive experience recognize that it was actually a longer and much more painful process than at first perceived. Of course, the longer one invests himself into encouraging and reinforcing the mind-game's influence, and the more energy he devotes to his absorption of the mind-game's assumptions, the more difficult it will become for him to recover from its deceptive influences and eventually to make a return to reality. In a way, it is like any investment one might make. It is very difficult, after a huge expenditure of energy and enthusiasm in a venture, to recognize its futility.

Look at the dot-com industry now. Companies are folding up left and right as CEOs and program directors begin to admit to themselves that their venture is a failure and their efforts to resuscitate their company's heartrate will not succeed. The parallels are enormous, except for the fact that the aims of the dot-com industry have some validity to them, and their pursuit of values is legitimate. This cannot be said on behalf of the Bible's mind-game, though.

Consider the investment of a seminary student, who has spent years of effort, energy and financial expense in pursuing his divinity degree. Is this person likely to jeopardize all this personal investment in order to question whether what he's been learning all this time is really a sham?

My suggestion is to seek a legitimate and rational philosophy, which is Objectivism, and learn to recognize that your idea of reality does not have to include the malevolent view of man's life which is encouraged by Christianity. You have a mind, but no one can force you to use it. The choice to accept the responsibility of rational thought is all yours, and yours alone. Running to the hysteria of god-belief is no substitute for rational thinking.

Your very question above assumes a dichotomy between what one allegedly knows "from his heart" and what you call "head knowledge." Such dichotomies are invalid and untenable, yet crucial to the persistence of the mind-game's success. I do not accept that there are two such categories of knowledge as your question assumes. One's emotions are not a substitute for principled thought, just as mourning, misery and self-sacrifice are not substitutes for man's joy, success or achievement of his values. This is a discovery of reality you likely have yet to make, but I hope some of the material on my site will help enable you to finally make this discovery for yourself.

I was quite fortunate in my case, for prior to my enshrinement of the arbitrary and my worship of the incomprehensible (i.e., prior to my experience as a bible-toting, verse-quoting rank and file, ever-agreeing, mind-surrendering Christian), I had taken a course in logic in junior college. I did very well in that class; so well in fact that my phone was going off the hook all the time from classmates asking to study with me in preparation for the course's upcoming exams. I learned to some degree that there is a method to valid thinking. What I lacked was a comprehensive view of life and of reality in which logical thinking achieves its non-contradictory validity. In essence, I lacked Objectivism, and therefore was vulnerable to any occasioning mysticism which appeared in my path to deceive me. I had no philosophical self-defense.

Virtually none of the believers at the church I attended were college-educated; nor did they seem to consider education at all important, particularly if it were secular education. The world is bad, is the droning sentiment of Christianity, and several of my fellow-worshippers (particularly the church's pastor) had even encouraged me to abandon my pursuit of an education at the local university so that I could devote all my energy to the merciless spin cycle of my god-belief and to enable me more free time to proselytize new converts. "One can know too much," I was told.

I remember trying to teach one of my fellow-believers the fallacy of the complex question, a fallacy I had learned about in that logic class I mentioned. I had heard the pastor sermonizing once and I recognized his reliance on this fallacy, the complex question. Your question above in fact commits this very error. The fellow to whom I was trying to teach this fallacy refused to grasp the error it commits, and was puzzled why I would worry about it. Obviously, sound reasoning was not his concern at all. I recognized that he did not want to learn how to detect this fallacy because then he might recognize the error committed in the sermon that had just been preached (in fact, the theme of the entire sermon was built on a fallaciously complex question). I could see the strain in my fellow-believer's face as he resisted this new and incriminating information; he would do anything to resist the introduction of new principles which might challenge the validity of assumptions he had taken for granted. Consequently, he eliminated himself from being a candidate for critical thinking.

I tried to ignore this incident and preferred to consider it just one of those anomalies in life. But it kept bothering me, this breach of reason, and finally I recognized that I was running from the same thing my fellow-believer was running from when he resisted learning about logical fallacies. What was I running from? I was running from the responsibility of rational thinking, and for the same reason this other guy had been running from it: to preserve the self-delusion of god-belief at all costs, especially at the cost of my own mind.

Then, I began to wonder, if Christianity is all so true, why then must the deliverance of its principles rely on fallacious reasoning? Questions of this nature would not go away, even though considering them made me uncomfortable, principally because they conflicted with the god-belief program I was afraid to disobey. Critical thinking is nowhere encouraged in the Bible; in fact, the Bible encourages quite the opposite: the confusion of one's emotions with knowledge (e.g., Proverbs 1:7), and the confusion of one's hopes with a means of validating knowledge claims (e.g., Romans 8:24-25; Hebrews 1:1, etc.). But emotions are not a substitute for knowledge, nor do our hopes override the facts of reality which knowledge must take into account in our pursuit of certainty and with which knowledge must conform to be objectively valid.

Slowly I began to recognize that something was critically wrong with all that I had accepted, or tried to accept, as "gospel truth." And the more I started to track down the problem that I had detected, and the more I started to consider the "reasoning" of those who spoke at the church I attended, the more I realized that I had been conned into an enormous snow job, literally of biblical proportions! The gospel teachings that I had taken to heart were useless the moment I stepped outside the church, and I tried to deny this fact. But eventually, I woke up and saw the hoax for what it was.

This is essentially what happened, though there are many more details and examples of error which I am not relating here, all of which made me recognize that biblical philosophy is false as I began to consider those details and errors more and more honestly. The more the pastor encouraged me to "lean not upon my own understanding" (cf. Prov. 3:5), the more I recognized that he had a vested interest in my reliance on my own ignorance. Indeed, his pay depended on it!

Eventually, I declared my own independence and my right to exist for my own sake, regardless of who did not approve.

Ms. A asked:

Proverbs 1:7 states, "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." (KJV) This is one of the most blatant reversals I've found in the Bible, and my exposure of its error is the subject of an essay I have currently under construction. Eventually, once it's finished, I will post it to my website. So far, in all my readings of atheological literature, this reversal has escaped the awareness of virtually every author I've read, yet I think it is one of the most significant errors in all Judeo-Christian philosophy, and as such warrants my attention. I don't expect those like yourself who have little or no working knowledge of rational philosophy to detect the error I'm talking about here, so unfortunately, my pointing this out will likely generate a number of questions on your part. Indeed, I hope it does generate questions, and that you seek their answers, either from my material, or from your own consideration of the issues involved. So long as believers are trapped in the throes of the evangelical mind-control system, however, I've found they are not too concerned with their commitment to fallacy. Such carelessness is only one of the engines of the Bible's mind-games.

Do they care that the content of their products is the result of cheap reasoning and (at best!) shoddy scholarship?

No.

Do they care that young persons like you, with your whole life still ahead of you, might read their drivel and take it as truth?

Of course not.

In fact, so much the better, as that only increases the odds that you'll buy their next load of lies. What the success of their deceptive influence over your mind depends on is your own ignorance of their subterfuge and your lack of a rational philosophy by which to protect your mind from irrational fears.

If you want a rational philosophy which will guide your life to success and happiness, there is no substitute for Objectivism. If you want a philosophy which preys on your ignorance, fears, your acceptance of unearned guilt and your desire to evade reality and objectify the contents of your imagination, then Christianity is tailor-made for you. Take your pick, and be prepared for its results.

Although according to my site statistics, this is one of the most popularly accessed articles on my entire website, no one has sent me a refutation of even one of the points I provide in this essay. Why do you suppose that is? Perhaps you'd like to review it and get back to me with your comments? I should gladly read it.

Thanks again, Ms. A, for your e-mail. I hope to hear from you again.

Best regards,

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