Archive
Reflections after reading The End of Christianity
I recently finished John Loftus’s The End of Christianity and I wanted to jot down some thoughts. This isn’t so much of a review as it is a debrief after reading the book. The strange thing about The End of Christianity is that it actually made me care less about atheism. But it’s not what you think. Let me explain.
Similar to his earlier book The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, Loftus assembles a group of counterapologetic heavy hitters to really dismantle Christianity in every possible. The collection of essays feel like they’re’s written for academics, so I felt that some of the parts were kinda dry… like reading a boring technical manual. In fact, that’s exactly what I felt when I read the first chapter, by David Eller. My sincerest apologies to him as a person, but I normally find his work dull and unengaging. Eller focuses a lot about the cultural aspects of Christianity, that it looks so much like any other culture that it’s probably just any other culture. Rather than, you know, being true.
Towards the end of his chapter though, things started picking up. This was specifically when he starts writing about how Christianity evolved and adapted when it came to America and beyond. It was probably more relatable for me. I get really bored with the history geekouts. But as I closed out Chapter 1 and started in Chapter 2, something in me died.
That something was the Power that Christianity had over my emotions. The end of Chapter 1 made Christianity feel not just “more false”, but blindingly, painfully, bluntly, and ridiculously more false. And as I went through the next chapters, this Power continued to wither and fade.
Since becoming an atheist, I felt it important to actually keep an open mind… to have an idea of what I’d anticipate seeing to change my mind. And while I still think it’s important to actually keep an open mind (and not just say the words), I’d be lying if I said that my anticipation came with a lot of emotions.
What were those emotions? It’s kinda that “on guard” feeling we in the psychology biz call “fight for flight”. It’s like a defensiveness… but more so. It’s trying to simultaneously stay open for a genuinely new correct information, while being prepared to catch nonsense, while being ready to respond in an adult and assertive manner. All that… stuff takes energy and is quite draining.
I also need to admit that a huge part of those emotions are the “what if they’re right” worries.
I mean, I “know” in my head that Christianity has been false for quite some time, but there’s always been that bit of emotional “what if”. I think it has to do with the effects of conformity: the natural impulse to think and act everyone else. So many people in my life are Christians, that it takes a lot of effort to combat that those effects. But it’s easier when more atheists are around. And after reading The End of Christianity, it kinda feels like the conformity effects are mostly gone.
Hmm… that didn’t occur to me until I typed it just now. The End of Christianity made Christianity so absurd that it took away the emotional distress of not confirming to it. Christianity isn’t just wildly improbable, it isn’t even remotely possible.
In fairness to my other life experiences. I wasn probably headed that way already and this book just took it over the top
Terror management theory predicts that I’ll be a more passionate atheist the more my worldview is threatened. Christianity doesn’t feel like a threat to me, so I don’t care as much.
I’m still an atheist, but I’ve definitely noticed that my rant blog is harder to write for. Thanks John, et al.
- – - – - – - -
Some other quick notes. My favorite chapters were the ones by Dr. Valerie Tarico on god psychology and Dr Victor Stenger on near death experiences and the afterlife. Richard Carrier’s stuff was good too, although his intelligent design chapter was a bit hard to follow. The biggest surprise for me was Robert Price. I’ve listened to him on atheist podcasts and utterly can’t stand the way he talks. His phrases are way too densely packed with references and quotes. He writes exactly how he talks and I was quite shocked to see how much better his communication style is on paper than on the radio. Same content, same style, night and day difference.
Been busy, but haven’t given up blogging
Hey regular visitors and people who have subscribed.
I just wanted to give you a hello as it’s been a couple weeks since my last post.
While I’m not a very frequent poster to begin with, I have run into a small yet significant problem that all bloggers must face… a lack of ideas for blog posts.
This blog was always meant to be my little vent space for my atheism while living in a Christian world. If I ran into something in life that bothered me and needed to let it out, but had no where to turn, I posted it here.
My posts are often inspired (more accurately, “provoked”) by my life’s current events. But more importantly, they were inspired by my ability (more accurately, “lack of ability”) to process them. It’s troublesome because lately, I’ve felt less provoked. And when I’ve felt provoked, I’ve processed them with myself better.
This has been an ongoing theme in my life. The situation is still the same. But I’m different. TiggerGal hasn’t turned from god and embraced atheism. LadyBug is still as much a believer as a 6 year old girl can cognitively be. I dunno, it just seems to bother me less. There’s a sort of fatalistic acceptance I have. Nothing I can do about it, so why not live my life with them and be happy.
As Victor Frankl once wrote:
When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.
The post-atheism I’ve been feeling ever since the evolution refutation talk has been growing. It feels like giving anymore attention to Christianity (out side of working on spiritual issues with my clients at work, or just listing to my wife’s day), feels like a waste of time. Better to focus on the things that excite and inspire me. And if anyone else wants to hear about it, I’ll be happy to share.
On a related note, I’ve recently discovered Eliezer Yudkowsky’s fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I know, I know… I’m almost a year late on it. It’s an alt-universe take on the Harry Potter series. What if Petinua Evans married a college professor and skeptic Michael Verres instead of general sod Vernon Dursley? The result is a rational, logical, and scientific look at the magical universe of Harry Potter.
There are so many things to love about this fanfic. From an educational standpoint, Yudkowsky artfully crafts in lessons about cognitive science, rationality, philosophy, physics, and more into the plot events of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. The teachy parts feel organic and a natural part of the story.
Not only that, but Yudkowsky stays true to the characters. They feel like the same people, and when confronted by Boy Genius Harry, they act in ways that are authentic and consistent with what we’ve read in J.K. Rowling’s originals.
I’m thoroughly impressed. It’s essentially an introduction to the Sequences on LessWrong, wrapped in a very engaging, very entertaining, very touching story. If you have some time, check it out. As Jen McCreight suggested, at least check out the first 5 chapters. If you don’t love it by then, thanks for trying.
If I ever do a book trade again, I’d probably suggest this.
A Christian’s Take on “Stumbling on Happiness”, Chapters 10 and 11
The following is a guest post by Christian commenter redBeardRobbins. We’re doing a book trade where I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and he’s reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. These two books were very influential to our respective lives, so why not share the goodness?
This being the last post on my book exchange with Shawn I’d like to thank him again for his interest in doing this and for graciously allowing me to post my thoughts. I think most Christians appreciate an atheist that is willing to dialogue on these issues in a fair way and I’m thankful Shawn took up the challenge of reading Lewis’ work with an open mind.
Gilbert opens by saying practice and coaching can teach us many things in life but they fail at teaching us to predict our emotional futures. In that section he says:
We expect the next car, the next house, or the next promotion to make us happy even though the last ones didn’t and even though others keep telling us that the next ones won’t. Why don’t we learn to avoid these mistakes…?
This betrays the common notion of what brings happiness in our culture. It’s an idea that material possessions or status bring happiness. Christians are guilty of this too but ultimately we recognize that these things are temporal and that what’s eternal is what matters. There’s also the idea that we weren’t meant to be fulfilled in this world – that we were created for eternity with Christ and as long as we live in a fallen world we won’t be satisfied even though the world seems to have a lot to offer. A Christian musical group called Caedmon’s Call encapsulates this thought in one of their songs:
This world has nothing for me and this world has everything.
All that I could want and nothing that I need.
As a Christian I reject the notion that happiness in this life is even the ultimate goal. For one thing, if your ultimate goal in life is to achieve true happiness then you’re setting yourself up for failure. This world is messed up, I still derive a lot of happiness from what is good here but ultimately realize I won’t be truly fulfilled until the next life. It’s a beautiful thought in that it recognizes the brokenness of this world but offers hope. We will be reunited with our Maker where, as Scripture says, the lion will lie down with the lamb and there will be no more pain or death.
Later in chapter 10 he comments on how we remember when we’re in the slowest line at the grocery store, for example, because it is memorable. It’s so mind-numbingly ordinary to wait in an average paced line that we take no notice.
There’s a good critical thinking principle here that Gilbert’s hit on. I remember learning that there was no evidence to suggest that some people can predict when a storm is coming by when their arthritis acts up. Now, up to that point I had heard people swear they could tell what kind of weather was coming based on the pain in their left knee. I didn’t quite buy it but who was I to argue if they said it happened every time before a storm. I think what Gilbert says is true – their knees hurt often but they paid attention when they hurt just before a storm and reasoned that it was caused by the impending weather.
The gist of this section is that learning from others stories about their experience isn’t as reliable as we might think:
Because we tend to remember the best of times and the worst of times instead of the most likely of times, the wealth of experience that young people admire does not always pay clear dividends.
One criticism I’ve had of Gilbert is that he explains in great detail why we fail to accurately predict our future happiness but doesn’t offer what to do with that information. Well, finally in the last chapter of the book he begins offering some thoughts along those lines. The first section I came across that hinted at addressing this basically said we can ask other people about the experiences they’ve had and hear how happy they were afterwards.
Before I finished reading that section I thought, ‘but he just spent most of the book (especially the last chapter) saying that you can’t trust people’s report on their happiness.” We have faulty memory, our vision plays tricks on us, we remember things better or worse than they really were so they’re probably giving us a distorted view of their past experiences. That hardly sounded like a ‘solution to the core problem with which this book has been concerned.’
Then I finished the section and he says even when people listen to the advice of others that have had experiences they are contemplating having people still make bad decisions. So that can’t be it. Part of the reason, according to Gilbert, is that we foolishly accept bad advice and foolishly reject good advice.
The last few points of the book are really interesting. He talks about something he calls super-replicators. A self-replicator is an idea or belief that even if wrong is likely to be spread because of its benefit to society as a whole. An example he provides is ‘children bring happiness.’ Parents know that children are a lot of really hard work and involve a lot of self sacrifice. His point is that even if it’s not true that ‘children bring happiness’ any society that denied it would cease to exist in around fifty years:
any belief – even a false belief – that increases communication has a good chance of being transmitted over and over again. False beliefs that happen to promote stable societies tend to propagate because people who hold these beliefs tend to live in stable societies, which provide the means by which false beliefs propagate.
And then:
The belief-transmission game is rigged so that we must believe that children and money bring happiness, regardless of whether such beliefs are true. This doesn’t mean that we should all now quit our jobs and abandon our families. Rather, it means that while we believe we are raising children and earning paychecks to increase our share of happiness, we are actually doing these things for reason beyond our ken. We are nodes in a social network that arises and falls by a logic of its own, which is why we continue to toil, continue to mate, and continue to be surprised when we do not experience all the joy we so gullibly anticipated.
That last sentence sounds a bit matrix-y. We’re pawns in a belief-transmission game. Here he’s answering the question ‘why aren’t we satisfied?’ I offered an alternative answer above – people gullibly anticipate joy because they don’t believe they’re created for the next world. They think that this world is all there is and that true happiness must be found here. It’s not, we only get a glimpse here – there’s much more to come.
He humorously addresses my earlier concern when he writes:
My friends tell me that I have a tendency to point out problems without offering solutions, but they never tell me what I should do about it.
Now he starts getting into really offering a solution to the problems he’s outlined. It all boils down to these two sentences:
If you believe (as I do) that people can generally say how they are feeling at the moment they are asked, then one way to make predictions about our own emotional futures is to find someone who is having the experience we are contemplating and ask them how they feel.
and:
This … suggests that when people are deprived of the information that imagination requires and are thus forced to use others as surrogates, they make remarkably accurate predictions about their future feelings, which suggests that the best way to predict our feelings tomorrow is to see how others are feeling today.
I immediately thought what if you’re considering embracing the party lifestyle and you asked a party animal how they felt *right now* at this party? They may very well tell you they’re having the time of the life and maybe they haven’t started drinking yet so they’re lucid and you believe them. But, ask that same person in 20 years and they may tell you how that lifestyle led to damaged and inconsistent relationships, medical problems and a lot of regret.
Would taking Gilbert’s advice serve you well in this instance? It might, if you’re only concerned with short-term happiness. Gilbert was concerned earlier about conventional methods of dealing with this problem still leading to bad decisions. It seems to me like that could still be the case here depending on what people will say makes them happy at that moment.
The chapter draws to a close with this statement:
The irony, of course, is that surrogation is a cheap and effective way to predict one’s future emotions, but because we don’t realize just how similar we all are, we reject this reliable method and rely instead on our imaginations, as flawed and fallible as they may be.
And he has several studies to back this up. People most accurately predicted their future happiness when they listened to what others that just went through that experience had said about their current happiness. But my own study of the interwebs revealed that people have drastically different opinions on what makes them happy. Maybe I’m missing the point here but a cursory examination of the Amazon reviews of this or almost any other book will tell you that right after reading it they derived highly varied feelings of happiness from it.
The last sentence of the Afterword is fitting:
But if our great big brains do not allow us to go sure-footedly into our futures, they at least allow us to understand what makes us stumble.
And that’s what this book was – mostly a description of why we fail at predicting our future happiness.
An Atheist’s Take on “Surprised by Joy”, Chapters 13, 14, and 15
As part of a book trade, I’m reading “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life” by C.S. Lewis. In addition to being his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy” also happens to chronicle Lewis’s path from a wishy-washy Christian, to a hardcore atheist, and back to a much more thoughtful and devoted follower of Christ.
So this is it. The final three chapters. And I should have guessed that Lewis would make these the most theologically dense chapters in the entire book. He really goes over a lot of material.
Chapter 13 is titled “The New Look” named after Lewis’s new outlook in life following his military service. He writes:
There was to be no more pessimism, no more self-pity, no flirtations with any idea of the supernatural, no romantic delusions.
It almost sounds like he’s become somewhat of an accepting naturalist. He goes on:
When once one has dropped the absurd notion that reality is an arbitrary alternative to “nothing,” one gives up being a pessimist (or even an optimist). There is no sense in blaming or praising the Whole, nor, indeed, in saying anything about it. Even if you persist in hurling Promethean or Hardyesque defiances at it, then, since you are part of it, it is only that same Whole which through you “quietly declaims the cursings of itself” – a futility which seems to me to vitiate Lord Russell’s stirring essay on “The Worship of a Free Man.” Cursings were futile, and as immature, as dreams about the western garden. One must (like Carlyle’s lady) “accept” the universe; totally, with no reservations, loyally. This sort of Stoical Monism was the philosophy of my New Look. And it gave me a great sense of peace. It was perhaps the nearest thing to a religious experience which I had had since my prep-school days. It ended (I hope forever) any idea of a treaty or compromise with reality. So much the perception of even one Divine attribute can do.
Sounds good to me. I can get behind all that. However, something that bothers me a bit is Lewis’s capitalization of “the Whole”. There’s still this sacred, worshipful reverence that he attaches to things, whether he intends to or not.
At this stage, Lewis views Joy as merely “aesthetic experience” which is pretty okay in my book too.
But like any shiny new thing, the novelty of his New Look started to dull. The honeymoon was over and the normal stressors of reality started to sink in. Not only that, but two of his now close friends, Barfield and Harwood, became Anthroposophists. That’s a fancy word for a kind of spiritual naturalism.
This was a pretty big blow to him since both of those friends were supposed to be pretty hardcore non-superstitionists. If they could change over to spiritualism, couldn’t anyone? Couldn’t Lewis?
And so the debates began. And although his friend Barfield didn’t convert Lewis to Anthroposophism (such a hard word to type), he did manage to break down two important parts of Lewis’s belief system. The first discarded belief was “chronological snobbery”, the blind favoritism in the present day intellectual climate over the thoughts of the past.
The second discard was was that of “realism”:
“…we accepted as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses. But at the same time we continued to make for certain phenomena of consciousness all the claims that really went with a theistic or idealistic view. We maintained that abstract thought (if obedient to logical rules) gave indisputable truth, or our moral judgement was “valid”, and our aesthetic experience not merely pleasing but “valuable”
…
If one kept (as rock-bottom reality) the universe of the senses, aided by instruments and co-ordinated so as to form “science,” then one would have to go much further – as many have since gone – and adopt a Behaviorist theory of logic, ethics, and aesthetics. But such a theory was, and is, unbelievable to me.
…
I mean that the act of believing what the behaviorist believes is one that my mind simply will not perform. I cannot force my thought into the shape any more than I can scratch my ear with my big toe or pour wine out of a bottle into the cavity at the base of that bottle. It is as final as a physical impossibility. I was therefore compelled to give up realism.
Emphasis mine. I think I finally found the fundamental and, dare I say presuppositional, point where Lewis and I differ. This may be the constitutional difference that makes his conversion back to Christianity pretty understandable (in context) and my rejection of the spiritual as equally valid. Where as Lewis has no physical ability to believe in behaviorism, I find accepting it ridiculously easy. I see everything as causal events so behaviorism is a no-brainer for me. I can’t really fault him for this I guess.
The penultimate chapter 14 is appropriately titled “Checkmate” and it documents Lewis’s final steps to theism.
The battering that Lewis got from his friend Barfield was followed up by a decimation from a new classmate, Nevill Coghill. Coghill was not only the most perfectly person in the class intellectually and personally, he was also a super supernaturalistc Christian. His very presence alone was sufficient evidence for the truth of spirituality. Lewis started reading and noticing his appeal to the more theistic and religious writers, while at the same time, noticing his boredom with non-spiritual writers. It’s interesting that the people he’s most attracted to are the spiritual ones, in some kind of Argument from Fandom or something.
Lewis is quick to point out that he’s not really headed toward Christianity at this stage, just closer to a generic belief in a generic god. And fortunately, he telegraphs the moves that his generic god takes to reveal itself.
- Reading the Hippolytus of Euripides wiped out the New Look. Lewis’s writing style made it hard for me to pin down how this happened.
- Lewis rediscovers Joy after an intellectual exercise after reviewing Alexander’s Space Time and Deity.
- Lewis assimilates is beliefs about Joy with his beliefs about idealism. Other disparate beliefs begin to meld together.
- While teaching an philosophy and English classes, Lewis reads Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and suddenly understands “the whole Christian outline of history”. Additionally, while talking to “the hardest boiled of all the atheists [he] ever knew”, Lewis was told that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was “really surprisingly good”. Yeah I dunno about that.
From there, Lewis enters an atheistic death spiral that left him humbled before god.
And nearly everyone was now (one way or another) in the pack; Plato, Dante, MacDonald, Herbert, Barfield, Tolkien, Dyson, Joy itself. Everyone and everything had joined the other side. Even my own pupil Griffiths – now Dom Bede Griffiths – though not yet himself a believer, did his share. Once, when he and Barfield were lunching in my room, I happened to refer to philosophy as “a subject.” “It wasn’t a subject to Plato,” said Barfield, “it was a way.”
Here’s the moment:
Really, a young Atheist cannot guard his faith too carefully. Dangers lie in wait for him on every side. You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to “know of the doctrine.” All my acts, desires, and thoughts were to be brought into harmony with universal Spirit. For the first time I examined myself with a seriously practical purpose. And there I found what appalled me; a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds. My name was legion.
…
Perhaps, even now, my Absolute Spirit still differed in some way from the God of religion. The real issue was not, or not yet, there. The real terror was that if you seriously believed in even such a “God” or “Spirit” as I admitted, a wholly new situation developed.
…
It might, as I say, still be true that my “Spirit” differed in some way from “the God of popular religion.” My Adversary waived the point. It sank into utter unimportance. He would not argue about it. He only said, “I am the Lord”; “I am that I am”; “I am”.
…
Total surrender, the absolute leap in the dark, were demanded. The reality with which no treaty can be made was upon me. The demand was not even “All or nothing.” I think that stage had been passed, on the bust top when I unbuckled my armor and the snow-man started to melt. Now, the demand was simply “All.”
…
In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
You know… for being a generic god, that god sounds a lot like Yahweh. “I am that I am?” Come on now.
The final chapter is 15, titled “The Begining”. It is by far, the most frustrating chapter in the book. Here’s why:
The last stage in my story, the transition from mere Theism to Christianity, is the one on which I am now least informed.
What!?!? Mr. Supermega Christian Apologist doesn’t quite remember how he became a Christian!?! In a book about going from atheism to Christianity, he muddles up the part where he goes to Christianity! He explains:
I think there are two reasons. One is that as we grow older we remember more distant past better than what is nearer.
Okay, fine.
But the other is, I believe, that one of the first results of my Theistic conversion was a marked decrease (and high time, as all readers of this book will agree) in the fussy attentiveness which I had so long paid to the progress of my own opinions and the states of my own mind.
…
If Theism had done nothing else for me, I should be thankful that it cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary. (Even for autobiographical purposes a diary is nothing like so useful as I had hoped. You put down each day what you think important; but of course you cannot each day see what will prove to have been important in the long run.)
Okay, I guess that’s fair too.
Although still a theist, Lewis then starts attending service at his parish church and his college, if only to plant his flag somewhere people can see. Why not a Jewish temple or a Muslim Mosque (maybe there weren’t any around). In regards to his efforts to specify his theistic beliefs, Lewis clarifies:
The question was no longer to find the one simply true religion among a thousand religions simply false. It was rather, “Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?”
Wait, what? So it’s more important to find a religion sans paganism than to find a religion that’s actually true? I can’t seem to roll my eyes far enough back in my head.
The God whom I had at last acknowledged was one, and was righteous. Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or a prophetic dream.
…
There were really only two answers possible: either in Hinduism or in Christianity. Everything else was either a preparation for, or else (in the French sense) a vulgarization of, these.
Hmmm… I guess that cancels out Judaism and Islam.
Hinduism was tossed out for two reasons. The first was that it seemed like an “oil-and-water coexistence of philosophy side by side with Paganism unpurged…” The second was that it made no historical claim.
Christianity, on the other had, sounded plausible to him. Lewis felt that the gospels lacked a mythical taste. Because a god sending an avatar, born of a virgin, to be sacrificed to himself, to absolve mankind their ancestors breaking a rule that god made, only for the avatar to resurrected and then teleported to heaven doesn’t sound mythological at all.
Here’s his born again moment:
I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.
That’s it. Hardly a road to Damascus event. But there it is. Christianity wins!
But what, in conclusion, of Joy? for that, after all, is what the story has mainly been about. To tell you the truth, the subject has lost nearly all interest for me since I became a Christian.
I guess the surprise of Joy is that it lead him to god. Surprise!
======
So that’s it. All in all, it was an okay book. Given how he recounted his life, how he described his atheism, and how he narrated his rebirth, the whole story seems pretty reasonable I guess. His change makes sense given the context. It’s definitely not a knock down drag out argument to get me to drop my atheism and praise Jesus, but I did feel a bit privileged to experience some of Lewis’s life. And I actually found a lot of him I can relate to.
Cheers!
A Christian’s Take on “Stumbling on Happiness”, Chapters 8 and 9
The following is a guest post by Christian commenter redBeardRobbins. We’re doing a book trade where I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and he’s reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. These two books were very influental to our respective lives, so why not share the goodness?
Gilbert opens chapter 8 talking about a wrongfully imprisoned inmate that said, “it was a glorious experience” upon being released. He mentions how Christopher Reeve said, “I don’t appreciate others nearly as much as I do now.”
He asks:
Are we really supposed to believe that people who lose their… freedom, and their mobility are somehow improved by the tragedies that befall them?
He goes on to say that we are more resilient that we think and claims like this should not sound as outlandish to us as they do.
I have a somewhat different perspective. For one, I believe we can change our attitudes toward our circumstances. We don’t have to let circumstances dictate our happiness. If Christianity is true and the good God of the universe is ultimately in control of what happens to me then it dramatically changes my perspective on life. I can face any circumstance under the sun with the assurance that everything is ultimately taken care of. This allows me to go through an ordeal like the loss of my job a couple years ago with the knowledge that even if I don’t get another one God is in control.
The Scriptures say don’t be afraid of man because he can only destroy your body. Instead be concerned with God because He controls the fate of your soul. And if you’ve accepted Christ then God see’s you like the father saw the prodigal son.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
If that’s really the way things are then your happiness doesn’t have to be tied up in your current situation. You can rise above all that and rest in the fact that God loves you and has a plan for your life.
I know many of the readers of this blog may balk at that. If you doubt God’s existence then this doesn’t do much for you. You may call it delusional – that Christians are mistaken in believing that God is in control. I’ll just say that if you’re concerned with your own happiness and the prospect of rising above your situation and not allowing circumstances to dictate your happiness is intriguing to you then consider the claims of Christianity. If you give them a good hard honest look and find them lacking then I respect that. But I hope the prospect of taping into the source of true joy is appealing enough for you to consider what the Bible teaches. I’d be happy to talk to you if you decide to give it a go and you’ve got any questions. Just post a comment.
Gilbert goes on to say that we view the world both as we want it to be and as the way it really is – and that both provide limits on each other.
The world is this way, we wish the world were that way, and our experience of the world — how we see it, remember it, and imagine it — is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion.
He seems to think we can’t be realists and not be depressed. While I don’t agree with that (I think we can have an accurate view of the world without needing Prozac) I think he’s making a good point. We need the realistic view of the world to function and fly planes and harvest corn but we need the idealistic view of the world to help us dream up the idea that we can build a plane or plant the corn.
Later he talks about how we cook the facts to confirm our favored conclusions. I thought it showed a clear understanding of how presuppositions influence our worldview. The facts don’t interpret themselves (as I commented on in an earlier post toward the end). In fact,
the only thing these facts clearly show is that people tend to see what they want to see .
In chapter 9 he references studies where students were given the choice between certainty and uncertainty and clarity and mystery. You would think people would choose certainty and clarity and you’d be right. The interesting thing was that people reported feeling less happiness when they chose those two and more happiness when they were uncertain and left in the dark.
students chose certainty over uncertainty and clarity over mystery — despite the fact that in both cases clarity and certainty had been shown to diminish happiness.
I’ll quote a chunk at the end because it summarizes the studies presented in the chapter:
We are more likely to generate a positive and credible view of an action than an inaction, of a painful experience than of an annoying experience, of an unpleasant situation that we cannot escape than of one we can. And yet, we rarely choose action over inaction, pain over annoyance, and commitment over freedom. .. We pay more attention to favorable information, we surround ourselves with those who provide it, and we accept it uncritically. These tendencies make it easy for us to explain unpleasant experiences in ways that exonerate us and make us feel better.
The inherent pride in the human heart seems a plausible cause for all this. Do we just try to make ourselves feel better by explaining away stuff we don’t like instead of facing the truth because we‘re prideful? If I’m looking out for number 1 then my pride will demand that I make myself look as good as I can even if the truth says otherwise.
Two more chapters to go – let’s see how this bad boy ends.
An Atheist’s Take on “Surprised by Joy”, Chapters 10, 11 and 12
As part of a book trade, I’m reading “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life” by C.S. Lewis. In addition to being his autobiography, “Surprised by Joy” also happens to chronicle Lewis’s path from a wishy-washy Christian, to a hardcore atheist, and back to a much more thoughtful and devoted follower of Christ.
Chapter 10 is titled “Fortune’s Smile” and offers more updates in the developments of Lewis’s personal life. Although he and his brother were close in childhood, adulthood seems to have put a strain on their relationship. Lewis’s brother fared significantly better at during his time at the bastion of anal rape that was Wyvern college. The fast distance in the quality of their experiences lead to a serious rift, that both men tried to overcome. In the end, it seemed as though they simply were on different journeys.
His brother’s companionship was supplanted by Lewis’s new friend Arthur, who shared a fascination with Northerness, Asgard, and other Norse mythologies. Arthur’s influence encouraged Lewis to expand his literary tastes to what Arthur called “the good, solid, old books”. Classic English novelists like Jane Austen and Hans Christian Anderson. Lewis originally found these stories dull, but Arthur showed him the charm behind them.
If you’ve read “Surprised by Joy” before, you’d know just how often Lewis name-drops various authors and artists of his time. In certain sections it’s just name after name, book after book. While he’s definitely a well read man, as an outsider looking in, I can’t help but feel like I’m missing a huge part of his story. I sincerely doubt that he mentions all these writers just to brag about how many books he’s read. No, I’m sure he mentions them because of their profound influence. But as a man who has never heard of most of them, the context is completely lost. I can say to you that Richard Bach’s work influenced me greatly and contributed to my eventual atheism, but if you have no idea who he is, or the common themes in his writings, that factoid is kinda meaningless.
I don’t bring this up as a criticism of Lewis, more as a lamentation of this experience.
Anyway, the rest of the chapter is mostly descriptions of how Lewis’s life started improvising from the years of torture from school thus far. However, he does end up describing an event that caused him great distress… the taking of his first communion.
Keep in mind, Lewis is still an atheist at this point. He hasn’t outed himself to is dad. And in an effort to avoid discussion (which considering his dad, is understandable), Lewis decides to fake his way through the ceremony. He writes of the moment with shame and regret.
It reminded me of my first communion during my time a Church camp. I was born again that evening. On the way back to the cabin after the events of the evening, I overheard two of the camp counselors chatting about the ramifications of unsaved people taking communion… that they’d essentially be auto damned to hell. They were worried since everyone took communion that evening, regardless if they were saved or not. The whole thing was a little weird to eavesdrop on, as if they weren’t quite sure of the ramifications of their possible slip up.
Chapter 11 is titled “Check”. From here on out, it’s Lewis’s conversion story to Christianity. And boy is it densely packed. Unfortunately, this chapter also highlights for me one of the challenges of reading Lewis’s writing style. He’s starting to get into the meat of his metaphysical and philosophical beliefs, not jus throw away lines and half-paragraphs from chapters past. This is where clarity and directness would have been helpful, and yet his writing is filled with rhetoric and symbolism that I had a really difficult time pinning down his believes (much less the evolution of those beliefs).
Though many of the topics discussed here seemed confusing to me, Lewis did present a pretty clear reason why at this moment in his life, he was fundamentally at odds with Christianity.
The horror of the Christian universe was that it had no door marked Exit.
…
But, of course, what mattered most of all was my deep-seated hatred of authority, my monstrous individualism, my lawlessness. No word in my vocabulary expressed deeper hatred than the word Interference. But Christianity placed at the center what then seemed to me a transcendental Interferer.
It almost sounds like Lewis is playing out the “I don’t believe because I wanna do whatever I want” atheist stereotype.
Lewis goes on write about how, in hindsight, he viewed materialism as being true primarily because it satisfied his desire to be left alone.
This “faith” in materialism would eventually be shaken as Lewis encounters highly intelligent, highly talented writers who believe in the supernatural.
But I now learned that there were people, not traditionally orthodox, who nevertheless rejected the whole Materialist philosophy out of hand.
…
I regarded Yeates as a learned, responsible writer: what he said must be worthy of consideration. And after Yeates I plunged into Maeterlinck…
….
In Maeterlinck I came up against Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Pantheism. Here once more was a responsible adult (and not a Christian) who believed in a world behind, or around, the material world.
…
But a drop of disturbing doubt fell into my Materialism. It was merely a “Perhaps.” Perhaps (oh joy!) there was, after all, “something else”; and (oh reassurance!) perhaps it had nothing to do with Christian Theology.
Logically, Lewis is treading into dangerous grounds. Basically, it sounds like he’s making an Appeal to Authority. “Look at all these wonderful writers. They’re smart, and talented, and they believe in the Occult! So can I!
Lewis also provides another hollow reason why he wished to believe in Materialism:
Every man who is afraid of spooks will have a reason for wishing to be a Materialist; that creed promises to exclude the bogies.
The odd thing about Lewis’s portrayal of beliefs is that they are like accessories or tools, to be used wherever it suits him. Believes don’t point to what is real or true, but what is satiating and comforting… what is convenient.
Chapter 12 is titled “Guns and Good Company”. Lewis goes to war! In the process, he ends up discovering the writings of Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton.
I had never heard of him and had no idea of what he stood for; nor can I quite understand why he made such an immediate conquest of me.
…
I was by now a sufficiently experienced reader to distinguish linking from agreement. I did not need to accept what Chesterton said in order to enjoy it.
Lewis also offers me a warning.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere – “Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.”
Yeah… doubt it.
Lewis’s turn to Christianity is starting to seem more and more telegraphed. More and more people who he admires enter his life… and guess what? They happen to believe ____!
I know Lewis had a disdain for psychology, but it’s a pity he didn’t have access to research on conformity.
Only 3 more chapters and 1 more post left. We’re in the home stretch!
A Christian’s Take on “Stumbling on Happiness”, Chapter 7
The following is a guest post by Christian commenter redBeardRobbins. We’re doing a book trade where I’m reading C.S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, and he’s reading Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness. These two books were very influental to our respective lives, so why not share the goodness?
I’ll just take Ch. 7 this time. It had a lot of good insights and I‘m finding myself in agreement with most of what it says.
He talks about what psychologists call habituation:
Among life’s cruelest truths is this one: Wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition.
He made the same point back in Ch. 2. where he said that the three chords he played on his guitar when he first learned them as a teenager brought him great pleasure but those same three chords became boring later. He invoked the experience-stretching hypothesis – an experience that once brought him pleasure no longer does. As opposed to the language-stretching hypothesis – his eyes were later opened by improved musical abilities and he now realized he wasn’t really happy back then.
As a counter point the opposite can be true. It’s what we might call an acquired taste. The first time my dad gave me a sip of his Heineken it brought me very little pleasure and made me think grown ups are weird for liking this stuff. Over time I grew to like it more and more until now I thoroughly enjoy a nice cold ones with pizza.
I certainly agree with his basic point that there’s a law of diminishing returns in a lot of areas. But I also look at things like arranged marriages where the couple grows to love each other over time after initially being forced together against their will and see that often it‘s the reverse.
In describing how we imagine time in terms of spatial relationships I thought he made a really interesting point. When people are given the choice of having variety in what they eat versus only eating one good tasting thing, they choose variety whether it’s spread out over multiple meals over a long period of time or just spread out spatially across the table at one meal. If we’re talking about a small spatial separation all in one place at one meal we are right in choosing variety. But, in reality our favorite food will always be pleasurable if there is enough time in between meals. In fact, he says, when we have variety when it’s spaced out over time it actually diminishes pleasure I think because if you had something of variety that you didn‘t like you would have enjoyed the tried and true dish better.
So, summed up, if there is enough time in between pleasurable experiences it’s better not to have variety but if there is no time between them it’s better to have variety. Our mistake comes in applying spatial properties (a variety of foods laid out next to each other in front of you) to temporal ones (the same delicious food spread out over time).
Next, I thought he made a good observation of a strange aspect of human behavior. First he illustrated it by pointing out that we perceive magnitude changes in relative terms. For example, if someone places a stick of gum on to the 1 ounce block you’re holding you will perceive a change in weight. But if someone places the same stick of gum on a ten block you’re holding you won’t notice because the change in weight was relatively small. Then he says:
Our sensitivity to relative rather than absolute magnitudes is not limited to physical properties such as weight, brightness, or volume. It extends to subjective properties, such as value, goodness, and worth as well.
Without getting into the claim that goodness is subjective I think the next example was telling. People are more likely to drive across town to save $50 on a $100 dollar radio but not on the purchase of a $100,000 car because $50 seems like a lot when we’re buying radios. He then says your bank account contains absolute dollars and not “percentages off.” When you’re spending that $50 on groceries and gas those dollars don’t know where they came from.
He’s done that a lot. He’ll start with a concrete example like the weight of something in your hand and apply the same principle to something more abstract like the relative value we place on money. He did it at the beginning of Ch. 7 by comparing the concrete example of what a flying winebago would look like versus what the passage of time would look like. I think it’s a good way to help people understand concepts and he uses it effectively. Start with something people can wrap their brains around and then move to something harder to grasp.
Another example he used is comparing the small elegant speakers in the store with the huge, boxy speakers, noticing the acoustical difference, and buying the hulking leviathans. We never notice the acoustical difference again but we do notice how terrible they look in our elegantly decorated apartment. So if I can derive a principle from this I think it would be:
Think of what the future will be like (“these speakers will look ugly in my apartment“) and make decisions based on that. You’ll be happier. Resist the natural tendency to compare the relative differences in the present. Instead look at the absolute qualities and the bigger picture.
In the subsection Onward he speaks of presentism – the tendency to judge historical figures by contemporary standards. It’s the temptation to view the past through the lens of the present. This reminded me very much of what Lewis calls “chronological snobbery.” He describes it as the notion that we, with all of our scientific understanding, are better than the thinkers of the past. But we are standing on accumulated knowledge. I agree with Lewis that it’s a mistake to think we have got it all figured out and those that came before us didn’t know what they were talking about. If anything I think ease of access to information has made us lazy and some of the intellectual powerhouses of centuries past would mop the floor today. But now I’m just opining.
As I finished Ch. 7 I found myself thinking that Gilbert is long on ‘this is why we fail’ but short on ‘here’s how not to fail.’ I’m hoping he’ll get into that as the book comes to a close. This was a pretty solid chapter though.
Give God a Chance And You Won’t Have to Search Anymore
“I’m just going to say this one thing and then I’ll let it go. If you give God a chance and you won’t have to search anymore”.
These were the words spoke to me by my wife, TiggerGal, after I receiving my new copy of Richard Carrier’s Why I am Not A Christian and Richard Weisman’s 59 Seconds in the mail. One is a counter-apologetics book, the other psychology and self-help.
I wasn’t in the mood for an argument or a discussion either, so I let it go and went on with doing the dishes. Under normal circumstances, I would have pounced on it. I don’t care very much for drive by evangelism, or any other situation where a person expresses an opinion and refuses to hear responses. But whatever.
Despite this, I couldn’ t help reflecting on her statement.
“Give God a chance”
As if I hadn’t given god a chance before and been thoroughly disappointed with the results.
As if I hadn’t approached new arguments, new cases, and new evidence openly and fairly and found them wanting.
With every chance I gave “god”, he’s failed miserably and unambiguously.
“You won’t have to search anymore”
As if continually striving to improve yourself, to be a better person, is the same as being a lost or directionless little sheep. As if honing and refining my skills at life is the same thing as trying to figure out who I want to be.
I know the Christian party line requires believers to view non-believers as less than, but I’m pretty sure I know who I want to be and I’m pretty sure I’m on the right track. I’m definitely open to new ideas and to knew ways of thinking, but I’m pretty sure any new revelations won’t be coming from Christianity’s side of the room. We can pretty much forget about that snake oil.
But just for the sake of conversation, if you’re a Christian reading this, I ask you:
Is there ever a point where you could concede that someone has genuinely, honestly, and thoroughly given god a chance and yet still legitimately not believe in him? Or has ever non-believer simply not tried hard enough?
My 5 Year Old Daughter’s Take on Theology
I’m happy to report that, despite my despondent tone in the post, Music as a Defense Against Demons, I’m feeling pretty good again. I think the biggest reason why is that my daughter LadyBug and I have a pretty fantastic relationship, and we communicate really well. She’s really comfortable asking me practically anything, and I’m really good at giving her fair, thoughtful, and honest answers. At 5 years old, she identifies as a Christian, and although my biggest worry is that our religious differences will cause a rift between us in the future, from the evidence I see today, I probably don’t have anything to worry about.
Since the nite-nite music drama, LadyBug and I have had quite a few opportunities to talk about her spiritual beliefs. Most of them were prompted while reading The Magic School Bus and the Science Fair Expedition.
Let me tell you… this book is FABULOUS for introducing kids to the scientific method. It reviews many of the major discoveries and scientific advancements in human history and talks about the challenges each scientist had in proving their theories correct. It pays particular detail about how scientists overcame the nay sayers and deniers of the time with evidence.
As a child, she still relies a lot on authority figures to tell her what to believe (mom is an expert on Christianity because she “knows” god, vs me who doesn’t “know” god so I don’t know Christianity). But this book has really sparked a lot of discussions about epistemology, how we know what we know.
And of course, after church, she’s been getting some bible verses to share with her parents, so we talk about that too.
In our talks, I’ve learned some interesting things about LadyBug’s Christianity.
For starters, god is invisible and he talks to you in your dreams. He live in a castle in the sky called GodLand. This GodLand looks a lot like Bronze Age Middle East; lots of deserts.
When who believe in god die, they get to go to Heaven and live forever. Although I don’t think she’s decided yet if Heaven and GodLand are the same place (I should ask her about that).
For a while, she didn’t know what happens to people who don’t believe in god when they die. However, this weekend she let me know that people who don’t believe in god still go to heaven… they just don’t live forever. Fine by me, because I wouldn’t really want to live forever, that’s kinda boring.
As you’d expect, no Hell yet. I’ll have to ask when kids are introduced to hell.
When asked about her view of non-believers, she says that it’s totally fine for people not to believe in god. There’s nothing wrong with people who don’t believe and I (yes me) get to choose whatever I want, and whatever I choose is totally okay. I was particularly proud of that last bit.
She recognized that a lot of people don’t believe in god, including friend at church’s dad, and well as her Uncle HockeyKid.
It’s actually kinda interesting to see how she’s piecing it all together, and to see how subtle indoctrination can be. I’m hyper curious to see what will happen once she learns that her god is gonna send daddy to Hell.
Recent Comments