Saturday, April 12, 2008

Moving On

A non-believer I know puts his view this way to a young Christian who was perplexed about why he turned away from Christ:

I didn't turn away from Christ; I accept most of Christ's teachings about how to live, though of course I do not live up to them. I just don't accept the metaphysical interpretation that other people gave to Christ's life. Once you receive a proper education in the history of science, it is almost impossible to take seriously the idea that a view that people created about the origin of the universe a few thousand years ago is true. That was a time when people believed that the stars were all tiny objects on a celestial sphere just a few hundred miles away. They had no knowledge of how the universe worked or its vastness or how babies are made, or what the brain does, or why we get sick, or our genetic relation to animals.

Once you begin to assimilate all of this knowledge and more, then you begin to realize that the theory that universe was created by a being that has a gender and resembles a human in the way that it thinks and acts is just incredibly unlikely to be true. It made sense at the time it was proposed, but it is completely inadequate to this one. It is possible to avoid conclusions like these by simply refusing to become educated, assuming that you were just lucky enough to be born into a culture that has had the truth delivered to them in a simple comprehensible form, but that is just to choose the path of ignorance. It is better to try to take everything good from Christ's teachings as well as those of Buddhism and other religions, and try to incorporate them into a world view consistent with our current scientific understanding of it.

You are a bright young man, and I think this will happen to you as you move through the world. It will happen naturally without you even thinking about it as long as you choose to keep learning.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Once you begin to assimilate all of this knowledge and more, then you begin to realize that the theory that universe was created by a being that has a gender and resembles a human in the way that it thinks and acts is just incredibly unlikely to be true.

And the more "liberal" versions of theology are just watered down versions of the original; with the more evidently wrong details removed, there is still no reason to believe the watered-down remainder. Why should I believe half a lie?

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