Why I came back
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Love does not categorize.
– Irma Zaleski
WHEN I WAS A FRESHMAN in college I abandoned my faith. The students in the Christian organizations were no less prone to backbiting and foolishness than anyone else. In fact, their claims about being not perfect, just forgiven made them look all the more spiteful and ridiculous. Of course I never got to know any of them personally. Not my crowd. Fancying myself the calm reasonable sort, I adopted the point of view that the whole Christian thing was probably not correct. I didn’t feel angry; I was just taking a good look around, and God made the world good then we fucked it up so God sent Jesus to die for our sins and if you don’t believe it then too bad for you seemed, on balance, a fairly unlikely explanation for life, the universe, and everything. So I just let it go.
And in fact, I wasn’t angry at all. I was just young. Which is to say, I was obsessed with appearances. And so I changed my appearance. I grew my hair out past my shoulders and wore torn-up jeans and abandoned my shoes. I played in extremely loud rock bands and hung out with guys who smoked a lot of marijuana. We spent a lot of time sitting in clouds of yellow smoke and listening to Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. And this leads me to the real reason I avoided those Christian students. It was not an issue of reasonableness, but of identity. My real problem was: They dressed like my mom always wanted me to dress. Everything neat and clean and tucked-in. You got the idea that their theology had the same characteristics. That’s how I saw them because that’s how I wanted to see them. It granted me exemption from having to take them seriously. It gave me a free pass to engage fully in my new mission: “finding myself.”
Nothing wrong with that; searching for one’s identity is a fully praiseworthy activity. I recommend it heartily. So I looked around for awhile, and when I transferred to Furman University after my sophomore year I was still on the hunt for my skittish and evasive self. And at Furman I had some help. A number of Baptist students offered their assistance. I didn’t even have to ask for it. I recall one conversation in particular. I was sitting by myself at a table in the student center when David walked up. He was a friendly fellow who reminded me of Radar O’Reilly from M*A*S*H.
“Hi Paul. May I sit down?” he asked.
“Sure. Have a seat,” I said.
We chatted for awhile. I knew what he was up to. He was known for helping people like me and I was anxious to get down to business. Starting it myself was not an option, so I waited. Eventually he began.
“Let me ask you a question,” he said.
“Okay.”
“What do you think is the bigger sin: stealing a pen, or murdering a child?” This was a new angle. It took me by surprise.
“Uh, the murder?”
“No, that’s not right. It says in the Bible that all sins are equally reprehensible before God.”
“That’s crazy. I don’t believe that.”
“But it’s true. It’s in the book of…”
“That’s not what I mean,” I countered. “Please don’t start with the Bible. Start with the actual three-dimensional world. Join us. It’s nice and colorful out here. The consequences of the murder are huge. Think of the parents’ pain. They would be scarred for life. No one cares if you steal their pen.”
“God does.”
“Maybe. But not as much as he cares about a child’s life and a family’s happiness.”
“Any stain on you is unbearable to God,” he said.
“Too damned bad for me.”
“No, see, that’s where Jesus comes in…”
It went on. I eventually got fed up and left.
This kind of conversation is not helpful for anyone. And the reason is not because he was pushy, or because I was sarcastic, or because our logical jumping-off places were miles apart. It was was futile because it was not grounded in a relationship, and it was hurtful because it fed our disconnection. In our insistence on winning an argument we regarded one another as functions, not as people. We hid behind each other. We were both too young to see it. I was a just a poor lost soul in his fantasy world, and he was just a convenient religious nutjob in mine. So long as there were preposterous Christians like him, I figured, I could keep my distance from anything that went by the name of God, and I could do it with integrity.
My distance remained until September of my senior year. That’s when I met Elizabeth, a Christian I could not laugh at. And it didn’t matter how she dressed or what her theology was, because on the day I met her, sitting in the same room where I had spoken with David a year earlier, she looked directly at me and did not see a poor lost soul or a physics major or a freaky rock musician. To this day I don’t know what she saw, but there was not the vaguest whiff of an agenda. This immediately shut down the rather prominent smartass component of my persona. You should know how frightening that was. I longed to be her project, but her interrogation of me was wordless. I panicked. Over the next six months she stood still, waiting as I skittered frantically toward her and away from her and back, over and again. It was painful for her, but she held out. In the level gaze of her love I eventually calmed and in June of the following year we were wed in a traditional Christian ceremony.
Not long after our discussion about pens and murder, David’s theology underwent a transformation. So far as I know, reason and its disciples had nothing to do with it. Instead, it was the Appalachian Trail. He hiked every one of its 2,160 miles, solo, and came out a changed man.
There are 9 Comments to "Why I came back"
Unfortunately, I’m too old to have those reasons to come back…I hope I can find other ones:)
Hey Paul,
You probably don’t remember me, but I was a Bio major at FU, class of ’89. I was captivated by the article about you in the Furman Alumni magazine – I admire your courage to live life on your own terms, and refusal to be ‘pigeonholed’ by society. I think we have a lot in common. We are both scientifically trained, (I also completed a DMD at MUSC) both walked away from Christianity while at Furman, the good Southern Baptist school that it was back then! (The irony!) We both grapple with the unknowable, the origins of the universe, the meaning of life, and how those things relate to our scientific sides. Unlike you, I have kept to my atheistic stance since leaving Furman. I actually describe myself as Secular Humanist/Pantheist.
I understand your yearning for an explanation of the ultimate question “What was there before there was anything?” Admittedly, science can’t begin to answer this question. I can see the need to invoke a divine explanation for something from nothing. When did time begin? And what preceeded it? These are questions I struggle with. But Christianity? Bronze Age Middle Eastern mythology? The bloodthirsty, sociopathic Yahweh of the Old Testament? Human Sacrifice? (Crucifixion) Ritual cannibalism? (Communion) All of that stuff in the Bible you know is nonsense? I’m sincerely interested in how you resolve these issues intellectually.
I’m not here for confrontation, even though we sit on different sides of this ‘fence’, just to exchange ideas – I’m very interested in what you have to say. I started reading Sagan, Dawkins, et al. at Furman, and haven’t looked back. I think I’m mostly attracted to your rigorous commitment to keeping your mind open, so here’s looking forward to a fascinating exchange of ideas, and great work on your website!
Best regards,
Andrew
Andrew, thank you so much for your kind words and your interest in psnt.net. It always means a lot when folks read my writing, and even more when they care enough to comment on it.
I look forward to replying to this comment (and others you have posted) more fully after Monday at 4:30, when the last of my semester’s work is complete.
P.
Just to be clear – my mind is open as well : )
Andrew
Paul, in light of your “why I went away and came back,” I thought I’d share an “abbreviated” summary of mine (undoubtedly by such selectivity leaving out what are probably some of the more important parts). As I have mentioned elsewhere, my dad was a Southern Baptist preacher who eventually became a missionary to South Korea. I attended a Christian “missionary kid” boarding school in high school. I even preached once at the “interdenominational” church there! However, from time to time I was bothered by the concept of Hell as eternal. I viewed punishment as being a means to lead to improvement, and if it was eternal, obviously that “improvement” couldn’t happen. Also, I began to be plagued by debate about predestination versus free choice.
Then I went to Furman, that nominally Baptist institution (which now in some respects seems more nominally Buddhist!). In my Religion 101 class, the textbook pointed out what it took to be a flat contradiction, and a silly one. As I read it, I thought, “You know, that is a flat contradiction, and a silly one.” Immediately I chucked the whole thing. Not a very rational move, but there you have it. (Undoubtedly substantially influenced by the teaching that scripture had to be entirely inerrant.) Also, the old free choice versus predestination bit was still playing around in the background, and afterward came to the foreground. (Probably I would have to admit that some restraints on certain moralities may have been playing around in the background as well.) Having jettisoned the faith, I even went so far as to write for my independent study in Political Science a fifty page paper boldly entitled “A Theory of Man and Politics,” taking a generally evolutionary tack.
In the same vein, between Furman (class of 78) and law school at Duke (class of 81) I wrote another fifty page paper, entitled “Contradictions and Christianity,” in which I briefly mentioned inerrancy, but aimed my big guns at predestination and free choice. I took the logical position that the Bible taught both, and they were flatly contradictory, and contradictions cannot be true, so there you have it. In my first year at Duke, I finally had to break down from my “deception” that I still believed and advised my parents by mail that I had become an atheist while at Furman, and even enclosed a copy of “Contradictions.” Thoughtful. Naturally, they were devastated; actually, Mom was devastated–Dad was more upset. So I maintained my partying ways and eventually moved in with a law school gal (one condition that I looked for was her definitely not being Christian–didn’t want anyone nagging me on that subject), and we got married after one year from my graduation, after I had moved to Jacksonville to become a litigator in a law firm there.
However, trouble came to “paradise.” Without going into reasons, my bride after a couple of years asked for a divorce. I was pretty devastated, but didn’t fight it. Meanwhile, all this time my parents had been praying, and getting everyone else they knew to pray as well. Anyway, they happened to be home from the mission field on furlough at the time, and took advantage of my pending divorce/separation to make overtures to me to come back to the faith. I was fairly opposed, but nonetheless took some dabbles here and there, which are too numerous and full of specifics to recount. Anyway, finally I visited my family (parents, three brothers, two sisters, all dedicated believers) during Christmas time, 1984. After a Christmas service at the church where they attended, during which the profoundly bass-voiced music minister did a rousing rendition of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” I went back home and pulled the family together and said something to this effect: “You are so happy, and I am so miserable, that, even though I don’t see how it can be true, I am going to try to believe it.” A very funny thing happened. Almost immediately I DID start believing it.
After I returned to Jacksonville, I “changed my ways,” and after a week or two quit my job and started going to a small seminary there. Now, I don’t know how all this plays in, and recognizing this opens me up to an “it’s all psychological” charge, but feeling honesty is the best policy, about this time I also became manic-depressive (or, politically correctly, “bi-polar”). Eventually I moved here to Fort Worth and started seminary at Southwestern Baptist. I part-timed at the law firm where I now work full time. After awhile, mainly through my parents’ intervention, I recognized my psychological condition and started getting medicated. Not too long afterwards, I concluded I wasn’t cut out for the ministry, quit seminary, and resumed the practice of law. Eventually I met my present wife, married, and have two kids, now both teenagers.
What about predestination and free choice? Or inerrancy? Interestingly, neither of them bothered me particularly for quite some time after I started “believing again.” However, that didn’t last forever. I had to ponder these things out. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that it was not possible for a good God, who would have it said about himself that “God is love,” to create beings who could only do what he “made” them do and put a bunch of them in Hell for doing so. So I concluded free choice must be correct, whether I could quite get a totally rational handle on how that could fully work out or not. As for inerrancy, I came up with a “Peach Fuzz” theory, whereby the authors wrote as God “inspired” them to do, but used their own minds and historical investigation in putting things together, as a result of which, as in most instances where God “works through men,” there might be a little “fuzz” on the “peach,” but not enough to make any significant difference to the accounts. Not totally sure if I have that fully correct–maybe it is actually possible for scripture to all be “correct” as to getting across exactly what it means to–but I’ll leave that to the side. The more significant issue was the free choice bit. I do believe God ‘foreknows” what will happen, but that he only works in history in line with what he “foreknew” we would actually choose to be like with respect to “for him” or “against him” out of our own choice. He never made anyone choose against him.
I guess so much for “abbreviated”! Anyway, after the “reconversion,” as it were, I developed a passion for trying to persuade others of what I now considered to be the truths in scripture, one, because frankly I do like a good argument, and, second, because obviously if what I now believe is truly correct, it makes quite a lot of difference whether someone accepts it or not. Then I saw about Paul’s blog in the Furman magazine, so, here I am! So that’s my story of “leaving and coming back.”
Tom Harkins
P.S. Paul, the poor fellow who argued to you that taking a ball point pen is equivalent to murdering a child was simply misguided. God frequently provides greater punishments for greater sins in the Bible. See also Matthew 5:21-22. Jesus chided the Pharisees for their fascination with minutia of tithing, but leaving aside the “weightier” matters of the law, “judgment, mercy, and faith.” Matthew 23:23 (King James Version). Sometimes, at least, when people tell us things that Christianity teaches that sound preposterous, it may be because they actually ARE. God, after all, made us in his image. Genesis 1:27.
Thanks for sharing this, Paul. I hear your voice loud and clear. And true. It’s interesting how that story shares so many elements with your larger story and concerns–identity; patience; silence; the futility of words to capture the unspeakable magic of life as actually lived; the need to express the unspeakable in words. Really a lovely piece, brilliantly written.
Thank you, Mike.
“Over the next six months she stood still, waiting as I skittered frantically toward her and away from her and back, over and again. It was painful for her, but she held out. In the level gaze of her love I eventually calmed . . .”
Sounds like Jesus. Sounds like me and Jesus. Sounds like many of us, and Jesus.
She must be one special lady.
Oh Angela, she is. She *is* Jesus, actually.
Thank you so much for reading. I hope you and Vincenzo are well.
P.