Ranting on pastor, church, Lee Strobel, books, and the Gospels

So, I'm going to go talk to the pastor next week, I've decided. I'll call maybe Monday or Tuesday and try to figure out when he'll be available.

Topics will include my own faith experiences, my concerns regarding "coming back" to right the wrongs of my departure, and my doubts of faith in an attempt to understand and to challenge his position.

As far as my faith is concerned, I do plan to limit it. I don't feel I could possibly tell him everything, but I can attempt to summarize. My loss of faith is still a story I haven't told here. It will be told, and it will be thorough and interesting, I promise.

As far as "coming back" goes, I might want to visit the church. I want to discuss the nuances of the situation with him. I want to educate the pastor as to the intimidation and emotional distance created by churches toward atheists as well.

There are a lot of stories and tidbits I could share regarding atheistic clashes within the family or church structure. I'm sure anyone reading this blog has either exprienced or at least heard of something like it.

My biggest concern if I visit is, how can I balance what I want (to face my fears, to be true to myself, to share myself with others, and to voice my positions and challenge the establishment) with what I do not want (to give the wrong impression, to cause unnecessary distress, to disrupt planned activities like Sunday school lessons with debates or evangelism.)

I've said it before, perhaps not here but definitely to my mom and others, that if I attend church, I have three options: participate insincerely, challenge and thus disrupt, or obstain from involvement. Even obstaining is insincere as well as unnecessary. I refuse the idea that I avoid or hide from Christian messages or dogma, as I've heard them my whole life and still indulge them on occasion, but all the same, there's no reason to attend church regularly and listen to their side indefinitely.

There comes a time where they grow redundant, uninteresting, and pointless to someone like me. That time came years ago. And besides, it's not as though they'd want to listen to me with equal time and courtesy as I'd be expected to listen to them at church. If they did, I'd gladly join an exchange of that sort, but I'm not expecting that.

I'll cut straight to the pastor. Skip the chain of command, skip the people who might just dodge or defer me anyway. I've grown bolder like that, and he's not really in a position to deny me. This is a rite of passage, of sorts.

I've got my general gameplan, but I am working on some things. I'll need to write out basic counterarguments to the arguments I expect from him, but I don't want to overprepare, as trying to hold to specific notions could see me derailed and appear to be underperforming. One thing I've been readying for is Lee Strobel's "Why would they die for a lie?" spiel. My mom described this pastor as young, an "information junkie" and "used to talking to people like you." With that information and considering the sorts of arguments I have against the faith, I have a hunch he might use this one.

If anyone's unfamiliar with it, you can find both a demonstration and a rather amusing refutation here.

Additionally, ProfMTH on YouTube made a rather detailed video series examining the particulars of this argument.

A quote from the first link at Conversational Atheist speaks to my problem: "There are so many ways to tear apart this ridiculous argument that choosing the most effective becomes problematic." One can simply watch any number of debates between atheists and Christians, regardless of one's stance on the matter, and see that atheists have a wealth of options to launch as their primary attacks. Some, like Christopher Hitchens, have streamlined it into a somewhat redundant, though timeless, "best of" line of arguments, but these, like all things, are subject to individual interpretation.

That's one of the reasons why I say I shouldn't overprepare. If I focus my preparations on the idea that God cannot be logically proven based on the evidence around us, the pastor might focus on a "God must be personally experienced" line. It isn't that personal experience would defeat me, not by any means, but if I overprepare for the wrong topic I run the risk of underperforming. Adaptability is most important, and I think that as long as I am loosely comfortable enough with the general gamut of arguments and lines of thinking, I should be able to orient my innate opinions and insights to accomodate the entire discussion.

I do, after all, consider myself to be something of a shrewd layman. I lack expertise, but I attempt to adapt to details as they are presented. One of my greatest heroes is James Randi, a man who is not a scholar, but who has paid attention.

On the topic of religion, which claims that feelings and beliefs take precedence over thought and reason, it is apparent to me that while education can be useful, if religion is truly meant for the participation of all mankind, then it can be assessed by people of all walks and persuasions. There is a bit of a catch, in that if religion is true, one need not be well-learned to understand that truth, but if religion is false, one might need a certain degree of learnedness to understand that falsehood. I see it as my place to slip through the cracks in that potential premise.

I can't help but expect Pascal's Wager. I really like to think we're beyond that, but I can't say. At least it is easily destroyed.

I hope I'm not presented the "historical Jesus" AS EVIDENCED BY SO MANY HISTORIANS HOW CAN YOU DENY IT. I'm not in the mood to have to read a bunch of biased books, then read even MORE books to refute the original books, in a field where I don't have any training. It feels like a drawn-out fetch quest. Besides, if this is a matter of personal faith in a god who wants to reveal himself to you, why would it require the examination of historical details which were not available to the people who founded or expanded the religion for the majority of its life?

I'm starting to get off-topic from my original off-topic tangent, but someday I hope to make a YouTube video about my mom's book collection. It ties into the historical stuff in that I can't grasp why, if Christianity were true, people need to read all these contemporary books about things like prayer, healing, keeping your faith, arguing with atheists, proving Christianity... these books aren't the true and perfect word of God, like the Bible is supposed to be, so why is it that they have to exist, to claim the ability to do what The Bible apparently can't? I get why, in that it's all false, and that it's a mix of hypocrisy, profiteering, delusion and cognitive dissonance that facilitates the abundance of these things, but... well, I guess that covers it, then.

Right now I'm reading through the Gospels. I've got some hunches and curiosities I'll indulge while refreshing my memory and preparing for the context of the discussion to come. I may post some interesting verses, or reveal the machinations of my plots and studies this weekend. I also have plenty of stuff I still need to talk about, so expect some or any of that soon.