Question from Jason:
Besides our energy living on for all eternity (watch 10 Myths About Death at 1:50) is any other afterlife possible? Is any, all (especially regarding Hell) of http://www.evangelicaloutreach.org/ telling the truth? I am Fira777 on YouTube.
Answer by SmartLX:
I’ve written a great deal on the afterlife, because of course many are curious about (or troubled by, or desperate to salvage) the idea. The simple answer to your question is that anything is possible (science does not support an afterlife in any meaningful sense, but the mechanism of the supposed soul may be beyond science if real) but if the Evangelical Outreach page is correct about any of this stuff, it is not because they know for sure. They are relaying their interpretation of the scriptures they accept as the word of God, and they are right or wrong if the text is. “Telling the truth” is subjective based on what one believes; one can be honest and still wrong.
Category: Faith
Demons AFTER an exorcism?
Question from Sneroul:
Ok this is gonna be a long post so brace yourself.
I live in South Africa Western cape. The Church here is quite conservative but that’s not the point. i have been indoctrinated but it never really had an effect. Well it did give me somewhat respect for the faith but that is about it. OK to make a long story short I went from liberal Christian to atheist to agnostic then to fundamental and then back to atheist and then agnostic. But I am gonna talk about the events in the last 6 months.
It happened like this: a friend of mine was a pastor who visited me. I was slightly bored so I decided to talk to him about random stuff. It eventually came to religion and I asked him why he decided his career path. And he converted me and I became born again, the feeling is hard to explain but I can’t say if its positive or negative. But that night I felt very strange, like I committed intellectual suicide. I brushed the feeling off… then the trouble started.
I began hearing voices in my head. Some of them good and some bad, it’s hard to explain but there did come out one good thing: one of the voices convinced me to leave a dangerous addiction. BUT I NEVER FELT ALONE. I made a big mistake to talk to some of the clergy and they said that there were demons in me. they decided to do an exorcism which did help at first but in the long term the voices came back worse than before. I started to feel fatigue and was tired and sweaty most of the time. So what happened next? Well I started to read about skeptics and atheism and the more I read the more I feel better, most of the voices are gone and only appear when I ask them. The clergy told me the reason for this is that the demons were successful in turning me away from God. I think they’re wrong so I came here and see if you can explain it.
Answer by SmartLX:
The simplest explanation for voices in your head (regardless of the mental state that is manifesting them so vividly…we’ll get to that) is that they are all you, expressing thoughts of which you are not fully conscious at first. The rational part of you would have been screaming for attention after you declared yourself “born again” in spite of all the issues with faith and religion which you learned about when you first became an atheist. If you had a dangerous addiction, that same rational voice would have been struggling against your compulsion to indulge it. It sounds as if you have externalised part of your own mind, to serve as a separate entity that you can talk to – both to work out difficult issues, and for company.
Some branches of the Church will instead jump straight to the conclusion that you have a case of demons, and propose (or impose) an exorcism. If you come to believe along with them that demons are responsible for your mental issues, an exorcism becomes a literal placebo, and you will feel better. Unfortunately, if the true cause is anything other than demons, the symptoms will return in time, and they may be worse for lack of proper treatment.
Hearing and conversing with inner voices is a known symptom of well-defined mental illnesses such as schizophrenia. Between that and your mention of a bout of long-term fatigue, I can’t dismiss the possibility that you have a significant and perhaps serious medical issue. I advise you to see a doctor when possible, for a full check-up and for a referral to a psychiatrist. You will learn more about yourself and what you’re going through than you would from any pastor.
Tonight on Maury: “Suddenly Atheist in a Strict Jewish Family!”
Question from Josh:
Hey Guys,
Firstly, thanks for wasting hours of my time and robbing me of any sort of productivity 🙂
I’m 30 years old and grew up in an ultra-orthodox, Jewish home. While I always had my doubts and skepticism, I did not make the leap to accepting there is no God till the past few months.
My wife is of course religious, and there are a ton of things we gotta work through now. My question to you is: Is there anything redeeming you can find in raising your kids to be religious?
Of course we will make sure they have a great education, and view everyone as equals, but is it morally or ethically wrong to raise your child with the burden of religious dogmas and beliefs you know to be false? (when I write out the question, it kind of answers itself. I guess I’m asking you to throw me a bone.)
Thanks.
Answer by SmartLX:
Think of it in more general terms: as a parenting team, what do you teach your kids about a subject where you disagree with each other? You hold off on the subject until it’s settled between you, if possible, but if it’s unavoidable then you’re honest about it at an age when you think they’ll understand the truth – “This is what Mum thinks, and this is what Dad thinks.” It’s a perfect introduction to critical thinking, and in the case of religion it often ends up favouring irreligion. I speak from experience, because the discovery of the mere fact of my father’s disbelief drove home to me that I had some investigating to do. There’s a good reason why many dogmatic religions have specific instructions against questioning them.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you don’t go ahead and raise them in the Jewish tradition. For many branches of Judaism belief is one of the less important aspects of the Jewish identity, and simply teaching all the rituals, customs, Israeli history and so on will suffice. A “secular Jew” is a common thing, whereas you’d be hard-pressed to find a self-proclaimed “secular Christian”. Maybe it’s different in your family, but you can work with that: “This is what Mum and Grandma think, and it’s very very important to them so make sure you remember it, okay?”
As you can tell, I’m not okay with indoctrinating children into faith at the best of times, let alone when you don’t share that faith. If every voice they trust either tells them a thing is true or says nothing, they may believe it for the rest of their lives, or else have a very hard time shedding it later in life. That said, learning in my teens that my father was an atheist had a huge impact over time, so even if you do stay silent for years it may ultimately be for nothing in your family’s eyes once your real position slips out. Better to be straight with them at the start, and teach them to do what the family requires of them while knowing the truth of the situation.
I’ve got the same situation coming up in a couple of years when my son’s old enough to understand the concept of God, but it won’t be so difficult compared to your situation. My wife’s religious but liberal, and both sides of the family are a patchwork in terms of religiosity, so Junior will be exposed to a variety of viewpoints regardless of what I tell him, and therefore there’s no point pretending I agree with his mother.
Where Do Bad Folks Go When They Diiiiiiiiiie
Question from Becky:
I was never a big believer in the Christian God but I did read the Bible which showed me nothing but a vengeful God as oppose to one of love. I considered being a deist but hell has latched into my brain and won’t let go. Worst knowing there is fire underneath the earth seems to support hell even more since Jesus said he was going to the heart of the earth I just want to let the fear go since it was a main reason I believed. How do I let this fear go?
Answer by SmartLX:
You’re suffering from what I call faithdrawal, the continued fear of the wrath of God (including banishment to Hell) after belief in God has faded. As the link shows, I’ve discussed it a lot, because you’re not alone in dealing with it. You realise of course that it’s irrational because in a doctrine where God is responsible for the existence of Hell there can be no Hell without a God, but since when was fear rational all the time?
Let’s look more closely at the apparent piece of support you’ve found for the existence of Hell: Matthew 12:40, where Jesus spends three days “in the heart of the earth”. First of all, that might simply have meant he was physically down in his tomb for that long. If instead it is actually a claim that he was in Hell between his crucifixion and his supposed resurrection, I wouldn’t be surprised at the implication that Hell is deep underground. In the same way that it’s easy to imagine Heaven being up in the clouds, the unexplored depths seem like a perfect place for Hell, and may even have been part of the inspiration for the popular image of Hell. People living near volcanoes and elsewhere along fault lines, in Biblical times as in any other, would have seen and documented literal lakes of fire and many varieties of red-hot wrath spewing from fissures in the ground. Miners all over the world would have noticed the increase in temperature in a deep enough cave (though this might often have been caused merely by lack of ventilation). From the science of geology we now know why it happens in great detail, so the God-of-the-gaps has retreated from the subject entirely. Unlike our ancestors, we know the lava isn’t coming from Hell.
To answer your final question directly, It’s not a matter of letting the fear go so much as the fear letting you go. An irrational fear, like a belief, must be reinforced artificially in the absence of evidence, by various means: acts of devotion, new personal discoveries in the source texts (like the “heart of the earth” thing) and so on. If you recognise on the face of it, and continue to actively recognise, that all support for the reality of the danger is unfounded, it won’t kill the fear but it will leave it with no reason to remain. Over time, and without emotional reinforcement, the fear will fade and leave you. Though it’s frustrating to hear, the less you worry about it the faster it will go, so engross yourself in something else for a few weeks or months.
What Would God Actually Write?
Question from Abdulmalik:
I have a question and I wish you to seriously answer me! if we postulated that God exists…and he sent down his word to humanity as a book…what do you expect that book to be like? or how would you test it to be a God’s book?
waiting for your awesome answers…\
my first suggestion that it should has no scientific mistakes…
do you have any other suggestions?!
Answer by SmartLX:
A book literally written by a god would in many ways be like the Bible or the Quran – as they are described by the people who think their gods wrote them. Specifically, they are claimed to be inerrant, internally consistent, full of divine knowledge or prophecies that either come true or are revealed to be true as time goes on, supernaturally beautiful in their prose and with an ability to influence the hearts and minds of readers and listeners that goes beyond anything the words actually say. Thus, people often claim these things about them explicitly as arguments for their divine authorship. As you can see by simply putting ‘bible’ or ‘quran’ in the search field of this site, after a great deal of discussion I’m still of the opinion that these claims are incorrect, unsupported or subjective.
Further speculation about what a real god’s writings would be like doesn’t tend to move the discussion forward, as such speculation can be dismissed outright by anyone who thinks it is unreasonable or doesn’t match their chosen book. But what the heck, I do have one idea on the subject: such a book would be timeless, such that it didn’t seem more and more backward the more society progresses. In the Bible, for instance, a modern reader has to confront references to slavery, incest, subjugation of women and entire ethnic groups, human sacrifice, demonisation of many sexual orientations and so on. A reader in the first century AD would have taken most or all of it for granted. I think a god would find a way to keep a fixed book from suffering the effects of a shifting moral zeitgeist.
“If only she weren’t Christian…”
Question from Fiak:
We’ve been best friends for so long. While there’s no evidence (yet) that she’s going to want to date me, I feel she is contemplating doing that. The only problem is that I’m atheist and she’s Christian. I’m just confused. Please help me convert her. There’s about 7 more years till I totally lose her to some Christian. I feel she’s mine tho. Help please!
Answer by SmartLX:
I feel you presume too much about “her” in general, but I’ll concentrate on the religion part.
I’ve been with a Christian woman for almost ten years, and married to her for seven. Trust me when I say the difference in beliefs is not a deal-breaker. Each of us is also the product of an atheist-Christian couple, and beliefs vary among our siblings as well. Those of us in the extended family who are atheists got that way either because they were never indoctrinated or by a slow, natural fading of belief in the absence of reinforcement. Like in any group of people with two disparate positions among them, harmony is better served by not focusing on our differences. My wife and I each hope the other will “come around” in time, but it’s not a big enough part of either of our lives that we feel the need to force the issue.
What you’ll have noticed in the above description is that there were no major de-conversion events to speak of in the family. (One branch loudly denounced Christianity after one of its number was jilted by a hypocritical evangelical, but I suspect their actual beliefs didn’t shift much.) If I were you I wouldn’t try to make an atheist of “her” within a set timeframe as it’s really not reliably done.
Here’s how I would approach the issue directly if I did decide to try: I would ask the question, “Why do you believe in God?” Once I had the answer, I would work with her to answer the question, “Is that a good reason?” Maybe she has structured arguments that you can look up on this site or elsewhere, maybe she had a “road to Damascus” moment years ago you can examine, maybe she’s never really thought about it and will have to get back to you. Either way, it’s likely to be a conversation carried out in pieces over several days or weeks, especially since if you’re not careful it will be seen as an attack on an integral part of her identity and she won’t be keen to continue. (I did start along this path with my wife, but I sensed how defensive she was becoming and I let it be.) Remember to be totally open about your own position if she asks the same of you.
When it’s over and you’ve made your point, the belief may persist even if she’s unable to argue back, because beliefs are not beholden to reason. Only months or years later might it sink in that something’s not secure about them. On ATA I may argue specific points forcefully but I recognise that people are very unlikely to comment the next day thanking me for ridding them of their faith; that’s just not how it works.
What Nightmares May Come
Question from Chelsea:
Besides disrespect for the planet and a willingness (or even eagerness) to die for a religious cause, what are other negative consequences of maintaining belief in an afterlife?
Answer by SmartLX:
Well, don’t belittle those two points for a start, because they can cause a whole lot of damage all by themselves. But we’ll cover a few more things.
Most people don’t go as far as being eager or even willing to die, but the idea that there’s another life can make people more accepting of death – usually not very much their own, but the deaths of others. When we hear of tragedies and atrocities, the religious may comfort themselves with the idea that the victims are now in heaven, and in some cases that can sabotage the public will to prevent these events from recurring. Famine in Africa is a good example; some may think all those poor kids are better off dead, which isn’t conducive to donations. 9/11 was a bad example, as the mad rush to fight the perceived Islamist threat sprang from the American people’s fear that they were now personally at risk.
If you think someone you love is just the other side of the proverbial veil, you may start thinking you can reach them somehow. Self-proclaimed mediums all over the world can make a good living by exploiting people desperate for one more chance to hear from their late parents, or their late children. Some people have seriously hurt themselves financially by essentially becoming addicted to the faint hope of restoring a lost connection or mending a broken heart, when in fact this pursuit can poison and prolong the grieving process.
The most commonly and directly harmful aspect of belief in an afterlife, though, is the fear that it may not be a good one. Children are evidently and routinely traumatised by direct and indirect threats of hellfire and God’s permanent disapproval, in some cases to an extent comparable with sexual abuse. Several people have written to ATA about the fear they continue to feel for months or years after they stop believing in God, so deep has it burrowed into their psyche. (I call this “faithdrawal”, and it fades but very slowly.) Anytime I can spare a child from this potentially lifelong ordeal, I will regard as among my best deeds in life.
Nothing, Something, Everything
Question from Niki:
Hi, it’s me again, with my ORIGIN OF MATTER IN EMPTY SPACE question. Or not so empty, even before the big-bang.
I tried again googling the question with some other words, like what caused the big-bang, why then and not sooner or later, and how did the matter in whatever is called singularity, or is it the event of big-bang that is called so, or both, how did the material got there and where it came from.
So, having read this time what Stephen Hawking says on the issue, as well as many other relevant articles, I got to realize that science has no idea where that matter, that later big-banged, came from and how it got there. So much for the answer about the origin of matter, cos big-bang only explains what happened to the matter in singularity, after it had been there for no one knows how long, but not the origin of that matter there.
But, here I have another question. It has to do with the notion that if THAT matter came out of nowhere and that in the moment of singularity time was created, it’s totally unfathomable for my earthen brain, dumb or smart, relevantly educated or not, then what is the difference from that with the divine creation. So, the matter we now see and know is out there, and we ourselves are part of it, came from nothing, say the scientists and it satisfies the scientists who say so, however it does not satisfy the lay people who believe in divine creation of matter. And now I wonder, what is the difference between the origin of matter being from nothing, scientifically, and from a divine entity, again from nothing.
My answer, and I believe all scientists who claim it came out of nothing, but not from divine entity, is that the difference is really MAJOR, that in case of origin of matter from the universe, or its state before the big-bang occurred, there was no intelligent and intentional agency that created matter out of nothing, whilst in case of so called ‘god’, this entity is intelligent and intentionally created matter, no one of them can tell us the reason, motif for ‘god’ doing so, again out of thin air, as is the case of what scientists claim. No intelligent or any other intention. Just an accident, for scientists, and intelligence and intention for the believers. Or, the universe, let’s call it so, before the big bang, was such a place, that it had in it the ‘pre-matter’, and it once happened to get into this little spot (or was forever in the past, before, in it), and then blew up. Why, what is the cause of it in both solutions, according to the law of causality, or we are asked to believe Einstein who told us time began then, so there is no sense in asking what happened before, thou there is very much the question of the origin of the matter in the little ball, what caused the scientific explanation, and divine one too, it is interesting to know, but even more interesting, in my humble opinion, cos my knowledge of physics is from the secondary grammar school…well, I was listening to the teacher and reading my physics text book. But, still, very modest knowledge. However, I now have ample time and internet, together with great curiosity and kinda master English, so I think, think, think. And, what I finally realized is that even Stephen Hawking does not know, so I am OK with not knowing the first question of the thinking brain: the origin of matter. So, what is YOUR take of it?
I, of course, don’t ask about the purpose of humanity or whatever happens and is felt and thought of, decided by our brains, our consciousness, cos I firmly believe in the causality law, that says everything is a consequence of previous causes, a chain of them, and going backwards in time I came to the beginning of the universe, where the first question was awaiting me and every thinking human, well not everybody, cos MOZART thought of better things than I do, how to move my feelings. And believed in ‘god’ firmly, my darling Wolfgang… So, no purpose in anything, and thus not even in humanity. But, since life is kinda nice, then we want to live it, thou we will die one day, just as we go to a holiday knowing it will be over soon. Well, holidays will repeat themselves, but there are nice things we do, thou knowing they will be over once and forever, just as is human life. But while we are here, why not enjoy the journey?! And, as for unhappy, sad lives, people normally don’t end them themselves, evolution took care of that, for good or for bad in their cases…
Answer by SmartLX:
You’ve certainly given this a lot of thought Niki. My thoughts on these matters are similar in many ways.
The scientific hypothesis that the universe came from nothing uses a nuanced definition of “nothing”, because it can refer to the “quantum foam” or some other ground state. The simplest explanation I’ve read is that it counted as nothing because its total energy was zero. It was unstable, so from the zeroed-out state emerged a positive quantity and a negative quantity at the same time: matter and antimatter, which then acted out the Big Bang and everything that followed. When you added it all up it was still zero, so rather than something from nothing it was technically a case of nothing from nothing. The entire universe may be a zero sum game, and one of many at that, since there’s no indication that the quantum foam went anywhere.
The theistic alternative to this is that a god existed before the universe, made the universe, and still influences it to this day. It’s impossible to prove that this didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean there’s any good evidence that it did, or particularly that there’s good reason to believe that it did. There are reasons mind you, and Christians will happily tell you theirs, but it must be asked whether those reasons are good ones.
One point I haven’t seen many people raise is that we’ve never seen anything come out of absolutely nothing. New objects, new lifeforms and even new thoughts consist of the matter and energy that came before. When the Kalam Cosmological Argument claims as a premise that everything that began to exist has a cause, it has no basis to extend it to something that may have come from nothing, except for an assertion about the universe that pre-empts the conclusion of the argument. We don’t know what it takes for something to emerge from nothing in a void without time or space, if anything is required at all.
Adam and Eve, not Ug and Eev!
Question from Dontay:
Evidence of dinosaurs has been found…museums show that cavemen existed…. But… How can cavemen be real if Adam and Eve are supposedly the first people on earth?
Answer by SmartLX:
If by “cavemen” you simply mean people who lived in caves and hunted and gathered for a living, then perhaps Adam and Eve’s immediate descendants did that once the garden of Eden was closed to them. The timing doesn’t work out at all when you count the supposed 34 generations from the Biblical Adam to the Biblical and historical King David and compare them to the scientifically estimated dates of the cavemen’s remains, but people who are motivated to prop up the story of Genesis will accept it anyway.
If on the other hand you mean Neanderthals and other departed species within the genus Homo, there you have a conflict which is less easily dismissed. The story goes that God not only made Man more or less in his present form (or a super-version that was huge and could live for centuries) but He made Man in his own image, which is poorly defined but usually taken to mean an image of perfection. “Lesser” or more primitive versions of Man don’t jibe with this idea at all. That’s why creationist explanations of the evidence simply assert that they were all just modern-type humans with primitive lifestyles.
As for dinosaurs, all evidence points to the fact that the last ones were dead millions of years before the first humans were born. Not so for most creationists; rather than deny they existed, many of them say dinosaurs were present on the Ark, and they’re depicted as such at the new Ark Encounter park in Kentucky. Any evidence or argument that so much as requires the expression “millions of years” is explicitly demonised.
Blood Covenants And You
Question from Chinx:
Should blood covenants ever matter to atheists?
Answer by SmartLX:
If they’re real, yeah.
A blood covenant, as far as I can gather from articles like this, is a mutual obligation between two parties to serve each other in every way needed on pain of a horrible death, not just for the covenant-breakers but possibly for their loved ones.
If one thinks one is a blood covenant, and that the penalty can be enforced, it makes sense to honour it for one’s own safety even if one did not enter the covenant by choice. If a man with a gun is holding you to a supposed blood covenant you should probably do what he says, at least until you can call the police. And if you do enter a blood covenant by choice then you probably have good reason to want to help the other party.
None of this is exclusively in the realm of religious belief or non-belief. Where religion comes into the picture is that Christians, Jews and others think that everyone, not just those groups, is in a blood covenant with God. Whatever God is meant to be doing for us, apparently we are bound to do everything for Him, and we will be punished for not obeying God’s commands.
If you don’t think that’s true, it makes no sense to obey. If there’s only a chance that it’s true, again in the vein of Pascal’s Wager you have to consider all the other possible commitments that might have been made for you by gods and ancestors without your input. By honouring the supposed covenant you’re aware of, you might be breaking the real one. Doing so is by no means the safest move.
So in the end, threatening atheists with the blood covenant is like threatening them with Hell, or demons, or the boogeyman. You have to believe in something at least to some extent to be afraid of it. A lot of Christians think atheists secretly believe in God so these kinds of threats (often phrased as warnings on behalf of God, which is a thin distinction if you don’t believe in God) can be justified internally, but that doesn’t make them work any better.