A Barna Group poll of 2,004 American adults, revealed that 12.5% of American adults have “switched out” of Christianity and into atheism, agnosticism or another faith. In the meantime, only 3% of American adults have switched into Christianity.

The former Christians who switched out of their childhood faith cited several reasons – none of which will surprise you – for doing so:

• gaining new knowledge or education
• feeling disillusioned with church and religion
• feeling the church is hypocritical
• having negative experiences in churches
• being in disagreement with Christianity about specific issues such as homosexuality, abortion or birth control
• feeling the church is too authoritarian
• wanting to express their faith outside of church
• searching for a new faith
• wanting to experience other religions

American adults who switched into Christianity did so for familiar reasons:

• going through difficult life events
• getting older and seeing life differently
• wanting to connect with a church and grow spiritually
• discovering Christ
• wanting to know what was in the Bible

Now, before we non-Christians get too excited about these statistics, we’ve got to remember that there are still many Christians in the USA. Tens of millions of them. Their numbers may be declining, but they’re not in danger of going extinct anytime soon. Even though adults are leaving Christianity at a rate 4 times higher than they’re entering it, millions of child-replacements are being indoctrinated into Christianity every day. Some of those children will likely leave their churches when they become adults, but many of them probably won’t. After all, for every American adult who switched out of Christianity, seven others didn’t flip their switches at all. Assuming that at least some of those people were reared in a religious tradition (a pretty safe assumption in the USA), one conclusion is ineluctable: many Americans are still sitting in the dark.

– the chaplain

My mother recently gave me a couple of P.D. James books, both of which I’d read years ago, but I accepted them anyway. Since I always enjoyed P.D. James’ writing, I started re-reading one a few days ago, Death of an Expert Witness. As I read last night (while listening to Forrest Gump in the background – it was a heavy night for armchair philosophy), I came across an intriguing passage. The conversation you are about to read takes place between Adam Dalgliesh (the detective) and the 15-year-old daughter of a murder suspect:

“Are you going to discover who killed Dr. Lorrimer?”

“I hope so. I expect so.”

“And then what will happen to him, the murderer, I mean?”

“He’ll appear before the magistrates. Then, if they think that the evidence is sufficient, they’ll commit him to the Crown Court for trial.”

“And then?”

“If he’s found guilty of murder, the judge will pass the statutory penalty, imprisonment for life. That means that he’ll be in prison for a long time, perhaps ten years or more.

“But that’s silly. That won’t put things right. It won’t bring Dr. Lorrimer back.”

“It won’t put anything right, but it isn’t silly. Life is precious to nearly all of us. Even people who have little more than life still want to live it to the last natural moment. No one has a right to take it away from them.”

“You talk as if his life were like William’s ball. If that’s taken away, he knows what he’s lost. Dr. Lorrimer doesn’t know that he’s lost anything.

“He’s lost the years he might have had.”

“That’s like taking away the ball that William might have had. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just words. Suppose he was going to die next week anyway. Then he’d only have lost seven days. You don’t put someone in prison for ten years to repay seven lost days. They might not even have been happy days.”

“Even if he were a very old man with one day left to him, the law says that he has a right to live it. Willful killing would still be murder.”

The girl said thoughtfully:

“I suppose it was different when people believed in God. Then the murdered person might have died in mortal sin and gone to hell. The seven days could have made a difference then. He might have repented and had time for absolution.”

Dalgliesh said:

“All these problems are easier for people who believe in God. Those of us who don’t or can’t have to do the best we can. That’s what the law is, it’s the best we can do. Human justice is imperfect, but it’s the only justice we have.”

I find that an extraordinary passage to have been included in a piece of pop lit. Here are some questions to consider in the comments:

• Do you agree that questions of life, death, justice, etc., are easier for believers than nonbelievers?
• Do you agree that people who have even just a little bit of life want to live it to the last “natural” moment? What about terminally ill people who want to control their deaths to some degree and die with dignity?
• Did you see, as I did, a parallel between the idea of imprisoning someone for ten years to repay the loss of seven days and the idea of a deity punishing someone for eternity for the “sins” of a finite lifetime?
• What did you think about the girl’s assumption that the days when people believed in God were past?

As always, let me know what you think in the comments, and let me know if something else in this passage caught your attention.

– the chaplain

This past week, I’ve gotten acquainted with two Australians, a husband and wife, who are visiting the USA for a few weeks. I was stunned when I learned that one of the things she most wants to do in this country is shop at Wal-Mart.

Let’s just say it wasn’t a “proud to be an American” moment.

– the chaplain

I learned recently that The Salvation Army was once involved in a grand plan to convert Robert G. Ingersoll, America’s Great Infidel, to Christianity. For some reason, that story never made it into the Junior Soldier curriculum. I doubt that it will make it into future editions either, since the scheme failed miserably.

PART ONE: PRAYER FAIL

Here’s AmericanHeritage.com’s brief account of the scheme:

The most massive attempt to convert Ingersoll came on Thanksgiving Day, 1895. Every soldier in Cleveland’s Salvation Army, several hundred members of the Epworth League, and three thousand Christian Endeavorers all offered mass prayers for Ingersoll’s conversion. He took their efforts in stride. “I feel pretty much as the pretty girl did towards the young man who squeezed her hand,” he observed; ” ‘It pleased him,’ she said, ‘and it didn’t hurt me!’”

The author of that article noted that the Thanksgiving Day prayer vigil was just one of numerous attempts to convert Ingersoll, the son of a Presbyterian minister, to Christianity. Ingersoll’s response to the enterprise was recorded in the New York Journal (google “Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, volume VIII” or “Christian Endeavorers Ingersoll”) :

Question. How were you affected by the announcement that the united prayers of the Salvationists and Christian Endeavorers were to be offered for your conversion?

Answer. The announcement did not affect me to any great extent. I take it for granted that the people praying for me are sincere and that they have a real interest in my welfare. Of course, I thank them one and all. At the same time I can hardly account for what they did. Certainly they would not ask God to convert me unless they thought the prayer could be answered. And if their God can convert me of course he can convert everybody. Then the question arises why he does not do it. Why does he let millions go to hell when he can convert them all? Why did he not convert them all before the flood and take them all to heaven instead of drowning them and sending them all to hell? Of course these questions can be answered by saying that God’s ways are not our ways. I am greatly obliged to these people. Still, I feel about the same, so that it would be impossible to get up a striking picture of “before and after.” It was good-natured on their part to pray for me, and that act alone leads me to believe that there is still hope for them. The trouble with the Christian Endeavorers is that they don’t give my arguments consideration. If they did they would agree with me. It seemed curious that they would advise divine wisdom what to do, or that they would ask infinite mercy to treat me with kindness. If there be a God, of course he knows what ought to be done, and will do it without any hints from ignorant human beings. Still, the Endeavorers and the Salvation people may know more about God than I do. For all I know, this God may need a little urging. He may be powerful but a little slow; intelligent but sometimes a little drowsy, and it may do good now and then to call his attention to the facts. The prayers did not, so far as I know, do me the least injury or the least good. I was glad to see that the Christians are getting civilized. A few years ago they would have burned me. Now they pray for me.

Suppose God should answer the prayers and convert me, how would he bring the conversion about? In the first place, he would have to change my brain and give me more credulity–that is, he would be obliged to lessen my reasoning power. Then I would believe not only without evidence, but in spite of evidence. All the miracles would appear perfectly natural. It would then seem as easy to raise the dead as to waken the sleeping. In addition to this, God would so change my mind that I would hold all reason in contempt and put entire confidence in faith. I would then regard science as the enemy of human happiness, and ignorance as the soil in which virtues grow. Then I would throw away Darwin and Humboldt, and rely on the sermons of orthodox preachers. In other words, I would become a little child and amuse myself with a religious rattle and a Gabriel horn. Then I would rely on a man who has been dead for nearly two thousand years to secure me a seat in Paradise.

After conversion, it is not pretended that I will be any better so far as my actions are concerned; no more charitable, no more honest, no more generous. The great difference will be that I will believe more and think less.

After all, the converted people do not seem to be better than the sinners. I never heard of a poor wretch clad in rags, limping into a town and asking for the house of a Christian.

I think that I had better remain as I am. I had better follow the light of my reason, be true to myself, express my honest thoughts, and do the little I can for the destruction of superstition, the little I can for the development of the brain, for the increase of intellectual hospitality and the happiness of my fellow-beings. One world at a time.

–New York Journal, December 15, 1895.

Ingersoll’s statement was impressive for both its clarity and profundity. I won’t detract from it by attempting to comment on it.

PART  TWO: SUBSEQUENT LIES

You will not be the least bit shocked to learn that Ingersoll’s death was followed by rumors similar to those that circulated shortly after Darwin’s demise:

His death came in July 1899, when he was not quite sixtysix. He had been lecturing on religion just the month before, and he was working on new lectures at Walston, his son-inlaw’s elegant estate at Dobbs Ferry on the Hudson. There, surrounded by a family constantly concerned with his comfort and happiness, he died suddenly of what the doctors called angina pectoris. Quickly, rumors began circulating. Ingersoll had recanted on his deathbed, went one. Another held that he had been thrown into such despair by his beliefs that he committed suicide. Although it was strenuously denied by those who were with him when he died, for some the notion was irresistible that Royal Bob, the Illustrious Infidel, dreading the hellfire, had seen the light at the end.

In addition to repeatedly failing to understand why their prayers go unanswered, some Christians have a propensity for lying about the dead people who were once the objects of their prayers. Be prepared to encounter similar stories about Christopher Hitchens, should he succumb to esophageal cancer within the next few years. We already know Christians are praying for him, and he has responded graciously: he accepts prayers for his well-being with gratitude, but doesn’t expect any divine intervention in his life. I’m betting that, should cancer be the death of him, at least a few Christians will succumb to the temptation to manufacture a deathbed conversion story about him. It’s the way they roll: when the prayers fail, the lies begin.

– the chaplain

Sometimes Keith Olbermann annoys me. His bitching about Bill O’Reilly is juvenile. The Oddball segment of his show is goofy, at best. But, his special comments are often noteworthy. Last night’s was no exception. If you didn’t see it live, take a few moments to watch it now.

I hadn’t intended to write anything about this issue. After all, Keith Olbermann said all that I would have wanted to say, and he said it much better than I would have. And, Christopher Hitchens wrote a nice piece in the National Post. Spanish Inquisitor and Tommykey also wrote good blog posts about the matter. With all that they’ve said, I haven’t felt that I had anything new or worthwhile to say about it.

I can’t say why I’ve changed my mind and am writing now. Nevertheless, I’ve decided that I should express my support for the right of these Muslims to build a community center in lower Manhattan. I’m ashamed that so many Americans, particularly politicians, are jettisoning the values of our country for ignorant and/or self-serving reasons. I’m sure you know that I have no more love for Islam than I have for Christianity; in fact, I consider Islam to be an even more primitive, barbaric and oppressive religion than Christianity is. But, my loathing of theism is outweighed by my love for freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Those are the values that prompt me to state my support for the Muslims in this situation. The opposition to this community center is narrow-minded, hateful and unconscionable. Frankly, I find it embarrassing. It’s so un-American! It’s also an indicator that the jihadists have already defeated us. They won when we decided to renege on our core values and try to limit the freedoms of some of our citizens for no better reasons than bigotry and fear. I once believed that America was better than that. I hope I’ll be able to believe it again.

– the chaplain

I promised to post this video several weeks ago, so here it is.

– the chaplain

Phillychief posted recently about religious believers who discard the most objectionable beliefs and practices of their religions, yet cling tenaciously to something religious, often some form of god-belief, however vague it may be. He compared this position to a young child who clings tenaciously to its binky. The child may drink from a cup and reject the nipple or the bottle most of the time. Yet, in times of fatigue or stress, the child refuses to relax, go to sleep, or otherwise function without sucking on a binky. That seems to be the condition of religious believers who reject dogma, yet cling to a god – perhaps as a person, entity, force, or simply a concept.

My last binky was a bit different. In the final stage of my deconversion, after I realized that I couldn’t justify belief in miracles, gods and other supernatural phenomena, I sought a way to retain a connection to my Christian heritage, some connection with the community, if not the creed. I tried to do this via Christian humanism. It didn’t work.

Christian Humanists contend that “being a Christian without a concept of God is both possible and necessary for those who find the life and teachings of Jesus compelling but have difficulty with the concept of God in traditional Christian theology.” One problem I had with this position was that scholars are not sure exactly who Jesus was (if he actually existed), let alone what he actually taught (assuming, again, that he actually existed). The reason this is so difficult is that the principal source of traditions, legends, myths and, perhaps – information – about Jesus is a very flawed collection of propagandist literature. Another difficulty for me was that, by this time, I no longer found Jesus’ life and teachings appealing. If one accepts the gospel accounts as being, perhaps, somewhat factual, then one can’t help noting that Jesus was an impatient teacher (continually berating his disciples for being dense when the problem was that his teachings were obscure) who was prone to temper tantrums (cursing the fig tree, chasing the business people out of the Temple) and suffered serious delusions of grandeur. If one doesn’t accept the gospel accounts as factual, which I didn’t by this time, then it’s difficult to find anything about Jesus’ creed to admire (contrary to Christian dogma, most of his insights were not unique), and impossible to find anything about his deeds to respect. Once the miracle stories and delusional acts (among which offering oneself as an atoning sacrifice to a vindictive god must be included – well-intentioned, but delusional nonetheless) are discounted, there’s not much substance to the stories of Jesus’ life. Clearly, Christian Humanism was not the philosophy for me.

I learned a few weeks ago that Christian Atheism is another flavor of godless Christianity. As far as I can see, the differences between Christian Humanism and Christian Atheism are primarily semantic: one group identifies what it values – humanism, and the other group identifies what it rejects – theism. Otherwise, the tenets of both sets of godless Christianity seem to be identical.

I didn’t linger in my Christian Humanist stage for very long. I compared Christian Humanism and Secular Humanism and found the latter to be a more honest, coherent position than the former. Weaning myself from that last binky wasn’t easy. But, just as children weaned from a mother’s breast discover that they are freer physically, believers who wean themselves from the breast of religion discover that they are freer intellectually, socially and morally. Letting go of that last binky is a significant step in growing up as a human being.

– the chaplain

I’ve written several posts about Christian music.  One examined the sexually evocative texts of Christian songs that have been written over several centuries. Another discussed a late 20th century trend of taking popular love songs verbatim and addressing them to Jesus. In this post, I’m going to discuss the centuries-old practice of co-opting secular tunes for sacred texts.

During the Renaissance, composers wrote more than 40 masses based on a secular tune called, L’homme armé, The Armed Man:

L’homme armé seems to have been the 15th century equivalent of Over the Rainbow. It was a rite of passage for composers to write at least one mass based on the tune. Composers apparently liked it a lot, because several of them used it multiple times.

In the Baroque period, German composers adapted the tune of a secular love song, Mein Gmuth ist mir verwiret, for a German hymn. J.S. Bach later appropriated this hymn and used it five times in his St. Matthew’s Passion. Most Westerners know it as the Passion Chorale:

In the 19th century, The Salvation Army got in on the tune appropriation game:

Sunday School choruses are not exempt from Christian borrowing. The words below are commonly sung to the tunes of The Halls of Montezuma (USA) and Puff the Magic Dragon (Canada):

God’s love is like a circle,
A circle big and round,
For when you see a circle
No ending can be found.
And so the love of Jesus
Goes on eternally,
Forever and forever,
I know that God loves me.

Notwithstanding the tight copyright controls that Richard Rodgers’ heirs have tried to enforce on his music, Protestant church-goers across North America often close their services with a benediction set to Edelweiss:

No song is safe from religious appropriation. If theists like the words and the music, they’ll use the whole thing. If they like tune but not the words, they’ll write their own text and plop it right in with your tune. The only advice I can give to the songwriters among you is, be careful out there.

CODA:
Since I’m not cruel enough to let you leave this post with that rendition of Edelweiss ringing in your ears, I’ll close with this one instead, sung by the inimitable Julie Andrews.

– the chaplain

After a stressful day at work, I opened my email box and immediately burst into gales of laughter when I opened this message:

Honestly, I don’t think anyone could have found a better way to lighten my m**d and put a g**n on my face than the American Family Association did. It’s no surprise that they’re offended by n*de posters. And it’s no surprise that they’re outraged that the quintessential American department store, Sears, is selling such posters on its web site. It’s not even a surprise that Tim Wildmon, AFA president and author of this letter, couldn’t bring himself to spell the word “sexual.” What I found to be just a bit over the top, though, was that sweet, innocent Tim couldn’t even bring himself to write out the word “nudity.”

Memo to Tim: If I’m old enough for you to solicit my donations (I am and you did), then I’m old enough to read such naughty words as “nudity” and “sexual.” I’m also old enough not to be the least bit impressed by your prudishness. Grow up and get a life!

Here’s a suggestion, Tim: if you want adult businesspeople to treat you like adults with a legitimate concern, and respond to your emails and phone calls, you need to communicate like an adult. If you want adult citizens to treat you like adults with a legitimate concern, and support your cause, you need to communicate like an adult. Acting like a school child spelling out dirty words is not the way to gain respect from either Sears or me.

I particularly like the complaint that the posters are offensive because “Very little is left to the imagination.” Perhaps Tim tried to compensate for that shortcoming by compelling his readers to im**ine the words with the del***d le**ers. It didn’t work. But, it did amuse me.

Believe it or not, there’s more and it gets better:

I wonder how many of Tim’s good, clean Christian readers found that page titillating rather than offensive and are now scouring Sears’ web site in search of more stimulation? I wonder how many of Tim’s employees endured the drudgery of scouring through thousands of photos at the Sears web site to find those pictures? I wonder how many of them volunteered for the task? I wonder how many of them are hoping they get a similar assignment next week – maybe at JC Penney’s? All for the sake of research, of course. And to warn their readers, yet again, of Internet perils.

And to market the AFA’s porn filter.

Here’s a wider view of the porn spread page:

If you click on the American Family Filter link, you’ll get this page:

Well, thank you Jesus! The AFA has three different filter packages, priced at $ 49.95, $69.95 and $49.95 respectively. How convenient. There’s a problem/need and they have the solution for it. That sounds suspiciously like Marketing 101 to me: develop a product, then create the need for it. It tells me all I need to know about the AFA’s so-called high-minded Christian principles. This email wasn’t about moral offense or Christian activism at all. It was about selling a product.

Of course it was. That’s all Christianity has ever been about.

– the chaplain