So, over the last few months and the past year, I’ve been through an abrupt, yet also rather bumpy, process of de-conversion. It simply started when I was encouraged to question things; I was actually on the verge of becoming somewhat religious. Along the way, I also read some books and found my way back to science, slowlly. What really got to me, though, was what the wrong people told me in a self-improvement group → they claimed for proper selfimprovement you had to be religious and that the Catholic faith was the only true one. And so I became unsettled, because I’d also been baptised as a Protestant at birth, not being religious tho and as my ‘religiousness’ developed, I thought, ‘Oh yes, I’m on the wrong side and I need to convert now.’ Fortunately, I didn’t do that. I hung on every word these people said and believed that there were a actaully cases of weeping statues where neither the police nor scientists could find anything, and no ‘naturalistic/natural’ explanation made sense.
Or take the Shroud of Turin: ‘Oh yes, but blood was found there that matches that of someone who’d been tortured’ (of course in reality it’s unclear whether it’s blood, something else or a mixture of the two). There is, of course, also well-founded evidence that the shroud isn’t genuine. But even there is criticism of this from the religious side – some of which is logically sound and consistent with parts of the evidence. My brain always goes like: the naturalistic explanations are being criticised, then the supernatural explanation must also be true since they said something somehwat choherent and have some puzzling/weird or odd
, sloppy evidence, and that must therefore be genuine. I don’t know how to break out of this pattern of thinking, because that definitely doesn’t follow from it. But somehow I can’t get it out of my head.
I’ve now put a stop to all that and only look at sources that take a critical view of such things. In this case, these are mainly atheist sources, but of course also biblical scholars – and these aren’t necessarily believers, of course. And given my background, it feels as though I’m doing something wrong and that the other side (religious sources and, above all, apologists) carries just as much weight – or ought to. I no longer have the inclination or energy to engage with every argument that speaks in favour of the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin, weeping statues, various miracles, or things in the Bible.
In some respects, I’ve also taken on board criticism of people whose videos I enjoy watching. For example, Alex O’Connor was a bit silly at one point when he said that, as an atheist, one shouldn’t use the phrase ‘claims aren’t evidence’ so much – but it’s simply true that claims aren’t evidence. A claim is not evidence of anything, only of the claim’s own existence. Imo that was nonsense from him.
Similarly, it really gets me down when I know there are lots of comments under a video, including ones that say, ‘Oh no, that’s all wrong, it’s being misinterpreted, and that person (for example, a critical biblical scholar who lets say doesn’t share the Catholic interpretation) is simply lying.’ It’s interesting – even when it comes to nutrition, I’ve been taken in a few times and believed that somehow pasture-raised cattle farming was better in an environment sense than vegan agriculture (which is definitely NOT the case).
And I just want to be left in peace to convince myself that religious worldviews aren’t true. I am afraid of them.
It bothers me that arguments like this are allowed to slip through: “Yes, we all have free will and we choose entirely of our own accord to turn against God and against doing good things, and we simply want to live in sin.” But I find that far too ridiculous as well. Even A few months ago, I was too quick to assume that some pesky apologists would surely have some half-baked answer to this and i had to consider them too. but I say it’s incompatible with an all-knowing, all-loving God, etc., that people should even leave the supposedly perfect denomination or even religion altogether, fail to find it, or simply have different cultural beliefs. these are not a matter of free will – that lead them to act contrary to, for example, Christian values. I just can’t understand how such arguments are allowed to be put forward by religious representatives. Furthermore, an argument I’m very keen to put forward myself is: “If religion were really true, why don’t we learn about it at school (I’m from Germany, for context, and we didn’t learn that this supernatural stuff is ‘real’)? Like why then doesnt everyone know about it.
You often hear things like: ‘The people around Jesus wouldn’t have made that up’, and they probably didn’t – in the sense of simply inventing an entire story – but these were simply things they genuinely believed in or were convinced of. Some things, such as the texts in the Bible, probably just developed from foundations that were partly true, and that’s why I don’t understand why people say, ‘Well, the Gospels were written for different groups of people in different places, so they’ve phrased things differently. On purpose’ But bro, there’s a narrative development where some details vary – who did what, or how many people were there, and so on – and the details that differ aren’t just a case of ‘Oh, it was simply written for a different audience.’ Rather, it’s a narrative development.
