Responding to 10 Questions for Atheists

In this video, The Skep✓ responds to Trinity Radio’s video, which is available here:

I watched this video and wanted to make my own responses because I felt like The Skep✓ didn’t really do a great job of answering them. I usually like his content but in my opinion, this video wasn’t his best work. So here are my responses:

Question 1: “What facts about reality that you and I agree are real facts about the way the world is, does your worldview account for but my Christianity doesn’t account for or at least doesn’t account for well?”

Here, Trinity Radio lists several things that he thinks Christianity can explain that atheists cannot explain, and argues that atheism cannot explain anything that Christianity cannot explain. He lists:

• Evil
• Suffering
• The existence of other religions (including supernatural events in those other religions)
• Science
• Differences among different denominations of Christianity
• Universal supernatural claims
• Universal religious experiences
• Free will
• Morality
• Near-death experiences
• Beauty
• The rapid expansion of the early church
• The events surrounding the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth
• Our shared longing for purpose and meaning

First of all, I think The Skep✓ explained well that saying “I don’t know” is better than inventing an explanation that doesn’t hold water. But I’m going to try to offer explanations here. This will involve touching on a lot of things that I originally wrote about way back in my post, “Don’t Studies Show that Religion Makes People Happier?” which is available here:

“Don’t Studies Show that Religion Makes People Happier?”

Suffering is also explainable by evolution. In general, we are attracted to things that help us to survive (like food and sex) and suffer as a result of things that are bad for us (like being eaten alive or forced to eat spoiled food). Obviously there are exceptions (I’m asexual for example) but my point is that the existence of suffering has helped us survive ever since we were much more primitive than the original primates. If we weren’t able to suffer as a result of being hungry, we wouldn’t be motivated to find food. Since then, we have developed emotions, and there is a whole section in Marsha Linehan’s DBT manual about what the different emotions do for us and why we have them. The gist is that every emotion has a purpose, even when we would much prefer not to ever have to feel it.

The existence of religions is something I talked about extensively in my post that I linked to above. Originally, primates bonded by grooming each other. However, we can only spend a certain maximum percentage of our time grooming and being groomed, so this form of bonding limits the size of groups we can bond in. When religion entered the scene, humans were able to bond in much, much larger groups by having shared religious experiences. So it makes sense that most humans follow religions because religion is a HUGE component of what made us the dominant species.

I feel like when Trinity Radio mentions science, they’re referring to the idea that many previous scientists believed that the world followed laws that could be studied and understood, because they believed that the world was made by a rational Designer. This idea is what DarkMatter2525 talks about in this video:

As a summary, that’s not why people study the Universe and there have been plenty of atheists throughout history who were scientists, but they are largely unknown because they were either assassinated by religious organizations, or pretended to be theists in order to avoid the same.

Differences among different denominations of Christianity can certainly be explained without Christianity being true. People join groups, but they fight with each other and they split. I don’t know if this is something that is actually good for us and keeps us from living in groups that are too large, or if it’s a flaw in our species. Religion and tribalism is something that is talked about a lot in The Happiness Hypothesis and I would highly recommend it.

If people do better in religious settings, supernatural claims help make us more religious. I personally am not 100% convinced that there is no supernatural, so it’s possible that supernatural events happen, although I think it’s unlikely. If they are real, it makes sense that people would respond to them by creating religions around them, even if the supernatural world didn’t necessarily intend for us to take away the conclusions that we do. And if there is no supernatural, then it would still make sense that we believe in one because it draws us to religion and religion has done lots of good things for our species. And, as I explained in my previous entry linked above, you do not need God in order for that to be true. The belief in God has been good for us, regardless of whether one exists, and people who believed in God have had a survival advantage and passed along their genes.

I’m going to say I’ve covered universal religious experiences.

Free will and determinism have been something I have thought about a lot since way before I became an apostate. I’m going to go with The Skep✓ here and say I don’t know. Our brains seem to work based on the movement of molecules, and people can be manipulated using psychology, so I don’t know if free will is even a real thing. It definitely feels like it is, though, from a subjective standpoint. I don’t know where consciousness comes from. I don’t know, if we were to discover life on another planet, whether they would experience consciousness the same way we do. Maybe they would experience consciousness like Krista and Tatiana Hogan.

One time, I asked my grandfather whether he believed in a god that was conscious. He paused for a moment to think, and then said, “I believe that God is consciousness.” I thought that was incredibly profound and it started me down a long path. Maybe the consciousness that we experience is somehow divine, and somewhere there could be a universal consciousness experiencing everything that we as individual points of consciousness could ever possibly experience. Animals don’t even have the same five senses that we do. A universal consciousness would have to be huge. And to me, freewill and consciousness are highly intertwined. Determinism would make sense from a scientific standpoint, because molecules move around and the way the world is and they way we behave is the only way it could ever be, and history couldn’t have unfolded any other way because ever since the big bang, molecules have been moving around according the laws of physics. So with consciousness and freewill, I will concede that religion has answers and I don’t. As The Skep✓ pointed out, however, this does not mean that theism’s answers are correct. It also doesn’t solve the problem that if there is a god, it’s highly questionable to me that any religion actually portrays it accurately. But this is definitely one of theism’s more convincing points and if I were them, I would put a lot more emphasis on it than what the religious people I’ve met actually do.

For morality, I’m going to refer back to the paragraph above on evil.

Near-death experiences. I think there’s a difference between there being a god and there being an afterlife. I was homeschooled in a cult and my mom was dysfunctional so I didn’t get to learn much about physics, but from what I understand, they have started studying consciousness. It is possible that it could exist according to some laws of nature that we have not yet fully discovered, or at least that I did not learn about in the tiny section on physics in my Apologia textbook that I read 15 years ago. Maybe there’s nothing when we die, but maybe our consciousness goes somewhere else. Honestly I need to know at this point whether Trinity Radio is specifically trying to argue on behalf of theism or Christianity. Either way, as The Skep✓ points out, there are plenty of ways to describe near-death experiences from an atheistic standpoint. Maybe, as he mentions, near-death experiences are our brains’ way of explaining things that are really scary and which we don’t understand. Honestly, to me a lot of the descriptions of near-death experiences that people give sound a lot like dissociation. I’ve been through some extreme dissociative episodes so I have the position of being much more able to describe dissociation subjectively that the average person. Once, I was in pain and I didn’t know if it was physical or emotional. It was like every individual part of my body was in as much intense pain as it possibly could be, but each part had its own kind of pain. My head had a headache and my stomach had a stomachache and I could not attend to all the problems at the same time. My eyes were bugged out like is usually only seen I believe in people with thyroid issues, but they tested my thyroid and it was fine and people with that condition don’t actually have their eyes bulge that quickly anyway. They were completely bloodshot and hurt indescribably. I looked in the mirror and it was like something from a horror film. I just remember thinking the word “astronomical” a lot. As though if every painful thing that had ever happened in my life could be condensed into just one moment, it would have nothing on what that experience was like. When it was finally over, I looked at my breakfast and cried. How could eggs and a banana matter? How could anything matter once I knew pain like that existed? The doctor said this was “not in the medical literature” and the closest thing it resembled was acute opioid withdrawal, but I wasn’t on opioids. However I was in the midst of a life-altering dissociative episode that had been going on for weeks. Dissociation happens when pain becomes too intense. If you look at fear for example on a scale of 1-5, a 4 would technically be the worst fear possible, and 5 would be dissociation. Humans have obviously evolved to fear death, so it would make sense that they would experience dissociative episodes around near-death experiences. People who experience “hell” could have been going through what I was going through. And feeling like you’re off in another part of the room looking back at yourself is an incredibly common description of dissociation. Most of my memories of childhood are as though I’m up at the ceiling in the corner of my room looking down at myself. So as much as I would like to believe that there is an afterlife and near-death experiences prove it, there are also natural explanations like dissociation that are just as likely to be the correct explanation.

Beauty is when we experience something that makes us happy. As a Christian, I believed that God was an aesthetic being and that was why I was as well, because he created me. I remember sitting by a lake a dusk and listening to the loons and looking out over the water and having a profound spiritual experience. As happy as I am that I got to experience that, there are other explanations. Happiness is an emotion, and we have emotions because we evolved to have them. We are motivated to pursue things that make us happy, like food, which are often also things that historically have helped us survive. The idea of beauty could have co-evolved with our ideas of religion and the divine. We were already able to feel happiness, so it was just a small step to be able to appreciate beauty. And this has helped us to bond; humans come together around things we think are beautiful. Note that I’m not saying that this is the answer. All of these answers are just speculation. I’m just saying that there could be an answer from an atheist perspective, just as there are answers from a Christian perspective.

The rapid expansion of the early church is not that hard to explain. With the destruction of the second temple in AD 70, there was a religious vacuum. More on that here:

Honestly, this could be explained with or without the temple, though. Religious movements all over the place have taken off. That’s how religion works. It’s part of our evolution.

I really don’t think that Christianity is a great explanation for “the events surrounding the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.” It’s highly questionable to me how the church decided which texts ended up in the bible and which (like the gnostic gospels) were thrown out. A couple of videos; one, a scholarly documentary and the other, a silly cartoon, describe this:

So, I don’t think that the people who believe the bible is inerrant in its current form are at all more equipped to account for Jesus’ existence. Most people are pretty sure he actually existed (see below) but it also really seems hard to argue that the Christian narrative of who Jesus was and what he did, is the most historically accurate.

As for our shared longing for purpose and meaning, I’m going to say I don’t know. The book Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl came into my life at a time when I desperately needed it, and it describes how meaning and purpose helped him and several others survive Nazi concentration camps and rebuild their lives afterwards, so it’s entirely possible that we just evolved to have it because it helps us survive.

With all of this, even though I’ve put in a lot of time and effort to trying to learn about different viewpoints, I really don’t know and I don’t have all the answers. I do think, though, as a former Christian, that Christians are also just speculating on most of this. The Bible doesn’t even talk about a lot of these topics. They come up in apologetics and whoever can think of something that sounds good to the most people goes viral and their (usually his) opinion becomes widespread. It’s not based in actual evidence or fact. I know that sounds harsh, but so much of what we believe the bible says was politically motivated. People spend their whole lives genuinely trying to find the most accurate original manuscripts and I know they value facts and the truth but they also desperately need the bible to be true for emotional and existential reasons. And even the books that they’re trying to find the original versions of and the best translations for are just books that were picked out by people with various motivations. I remember being at bible college when I was an incredibly sincere Christian and it really bothered me the way they chose which books were inspired. I tried to convince myself that it made sense and I tried to find sources that could convince me but I couldn’t because it doesn’t make sense. And that was honestly my whole experience with Christianity.

So, to respond to the original question, I do think there are things that Christianity doesn’t explain. For example:

• How are we to believe that the biblical canon is divinely inspired when a historical account of how they arrived at it makes it look dubious at best?
• Why doesn’t the bible predict anything that was later corroborated by science? And why do so many bible stories (such as the creation story) directly contradict what we know from science?
• Why is the bible so inconsistent? Why does it condone atrocities such as genocide (See Friendly Atheist’s playlists on “Everything wrong with [insert book]” available here: https://www.youtube.com/@FriendlyAtheist1/playlists )
• Why is there so much biodiversity on earth if there were only two of each biblical kind just 5,000 years ago when the The Great Flood occurred?
• In life, what you believe or whether you’re a good or bad person doesn’t seem to determine whether good or bad things will happen to you. So why should we expect differently in the afterlife?
• People do not seem to actually be evil. Many atheists would respond that most people behave in prosocial ways most of the time because of the way we evolved, so from a subjective human perspective in which we experience certain behaviors as “evil,” most people are not evil most of the time. However, Christians have a harder time explaining why people are good and kind to each other even without religion. They cling to the idea that “We’re not evil because we sin; we sin because we’re evil” and The Great Flood was justified because “The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5, ESV). But to do that, they have to create the idea of Common Grace, which isn’t even directly taught in the bible. My point with this is that most people would agree that most humans do not seem to be evil enough to deserve hell. It is much easier to explain this from the perspective of atheism because I for one would argue that we simply do not deserve hell. Christians have to come up with an incredibly convoluted narrative that varies by denomination to explain how we are actually evil enough to deserve eternal conscious infinite torment even when we seem mostly good.
• Why are followers of Jesus not actually more loving than those who do not follow Jesus, when Jesus said “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35, ESV)?

Question 2: “If your definition of atheism is merely that it’s a lack of belief in god and you’re just waiting to be convinced, but then you speak of him as though he’s in some way synonymous with Santa Claus the Easter bunny or fairies, doesn’t that at least send the message to your listeners that you actually believe that there is no God?”

Yes. 100%. On the one hand, I feel like I understand why people make these comparisons: for example, in the case of Santa Claus, we have explanations for where beliefs in him came from, from a historical perspective. There may have been a historical figure, but then people embellished the story and literature was written and people liked the literature and it spread and it really took off in certain countries that were far away from where the historical Saint Nicholas actually likely lived, and then finally the Coca Cola company drew a picture and now we have Santa Claus. And if you look at the way religion evolves, it’s kind of similar. You can see how ancient people drew cave paintings that imply they were animists, and then in the Middle East there were tribal religions which got influenced by other religions and we can trace back where our concepts of religion came from, with the addition of new historical figures who were believed to be either prophets or actually divine (as in the case of Jesus). I also think that we can explain why people believe in religion from an evolutionary standpoint, as in the entry I linked way at the top.

But there are also huge differences between Jesus and Santa Claus. For example, if you believe in Santa Claus after reaching adulthood, you are presumed to either have serious intellectual disabilities or a psychiatric disorder. This is why I personally do not compare belief in God to belief in Santa. I compare it to the Yeti. One time, I was in a hotel room with nothing to do and watched a whole documentary on finding the Yeti, and it intrigued me. There are tons of forest in that part of the world so it’s entirely possible that the Yeti might exist. And from an emotional perspective it would be really cool if he did, so some people spend their whole lives trying to find him. It’s different subjectively in the case of God because as a Christian I spent about the first 26 years of my life trying to find him and did not succeed. I actually think there actually are reasons not to believe, such as the fact that we can trace back the origins of religion to ancient times and it is explainable with evolution. But it is much more like the Yeti than Santa Claus. Right now, I have an open mind that the Yeti could exist, but I’m not going to go base my entire worldview around that until I have evidence that the Yeti definitely exists and definitely can propose a worldview and corresponding lifestyle that is better than the one I currently have.

Question 3: “When atheism becomes a part of someone’s worldview, they typically change their positions on other issues like abortion, sexual morality, and a number of other things. I actually have several videos of well-known atheists saying that there’s nothing wrong with prostitution, that they hope their children don’t save themselves until marriage, and that sex workers should be put up on a pedestal no different than the military…. Even if you didn’t become an atheist just so you could sin (and I believe you), do you at least understand why those moves could send that message to people who might say that to you?”

Okay, so, it seems like we’re talking about:

1. Abortion
2. Sexual morality
3. Prostitution
4. Whether or not one wants one’s children to save themselves for marriage
5. Whether or not sex workers should be put up on a pedestal no different than the military

These things are very different from one another. I think there are a lot more people who would be in favor of giving woman access to legal abortions than there are people who would be in favor of glorifying sex workers. The bible talks about most of these issues and Christians generally base their opinions on whatever is the dominant opinion in their particular Christian community. When a person leaves Christianity in favor of atheism, they no longer base their opinion on what the bible or their Christian community says, so it makes sense that their opinions will change. I can definitely see why the idea of glorifying sex workers would be incredibly disturbing. My understanding is that most of them have endured horrific abuse as children or somehow ended up in the adult entertainment industry as a result of trauma. I would be in favor of society helping them rather than ignoring their suffering, and perhaps this is what the original source was referring to. (Since he “didn’t want to seem combative” and thus did not provide a source, we’ll never know.) But I’ve never run across the idea of giving them the same status as the military, so I think it’s a bit “disingenuous” (to borrow his favorite word) to imply that this is a common argument. I personally have never had an abortion and would never do so unless it was the most merciful thing to the child, am asexual, have never been a prostitute or hired a prostitute, don’t have children, and disagree with the position he referenced on glorification of sex workers. So when people argue that I left Christianity so I could sin, my point is that I’m not actually sinning much as part of my lifestyle. I really can’t speak for unnamed individuals who espouse positions I’ve never heard of. I do think that most people change their worldviews first, and then change their behavior to match. Referencing obscure viewpoints that involve maximum possible amounts of sin is unfair to the vast majority of us who are just living our boring lives.

Question 4: “If it’s a lack-of-belief sort of atheism, what is it? Is it 50/50 60/40 75/25, and at what point do you feel disingenuous saying that you merely lack a belief as opposed to leaning towards ‘I believe that god does not exist’?”

This is hard to answer because I don’t really understand the question. I think what he means is, if I think there’s a 75% chance that God does not exist and a 25% chance that there is a god, then would I claim certainty that God does not exist? Which the answer is, like, no. When making the argument that something doesn’t exist, there’s never a point of total, absolute certainty. Maybe there’s a way to calculate the probability that Santa Claus exists, but I don’t know what it is. Technically, there is a minute chance that he’s out there. If I were presented with overwhelming evidence that was temporarily lost to humankind that verified ancient myths of Santa Claus, I would change my mind. Willingness to change my mind in the face of new evidence is important to me. I don’t know if that answers the question.

Question 5: “Doesn’t it bother you a little bit that when we come to talk about the origins of the universe, and if there’s a multiverse the origin of that, too, that the only real options you’ve got besides God is a past infinite universe (which is impossible), or the universe coming to exist uncaused out of nothing, or something far less clear than even those? It seems that for any worldview that includes atheism, there’s a massive blind spot when it comes to the origin of the universe and all the attempts to try and circumvent that problem seem desperate and at least far less likely than theism. My question isn’t just, ‘What do you typically say about this?’ because I’m well aware of the responses. My question is simply this: when you step away from the Debate Mode that it’s so easy for us all to get into online, doesn’t this issue destabilize you a little bit? It seems to fit really poorly with any worldview that includes atheism.”

I stopped making arguments that were “desperate” when I left Christianity. Once I wasn’t forced to come to a fixed conclusion no matter what and was able to actually look honestly for answers, I didn’t have to make desperate arguments because it’s normal and okay to be wrong. I’m not here trying to make the facts fit my worldview; my worldview changes with new facts.

Honestly, though, this does not destabilize me. I still don’t think there’s enough evidence to conclude that there’s a god. If God made the Universe/Multiverse, then who made God? The Origin-of-the-Universe argument doesn’t really work for me because it’s special pleading. Why does God not have to have a beginning or an end, but the universe does? As Viced Rhino has pointed out, our brains evolved to understand how to survive on Earth, not to understand the origins of the Universe. I don’t know how or why the universe came into existence, and I think it would be a really strange thing to know. Why would I be able to comprehend that information?

Question 6: “Of the arguments for God’s existence, is there one that to you seems more interesting than the rest? Is there one that for you actually does weigh in favor of theism? Which one?”

See my comments above on consciousness. It’s confusing to me how it’s possible that I am sentient when I came from things that were not sentient. So, to answer the question that I think is behind your actual question; yes, I am capable of thinking about arguments for a different point of view.

Question 7: “What sort of evidence (if any) would be enough to convince you?”

If they could find passages in the bible that predicted things that were later corroborated by science. If prophecies came true, but like actual prophecies and not apocalyptic literature that can be retro-interpreted to mean absolutely anything. If a voice came from Heaven and everyone on Earth (including me) heard it at the exact same time and in our own languages saying that the bible is inerrant and we should accept it as the incarnate manifestation of Absolute Truth. If there were a god that actually wanted to be known by us, they would have no difficulty doing any of these things. Alternatively, I would accept this:

Question 8: “To what extent did social and moral issues start you down the path toward your atheism? That is to say, the typical Christian or religious views on sexuality, gender, rights, and acts and commands of God in the Old Testament? It seems that many deconversion stories online begin with or at least include LGBT issues, purity culture, or Hell as instrumental in the deconversion process. It strikes me that what should matter most is the truth and not what we might prefer that the truth were. I honestly wonder how much those issues and ones like them motivate the deconversion rather than all this talk about evidence.”

This is fair. I post a lot about how Christianity is awful and causes a lot of harm, but technically that does not make it false. Horrible things turn out to be true all the time. We’re not claiming that there is no war in Ukraine because it would be awful if there were. I do think that the bible is kind of an exception because it includes a ton of commands to rejoice and Christianity expects that if you believe it, you will see it as a positive thing. I didn’t run into a lot of Christians in church who thought it was unfortunate but true that the bible was inerrant. So in a way, showing that it’s not something to rejoice over makes it less credible.

But the distinction between whether something is true and whether it is something to be happy about is real. I will share my story. I went to bible college and while I was there, I started to have “doubts.” I was completely immersed in a Christian college, I had been a Christian since I was a little kid, and I desperately wanted to believe. My pastor and his wife offered book suggestions and I read them. I did not read literature from any other viewpoints. And yet, I have hundreds of journal entries from that time that were about how no matter how hard I tried to prove that Christianity was true, I kept arriving at the “wrong” conclusions. I assumed something was wrong with my logic. Now I would say that I didn’t have enough evidence. But I continued to be a Christian until years later, I had people in my life (like my grandma) who I believed were going to go to Hell, and I wasn’t okay with that. I finally decided that I would rather go to Hell than spend eternity praising a god who damned my grandma. Only once the fear of hell was taken away, was I able to acknowledge that I was facing a lack of evidence. I looked at my original writing once and realized that I was coming to the same basic conclusions then as I am now, I just wasn’t able to accept those conclusions because I was trapped in a system where I was forced to hold certain beliefs.

So why do I write about the harm inflicted by Christianity rather than just focusing on whether it is true? Because if it’s not true, then it’s no sense letting it do the harm that it’s doing. There are beliefs that are harmless. Some people believe that throwing salt in your doorways will keep bad spirits away ( https://qr.ae/prQUZ7 ). I don’t spend a lot of time trying to get people not to believe that because, aside from possibly a small environmental impact, it’s not harming anyone. Christianity does harm a lot of us. If you look at issues such as shunning, degradation of women, admonishments for slaves to obey their masters, freaking genocide, demonization of science, etc., Christianity harms us in all kinds of ways. Which, given that there’s really not a lot of good evidence that it is true and there are a lot of things that would cast doubt on it (like, say, the fact that we know how they chose the books in the Canon and it seems sketchy AF, we can trace how it spread and that also seems sketchy AF, etc.), it really seems like the existence of Christianity causes a ton of completely unnecessary suffering.

Question 9: Can you name the last three academic books you read by theists on the subject? How long ago did you read them? Or is most of your understanding of apologetics and atheism from non-scholarly internet sources, pop level books and–let’s face it–YouTube videos? And be honest with yourself about this; anyone can google up a list of books and paste them in the comments section, but I want to know: are you getting the best from the other side?

So, it’s a bit invalidating that when I post a list of books, you’re going to think I just “googled them up.” If you think your interlocutors are outright lying about our experiences, you’re not going to get very far in persuading us. I also don’t know exactly what you mean by “academic” books or what differentiates them from “pop level” books. I dedicated the first 26 years of my life to pursuing Christianity, so when I concluded that it wasn’t for me, I stopped reading Christian material. I think this is only fair. Twenty-six years compared to the average human lifespan is a lot, so it’s unfair to expect me to continue trying to make Christianity work for me after all that. At some point you have to move on.

I also don’t know about the last three I read before giving up. I would just list all the Christian books I’ve read but I gave away most of my Christian library after I became an apostate. I would definitely suggest that I’ve read more Christian books than the YouTuber has read of atheist books. A few that I can name off the top of my head would be:

• The Reason for God by Timothy Keller
• The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God by John Frame
• Several books by C.S. Lewis, including Miracles and The Screwtape Letters
• How Could a Loving God? by Ken Ham
• The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Evidence Ⅰ and Ⅱ by Josh McDowell (I did not read this one cover-to-cover, but I used it for reference.)

I’m probably going to remember a million more as soon as I finish this entry. I do think it’s important to note something about my life story. When I was a kid, I was an absolute bookworm. I loved reading and did it all the time. Then, when I started ninth grade of homeschooling, my mom didn’t want to teach lessons and she didn’t want to enroll me in online classes or get me video courses or any of it. She just bought huge textbooks and demanded that I read them cover to cover or I wouldn’t be able to go to college. I spent most of my days trying to slog through them. Unfortunately, that is not how teenagers learn, so my brain started dissociating. I would look at the book and immediately space out and lose time. I didn’t want this to happen and I hated it, but no matter how hard I tried, I spent literally most of my day every day alone, holding a textbook and trying to read it but spacing out. So now when I try to read, I still space out. This has been a problem for me in school ever since. So I would have read more Christian books but I do a lot better with YouTube videos. Honestly, YouTube is where I’ve gotten most of my information about what different atheists believe. I can’t think of any books I’ve read by skeptics cover to cover the way I read Christian books. Aside from that, I was raised Christian, went to and evangelical college affiliated with what was then the CCCU (Council for Christian Colleges and Universities), and was active in church (including not just Sundays but also bible studies and the like) until my late twenties. I explored the denomination I grew up in (which followed the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith), then went to a Southern Baptist church for a while, then went to an EPC (Evangelical Presbyterian) church for a while when I started to swing back toward Calvinism, then went back toward Arminianism (which reminds me that I read Why I am not a Calvinist by Jerry L. Walls and Joseph R. Dongell) and went to a 4C Congregational church, I joined a Bible study run by the Assemblies of God, I got SiriusXM radio and listened to The Catholic Channel regularly, I made friends with a member of the Greek Orthodox Church and went to church with her several times and talked to her priest. I would say that yes, I really did explore the best that Christianity had to offer. This was not a superficial venture. I needed Christianity to be true, or at least I thought I did. I needed to believe that the God I had prayed to since early childhood was real and had been listening to me. I needed to believe that he remembered everything that had happened in my disjoined life, that he had always been there and was the unifying thread. That the world was perfect 6,000 years ago and would be perfect again. I needed to be able to go to church because that was the only way I knew to meet people and be part of a community. I didn’t end up shunned by my family and mostly alone in life because I didn’t try hard enough to be a Christian. And now, I don’t see it as a failure or a bad thing. Honestly, I’m glad I made it out and I think the rest of my life will go better now that I ripped off the band-aid. But at the time? 100% it was horrible and it felt like the God who promised to never leave me or forsake me was leaving me and had lied to me and it was not fun at all.

Question 10: If you found out today to your satisfaction that Christianity were true, would you accept God’s authority, repent of your sins, and trust Jesus as your king?

I’m going to have to agree with The Skep✓ here and say… probably not. On the one hand, spending eternity in hell does not sound fun, especially if my being there did not actually do anything to release anyone else from hell. But honestly, I don’t think I would be able to love God again. It was an abusive relationship. If someone tells you that you have to love them or they’ll have no choice but to hurt you and it will be your fault, it’s impossible to know whether you really love them or just don’t want to get hurt. There was a book called Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell (which I also 🤬 read and did not just “google up,” thankyouverymuch) which argued that there is no hell, and if that were the case, it might be easier. But as I think aloud here, God definitely commanded the killing of entire communities on regular basis in the Old Testament, and sometimes allowed that they save the virgin girls for themselves, essentially commanding these girls to spend the rest of their lives being raped by the men who killed their families. Honestly there was a lot of the Old Testament that was super barbaric. And they try to solve this with dispensationalism and the idea that God is totally different now, but it’s not like he apologized for the Old Testament. Besides, the New Testament has all that stuff about how I’m not allowed to talk in church because I’m just a woman. So I’m going to have to say that no, I don’t think my personal values would allow me to be a Christian. Maybe if you strip away everything but the teachings of Jesus. At the very end of my Christian experience, I once went through and looked at every single mention of Hell, and noticed that with the exception of John 3:16, Jesus always talked about salvation being works-based. The people who were good to the poor etc went to heaven and the people who were just total jerks to everyone went to hell. I feel like Jesus as he’s portrayed in the four gospels was pretty cool. I could get behind causing a ton of trouble in church and beating up people who exploited religion for financial gain (John 2:13-17). And it’s my understanding that in the gnostic gospels, Jesus was even cooler. At the end of the day, there are so many types of Christianity that if one day I found out that “Christianity” was true, I would have no idea what to do if I did want to accept Jesus as my personal lord and savior. And those who do not believe me, I will re-link to this video, which is the first in a seven-part series:

Closing thoughts:

This was my original response on YouTube, and I still think that Trinity Radio’s video was condescending. In my quotes from him, I tried to isolate the actual questions and left out a lot of admonishments to really think through the issues honestly. However, there is a reason I spent most of my afternoon responding to him, and that’s that I think he actually was addressing atheists and not preaching to the choir. Which is unusual and I appreciate it. If he thinks my soul is going to go to hell, he’s trying to help me when most videos ridicule me and are produced for people who will laugh along. So, as annoying as it is to be talked down to, I thought he made some good points and I appreciate that he’s trying his best to understand points of view other than his own.

References:

TheSkepTick. (2023, April 1). Dumb Questions To Annoy Atheists [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/EnKO-0i814w

Trinity Radio. (2020, October 19). 10 Questions for Atheists [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/E1SDYPaUNiY

DarkMatter2525. (2017, September 27). The Theft of Our Values [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/dPOMNdvKZtQ

60 Minutes Australia. (2018, December 19). Conjoined twins share taste, sight, feelings and thoughts | 60 Minutes Australia [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/N1Mac4FeKXg

UsefulCharts. (2023, January 13). Christian Denominations Family Tree | Episode 1: Origins & Early Schisms [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/uzuYZi749CM

HISTORY. (2022, May 7). Bible Secrets Revealed: The Real Jesus (S1, E4) | Full Episode [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/8gPMGbWcBps

NonStampCollector. (2019, January 22). The Gospel of Luke [The Alternative Facts gospel] [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/78bsM7RbK0A

Let’s Talk Religion. (2021, February 19). Did Jesus Exist? [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/SRfFLjWLybA
DarkMatter2525. (2021, April 27). Scientists Discover God [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 8, 2023 from https://youtu.be/31uWQhYB4Ww