I grew up a conservative Baptist setting, where fundamentalist thinking was the norm. Certain beliefs were deeply ingrained in me that took a very long time to critically deconstruct. Some of these beliefs were:
- Every person is intrinsically evil
- Every person is evil from birth
- Every person is either saved or damned
- Damnation is the default
- Damnation means going to hell after you die
- Going to hell means eternal, conscious pain and torment
- Most people are damned
- I am one of the lucky ones who is saved
- But I still deserve to be damned
There was also a very big emphasis on holding the right beliefs. "Salvation" in this framework was not only a matter of intellectual belief ("Even the demons believe—and shudder"), but having the right beliefs was almost a prerequisite for being saved. So, being saved meant being a "true" Christian, and being a true Christian meant not believing anything that went against the core truths of Christianity. So if you, as a child, came under the impression (as a result of your simple "childish" logic) that God must have created Jesus, well then you weren't a true Christian, because that's not Christian orthodoxy. Jesus is God, so he can't be created. If you think Jesus is created, then you're not really a Christian. And if you're not really a Christian, then you're not really saved.
While a professional Baptist theologian could probably lay this all out in a more thoughtful and relatively sensible way, in the real world of small, fundamentalist Baptist Christian communities, nuance is not usually a core value. What I mean is, I know that "Christianity" doesn't officially teach that salvation depends on believing all the right things, but a lot of Christians really do teach that. So what difference did the more nuanced version of Christian theology make for me in my childhood? I did not grow up with a nuanced worldview. So making sure all my beliefs were right was a big deal.
Growing up, I would often hear people ask (or I would ask myself) one of the big questions that any theist must contemplate: Why does God let bad things happen to good people? And the answer I was accustomed to hearing, one which was deeply internalized, was that there are no good people. None of us are good. Bad things only happen to bad people. In a sense, we are getting what we deserve. We are actually lucky that more bad things don't happen to us!
Of course, a sensible person would think that there are lots of good people. This was always a source of confusion for me when I was young. I knew that there were good people. I knew that some of them—many of them—were not Christians. But how could this be? My fundamentalist worldview gave me an incredibly damaging answer: They're not really good, you know? After all, we're all intrinsically bad. We don't even want to do good things for each other. Anything good that we do is only because of God's grace. Anything bad that we do is because of us. We don't get to take credit for any of the good. So all of those allegedly good non-Christians are really just taking credit for something that they are not even capable of doing. How arrogant! Someday they will be damned, just as they deserve to be.
Thankfully, I thought, God helps us to be good people. So in a sense there are good people. But if we're good it is only because God made us good. That was part of the gospel message as I understood it. We were all bad by nature and by choice, and then God sent Jesus to take the punishment for all of our badness. If we believe in/put our faith in Jesus (which, again, entails maintaining the right beliefs about him), then God takes our badness away. Sort of. I mean, people like that can still do bad things. I understood that even as a child, and it confused me terribly. If God makes us good, why do we still need so much help with not being bad? Maybe turning us into good people just takes a long time. Maybe that's how bad we all are!
Very damaging indeed, and one of the lasting impacts this kind of indoctrination had on me is that I still sometimes default to assuming the worst of every person I meet. I've put a lot of work into trying not to do that. I don't want to think that every person I meet is intrinsically an evil wretch. But sometimes I still have to make the effort not to stick with my default attitude.
Incidentally, I've learned from my partner (who learned from her therapist) that your immediate reaction to something does not represent your true character. It represents the way you were taught to react to things in childhood. It's your second reaction, the considered reaction, that more accurately reflects the real you. Of course, if I'd heard this as a child, I would have said that it was non-Christian propaganda for making ourselves feel better. I would have said that we are just trying to ignore what we really are. But that reaction is just how I was taught to react to things in childhood. It's not really what I think anymore.
After leaving the Christian world behind, I struggled a bit to make sense of my new worldview. I still believed in God (and still do to this day, though not the same sort of God that I believed in when I was younger). I still believed (and still do) that there are an awful lot of people out there who seem to delight in being evil. I'm not talking about the sort of things I thought were evil as a child, like saying curse words. I'm talking about people who willfully brutalize and victimize others, who actively try to cause pain and suffering for others, who seek to hurt people for being different from them. There are lots of people like that. I have no idea if it's most people.
I no longer think people are born evil. I do think that psychology and environment have a major influence on us, but I don't believe that our thoughts and actions are determined by these things. I also think there really are lots of good people, and that they deserve to find peace of mind and happiness (not just any happiness, but the sort of happiness that comes from living a truly good life and finding satisfaction in truly good things). Of course, that doesn't always happen. Bad things really do happen to good people. In fact, bad things happen to almost all of us. Part of the appeal of theism for me, though certainly not the only thing that draws me to it, is the hope that, in the end (whatever that means) all of these wrongs will be made right somehow. But anyway, that's not really the main thing I wanted to write about.
What I've been reflecting on today, which is something I think about a lot, is this lingering impulse to divide the world into saved and damned, and the saved are the ones who believe all the correct things, like I do (sarcasm). I have sometimes struggled with the fact that believing in God is no longer the norm in my social network. Or at least, talking about God as a reality is certainly not the norm. I actually don't know how many of my friends believe in God. Some of them do, a lot of them don't. And among those who do, at least some of them believe things that seem very irrational to me. But of course I don't tell them that!
I haven't believed for a long time that people need to have the right beliefs about God in order to be good people. Nor do I think that people are born evil, or that truly good people don't exist. But I still see a temptation to fall back into old ways of thinking. After all, truth matters. Rational thinking matters. I don't see how I could think otherwise. But if that's correct, then right belief matters. Doesn't this recreate the problem of my old fundamentalist worldview at some level? The question I struggled with for a long time is whether there is a necessary connection between rational thinking and being a generally good and decent person. I think the answer is that there obviously isn't. I know lots of good people—not just good, but amazing, generous, absolutely marvelous people! And sometimes they believe what seem to me to be really kooky, irrational things. And many of them believe different things, conflicting things, so logically I know they couldn't all be right even if I didn't think any of their beliefs were kooky or irrational.
My reflexive instinct, or my first reaction, is often to look down on people who believe kooky and irrational things. I reflexively see it as a moral failure. Then my second reaction, the more considered one, is to reject this idea as itself a failure of moral reasoning. I don't think it's a moral failure to have a wildly irrational belief about the nature of reality. So I'm confronted with a very troubling paradox: Lots of people I know (or at least know of) whose beliefs about the nature of ultimately reality align more closely with mine, also embrace a number of shockingly immoral attitudes. On the other hand, lots of people I know (or know of) whose beliefs about ultimate reality don't align with mine are deeply passionate about doing what's right and helping to create a truly good society. It is for this reason that I don't have any desire to argue with friends about God, much less other topics like whether we have souls or free will. I mean, if any of them ever wanted to talk about it and explore our disagreements, I'd be very happy to. But as I said, talking about stuff like that is not the norm.
The truth is (and I think about this a lot), I'd much rather align myself with irrational people who are good than with rational people who are evil. I'd rather interact socially with people who care about me as a person but who don't have any interest in philosophy or have even the slightest clue about how the universe works, than with people who have impeccable beliefs about the structure of reality but who also hate trans people, queer people, people of color, and so forth, and who don't value empathy or treating everyone with dignity. In that sense, I guess I value good ethics over good metaethics. But I do struggle with how to make sense of this, though, from a rational perspective. How can there be such a divide between rationality and goodness? Why is this the way things are?
In a sense, it's not that good people are irrational. There is such a thing as moral reasoning. But I guess the big difference between the people who seem good to me and the people who seem bad to me (and for the record, yes I am aware that I do still instinctively split the world into two groups when I talk this way) is that the people who seem good to me are people who actually give a damn about trying to be good people, and about treating other people with dignity. That seems like a better sort of rationality to me, since taking pleasure in hurting other people seems not just irrational but truly insane. In other words, people who see empathy as weakness are not doing well psychologically. They are certainly not rational.
I also need to stop and remind myself sometimes that I have a tendency to exaggerate these dichotomies, which is probably another lingering effect of my childhood indoctrination. What I mean is, I shouldn't let myself think that people who align with my philosophical beliefs (say, theism) are less aligned with my ethical beliefs, or vice versa. It's easy to make sweeping claims about trends based on my personal experience, but this is all anecdotal and my sample set is obviously limited to my own experience. It's helpful for me to remember that I don't need to always draw connections like this.
Probably one of the reasons I do this is because I had such a toxic, harmful experience of growing up in a theistic religious environment, as have many of my friends. Some of them are very turned off to religious ideas for that reason, and I can't say I blame them. There is a very visible, yet very toxic segment of the population in my country that uses its theistic religious framework as a weapon for hurting innocent people. Since I believe in God, and since I have personal issues with shame and anxiety, it is hard for me not to feel some sense of shame about that. But of course, people who do that don't represent me at all, even if we happen to agree on certain philosophical questions.
For instance, I think often about this one case. I used to cohost a podcast where we would watch religious media, including the occasional music video. On one episode we watched the music video for "God's Not Dead" by the Newsboys. Without getting into everything I hated about it, I will just say that there is one point where one of the band members sees an atheist arguing that evil disproves God's existence (I think on a social media site) and he responds that evil happens because of free will. This is treated as a triumphant, mic drop response. Nothing further needs to be said, it seems. This moment always stuck with me because, as a theist, I happen to think that the reality of free will really does play a crucial role in dealing with the problem of evil. I found myself wincing at how this obnoxious music video was turning this important philosophical belief into sort of a weapon to be used in our "battle" with atheists, as if atheists are enemies.
It's also impossible for me to think about this without thinking of Michael Tait, the lead singer featured in that music video. I grew up listening to Tait's earlier music as part of the group DC Talk, and many of their songs were important to me. I even met Tait once after a concert. In the past year, though, a number of deeply disturbing allegations have been raised against him that plausibly paint him as an extremely dangerous and harmful person. As someone who grew up listening to him, I have been dumbfounded at the level of hypocrisy involved, not just from him but from others in the Christian music industry who helped with keeping it covered up. It probably sounds dumb, but when that news came up, I thought frequently about that moment in the music video: "Evil happens because of free will!" Indeed it often does. It is the same belief I hold, but whether a person shares that belief tells me nothing about whether I consider them to be a safe, trustworthy person. Hence the severe disconnect between what I believe about life and reality, and what I value most in other people.
It is easy to talk about the hypocrisy of religious people. It is easy for me to feel awkward about all this, as a theist. How can I talk about the free will defense against the problem of evil without thinking of these terrible people? But this sense of awkwardness isn't really rational either. We know full well that this kind of stuff can happen anywhere, in any group. I've never accepted the claim that religion makes people evil. And if I'm being honest with myself, abandoning theism in favor of atheism or agnosticism wouldn't change anything. There would still be people whose views aligned with mine, who I would not want to be part of a community with.
In that regard, I've also spent a lot of time thinking about Lawrence Krauss. He's one of the most influential atheists of the past couple decades. In some ways he's been treated like a rock star, and he's acted like one too. On paper, he has probably articulated a number of ethical beliefs that I would share. But Krauss is no better than Tait. He's had allegations raised against him as well, and that's to say nothing of his association with Jeffrey Epstein. So I guess the point I'm trying to make (to myself, more than anything) is that it really does make good, rational sense to align oneself with people who sincerely affirm the need for empathy, for treating others with dignity, and for actually applying this in practice to marginalized communities, and it makes no difference if our philosophical views sharply diverge. Nor does the validity of any philosophical view seem to depend on the moral integrity of those who hold it, even though, in practice, it often feels this way.
Before ending, let me explain why I've been thinking about this a lot this week. I do a lot of thinking about God and truth and stuff like that. Sometimes I think it would be really nice to find a community of "like-minded" people. But in some ways I think I already have access to a community like that, it's just that we are not always aligned intellectually, or whatever. I don't even like phrasing it that way. I'm currently on sort of a personal side-quest to get a definitive answer about whether I am technically a deist or not (I will be writing about that soon enough). If I am a deist then naturally I will want to try to connect with other deists. But my initial research leads me to believe that this could potentially be a very unpleasant experience.
Deists typically place a high value on rationality, but obviously this doesn't tell me anything about their moral sensibility. It seems obvious that deism could be a large umbrella (in theory) that encompasses a number of different perspectives and attitudes. The only problem is that deism does not seem to be a very popular view, so (unless I am mistaken about this, and I hope I am) that kind of diversity simply does not exist in the deistic community. I can't help but notice that most of the deistic resources I find online are produced by white men. Being a white man myself, I can't say that that's intrinsically bad, but I mean, if you know you know. I'm not optimistic about the chances of being comfortable in a community that is mostly run by, or mostly caters to, white men (straight white men? straight cis white men? straight cis mononormative white men? ugh). The tone of some of the deistic resources I've encountered does not inspire much confidence for me. They may speak highly of rationality, but to echo an earlier point, I'd much rather align myself with irrational people who care about empathy and compassion than with rational people who don't.