Pick up the bible with an open mind, visit a couple churches, read Dostoyevsky. Its always ironic to me when anti-Christian folks claim to be so open-minded and tolerant but then refuse to tolerate Christians and refuse to consider Christian beliefs.
Saw this comment in a longer note that was in effect going after someone for not being Christian or giving Christianity a try. Alongside others reposting defenses of Christianity it gave me pause for thought. Faith is actually a deeply personal matter and both sides of the debate seem to treat it in an odd fashion. They carve out imaginings of arguments against their faith and struggle to understand why non-believers might not ever cross the believer threshold. In short they both wish to know why but the very nature of the why might elude them - are they incapable of understanding the rejection of the faith that they themselves are bound to?
If they are incapable of that it is not because they are stupid or any other slight. It is likely because the depth of their belief in Christ is so deep that they can no longer look outside of it. It also might explain why many from the more ‘Trad’ denominations (Roman Catholics and Orthodox) struggle to evangelize their religions in quite the same way as their Protestant cousins.
Here I’ll offer up some thoughts on why I am not a Christian and some insights from someone who attempted to engage and grapple with it. You may not like what you read but it is honest and I will always attempt to inform of where a certain belief comes from. If you want to skip the pre-amble below you can scroll to the two principle objections I have with the faith.
Growing up
In simple terms I am not a Christian because I was not raised one. I was raised in a secular atheistic household. Religion was something practiced by the original outgroup - that is to say one must understand the in group you grow up with is your immediate family unit. The patriarch sets the standard. My father was baptized but that was it, like any boy of his generation though he grew up with going to Church, though by all accounts my Grandparents were not particularly religious. My mother similarly came from a family of recent non-believers.
That is not to say there were not elements of the supernatural in childhood. My mother being a believer in faeries. Indeed if there was something approaching spirituality it was always to be found in nature. The other stories I remember most from my childhood were actually the Greek and Norse myths. These were read to me and I truly found them engaging and formative. There was something relatable within them.
My exposure to Christianity growing up then was minimal. My parents were by no means dogmatic to the extent we would not visit Churches, they had religious friends. It just simply existed outside the family, something other people did. What other people believed. No doubt around this time as well some early ideas about the negative impact of religion were imparted. General thought inspired from the latent Marxism that lingers - that religion is understood as a tool of control. A vaguely negative air. For smaller people. This is an honest reflection of the general feeling I had at the time.
What of Christmas and the other cultural markers of Christianity? It may upset the Christians but I truly don’t think Christmas is unique to Christianity. In the sense that celebratory time of year has existed before Christianity and was celebrated by people for a long time. The same can be said of Easter. These are markers that in many ways are deeper than Christianity is, that they effectively mapped over to the new religion for our ancestors was convenient. So yes those were celebrated within our family growing up, we even had a nativity scene set up, but never once did we go to Church on Christmas.
Teenagedom to Adulthood
I’ll be the first to admit I was a slightly annoying teenage atheist type. Not really comparable to today because I was genuinely young, and well the internet as it exists today was not a thing. My own neutral feelings were growing more sour over time, and not really uniquely to Christianity. 2001 and Islamist terror prompted as much as anything, I never shied from looking at Islam and it has to say my general anti-religion streak towards Islam certainly led me to becoming pilled on immigration as a whole. During this time I of course read Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. It is amusing to look back on but I felt very committed to secular society and a belief it was possible. This continued into University years but that was when I started getting more exposure to philosophy. Philosophy sometimes gets a bad rap but if understood as a way of thinking and if taught correctly it can be truly mind opening.
Throughout this era of my life I had always had a reverence for nature. I idealized the woods and the countryside. A keen interest in bushcraft developed from time in the woods which imparts skills and a connection to the natural world that many lack. In this respect I had an openness to the natural world, a sense of wonder. This never extended towards what was inside a Church. Some Christians struggle to understand this and think it silly when someone comments about how the walls of a Church place God inside it but in the modern era where everything has more explanation the few places left for wonder are in the natural world. This doesn’t mean someone couldn’t experience that openness towards the super natural and end up a Christian but they would certainly not need to be as negatively disposed towards it as I was.
Philosophy has often been used to question the existence of the super natural and many like Bertrand Russel are held up as pillars by atheists but as a wide ranging form of investigation exposure to philosophy as a whole to me it opened up more ideas that the atheists could be wrong, that there was something beyond us. This helped kill the atheist in me, there existed now an openness to the divine.
My Church Experience
Jumping ahead some years now. I had become ‘red pilled’. I had been talking with people online. I was still a skeptic of Christianity but enough reading and time had passed that I was open to giving it a go. It was at a time in my life where I was alone and open to finding something new. After reading and talking and having no great connection to any particular denomination I went the usual route of the extremely online and decided to visit an Orthodox Church.
Many have already written how strange it can be to attend an Orthodox service. To me the first few visits were just observational. One of their deacon equivalents quite eagerly came over to me and chatted after a service - asking why I was there. He was welcoming and seemed to understand I was feeling it out. The ritual of the Orthodox services I found in all honesty charming. It definitely felt like a rooted tradition that was being carried out in much the same way it had been for thousands of years. The singing, the incense. Not to get too anthropological about it or perennialist (though I harbor thoughts in that direction) but truly you see and feel an overlap with elements of other faiths. The incense in particular to me felt very ‘Pagan’ - in the sense other faiths from the Orient use it and we know that smells and offerings are talked of in accounts of Roman paganism. At one service it was asked who was traveling that week and I was - they included me in asking for protection from a guardian Angel. This too felt ‘pagan’ to me - at least in the sense my Prot friends would highly disapprove and be suspicious of.
The post service eating and community of this small Orthodox Church was also nice. It had this community air, people were again welcoming and made food to share. Whilst this was a Russian denomination I remember a devout Greek man excitedly sharing the food he brought every week with me. There was also a group of young converts. They were somewhat more cautious towards me but warmed over time and before I left I had reached the stage where they invited me to the post food coffee with the Priest. The Priest himself was basically a stereotype of what we think of as a based Orthobro. He railed against Communism multiple times. He was clearly sharp witted and smart. I didn’t stay long enough on this journey for him to evangelize or really talk one on one with me though.
All in all I found these elements of experiencing the faith to be wholly positive. The trouble was that the ideas behind the message did not resonate with me. They felt wholly alien at times. The requests for supplication, the continued askance of forgiveness. At this time I was not actually reading the Bible but mainly another book that is often recommended to the Orthodox curious: “Sayings of the Desert Fathers”. To those not familiar the Desert Fathers were early monks of the early Christian Church. They are steeped in mystery and held in high regard. Early and incredibly devout men who lived in harsh places. The book is a collection of their sayings and thoughts and it is seen as representative of many ideas held within the Church (at least this is my understanding).
I read it with an open mind but by the end it was what pushed me away. So onto the concrete objections. In an attempt to be concise I’m sharing the two main objections I hold.
Objection One: World Denying.
Buddhists believe that we need to escape reincarnation. That effectively this life is in some way cursed. Through having desire to experience life we are damned to repeat it and suffer. Life is suffering and must be escaped. Perhaps I butchered some elements of that but I think it is close to the mark. Christianity to me is not that removed from holding this same belief about this world.
We live in a fallen world. This is what we are taught and told. Man was expelled from the Garden of Eden.
The fallen world is the domain of Satan. Many ‘earthly pleasures’ are in fact tricks of Satan.
These ideas are explored at great depth within the sayings of the Desert Fathers. They see and saw the world as a kind of prison of misery. The only way to escape it was extreme ascetic action and devout faith. Why? Because the reward of escape from this world, through death was to conquer death with Christ and exist in a state of grace in Heaven.
To me this sits at complete odds with my perception of the world. To me life IS suffering yes. It only has value because it is suffering. We are to overcome it, and it is a cyclical relationship. You are in fact most happy in overcoming suffering and passing through it. It is something you can fear but it is a necessary condition of existence. It is not that we find meaning through struggle it is that life is struggle.
The Desert Fathers with their life denying mentality and beliefs repulsed me. I find it hard to look at Christian weight lifters and reconcile that with the pleasure that these monks took in living only on bread and water. They were living skeletons hardened by faith but their only meaning came from denial of what life was. In someways they were embracing struggle, which I can understand, but it was towards an end goal to escape this world of suffering and the promise of a new one. Not to be present in this world, to accept this is life now regardless of what comes next.
This elevation of these life and world denying ideologies that seem deeply entrenched in Christianity - the fallen world of sinners, the desire the next life is what to strive for did not resonate with me and in fact deeply repulsed me.
Funnily enough as I am editing this and browsing the substack feed a Christian substacker I have read posted this. In good faith I see the humor, but I think it is a poignant image to share…
Objection two: Evil may never be triumphed over.
This is not an argument about how Christianity is cucked because all people of all races are seen as equal before God. That is a surface level critique that some may have and I don’t begrudge them but it is not what I believe. Within hierarchies you can have ultimate equality before the King (law) both the Noble and the Peasant are in a sense equal in the fact they are NOT the King.
No this to me is a deeper question and it stems from a conception of evil and the idea of redemption. Bluntly put I believe that some people are just truly evil, that that they have no hope of ‘salvation’ or redemption. That their crimes, their actions, are beyond any kind of forgiveness. This links to the idea there is an eternal evil that exists and cannot be triumphed over. In the Christian belief evil (Satan) is eventually vanquished, as Christ vanquished death. The ultimate battle is a resolution.
To me it does not square. This ranges from a disbelief that a man can ‘repent’ of sins in this life. This suggests that sin is something almost medical. It can be expunged and removed. That no one is truly evil. There is a choice. Oho - we approach the free will question. That God gives us free will to choose between following and loving him and not. Or are the Calvinists right - they seem able to square this question another way.
Good often triumphs over evil, but not always. This isn’t an edgy position. This is a genuinely held one. It’s not some ‘realist take’ but rather one held that there is a cyclical battle that rages eternally between good and evil. That struggle again is what is the meaning of life. For one to vanquish the other entirely ends the purpose of life. Some peoples souls are fundamentally different, turned towards something else and forever will be. Some people are not able to be redeemed, perhaps some are but not all.
If evil is a constant force and there is a cyclical pattern to an eternal conflict that rages between good and evil then it just is not possible to accept the Christian world view that sees ultimate triumph.
The role of belief
Both these objections are fundamentally about belief. To believe in Christianity you need to accept some things (that Christ died and was resurrected for example) and certain ideas. This is not a challenge to Christians to persuade me otherwise - this is not a logical moment. These are about deeply held beliefs. I do not believe this is a fallen world and that we need to escape it. This notion is critical to Christians - other lesser objections I may have that are the more common are often refuted and argued against but this core point is just a matter of belief. Either you believe we are fallen and sinful or you do not. The same applies to my other objection - it is not about the scripture of the Bible in so much as it is an objection to the very foundations the house is built on. If I do not believe that there will be ultimate triumph over evil then it follows that I can’t believe in the Christian gospel.
Returning to that original quote that sparked writing up this long discussion of faith: I have considered Christian beliefs and more than that. Truthfully it did give me more appreciation for both the hard beliefs (that I don’t agree with) and also the soft benefits - community and belonging.
I think a trap that people fall into when discussing faith is similar to one the teenage atheist me made - the assumption that I am a somehow a superior person by holding my beliefs versus the Christians. That is not the case, they are just beliefs. It does not make me a smarter or better person to think that evil can’t be triumphed over. Often times people see opposition to their faith as a kind of personal attack (and sometimes in crude ways it is) when it is not. There is a valley, a gulf, that sometimes can’t be crossed by either side. The question comes out always:
“How can you truly believe that?”
I wish all the Christians who read this well, we are not enemies.