Bright Adventist Interview

I had the privilege of interviewing A Bright Adventist. Although he does not consider himself a "Cultural Adventist," I enjoyed his responses. As you read you can tell that he is a serious seeker of truth.

How old are you and how long have you been an Adventist?

I am 25 years old. I was baptized when I was ten, but I felt like an Adventist before that. I mean I was devout before that. It may sound strange but I was extremely serious about my faith from about the time I was nine. So, I’ve been an Adventist “on the books” for a solid 15 years and longer if you count my subjective experience. Conversely, I was raised in a fairly secular environment until the time I was eight or nine.

So you are relatively new to Adventism?

Actually, I am a forth generation Adventist. The first part of my life was secular because my mother had left the church as a young adult. Some of my earliest memories are of going to Sabbath School with my grandparents. To this day, Sabbath dinner at Grandma’s is wonderfully stereotypical.

Are you currently a Student?

No, but I am applying to Graduate school next year.

Are you living independently?

I am married and currently living outside the United States. How independent this makes me is up for discussion and bad marriage jokes.

On your blog you say that you don’t believe in God...

Yes, I don’t believe in any of the gods. I don’t believe in Thor, Zeus, Krishna or the Christian God. I don’t believe in fairies either.

Tell us a bit about your religious background. How did you get to this point?

Like I said before, I became part of the church when I was about nine years old. At first it was a huge shock to my system, but I quickly learned to love the church. It is interesting looking back on that time now. I remember dealing with some serious contradictions between my mostly secular first nine years and the teachings of my new faith. I remember thinking something like, “What I learned in church about creation and what I’ve learned about evolution and the origin of the universe can’t both be correct. How do I know that the Bible is true?” At the time I didn’t see any way I could know for sure. So, I set up a little thought experiment. I said to myself, “If the Bible is true and I don’t believe it, things could turn out really bad for me. If it’s not true I will be wrong but that’s about it.” I didn’t know about Pascal’s Wager at the time, but in some crude form that is what I did. At this point I can’t remember if this thought was my own or if I had heard it from someone at church. I suspect the latter is more likely. Either way, I remember the exact moment I decided to forget all doubt and trust the literalist interpretation of our church. At the time, to my nine-year-old mind, the wager made sense. I wanted to be safe. It was very emotional.

As I got older I attended Adventist schools, made some amazing friends and had a great time in general. During my teenage years I diverged from the lifestyle of many of my peers because I insisted on following our church’s teachings to their logical conclusions. I realized that very few members actually do this. Adventist teachings can be a difficult master if you go all the way with them. Most people compromise; very few live like they believe it. I believed and subsequently became a bit of an oddity even within my church.

Because of the original wager that brought me into the church, I refused to seriously entertain any evidence that contradicted Adventist teaching. I was too afraid of the possible consequences. This all changed while I was attending an Adventist college. Many ideas presented there disturbed me. A big one was the fact that the gospels were not written by the disciples they were named after. By itself this fact is rather benign. It actually doesn’t challenge any part of our belief system. However, it pointed out the fact that I had been taught at least one falsehood in church and church school. I became very afraid that other things might not be true. As a consequence I was depressed for months.

It took this huge existential crisis to teach me the deep meaning in the verse, “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” I decided to seek God and the Truth without fear. This was the reversal of my wager.

It is important to realize that not a single one of my beliefs had changed at that point. I simply decided to seek the truth without fear. For all I knew I was on the path to confirming the church’s interpretation of the Bible. Furthermore, even though the result so far has been almost the exact opposite (I don’t believe in any god), I am on the very same path. Perhaps there is a god and he is leading me to an end that is quite different from the place I’m in now. I don’t think this scenario is very likely, but as a seeker of truth I would not resist such a conclusion if I were lead to it honestly.

How did you come to lose your faith?

This is where I start to have trouble with the language of many Cultural Adventists. (As a consequence I don’t call myself one.) That is, I have not lost my faith if “faith” means “faith in the Truth.” I guess you could say that I lost my faith in “blind faith” at the moment I rejected fear. However, like I’ve said, my beliefs were completely in tact at this point.

I like to think of my journey as an arrow shot out of a bow. The arrow never ceases to be an arrow on any part of its trajectory. It only follows the consequences of natural law. You can think of my rejection of fear as the release of the arrow. The strict laws of intra-personal honesty determine my “flight path.” Finally, just like the arrow never stops being an arrow, I have not stopped being an Adventist. (I’ll explain my reasons for thinking this way in my next blog entry.)

If you want to know how I came to reject belief in God, I don’t think I can give an adequate answer in this limited space. I will only say that I finally woke up to the fact that my concept of God was forced to retreat so many times in response to different types of evidence that it was merely an expression for what I didn’t know. You can say I still believe in god; he is synonymous with the question mark.

How many people have you discussed your new philosophy with, if any, and what was their reaction?

So far, I have only talked it over with my wife. I don’t think she was very surprised. Essentially nothing changed except that I no longer go by the name believer. I don’t know if many people can imagine it, but saying I don’t believe in god feels natural. There was no trauma involved.

What is it like to live as a Cultural Adventist?

As I said earlier, I don’t call myself a “Cultural Adventist” because I don’t feel like I’m separated from the church in any way. I know far too many Adventists who are on parallel paths to mine, meaning that they too are only interested in the truth. They believe in God but only to the extent that God is Truth.

Having said that, my life hasn’t changed. People may fear that having no belief in god will change them a great deal, but they are absolutely terrified that they will remain the same.

In what ways have you taken advantage of your "liberation?" Are there any things you do now that you felt were wrong before?

I don’t do anything now that I didn’t do before. I’m not trying to get even with the church for “holding me back”, nor am I trying to make up for lost time. Very little is different.

Where do you see yourself going with this in the future?

I don’t really know. I haven’t set any goals. In fact, the purpose of my blog is not to push an anti-god agenda, as much as to explore what is essential about Adventism. This question has consumed me for some time. I think there is nothing incompatible with my lack of belief and church membership given other essential requirements are fulfilled.

Other essential requirements?

I’m going to explore this more in my blog but essentially Adventism is a “Truth Seeking Movement.” To be Adventist is to be a seeker of truth within an Adventist community, period. This does not mean that all truth-seekers are Adventist (that would be absurd). It just means that the movement was founded on and organized around the value of “truth above all things.”

Do you think you will be more open about your point of view or attempt to explain yourself to others at some point?

Maybe. I don’t ever see myself brining it up in conversation without being asked. That would just be silly. Will I become some sort of crusader? No. There are too many more interesting things to do.

Is there anything you would like to say to the readers?

My greatest hope is that lifelong Adventists who are thinking about leaving the church on honest theological grounds will read what I have to say and realize it is OK to stay. The church is full of people like us. If it were not the church would be a very different entity than it is now.

A Timeline of Cultural Adventism

I had a request in the comments from Erv Taylor to find out the origins of the term "Cultural Adventist." Here's a short history of Cultural Adventism:
Here are the links from the timeline in chronological order:

http://64.227.85.187/discus/messages/11/981.html?982135345
http://www.spectrummagazine.org/library/columns2003/030721carpenter.html
http://www.adventistreview.org/2005-1517/story4.html
brightsda.blogspot.com

Questions from the Saints

On a recent Sabbath afternoon, I was spending time with some Adventist acquaintances and friends of mine. I was a bit surprised when one fellow who I don't know that well kept raising thorny questions from the Bible. The guy talked incessantly about things like spending an entire day reading Ellen White or how studying the Bible was really what we should all pour our efforts into. He then surprised me by raising what wouldn't be a theological issue for some variants of Christianity, but what certainly is to Adventism:

"Do you think Jesus made actual alcoholic wine at the wedding?"

Another guy with us said "Definitely not. Jesus would not promote drunkenness."

However the questioner pushed the issue a bit further. "The way it is written it tells us that the wedding-goers had already drunk quite a bit and they called the wine Jesus created 'the best.' People who had already been drinking would only consider alcoholic wine 'the best.'"

The second guy said "Well, however it happened, the Bible condemns drunkenness elsewhere and the Jesus we serve wouldn't have made alcohol."

As the words of Mark 8:18 came to my mind, I had a hard time keeping myself from asking "But the real question is, do you serve the Jesus of the Bible, or do you serve the Jesus that has been invented by the culture of the church you've been in your whole life?"

Later on, he asked us, "If God gave us the commandment 'thou shall not kill,' why did he then authorize the destruction of entire clans of people. He didn't just have a few people killed; he ordered the killing of men, women, children and babies." After stating this seemingly obvious Biblical paradox, the guy let us ponder for about five seconds and came up with "Well, He must have known what was best. I guess it isn't for us to be able to figure these things out now..."

If I didn't know how it is so well, I would certainly wonder what keeps people believing.

Mark 8:18(a) New American Standard Bible
HAVING EYES, DO YOU NOT SEE? AND HAVING EARS, DO YOU NOT HEAR?

Atheist vs. Mormons

This seriously cracks me up. I've even found myself quoting parts of it.

"But not me, I think you're fine. You certainly don't make less sense than the the Buddhists, Catholics and Muslims."

Fijians Get to Stay on Church Land

28 families descended from forced laborers have won the case to remove them from the land where they have been living for 70 years that was brought against them by the Australasian Conference Association Limited of Seventh-day Adventists. The Fijian government claims to be seeking a place to relocate them. I wonder if the church has an official statement on this situation?

Also: another blog's mention of the story.

Some surprising candor from the Old Testament:

Jeremiah 8:8 'How can you say, "We are wise,
for we have the law of the LORD,"
when actually the lying pen of the scribes
has handled it falsely?'

Where Did God Come From?

The following is a reprint of a post I made to a forum over a year ago:

Needless to say I've been doing lots of reading and thinking since the "deconversion." Several salient points have come out of this time. First, the tribal nature of the Old Testament is repulsive. Next, I read the transcript of Douglas Adams' speech Is there an Artificial God?. This is the main part I have been thinking over.

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let’s try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he’s begun to take a little charge of; he’s begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he’s made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we’ll come and we’ll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who’s a tool maker, doesn’t have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven’s sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn’t have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I’ll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day’s tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can’t get you; in front of him there’s the forest—it’s got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water—water’s delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here’s cousin Ug and he’s caught a mammoth—mammoth’s are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it’s fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, ‘well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in’ and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says ‘So who made this then?’ Who made this? — you can see why it’s a treacherous question. Early man thinks, ‘Well, because there’s only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he’s probably male’. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , ‘If he made it, what did he make it for?’ Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, ‘This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely’ and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, ‘This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn’t it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it’s still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there’s plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that’s a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what’s supposed to be going to happen on the 1st of January 2000—let’s not pretend that we didn’t have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

All that said, there are still things that present themselves as mysteries that are not easily answered. For example, Cheating with chance shows the statistical improbability of life's spontaneous arisal.

The probability of the chance formation of a hypothetical functional ‘simple’ cell, given all the ingredients, is acknowledged2 to be worse than 1 in 1057800. This is a chance of 1 in a number with 57,800 zeros. It would take 11 full pages of magazine type to print this number. To try to put this in perspective, there are about 1080 (a number with 80 zeros) electrons in the universe. Even if every electron in our universe were another universe the same size as ours that would ‘only’ amount to 10160 electrons.

Obviously the way he jumps in at the end and says that these numbers prove the presence of a creator follows poor logic. However, it just shows that accepting a rational view of "life, the universe, and everything" doesn't promise to answer all questions.

If anything, David Brin's essays Holodeck Scenario I and Holodeck Scenario II provide one of the best explainations of reality I've seen yet.

Hello World

Ah yes, the introductory post. The beginning. Well, a few words about me seem appropriate.

I was born and raised in the Adventist church. Underwent a serious conversion to personal-relationship-with-Jesus-Christ Christianity in my late teens. However I have a serious bent for seeking truth and that became my undoing as a Christian. I still retain a strong attachment to the world of Adventism. I still eat Big Franks. I still keep the commandments. In fact only a couple people even know about my philosophical change in stance. I've even put on an act once or twice to keep the charade alive.

The simple truth is though, I don't believe. I enjoy the culture of Adventism in many ways, but I don't share so much as one of the 28 fundamental beliefs. Have we experienced belief inflation by the way? I only remember signing up for 27.

It's funny because even though I don't believe, I certainly have no problem with others believing. I do take issue with Clifford Goldstein's dismissal of Cultural Adventism however. I find eating a vegetarian diet, keeping a weekly sabbath and associating with a large group of non-smoking, non-drinking people to be a great part of living a fulfilling life. I just do it as a secular individual. I get to have my healthy, wholesome lifestyle and yet I am also able to live with complete freedom from moral guilt. It may be way out of context but I find it funny how true John 8:32 has turned out to be for me.

Until next time, live well!