Why I Am No Longer A Christian

To whom it may concern,

Please take note that I’m officially leaving the Christian faith. (In fact, I’ve left.) This is my intellectual and moral decision after further study and reflection. It is not caused by any personal problems.

My current belief is that the spiritual realm exists and “God” probably exists as well. Humans, as spiritual beings, are bound to have spiritual experiences. However, so far no single religion or philosophy has got the complete picture of what is going on. Humans need to continue searching and discovering.

I guess I will have to explain myself. Stated positively, the reason for my current belief is that I see no superiority in any single religion or philosophy (especially religion) in terms of doctrine, “miracles”, history, prophecy, science, achievement, morals, etc. At this point, I am unable to prove this conclusively but I shall attempt it in future after more study. Stated negatively, I have discovered that my past certainty was based upon several biases. I shall list them here. I am quite sure that many of these biases also form the basis of certainty for multitudes of people who believe their faith is superior or simply The Truth. You will see that once we remove these biases, there is not much left of this certainty. Therefore this serves as an explanation of why I’m leaving the Christian faith. It will be a bonus if I can persuade a few to be more open-minded and less dogmatic.

NINE BIASES TYPICALLY COMMITTED BY A PERSON WITH AN UNSHAKEABLE FAITH IN ANY ONE RELIGION/PHILOSOPHY

1. Learning selectively

This is the first and most common mistake committed by almost all “people of faith”. We learn selectively and do not realize that we do. We then assume that what we learn is an accurate reflection of the whole Truth.

After I became a Christian, I made great efforts to be an exemplary one. I read many books relating to my faith and even obtained a Master degree in Christian Studies. It should not come as a surprise that my faith grew stronger and stronger! In every single area, Christian books and materials tell us that the Christian faith is superior. It has the most reasonable doctrines (which alone can satisfy all of humanity’s ageless psychological and other needs), its God can be seen working in history and is active even now, all the biblical prophecies are being fulfilled, science proves the Bible to be true, Christians have made a huge positive impact upon world history, etc. So nice!

But somehow, at the back of my mind, I suspected that I didn’t know all of it. One fine day I decided to find out properly, at which point I still believed that the result would be a further strengthening of my faith. So I started reading up on other religions and philosophies including Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age and Atheism. I was very surprised to discover a lot of new information which changed my views. All the problems with Christianity which I didn’t know existed! All the great stuff about other religions too with their respective logic and proofs! I learned a lot more than I had thought possible. As expected, some of these materials did not present Christianity accurately but then in general, I found many of the criticisms valid (and vice versa). In short, all religions/philosophies have got strong supportive evidence as well as major shortcomings!

More importantly, I discovered there is nothing wrong with people of other faiths. What I mean is that there is no special tendency for them to be wrong and the Christians to be right. They (people of other faiths or no faith) are also using their brains properly, although limitedly as is the case with all humans. For example, Christian authors keep telling us that many people don’t believe in God because if God exists, these people would have to ditch their sinful lifestyles. Reading materials by atheists made me realize they are also moral beings with high moral values. There is nothing wrong with them. Besides, the atheists also point out that believers are afraid to let go of God because it is their psychological crutch. I feel that nobody wins. In short, there should not be a tendency of any group of people (religious or otherwise) to be consistently more biased than other groups. (They are all biased but no more than others.)

I am just so glad I took the step to learn more. Many people will still tell me I am wrong, but why should I even listen to someone whose knowledge is limited mainly to his or her own religion and everything he/she knows about other religions or philosophies was obtained through materials produced by those from his/her own religion?

2. Listening selectively

We do not only learn selectively, we also listen selectively. What I mean is that we place ourselves in a limited circle of friends and acquaintances and as a result of this, the news/information we receive becomes limited. Since we do not realize this, we assume that the news/info we receive is representative of the entire body of news/info.

Up to a few years ago, the majority of my friends were Christians. I moved in that circle. As a result, I would constantly hear news about “God’s working”, meaning the Christian God’s working. This news came in various forms including Facebook postings, e-mails, SMS texts and of course face-to-face sharing. I heard about so many miracles and deliverances. The top favourites were conversion stories. Being bombarded with all this input helped confirm my belief that I was in the “correct faith”. My God was the “correct one”! However, after I started having more friends from other faiths, especially Islam, I discovered that they also had the same amount of miracles and conversion stories to share. Same quantity and same quality too. Again, I feel that nobody wins.

3. Dismissing selectively

From time to time, of course, facts or news which contradicts our beliefs are brought to our attention. At this point, we tend to find ways to dismiss them. However, the same rule is not applied to facts or news favourable to our own faith. In the past, I used this method a lot to subconsciously help me remain certain of my faith.

I shall provide three examples. The first concerns visions, dreams and the like. (This point applies to miracles generally.) Christians have always shared testimonies of people who dreamed of meeting Jesus and then converting to Christianity. However, if told that Christians also dreamed of meeting other religious figures and ended up following them, they dismiss it as “flukes” or even something from the devil. Perhaps they do not realize the prevalence of such cases (refer to no. 2). On the other side of the fence, I have also seen Muslims discount the meeting with Jesus saying it’s from the devil. For the record, the meeting with Jesus is also very prevalent. In short, visions and dreams which support your beliefs are from God, if they do not, then they are either accidents or from the devil.

The second example directly concerns those who convert. Christians tend to say that Christians who converted out of Christianity did not really understand the Christian faith in the first place. This is to lessen the impact of the news that a thinking human decided against their faith. Muslims also say the same thing i.e. only those who didn’t truly understand Islam could convert out of Islam while those who converted to Islam were intelligent and made their decision after due research and reflection. There is actually not true because the quality of converts and apostates is roughly the same on both sides.

The third example concerns scriptural verses which seem to be erroneous. If the error appears in one’s own scriptures, it is immediately dismissed as “having an explanation”. Indeed, lengthy explanations have been made to “reconcile” the error with reality. However, if the error appears in other people’s scriptures, it is not dismissed. It is taken as proof that that religion is wrong.

4. Turning personal experience into philosophy

I guess that my life has been relatively smooth sailing and as a result I did not experience great miracles or deliverances from God. However, I had Christian friends who were in deep shit and experienced “miracles” from their God or the God they then believed in (they thought so because they prayed to this God or someone prayed for them). Of course, it was our God at that time and I used to hang upon to their words and miracles to boost my own faith.

Later I realized that this is a fallacy. While it is natural to conclude that the God who apparently rescued us is the true God, we are ignoring the fact that another person was also in deep shit and got rescued by a different God. If we take into account our experience only, this is termed as “making a philosophy out of personal experience”. We are basically dismissing other people as lesser than we. It would be good to remember that other people are also real persons, with lives as real as ours and brains as functioning as ours.

Let me provide some real examples to show the stupidity of this. There was one guy who wanted to commit suicide by jumping off a building, at which point he received a note from a Christian friend who said God sent him with the message. Result = he became a Christian. There was another guy who almost drowned and prayed for God to save him, he was rescued and immediately someone gave him a Koran. Result = he became a Muslim. Really how intelligent is this? The fact is that miracles occur in all religions. Miracles don’t prove any religion to be true. Your personal miracle does not prove your religion to be true.

5. Turning an ambiguous event into a clear miracle

I have personally committed this error. Whenever I was in trouble and prayed, and the problem got sorted out, I would attribute it to God’s intervention (so far it’s okay). Surely I had to give “testimony” to praise God and encourage others. When I did, I tended to report only the nice parts i.e. I would relate a one-track story leading to final victory. The reality was that the story contained other parts which would cause doubt if reported. I didn’t report those because they were “not part of the main story”. I believe other people do this as well. As a result, when a group of believers come together and share, each person comes with doubts but leaves them at the door. They report the nice bits only. In the end, each person’s faith is strengthened. This is called mutual delusion.

Yes, this occurs in all religions so this point cannot be used to explain why I no longer believe in Christianity. But it can be used to show why religion/faith as a whole is overrated including Christianity.

6. Making an unfair comparison on morals

This bias is committed on two counts. In the first case, those who are leading the spiritual pack i.e. people who lead relatively righteous lives tend to regard themselves as the norm for their religion/faith and compare their moral standard with the average moral standard of the general population from other religions. This is obviously an unfair comparison but I have seen a lot of Christians doing it including myself. They are always asking fellow believers to reach out to the “lost”, citing the latter’s poorer quality of life due to lesser moral values and attributing it to their “wrong” faith.

In the second case, the unfair comparison is carried out by disqualifying the poorer samples from one’s religion to be regarded as true believers. For example, from some Muslims’ point of view, Muslim terrorists are not true Muslims and therefore their behaviour should not be counted as “Muslims behaviour”. The problem is the same rule is not applied to Christians and others. Christian terrorists (the Crusaders, for example) were also not Christians (the Bible did not teach them to do what they did) but this point is not granted. On the other hand, Christians claim that Christian terrorists are not Christians while Muslim terrorists are still Muslims.

With all these unfair and biased comparisons, we can easily win the competition and fool ourselves that our faith is superior.

7. Abstaining from making an obvious conclusion based on a fair comparison on morals

However, many people do realize and admit (no choice!) that they don’t win on morals. I have seen this among Christians and Muslims. They praise the non-believers for having great moral values and qualities and lament the fact that their own people lack these. But they miss the obvious conclusion i.e. there is no superiority in their religion/faith because it has failed to produce superior human beings.

Instead of facing up to the truth, they now claim that we should look at the teachings instead of the believers! This is ridiculous. If their teachings are the best, and their God is the most powerful one, why can’t their believers perform better in morals? Remember that people with the wrong God, the wrong scriptures, the wrong prophets etc. are already performing at a given level. If you have the right God, the right scriptures and the right prophets, why can’t you outperform the rest? Besides, people from other religions also make the same claims, that their teachings are better even though they may not win in terms of morals. To take a worldly example, if a company can’t produce better products, can it claim to have the best philosophy and principles? While the claim is “possible”, won’t you summarily conclude that it is just no better despite the claims?

After having been in Kelab Pidato Perdana for so many years, I have observed the behaviour and moral values of the members. I found that they are equally good and upright compared to members of my former Christian groups. Yes, there are psychos there too, but so do those other groups. Logically, I cannot accept that their religion is inferior as I had initially thought. However, if they try to push it to me that their religion is superior, well, they will have to prove it in the same way i.e. via superior morals.

The way I see it, all religions and belief systems have their own methods to produce good and upright humans. Compared to nothing at all, this is clearly a good thing. But they simply don’t win against each other.

8. The myth of enlightenment

In the past, I had tried very hard to persuade my family members and friends to “accept Christ”. When they did not, I prayed to God for their enlightenment.

The myth of enlightenment offers us a convenient way to dismiss the fact that someone doesn’t accept our beliefs. “There is nothing wrong with the beliefs. It is just unfortunate that he or she hasn’t been granted enlightenment by God.” Several religions have this concept of enlightenment. Granted, facts are not enough and one needs to “see”. However, it is more likely that our conclusions aren’t as obvious as we think they are.

A variation of the myth of enlightenment is the myth of “sufficient learning”. If I don’t believe in a certain religion, people from that religion will say it is because I have not learned enough about their religion. No matter how much I have actually learned, I still haven’t learned enough as long as I still don’t believe. However, if I already believe, they don’t care if I actually know very little.

Basically, what I am saying is that in all such cases, we should just accept that we don’t have enough points to prove our theory instead of saying people don’t have enlightenment or haven’t learned enough. In other words, our beliefs are not as great as we think they are.

9. Conceit

Now we’ve finally arrived at the fountain of all stupidity i.e. conceit. Humans are conceited in that individuals are not “surprised” they are chosen for good things over other individuals. They can believe it. For example, many people actually believed it when told that they had won prizes (scams), etc. The same happens in religion. You can actually believe that long before the world existed, God chose you to be saved (to believe in the one true faith). Not someone else. Not the majority of humans. You and a few elects. The fact that you can believe it, is proof of your conceit. You may protest that the selection was not based on your own merit but solely by God’s grace, hence there is no place for conceit. However, this only makes the conceit even worse!! God chose you for no reason!! You and not someone else.

A variation of this concerns miracles. I have heard very conceited testimonies from people who think God moved the world for them. One businessman was about to go bankrupt after oil prices rose, he prayed and oil prices went down 3 days later. This fool actually believed it was done for him. Despite the fact that if oil prices rose, some would benefit and other would lose, and vice versa if oil prices slumped. Many of these affected people would be Christians too who also depended on their God for their well-being. So if oil prices rose, some would praise God. If oil prices slumped, others would praise God. It is pure conceit that people actually think such manoeuvres were carried out for their sake and proved their religion to be true.

Welcome to the greatest paradox of humankind! Imagine this scene. Someone on his knees before God, feeling so humble, God chose him to saved, for no reason at all, luckily God did, so so so lucky for him ehh (his neighbour was not chosen), so with his tears running down his cheeks, he thanks God for choosing him after all. Now this is a huge paradox! Because at exactly the point of humankind’s deepest humility, we also discover his highest conceit.

I am not proud to say I had been there too.

To end this article, let me clarify that I do not dismiss your spiritual experiences. Not at all. It is likely that they are all true and genuine. I am only questioning the interpretation. Humans can have true spiritual experiences even if they don’t interpret them correctly. Or rather, we can say that all faiths/religions are correct in the sense that they have captured a part of the spiritual journey of humankind. Unfortunately, some religions more than others added dogmatic points to the story and claim that those who don’t believe are damned. This weakness, I trust, will be overcome as humans progress further on their spiritual journey. In short, there is no need to be dogmatic. It is better to be open and learn from one another. The world will be a better place.

So, please get out there and get to know people different from you. View them as equals and not merely people to be “reached out to”. You will find that you cannot maintain your prejudices indefinitely. This is the cure for all of humanity. Most people who think they are right while others are wrong (in terms of religion/faith) do not have many friends from other religions/faiths. That is how they maintain their bigotry in their own rabbit hole.

Thank you for paying attention.

Yours Sincerely,

Sandy Tan