Nathan The Skeptic

If you haven’t read my previous series of blogs, I strongly recommend going back and starting at the beginning and working your way through to this one. That will give you a good idea of why I am now such an advocate for science and skepticism.

For those of you who haven’t been following along, I used to hold some really terrible ideas. Ideas that I had no justification to hold other than the fact that I was simply trying to force my worldview to fit reality. My belief that the world was six thousand (or so) years old required me to deny the nearly 97% scientific consensus on the theory of evolution by natural selection. This caused me to distrust the scientific community—except when the science seemed to confirm what I already believed—and inevitably led me to believe in a whole swarm of conspiracy theories and pseudosciences.

I’m not going to sit here and claim that now that I’m an atheist, I have ‘found the truth.’ By saying that I’m an atheist, I’m not making the claim that there are no gods and that this is purely a materialistic universe. I’m simply stating that I do not see evidence for any gods or anything supernatural. That could very well change tomorrow, and I would change my mind. After all, if you’ve read my blogs, you’d see that I made every excuse in the book to hang onto my faith. In the end, I just had to be honest with myself.

I remember, as a Christian, thinking that atheism was the belief that no gods exist. I remember thinking it was just another faith-based belief system, trading one faith for another — which, ironically, is a sweeping admission that faith isn’t such a noble thing. I’d make statements like ‘even the atheist is using faith because they can’t prove that God doesn’t exist!’ That seems to be one of the fundamental issues with those who don’t understand how science works.

Science

“Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.” —Carl Sagan

When engaging with science deniers, I’m often met with the criticism that scientists are arrogant. Which is hilarious to me because there’s no discipline that fosters humility more than science. Without people who are willing to admit their ignorance, there would be no science. If we already knew the answer, as the religious so often claim, what would be the point of seeking it? So, who is arrogant, again?

Continue reading “Why Science and Skepticism?”

Depression (and anxiety) is something that I’ve dealt with, at some level, for most of my life. I don’t think my story is particularly unique. I was the quiet kid. I was the daydreamer. The socially awkward kid—the weird kid. Right? Naturally, I had a difficult time making friends. Which led to a pretty lonely childhood.

Not to get too deep into that, I bring that up to say, when I lost my faith and started to question the meaning of existence, depression was nothing new to me.

“Hello darkness, my old friend.”

When I was a fundamentalist Christian, I remember talking about life without God being meaningless. “What’s the point if it’s all just going to end someday?” Even now as an atheist, it can be a difficult question to deal with.

When my theology began to shift toward a more progressive perspective, after I had convinced myself that a belief in hell was a ridiculous notion, I began to wonder about heaven, as well. “Isn’t heaven an equally ridiculous notion as hell?” I started thinking about the point of this world if there was a perfect world that is waiting for us when we pass. Fundamentalist beliefs say that the reason we have sin in the world is because of the Fall—when Adam and Eve ate from The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Right? The skeptical objection, and the question I was asking at the time, was, “why create a forbidden tree to begin with?” Free will, right? God had to allow a choice. Right? We could choose to follow him, or we could choose to seek knowledge and be “like gods”. Right? For a long time, this made perfect sense to me. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered, “Is there free will in heaven?” Of course there’s free will in heaven, how else did Lucifer rebel against God?

That got me thinking, if there’s free will in heaven that means we can still choose to rebel after we get there, right? So what’s the point of this world? God could’ve just created us in heaven and avoided this world all together. The excuse I used to give was, “then we wouldn’t need faith”. But what difference does that make? Lucifer didn’t need faith! He actually made a genuine choice as he knew God existed and still rejected him! Why do we need faith? And by the way, how ironic is it that an alleged “omnipotent” god needs something to accomplish his plan? The answer was becoming more and more clear to me then, and it is obvious to me now.

I’m reminded of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the Tin Man, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy were standing in front of The Great and Powerful Oz, and Toto pulls back the curtain and exposes the man behind the curtain. It’s so obvious to me now that it’s hard not to feel ashamed for ever having believed it.

Continue reading “Motivation After Faith”

My fear was disappointing everyone I knew and potentially losing family and friends over it. All because I could no longer believe, or rather, no longer pretend to believe.

Admitting to myself that I was an atheist gave me mixed feelings, at first. I was both excited and afraid. I wanted to tell everyone about the problems with religion and why they should abandon it, but at the same time I didn’t. Looking back, I think the fear is what took me so long to finally admit it. Although there was a period of time that I was a deeply devoted believer, if I’m completely honest, I was probably an atheist for much longer than I could admit.

While I had long stopped believing in hell prior to deconversion, I did still have a minuscule amount of fear that maybe I was wrong—or maybe that I missed some important information that might have prevented me from losing my faith and I could potentially be going to hell when I die—that wasn’t where the majority of my fear came from. It definitely played a part, but it certainly wasn’t the biggest contributor.

My fear wasn’t so much that I was wrong, because the way I saw it, if a God wanted required me to believe in him so that I could avoid eternal punishment, he would give me better reasons than the ones that I had seen up to that point (even just A reason). And if he didn’t, well, that’s not a god that I would worship anyway. On top of that, not only did I need to worry about the particular brand of Christianity I was following, there were also hundreds, if not thousands, of other gods and religions, and I might be going to hell in more religion than just one! No, my fear wasn’t being wrong, my fear was telling my wife that I no longer believed. My fear was explaining to our children why I no longer believed what they believed. My fear was disappointing everyone I knew and potentially losing family and friends over it. All because I could no longer believe, or rather, no longer pretend to believe.

Luckily, I lost very few people in my life, as I’ll talk about in a bit.

As I said in my previous post (that you can read here), when I was deconstructing my faith, I had an online community of people that I was able to talk to about my experience. In fact, I was so comfortable sharing my new views with that particular group of people, when I came out them as an atheist I would talk about it all the time. So much that I felt like I had worn out my welcome—as most of them were still very much believers—and I eventually left. Thankfully, there were a few that were in a similar place in their journey as me, and we continued to support each other through private groups and messages.

Eventually, I found other online communities that were specifically made for people that had left their faith. There, I met many awesome people that relate to what I was going through, and what I’m still going through. Some that may even be reading this right now.

If that’s you, just know that you are appreciated!

I’ve read enough about human behavior and psychology to know that community very is important to human beings. Even for someone like me that doesn’t require a lot of social interaction.

Continue reading “You’re Not Alone”

In my last blog, I wrote a little about my journey as a Christian fundamentalist, how my persistence to force my “infallible” worldview to fit reality inevitably led me down a conspiracy rabbit hole of fallen angels, and their attempt to deceive the world into worshipping Satan. I talked about the various conspiracy theories that followed, one leading to another. That is, until I ran into the flat earth conspiracy and began to have serious doubts about the path I was going down. Looking back on it all now, seeing these conspiracy theories for what they were probably should have been enough to turn me atheist. But my belief that a creator, or some sort of god, was necessary, prevented me from even entertaining the idea that there, not only might not be a need for a god, but the very real possibility that none exist at all. So, I continued to look for confirmation of my bias. Which led me to some very pseudoscientific interpretations of Quantum Physics.

Thankfully, that was short lived.

As I got deeper and deeper into the New Age philosophy and saw the claims that proponents like, Deepak Chopra, were making, such as “Quantum Healing”, I began to very seriously doubt their claims, as well.

As I said in the previous post, 2014 was a big year for me. I told myself for the first time that I was going to put truth above everything else. If the Bible was true, if gods exist, if there is any legitimate reason to accept these supernatural claims, they would survive all scrutiny. In that year, the second installment of the original Cosmos series, previously hosted by one of my favorite science communicators and skeptic, the late, great, Carl Sagan, was now being hosted by another one of my favorite science communicators and skeptic, Neil deGrasse Tyson. If you haven’t watched, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, I strongly urge you to check it out. It was absolutely mind blowing at the time. Rent it, buy it, do what you have to do, but watch it! It’s totally worth your time.

(The third installment, Cosmos: Possible Worlds, is currently in production and I cannot wait! Here’s the trailer!)

In that same year, Ken Ham and Bill Nye had their creation vs evolution debate. Bill Nye wiped the floor with Ken Ham (in one of my most sincerest of opinions), as the only real answer that he could give was literally, “Well, I have a book…” (If you haven’t watched that you can watch in its entirety here).

While I was already having my doubts about my beliefs and was already on the fence, the Bill Nye and Ken Ham debate, paired with the truly eye opening Cosmos series, were probably what I would credit to be, the final nails in the coffin of my Christian fundamentalist beliefs.

Continue reading “Progressive Christianity Didn’t Lead Me to Atheism, It Was the Last Straw”

“When human beings began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of humans were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, “My Spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal; their days will be a hundred and twenty years.”

The Nephilim were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” The LORD regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So the LORD said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created–and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground–for I regret that I have made them.”

Genesis 6:1-7

In my previous post, that you can read here, I talked a little bit about my first run-in with the Bible (after becoming a Christian at 28), how I had accepted the Bible as true before even reading it and actually taking the time to examine its claims, and how I was confronted with many things that I considered to be disgusting and immoral. I talked about how I tried to justify many things, such as slavery and genocide. I talked about using apologetics websites, like gotquestions.org, for simple answers to these deeply troubling questions. And I talked about how those simple answers, over time, weren’t sufficiently satisfying, and drove me to look to other sources. Which led to me the Book of Enoch…and eventually led me down a rabbit hole of wild YouTube conspiracy theories and various forms of pseudoscience that I will be discussing in this blog today.

Much like when I initially started buying into Christianity, I didn’t actually read (much) of the source material of the various conspiracy theories and pseudosciences. I only really listened to what other people were saying about these various concepts. To this day I don’t think I’ve read more than a few passages in The Book of Enoch. Honestly, I’ll probably end up reading more writing and researching things for this blog than I did when I bought into it.

Continue reading “A Hint of Skepticism: Part 2”

I was baptized for the first time on June 17, 2012. By my father in law (that I had asked if he would do the honor and he accepted), in front of my wife, two of my four children (the other two weren’t born yet), my wife’s side of the family, my mom and dad, and a full congregation of people cheering as I was pulled up out of the water and declared an adopted child of God.

It was a special moment in my life. One that I don’t think I’ll ever forget (I plan to write about the contrast between becoming a Christian, and losing my faith in a future blog, so look forward to that).

Most ex-Christians, that I’ve talked to, tell me about how they were raised up in a Christian home, and had it not been for their indoctrination they probably wouldn’t have ever been religious. Others say that, while they were raised in a religious home, they never really bought into the crap, they just kind of faked it until they were old enough to move out on their own and be who they truly were.

These two scenarios are very different from my experience. I was 28 years old and didn’t grow up religious. If you missed my first three blog posts you can read more about my experience here.

I didn’t actually start reading the Bible (from the beginning to end) until after I was already a baptized Christian. I suspect it’s a fairly common theme for the majority of religious people, especially among those that (I assume) were raised in it, not to read their holy scriptures until after they already accepted them as true. Today, I wonder how many people would become a Christian, at or beyond the age of reason, if they read the Bible before they accepted Jesus into their heart. My guess is, not many.

Continue reading “A Hint of Skepticism: Part 1”

Not growing up religious meant, like for so many of my religious friends and family, that scientific knowledge wasn’t replaced with creation myths and stories such as Noah’s Ark.

I was taught to believe in evolution. Both in school and, indirectly, by my parents.

I remember when I was, probably, a sophomore in high school, my mom came home from work and was telling me about her boss at the time that was a young earth creationist—she, too, accepted the theory of evolution as a fact. I don’t remember the specific details of the conversation that my mom and I had, but I do remember bringing up the idea that maybe the Bible wasn’t supposed to be read literally. Maybe, I said, 6 days was actually a metaphor. Or possibly, because God was allegedly outside of space and time, 6 days may have been equivalent to millions of years. Implying that the Bible (or a story equivalent to biblical creation) and evolution weren’t mutually exclusive.

Of course, now I know that evolution by natural selection is pretty incompatible with the concept of a creator, but back then I saw no reason to doubt that a god couldn’t have been behind it all, guiding the whole process.

As the years progressed, I thought very little of a possible contradiction between the concept of a god and the theory of evolution by natural selection. I was still very much interested in the big questions of life, but evolution was something I never really saw a reason to doubt. Nor did I find any reason to doubt the existence of a creator. In my mind, both were perfectly compatible. Evolution was simply a fundamental part of creation and the diversity of life on earth. And god was what got the ball rolling (and possibly kept it going).

Around my junior year of high school or so, I started getting more and more into drugs and alcohol. By my senior year I wasn’t just smoking pot heavily, but I also got heavily into using and selling methamphetamines, cocaine, among other things I could get my hands on. My life was beginning to spiral down pretty quick.

Despite my party habits, I graduated high school, and I even went to a community college with an art scholarship. Unfortunately that was short lived as I dropped out after only a semester and a half, and literally sold by books for dope.

After a few years of working at a local factory, I decided I needed to move away from the life I was living. About a year after I moved to my current city, got a new job, and a place with my cousin, I met my future (current) wife.

And that’s when I (almost completely) stopped doing drugs and started going to church.

At first I was very cynical. My views about organized religion had evolved over time. I had heard stories of mega church leaders and all the money they had accumulated. It took a long time for them to break down my walls.

But eventually, they did.

I would say that I wasn’t reasoned into Christianity, but I don’t know if I can honestly say I wasn’t. Whether or not it was good reasoning is beside the point. I think a lot of it was emotional, but a lot of what the pastor preached made sense to me at the time—before I actually read what was really in the Bible. From my perspective, I had fallen prey to a sinful world, and I needed forgiveness for the things that I had done. It took some time, but I eventually bought in fully. And I went in deep, with both feet.

I have never been a social person, so the community aspect was never really a big part of my faith. Outside of just feeling like I belonged to something, my faith really relied on it making sense. And that’s probably why I am where I am now. But like I said, at the time it did make sense—at least, I was pretty good about finding ways for it to continue making sense.

Our church definitely had a fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. Very literal in terms of creation, the Exodus, prophecy, the miracles, as well as negative views on LGBT rights and abortion. But most of these things didn’t seem to correlate with what I knew about how the world worked. Evolution by natural selection certainly didn’t line up with what our church believed.

About 2-3 years of going to this church and learning about their beliefs, they brought in a speaker from the Creation Museum. Which, of course, is associated with the infamous Ken Ham, co-founder of Answers in Genesis. It really challenged my—subpar—knowledge, and I would even go so far as to say, my indoctrination of the theory of evolution.

Looking back now, I know that these folks weren’t using good arguments, they were simply taking advantage of a bunch of people that either didn’t understand what the theory actually was or lacked the critical thinking skills required to sniff out the fallacious crap they were spewing (or both). For me personally, it was definitely a combination of the two. I just blindly accepted evolution because that’s what I was told was true in school (another reason I think public education should emphasize critical thinking skills). I believed evolution was true, but I didn’t understand why it was true. I will make a separate post about what I now know to be the flawed arguments that creationist proponents make in the near future, but at this point in my life, I had never heard refutations to the theory like this speaker was (seemed to be) making. And I bit hard on the bait—a mistake that, if I had had a better education, I may have never made.

This new view of the world was one that grew into a deep cynicism for scientific knowledge and the leaders of our world. Why were they lying? Why would millions of people all be in on a grand conspiracy to push evolutionary theory? What else were they lying about? How far down did this rabbit hole go?

I was about to find out. And so are you.

Stay tuned!

I’ve always been a bit of a thinker, but as I stated in my previous post, I’ve never really been much of a critical thinker.

In high school, I remember often going to my buddies after school got out, smoking a few bowls and then wildly speculating about the nature of reality. Those were some of my most prized conversations. I still love to have those sorts of conversations today in my mid-30s. Although now I feel like I’m much more tethered to reality, and I at least have a basic understanding of the concepts that already exist and have been debated by people much smarter than I, for centuries.

I don’t, specifically, remember much about the conversations that my friends and I had, more than likely because I was stoned out of my mind, but also because it was close to 20 years ago. However, I do remember thinking that a conscious and intelligent mind must have been behind the creation of the universe. I just couldn’t conceive of a way that the universe could have just come into existence by chance, with no intention at all behind it.

Now, I’m still not very well read in philosophy, but this was years before I had heard of any ideas such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, or any formal argument for the existence of god/gods, whatsoever. Since I had never heard any of these arguments, I had damn sure never heard any of the criticisms to these arguments – which very well might have helped me avoid a lot of faulty thinking later in life. This, however, was pre-internet – at least the internet wasn’t as widely available as it is today – and I wasn’t much of a book reader at that point in my life, so the chances of me actually hearing these arguments were pretty slim.

All this mostly uninformed and wild speculation led me to ideas that were very similar to what I now know to be pantheism, or perhaps, panentheism. Which is the type of thinking that opened my mind to the possibility of a god, or gods, later in my adult life.

Now, I’m not exactly sure when the very first thought of the Christian God first entered my mind. As I mentioned in my previous post, I wasn’t raised religious. I went to Sunday school a few times with my neighbors as a kid, and I remember going to a Methodist church with my grandma a time or two, but I don’t really recall hearing a whole lot about god or Jesus during either. Sunday school was mostly just coloring pictures of biblical characters, playing games, drinking juice and eating cookies, and I honestly don’t remember much about my grandma’s church – I was really young. Other than that I never really thought too much about god or theological ideas as a child. It just wasn’t a big part of my life. Indoctrination wasn’t something I really had to deal with. It is possible that the concept of Jesus or the Christian God stuck with me in some ways, I just really cannot honestly say for sure.

What I can say for sure is, at least in my teen years, that I was very much interested, and still am to this day, in the concept of a God – at least some crazy explanation for how the cosmos came into being that we currently do not have.

The difference between who I was 20 years ago and who I am today, has a lot to do with what I will be discussing in the next week or so. How I went from, more or less, a deist, to a Christian fundamentalist. After that, my plan is to move on to talk about my trip down the YouTube conspiracy theory rabbit hole, how I escaped that, and slowly shifted toward a more liberal interpretation of the Bible, and eventually losing my faith altogether. Then, my plan is to shift focus to what I created this blog for in the first place; science and skepticism.

Stay tuned.

In my first (short) post, for those of you that don’t know me, I just want to take the time to tell you a little bit about myself.

My name is Nathan, aka NathanTheSkeptic, but I haven’t always been a skeptic.

I consistently hear other ex-Christians talk about having to overcome their indoctrination from youth and how that had a detrimental effect on their thinking, but I didn’t really have that experience. I think I had something just as detrimental to my thinking, but it wasn’t due to indoctrination – at least not religious indoctrination. While I didn’t grow up particularly religious – culturally Christian at best – critical thinking skills weren’t exactly promoted in my family.

I don’t recall a lot of credulity growing up, but certainly as I grew older and moved out of my parents home, it became pretty clear why I so easily bought into Christian ideology.

I love my parents, but they didn’t exactly teach me critical thinking skills. I am grateful for the things they did teach me, such as respect, kindness, love, work ethic, and things of that nature, but when it came to thinking about things critically, challenging ideas, making informed decisions based on logic and reason, it just wasn’t encouraged that much. And, unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that seems to be fairly common amongst a large portion of the population (especially as I update this blog after 2020).

I’m very much an advocate for public education, I wouldn’t even be as educated as I am now – very minimally – if it weren’t for public education, but, I’m afraid it, too, failed to promote critical thought adequately. While, there certainly are exceptions, and I do think this is being addressed in some regard, it seems there is little emphasis on teaching children how to think, rather than what to think. The systems that have been used in the past, and to a large degree, are still being used today, are failing us – they certainly failed me.

So how did I become such an advocate for science and skepticism? Well, that’s a long story that I’m quite sure I will write about it extensively over the course of my future blogging experience. The long and short of it is, after going down a very deep and dark path of pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, very fringe views of Christianity, and years of trying to justify all these ridiculous ideas, I finally got honest with myself and admitted I really didn’t have good reasons to believe these things anymore.

In the coming weeks I would like to focus on some of the things I used to believe, why I believed them, and why I no longer believe those them to be true. After that, I will get into my new found love for science and skepticism, what these things are about, why I believe they’re are so very critical (pun intended), and why I think you should join me on the road to a more rational world.

Thanks.