Why I am not a Christian, aparecida version

[aparecida]

(This is a public clone of my friendslocked post, for lostcosmonaut's linking purposes.)

Because I don't find the Bertrand Russell argument for atheism persuasive, nor any logic that objects to Christians rather than Christianity. As usual I don't mean this as an attack on anyone and I don't intend to offend. Just working out my own thoughts in my own journal. If you yourself feel that God exists, I'm happy for you and in certain ways envious. It must be comforting.

1. I can't feel the existence of God, or indeed of any divine being. It appears that some people do. I don't. I've wanted to, at various times, but I haven't. I've prayed, and I felt like I was talking to the wall. This is the big one. I'd probably find a way to make peace with all of the other stuff, or at least get interested in some other religion. But I don't feel the presence of any sort of deity, spirituality, life force, or destiny.
   
2. Most of the tenets of Christianity (and all religions) feel like things that people would come up with because they find the alternative to be intolerable. Death is unfathomable, so hey, wouldn't it be great if everyone lived forever Somewhere Else? Where things came from is unfathomable, so it must be true that a Creator made things, because I can make sense of that. The idea of life and death being random is intolerable, so I find it comforting to think that everything happens for a reason and according to a plan. Great, but wanting to believe something doesn't make it true. As they say, if wishes were horses....
   
3. A lot of Christians say that if there's no God, you have no moral absolutes and hence no reason not to go around being totally selfish and killing people if you can get away with it. If you ask me, though, "because God says so" seems like a simplistic and one-dimensional basis for any moral system. If your entire moral and ethical system is grounded upon the axiom that "God told me not to," that seems awfully empty to me. Surely we can formulate a more meaningful reason to behave well toward our fellow human beings than the admonishments of an invisible supreme authority figure? I find the internal-critique method, attempting to formulate an ethical system that does not depend upon an axiomatic external God-figure, a fascinating, complex and meaningful challenge.
   
4. I believe that particular gender roles are essential to Christianity: "Wives, obey your husbands; husbands, love your wives." Though I don't believe that this implies that women are inferior, it does imply that your sex assigns you to a different, albeit equal in importance, role. I can't buy that. I cannot bring myself to believe that we are all "meant" for monogamous, heterosexual lifelong marriages in which the husband is the strong, loving and protective head of the household and the wife is the caring helpmate. I don't want that. I'm sure it's a model that works for some people, but I can't universalize it.
   
5. If faith is meant to be freely chosen, why does almost everyone "freely choose" exactly the same faith as their parents? You could say that God chooses you ahead of time to be a Presbyterian so he makes you be born to Presbyterian parents, but that seems incompatible with freely choosing.
   
6. Most of the meaning Christians attribute to things seem, with my background in social and cognitive psychology, like after-the-fact rationalizations, attempts to give meaning to the randomness of life. Pray for money and get it? God must've given it to you because you prayed for it. Pray for money and don't get it? God must not have wanted you to have it. Parents still alive? God's blessing you and them with long life. Parents die? Must've been God's time for them to go. If you're healthy, God's keeping you that way; if you're sick, He's sending you a trial. Last week I was looking for a sofa. Just when I was frustrated, I found one that I liked. If I were my mother, I would have said God sent it to me. She believes God sends me my good grades, too. Um. Yeah.
   
7. If God's blessing you with something, doesn't that mean he's choosing not to bless other people with it? If I'm middle class by the blessing of God, why isn't God blessing that poor family the same way? Is my faith stronger? Or is it God working in mysterious ways? Seems like God's motives are termed plenty transparent when they make sense to people and mysterious when they don't. In any case, I cannot come up with a single argument based upon the born-again Protestant model (which is the only one with which I'm familiar) for the existence of the class system that doesn't somehow imply that the poor are meant to be poor. (n.b. As I've stated before in this journal in the context of defending the South, I absolutely believe that great social good has been brought about based upon Christian belief. But that's so far from any of the current models of Christianity with which I'm familiar that I find it almost unimaginable.)
   
8. I strongly object to the negative attitude toward sensual pleasure that pervades Christianity, Buddhism, and most of Western thought dating to the Enlightenment and beyond it the ancient Greeks. The creation of a dichotomy between mind and body, valuing the mind and consequently devaluing the body, seems artificial and unhealthy to me. I derive tremendous joy from my embodiment, sufficient to be well worth the price of such suffering as the body and sensual pleasure does cause me. I feel we ignore our embodiment at our peril.