How I Got Religion, And Then Lost It
The Rest of the Story, According to Evangelicals
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
In due course, I learned I had to believe a lot of unconventional ideas if I wanted to go to heaven.
It was explained to me that "the world" had always, in general, rebelled against God's teachings. The righteous - those who chose to obey God - were always only a few. They were always called upon to be in some way different from most people.
The righteous always had to believe things that most people disbelieved, because holy men had said that these things were so. They had to avoid certain behaviors that most people thought innocuous, because God had prohibited those behaviors - and righteous people did not need to know why. They had to do certain things most people thought wasteful of time and resources, because God had said it pleased him when people did these things.
It was explained to me - not explicitly, but by clear implication - that righteous people knew these things to be true because they were written in the Bible, and righteous people believed everything in the Bible, because it was God's word. How do we know that? It says so, right there in The Book.
Even without any formal instruction in logic, I intuitively understood the invalidity of circular arguments. But I did not, and for many years would not, trouble myself about the fallacy of this thinking. I needed, for emotional reasons, to believe the conclusion, and so I believed it. Besides, the truth of scripture seemed, at that time, in a certain way to be self-evident. The Creator must have had a reason for the creation, and he would need some way of letting us know what the reason was. Why not put it in a book?
Then, too, there were the gospels and the Book of Acts, and I was not yet aware that anyone questioned their historical accuracy. I understood them to have been written by witnesses to the events they reported, or at least by people who had known the witnesses.
I could understand skepticism about Genesis. It was written long after the events it reported. The entire Old Testament might have been legend, for all I could know. But the New Testament was different. I understood it to be the testimony of men who had known Jesus. Jesus said he was the Son of God, and he did miracles to prove it. He vouched for the Old Testament. And so, as far as I was concerned, the scriptural assertion that "All scripture is inspired" was not actually an argument as such. It was not supposed to prove the Bible was inerrant, but was intended only to remind Christians that it was inerrant.
-->
