eChurch Blog

Should personal experience of natural evil such as a catastrophic earthquake turn folk away from belief in an all-powerful benevolent God? This fascinating study indicates exactly the opposite:

Abstract

On 22 February 2011, Christchurch New Zealand (population 367,700) experienced a devastating earthquake, causing extensive damage and killing one hundred and eighty-five people. The earthquake and aftershocks occurred between the 2009 and 2011 waves of a longitudinal probability sample conducted in New Zealand, enabling us to examine how a natural disaster of this magnitude affected deeply held commitments and global ratings of personal health, depending on earthquake exposure. We first investigated whether the earthquake-affected were more likely to believe in God. Consistent with the Religious Comfort Hypothesis, religious faith increased among the earthquake-affected, despite an overall decline in religious faith elsewhere. This result offers the first population-level demonstration that secular people turn to religion at times of natural crisis. We then examined whether religious affiliation was associated with differences in subjective ratings of personal health. We found no evidence for superior buffering from having religious faith. Among those affected by the earthquake, however, a loss of faith was associated with significant subjective health declines. Those who lost faith elsewhere in the country did not experience similar health declines. Our findings suggest that religious conversion after a natural disaster is unlikely to improve subjective well-being, yet upholding faith might be an important step on the road to recovery.

The entire report is worth reading; however, if you would prefer a more concise synopsis then I recommend reading Connor Wood over on Patheos (Science on Religion) entitled simply: Does suffering drive us to religion? Yep.

A German neurologist claims to have identified a specific brain configuration within which he says ‘evil lurks”. Measuring brain waves on violent criminals whilst watching ‘brutal scenes’ revealed a “dark patch” in their frontal brain. This area believed to be responsible for compassion and sorrow, showed no activity.

Dr Roth’s research has led him to believe “that some criminals have a ‘genetic predisposition’ to violence.”

This strikes me as rather deterministic which seems to be the trend of modern neurology and Dr Roth cites a 66% probability of an adolescent with this brain anomaly going on to become a felon.

But then Dr Roth makes this observation:

Dr Roth believes that criminal mental decline “begins in the kindergarten”, but a positive parental environment and strong societal support can easily stop the child going on to offend.

Equally, a negative domestic situation could easily lead to a child otherwise moderately pre-disposed to violence, to become a hardened criminal.

This almost seems to contradict the earlier determinism.

Last year I spoke with a clinical psychologist on the subject of psychopathy and the observation that stood out most starkly for me was from her experience of psychopaths, the vast majority had experienced a childhood of extreme brutality and neglect.

With the growing understanding of Neuroplasticity or ‘Brain Plasticity’ within which physical brain changes in neural pathways and synapses can occur as a result of environment and behaviour changes, can we write anyone off as simply ‘genetic predisposed’ to violence?

As an relevant example of Neuroplasticity I read recently of soldiers suffering PTSD as a result of combat had evidence of neurological brain changes.

As with everything pertaining to the nature / nurture debate I suspect that physical brain abnormalities of ‘dark patches where evil lurks’ are as much a product of the environment as anything else. And it would seem that Dr Roth also holds that view with his comments on ‘positive parental environment and strong societal support’.

I assume that Dr Roth here is advocating an environmental buffer against genetic predisposition.

I don’t believe that any single person is beyond the pale of God’s grace. To accept that they are, is in some way, for me, to denigrate God, or undermine his salvific power.

There may of course be those so given to their evil inclinations they would reject the grace and light of God. But I would not view this as deterministic, but of self-will.

The question I would dearly love to have answered: Are there Neuroplastic changes when a person accepts faith in God? As this process may involve complete reversal in thinking and behaviour (and possibly environment), especially for the adult convert, could this precipitate positive neurological changes?

Just wondering……

UPDATE: Thinking on it would be interesting to compare the recidivism rates between criminal Christian converts and others. If the recidivism rate is reduced in violent criminal converts, then could this potentially be evidence of neuroplasticity in action?

I don’t know of any research of this type, but would be very interesting….

I just stumbled on a post entitled: Crooked Healing: Disability, Vocation and the Theology of the Cross.

Written by Kelby Carlson, himself a disabled chap, he looks at the ‘theology of disability’ through the prism of the Doctrine of Vocation and the Theology of the Cross.

This post is singularly excellent. Carlson clearly and harmoniously articulates so much of which has been ruminating around my own disjointed mind for some time.

I can’t encourage you enough to take the time to hop over and read.

Brilliant stuff…..

Hat-tip: First Things

Lesley over on Heretics Anonymous fears there are two Christian Churches divided by fundamental beliefs. Whilst Lesley highlights four beliefs, I want to focus on the following:

One Church views humans as ‘essentially fallen’ whilst the other as ‘essentially good’.

Lesley is entirely correct in this observation. I would posit this difference is a product of theology and that perhaps there is room in the one church for fundamentally different perspectives, but that is another matter.

I used to be in the ‘essentially fallen’ camp derived from a hyper-Calvinistic and somewhat pessimistic view of humanity, but now incorporating and taking on board Catholic teaching, view humans as ’essentially good’ as a by-product of being made in the image of God.

And it looks like some recent research supports this.

The best way to get under the bonnet of human hard-wiring is to conduct research on those of us with the minimum of cultural influences, and that of course is babies.

At this point I’d like to direct you to a blog post on this issue over on Mind Hacks, detailing a fascinating experiment which indicates babies not only infer motive, but have an in-built preference towards ‘good motives’.

I’m having trouble embedding the audio file here and as I have limited patience this morning I shall guide you to Peter’s blog to listen to a conversation that took place between Peter Ould and Steve Chalke, hosted by Justin Brierley at Christ Church Woking:

I’m still in the process of listening to this myself as we have a ‘snow day’; schools are shut and noise abounds.

Let me know your thoughts, or of course, comment on Peter’s blog.

Guest post by Edmund Standing:

Reading the Gospel of Matthew, and indeed the New Testament in general, it is all too easy to narrow one’s focus to the apocalypticism that (in various ways) can be seen to run throughout. Indeed, since the publication of Albert Schweitzer’s seminal work The Quest of the Historical Jesus, there has been a strong tendency among many scholars to arguably place an excessive and reductive emphasis on this element of the writings of the early Christians. I once advocated such a simplistic approach and through it felt justified ultimately in dismissing the New Testament and the message of Jesus. In time, I have come to reject this reductive approach and at some point may offer some thoughts on the issue of apocalypticism in the New Testament.

However, for now I would like to look at a very different aspect of the teachings of Jesus, in particular the remarkable extent to which the picture of Jesus in Matthew illustrates someone who deeply reiterated and expanded upon the Hebrew wisdom tradition. Reading Matthew in conjunction with the Book of Proverbs uncovers the extent of the centrality of wisdom teaching in the message of Jesus. This post is by no means an extensive study or a final word, but rather very much a work in progress and an attempt to begin to consider the significance of this phenomenon.

Wisdom is mentioned in a number of places in Matthew. We read that ‘wisdom is vindicated by her deeds’ (Matthew 11:19). In Matthew 12:42, Jesus states: ‘The queen of the South will rise up at the judgement with this generation and condemn it, because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon, and see, something greater than Solomon is here!’ And in Matthew 13:54-56, Jesus’ wisdom is remarked upon as follows:

He came to his home town and began to teach the people in their synagogue, so that they were astounded and said, ‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these deeds of power? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all this?’

The teaching which astounded those who encountered Jesus has strong parallels in the wisdom teachings of the Book of Proverbs, as can be seen in the following comparisons:

The straight and narrow road

In Matthew 7:13, Jesus teaches of two paths: ‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it’.

In Proverbs, the theme of walking on the path of righteousness appears time and again. We read of ‘the paths of justice’ (Proverbs 2:8), ‘those whose paths are crooked’ (2:15), ‘walk[ing] in the way of the good, and keep[ing] to the paths of the just’ (2:20), how God ‘will make straight your paths’ (3:6), of ‘the path of the wicked’ (4:14), of ‘keep[ing] straight the path of your feet’ and ‘not swerv[ing] to the right or to the left’ (4:26-27), of the ‘path of the righteous’ and the paths of righteousness and justice (4:18; 8:20), of how ‘the righteousness of the blameless keeps their ways straight’ (11:5), and so on.

The theme of the lamp

Jesus teaches his followers that they are ‘the light of the world’ and should be like a lamp that ‘gives light to all in the house’. ‘In the same way,’ he states, ‘let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 5:14-16) Jesus also teaches that:

‘The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!’ (Matthew 6:22-23)

Turning to Proverbs, we find clear parallels as we read that ‘the light of the righteous rejoices, but the lamp of the wicked goes out’ (Proverbs 13:9; 24:20) and that ‘haughty eyes and a proud heart – the lamp of the wicked – are sin’ (21:4).

On enemies

Jesus’ teachings on how we relate to enemies are radical and certainly go against the grain of how we tend to react to those who are hostile towards us. He challenges the authority of the notion that justice should be based on retribution in kind (‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’) and instead teaches: ‘If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also’ (Matthew 5:38-39). He continues:

‘You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’ (Matthew 5:43)

Again, while these teachings are radical, they are also firmly rooted in the Hebrew wisdom tradition:

Do not say, ‘I will repay evil’; wait for the Lord, and he will help you. (Proverbs 20:22)

Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble. (Proverbs 24:17)

Do not say, ‘I will do to others as they have done to me; I will pay them back for what they have done.’ (Proverbs 24:29)

If your enemies are hungry, give them bread to eat; and if they are thirsty, give them water to drink.(Proverbs 25:21)

On riches

Jesus warns against the accumulation of worldly riches, stating:

‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal.’ (Matthew 16:19-20)

And, again, he asks how it will profit anyone ‘if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life’ (Matthew 16:24-26).

There are precedents for this teaching in Proverbs, where it is stated that ‘riches do not profit in the day of wrath, but righteousness delivers from death’ (Proverbs 11:4) and that ‘those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves’ (11:28).

On the poor

Jesus teaches of the importance of kindness to those who are poor and who suffer, and identifies this as being central to our relationship with God:

Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:34-36)

Similarly, Proverbs emphasises the theme of helping the poor and of how this is tied in with our relationship with God, for ‘whoever is kind to the poor lends to the Lord, and will be repaid in full’ (Proverbs 17:17) and ‘those who are generous are blessed, for they share their bread with the poor’ (22:9).

Indeed, Proverbs is unambiguous on this issue, stating that ‘those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honour him’ (14:31) and also that ‘those who mock the poor insult their Maker’ (17:5). Further teachings on the poor include:

Whoever gives to the poor will lack nothing, but one who turns a blind eye will get many a curse. (28:27)

The righteous know the rights of the poor; the wicked have no such understanding. (29:7)

Speak out for those who cannot speak, for the rights of all the destitute. Speak out, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy. (31:8-9)

Jesus commands: ‘Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you’ (Matthew 5:42), and Proverbs warns: ‘Do not say to your neighbour, ‘Go, and come again; tomorrow I will give it’ – when you have it with you’ (Proverbs 3:28). ‘If you close your ear to the cry of the poor, you will cry out and not be heard’, warns Proverbs (21:13), and Jesus warns: ‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’ (Matthew 7:21)

The bread and the wine

In Matthew’s account of the Last Supper, we read of Jesus gathering his disciples together for a final Passover meal. He breaks a loaf of bread and commands them to eat from it, stating that the bread symbolises his body (which will be broken on the cross). He then passes round a cup of wine, stating that this wine symbolises his blood (which will pour out from his body during the Crucifixion) (Matthew 26:26-28). Even here, there are echoes of the wisdom tradition.

In Proverbs, two kinds of bread and wine are spoken of. Firstly, we read of the ‘wicked’, who ‘eat the bread of wickedness and drink the wine of violence’ (Proverbs 4:17). This is contrasted with the bread and wine of the Wisdom of God. Wisdom calls:

‘You that are simple, turn in here!’ To those without sense she says, ‘Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity, and live, and walk in the way of insight.’ (9:4-6)

Concluding thoughts

Comparing Matthew and Proverbs, then, we see the extent to which Jesus’ message stands in continuity with the Hebrew wisdom tradition. Jesus here is not the negation of what has come before, nor does he essentially teach anything that was not already present, but rather he re-states these commands with great force and with such authority that the people who hear him are amazed and, indeed, in many cases repulsed.

These radical teachings from the Hebrew tradition in many ways do invite a sense of revulsion in the reader. How tempting it is to say that this is too much, that the burden these teachings place upon us is too heavy to bear. But it is here that we recall that at the same time as these many demands are placed before us, we are also assured by Jesus:

‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ (Matthew 11:28-30)

So, then, we are here presented both with radical challenges and also the prospect of a God who at the same time brings rest. Perhaps Christianity has often placed too much emphasis on the rest and not enough on the action. Certainly, looking at Jesus’ teachings and those of Proverbs, there is no room for a casual response. The ‘religion’ expressed here is not one of passive ‘spirituality’ or merely one of sitting around waiting to be taken up to some fluffy heaven in the sky. It stands against all conceptions of religion as quietism and escapism and calls upon the reader to become fully immersed in the here and now.

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

Chelliah Laity - RIP Big Issue Sellers

The World of Mentalists - The #TwentalHealthAwards – The Winners

Believer’s Brain - Flat-Pack Furniture and the Body of Christ

Accepting Abundance - Unmoved Mover for Unmoved Doubters

The Alethiophile - A christian response to trolling, Part 1: Trolls and what Peter said - (Part 2)

The Not So Big Society - Generic Condemnation of This Thing That Person Said on Twitter

British Religion in Numbers - Attitudes to Muslims

The Ugley Vicar - The enormous value of being logically wrong

Thought catalog – Five emotions- invented by the internet

Back in July I explored the issue: Is Mindfulness based on Buddhist meditation compatible with Christianity? This produced some good discussion and interestingly is a post that continues to be fairly well read and so is obviously a question some Christians explore online.

In view of this, I requested permission from the ever excellent Mind and Soul website (Twitter) to cross-post the following written by Shaun Lambert:

A Christian Perspective On Attention, Awareness And Mindfulness

Today, as a parent, you might be praying for your child’s ability to concentrate as they take another exam. On Boxing Day 2004 Tilly Smith, a 10-year-old British girl, saved 100 tourists on a Thai beach because she noticed that the waves were receding. She remembered her geography lessons and told her mum that the beach was about to be struck by a tsunami. I wonder why she paid attention in that particular lesson with her geography teacher, Andrew Kearney?

Two thousand years ago a centurion paid attention to the present moment, and as he saw how Jesus died he said, ‘Surely this man was the Son of God!’ (Mark 15:39). At the birth of Jesus, there were a host of unimportant people who watched, waited and paid attention, as well as some important ones: the shepherds, the magi, Simeon and Anna, and Mary who pondered and treasured all these things (‘pondered’ and ‘treasured’ are words about attention and awareness).

How about you?

[i] Diadochus of Photike, Following the Footsteps of the Invisible: The Complete Works of Diadochus of Photike, Introduction, Translation and Notes by Cliff Ermatinger. Liturgical Press: Collegeville, Minnesota (2010), p.69.
[ii] Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (230-241).
[iii] Ibid, p. 232.
[iv] Ibid, p.232.
[v] Ibid, p.232.
[vi] Ibid, p.232.
[vii] Ibid, p.232.
[viii] Ibid, p.232.
[ix] Teasdale, J.D., Segal, Z.V., Williams J.M.G., & Mark, G. (1995). How does cognitive therapy prevent depressive relapse and why should attentional control (mindfulness) training help? Behavior Research and Therapy, 33, 25-39, quoted in Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (232).
[x] Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 p.233.
[xi] Roemer, L., & Orsillo, S.M. (2002), quoted in Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (233).
[xii] Quoted in Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (233).
[xiii] Hayes, S.C., Wilson, K.G., Gifford, E.V., Follette, V.M. & Strosahl, K. (1996).’ Experiential avoidance and behavioural disorders: A functional dimensional approach to diagnosis and treatment’. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 64(6), 1152-1168. Quoted in Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (237).
[xiv] Bishop, S.R. et al. ‘Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition’ (2004). Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11 (235).
[xv] Ibid, p.234.
[xvi] Ibid, p. 234.
[xvii] Ibid, p.234.
[xviii] Ibid, p.234.
[xix] Ibid, p.234.
[xx] Ibid, p.234.
[xxi] Ibid, p.234.
[xxii] Ibid, p.234.
[xxiii] Ibid, p.235.
[xxiv] Ibid, p.235.
[xxv] Ibid, p.235.
[xxvi] Ibid, p.235.

A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

Digital mental Health - Pros and perils of social media in a mental health inpatient setting

Heresy Corner - Obesity and Sin

Cranmer - Homosexuality is an issue blown out of all proportion

Connexions – Mind your language

The Neurcritic - Spirit Possession as a Trauma-Related Disorder in Uganda

Theology Matters - Gnosticism and Modernity

Epiphenom – That was the year that was 2012

Those of you who have been with me over the years will remember Edmund Standing, who hung up his blogging boots this time last year. This is what I wrote back then:

My good friend Edmund Standing has announced his retirement from the blogging world over on Harry’s Place.

He was a singular champion in the fight against the rise of the far right.

He also blogged on other diverse subjects and wrote one for eChurch back in August, entitled: Black Britain: Broken by the Left

The strange thing is that a couple of days ago I thought of Edmund and felt sad I’d probably never hear from him again.

One of things I never mentioned about Edmund, is that he is an atheist and quite prolific online in this regard. Edmund is that breed of atheist that has a deep knowledge of the Scriptures and theology.

Today I received an email from Edmund and imagine my surprise and delight to read this:

For around ten years, I have written articles and blog posts from an atheist perspective. I no longer consider myself to be an atheist, and the following is my attempt at explaining this change of position. After a year away from writing, I now intend to post the occasional piece again from time to time, and this first post hopefully provides some clarity on where I’m ‘coming from’.

——

My background is one of a family rooted in a mild and liberal Anglicanism. I wasn’t brought up in the kind of household where religion was ‘forced’ upon me. I didn’t ‘have’ to pray, and I wasn’t made to feel inherently depraved and sinful.

At age 14, I stopped attending church. Four years later, a quest for meaning of sorts began. Having watched a documentary on the racist ‘Christian Identity’ movement, I looked into some of its writings online. These texts were filled with biblical quotations used to ‘validate’ the CI theology and I picked up a Bible and started to check these texts in an attempt at looking at them in their proper context. I was instantly absolutely captivated by the Bible. I had never read the Bible properly before and, while I was of course familiar with a few of its passages and stories from church services, I was now seeing it in a completely different way. I found the book hugely exciting and in time I became an evangelical Christian. I was not ‘converted’ by anyone, but rather came to faith through my own reading of the Bible.

Through browsing in my local library, I became fascinated by religion and philosophy in general. I began a journey which involved lots and lots of reading, and sending off for numerous books and pamphlets from groups as diverse as hardline Christian fundamentalist sects, messianic Jews, Unitarians, Deists, Bahá’ís, Rosicrucians, ‘Sacred Name’ groups, John Todd Ferrier’s ‘Order of the Cross’, Theosophists, Gnostics, neo-Pagans, and so on. This collection of religious literature would later be joined by Catholic Truth Society books and a large collection of Islamic materials. I also started to read theological books, biblical studies, and historical Jesus studies. In time, my simplistic evangelicalism morphed into a less literalist and more thoughtful faith, and I decided to study Theology & Religious Studies at university.

Overall, I greatly enjoyed my degree. I loved all the reading, the class debates, and the exploring of ideas. In my final year, things started to go downhill somewhat, not academically, as I ended up with a First, but rather in terms of the direction my reading was going. I started to read a lot of so-called ‘radical theology’ and ‘postmodern theology’. Initially, I found these obscure, difficult texts, filled with a dazzling array of neologisms and technical terms, very engaging. Gradually, however, I began to see their inner emptiness. This was not religious material, it would not inspire action and it all too clearly was ‘academic’ in the worst possible sense. For an example of what I’m talking about, consider the following typical passage from the late Charles E. Winquist’s book Desiring Theology:

Theology belongs to the population of all discursive practices. It remains text production. There is no special privilege to its discursive formations that comes from outside of the text production. The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. The efficacy of these formulations is in their pressure upon ordinary usage and reference. The pressure of figurations of ultimacy on the pragmatics of discourse is a transvaluation of the ordinary… Theological texts explicitly express their internal undecidability. In this sense, theological texts introduce an incommensurability into discursive practices that is an internal trace of the other.

Immersed as I was in this material, I felt increasingly dislocated from faith as a lived experience and more and more bogged down in a world of academic obscurantism. I no longer attended church, had little or no connection with any kind of religious belief or practice, and eventually became weary of not only academic theology but of all thinking of God. After my degree was over, I left theology behind and decided to further explore instead the critical and cultural theory the postmodern theologians were working with (or arguably misrepresenting). Sadly, in doing this, I inflicted upon myself the experience of reading piles of barely coherent, jargon-filled academic waffle, which I concluded fairly early on was devoid of any genuine meaning or purpose. I descended into a great period of depression and was overcome by a sense of emptiness, darkness, and meaninglessness. Unlike those who might be accused of using religion as a ‘crutch’ in such circumstances, I didn’t return to faith. In fact, in the period after I finished my MA, put academia behind me and got a proper job working with the elderly, I gained a new, wholly negative connection to religion and religious texts. As a result, I spent much of the past decade writing atheist articles which attempted to undermine the possibility of faith, the relevance of the Bible, the reality of God, and so on.

Looking back on it now, I can see a clear and deliberate pattern emerging, and a ‘tactic’ of sorts in use that I now consider to have been part of a subconscious effort to finally bury any connection I once had, or could ever have again, with belief. It seems to me now that, over my period of atheist writing, I was engaging in a systematic process of tearing down each aspect of faith one by one (the possibility of God, the relevance of Jesus, the relevance of the Bible, the value of faith, the possibility of a thinking faith, the possibility of engaging in theological thought and writing, the positive contributions of religion) in order that I could finally and ‘logically’ satisfy myself that the only rationally justifiable course of action was a wholesale repudiation of God and religion. Essentially, then, I would now argue that the attractiveness of atheism for me lay most clearly in the fact that, for me, embracing atheism offered a quick escape route from thinking too deeply. Weary as I was after four years of academic work, there was a strange sort of comfort to be found in arguing that all the big questions I had been looking at previously were ultimately meaningless and that there is consequently no need to investigate any further. On a certain level, there was a mirror here with the simplistic faith I first embraced in my late teens. The world is a simpler place and life is less challenging if you can satisfy yourself that you have all the answers and that the quest for meaning is complete. Both religious fundamentalism and atheism can provide that same certainty and a sense of being ‘at peace’ in a world in which truth is immediately self-evident and the need for debate is over, although I would now argue that any sense of being at peace in atheism was ultimately illusory and unsatisfactory.

With time away from writing and a period spent getting on with life itself, working hard, getting married, and making a home, certain interests and thoughts have come back to haunt me, although I feel they were always haunting me even in my time advocating atheism and attacking religion as wholly outdated, irrelevant, and so on. I have come to the realisation that, try as a might, I simply cannot shake the questions of meaning and the draw that faith continues to have on me. Am I really an atheist? Was I ever truly an atheist? The claim that atheists don’t really mean what they say or are deluding themselves is a smug and intellectually lazy way to answer atheism. There are many genuine atheists out there, but I’ve come to realise that I’m not one. I fear (on a certain level) that my atheism was always at heart a process of iconoclasm and a type of negative theology. As I say, for many, atheism is exactly what it appears to be, yet in my case I continued to channel my ongoing fascination with Christianity, my ‘obsession’ with the Bible (as one of my university lecturers called it), and my desire to engage with questions of belief and so on through a process of negation. I attacked the notion of God and offered strong critiques of biblical texts, yet in doing this I was able to maintain a connection, albeit a negative one, with those very things. For an atheist, I certainly filled a large amount of my time with talking about God and Jesus and reading the Bible. Now, again, there are atheists who do just that, and for entirely atheistic reasons, but I can simply no longer fool myself that this was all that I was up to.

On a certain level, I’m deeply frustrated. Many atheists or agnostics I have come across who are not intrinsically hostile to religion often say, “I wish I could believe in God, but I can’t.” I’m not one of those. I explicitly and definitely did not want to believe in God. Instead, I wanted to be rid of God, to purge myself of every last trace of what Nietzsche called the ‘theologian instinct’. Yet, somewhat to my surprise, I found that I have ultimately failed. I thought I had succeeded, but I was fooling myself. I continue to hear a knocking at the door, a knocking I have sought to silence, to deny exists, to muffle and drown out. I can no longer ignore that knocking, much as a part of me strongly wishes to do so. I am forced, for the first time in a decade, to confront the fact that I am not an atheist, but I am rather a believer in deep denial, or perhaps more accurately a believer who has been engaging in a heavily disguised kind of apophasis, and a believer whose attacks on the Bible are actually part of a quest not to destroy it, but rather to re-examine and re-think it. Frustration and disappointment are, of course, not all that I feel, otherwise I would be little more than a failed believer stuck in a state of melancholia. In reality, those frustrations and disappointments are nothing more than the result of a process of working through and rejecting the false comforts of a narrow and simplistic world view, and those feelings of frustration are even now giving way to a new sense of excitement and purpose, and new hope for the future.