Aldous Huxley Quotations on the Bible, Christianity, sexual mores, philosophies of meaninglessness, and philosophies of meaning

Aldous Huxley Quotations on the Bible, Christianity, sexual mores, philosophies of meaninglessness, and philosophies of meaning

Aldous Huxley on the Influence of the Worst Aspects of the Bible on the History of Christianity

“Examples of reversion to barbarism through mere ignorance are unhappily abundant in the history of Christianity. The early Christians made the enormous mistake of burdening themselves with the Old Testament, which contains, along with much fine poetry and sound morality the history of the cruelties and treacheries of a Bronze-Age people, fighting for a place in the sun under the protection of its anthropomorphic tribal deity… Those whom it suited to be ignorant and, along with them, the innocent and uneducated could find in this treasure-house of barbarous stupidity justifications for every crime and folly. Texts to justify such abominations as religious wars, the persecution of heretics… could be found in the sacred books and were in fact used again and again throughout the whole history of the Christian Church.”
[Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 328]

“In this remarkable compendium of Bronze-Age literature, God is personal to the point of being almost sub-human. Too often the believer has felt justified in giving way to his worst passions by the reflection that, in doing so, he is basing his conduct on that of a God who feels jealousy and hatred… and behaves in general like a particularly ferocious oriental tyrant. The frequency with which men have identified the prompting of their own passions with the voice of an all too personal God is really appalling.” [p. 276-277]

“According to his very inadequate biographers, Jesus of Nazareth was never preoccupied with philosophy, art, music, or science and ignored almost completely the problems of politics, economics and sexual relations. It is also recorded of him that he blasted a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season, that he scourged the shopkeepers in the temple precincts and caused a herd of swine to drown. Scrupulous devotion to and imitation of the person of Jesus have resulted only too frequently in a fatal tendency, on the part of earnest Christians, to despise artistic creation and philosophic thought; to disparage the inquiring intellect, to evade all long-range, large-scale problems of politics and economics, and to believe themselves justified in displaying anger, or as they would doubtless prefer to call it, ‘righteous indignation.’” [p. 275-276]

Aldous Huxley on Religious Faith and Ethics

“There are some… who believe that no desirable ‘change of heart’ can be brought about without supernatural aid. There must be, they say, a return to religion. (Unhappily, they cannot agree on the religion to which the return should be made.)”
[Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 2]

“In practice, Christianity, like Hinduism or Buddhism, is not one religion, but several religions, adapted to the needs of different types of human beings. A Christian church in Southern Spain, or Mexico, or Sicily is singularly like a Hindu temple. The eye is delighted by the same gaudy colors, the same tripe-like decorations, the same gesticulating statues; the nose inhales the same intoxicating smells; the ear and, along with it, the understanding, are lulled by the drone of the same incomprehensible incantations [in the old Catholic Latin mass tradition], roused by the same loud, impressive music.”

“At the other end of the scale, consider the chapel of a Cistercian monastery and the meditation hall of a community of Zen Buddhists. They are equally bare; aids to devotion (in other words fetters holding back the soul from enlightenment) are conspicuously absent from either building. Here are two distinct religions for two distinct kinds of human beings.” [p. 262-263]

“In Christianity bhakti [or, loving devotion] towards a personal being has always been the most popular form of religious practice. Up to the time of the [Catholic] Counter-Reformation, however, the way of knowledge (“mystical knowledge” as it is called in Christian language) was accorded an honorable place beside the way of devotion. From the middle of the sixteenth century onwards the way of knowledge came to be neglected and even condemned. We are told by Dom John Chapman that “Mercurian, who was general of the society (of Jesus) from 1573 to 1580, forbade the use of the works of Tauler, Ruysbroek, Suso, Harphius, St. Gertrude, and St. Mechtilde.” Every effort was made by the [Catholic] Counter-Reformers to heighten the worshipperʼs devotion to a personal divinity. The literary content of Baroque art is hysterical, almost epileptic, in the violence of its emotionality. It even becomes necessary to call in physiology as an aid to feeling. The ecstasies of the saints are represented by seventeenth-century artists as being frankly sexual. Seventeenth-century drapery writhes like so much tripe. In the equivocal personage of Margaret Mary Alacocque, seventeenth-century piety pours over a bleeding and palpitating heart. From this orgy of emotionalism and sensationalism Catholic Christianity seems never completely to have recovered.” [p. 281-282]

“First Shakespeare sonnets seem meaningless; first Bach fugues, a bore; first differential equations, sheer torture. But training changes the nature of our spiritual experiences. In due course, contact with an obscurely beautiful poem, an elaborate piece of [musical] counterpoint or of mathematical reasoning, causes us to feel direct intuitions of beauty and significance. It is the same in the moral world. A man who has trained himself in goodness come to have certain direct intuitions about character, about the relations between human beings, about his own position in the world — intuitions that are quite different from the intuitions of the average sensual man… [p. 333]

“The ideal of non-attachment has been formulated and systematically preached again and again in the course of the last three thousand years. We find it (along with everything else) in Hinduism. It is at the very heart of the teachings of the Buddha. For Chinese readers the doctrine is formulated by Lao Tsu. A little later, in Greece, the ideal of non-attachment is proclaimed, albeit with a certain, pharisaical priggishness, by the Stoics. The Gospel of Jesus is essentially a gospel of non-attachment to “the things of this world,” and of attachment to God. Whatever may have been the aberrations of organized Christianity — and they range from extravagant asceticism to the most brutally cynical forms of realpolitik — there has been no lack of Christian philosophers to reaffirm the ideal of non-attachment. Here is John Tauler, for example, telling us that ‘freedom is complete purity and detachment which seeketh the Eternal…’ Here is the author of “The Imitation of Christ,” who bids us ‘pass through many cares as though without care; not after the manner of a sluggard, but by a certain prerogative of a free mind, which does not cleave with inordinate affection to any creature.’” [p. 5, 6]

“…as knowledge, sensibility and non-attachment increase, the contents of the judgments of value passed even by men belonging to dissimilar cultures, tend to approximate. The ethical doctrines taught in the Tao Te Ching, by Buddha and his followers, in the Sermon on the Mount, and by the best of the Christian saints, are not dissimilar.” [p. 327]

What did Aldous Huxley Say About “Philosophies of Meaningless?” & What Did He Believe?

In his book, Ends and Means, written in 1937 (chapter 14, the chapter on “Beliefs”), he wrote about the rise of “philosophies of meaninglessness” and materialism among the masses after the First World War, the generation of the 1920s-30s. Speaking of that generation, John Derbyshire wrote:

“The second and third decades of the twentieth century were notoriously an age of failed gods and shattered conventions, to which many thoughtful people responded in obvious ways, retreating into nihilism, hedonism, and experimentalism. Literature became subjective, art became abstract, poetry abandoned its traditional forms. In the ‘low, dishonest decade’ that then followed, much of this negativism curdled into power-worship and escapism of various kinds. Aldous Huxley stood aside from these large general trends. Though no Victorian in habits or beliefs, he never entered whole-heartedly into the spirit of modernism. The evidence is all over the early volumes of these essays. James Joyceʼs ground breaking novel, Ulysses, he declares in 1925, is ‘one of the dullest books ever written,and one of the least significant.’ Jazz, he remarks two years later, is ‘drearily barbaric.’ Writing of Sir Christopher Wren in 1923, he quotes with approval Carlyleʼs remark that Chelsea Hospital, one of Wrenʼs creations, was ‘obviously the work of a gentleman.’ Wren, Huxley goes on to say, was indeed a great gentleman, ‘one who valued dignity and restraint and who, respecting himself, respected also humanity.’ In his thirties, in fact, Huxley comes across as something of a Young Fogey.”
[John Derbyshire, “What Happened to Aldous Huxley,” The New Criterion Vol. 21, No. 6 (February 2003)]

In chapter 15 of Ends and Means on “Ethics,” Aldous, the “Young Fogey,” abhorred “sexual addictions,” or using sex as a means to achieving base ends. And Aldousʼ chapters on “Religious Practices,” “Beliefs,” and “Ethics” argued in favor of a meaningful cosmos and a universal spirituality that Aldous said was reflected in the works of certain Eastern mystics as well as some famous Christian mystics. Below is a series of quotations demonstrating what I have said above, all taken from Aldous Huxleyʼs Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for Their Realization (Harper and Brothers Publishers, New York and London, 1937, fifth edition).

Aldous Huxley Rebuts “Philosophies of Meaninglessness”

“From the world we actually live in, the world that is given by our senses, our intuitions of beauty and goodness, our emotions and impulses, our moods and sentiments, the man of science abstracts a simplified private universe of things possessing only… elements which can be weighed, measured, numbered, or which lend themselves in any other way to mathematical treatment. By using this technique of simplification and abstraction, the scientist has succeeded to an astonishing degree in understanding and dominating the physical environment. The success was intoxicating and, with an illogicality which, in the circumstances, was doubtless pardonable, many scientists and philosophers came to imagine that this useful abstraction from reality was reality itself. Reality as actually experienced contains intuitions of value and significance, contain love, beauty, mystical ecstasy, intimations of godhead. Science did not and still does not possess intellectual instruments with which to deal with these aspects of reality. Consequently it ignored them and concentrated its attention upon such aspects of the world as it could deal with by mean of arithmetic, geometry and the various branches of higher mathematics. Our conviction that the world is meaningless lend itself very effectively to furthering the ends of erotic or political passion; in part to a genuine intellectual error — the error of identifying the world of science, a world from which all meaning and value has been deliberately excluded, with ultimate reality.

“[The philosopher, Humeʼs, erroneous attitude was typical] Hume wrote, ‘If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstracts reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact or evidence? No. Commit it then to the flame; for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.’ Hume mentions only divinity and school metaphysics; but his argument would apply just as cogently to poetry, music, painting, sculpture and all ethical and religious teaching. Hamlet contains no abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number and no experimental reason concerning evidence; nor does the Hamerklavier Sonata, nor Donatelloʼs David, nor the Tao Te Ching [book of Chinese philosophy and wisdom], nor the Following of Christ. Commit them therefore to the flames: for they can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.”

“We are living now, not in the delicious intoxication induced by the early successes of science, but in a rather grisly morning-after… The contents of literature, art, music — even in some measure of divinity and school metaphysics — are not sophistry and illusion, but simply those elements of experience which scientists chose to leave out of account, for the good reason that they had no intellectual methods for dealing with them. In the arts, in philosophy, in religion, men are trying — to describe and explain the non-measurable, purely qualitative aspects of reality…[Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 308-310]

“In recent years, many men of science have come to realize that the scientific picture of the world is a partial one — the product of their special competence in mathematics and their special incompetence to deal systematically with aesthetic and moral values, religious experiences and intuitions of significance. Unhappily, novel ideas become acceptable to the less intelligent members of society only with a very considerable time-lag. Sixty or seventy years ago the majority of scientists believed — and the belief caused them considerable distress — that the product of their special incompetence was identical with reality as a whole. Today this belief has begun to give way, in scientific circles, to a different and obviously truer conception of the relation between science and total experience. The masses on the contrary, have just reached the point where the ancestors of todayʼs scientists were standing two generations back. They are convinced that the scientific picture of an arbitrary abstraction from reality is a picture of reality as a whole and that therefore the world is without meaning or value. But nobody likes living in such a world. To satisfy their hunger for meaning and value, they turn to such doctrines as nationalism, fascism and revolutionary communism. Philosophically and scientifically, these doctrines are absurd; but for the masses in every community, they have this great merit: they attribute the meaning and value that have been taken away from the world as a whole to the particular part of the world in which the believers happen to be living.

“These last considerations raise an important question, which must now be considered in some detail. Does the world as a whole possess the value and meaning that we constantly attribute to certain parts of it (such as human beings and their works); and, if so, what is the nature of that value and meaning? This is a question which, a few years ago, I should not even have posed. For, like so many of my contemporaries, I took it for granted that there was no meaning. This was partly due to the fact that I shared the common belief that the scientific picture of an abstraction from reality was a true picture of reality as a whole; partly also to other, non-intellectual reasons. I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption.

“Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We donʼt know because we donʼt want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence. Those who detect no meaning in the world generally do so because, for one reason or another, it suits their books that the world should be meaningless.” [p. 311-312]

Aldous Huxley Rebuts “Philosophies of Meaning” Proposed by Established Religions Like Christianity

“No philosophy is completely disinterested. The pure love of truth is always mingle to some extent with the need, consciously or unconsciously felt by even the noblest and the most intelligent philosophers, to justify a given form of personal or social behavior, to rationalize the traditional prejudices of a given class or community. The philosopher who finds meaning in the world is concerned, not only to elucidate that meaning, but also to prove that is it most clearly expressed in some established religion, some accepted code of morals. The philosopher who find no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics. He is also concerned to prove that there is not valid reason why her personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. The voluntary, as opposed to the intellectual, reasons for holding the doctrines of materialism, for examples, may be predominantly erotic, as they were in the case of Lamettrie (see his lyrical account of the pleasures of the bed in La Volupte and at the end of L’Homme Machine [‘The Human Machine,’ a work of materialist philosophy]), or predominantly political, as they were in the case of Karl Marx. The desire to justify a particular form of political organization and, in some cases, of a personal will to power has played an equally large part in the formulation of philosophies postulating the existence of meaning in the world. Christian philosophers have found no difficulty in justifying imperialism, war, the capitalistic system, the use of torture, the censorship of the press, and ecclesiastical tyrannies of every sort from the tyranny of Rome to the tyrannies of [Calvinʼs] Geneva and [Puritan] New England. In all cases they have shown that the meaning of the world was such as to be compatible with, or actually most completely expressed by, the iniquities I have mentioned above — iniquities which happened, of course, to serve the personal or sectarian interests of the philosophizers concerned. In due course, these arose philosophers who denied not only the right of Christian special pleaders to justify iniquity by an appeal to the meaning of the world, but even their right to find any such meaning whatsoever. In the circumstances, the fact was not surprising. One unscrupulous distortion of the truth tends to beget other and opposite distortions. Passions may be satisfied in the process; but the disinterested love of knowledge suffers eclipse. [p. 314-316]

“For myself as, no doubt, for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was simultaneously liberation from a certain political and economic system and liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom; we objected to the political and economic system because it was unjust. The supporters of these systems claimed that in some way they embodied the meaning (a Christian meaning, they insisted) of the world. There was an admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever… The men of the new Enlightenment, which occurred in the middle years of the nineteenth century, once again used meaninglessness as a weapon against the [conservative] reactionaries. The Victorian passion for respectability was, however, so great that, during the period when they were formulated, neither Positivism nor Darwinism was used as a justification for sexual indulgence. [p. 316-317]

Aldous Huxleyʼs Warning Against Sexual Addiction

“It is only when it takes the form of physical addiction that sex is evil. It is also evil when it manifests itself as a way of satisfying the lust for power or the climber's craving for position and social distinction.” [Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 358]

The Failure of the Search for Evidence of Human Giants Over Ten Feet Tall, The Nephilim, et al. A Creationist Story of Obsession

What creationists (like Carl Baugh and Kent Hovind) “see” below is “photographic evidence” that human giants over ten feet tall existed.

Big Skeleton

The source of the “photograph” turns out to be an engraving from a book that contains an unsubstantiated story

Source

One finds endless pages of bunk on “human giants” (over ten feet all) on the web, a hodgepodge of photoshopped images (people neglect to even google the words, “photoshop human giant,” or check Snopes and other urban myth tracking sites to see the evidence that such images were photoshopped.

Even a video showing you how). One can also find ancient reports that simply talk about the bones of human giants being found but lack any bones to back up the talk (we don't know if the bones were human, since in the 1700 and 1800s plenty of such misinterpretations existed due to discovering large mammal and dinosaur bones that people supposed might be human). The “solid” evidence for human giants over ten feet tall consists of carved giant human-looking statues. One such statue can be seen leaning up against a train in Great Britain:

Source: “The Living Moon Forum”

Both raked in money for their owners who put them on display. See the full story below.

A Colossal Hoax: The Giant from Cardiff that Fooled America

The “discovery” of the “petrified Cardiff Giant” in the 1860s directly preceded the “discoveries” of both the “petrified Irish Giant” and even a “petrified Revolutionary War soldier” in the 1890s.

The “discoverer” of the “petrified Irish Giant,” Mr. Dyer, said it had been dug up in County Antrim, Ireland, in the 1890s. We'll see below why that claim itself is part of the hoax. Dyer, after showing the “giant” in Dublin, came to England with his find and exhibited it in Liverpool and Manchester at sixpence a head, which was exactly what happened in America in the 1860s with the “Cardiff Giant,” the parallel hoax. P.T. Barnum made loads of money displaying the Cardiff Giant, which probably gave Dyer the idea to carve a giant in a similar posture, though with a modest covering for its naughty bits, because after all, Ireland was a Catholic country, though Dyer made his carving two feet taller than the Cardiff giant. (The “petrified Revolutionary War Soldier” apparently was also carved in a somewhat similar position, but was not gigantic, though it didn't need to be, it's draw was its southern heritage.) Note that the county in Ireland where Dyer allegedly “discovered” the “Irish Giant” also was home to the mythologically named “Giant's Causeway,” i.e., County Antrim in Ireland.. But the “Giant's Causeway,” has as little to do with actual giants as does the carving that Dyer put on display to make a buck. But by making such a claim Dyer set up a mythological connection in the minds of Great Britain's ticket-buying public.

A different mythological connection existed in the U.S., reaching back to claims by prominent Puritan settlers in New England that fossilized mammoth bones belonged to “human giants.” Such connections helped feed the Cardiff Giant hoax. See the article, “When Giants Roamed the Earth: In the Golden Age of Hoaxes, Petrified Men Came to Life” by Mark Rose, Archaeology, Volume 58 Number 6, Nov./Dec. 2005

Google: “Cardiff Giant” to see how the posture of the first carved hoax was recreated in the “Irish” Giant, plus a couple feet added in height. The hoax grew, literally. And google some pics of the Giant's Causeway sites below to learn more about the myth that “giants” created it:


Another “petrified man” claim from the 1890s was that of a “petrified Revolutionary War soldier” on display in South Carolina. It was an easy way to make a buck back then, simply by charging a small amount to allow people to take a peek at your “discovery”


Another image I often see is based on unsubstantiated tales of Patagonian Giants. The Patagonian giant frenzy died down substantially when some more sober and analytical accounts were published. For instance in 1773 John Hawkesworth published on behalf of the Admiralty a compendium of noted English southern-hemisphere explorersʼ journals, including that of James Cook and John Byron. In this publication, drawn from their official logs, it became clear that the people Byron's expedition had encountered were no taller than 6-foot-6-inch (1.98 m), tall perhaps but by no means giants. See these pieces:

  1. Giants
  2. Patgonian Giants

Speaking of research on human giants, see this piece on Men Over Ten Feet Tall that I wrote years ago.

Years after the above piece was composed someone sent me the exact origin of the so-called “photo” of an 11’ 6” skeleton. The image was originally an artist's engraving from The Tongue of Time, a book published in 1838 (before the invention of permanent non-fading photos, so books at that time did not even contain photographs). This link for the original artist's engraving.

A creationist took a blurry photograph of the above engraving and other creationists claimed that the blurry photo of the engraving constituted photographic evidence! But one can see, all the images in the book are engravings created just to accompany the stories.. The story has remained unsubstantiated to this day, and also mentions tales of “Cyclops” in ancient Sicily. But archaeologists have noted that the ancient Greeks probably confused mammoth leg bones and their skulls for the remains of “human giants.” The huge skull of the mammoth has as a large “socket” in the middle which would have been for the mammoth's trunk, but the Greeks probably pictured that “socket” as the eyehole of a human giant, not knowing about ancient mammoths once roaming Europe. Check out this photo.

And see this book:

On Recovering from Alcoholism, Drug Addiction, Schizophrenia, and… Addiction to Religious Certainties

Recovery

Famed Christian faith healer, Rev. A. A. Allen, died an alcoholic when his liver and/or heart finally gave out. Rev. Allen was also a yearly Bible Conference speaker at Bob Jones University and president of the Fundamental Baptist Fellowship. Allen was addicted equally to spirits from the bottle and to his fundamentalist beliefs and died an alcoholic in his hotel room hours after bragging on radio that people were lying about his addictions and that he would be appearing at an Evangelistic conference that night. In other news, Dr. Rod Bell, the outgoing president of the FBFI (Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International), also is suffering from addiction to alcohol according to Dr. John Vaughn, the new president of the FBFI.

One can only be grateful to some Christians for helping some people get hooked on Christianity rather than alcohol or drugs. In a similar fashion one can only be grateful to some Scientologists for helping some people get hooked on Scientology rather than alcohol or drugs. But even converts to Christianity and/or Scientology have gone back to their addictions. Of course neither Christianity nor Scientology publicize such failures.

And sometimes former addicts to alcohol or drugs go further still, and after adopting religious certainties in place of alcohol or drugs, learn to question even those new found certainties (without feeling the need to revert back to alcohol, drugs, or religious certainties).


Casper Rigsby from, “Diary of a Christian Schizophrenic”:

I have mild schizophrenia. Itʼs easily treatable, and with medication Iʼm an average person. Iʼm not ashamed in the least to tell you this. It isnʼt something to be ashamed of because it isnʼt my fault. It wasnʼt caused by something I did or some supernatural force. But for a long time I was ashamed of it and I did think that it was my fault somehow… When the visual hallucinations began and I started catching shapes out of the corners of my eyes, I became afraid. I wasnʼt afraid that someone was messing with me, rather I was convinced that Satan had besieged me and had infected me with demons. This may seem an absolutely foolish notion to those of you not raised in an evangelical Christian home, but for those who were, you likely understand my fear all too well… When I was 16 it had gotten so bad that Iʼd began drug and alcohol abuse. I would use methamphetamine daily to get my mind going a mile a minute and this would overwhelm the voices and visions to some degree. It wouldnʼt get rid of them altogether, but it clouded things well enough for me to “function”… [Casper was arrested for possession of some meth and marijuana and spent three years in prison, but the prison included] a good staff of general health personnel, and a mental health staff. After being isolated and given a mental health evaluation where for the first time I actually told someone what was going on, I was started on medication and counseling. For the first time since it had begun the voices and visions went away. I was able to sleep and rest. My paranoia and anxiety diminished. I didnʼt feel like I needed to escape some demon that was chasing me… Understanding is something my former religion robbed me of as a youth. It gave me an unrealistic perception of reality and caused me to blame myself for something that wasnʼt my fault. It made me feel scared and alone because I was confused and even more scared to seek out an answer. When people get upset about atheists such as myself stating without hesitation that religion causes harm, I think of the harm it caused me. I think of the fear that I felt. I think of how I considered suicide at just 14 because I just didnʼt know what to do or where to turn. Most of all I think of how I wasnʼt alone in feeling that way then and that there are many who feel that way now. If you are suffering from mental problems, be it depression, anxiety, or something worse, do not resort to prayer or religion in hopes to fix something that they quite honestly are not mentally equipped to deal with. Seek professional help. Talk to someone and please remember that you arenʼt alone and this isnʼt your fault.


David J. from, “Tell me about that hell part again”:

When I believed the Bible was infallible, it felt hopeless, and I drank to drown that out. Now that I see it has mistakes and has been severely altered by men, the constant fear and depression is gone. It is ironic to think back a few years to me quoting scripture to try and stay sober. Now that my beliefs have changed, I have absolutely no desire to drink. I still believe in God and donʼt know what to believe about Christianity. I will continue to read about both as I did about the Bible and see where the evidence takes me.


from “Scratching Walls”:

I went from one of the top students at my high school to a needle junkie to a real holy roller within the space of about a year… I think itʼs clear that a drug addict, and most especially a very young one, is not exactly what I would call a “clear-thinking individual”. When we consider the sorts of decisions this person has been making up to the present time-stealing, lying, cheating, slowly killing their bodies…it seems obvious that they are not in a correct frame of mind to make thoughtful decisions… So now this line of thought becomes personal: I was a drug addict, I needed to change my lifestyle, worldview, etc., but I needed help doing it. For me, help came in the form of a sort of religious quasi-boot camp. The name of this loveshack is Appalachian Teen Challenge (ATC). My brief testimony on their webpage (written a while back) was posted by the director, Jim Nickels. At the time I last emailed him (according to my records, summer of 04, since the testimony has this timeframe), I was already at a stage of escape from this darkness that Jim would consider heresy-to him, I was “backslidden”. However, I felt a deep discord at the idea of revealing the depth of my progress to him, (as I see it) and opted instead for a generic report about how god was really helping me and mostly focused on my goals and plans and marriage, see the letter I recently wrote him for more… One of the most interesting things about the Christian culture is their tendency to bury the wounded. What they see as “lost souls” are ripe for evangelism and discipleship, but those who “fall away”, especially those like myself, who spent quite a few years teaching/preaching the faith, are often, as the Bible instructs (Heb. 6:4-6, 1 Jn 2:19), abandoned. Besides giving up hope for a backsliderʼs salvation, there are also a number of scriptural precedents for booting people who lose faith from the fold (1 Cor. 5:1-13; 1 Tim. 1:19-20; 2 Thes. 3:6; 2 Cor. 6:14-15; Job 24:13). So, I guess I shouldnʼt be surprised at the response I receive(d) from Christian friends and family… I will write more about my deconversion, and edit this accordingly, but suffice it to say that although I am open to new evidence and arguments in favor of godʼs existence and in the religion of Christianity, I think Iʼve already heard the “best” there is to offer, and I find it, on the whole, unconvincing.


from “Fear leads to the dark side”:

I became a Christian as a result of a burnout on drugs (hash,opium) that I had at the ripe old age of 16 while living in Europe. After experiencing a great deal of paranoia and instability, I encountered a pastor of a newly developing church called International Christian Fellowship. Basically this was a spin-off of the Assemblies of God, made for the European market. Being so young and impressionable I believed all this, burned my albums (ouch!) cut my hair (Oh no Delilah!) and basically became a completely brainwashed Evangelical. We would preach to people of all nations, creeds and backgrounds through our church and I became what others considered to be the best at Christian Apologetics. It seemed as if I had an answer for every argument against Christianity at the time. When the church began to indoctrinate us further and require classes for all assistant pastors I complied and became fully immersed in it. I stopped sleeping with my girlfriend who also became a Christian (what was I thinking?), I stopped smoking (not bad I admit), and became the perfect “soldier for Christ” The church used “before and after” photos of me to show the transforming power of Jesus. Heavy rocker to Christian. Whoopee! But all was not well in paradise. As I became more and more involved in learning about the religion and being a defender of it I became aware of…


Daniel M, from “Returning to Sanity”:

At 16, I had already developed pretty deep doubts about godʼs existence and attributes. When my father got cancer (a devout Xian) I lost all faith in the idea of a personal god. Unfortunately, I was also quite immature and emotionally unstable, and I started using pretty hard drugs during this time of intense confusion and pain. To get “clean,” a court and my parents decided a Xian rehab named “Teen Challenge” was the best answer for me. After 14 months there, this young, confused, hurting person came out a devout Xian again. I had stability in what I believed, and the evidence for godʼs existence was the “change” that god wrought in me. After all, I was drug free!! Nevermind that I was seriously programmed, and that during that 14 months there was absolutely no way I couldʼve gotten drugs had I wanted to. Nevermind that my problem was a mental and philosophical crisis rooted in confusion and disillusionment, and not the drugs themselves. Nevermind that deep down, I never bought into the creationism because I already knew enough about science and reason to reject a literal reading of Genesis. I was 19, and fresh out of Christian boot-camp/rehab. After slowly regressing over the period of years to a moderate Xian, I found I finally had the courage to acquire books…


x-ray man from “I Tried, I Really Tried…”:

Many of my best friends also fell into serious alcohol addiction. Gary one of my oldest and dearest friends from childhood finally stopped drinking and found God. Almost over night he became a preachy born again Christian. I really wasnʼt too fond of his ways, yet he did succeed in putting the cork in the jug. I continued to drink heavily. He always said that Jesus was the way to overcome my addiction. At age 27 I was married with a small child when I finally hit a complete rock bottom. My drinking took me as low as a man could go. On a March night in 1991, I was alone in my house shaking uncontrollably in a pool of cold sweat, with the DTʼs. I had been drunk with a friend for a week straight. When the money ran out and the booze ran dry, I had the worst withdrawals any human ever had. My mind and body were in peril. I decided it was time for me to surrender to Jesus. It was my only hope. This was your typical addict finding God story in the making, and I was the main character. I called the 700 club prayer line, and got on the phone with a prayer counselor and asked Jesus to come into my life. I got down on my knees and prayed with all my heart. I wanted to be saved from the misery so bad. Well, as I was praying and pleading with God, I felt… nothing. Absolutely nothing. No spirit, no uplifting experience. No sense that everything would be OK. Not even a little twinge of evidence that God was with me. I even remember the prayer counselor getting a little short with me, like as in “Hey buddy Iʼve got other calls.” Well for the next few days I continued going through the serious withdrawals. I didnʼt sleep for two nights. It was the worst experience my body had ever endured. The religious experience I had hoped for didnʼt come close to happening. I have never drank again since that experience, but it wasnʼt because I was saved by God, it was because I never wanted to feel that way again. Many will say that it was God, but I know better. It was me finally wanting to turn my miserable life around. Years later I tried to find God again. My wife and I decided to join a local church and get the kids baptized…


The life of the late evangelist A.A. Allen is proof that one can preach Christ and drink himself to death at the same time. His last months were living in a drunken state in a run down hotel room making audio evangelistic tapes for his radio broadcasts while in a drunken state:

On June 14, 1970, listeners in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines were hearing a recorded message from A. A. Allen on his radio program saying: “This is Brother Allen in person. Numbers of friends of mine have been inquiring about reports they have heard concerning me that are not true. People as well as some preachers from pulpits are announcing that I am dead. Do I sound like a dead man? My friends, I am not even sick! Only a moment ago I made a reservation to fly into our current campaign. Iʼll see you there and make the devil a liar.” At that moment, at the Jack Tar Hotel in San Francisco, police were removing A. A. Allenʼs body from a room strewn with pills and empty liquor bottles. The man who had once said that “the beer bottle and gin bucket” should have been on his family coat of arms was dead at 59 from what was said to be a heart attack but was in reality liver failure brought about by acute alcoholism. (p.88)

SOURCE: The Faith Healers by James Randi, section on Asa Alonzo Allen (1911-1970). Prominent, flamboyant and controversial Pentecostal “healing evangelist” of the 1940s-1960s. Allen made many outrageous, unsubstantiated claims of miracles.

Harry McCall, ex-fundamentalist seminarian, and son of an alcoholic parent, adds this

If a person can get to a place where alcohol hurts more than it helps, they can quit. Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists and any other non-“Jesus” religions can and do put depressed people on a spiritual journey and often apart from any god in the sky.

The fact is, when one is burned out by a section of their life of drugs and alcohol and their body is shutting down, what else can one do but to either change or die.

Call it “god” of self determination…both seem to work and boil down to that if help has a social support context, itʼs religion; if not, itʼs self determination.

Leaving the Fold : A Few Brits Discuss Their Experiences and Reasons for Leaving the Fold after having tried to defend and promote Christianity

Paul Wright

Paul Wright

gjm11 is someone Iʼve known for years, initially through the uk.religion.christian newsgroup, and then through LiveWires. Heʼs a very clever man. Since my own loss of faith, Iʼve sometimes wondered about the very clever people I know who are Christians (gjm11 among them), and how they manage to sustain their faith in the face of (what I see as) the serious intellectual flaws in Christianity.

Unbeknown to me, gjm11 had been thinking hard about it for a while, and recently announced that he is no longer a Christian. He has an essay on the web where he outlines some of the main reasons for his deconversion. The enormous thread on uk.religion.christian which followed his announcement is, I think, interesting to anyone who wonders about how people get, keep and lose faith.

Gareth McCaughan