Why I Am Not A Christian - Bertrand Russell

As your Chairman has told you, the subject about which I am going to speak to you tonight is "Why I Am Not a Christian." Perhaps it would be as well, first of all, to try to make out what one means by the word Christian. It is used these days in a very loose sense by a great many people. Some people mean no more by it than a person who attempts to live a good life. In that sense I suppose there would be Christians in all sects and creeds; but I do not think that that is the proper sense of the word, if only because it would imply that all the people who are not Christians -- all the Buddhists, Confucians, Mohammedans, and so on -- are not trying to live a good life. I do not mean by a Christian any person who tries to live decently according to his lights. I think that you must have a certain amount of definite belief before you have a right to call yourself a Christian. The word does not have quite such a full-blooded meaning now as it had in the times of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In those days, if a man said that he was a Christian it was known what he meant. You accepted a whole collection of creeds which were set out with great precision, and every single syllable of those creeds you believed with the whole strength of your convictions.

What Is a Christian?

Nowadays it is not quite that. We have to be a little more vague in our meaning of Christianity. I think, however, that there are two different items which are quite essential to anybody calling himself a Christian. The first is one of a dogmatic nature -- namely, that you must believe in God and immortality. If you do not believe in those two things, I do not think that you can properly call yourself a Christian. Then, further than that, as the name implies, you must have some kind of belief about Christ. The Mohammedans, for instance, also believe in God and in immortality, and yet they would not call themselves Christians. I think you must have at the very lowest the belief that Christ was, if not divine, at least the best and wisest of men. If you are not going to believe that much about Christ, I do not think you have any right to call yourself a Christian. Of course, there is another sense, which you find in Whitaker's Almanack and in geography books, where the population of the world is said to be divided into Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, fetish worshipers, and so on; and in that sense we are all Christians. The geography books count us all in, but that is a purely geographical sense, which I suppose we can ignore.Therefore I take it that when I tell you why I am not a Christian I have to tell you two different things: first, why I do not believe in God and in immortality; and, secondly, why I do not think that Christ was the best and wisest of men, although I grant him a very high degree of moral goodness. But for the successful efforts of unbelievers in the past, I could not take so elastic a definition of Christianity as that. As I said before, in olden days it had a much more full-blooded sense. For instance, it included he belief in hell. Belief in eternal hell-fire was an essential item of Christian belief until pretty recent times. In this country, as you know, it ceased to be an essential item because of a decision of the Privy Council, and from that decision the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York dissented; but in this country our religion is settled by Act of Parliament, and therefore the Privy Council was able to override their Graces and hell was no longer necessary to a Christian. Consequently I shall not insist that a Christian must believe in hell.

The Existence of God

To come to this question of the existence of God: it is a large and serious question, and if I were to attempt to deal with it in any adequate manner I should have to keep you here until Kingdom Come, so that you will have to excuse me if I deal with it in a somewhat summary fashion. You know, of course, that the Catholic Church has laid it down as a dogma that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason. That is a somewhat curious dogma, but it is one of their dogmas. They had to introduce it because at one time the freethinkers adopted the habit of saying that there were such and such arguments which mere reason might urge against the existence of God, but of course they knew as a matter of faith that God did exist. The arguments and the reasons were set out at great length, and the Catholic Church felt that they must stop it. Therefore they laid it down that the existence of God can be proved by the unaided reason and they had to set up what they considered were arguments to prove it. There are, of course, a number of them, but I shall take only a few. 
 

The First-cause Argument

Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. (It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God.) That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have; but, apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question 'Who made me?' cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question `Who made god?'" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause. 
 

The Natural-law Argument

Then there is a very common argument from natural law. That was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for explanations of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the law of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced. I do not propose to give you a lecture on the law of gravitation, as interpreted by Einstein, because that again would take some time; at any rate, you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion. We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have been regarded as laws of nature are of that kind. On the other hand, where you can get down to any knowledge of what atoms actually do, you will find they are much less subject to law than people thought, and that the laws at which you arrive are statistical averages of just the sort that would emerge from chance. There is, as we all know, a law that if you throw dice you will get double sixes only about once in thirty-six times, and we do not regard that as evidence that the fall of the dice is regulated by design; on the contrary, if the double sixes came every time we should think that there was design. The laws of nature are of that sort as regards a great many of them. They are statistical averages such as would emerge from the laws of chance; and that makes this whole business of natural law much less impressive than it formerly was. Quite apart from that, which represents the momentary state of science that may change tomorrow, the whole idea that natural laws imply a lawgiver is due to a confusion between natural and human laws. Human laws are behests commanding you to behave a certain way, in which you may choose to behave, or you may choose not to behave; but natural laws are a description of how things do in fact behave, and being a mere description of what they in fact do, you cannot argue that there must be somebody who told them to do that, because even supposing that there were, you are then faced with the question "Why did God issue just those natural laws and no others?" If you say that he did it simply from his own good pleasure, and without any reason, you then find that there is something which is not subject to law, and so your train of natural law is interrupted. If you say, as more orthodox theologians do, that in all the laws which God issues he had a reason for giving those laws rather than others -- the reason, of course, being to create the best universe, although you would never think it to look at it -- if there were a reason for the laws which God gave, then God himself was subject to law, and therefore you do not get any advantage by introducing God as an intermediary. You really have a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve your purpose, because he is not the ultimate lawgiver. In short, this whole argument about natural law no longer has anything like the strength that it used to have. I am traveling on in time in my review of the arguments. The arguments that are used for the existence of God change their character as time goes on. They were at first hard intellectual arguments embodying certain quite definite fallacies. As we come to modern times they become less respectable intellectually and more and more affected by a kind of moralizing vagueness. 
 

The Argument from Design

The next step in the process brings us to the argument from design. You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application. It is an easy argument to parody. You all know Voltaire's remark, that obviously the nose was designed to be such as to fit spectacles. That sort of parody has turned out to be not nearly so wide of the mark as it might have seemed in the eighteenth century, because since the time of Darwin we understand much better why living creatures are adapted to their environment. It is not that their environment was made to be suitable to them but that they grew to be suitable to it, and that is the basis of adaptation. There is no evidence of design about it. When you come to look into this argument from design, it is a most astonishing thing that people can believe that this world, with all the things that are in it, with all its defects, should be the best that omnipotence and omniscience have been able to produce in millions of years. I really cannot believe it. Do you think that, if you were granted omnipotence and omniscience and millions of years in which to perfect your world, you could produce nothing better than the Ku Klux Klan or the Fascists? Moreover, if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.
 I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things.

The Moral Arguments for Deity

Now we reach one stage further in what I shall call the intellectual descent that the Theists have made in their argumentations, and we come to what are called the moral arguments for the existence of God. You all know, of course, that there used to be in the old days three intellectual arguments for the existence of God, all of which were disposed of by Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason; but no sooner had he disposed of those arguments than he invented a new one, a moral argument, and that quite convinced him. He was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed implicitly in the maxims that he had imbibed at his mother's knee. That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times. Kant, as I say, invented a new moral argument for the existence of God, and that in varying forms was extremely popular during the nineteenth century. It has all sorts of forms. One form is to say there would be no right or wrong unless God existed. I am not for the moment concerned with whether there is a difference between right and wrong, or whether there is not: that is another question. The point I am concerned with is that, if you are quite sure there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are in this situation: Is that difference due to God's fiat or is it not? If it is due to God's fiat, then for God himself there is no difference between right and wrong, and it is no longer a significant statement to say that God is good. If you are going to say, as theologians do, that God is good, you must then say that right and wrong have some meaning which is independent of God's fiat, because God's fiats are good and not bad independently of the mere fact that he made them. If you are going to say that, you will then have to say that it is not only through God that right and wrong came into being, but that they are in their essence logically anterior to God. You could, of course, if you liked, say that there was a superior deity who gave orders to the God that made this world, or could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up -- a line which I often thought was a very plausible one -- that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it.

The Argument for the Remedying of Injustice

Then there is another very curious form of moral argument, which is this: they say that the existence of God is required in order to bring justice into the world. In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying; but if you are going to have justice in the universe as a whole you have to suppose a future life to redress the balance of life here on earth. So they say that there must be a God, and there must be Heaven and Hell in order that in the long run there may be justice. That is a very curious argument. If you looked at the matter from a scientific point of view, you would say, "After all, I only know this world. I do not know about the rest of the universe, but so far as one can argue at all on probabilities one would say that probably this world is a fair sample, and if there is injustice here the odds are that there is injustice elsewhere also." Supposing you got a crate of oranges that you opened, and you found all the top layer of oranges bad, you would not argue, "The underneath ones must be good, so as to redress the balance." You would say, "Probably the whole lot is a bad consignment"; and that is really what a scientific person would argue about the universe. He would say, "Here we find in this world a great deal of injustice, and so far as that goes that is a reason for supposing that justice does not rule in the world; and therefore so far as it goes it affords a moral argument against deity and not in favor of one." Of course I know that the sort of intellectual arguments that I have been talking to you about are not what really moves people. What really moves people to believe in God is not any intellectual argument at all. Most people believe in God because they have been taught from early infancy to do it, and that is the main reason. Then I think that the next most powerful reason is the wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you. That plays a very profound part in influencing people's desire for a belief in God.

The Character of Christ

I now want to say a few words upon a topic which I often think is not quite sufficiently dealt with by Rationalists, and that is the question whether Christ was the best and the wisest of men. It is generally taken for granted that we should all agree that that was so. I do not myself. I think that there are a good many points upon which I agree with Christ a great deal more than the professing Christians do. I do not know that I could go with Him all the way, but I could go with Him much further than most professing Christians can. You will remember that He said, "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." That is not a new precept or a new principle. It was used by Lao-tse and Buddha some 500 or 600 years before Christ, but it is not a principle which as a matter of fact Christians accept. I have no doubt that the present prime minister [Stanley Baldwin], for instance, is a most sincere Christian, but I should not advise any of you to go and smite him on one cheek. I think you might find that he thought this text was intended in a figurative sense. Then there is another point which I consider excellent. You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged." That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians, and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did. Then Christ says, "Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away." That is a very good principle. Your Chairman has reminded you that we are not here to talk politics, but I cannot help observing that the last general election was fought on the question of how desirable it was to turn away from him that would borrow of thee, so that one must assume that the Liberals and Conservatives of this country are composed of people who do not agree with the teaching of Christ, because they certainly did very emphatically turn away on that occasion.
 Then there is one other maxim of Christ which I think has a great deal in it, but I do not find that it is very popular among some of our Christian friends. He says, "If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that which thou hast, and give to the poor." That is a very excellent maxim, but, as I say, it is not much practised. All these, I think, are good maxims, although they are a little difficult to live up to. I do not profess to live up to them myself; but then, after all, it is not quite the same thing as for a Christian.

Defects in Christ's Teaching

Having granted the excellence of these maxims, I come to certain points in which I do not believe that one can grant either the superlative wisdom or the superlative goodness of Christ as depicted in the Gospels; and here I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about him, so that I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought that His second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, "Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man be come." Then he says, "There are some standing here which shall not taste death till the Son of Man comes into His kingdom"; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that He believed that His second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of His earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of His moral teaching. When He said, "Take no thought for the morrow," and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought that the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe that the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them that the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden. The early Christians did really believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In that respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He was certainly not superlatively wise. 
 

The Moral Problem

Then you come to moral questions. There is one very serious defect to my mind in Christ's moral character, and that is that He believed in hell. I do not myself feel that any person who is really profoundly humane can believe in everlasting punishment. Christ certainly as depicted in the Gospels did believe in everlasting punishment, and one does find repeatedly a vindictive fury against those people who would not listen to His preaching -- an attitude which is not uncommon with preachers, but which does somewhat detract from superlative excellence. You do not, for instance find that attitude in Socrates. You find him quite bland and urbane toward the people who would not listen to him; and it is, to my mind, far more worthy of a sage to take that line than to take the line of indignation. You probably all remember the sorts of things that Socrates was saying when he was dying, and the sort of things that he generally did say to people who did not agree with him. You will find that in the Gospels Christ said, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Hell." That was said to people who did not like His preaching. It is not really to my mind quite the best tone, and there are a great many of these things about Hell. There is, of course, the familiar text about the sin against the Holy Ghost: "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost it shall not be forgiven him neither in this World nor in the world to come." That text has caused an unspeakable amount of misery in the world, for all sorts of people have imagined that they have committed the sin against the Holy Ghost, and thought that it would not be forgiven them either in this world or in the world to come. I really do not think that a person with a proper degree of kindliness in his nature would have put fears and terrors of that sort into the world.
 Then Christ says, "The Son of Man shall send forth his His angels, and they shall gather out of His kingdom all things that offend, and them which do iniquity, and shall cast them into a furnace of fire; there shall be wailing and gnashing of teeth"; and He goes on about the wailing and gnashing of teeth. It comes in one verse after another, and it is quite manifest to the reader that there is a certain pleasure in contemplating wailing and gnashing of teeth, or else it would not occur so often. Then you all, of course, remember about the sheep and the goats; how at the second coming He is going to divide the sheep from the goats, and He is going to say to the goats, "Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire." He continues, "And these shall go away into everlasting fire." Then He says again, "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off; it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into Hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched; where the worm dieth not and the fire is not quenched." He repeats that again and again also. I must say that I think all this doctrine, that hell-fire is a punishment for sin, is a doctrine of cruelty. It is a doctrine that put cruelty into the world and gave the world generations of cruel torture; and the Christ of the Gospels, if you could take Him asHis chroniclers represent Him, would certainly have to be considered partly responsible for that.
 There are other things of less importance. There is the instance of the Gadarene swine, where it certainly was not very kind to the pigs to put the devils into them and make them rush down the hill into the sea. You must remember that He was omnipotent, and He could have made the devils simply go away; but He chose to send them into the pigs. Then there is the curious story of the fig tree, which always rather puzzled me. You remember what happened about the fig tree. "He was hungry; and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, He came if haply He might find anything thereon; and when He came to it He found nothing but leaves, for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it: 'No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever' . . . and Peter . . . saith unto Him: 'Master, behold the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away.'" This is a very curious story, because it was not the right time of year for figs, and you really could not blame the tree. I cannot myself feel that either in the matter of wisdom or in the matter of virtue Christ stands quite as high as some other people known to history. I think I should put Buddha and Socrates above Him in those respects.

The Emotional Factor

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler's book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshiped under the name of the "Sun Child," and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the Feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the high priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says, "I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon." He was told, "You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into Heaven they will all become wicked"; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away. That is the idea -- that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.
 You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

How the Churches Have Retarded Progress

You may think that I am going too far when I say that that is still so. I do not think that I am. Take one fact. You will bear with me if I mention it. It is not a pleasant fact, but the churches compel one to mention facts that are not pleasant. Supposing that in this world that we live in today an inexperienced girl is married to a syphilitic man; in that case the Catholic Church says, "This is an indissoluble sacrament. You must endure celibacy or stay together. And if you stay together, you must not use birth control to prevent the birth of syphilitic children." Nobody whose natural sympathies have not been warped by dogma, or whose moral nature was not absolutely dead to all sense of suffering, could maintain that it is right and proper that that state of things should continue. That is only an example. There are a great many ways in which, at the present moment, the church, by its insistence upon what it chooses to call morality, inflicts upon all sorts of people undeserved and unnecessary suffering. And of course, as we know, it is in its major part an opponent still of progress and improvement in all the ways that diminish suffering in the world, because it has chosen to label as morality a certain narrow set of rules of conduct which have nothing to do with human happiness; and when you say that this or that ought to be done because it would make for human happiness, they think that has nothing to do with the matter at all. "What has human happiness to do with morals? The object of morals is not to make people happy."

Fear, the Foundation of Religion

Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly upon fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown and partly, as I have said, the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in all your troubles and disputes. Fear is the basis of the whole thing -- fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death. Fear is the parent of cruelty, and therefore it is no wonder if cruelty and religion have gone hand in hand. It is because fear is at the basis of those two things. In this world we can now begin a little to understand things, and a little to master them by help of science, which has forced its way step by step against the Christian religion, against the churches, and against the opposition of all the old precepts. Science can help us to get over this craven fear in which mankind has lived for so many generations. Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it. 
 

What We Must Do

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

Updating files: 1 out of 23467897654345...

Dated 6 May 2013 and edited 31 May 2013:

Havn't written a post about everything trivial that has been going on in my life.

1. 66km night cycling with Mingxuan, Tiongann and Martin.
It will be a night I'll remember for many nights (:

2. Selected for Exercise Wallaby.
Will be going to Australia in October.
looking forward to it because it'll mean that it is time to clear all of our offs and leaves after that. (AND THEN ORD LO)

3. Done with PC1141 (Mechanics), first half of PC1142 (Thermodynamics), and completing PC1143 (Electromagnetism) soon. (hopefully today).
Next up, second half of PC1142 (Optics) and PC1144 (Modern Physics - Special Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Nuclear and Particle Physics, Condensed Matter Physics and Cosmology)
Can't wait for Modern Physics. YEAH.

5. Had my first driving lessons, and woah it really is difficult to drive a car.
I NEED MORE PRACTICE.
Stalled my car on the curb SIGHHH hahaha.
Need to get used to it.

6. met with 48th guys.
Had lunch at amk hub's new york.
havn't seen everyone in the longest time (:

lepak with guys at the pub at serangoon gardens at night.
talked until the bar closed, before we had prata for supper.
Zihui went home after that; Joel, Chinhow and I walked to Nex from Serangoon gardens, and we talked along the way.
learnt a lot of things.

Good night spent.

7. Watched 'The importance of being earnest' with Ming Xuan, Tiong Ann and Martin.

LOL the play really played on the 'earnest' pun LOL.

It was good. Couldn't catch much of the first part (their accent was strong) but the twist at the second part was... WOAHHHHH.

8. Met up with the '82 gang' (HAHAHAH havn't called us that for a long time hehehe)

Ate at Ministry of Food at Bugis. yupxz money well spent!

Well, it was basically time for the girls to tell us all the exciting stuff that has been happening in their lives (walao all go bkk BOJIO) while the guys talked about our non-existent lives HAHAHAH.

9. Went to recce for 30km night cycling with ming xuan, martin and tiong ann and it was fun!!!

was actually tired and wanted to sleep but I dragged my lazy ass out of the house.

Saw vivi randomly at a bus stop omg HAHAHA WHY SO QIAO. (At Yishun some more.. not a place we frequent)

Went for prata after that, and shiokkk!!!!!!!

booked in for duty the next day. OH WELLZ.

10. I am getting FAT.
and I'm back to playing maple HAHAHA. (for a little while)
gotta find time for guitar and coding too. (SIGH Coding is really difficult)

11. The upcoming months are going to be busy!

k thx bye shall try and finish EM waves today.

After all these years.

As a boy, I attended a Mennonite church next to cornfields in rural South Dakota. I went to that church every Sunday, both to the morning service and to Sunday school. To the best of my knowledge, I never missed a day of vacation Bible school nor did I ever miss the choir practices that came every Wednesday evening during the school year. I prayed before every meal and before I went to bed, then, as I got older, whenever things got tough. Though understand that ‘tough,’ at the age of 13, is not exactly what I would consider ‘tough’ now. But I’m sure it seemed like a big deal at the time, whatever my girl problems happened to be. It never crossed my mind that I should be praying for the souls of others. And it definitely never entered my that if I believed I’d be going to heaven someday I should be living my life in accordance with the Bible. That kind of thing seemed like stuff for crazy people. 

Still, even without God heavy in my life, I was an obedient adolescent out of reverence for my parents. In high school, I didn’t drink. I didn’t have sex. I certainly didn’t do drugs. In college, though, all those things become available, and since I had never tried them but wanted to – and now that my parents wouldn’t find out — I would. So, somewhere at the end of my first semester at South Dakota State University, I attended a party in the dorm next to mine and had my first, slightly buzzed, make out with a girl. We ended up in her room and I was terrified. Not only because I had never done it before, but much more before of the fear of getting her pregnant. I would live the rest of my life with her and the kids we would make because I drank a cup and a half of Coors Light. I remember thinking how disappointed my parents would be. My life would be over. So I prayed. I prayed for the first time for something that was real and pressing.

“God,” I said as she did what she did, drunkenly, with my penis. “I don’t know what I’m doing here. But I don’t want to get this girl pregnant. I want to do so many other things in my life. Please, help me. I promise I’ll start following You with all of my heart. Please.” And, like that, the seed was planted, just like I imagine other seeds have been planted. Someone afraid of what the world might hold reaches out for something larger to help him through a time he is not yet ready to handle. So, there I was, walking up the stairs back to my dorm, pulling up my pants, and fully in God’s hands. And though I didn’t immediately go out on the street corner with a ‘The End is Near’ sign, I would start my journey by attending meetings for a group that almost did that sort of thing. I began going to Campus Crusade for Christ meetings the end of my freshman year. Just a couple at first, dipping my toes into a world where everyone was very open, asking me often questions that never failed to make me uncomfortable, ‘So, Jeffrey, how are you doing in your Walk with the Lord?”

It wasn’t till sophomore year, after a conference over Christmas break, that I started to truly give my life to God. In Minneapolis, with a host of other college aged kids from all over Midwest, I really learned that I wasn’t living for Him. I needed to give ALL of myself. That idea hadn’t yet hit home, but after hearing a charismatic speaker talk on the subject I left that conference knowing what I do for the rest of my life. I would be a missionary. If Jesus was real,, it was the only profession that mattered. So, with my new-found knowledge of God, I went back to school and progressed in my Walk and sometime in my junior year I decided to renew my faith by “praying the prayer.” I was lying down in my lofted bed in a house that had actually once been a church and while I know others will be critical when I say this, I felt something. At least, I know I tried to feel something.

For the rest of that junior year, I read the Bible and wrote the verses that resonated with me on little sticky notes and put them up around my room. I got heavily into alt Christian music and the summer between my junior and senior went on a Summer Project, as they’re called in Campus Crusade. I went to Colorado where I worked at a day care with other Campus Crusade college kids during the day and on nights and weekends I proselytized in downtown Ft. Collins. It never crossed my mind that I was living in America in the 21st Century and that if someone hadn’t heard about Jesus they’d probably been raised by wolves. I guess I never stopped to think about that.

After that summer, I went back for my senior year of college, sure that one day I would be a missionary. I became a leader in our Campus Crusade group, as well as the emcee for the weekly meetings. I lead others into a relationship with Jesus. After that school year, I interned at a Christian music magazine in Texas and it is there that I have my first memories of deep guilt. All the details are probably not necessary, let’s just say I didn’t have a girlfriend and I did have a computer. I can remember feeling after it was done, and very pervasively for the first time in my life, that I needed to shower in order to function again. And as the water would go down my face and shoulders I would pray, out loud, for God to forgive me. Sometimes, it would be weeks before I felt right again.

Now, you may think I’m crazy, and you may be right, I might have been. I might have been predisposed to feeling like that and other Christians maybe aren’t so racked with guilt. But, I think, people who have never lived in this realm would be amazed to hear how many other Christians were exactly like me. They have desires. They act on them. Then they feel guilty and ask for forgiveness. Then, when they don’t feel forgiven, they’re frustrated from not feeling forgiven, so they return to their desires to quell the frustration and afterwards they feel guilty again. So it goes like that, on and on forever. For me, in those late years of college and the couple years into my early 20s, I had those desires but couldn’t act on them because I had been told, and I believed it because it was in the Bible, that any kind of relations with a woman outside of the bounds of marriage was sinful. That was that and there was nothing I could about but wait until God gave me the wife of my dreams. In the meantime, it just seemed like this lust thing would have to be something I, with God’s help, would have to conquer. Eventually we would best this demon of desiring naked women. And when that happened, when I finally “got right,” I would be given a wife and she would be the one who would satisfy all my desires. I don’t need to go into the theology of all this now, but I will say it’s there for anyone to read. Though if you’re someone you takes the Bible metaphorically, there’s really nothing to debate. Anyway, I fully believed that having a wife would rid of me of the guilty thoughts and my desires to want to see other women naked. And I prayed for her, for God to send her, constantly.

But my desires, they didn’t go away. I student-taught for my final semester of college and I did the same things and felt guilty. I got a job as a dentition supervisor at a high school after college and I did the same things and felt guilty. I felt guilty all the time, even for entertaining the idea of seeing a naked woman. I didn’t doubt that God existed, I still would defend Him, but I was dumbfounded at why He wouldn’t help me out of my cycle. Then, it seemed, just as I losing hope, all my prayers were answered. I found a job at a Christian group home in Nebraska and even though I went there with the intention of “getting clean,” like a detox clinic for my lust, I still had a secret hope that maybe, somehow, way out in the middle of nowhere, working with eight other people in a town of about 1,000, some way, somehow, one of them would be the woman of my dreams. And Dear God in Heaven, that is exactly what happened. “M” came in the second week of working there and from the first moment I saw her, I knew, I absolutely knew and innately felt, this was the woman I was supposed to marry. I can remember talking with her one of those first days and being struck with how she was exactly how I envisioned my wife. In modern Christian terms, I was getting “The Call.” I was so thankful.

Now, since I’m not married, and since I’ve never been divorced nor engaged, you can assume things never worked out between M and myself. Though during that year of working with her in that small town, sometimes seeing her for nearly every hour of the day and even into the night because of the nature of our work, I prayed more than I had ever prayed my entire life. Right now, though, I can already feel it. I am sure many Christian apologists are out there pointing to the fact that God isn’t a genie. He isn’t here to grant us our dreams and that just because I believed in marriage with this woman and it didn’t happen doesn’t mean God isn’t alive. Well, even if that’s true, which it’s not (Psalms 37:4 and many other verses on God fulfilling the desires of His follower’s hearts) I still was left with the problem of trying to figure out why exactly He would have set this absolutely perfect woman right in front of me for an entire year. Even if he didn’t want me to marry her, what was the point of putting her there. To taunt me? So, after our year together and me praying, on average, two to three hours a day for her to be my wife, I went back to South Dakota alone. It took nearly two years until I could wake up and not entertain notions of moving to Iowa to try and win M’s heart. But who can blame me? She had come straight from God.

But M didn’t break me and God. I moved to Sioux Falls and looked for a good church with young people also in their mid-twenties, those who’d gone through trials and had questions but still wanted to believe. I began working a lot too. I had a night and a day job and didn’t really go to church but still identified as Christian. I would pray and wrestle with the whys and the hows of things and I know I must have still been trying because I can remember, in my first place in Sioux Falls, I had my internet turned on, then off, then on, then back off again, to save myself from lusting. I wanted to be prepared for the next time I met a Godly woman. And when I would, I would be fully ‘right’ with God, a thing other Christians had told me since M. I hadn’t been ‘right with God.’ Sin was holding me back and that was why it wasn’t time for me to have a wife. To this day, those kinds of conversations make my skin crawl. because essentially what they’re saying is this: God didn’t want me to be happy because I wasn’t good enough. I needed to pray more, give more, tell others about Jesus more. But exactly how much praying, giving, telling should I have been doing to have been deemed worthy by God for M’s love? I wanted, I still want, exact numbers. The problem is, if someone won’t give me real numbers, if they say instead, “Well, it’s just what’s in your heart” then we’re back to where we started because no one has any idea what was in my heart. No one knows how much I wanted to have a Godly marriage with M. It was all I wanted. In fact, to this day, I have never wanted anything more.

Without M, I began, back then, to think that maybe things were more arbitrary than what I had been told. But only kernels and shards of thoughts entered my mind. A year went by. I had just turned 25 and was still a virgin. I was depressed and played a lot of video games. The only thing I had going for me is I worked almost constantly so I had less time to feel sorry for myself. Then, somewhere in the fall of that year I visited Seattle. I loved it and my friends there told me I should I move, that it was time I got out. I said I was too old to just pick up and move. Secretly, the thought of a move was very exciting and I went back home buzzing with the idea.

But God wasn’t done with me because when I got back home I had a message from K in Alabama. “K,” from Myspace. Yes, Myspace. I know it sounds awful to say but you’ll have to believe me when I say K, on looks alone, was the most attractive person I have ever been associated with. If God does exist, then surely it can be considered a miracle I began talking with K and eventually went to visit her in Alabama. As for the visit? Well, it went great. We hit it off so well, naked just hours after meeting at the airport and before I left we talked about when I would move to Alabama, where I would live, and what I would do. It was all happening, this K, a thrower, who was once a wild pot smoker but now had a life focused on God, would be mine. I thanked God. I was to be a more evolved Christian. After the visit, I went back to South Dakota and when I got off the plane I had a message. It was K. She sounded a bit off, like something had gone wrong. And while it did worry me, it was late, and I had started to feel sick. I needed sleep. I figured things would be better in the morning. When the sun came up I called her and this is, as close to how I can remember, what she said.

“Jeffy, it’s just that God has spoke to me. I know this is hard, but He showed me a verse (I can’t remember the verse) and it spoke about what what we were doing. It just wasn’t right. I need a man who is going to be a spiritual leader. He shouldn’t be going to bed with me so easily. Please, understand, this is for the best.”

That afternoon, I went over to my sister and brother-in-law’s place for something or another that afternoon and immediately, like I was some kind of zombie, went up to my sister in her kitchen and hugged her. Then I began to cry, uncontrollably. I was hardly able to stop.

After that, I still had Christian friends of mine, even my brother in law who I love and I know only wanted the best for me, telling me there was something that God still wanted me to do before he would let me have a wife. By then, however, those words started to sound hollow and I began to have the scary thought that maybe I had only been believing in God so he could grant me a wife. It was ridiculous to believe in God for that reason but what was even more ridiculous is what the faith had taught me is that if I desired something with all my heart and if I was right with God, He would give me whatever I wanted. And, finally, that thinking scared me more than being alone.

I had to get as far away from Alabama as possible. A friend had just moved to Seattle and she knew people who needed a roommate there. That was wonderful, because I wanted to go back, but the people I’d be moving in with were Christians. Though they were kind of Christians who believed in gay marriage and leadership for women in the church and ending the tax cuts for the rich. I figured they might be going to a church which, somehow, could save my relationship with God. It would be a last resort, yes, but it was worth a shot. So I went to Seattle and I loved it. For the first time in my life I wasn’t feeling guilty if I drank (it was, for all intents and purposes, the first times I drank) and I didn’t feel guilty if I had sex (which began happening on a somewhat regular basis) and I didn’t feel guilty, just, in general. Not so coincidentally, at least I don’t think so, it was also the first time in my life that I would have said I did not believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Though I think what finally made it clear for me was attending that liberal church where my roommates went. Going there and seeing the rituals to make their service seem holy and their skits to make it seem relevant and hearing the sermons on anything but Jesus made me realize I resented non-church church more than I resented real church. I realized then that there was nothing left and it was, I have to admit, a lot like they say, like having the weight of the world taken off your shoulders.

Of course, it’d be hard to wrap it all up now, to tell exactly why I don’t believe. I suppose there’s no neat answer. No one has ever shown me the secrets of the universe so it’s possible a being created everything. Though, I like to think, the simplest answer is much more reasonable: yes, it is a miracle we’re here, but that the miracle does not involve God. In the end I suppose I could say it was a combination of everything: the guilt, the unfulfilled wife dream, the unanswered prayers, the silence, the contradiction in everything I was trying to tell others to believe, the way that it all just seemed to be much harder to believe than not to believe. But none of those things were enough of their own. I had to come to my own conclusion. We all do. 

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/why-i-am-not-a-christian/

After so many damned years.

I HAVE ISSUES.

I really don't know what the fuck I'm doing with my life.