May our world learn to see the infinite shades between black and white.

This week’s guest author is Mike McHargue, Author and Podcaster

Evolution shaped our brains to take shortcuts. Our senses relay to the brain a ceaseless, torrential downpour of stimulus and information, and so our neurons team up to sort and sift this stream into higher-order abstractions–mainly categorizations in the form of either/or classifications.

Prey or predator.
Edible or inedible.
Friend or Foe.

Modern civilization allows us the time and space to view the world with more nuance, but we generally don’t take advantage of it. A black-and-white, with-me-or-against-me worldview is just so easy for our brains, and therefore gratifying. So, we sort the world into oppositional camps via snap judgements that are hard to shake off.

Conservative or liberal.
Rich or poor.
Theist or atheist.

I understand this tendency–I was raised in the Southern Baptist tradition. I learned as a child to view the world almost exclusively in “this or that” terms–and it served me well. The world made sense, and I understood my place in it. The purpose of my life was to know and serve God–and that meant taking Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.

I had a crisis of faith in my thirties, and because I’d been taught you were either a theist or an atheist, I took the only option available to me and became an atheist. It’s a common tale, but mine has a twist. I was an atheist, yes, but also a deacon who taught Sunday School, and I was married to a good Baptist.

I didn’t believe in God anymore, but I loved my wife, Jenny. I knew if I admitted that I was on the other side of the theist/atheist divide, I could lose my marriage. So I did the only thing I could: I lied. I pretended to believe in God for two years.

In time, a small circle of friends and family became part of a small circle that new “my secret.” Pretending to believe in God every Sunday was fatiguing and I couldn’t keep up the facade. I started to plan by public exit from faith.

Then I encountered God.

That sounds like a line ripped from one of those Christian movies they play mainly at evangelical churches, but that’s not what I mean. Yes, I had an incredible, moving mystical experience that changed how I saw the world, but it wasn’t one that sent me back to my old faith. Not at all. I didn’t cross back over to the “theist” side of the fence.

I found myself lost, unable to fit with either camp.

Atheists lack belief in any God or gods. My encounter with a blinding light that made me feel known and loved knocked me out of that camp.

But theists believe in a personal God with an agency and a specific plan for humanity. They have sacred texts, and complex theological notions.

That wasn’t me either. I’d encountered a Great Something, maybe even a Great Everything, but that light didn’t recite the 10 commandments– or anything at all. It was just a presence; a moment of profound peace.

As an atheist, I was every bit as much a black-and-white thinker as I’d been as a Baptist, but I was in a state where neither binary view fit. Skeptics flatly dismissed such encounters as trickery from our brains, while theologians all made supernatural assumptions I couldn’t.

I was stuck. And then I heard a book mentioned in a YouTube video (of all places) called Why Christianity Must Change or Die. I bought it immediately because of a single word in the description: nontheist.

I’d never heard of a nontheist before, but as I turned the pages of Bishop Spong’s book, I felt at home. Here was someone compelled by the mystery of faith, and indeed by the person of Jesus, but who was also uncomfortable with a bunch of supernatural theologies bolted on to his teachings by centuries of Christianity.

It was from Bishop Spong that I learned of God as a Ground of Being or Source of All, and how to reclaim a faith I loved, but couldn’t stomach. Spong revealed a faith based on transformation, but without a rejection of science. But most of all, Bishop Spong showed me I was not alone–other people felt like the theist/atheist dichotomy is a false one.

That insight has become the animating energy behind my work today. I’m an author and podcaster who helps tens of thousands of people every week see beyond the forced categorization in our culture. I help the Church-in-exile realize they are not alone–that in fact there are millions of us. I count myself among the Christian nontheists, and in doing so help others to do the same.

May our world learn to see the infinite shades between black and white.

About the Author

Mike McHargue (better known as Science Mike) is the best-selling author of Finding God in the Waves, host of Ask Science Mike and co-host of The Liturgists Podcast. He’s a leading voice on matters of science and religion with a monthly reach in the hundreds of thousands. Mike lives in Tallahassee, FL with is wife Jenny and two daughters. Visit Mike’s website

Read the essay online here.

Question & Answer

Peter from Tasmania, Australia writes:
 

Question:

When Jesus said, "In my house there are many mansions," was he giving legitimacy to the other world religions like Islam and Buddhism?

 

Answer:

Dear Peter,

The quotation you cite is from the Gospel of John and most Biblical scholars doubt the literal historicity of any of the words attributed to Jesus in that text. They do not doubt, however, that this Gospel captures much of the meaning of Jesus in its narrative.

The idea that in the Kingdom of heaven there is room for all is one of those essential themes. Organized religion tends to become narrow in its focus to increase its power and to threaten those who think differently with exclusion from God's presence.

What we need to hear first is that every religious system is a human creation. For this reason alone no religious system can capture the fullness of God. God is not a Christian, a Moslem or a Jew. All religious systems are designed to help us walk into the mystery of God. Most of us walk via the cultural path into which we were born. It is natural to honor the pathway on which we have found holiness. What we do not seem to understand is that we do not bring honor to our pathway by being negative about someone else's pathway.

Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism have each produced millions of holy lives. So has Christianity. However, holiness is never found in that religious attitude that assumes that truth itself has been captured in my particular religious system. That attitude, rather, produces religious persecution, religious violence, religious bigotry and religious wars. There is far too much of that kind of religion in out world today.

I urge every person of faith to sink their lives deeply into all that their religious system can be but never to assume that God is a Being who can be known only through that tradition. God cannot be limited and the ultimate judgment about what is finally true belongs to God alone, not to us. So walk in love. Join hands with all those who seek God and a god-filled life. They are not the enemies of your religious convictions. They have simply found the Holy One in places different from ours. You and I must honor that place, for God is bigger than any religious system that any person has ever devised.

~ John Shelby Spong

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