In previous posts, I've mentioned that the choosing of a given worldview has a LOT to do with emotions and feelings. According to my observation, in USA it is very common that certain negative emotions and feelings (specially feelings of guilt, fear and anger) are connected with Christianity. Depending on the degree and intensity in which such negative emotions have affected a person, we will have a strong, militant atheist or "skeptic" (like the fans of Richard Dawkins, Randi, etc.), or a more spiritualy oriented anti-Christian person (the latter is the kind of person who will tend to like New-Age literature, oriental philosophies, the Jesus Seminar and other revisionistic views about the historical Jesus which depict a pluralisitc Jesus palatable to anti-Christian ears whose teachings fit what the anti-Christian person wants to hear).
This is a conclusion based on my careful observation of American people and the spectrum of their spiritual-religious preferences. I cannot say if the same applies to people of other countries, but I suppose that, mutatis mutandis, something similar applies to them, since the human nature is the same along all cultures.
It has to be said that my observation has been confirmed, at least to a certain extent, by other independent observers. For example, after his investigation (as an insider) among professional "skeptics" (specially the skeptical group PhACT, most of whom are militant atheists and secularists), agnostic David Leiter comments in his article "The pathology of organized skepticism": "I may have detected the reason, but only because I have continuously and closely observed and engaged so many of PhACT’s members. Sometimes that engagement has been adversarial and, thankfully, sometimes collegial, but mostly neutral. The theme that has emerged time after time, as I become closely acquainted with individual PhACT members is this: Each one who has disclosed personal details of their formative years, say up until their early 20’s, has had an unfortunate experience with a faith-based philosophy, most often a conventional major religion.
Very often, their family or community has (almost forcibly) imposed this philosophy on them from a very early age; but then as they matured, they threw off this philosophy with a vengeance, vowing at a soul level never to be so victimized again. Less often, it appears that they have instead voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced, for example, a New Age cult, or have become say, a born-again Christian. Then after a few years, they become convinced of the folly of that infatuation with the same basic result.
A person who has been duped frequently in everyday life might learn by bitter experience to be cautious and wary. The reaction of those who have joined PhACT is however more dysfunctional. They have been wounded at a deeper level, to the extent that what was purported to be a valid philosophy of life, and in which they were heavily involved, turns out to be empty and useless, even damaging, in their eyes. Thus, they gravitate to what appears to them to be the ultimate non-faith-based philosophy, Science" (emphasis in blue added).
Very often, their family or community has (almost forcibly) imposed this philosophy on them from a very early age; but then as they matured, they threw off this philosophy with a vengeance, vowing at a soul level never to be so victimized again. Less often, it appears that they have instead voluntarily and enthusiastically embraced, for example, a New Age cult, or have become say, a born-again Christian. Then after a few years, they become convinced of the folly of that infatuation with the same basic result.
A person who has been duped frequently in everyday life might learn by bitter experience to be cautious and wary. The reaction of those who have joined PhACT is however more dysfunctional. They have been wounded at a deeper level, to the extent that what was purported to be a valid philosophy of life, and in which they were heavily involved, turns out to be empty and useless, even damaging, in their eyes. Thus, they gravitate to what appears to them to be the ultimate non-faith-based philosophy, Science" (emphasis in blue added).
This "wound at a deeper level" is exaclty what I suggested has affected many anti-Christians in USA. It is the level of the wound which will determine if the individual in question will tend towards extreme (or moderate) forms atheism or rather (if the wound is superficial) towards anti-Christian spiritualities and New-Age based religions. (Remember that we have using Christianity as an example, because this is the leading and most influential religion in USA and hence it is the one to which wounded people will tend to react against).
I explained too that Americans have been familiar mostly with a version of Christianity which tends to be anti-intellectual, anti-scientific, dogmatic and obscurantist, and that they tend to be ignorant of the brilliant minds in the history of Christianity and the intellectual sophistication of classical and contemporary Christian theology and philosophy.
As consequence of this ignorance plus the negative emotions associated with Christianity, Americans anti-Christians tend to have a strong prejudice against Christians in general and will apply a double standard in their evaluation of Christian literature. For example, when evaluating scholarship about the historical Jesus, they will tend to consider the liberal scholars to be more reliable and objective than the Christian ones (a prejudice similar to the atheist's lack of confidence in serious professional parapsychologists like Dean Radin and in turn will give sympathetic credibility to what professional skeptics like Randi or Wiseman or Blackmore publish or say about psychic research. The double standard guarantees that the skeptical atheist will be confirmed in his belief that ESP doesn't exist).
Holly Ordway, PhD, was a telling example of this kind of atheistic mindset. She is an academic and scholar (with a doctorate in English Literature), who thought that Christianity was a purely faith-based and anti-intellectual blind faith belief system, with not rational basis at all. However, after carefully studying Christianity and its most sophisticated defenders (like CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, John Donne, William Lane Craig, NT Wright, Gary Habermas, etc.) she has had a completely different view of theism, and eventually became a Christian theist.
Her atheism was of the extreme, arrogant, condescending, "I'm-smarter-than-you" hostile type. For example, in a typicaly arrogant, ego-based, self-congratulatory atheistic fashion, Ordway thought "It was fun to consider myself superior to the unenlightened, superstitious masses, and to make snide comments about Christians". Her academic credentials deluded ther into the belief that she was intellectually superior than other people, specially the supposedly ignorant and intellectually inferior Christians.
Since wishful thinking is extremely common among atheists, Orway wasn't an exception. She confesses "I thought I knew exactly what faith was, and so I declined to look further.... Easier by far to read only books by atheists that told me what I wanted to hear – that I was much smarter and intellectually honest and morally superior than the poor, deluded Christians"
The tendecy of reading or hearing only what one wants to hear is a very dangerous one as I've explained in previous posts. This tendency explains, for example, Ordway's atheistic confidence that atheists were morally superior than other people (a common delusion among atheists, which itself is evidence for Jime's Iron Law), even when the ideological champions of atheism are the main defenders of moral nihilism, relativism and subjectivism, because they fully realize that the atheistic worldview cannot provide any grounds for the objectivity of moral values (nor of moral responsability or moral free choice). On the contrary, atheism, in its contemporary naturalistic-materialistic version, positively excludes any objective moral values or other person-relative properties (like free will or consciousness).
Ordway's book Not God's Type is an interesting book explaining his journey from atheism to Christian theism. I highly recommend this book for people who want to study the factors which make a person to change her worldview.
Watch this lecture by Ordway about his journey from atheism to theism:
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