Editor’s Note: Here’s the latest in the correspondence between “Common Sense Atheist” and me (Mark Van Steenwyk). Go HERE to read Luke’s (he’s the atheist) initial letter. My response was posted here.  To mix things up, all future letters in this series written by me will be posted over at Common Sense Atheism. And all letters written by Luke will be posted here. Luke and I feel like this will foster deeper conversation as neither of us will be preaching to our respective choirs. Luke’s latest is below.

Mark,

You’re right, there is a faint hope you could play a role in my reconversion to Christianity. I will always keep an open mind.

My apologies for the length of this letter. I had to break it into sections.

Your questions for me

1) What drives your desire to engage people of faith regarding the unreasonablity of their faith?

When it first happened, my discovery of critical thinking (and consequently, atheism) was the worst thing that ever happened to me. It was gut-wrenching. Terrifying. Heartbreaking. I wished I could go back in time and never gain an interest in critical thinking – that horrible devil that destroyed my faith, killed my best friend (God), made my relationships difficult, and demolished all the meaning and purpose I had in life. I kept hoping it was all a nightmare. I would wake up one day and be a happy Christian once again, oblivious to logic and epistemology and Historical Jesus studies and philosophy of religion. I could just live out the beautiful mission of Jesus with the help of my good friend Mark, and all would be good.

Later, I found that life via critical thinking was pretty cool. The universe we find ourselves in, as revealed by science, is more surprising and wonderful than any religious fairy tale crafted by human minds. Indeed, reality turns out to be bigger and stranger than human minds can imagine. You can’t make this shit up. Literally.

I also discovered, as hundreds of millions of atheists around the world already knew, that life can be full of purpose and meaning and morality without God.

It turned out that my discovery of critical thinking and atheism was the best thing that ever happened to me. And when something transforms your life for the better, you want to share it with people. So that’s one reason I engage people of faith.

But Christianity had transformed my life for the better, too. So there’s something else going on here. It’s this: I engage people of faith because I care about the truth.

Truth matters. If God does not exist, billions of believers are wasting a lot of time and money and resources that could be devoted instead to making the world a better place. If God does not exist then believers need not fight back science that happens to contradict their Iron Age mythologies. If God does not exist, then believers need not hate and fight and kill each other over whose Book is right or whose religious doctrines are correct. If God does not exist, believers need not terrify their children with fears of hell, or tell them it’s the next life that matters, or train them to accept magical explanations rather than encourage their curiosity to figure out how the world really works. If God does not exist then we don’t need to play intellectual Twister to make the demands of the Old and New Testament relevant and moral. We can just do what is relevant and moral.

Now, on to your second question for me:

2) You’ve said before that Jainism is a more ethical religious system than Christianity… I’d like to hear more on that.

Sure. Here is Sam Harris, in Letter to a Christian Nation, pages 11-12:

While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the “true” spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently – though isn’t it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed? Of course, many Christians believe that a harmless person like Martin Luther King, Jr., is the best exemplar of their religion. But this presents a serious problem, because the doctrine of Jainism is an objectively better guide for becoming like Martin Luther King, Jr. than  the doctrine of Christianity is. [In fact, MLK Jr. got his non-violent methods from Gandhi, who got them from the Jains, in India.]

The first and most important commitment in Jainism is the doctrine of ahimsa, non-violence. Jainism without a commitment to non-violence is like Christianity without affirmation of the existence of God or the resurrection of Jesus.

Here’s another way of seeing what I’m trying to say. After 2600 years of schisms and new sects, all Jain denominations still hold ahimsa to be their central commitment, though they disagree about ritual and cosmology and sainthood and so on. And after 2000 years of schisms and new sects, all Christian denominations still affirm the existence of God and the resurrection of Jesus, though they disagree about ritual and hierarchy and Biblical interpretation and so on. In Christianity, non-violence is affirmed only by a few small sects with a fairly heretical interpretation of Scripture. In Jainism, non-violence is affirmed by every sect, and always has been. That is what Harris means when he says that “Jainism is an objectively better guide for becoming like Martin Luther King, Jr. than… Christianity is.”

Put simply, I suspect the world would be a better place had Jainism become the world’s most successful religion rather than Christianity.

Finally, Mark, your third question:

3) What, do you believe, gives your life purpose and meaning?

I recently published a post called What is the Purpose of Life? The end result of my (greatly summarized) argumentation there was that, depending on your definition of “purpose”:

The purpose of life is to encourage desires that tend to fulfill other desires and discourage desires that tend to thwart other desires.

But that is not quite what you asked. You asked where my purpose comes from. My purpose does not come from the arbitrary will of a cosmic dictator. My purpose comes from objective facts about moral value in the real universe.

Clarifying my questions

I asked about your “basic Christian beliefs,” but I wasn’t referring to foundationalism. I just meant: “What is your Mere Christianity?” I assume it looks something like this:

1. God exists.
2. God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving.
3. God created this universe.
4. God wants to use humans to achieve his goals for humankind, which are…
5. God speaks to humans by way of the invisible sensus divinitatus inside each of us, with a method similar to telepathy.
6. God resurrected Jesus from the dead.
7. Jesus primary message while on earth was…

…and so on. It’s a fuzzy line between Mere and non-Mere Christianity, but all I meant was that you needn’t list proposition #72 of your Christian worldview: “The criteria for deciding which parts of the Jewish Law remain relevant to Christians today is…”

I’ll wait to hear back from you about what you mean by Christianity before I respond to your explication of why you think Christianity is true.

Also, since you’re sympathetic to those damned obscurantist postmodernists, I need to ask: By “truth” do you mean “that which corresponds to reality,” or something else?