Conversation with Andy
Conversation via e-mail exchange with Andy Horning
Copyright © 2008
Several have asked about "and my religion."
So, rather than indulge in many lengthy conversations to answer the same questions, I thought I'd post -- with his permission -- this e-mail exchange I had with Andy Horning in August, 2008.
If you still have questions, feel free to ask. I don't mind answering, but I try to avoid arguing. My friend Andy and I have two things in common: We both subscribe to libertarian views and we both ran for governor of Indiana as Libertarians, Andy in 2000 and 2008; I in 2004.
As you read, try to imagine choosing to believe the world is flat when you know it is round. Can you do it? Neither can I.
ANDY HORNING: Kenn, I sure would like to hear your story sometime. You had quite a voice! And I'd also like to know why you lost your faith. Were these two things related?
MY REPLY: I've always had a voice problem; just more serious in recent years.
Regarding the religious issue, I suppose it has to do with observing and experiencing religious people.
ANDY HORNING: Well, if you observe and experience people at all you have to conclude that we're a mess. The observation of atheists like myself is what made me lose my previous religion (atheism) about twenty years ago. Some time we must talk.
MY REPLY: I suppose I over simplified. There's a little more to it than that.
But, yes, when we both have time we can talk.
I had a long talk with my pastor about a year and a half ago and promised him I had no intention of deconverting anyone. That's still my intention. But dialog is always an option, nonetheless.
ANDY HORNING: Don't worry. I'm a Calvinist. I believe if you're chosen you're chosen; if you're not, you're not. I'm just curious, since the first thirty years of my life were rabidly militant atheist, it's always interesting to hear stories of conversion/deconversion.
MY REPLY: if you're interested... JUST BEYOND THE HORIZON
ANDY HORNING: Interestingly, I know several people who found God in physics. Ultimately, we choose our beliefs with our faulty minds. We could be no more than a dream in somebody else's mind (cogito ergo somebody else), but we must choose how our dream fits our senses.
MY REPLY: When I was little I was convinced there were monsters who lived in the closet. At night they would sneak under my bed. At first opportunity they would snatch me and carry me into their lair. I laid awake terrorized.
My dad turned on the light showing me there were no monsters in the closet. So I decided they must be hiding in the walls.
I find it interesting how the human mind adopts a belief system, then maneuvers around reason to accomodate absurdities. (Ever try talking rationally to a Mormon?)
Most evangelicals claim to be indwelt by the Holy Spirit. (Campbellites excepted.) But when you turn the light on and look inside, there's nothing there. For years I tried to logically manipulate my mind around the obvious, even preached on the topic from Romans 7 using Watchman Nee reference.
Eventually I had to admit the obvious: The reason I see no monster is there is no monster.
Your thoughts?
ANDY HORNING: You know your brain and senses are flawed. No matter how logical and studied you aim to be, you're still stumped, tricked and mistaken from time to time. You claim to look inside, but can you see even inside yourself. let alone others? How do you really know that other people exist? How can you so confidently trust any of your conclusions?
Why would you want to be so sure when that may not be the most functional mental programming? Kenn, I am convinced that there is a monster under your bed. It has eluded your mind and senses for years, and has been patiently waiting for just the right combination of confident disbelief, and a toe dropped over the side of the bed. Please do be careful.
MY REPLY: I agree with this:
"You know your brain and senses are flawed. No matter how logical and studied you aim to be, you're still stumped, tricked and mistaken from time to time. You claim to look inside, but can you see even inside yourself. let alone others? How do you really know that other people exist? How can you so confidently trust any of your conclusions? Why would you want to be so sure when that may not be the most functional mental programming?"
But this seems to contradict the above:
"I am convinced that there is a monster under your bed."
We can know nothing for certain. Shall we release the 2.1 million prison population? After all, we can't know for certain they are guilty. What about the 1,000+ inmates executed since 1976?
Believing in the supernatural simply because it can't be conclusively disproved (beyond the horizon) is about as rational as releasing the prison population because the prisoners' guilt can't be absolutely known.
ANDY HORNING: Well, I did make a leap with the monster under the bed. Perhaps I'm not certain. To me it came down to a functional decision. I was screwing up my life pretty badly and having an awful time without the monster. Believing in the monster was a surprising relief, a Deus Ex Machina for all my problems, and it worked wonders on me personally. Self-delusion? How can we do otherwise?
MY REPLY: There are certainly positive aspects of religion such behavior modification, social structure, benevolence, etc. For that reason I am very reluctant to talk about it, lest I talk someone out of a good thing.
If anyone's curious as to where I'm coming from, I'm happy to explain. I suppose in this brief e-mail exchange I've divulged more to you than most anyone.
ANDY HORNING: Kenn, I was something of a Saul until my conversion late in 1991. I argued with those crutch-using religious freaks a lot. I'd never met one who'd interrogated his/her faith very much, and I only exceedingly rarely met any Christian who'd actually made a study of their own Bible. It's hard to imagine that I've not heard all the arguments, as I expect I've made them all myself. I never was a "free choice" Christian, not even in the beginning, since from my respective, I did not at all want to be a Christian. I thought it the stupidest thing in the world. I'd read the Bible as ammunition against others, and became very well steeped in all the stories of revisions, intrigues and lies in the Bible. I picked out all the stupidest, contradictory claptrap, and used it all against others. To me this comes down to an existential coin toss. Some are picked, most are not. I understand that from the outside of my head this would appear to be a simple choice; believe or not. I'm OK with that too. It's also not like I don't doubt my own faith all the time. I certainly do. But as I have at least equal doubt about my previous faith, I don't see any reason to reject the one that I think works best for the one I know did not.
MY REPLY: I can't help but notice those who win the coin toss are those who live where the coins are being tossed. Why are the elect concentrated in the USA? Why were they once concentrated in Scotland? Northern Ireland? Does God not elect anyone in China?
And what about the Armenians? They read the same Bible as the Calvinists but draw opposite conclusions regarding coin-toss theology. How can that be?
These are questions I ask myself (not asking you, though you are welcomed to answer.) And this is the tip of the proverbial ice cube. It's a really big ice cube.
ANDY HORNING: You could say the same geographical thing about Democrats and Republicans. Or light people/dark people. Even gay/straight, or Catholic/Protestant, European/Chinese. But as you probably know, the number of practicing Christians is falling here and higher by percentage in regions of South America and Africa. Some say that China has more Christians (total number) than does the USA. And I get an entirely different read on the Constitution than does a Supreme Court judge bent on global domination. These things aren't problematic to me. In fact, one could say that the similarities and coincidences are proof of a designer and weigh against randomness. Nations are judged as are the people in them. I don't say that typically, but I've thought it (a lot) in relationship to physics and math. That is, of course, an enormous ice cube.
MY REPLY: Did I just see the monster move in the wall?
Again, I find it interesting how the human mind adopts a belief system, then maneuvers around reason to accommodate absurdities. Is it rational to believe that entire civilizations spanning hundreds of years and multiple generations are consigned to eternity in hell having been wholly unaware of Judeo or Christian god concept?
The Jehovah's Witnesses neatly maneuvered around this by simply denying hell's existence. Most evangelicals, however, would find that anathema.
ANDY HORNING: Well, if what we've been told has correct, there has never been a man alive who came before God and knowledge of Him in one way or another. We are told that we should be able to see evidence in every star and every leaf. That was part of my experience; a chaos theory devotee finding unwanted order while writing a paper on the ultrasound derivation of the constant Tau. There're lots of examples in the Bible of a priori experiences and conversions...most of which happened before the existence of a Bible. And most people simply do not want to believe in God, and only God chooses people, so why should He be compelled to save those He does not choose? God chooses which ant colony, and which ants live; the others get sprayed with malathion and bleach. The ants have nothing to say about it.
MY REPLY: You refer to Romans 1:20, "For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse"
This referenced those who "who hold the truth in unrighteousness." (See previous verses; v18 maybe.)
In other words, once you know God, THEN nature's evidence becomes apparent.
One would think that if the salvation message were clearly understood in nature, there would be multiple examples of great awakenings without precedence of evangelists (or prophets). One would think that someone, somewhere, in ancient Egypt's 1,000+ year history would have figured it out and left an historical record attesting to the fact. There is no such record in Egypt. None in Sumar. None in China, Japan or Asia. None in the Americas. None in Australia or sub Saharan Africa. That there are no such records argues in favor of the conclusion that the "God can be found in nature so you have no excuse" argument is invalid. Consider the millions of ancients spanning the continents for millenia. None found God through nature and left record to tell of it.
Strange?
Conclusion: To me the God-in-nature argument seems both illogical and bad theology.
ANDY HORNING: You speak of Biblical evidence as if I cared about that when I was converted...I did not. But I was referring to Psalm 19:1-4 as opposed to Romans 1:20. "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world." And if you're looking for evidence that a gubernatorial candidate held a press conference advocating the elimination of CPS/DCS (and he had 15 victims of that bureaucracy present), you'd find none. Not in Egypt, not in Sumar. Losers leave no history, do they? Even winners lose history from time to time. It took us 1800 years to figure out how the Romans made concrete, for example. I'll not mention the iterative/parallel/von Danekin-like historical episodes common to all cultures because I'm sure you've heard all that already. But just as historians are biased, and the creation of the Bible was biased (which books went in, which did not), and we can never know what got lost; one is always dependent upon what is evident in nature. We indeed have nothing else to judge anything by. It always comes back to our faulty senses and faulty brain choosing between apparently conflicting truths.
MY REPLY: I appreciate your insights.
However, I don't know what Romans and concrete have to do with the absence of historical evidence of conversions from nature. That leaves the problem of generations of humans being consigned to eternal hell without the slightest clue as to how they got there.
Anyhow, I've probably said more than I should. I have no interest in persuading anyone, but it's fun having a intelligent human with who to discuss these things.
ANDY HORNING: My concrete example was material to this discussion. Knowledge gets lost, sometimes even on purpose. The whole business of archaeology/history is to find what's been buried, hidden, twisted or inverted, after all. Particularly where religions are concerned, people can be pretty devious about squashing information forever. How do you know that there weren't conversions in the places you mentioned? Lack of evidence certainly isn't proof. And the Bible's pretty clear that most people who say they're saved aren't. There will never be more than a few chosen for eternity. The rest can be hardened like Pharaoh or employed like Babylon to serve God's eternal purpose. Seriously; don't worry about making me fall back to where I was for thirty years. I was a Democrat once too, y'know.
MY REPLY: I worry.
Years ago I saw a huge two-page-spread ad by Sun Myong Moon.
I can't be brainwashed, I thought. So I read the article.
Dumbest thing I ever read. Made no sense whatsoever. He made a grotesque reference to clearing one's throat which had no logical reason for being in his "sermon." My afterthought was, "How can anyone be brainwashed by this guy. He makes no sense."
The next day I cleared my throat and guess who I thought of?
Turns out the purpose of his sermon was not to make sense, but to make an indelible impression on the minds of readers. By associating a common, everyday behavior with himself, he lodged himself in the minds of his readers; and his image was evoked every time they cleared their throats. The purpose of all that: Our minds can be affected in ways we are unaware.
Back to your point:
That was the fundamental point of my "Beyond the Horizon" article.
Religion exists where it can't be seen.
Who's to say there's no sea monster beyond the horizon?
Who's to say there's no fountain of youth or city of gold in the jungle?
Who's to say there's no monster in the wall? Under the bed?
Who's to say there's no case when masses of people found the
Judeo-Christian religion by observing nature?
Supernatural religion: It's always beyond the horizon where it can't be
seen.
ANDY HORNING: That's how science works as well, though only from the inside. I can't tell you how many times we'd assemble data, then reassemble it with a log scale, and then delete some data that didn't fit, and then acquire some more data that would fit, until we arrived at a scientific fact.
The way knowledge is built is quite like building a card house with dry-rotted cards. Every now and then you find out that everything you knew for certain is completely wrong. Sometimes, as with Newtonian physics, it's still useful, and sticks around. Sometimes what we believe is the new truth is so freakish that it has no daily application.
And most of us don't know beans about any of that, but we have great faith in scientists. Knowledge is a vanity. Sometimes it serves a purpose, but mostly it deceives us.
It's pretty impressive how many scientists gain insights and make breakthroughs by the seat of their pants and not by the scientific method developed for such things. You can explain that to a degree with the quantum/random way the human mind is thought to work, but what does that leave you with ultimately? We're all just trying to negotiate through life by the crude tools of sensations and reason.
August, 2008
