My Smart Theist Friend

[sven]

Hello everyone!

I'd like to start by introducing myself briefly, and also by discussing something I've been thinking a lot about lately.
My name is Sven. I am Swedish, and I like to call myself a writer, although I work as a printer to support myself. I am also an experienced line cook, although I have managed to escape the horrors of the restaurant business.
I was raised in an atheist home. That does not mean that we called ourselves atheists, however. The subject of god and religion was simply something that almost never came up in our home. It would perhaps shock some people to learn that I and my brother grew up to be decent people despite of this.
Some years ago I had a bit of an existential crisis. I started dabbling in religion and thought that there might be a god, after all. But in the end, i found that faith in a god along the lines of the monotheistic religions simply wasn't in me. I gradually came to define myself as an atheist when it comes to the idea of god and the supernatural. I also became more outspoken about it. Nowadays I sometimes discuss religion with people of faith, even confronting them quite sharply at times.
I try not to be (too much) of an asshole however.

Confronting people about religion. This leads me to my next subject.
I have a very good friend who is a very intelligent person. Intelligence is difficult to define sometimes, but he is clearly smarter than me in a lot of areas. He is a doctor of state sciences and has taught for several years at Oxford University. He is currently teaching at Lund university. He is also a chess master and once beat me at chess blindfolded.
I was shocked when he let himself be baptised into the Catholic church some years ago. (He has since converted to protestantism)
I thought that he shared my atheist views. I was shocked that someone who has spent his entire life subscribing to the idea of empirical evidence would suddenly become a member of the Catholic church, which has spent many centuries working against a logical, rational world view.
I was hesitant to discuss ths subject with my friend, since we had spoken at length about god when I had my own little crisis. I felt guilty about in some ways 'switching sides' twice myself. Who was I to talk?
Some time ago the subject came up again however, and I couldn't keep quiet. I said to him that I saw no evidence that god existed, and that I strongly believe that organized religion does more harm than good. He was quite slippery about it and presented a lot of arguments that I have since found to be somewhat similar to what some christian apologetics use.
I have to stress that I have very little hope of somehow turning my friend into an atheist. I just want to plant a seed in his mind, since I think he is wasting his time on something that I think is wrong, and simply put just plain false.
We discussed what I feel are the various wrongdoings of the catholic church. The subject of pedophilia came up. He refused to acknowledge my arguments that sexual child abuse by catholic priests was a sign that there is something fundamentally wrong with not just the catholic church, but with all of christianity.
His response was to blame the individual priests, and to say that the blame for this should be placed on humanity itself. This comes of course from a very christian point of view...
He also washed his hands by saying that he had left the Catholic church.
I then presented him with a hypothetical situation.
Let us say that there is a political party that covertly or (in part) unknowingly promotes pedophilia. Let us them imagine that a group splinters of the mother party and changes portions of the party program, but keep an overwhelming majority of its fundamental principles intact. I asked my friend if he as an outsider would really believe that they were now a completely different, 'clean' party.
My friend said that he did not wish to answer a contrafactual question like that. I think he was taking the easy way out, even though he was right about that.
I have to add that the problem with pedophile priests is just one small fraction of the objections I have against all religons -- not just the Catholic church.
It would be interesting to know what other people think about this.

[SGOS]

People believe what they do, often times without evidence.  Love of empirical evidence or not, your friend has no evidence to support this belief.  My grandparents immigrated from Sweden to the USA back around 1900 or so.  My grandmother was a raving Baptist.  My grandfather didn't give a shit about religion, but my grandmother brainwashed her children with horrid tales of everlasting punishment.  The insidious horror of religion marches on.

[scroyle]

I know a lot of clever people who actually believe in a God being. I even know of very clever people who believe in the total inerrancy of the Bible. How they can do that is beyond me but there are.

I think a lot of superstition comes about because of our childhood beliefs and a lot of times, we just want to believe. It's like when I first discovered there was no Santa Claus, I was extremely unhappy. Our culture is such that with Santa Claus, people will make sure you stop believing in him when you've grown up. The whole community will ensure that. But with God, it's a bit hard. Segments in the community still believe in him.

It's easier as a cultural Christian. I look at religion from the standpoint of culture.  As a cultural construct, truth is no longer important. We know it's not true in the factual sense. But all cultural things teach us something and the bad bits we just have to re-interpret them. The church is very good at reinterpreting things to suit our modern morality. My personal view is Islam has a lot of danger in it because they haven't got the equivalent of a church that will always reinterpret things to suit humanity. So they can do really outrageous things that no sane person in today's world can support.

[Mermaid]

My personal view is Islam has a lot of danger in it because they haven't got the equivalent of a church that will always reinterpret things to suit humanity. So they can do really outrageous things that no sane person in today's world can support.

I would say the very same thing about Christianity.
examples:


and

[renasimplified]

Welcome Sven! My hope is that you find a no nitch here. It's a safe place! Thank you for sharing you story so far!

[Solitary]

Welcome aboard sven! My grand father came from Sweden. Thanks for your intro! I have a friend that is a theist and an engineering physicist. He said he can't prove there is a God or not, but believes because it makes him feel good. I asked him how knowing there is possibly a God that can send you to hell makes one feel good. He hasn't written to me since. Solitary

[Mr.Obvious]

Welcome Sven,

Regarding the pedophile-priest thing, it might be worth mentioning that my greatest grudge to the Catholic Church as an organization, isn't the fact that individual priests did these horrible things. Don't get me wrong, it is horrible and the Roman Catholic Church should have had a better system guarding against this kind of thing. But in the end, it's no worse than when a teacher or a doctor or whatever, does this horrible thing. What is worse about the Roman Catholic Church as a whole is that they actively guarded and relocated these child-rapists in an effort to protect their own name and standard, rather than evecting and punishing the individual child-rapists.  The previous pope, Ratzinger, actively instructed his clergymen to hide these pedofilic acts and relocate the offenders rather than consulting and informing the proper authorities. That's what makes the Roman Catholic Church most poisonous in this aspect, not just the fact that there are child-raping priests and nuns.

But, regarding to your grander subject... It's not uncommon for intelligent people to have an irrational belief. My older brother believes in 'something' without believing in a specific religion (I think). But he does, I think, believe in a creator and afterlife and such. And he is much more intelligent than I am. He's getting a doctorate in english-dutch, he knows more about computers, he knows more about politics, he knows more about obscure facts, he knows more about languages, he knows more about maths (probably) and some other sciences.
Yes, I'm better than him at chess (mentioned due to your original post), but that doesn't make me smarter than him.
But being smart, of course, does not make one automatically right. And smart people can be blind, ignorant, biased and impervious to reason on isolated beliefs, for sure.

However, if you ask me, trying to turn someone into an atheïst should not be our first concern. The first and foremost concern should be to make sure someone asks him- or herself questions and lets go of thinking patterns like dogmatic beliefs and circular reasoning. The important thing is to get someone to dare to question everything he or she knows. Not to (de)convert. So don't back away from religious conversations, and never fail to represent your argument. But don't worry about not converting him, that's not your job nor your duty. All one can expect you to do, is to be honest.

Again, welcome to the forum.

[aitm]

I was shocked that someone who has spent his entire life subscribing to the idea of empirical evidence would suddenly become a member of the Catholic church

No amount of reason, intelligence or knowledge can overcome fear. As in the beginning, fear first brought the rise of god.