Compliments are great when they come from other people.
Complimenting yourself is generally considered bad form.
The Danger of Thinking Too Much
NEIL: I’ve spent a good deal of time lately organizing my thoughts for a memoir, and in the midst of compiling all the most important turning points in my own deconversion I’ve come to see how one development impacted all the others more than I had previously appreciated: I had to study and learn a lot of new things for my job and it broadened my intellectual horizons significantly.
NEIL: If you feed the mind enough, it will soon demand more nourishment than any religious mentality can satisfy because the brain is better fed by questions than by answers. The former push the mind to expand and encompass larger worlds while the latter shrinks it, teaching it to be satisfied with less.
NEIL: “The secret things belong to the Lord,” I was often told in seminary (Deut. 29:29). Which being interpreted means, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.” At every turn where my mind tried to untangle the knots in my belief system, people intimated that being unwilling to let go of the questions was a sign of weakness, a failure to display the obedient spirit I was meant to possess in order to make God truly happy with me.
Remember that the forbidden tree in the midst of the Garden of Eden was the one that made you smarter.
NEIL: College and seminary can be lethal to a fragile faith because they cause you to ask better questions than you could ever think of on your own. This is surely why so many churches denigrate higher education—they know too well how detrimental education can be to their tiny little kingdoms of thought.
How do you explain the biblical texts instructing God’s people, repeatedly, to seek knowledge and wisdom?
NEIL: If you take the Bible as seriously as I did, you’ll learn enough about it to realize just how many impossible things it really teaches. And I don’t mean just things like miracles and afterlives and talking donkeys and snakes. I mean it asserts things about history and the natural world which we now know are indefensibly false, and you have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to keep the whole thing from falling apart.
NEIL: I had to go and get certified in multiple subjects: Language arts, history, civics and government, and math. I would have added science but the teachers’ exams all cost money out of my own pocket and the process of adding all those certifications drained my bank account. It was just enough immersion in multiple subjects to flex my intellectual muscles, and it forced me to learn a whole lot more about the world around me. It was a career-inspired expansion of my own mind and the impact it ultimately had on me was…well, it got me to where I am today.
NEIL: I know too much now to ever go back to the way things were before. The questions I used to ask were smaller questions, and I was satisfied with small answers that once made me relax, but now they only make me roll my eyes. I’ve seen and heard way too much to be satisfied with the kinds of answers I was taught to accept as sufficient, and I have my own career path to blame for it.
NEIL: This is why the church will never be able to shake its anti-intellectual flavor, nor will it even know itself well enough to see that it maintains a decidedly antagonistic posture toward unguided learning. Deep down the church knows they lose people to higher education, which is why they so giddily celebrate anyone who manages to keep their faith amidst a career in academia.
NEIL: Eventually I just knew too much, and I couldn’t do it any more. And it’s not because I’m all that smart. It’s just that sometimes you get to a place where your need to understand overtakes your need for security—your need to belong—and before you know it you’ve seen the guy standing behind the curtain, pulling levers and turning knobs to keep the illusions going. Once you reach that moment, there’s no going back.
3 Responses
Through all the kooky-talk, Neil did have one good point.
College and seminary can be lethal to a fragile faith because they cause you to ask better questions than you could ever think of on your own.
Indeed, if you’re not used to thinking critically, coming upon hard questions that challenge your unsupported and fragile faith will kill it.
But yeah, too bad Neil seems to be undermining himself in the rest of the post. Good catch on the irony, JB.
I once wrote a story about the atheist idea of being so smart you can see, “the man behind the curtain.” It’s a bit like being so smart you can tell that the Uncle delighting kids by pulling quarters from behind his ear, isn’t a real magician at all. Then you reject his quarters, miss out on the love and attention he is offering, and proceed to walk off to scoff and pout. But hey, at least you now can congratulate yourself for being so smart! Also, now you’re broke. Just saying….
Intelligence is not wisdom. Wisdom teaches you to stop looking for the trickery and deception and to just delight in receiving all those quarters. One thing I do know about people who are actually intelligent and plumb full of questions, they never brag about it. “All is vanity” is an excellent lesson on the nature of that truth. And King Solomon, smartest man ever, eventually lost his whole kingdom.
When you, John, ask the questions, that means Neil has to provide the answers. That will shrink his brain. Maybe… just maybe…he was offering you a “once in a lifetime chance, don’t miss it, act now” to expand your brain, too, by purposely saying as many inane comments as he can.
No…maybe not.