Well I didn’t literally say that. I don’t think the God of the Bible is a morally good God, and I’d prefer a morally good God to a morally corrupt one.
Do you honestly think that your rejection of the evidence for the existence of God is not connected at all to your assessment of the moral nature of God?
Yes. Without question. I used to be a christian. At no point did my deconversion ever revolve around a particular interpretation of scripture. My issue has always been epistemological. I’m not even sure exactly what started it, but over time I started to question my beliefs and realized to have good reasons for believing anything, I needed good evidence. I suppose in some sense I realized that method was more important than conclusion.
I realized that the reason that I believed in the first place was because I was raised to, and the reason I kept believing was because I had a tendency to always rationalize away the lack of evidence, or evidence against the existence of God (perhaps I’m just not worthy to see good evidence? Perhaps God just has some sort of plan and I need to be more devout? etc. etc.)
So I realized I had no good evidence to justify my beliefs, and even worse for my own rationalizations, which I were literally just making up. It slowly dawned on me that I didn’t have any good reasons for believing my own rationalizations in the first place. I understood that I was basically just making up excuses. So I had not started to believe for a good reason at all, I was just raised to, and I didn’t sustain my belief for any good reason either, it was just rationalizing away lack of evidence.
Once I realized this was what I was doing, I gradually stopped believing. I literally had to remind myself to stop making up rationalizations and then believe them. For the longest time I didn’t even consider the character of God as depicted in the bible, though once I no longer believed, it later did became obvious to me both how nonsensical and morally corrupt it all was. That was years later though.
Not even at a subconscious level?
Not even a smidgeon. Obviously if I have subconscious thoughts, I’m not aware of them. You can of course just conjecture that I don’t accept your arguments because I somehow subconscious am primed against them (which, ironically, is one of those rationalizations I caught myself doing all the time), but I can of course just do the same with you.
That doesn’t seem to be particularly conducive to persuasion I think.
Even from a rational standpoint, this makes sense. If you think Christianity is immoral, then that makes you more predisposed to favor atheistic arguments.
It would at best make me predisposed against particular interpretations of Christian theism. The God I used to believe in was way more liberal than what you find in typical american Christian circles. There are certainly many kinds of Gods, and afterlives, and things like justice, accountability and so on I would find welcoming news. I really dislike the idea that an asshole like Kim Jong-Un will probably get away with it. He will live a fat happy long life abusing his entire country. I’d like there to be some sort of accountability. I’d like the opportunity to meet long lost loved ones, and perhaps to get insights into some of life’s big mysteries in another life. All of that would just as much predispose me to want to believe in some kind of God, as you think I am predisposed against the existence of your brand of the Christian one.
But I just don’t see how this kind of “you just don’t accept it because you don’t want to” kind of argument can lead us anywhere. All the same kinds of arguments here could be turned back against you. You only believe because you’re afraid you’ll be punished if you don’t, and because you are predisposed against accepting your own mortality, bla bla bla. Are you convinced by this? Do you find it persuasive? I suspect not. Don’t expect it to be for me either.
