Well I’ll be the guinea pig and start this one off.

If you used to go…

Why did you stop, and what has kept you from going back?
I think a little background would help. I went to DFCC from the time I was 3 until I was 28. The reason I stopped going was due to my divorce and the way the church handled it. Aside from very few people, Heidi and I both felt abandoned by the church. At the time I can think of only 2 people who contacted me just to see how I was doing or to see if I wanted to talk or anything of that nature. The problem was those two people were friends just being friends. No leaders of the church called, they did eventually but it was far to late, and that really hurt and made me question my so called church family. I questioned their beliefs and what they were preaching. If you are going to preach shepparding and helping others why aren’t you? So I left and didn’t even want to think of going to church for the next few years. I went through consuling for about a year to deal with my divorce and trying to understand why the church did what they did. The consuling was more for my divorce but we did touch on the church aspect of it. Do I miss DFCC? Sure I do, I spent most of my life going there and helped build it to where it is today. Would I go back. Probably not. Right now I do attend church again. It feels good to get up on Sunday morning and go to church again. I was hesitant at first because even though I do feel church people can be hypocritical I wanted to get back into it. My gaurds are still up I’m sure. They will be for a while, I was pretty hurt.

What would make you think about going again?
The reason I started going again was kinda unplanned. My fiance and I found this church that we wanted to get married in so we went one Sunday morning to basically see the interior of the church and if we even liked the way it looked. Turns out we like more than the looks we enjoyed the people and the church itself. We’ve been going for almost 2 months now and I’m really enjoying it. Its nice to make new friends and getting to know them. One thing I learned when I wasn’t going is that a church is really a business. I mean the preacher is paid to come in and speak. The music director is paid to lead the service and so on. The church itself is a place to come to worship God and really you can do that anywhere. Trust me God and I talked more than ever when I WASN’T going to church. So I guess I’m trying to say are churches really neccessary? I think for some people they are. They need that place to go to worship. But really you can worship and be with God anywhere anytime. Thats the cool thing. He’s always there. I’ll continue to go to the present church I’m attending and probably get more involved as time goes by, I’ve already committed to do their website at the start of the year. Hopefully I can grow as a person there and learn more about God as I was at one point in my life. I’m looking forward to it. Anyway thats my story, thanks for the questions Nathan.

Next.

I just came across the site, stopped for awhile to read. Most conservative blogs seem to be written by blowhards, but I was impressed that yours reads as considerate and thoughtful.
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If you used to go…

Why did you stop, and what has kept you from going back?
What would make you think about going again?

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I went to church because my mother dragged me there. I positively dreaded every Sunday morning being droned at by the priest. I stopped going after my confirmation. Partly because we moved, but also because confirmation forces you to question your faith. I had never really questioned it before, and when I did, I realized that church was pointless for me because I had never believed in God. Nothing anyone told me convinced me that God exists. The concept always seemed completely ludicrous to me. I was much happier without the burden of thinking something was shamefully wrong with me.

Later as an adult I became fascinated by people that believed in God because I don’t understand WHY anyone would want to believe in God. If the God of the Bible were an actual person, and he required you to love him, and he would “punish” you if you didn’t, that would be an abusive relationship. Screw that. Either they never thought about it, or they were having a genuine experience of some sort. I would question them about their experiences of God. Most people couldn’t articulate what had happened to them, and of those that could it sounded to me like the experience was related to various forms of mental illness (not that they were ill, but experienced constantly it would be considered schizophrenia).

A few years ago, I came across a book called “The Alphabet vs. the Goddess” which completely advanced my thinking about the God experience. The book is largely speculative, and while I don’t agree completely with everything the author postulates, it is a radical idea. Basically, the author correlates the emergence of the male monotheistic God with the advent of symbolic writing (as opposed to pictographic writing like hieroglyphics). This new writing system emerged at the same time and at the same place where the monotheistic God was first worshipped. This of course could be a coincidence, but wherever the new writing went in the world, the monotheistic God followed. The author suggests that writing changed (or reformatted) how our brains worked. When we learn to write with symbols we do several things to our brains:

1. We think more linearly. Preliterate societies think in primarily in cycles not sequence.
2. We think more logically. Intuition, gut feelings, are accorded a back seat where they were once the primary motive for thought.
3. Spoken taboos become written laws. Instead of moral enforcement from shunning and reprimands, prison and sanctioned torture took over. In addition, taboos were adaptable and changed under different conditions and circumstances, while laws were absolute and inflexible (allowing for tyrannies).
4. The switch also favored men over women in society. Where women had prominent roles in culture, they were now diminished to the status of property – something that has sadly only changed in recent decades. This flipover has cascaded through every society tainted by the monotheistic God. Again, it might be coincidence, but it’s totally eery how well it correlates in history.
5. This may be the least correlated piece of evidence, but it may be the most convincing. Since writing is primarily a left brain activity, right-handedness has come to predominate in culture. Personally, I’m not sure if that’s a selection thing or brain reformatting. I’m ambi so it intrigues me that maybe my brain didn’t get entirely reformatted when I learned to write, though I know a leftie that believes in God. The point is, it could be used as a metric.

The author’s argument is further supported by current events. Our global culture is increasingingly image based. The explosion in the creation of art in the renaissance coincides with the beginning of the slow advancement of women in society. Photography and later film and television came to dominate over the written word. Even more recently in the post-modern era, non-linear film and art (i.e. “Memento” is just one notable example), is accepted as understandible in culture. Where images dominate, women are equal. Contrast this with areas were imagery is nearly outlawed, particularly in the depiction of people and especially in the depiction of the monotheistic God – i.e. fundamentalist Islam. Women are still considered property.

If all of that is correlation and not coincidence – and much further research into how the brain works needs to be done – everything anyone has told me about God makes sense. The experience of the monotheist God is at most, an interpretation of a wider experience filtered through a sequentially thinking brain, and at least, is just a figment produced by the brain. Personally, I think the former. Looking at the non-monotheistic cultures, clearly spirituality is common to all peoples, it just manifests different ways. In particular, the Buddhist interpretation is particularly insightful, Buddhists don’t necessarily believe in deities (they can if they personally want to), but have a general belief in connectedness, and work hard to experience a connectedness to the rest of the universe (even I have experienced that). They also do not view spacetime as linear (which it isn’t – go read some Brian Greene). Buddhists are primarily concerned in quieting the mind, and in fact, are retraining the brain. Monks who meditate most of the day have been shown to have an incredible ability to control their thoughts, and thus their emotions and actions. People who mediate even a little feel more in control of their lives (worked for me as well). Brain studies have shown that prayer is pretty much identical – though the result is interpreted as the prayer being answered rather than the praying person manifesting their own desired result, or at least a result that allows them to move on.

As a kid, I had thought a lot about what heaven and hell might be like, but was never convinced that those existed as separate physical places – though I now believe that our present reality consists of both heaven and hell cast on our own lives simultaneously – essentially, life is what we make of it. I don’t believe our “souls” go anywhere when the physical body dies – and I find that whole concept of soul immortality completely horrifying. “Serving” God for eternity or toiling in hell for trillions upon trillions of years are equally abhorrant. How intolerably boring. Believe me, if that is indeed the case, and I was there forever, I’d definitely figure out a way to commit soul suicide.

The only reason I’d ever go back to church is if I was obliged to go to a wedding or a funeral. My family are all now freethinkers as well, as are most of my friends, so no real risk of that.