Guide to conversion and deconversion

My guide to conversion and deconversion

The purpose of this text is to propose my own version and answers to the famous Theist's guide to converting atheists : what kind of evidences could there be and should be expected for a religion; which evidences can be strong, weak, or worthless ; especially empirical evidences.
Answers on both sides of the challenge, because I have been on both sides.
Namely: as a former Evangelical Christian, what evidences made me deconvert; what made it hard for me to deconvert earlier; why I don't reconvert (well, because the evidences which made me deconvert were solid !), and what it would take for a religion to seem, maybe not clearly the truth, but at least credible and worthy of consideration, and which I usually don't find.

First, one important thing, that, I think, would help many people deconvert. Because it was an important obstacle that slowed down my deconversion.

Which evidences against Christianity are there

A huge lot, in fact, of so many kinds it is impossible to sum up. In matters of history and archeology, which Christians are usually fanatics of, evidence is already overwhelmingly against it.
Indeed, one short evidence against Christianity I'm puzzled to not see more often, and to see so many Christians having seemingly not heard of: the archeological evidence that has relatively recently been found against Exodus and explaining how Judaism emerged. And no, Christians have no opposite evidence on their side, even other Christians are aware of that. But even though it can be considered compelling, I still don't see historical or archeological arguments as really important, I rather see them as quite out of subject. Because the real topic here is whether this really is God's will for us to give our lives to a given doctrine, and, are their followers actually in relationship with God or not. And there are much clearer and more direct ways to investigate this than any references to ancient history.

Personally, what I see as the strongest evidence against Christianity, is the observation of how clueless are all Christians together with their favorite doctrine, about the real issues of life, morality, and the world's problems and possible solutions. I'd even call that a strictly negative understanding, a pathological way of making oneself radically unable or unwilling to learn the real picture, by preaching the wrong picture and despising any try to explain things in the correct way. And also how clueless they are about the state of the debate and the real solidity and motivation of their opponents, which they picture as having "chosen" to "reject God", some bullshit and extremely arrogant, wrongly insulting picture light years away from facts. Clearly I cannot consider that any decent God could inspire, support or even forgive such an insane mentality.
Namely, important real and undeniable aspects of life and morality I explained here, are already for me a strong refutation of Christianity (both as a matter of incompatible facts and as a matter of what a pathological inability to grasp these realities, the Christian doctrine and "life with God" twists the mind of its followers into, so that of course no such an indoctrination could be approved by any decent God).
Other arguments in other pages in this site: Some logical refutation of Christianity - Evidence against theism - Some contradictions of spirituality, and many other pages in this site where I explained in different ways the nonsense and irrelevance of the christian view of things (and I still have more to write), and also much more in other sites by other authors I did or did not link to.

Why I cannot re-convert to Christianity anymore

There are huge lots of them, which roughly fall into the following categories:

Logical reasons : I cannot believe what I know to be false (as I have overwhelming proofs of its falsity)
Theological reasons :
- I know that the Bible is not a good book and is not divinely inspired
- The Christian concept of God is that of an evil tyrant not worthy of worship; it does not look like any decent God.
- I know from both logic and lots of NDE testimonies, that, contrary to the Christian view, God does not care what we believe and won't judge us on that
- I know a much better inspired piece of theology than those of official religions
Moral reasons : I know that conversion to Christianity ("giving one's life to Jesus") is most probably evil by its consequences:
- It leads to waste one's good willing efforts at the expense of more useful works for humanity; it may lead to some mental paralysis, expecting God to act instead of developing our own initiatives and creativity.
- It gets one's mind fucked up, leading to lots of terrible consequences such as, in some people
  - climate change denialism, which leads to actually go on spoiling the planet
  - More push towards overpopulation
  - Huge lots of other harm : see my links on atheists and anger for much more
- The main "mission" it leads one to, namely of preaching the Gospel further to convert many more people, is actually evil as it can turn out to spoil or even destroy the lives of the people one tries to "save", like my life was terribly spoiled by having been Christian, among other things.
- It logically, inevitably makes one terribly and wrongly insulting against anyone with different opinions; it can thus absurdly destroy many relationships of diverse kinds.

How Christians could more easily deconvert

It would be to explicitly get out of the dilemma between religion and naturalism.
When I was Christian, I saw the mere labels of "atheism", tries to argue against the existence of God, against miracles or afterlife, as sufficent reasons to stop reading any further what other arguments these people had to offer against Christianity.
Because I considered (and I still do consider) that many miracles happen still now, and that denying them, as well as denying the intuitive ideas that the mind differs from matter and that afterlife should exist, at least partly an expression of blindness on theoretical and/or practical levels.

It was not an obvious thing for me to fully develop and show the consistency of a worldview that reconciles [rationalism and the rejection of religious doctrines] with [the mind/matter duality and the existence of afterlife].
Not because of any logical incompatibility or difficulty (as there do exist many people whose position combine these as well without problem - see also my metaphysics), but just because of the cultural rumor that assumes that they would be incompatible (the people who combine these are not usually loud in the media and blogosphere).
More precisely: I was under the impression that, somehow, rationalism (the practice of reason as a primary method to truth above faith and revelation) was misleading because it leads people to the wrong conclusion, and therefore should not be trusted.
It was hard for me to find out that things were more complex than that:

That it is not the scientific method which led atheists to unfortunately happen to deny the existence of miracles and afterlife, but a sort of accident, that they did not properly examine the question, and that they focused their study on other issues.
That despite a possible error from their part on this question, they have made very wise findings on other issues.
That they do have otherwise excellent evidences against religions, and that these evidences are independent of metaphysical assumptions, and can hold as well in the framework of metaphysical dualism and the existence of afterlife.
That religions can very well be left and free rational thinking be adopted without touching the confidence in afterlife.
That there can be place in heaven for apostates. And that it is even a better news of heaven than the religious one, as it does not make any absurd requirements such as the requirement believing anything without evidence.

And also: that even more evidences against Christianity and other religions can specifically be found in a dualist (supernaturalist) framework.

Namely:

An extensive study of near death experience testimonies, which contradicts or at least fails to support the teachings of specific religions about the afterlife, namely the fact that fate in afterlife is not governed by religious beliefs or memberships, which appear pointless from an afterlife perspective.
The fact that miracles exist in diverse religions as well, and none has any more outstanding (fundamentally different) credible ones than others; they equally exist outside any religions. I finally had my own experience of miraculous healing in a totally non-religious framework.
The internal inconsistency of the story of Jesus miracles which, if true, would be an awfully wasteful use of God's power, which would have been much better used otherwise in less efforts, such as writing from scratch better human (and other species') DNA some hundreds of million years ago.
That the sense of Jesus resurrection, as explained in Paul's epistles, had more to do with materialism that dualism. Namely, that it was rather motivated by the unability of the people of that time to have any hope of afterlife without the body. Their inability to distinguish mind from matter, and to understand that the physical body is just a thing, an construction of atoms that can be replaced by other atoms, so that individual atoms making the body don't have any value for the soul after death, and won't need to be revived by any resurrection for giving the soul a full new life.
The presence of people on Earth with rememberings of a past life, thus refuting any religious teachings that deny all possibility of reincarnation.

What could give a religion a good deal of credibility to me as a true link to God

Having received an email message from someone who got the spiritual revelation to send it together with the address of my future wife (and/or that he had wrote to her my contact), if that turned out to be true (that we indeed fit each other). Indeed, for personal reasons I cannot sum up here, I cannot seriously accept the idea that a decent God with the ability to inspire someone on Earth by His Will, could have failed to do this. Now I see the fact of having not received such a message, as an evidence of absence of anybody currently on Earth who gets any inspiration from God's will.
That many people would have independently rediscovered the same spiritual truths without having been humanly taught them (this is a very well-know argument, the "argument from locality"). For example from Near Death Experiences.
That Jesus or any prophet would have made an announcement of the form "In truth I tell you, a new living specie will appear on Earth, it will look this way, behave this and that way" and then later it would indeed appear, and now we could not find any fossil trace of this specie from a time before this announcement, and could not locate it close to any other branch in the tree of evolution. (Please don't tell me that, if breads could be multiplied by Jesus and his body be resurrected and ascended out of Earth's orbital zone then a little piece of DNA can still resist God's will)

What could make a religion worthy of respect, be a sign of wisdom from its part

A doctrine, may it be official or presented by some individual (in his web site), with

a logically well-structured description of views on religious issues;
not pretending to have any more fundamental difference with other religious doctrines than it really has;
A demonstration of genuine, non-trivial wisdom and clues in moral, economic and political affairs above the too common childishness of religious views on these issues. See my own clues for example there and there and there. Indeed, why claim that you have any divine guidance or special value, and bother promoting them, if it gives you no more clue or any special means of any kind, to bring any more significant contribution to the progress of civilization and how to make the Earth a more decent place to live in, than anyone else can have without it ?

A representative debating with me without wrong behavior (despite my long experience, first as a Christian, then trying to debate with Christians, still never found one close to satisfying such criteria of intellectual decency):

not accusing me of having made any mistake I did not make or having had any wrong attitude I did not have;
not overloading his messages with stupidities and logical fallacies;
not holding his arguments as stronger than they really are;
not having divine faith in some awful bullshit from their doctrine or imagination about who I am and how I think, such as the bullshit of pretending that it was my "choice" to "reject God", or that I was "never a true Christian", and insisting to teach me this bullshit without any time listening or having any respect for what I know about myself ;
not provoking my legitimate anger by their nonsensical way of pretending to discuss and of judging me that does not let the chance for the discussion to make any sense nor for themselves to ever have any chance to understand my point, and then blaming me for how the discussion goes wrong, and pretending that I am impolite while they were very polite (since they cared so much to dedicate all the love of the universe to the dirty shit their Jesus told them I was and that it is honest, normal and right for them to trust Him about the shit I am since there is honestly no way for them to imagine me otherwise, oh yeah), and that I have a problem of arrogance and anger from my heart which Jesus has a solution for (ignoring that I already did everything in the past to give Him my life, so that giving my life to Jesus was the cause of my legitimate anger, not the solution)
having enough patience and intelligence to properly understand my own views, not blindly pretending that I don't have any good reason for my position just because one is totally ignorant about my reasons and chooses to have a divine faith in their non-existence.
thus, not spamming me with bullshit arguments whose vacuity and insanity I refuted by my texts long ago, and pretending I must keep listening as if I did not already heard that same bullshit hundreds of times in the past, while refusing to do themselves the work of learning about my refutations
not pretending that I would be arrogant, closed-minded and impolite just because I find good reasons to interrupt their flow of bullshit arguments which I already refuted long ago and decide to try having my say, when I see their nonsense repeated over again. Such an accusation is fucking superficiality and ignorance of all the years of patient listening to Christian preaches I went through in the past, when I gave Christians years to explain everything to me and I did a very long and careful search for truth (as a very intelligent INTP-T), while I clearly see Christians not having made any significant effort to learn the opposite view (or they could be very unlucky of only having heard weak arguments...)

The testimony by an atheist or agnostic person, reporting that this religion made him a wiser and better understanding person, with better human understanding and/or in depth of analysis of arguments. Indeed, so many Christians (for example) come to witness that their relationship with Jesus made them better people, however it is quite understandable that they succeeded to illusion themselves as being wiser and more virtuous people than others, considering the way in which this religion so seriously fucked up their mind that they are (with all the best intentions and serenity of their hearts) continuously painting the rest of the world in black, misjudging and misunderstanding others, thus giving others legitimate reasons to be angry but then insanely blaming them for this anger they provoked. That is too easy in these conditions to imagine having found the path to better morality and peace of heart than one's opponents.
Caring to answer my list of questions for Christians without covering yourself with ridicule in doing so.

What is definitely not convincing

Pretty much everything Christians ever told me until now. Examples among many others:

Pointing out the importance of the Fatima miracles
Radiating a powerful aura of divine love and serenity. This is only good at making people jealous of you without giving them a chance to enjoy the same indecent privilege (because such stuff may either be genetic or otherwise mysterious but anyway actually impossible to share), a mere nuclear bomb method that just works to terrorize people by the shame of ever trying to argue with you, thus erasing any possibility of actually meaningful discussion and understanding of the real problems of life and everything.
Making a fuss about some reports of a bunch of miraculous healings. It does not even matter to me whether these reports are factually true or not, I will anyway see such an "argument" as a testimony of dumbness on the issue of what are the most important stakes and needs of life, that any decent God with any intervention power on this Earth could and should care for : I see much more serious issues and chances for a decent God to do efficiently good interventions, than in the mere field of curing any illness.
Pointing out that the Catechism of the Catholic church declares faith to be compatible with reason (one's rationality has to be demonstrated by effectively behaving rationally, rather than just claimed and believed on blind faith), or that there exist some Christian scientists (I was Christian and scientist myself, and I have yet to see a hint that there exists any Christian scientists that are neither ignorant of the arguments, as I was, nor practicing specially flawed illogical thinking when it comes to religious issues).
Giving videos showing big penticostal meetings where the preacher makes "the holy spirit" fall on people and they all fall on the ground by that power (someone once sent me such link, I forgot the reference, it would be interesting to link to). Because there is no real difference between such stuff and things like this.

In one debate (I wasn't part of), a Christian wrote "No amount of outside evidence is going to be enough for you". Sorry, this accusation is plain false. Instead, what Christians interpret this way, is in fact the following fact: no amount of NON-evidence, stupidities, ridiculous fallacies and vain, blind faith declarations that this or that should be accepted as evidence while it is in fact clearly empty and illogical, is going to be enough for me.