The Former Denomination of Christian Deconverts

[TheRocketSurgeon]

There is some of that. Given how many the same people that desparage religion also advocate progressive political policies it seems like a safe assumption.

That's because you're taking this board and this board alone for a sample group. But atheism is as diverse as being affiliated with some religion. People come in all shapes and colors. I certainly hope, you wouldn't call Ayn Rand and her followers liberal.

Also your analysis leaves out what I like to call the god clamps. Once you no longer look for your pastor/priest/denomination for moral or social marching orders, you have to find your own way through these issues and make up your own bloody mind on what you consider moral or amoral or something in between. Which again is a broad statement, since many christians I know support pretty liberal views too. Among them the above mentioned grassroot organisations.

Exactly so. I do agree with Chad that I was surprised to discover there are some very rampant conservative atheists. It seemed to me that humanist values were atheist values, because those are what I came to when I stopped listening to the church's version of morality and started having to find my own moral path. I'm often accused of getting my liberality from liberal professors, but I went to USAFA and to a college in the southwest corner of Louisiana, in the deepest heart of Conservative Catholic Land, and as far as I know I literally had only one liberal professor, whom I loathed. My liberality came from an honest personal assessment of what was important to me about this world. 

When I joined SOMA, the Society of Open-Minded Atheists/Agnostics, a group which had been recently founded by a couple of college kids at KU in Lawrence, KS, but which had at the time only a couple of members, I worked (with my now-ex GF) to rapidly expand the group. I had expected many others like me, but I found that nearly a third of them were what I call Nietzscheans (reference to the sci-fi show Andromeda, but meaning the "will to power" philosophies of ol' Freddy) and/or Ayn Rand devotees. I found them somewhat abhorrent to my sense of morality, but then again, they found my liberalism to be pathetic and weak-minded.

I also had grown up thinking that all Christians were conservative, since I knew only the types found in the deep South. After becoming an adult and really starting to think about questions of moral philosophy (seeing which babies I didn't want to throw out with the bathwater, so to speak), I was actually surprised to learn that there were a large number of liberal Christians, ones who agreed with Gandhi about his analysis of the difference between Christ and the way Christianity is practiced in large swaths of the Western world. As we often point out, if you take the teachings of Jesus seriously, compared to the political views of most "Christians", you come to these conclusions, or at least I did:



I scoffed at your notion (which I have heard before, in many guises) that we rejected Christianity because of its rules. That cannot be farther from the truth. We liberal humanists actually share most of the values of Jesus of Nazareth, as expressed in the gospels, and in fact take most of our flak from fellow Americans for the values we share with what he expressed in his public ministry. We just don't find the worship of a god-man who did miracles to be a credible story, and find that the "extra layers" of Biblical law and Christian culture to be in opposition to what we consider good morality. We reject the exclusionary, judgmental, and self-deprecating view that we are flawed and therefore worthless without The System™ to guide us, and the moment we realize that no only does the Bible not line up with testable reality but that many of the moral structures found within "Biblical teachings" actually violate our sense of right-and-wrong, we stop being Christians... and then it is incumbent upon us to figure out our own system of valuation and moral guidelines.

To go through all the painstaking work that it takes to do this, only to hear people suggest that we rejected the faith because we can't follow rules, is disgusting and infurating. Calling me amoral because I don't follow your  standards of morality is to do me a great disservice, and devalues the effort I have put into formulating my own system of values and trying to live by them.

Jesus was only moderately liberal by modern standards, but he was outright radical, in his day. In that regard, I consider his legend to be a good one, and I applaud those Christians who do as I do, and reject the anti-humanist elements of Levitical culture (as enshrined in more-recent ideas like Puritanism and American conservatism) in favor of just trying to treat everyone fairly and decently. You may sneer at those liberal Christians as not being "real" Christians, but that's doing them a great disservice, and devalues the devotion they put into their modernized faith, and to trying to live by that set of values. 

When I speak to such Christians, including my fiancee and her family, I am glad to find that I have more in common with them than they do with Christians of the conservative culture. It gives me some hope for my country.