http://www.relevantmagazine.com/god/church/why-aren%E2%80%99t-more-intellectuals-believers
“my new atheist friend, Tyler”
Now that is an ambiguous description.
“Tyler used to believe in God.”
BUT THEN HE TOOK AN ARROW TO THE KNEE
“so when we began discussing his recent de-conversion, I paid attention.” Because most of the time, Tyler is boring.
“We considered the aforementioned story from 2 Kings.” No story was aforementioned. smh
“I have two theories”
>proceeds to list hypotheses…
“In 2009, Dr. Brent Slife published a study of this ‘pervasive, implicit bias,’ and demonstrated ways that the anti-God mentality is a systemic part of academia.”
What I found was a self-published essay about potential anti-thiesm in psychology. It’s not a study, and it does not demonstrate an anti-God mentality as being systemic in academia.
http://brentslife.com/…/Psychology’s%20Prejudice…
“Atheist author Richard Dawkins points out that, according to a survey of the National Academy of Scientists, only 7 percent of American scientists believe in a personal God.”
I like how he just takes Dawkins’ word on it. I am a huge Dawkins fan and I would not take his word on this….
Anyway, on to serious comments:
“First, there is an incredible bias against theism within higher education.” I call bullshit. I can recall only a single instance where religion was brought up in my entire college education. One of my bio profs had a diagram of eye anatomy and said something to the effect of “this is the best chart on eye anatomy I’ve come across, and it’s from a creationist website, so go figure.” That was it. Professor Kevin Sorbo never asked me to write an essay explaining how there’s no God, and my lab partners never spent any of their time around me talking about how stupid Christianity is. Maybe education itself has Christio-lytic properties, but it’s hardly any sort of atmosphere in academia.
“Secondly, I believe the present Church culture in America is unfriendly to intellectual scrutiny.”
This is a true statement but a completely incorrect thesis. If this and the next six “paragraphs” were their own article, I’d be giving it a big ol’ like right now. But they aren’t; they’re in the context of his assumptions as to why “intellectuals” are atheists.
“Thus, these disproportionately intelligent people are rejecting Christianity based on their experience within the Christian community.”
To state this categorically is wrong, and frankly a tad insulting. My beliefs (or lack thereof) were not formed based on any sort of discomfort I had from my Christian community. My parents are wonderful. My churches have been like second homes, and I’ve always felt welcome. No, I have not felt comfortable rejecting the faith in their presence, but that’s because of the personal discomfort it would cause, not any sort of certainty that I’d be met with hostility and intolerance. I lost my faith because I stopped finding the the faith a satisfying answer to what I knew about the world. I stopped buying the stories. And I went in heavy discussing religion with people online for quite some time. Christians have given me plenty of time and opportunity to bring up my questions, and many have gone to very great lengths to respond to me in a polite and earnest manner. The faith has given me a fair shake, an opportunity to air my grievances
But I’m not everybody, of course. I’m sure there are plenty of people who left the faith because of a bad experience with the faithful. Actually, it’s a lot of them. For more on that, I absolutely recommend “Unchristian” by Kinnaman and the Barna Group. But here’s the thing, there’s a difference between the “nones” and the atheists, even though partisans on both sides want to think otherwise. When you look at the “nones” as a whole, very few of them are openly atheists. Pew puts it at 13.5% (http://www.pewforum.org/…/americas-changing-religious…/ ). People who go through the effort to argue that there is no God are not necessarily in the same boat as the “I don’t go to church anymore” demo at large. You get into the sciences, and you get more explicitly atheists/agnostics. In my personal experiences, it’s a reasoning thing. I’ve literally never met someone who called themselves an atheist/agnostic who left because they were seduced by some anti-religious peer-pressure in college or got treated shabbily by Christians. It’s always some variation of “I eventually realised it was nonsense”, or “I wasn’t raised religious, and when I looked into it, Christianity sounded absurd.” I have, however, met people who’ve sworn off church because of the people there. But I never met any of them in the Bible debates.