But Then My Voice Changed: From Fundamentalist to Nonbeliever: One Man’s Story - Softcover

Bales, R. Eugene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1458205800 ISBN 13: 9781458205803

Verlag: Abbott Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

From revival meetings held in abandoned storefronts to seminars conducted in university halls, author R. Eugene Bales stumbled his way from youth as a fledgling fundamentalist preacher to adulthood as a nonbelieving academic.

Through a series of essays, he chronicles his spiritual journey that began in a white frame building that housed the Church of God in a dust-blown southwestern Kansas town. Here he learned the books of the Bible, was born again, baptized, sanctified holy, sang specials for Sunday morning services, and preached his first sermon. While attending the University of Wichita and serving as assistant to the pastor in a suburban church, he experienced an epiphany of doubt that collided with the teachings of his boyhood church. Advanced training in philosophy gave him analytical tools that he neededto critically evaluate conceptual underpinnings of religious claims.

In But Then My Voice Changed, Bales explains why traditional notions central to religious faith are fundamentally incoherent. He argues that the evidence of so-called religious experience is a chimaera, and he challenges orthodox pictures of the relationship of the body to the soul; of the continued existence of a conscious, disembodied soul after death; of heaven and hell; of miracles, the resurrection, and the efficacy of prayer.

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But Then My Voice Changed

From Fundamentalist to Nonbeliever: One Man's StoryBy R. Eugene Bales

Abbott Press

Copyright © 2012 R. Eugene Bales
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4582-0580-3

Contents

Introduction...............................................................................................viiPart 1: When I was a child, I spake as a child.—1 Corinthians 13:11..................................1Chapter 1: So Many Doctrines...............................................................................2Chapter 2: Church and Community............................................................................8Chapter 3: Celebrations....................................................................................12Chapter 4: God Talk........................................................................................16Chapter 5: My First Revival................................................................................19Chapter 6: Heaven and Hell.................................................................................24Chapter 7: Authority of the Elders.........................................................................27Chapter 8: "Godless Science"...............................................................................31Chapter 9: How to Choose?..................................................................................34Chapter 10: The Power of Prayer............................................................................36Chapter 11: Other Perspectives.............................................................................40Chapter 12: Crisis.........................................................................................49Chapter 13: Army Reserves..................................................................................55Chapter 14: Nietzsche......................................................................................57Chapter 15: Senior Year at Wichita U.......................................................................64Chapter 16: Theism, Deism, Pantheism.......................................................................68Chapter 17: First Teaching Job.............................................................................73Chapter 18: Grad Study at Wichita U........................................................................175Chapter 19: Grad Study at Wichita U........................................................................283Chapter 20: "The Will to Believe"..........................................................................86Chapter 21: Crisis 2.......................................................................................89Chapter 22: A Liberal Christian?...........................................................................92Part 2: But when I became a man, I put away childish things.—1 Corinthians 13:11.....................99Chapter 1: Invitations and Persuasion......................................................................100Chapter 2: Aquinas: Ways One through Four..................................................................122Chapter 3: Aquinas: The Fifth Way..........................................................................128Chapter 4: The Ontological Argument........................................................................134Chapter 5: God and the Basis of Morality...................................................................141Chapter 6: The Argument from Religious Experience..........................................................146Chapter 7: Critique of William James's "The Will to Believe"...............................................155Chapter 8: Miracles........................................................................................170Chapter 9: Body and Soul...................................................................................176Chapter 10: Disembodied Souls..............................................................................189Chapter 11: The Problem of Evil............................................................................198Chapter 12: "God is Love"..................................................................................203Chapter 13: "Prayer Changes Things"........................................................................207Chapter 14: Sense and Nonsense.............................................................................215Chapter 15: Falsifiability.................................................................................224Chapter 16: "Theology and Falsification"...................................................................228Chapter 17: Hare and Bliks.................................................................................231Chapter 18: On Religious Faith: A Reply to Basil Mitchell..................................................237Chapter 19: The Language of Faith..........................................................................247Chapter 20: An Immodest Proposal...........................................................................259Chapter 21: Conclusion.....................................................................................266Endnotes...................................................................................................271About the Author...........................................................................................285

Chapter One

so many doctrines

A few days after my twelfth birthday my parents and I moved to a windblown southwestern Kansas town, population about sixteen hundred, struggling in the 1940s to scrabble its way out of the Dust Bowl. The wind scattered sand, candy wrappers, dried leaves, and an occasional cigarette butt along brick-paved Main Street. Walking along Main from our home to downtown, I passed directly in front of the Church of God. A few steps further on I could see six other churches: Church of the Nazarene, Methodist, Bible Baptist, Assembly of God, Christian, and the Church of Christ. Saint Joan of Arc Catholic church, viewed by most of the townspeople with a suspicion usually reserved for communists and other atheists, was tucked away in the far southwest corner of town. Eight churches, sixteen hundred people—and not all of them were churchgoers.

Mother and I attended the Church of God. I know now that she cherished a lifelong commitment to the Methodist church. (At the time, my dad really didn't care; and my older brother was grown and away living on his own.) But we were new in town, and my seventh grade classmates from the Church of God were friendly to me at school and invited me to join them. Mother wanted to support me, so we attended Church of God services, paid our tithes, and became regulars in that community.

The Church of God congregation worshipped in a white frame structure with a basement that contained rooms for Sunday school. Upstairs, the sanctuary was furnished with wooden pews. At the front of the room, a stage-like platform held a crude pulpit and an upright piano. On the wall behind the pulpit was a large painting of a fair-haired, fair-skinned, blue-eyed Jesus kneeling in the garden of Gethsemane. Between the pulpit and the congregation was a long, low bench that we called the altar, where those who were troubled or in other need of spiritual help could come forward at the end of the service, kneel, and receive the prayers and encouragement of the preacher and other members of the congregation.

Ours was not one of those hillbilly, holy-roller Churches of God, thank you. The movement with which we were affiliated had a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Abbott Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1458205800
• ISBN 13: 9781458205803
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 300
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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