Recently, I was discussing, with a friend, the facts concerning the 911 Truthers’ conspiracy theory. As I countered his arguments, he claimed that I was holding onto “sacred cows,” as I would not acknowledge the “evidence” that WTC7 could not have come down without demolition explosives. What struck me, with this statement, was that, although, his “evidence” of demolition is held by a very small minority of people, he claimed that I was holding onto a sacred cow. This got me thinking about where I once was and where I am now. The ironic thing is that around 2005, I began to look hard at what I considered knowledge and began segregating, knowledge from belief masquerading as knowledge. Although, I had considered myself a very rational person, I realized I had intertwined the two, as many people do.sacred-cow

A “Sacred Cow” is any topic that one is not willing to discuss, or hear contradictory arguments. Sacred cows can include a myriad of things for which a person holds biased views, for any number of reasons, but there is one topic that historically has had an untouchable status, held above any criticism and that is religion. People use the cloak of religious freedom as a means to protect their factually unfounded ideas and their views of inequality. It has only been in stages, through long periods of time, that society has accepted discourse on these issues and have changed them, often with great resistance from the religious.

Ingrained with a very strong belief in a god, as a creator and a father, who loved his children, I became interested in cosmology, at a very early age. If God created the universe, then cosmology would describe how God created it. For me, there could not be any discord between belief in God and science, one describes the other, and they would meld perfectly together. Although, at the same time, believing in the unproven (God, spirits, souls, etc.) opens oneself to entertain all sorts of ideas, as being actual possibilities, which may contradict what is already known. As with the religious and the spiritual, they often make claims of fact or knowledge that cannot be verified, but they still hold them as absolute universal truths.

This is not to say that the religious are incapable of incorporating scientific knowledge into their belief system, which, at the time when I was still a believer, I thought I was doing. Although, concerning cosmology and biology, I acknowledged that God created the universe by the Big Bang, and that man was created through the processes of evolution, I also entertained some of the ideas of pseudoscience: Big Foot, alien visitations, ghosts and demons, conspiracy theories, telepathy, faith healing, out of body experiences, near death experiences, etc. So, you see, I have had my share of sacred cows. In Search Of… and other TV programs of the same vein were favorites, as they fed my beliefs in the pseudoscience (I find it disturbing that these programs are very common on science and history channels, now).

As I matured, experienced life and grew in understanding, one by one, I discarded these sacred cows, moving from Christian beliefs, to alternative spiritual beliefs, then to, eventually, shedding the greatest sacred cow of them all, God. It did not happen all at once. It happened gradually over time, like peeling away the layers of an onion, eventually realizing that there was nothing left to peel away.

Science provides an understanding of our world and universe, albeit incomplete, but a deep understanding still. How could it be so right about so much and yet be so wrong about others? Science surly has had its missteps and frauds, but it dismisses those and makes corrections. With cold fusion, the claim could not be reproduced by others, so it was never accepted. With Piltdown man, the fraud was exposed, which only proved that those fossils were fake. Science is self-correcting, religion is not. If a god created the universe, he did through the Big Bang. If a god created man, he did it through the process of evolution. Rather quickly, during my teenage years, I disposed of both of these religious sacred cows.

At the age of nineteen, right before serving on a mission for the church, I had an experience in the night that I had interpreted as an attempted demonic possession. Later in life, I learned there was a scientific explanation for this experience, sleep paralysis. All of my experiences, once thought to have been spiritual, have scientific explanations. There is not one experience which cannot be explained. If one holds religious claims to the lens of scientific scrutiny they will fall apart, such as the testing the efficacy of prayer. [1].

My experiences of prayer have fallen short of religious promises. In my experience, the outcome of prayer was indistinguishable from pure chance. More often than not my prayers went unheeded. I know all the answers that Christians give for why prayers do not turn out as expected, but, in reality, all of them are excuses for an absent or non-existent god. Even noted Christian author C. S. Lewis acknowledges the absence of God’s intervention, stating that miracles only happen around a great “ganglion of history.” These excuses only work for so long before one begins wondering if God actually wants them to suffer. If a god exists, it is a deist god and not a theist god, who intervenes routinely in our lives.

Even while I was exploring alternative forms of spirituality, I still had this nagging rational mind, attempting to find natural explanations for my experiences. I was constantly questioning and testing. [Dowsing (Ideomotor phenomenon[2]), demonic possession (Sleep Paralysis[3]), Reiki (Psychological Priming), prayer (unpredictable results, akin to chance, and placebo/nocebo effect),]

When I say that I have given up these sacred cows, I truly mean just that; I once was a believer, thoroughly studied the topic, and now a disbeliever. After my final de-conversion, I sold and gave away most of the books in the extensive library that I had amassed on pseudoscience. I’ve read Zecharia Stichin and Immanuel Velikovsky, read Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body and tried to experience it myself, had past life readings by a couple of noted psychics, studied Edgar Cayce’s extensive library of psychic readings, I’ve tried Reiki and other forms of faith or spiritual healing, I’ve dabbled with dowsing, had aura pictures taken, tried alternative medicine, was an Elder in the church with the priesthood, studied the Bible and other Mormon specific scriptures, studied books on the pseudepigrapha texts and other non canonical biblical texts. So, you see I have gone through the paces, tested and exorcised my sacred cows. My experiences of these over the last 50 years could easily fill multiple blog entries.

At one time I received Reiki attunements, in order to me a Reiki practitioner. While I could feel like I was in an altered state of consciousness, feel a warm burning in my hands, and feel a field of resistance, similar to magnetic resistance, I still was not convinced that I was sensing an actual energy field. I constantly doubted that what I was experiencing was real, but only an illusion of the mind. Just as my experience of demonic possession was merely night paralysis. When I expressed my doubts to other New Age practitioners, they would say that I needed to let go of the rational mind and believe. Among the religious, they also gave similar advice of shutting off the rational mind and relying entirely on faith, that my doubts were merely a test of my faith and that we are not to dwell on the mysteries of God.

This is what all spiritual and religious belief asks; to abdicate rational thinking and believe. While vacationing on the Big Island in Hawaii, I passed by a sign on a cross that summed up what religious belief asks one to do, “Don’t think, pray.” I simply cannot do that. Why is religion the only allowed exception to rational thinking, when it comes to people assessing whether something is true or not? I see numerous contradictions to rational thinking in religion and questions abound. Virgin birth? Death and resurrection? No one has ever seen anyone who has done either, whereas there are examples of these in mythology, but people still think that it is more probable that these exceptional events actually happened, rather than rationally judging, by all available likelihood, that they are in reality mythical stories. If that isn’t holding onto a sacred cow, I really don’t know what is.

It is very easy to misinterpret experiences as supernatural, as I did with my sleep paralysis experience, but there are scientific explanations for all of them, if we have the courage to open ourselves up to the possibility of giving up the most precious sacred cow.

As this year comes to an end, there was a courageous paster, Ryan Bell, that made a 2014 New Year’s resolution to spend a year as an atheist. Now, the year is over, he is not returning to his faith, but is remaining an atheist. He echoes what I have attempted to express here, “I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience.” [4]

On my journey of losing my “sacred cows,” I have found others who have done likewise, Ryan Bell, Michael Shermer, Dr. Mark Lehner, and Bart Ehrman, to name a few. I admire all of them, who dared to face their “sacred cows,” looked at the facts, and in the end, discarded the sacred cows that they hold most precious.

As I look back on my journey through life, my road is strewn with dead sacred cows.

Additional Reading
Year Without God Blog