Steve Patterson’s childhood experience of being “lied to” about Santa Claus was devastating to him.
“Disillusionment is powerful.”
That is what he said while relaying his experience.
I think that experience led him to be very skeptical of many things commonly accepted in our society today. I think it served him good to have realized very early in life that not everything that the adults make us believe are true. It serves us good, I think, that he is writing about his skepticism.
I too have experienced many disillusionments growing up:
- KJV Onlyism (ref. How we got our Bible: The KJV Only Movement)
- sacred/secular distinction - (ref. “Nothing is secular.”)
- the YEC interpretation is the only Biblical interpretation of Genesis 1-11 (ref. What Ken Ham Misses About Creation)
- Baptists have always existed since the early years of Christianity (some even teach that Jesus was a Baptist!) - (ref. Mopping Up the Trail of Blood)
- cigarrette smokers and alcohol consumers are some of the most evil people in the world - (ref. Spurgeon Smoked Cigars and Drank Alcoholic Beverages)
- etc.
In my estimation, the first one in that list, KJV Onlyism, had the greatest negative impact on me. Unlike Steve Patterson’s experience, I think I was not lied to by people who taught it to me. I think they were sincere. But it almost destroyed me. By “destroyed” I mean it almost destroyed my relationship with God, which is what destruction ultimately means. So in my own simple ways, I’m going to write things to combat some ideas being presented by its advocates (of whome I was one).
But I do not have a plan of writing on the other topics listed above because they did not have significant negative impact on me. I don’t have that much motivation and I don’t have that much experiential knowledge to write about those things.
Now, why do I think that KJV Onlyism almost destroyed me? It’s because it made me ask questions like:
- “Why are the majority of professing Christians not KJV Only advocates when all these other translations are products of corrupt manuscripts.”
- Why did God allow that to happen?
- Why did God even allow Bible manuscripts to be corrupted?
That last question could lead to questions like
- “Why did God allow people to corrupt bible manuscripts?”
Which can eventually lead to questions like
-
“Why did God allow Adam and Eve to rebel against him?” — which has potential answers available if you search online. (ex. Chapter 5 of “The Bible and Ethics” by David Gooding and John Lennox; “The Shocking Alternative” chapter of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis)
-
“Why did not God make Adam and Eve to be like robots who cannot decide for themselves?” — I’m just joking on this one
But the more dangerous questions are those which leads to questioning the charater of God, like these ones:
- “If the Bible is not perfect, and the Bible is God’s word, does that mean that God is also not perfect?”
- “If the perfect word of God is in the KJV which was published in 1611, where is the perfect word of God before that?”
- “The Greek Text compiled be Erasmus, named Textus Receptus, was the main basis in the translation of the KJV. Is Textus Receptus also perfect? If Textus Receptus used by the KJV translators was perfect, were the first and second editions of this text also perfect?”
- and on and on…
If you are someone who have been convinced that the KJV is the inspired and preserved word of God, your world will be shattered when you have or hear questions like that and do not get answers.
But not so fast. There is an answer to that (the old KJV-only in me is saying) — No one knows everything, so you have to eventually take it on faith. — And “faith” here means blindly accepting something to be true without evidence.
But “faith” is not supposed to mean that, from the Christian’s point of view.
The definition of faith to mean something like “believing without evidence” is only a recent addition to the dictionary, as John Dickson pointed out in his book “Is Jesus History?”:
The sceptical definition of “faith” as believing things without evidence really only made it into our dictionaries because of recent usage in sceptical circles. That is how dictionaries work. They are not arbiters of the best use of terms. They record how people end up using words. And only relatively late in its history (in the 19th century) did the word “faith” come to be used, by some, in the derogatory sense of believing things with no good reason. For most of the history of the English language, from at least the 11th century to today, faith has commonly meant “fidelity”, “loyalty”, “credibility”, “trust”, “reliability”, and “assurance” — synonyms of the original meaning of “faith” as listed in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). (empasis mine)
But Jesus told Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen yet believe!”, you might say.
Well, Jesus did not say “Blessed are those who have no evidence yet believe”. As John Lennox is saying in his debates, “Seeing is only one way to get an evidence”.
(to be revised and to be continued…)
