Turmoil as deep-rooted beliefs are dug up

A thought suddenly popped into my head the other day as I was travelling to work - what if an atheist finds out he is loved by our Lord Jesus; how would that affect his senses and his emotions? After all, at the very core of disbelief in God is a sensibility which cries out that one is not loved by Him. It sounds perfectly obvious, particularly when we look at the problem the other way round. A man who acts as though there is no God naturally acts as though God does not love him. That is perhaps the biggest solecism in the world and the principal reason why the atheist looks at the matter of Christianity in such a way. St Paul said that the message of the cross is ‘foolishness’ to those who see Christianity in this way – they are, to use his term, ‘perishing’, because they are behaving as though they are unloved, and they are almost entirely missing the message of what having a loving God brings to this world. The inverse of this is, of course, the point at which one realises that they are loved by Christ, and that is when a man will be ready to accede to Christ’s guidance in asking for revelation (Matthew 7:7)

 

I’m reminded of a very interesting remark made by moral philosopher Richard Hare who imagined a man that had lived all his adult life embracing Nazism and the principles of National Socialism; a man that supported the final solution and was wholly committed to seeing it through. Hare then imagined this man being told that in fact a discovery has been made that he is not the son of his supposed parents, but of two pure Jews, and the same is true of his wife. After hearing that news what is the likelihood of his saying “All right then, send me and my family to Buchenwald!”. In a similar sense, I doubt very much whether anyone could understand fully the love that is on offer to them and instead choose a route that is contrary to their very being. The more one understands God the less one wants be away from Him, or live apart from Him; thus I think the example by Hare has close parallels – for I do not think any man could get a proper purchase on what Christ’s dying really means for him and still go on to declare a desire to have nothing to do with Him. 

 

Psychologists have shown that there are various rules of endowment which protect one’s mind in the analysis of gains and losses. It is known that human beings place a much higher premium on not losing (that is, protecting what they already have) over failing to gain (that is, losing out on a potential increase). Imagine that there were one thousand tickets put on sale for a very unique and special event, say, an important sports event or music concert that only happens once every few years. If the thousand tickets sold out within a few minutes and a study was conducted involving a group of people who missed out and were offered the chance to buy a ticket at an increased rate, and a group of people who had purchased a ticket successfully but were presented with the opportunity to sell theirs, you would find that those doing the selling would place a much higher price of sale on theirs than those who were looking to buy would place on their maximum buying expenditure. 

 

In short, we treasure what we have and the emphasis on not losing it much more than what we could gain – and this, I think, gives us a little insight into some of the potential feelings and ponderings the atheist faces as he balances what he has with what Christ is offering him. We see an example of this in Matthew’s gospel:

 

 

That such a moral and decent man could be told his lifestyle was lacking is astonishing, but for all the qualities this man possessed he lacked the vital one, the cost was too much – he could not shift the emphasis from what he had to what Christ has. Often the changes Jesus demands of us are changes that undermine much of our way of life, but you can be sure that it is because He knows our present way of life is not enough to make us fulfilled. It is here that Christ wishes to step in and make us right. Yet in the Christian life as well as the atheistic life, the spectre of change – particularly the sort of change that undermines a deep felt principle (however good it appears at the time) – is not always something that is anticipated as Christ would like us to anticipate it. 

 

Much of the above is, as I said, conditioned by the particular decision we have already made and our propensity to stand by those decisions until a situation comes our way that renders the retention of those decisions too inimical or hostile for continuation. In psychology this is called the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ – we continue to make emotional investments in a situation once we resourced it sufficiently to call it a ‘conviction’. That explains why it is so hard to talk people out of bad decisions and, in particular, bad belief systems – it is not so much that they are wedded to the underlying philosophies of the beliefs themselves (although that is true to an extent) it is more to do with having those beliefs and the proprietary investments made early on when he or she began to formulate them. 

 

Of course we see this happening in much simpler propositions than the relatively complex matters like religious beliefs. To give you an example of the sunk cost fallacy; we are more likely to endure a movie that we know we will continue to dislike if we have paid to watch it. We are much more likely to turn it off if there were no financial costs attached to our watching it. Equally, we are more likely to continue eating something that is dull to our palate if we paid for it than if it came our way free of charge; in fact, the manner in which an item or object came our way conditions very much how we view it in relation to its costs and our liking it. 

 

Thus when it comes to the atheists we meet and our mission to convey to them the good news that we have an amazing God who loves them very much and wants a relationship with them – sometimes our biggest challenge can be less about the prospect itself, more about our ability to understand why people have these beliefs in the first place, how much emotional investment has been resourced into those beliefs, and whether we have the presence of mind to help induce a ‘change of mind’ in them – after all, as we have seen, the change of mind can be the biggest challenge of all, and may well define why they believe what they do about God and his potential to love them.

 

Having looked at the work we have ahead of us helping atheists change their mind, and the concept of the ‘sunk cost fallacy’ where people have the tendency to stick to their decisions once investment in them has reached a certain level of conviction and commitment. This week I want to talk about something inversely related to the sunk cost fallacy – it is called the law of diminishing returns - it is about showing prudent judgment in constructing an optimal stopping tool. In other words, it is about showing wisdom and clarity of mind in giving up things that are bad for you by shortcutting the process of decision-making. In some cases, less is more. Let’s have a look at a practical example.

 

Mathematicians John Gilbert and Frederick Mosteller created a natural logarithm to demonstrate a technique for short circuiting the much lengthier process of choosing between a number of given options. By dividing a given number by e (which is roughly equal to 2.72 in the logarithm) you can increase your chances of finding the optimum choice in a set of options. For example, let us say that you wanted to buy a rare first-edition book on the Internet and you found 100 websites that had the book available for purchase (all with varying prices) you could use Gilbert and Mosteller’s logarithm to give yourself a higher chance of finding the cheapest quote for the book without logging onto every one of the 100 websites. This would save you time and the trouble of visiting every website and comparing 100 prices. By dividing the number of options by e you can achieve this with any number of candidates or options. Dividing 100 by e gives you 37, so instead of trying out all 100 websites, you would try 37 (100 ÷ 2.72) and go with the next quote that beats the first 37. This works because by observing 37 percent of the prices offered and then picking the next best price the law of probability says that the amount of times the best priced book will appear in the percentage of books after the second best book is great enough to increase your chances by stopping at ‘the next best priced book’ after 37. 

 

This also works in gambling. If you fancied a flutter one afternoon and decided on, say, 20 bets - using the same logarithm you could maximise your chances of walking away at the best possible time by making 7 bets and then stopping at the next bet that wins you more than the previous biggest win. There are, of course, simpler ways that people utilise the law of diminishing returns. A good example is the lottery – by choosing higher numbers you can increase your chances, not of winning the jackpot, but of not having to share it with lots of people. This is done by choosing numbers that are chosen less-frequently than others, thus maximising your chances of choosing a unique six number combination. The reason higher numbers are less-frequently chosen is because the numbers 1-31 are chosen more superstitiously, often because they resonate as birthdays or other special dates on the calendar. Also studies of sublimity show that numbers on the slip that are more peripherally situated (on the edges of columns) are more likely to be chosen, so a combination of higher numbers on the edges of the ticket will maximise your chances of choosing a unique combination of six numbers.  

 

Of course, all this sounds a bit like exact science, so one must ask – how is this supposed to help our Christian ministries? Well, apart from providing prudence in knowing when to give up something or when to walk away from something or how to maxmise potential, it helps us become shrewder in our outlook, particularly as we realise that life and the beliefs people adopt in their lives are in a sense related to, and concomitant with, the aforementioned standards of analysing and choosing. 

 

In order to see how the acts of analysing and choosing stand up against the sensibilities and traits of the individuals, and how the law of diminishing returns in relation to atheism shows that the atheist’s rate of intellectual and emotional harvest beyond a certain point fails to increase in proportion to additional labour or investments, we must realise something very important. Atheists who have reached a point at which they feel positive beyond belief that there is no God will not view the Christian faith the same as we do, and therefore it is obvious that we are not likely to convince them of the good news by continuing down a road that they have long ago perceived as a cul-de-sac. Before we can do our bit in offering an atheist a stupendous pair of clarity-inducing glasses, we have to first ask for God’s help in giving him a new set of features so that the glasses will fit. When dealing with dyed in the wool atheists we are, in effect, asking God for a miracle, we are asking Him to help us help our atheist companions walk along a road that they perceive as a dead end. And as the law of diminishing returns shows us, it is no good persisting with methods that have already become unfruitful – we must go back a few steps; that is, we cannot begin with our influence until we have understood what is behind our atheist friend’s convictions.

 

And this, I think, is something vital that is often overlooked or misunderstood in Christian proselytising or Christian witnessing – the importance of which cannot be understated; after all, we all have people in our world that we love and care very much about, and who we would love to see come to Christ, so it is the convictions of the atheist that we must look at next.  

Although not wishing to invoke a standard set of atheist archetypes or customary set of oppositional typologies I have concluded from my aggregation of correspondence with atheists, from my friendships with them, and from my studies of psychology in my teens and early twenties that there are commonalties in atheism that, although perceptible in human beings in general, make a distinct compound personality of resistance to Christianity when mixed with facets of their own nurtured personhood. In other words, there are certain fears, insecurities and anxieties in personhood that the Bad One will use to extract from the eternity that God has set in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and educe something hitherto unrealised – the bringing forth of his bad intentions into a man’s personality with the purpose of making the good news of Christianity appear to conflict with his own doubts, fears, insecurities and anxieties (the more the Bad One has hold of you the less you know about it). 

 

Once this process begins the man is already starting to believe that no God could exist – and because of his doubts, fears, insecurities and anxieties embedded in his own personhood he will be a poor judge of his own convictions. As Denman said - “Trial by jury itself will be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare”. There are all sorts of facets to one’s nurturing and to one’s environment and background that will condition much about how a man will feel about the good news of Christianity. I have made a list and posed them in the form of questions rather than allegations or indictments. If you are an atheist reading this or if you are a Christian who has people in your world that you are praying for, it is useful to think carefully about these questions and how they might affect someone’s potential for realising the good news. Of course one must be mindful of something else before we look at the questions – if someone is affected by one, some, most, or all of these, this does not necessarily mean that they are aware of how these issues are affecting them – they may be aware of the effects only to the degree to which the subconscious or subliminal aspects of their personality allow the mind access to the self’s history. Having established this, we are now ready to look at the questions:

 

1) Have you, through parental indoctrination (usually fideist indoctrination), Sunday School, a strict Catholic school or education, oppressive religious teacher, or some other oppressive variety, had bad experiences in your younger years that have yielded negative feelings towards God or religion?

 

2) Have you issues in your past that yielded anger towards things associated with the Bible, how some of the verse were taught to you, and the effect those verses had on your life?

 

3) Does remembrance of some of your past experiences elicit in you questions like ‘Where was God in those days when I needed Him?’ and ‘How has He allowed these bad things happen to me and those around me?’.

 

4) Have you an idealised view of the world God would have, in your view, created, the mental picture of which does not match or complement the world you see?

 

5) Do you have grumbling insecurities that can be appeased by attaching yourself to those you think are ‘in the know’?

 

6) Do you suffer from a lack of clarity when it comes to analyticity and seeing the broader picture - a lack of clarity that causes you to see Christianity as a set of beliefs that conflict with your everyday worldview?

 

7) Are you worried by how friends and loved ones would react if you became a Christian - that they might see you as gullible, vulnerable, desperate, or that there might be conflicts and quarrels, etc?

 

8) Do you have a proclivity for absent-mindedness - always looking out of the window and missing the window itself?

 

9) Are you fixed on a journey that puts yourself in sole charge of the destination?

 

10) Have your experiences caused you to have any of the following…

i) Preoccupation with the spectre of ridicule?

ii) Repudiation of things beyond instinctive understanding?

iii) Subliminal hatred of authority?

 

11) Do you have one, some, most, or all the following fears…

 

Fear of vulnerability?

Fear of the numinous?

Fear of commitment?

Fear of abandoning comfort zone properties?

Fear of the unknown?

Fear of new social groups?

Fear of being in the spotlight?

Fear of radical change?

Fear of the self-honesty that is going to come from knowing God?

Fear of admitting that you really are a sinner in God eyes?

Fear of the changes that Christ would make in you once He started to do His work in you?

Or perhaps a bigger more general fear that it might all be true and that you’ll have to make some life changes?

 

Although we have said before that part of the atheistic delusion involves a failure to see some of the above with any degree of clarity, and that part of our response is in realising the lengths to which people will go to stay wedded to this type of falsehood - what is often referred to as ‘willful ignorance’ – we must remember that much of the above remains attached to sensitive issues in people’s lives, therefore we must not be people that try to enforce others to give birth to new and better ideas, we must be like gentle and patient midwives who help others to perfect the methods of giving birth to their own better ideas. 

 

Here in this message we are touching on something that we do not often touch on – we are looking at the very real and very sensitive issues often involved in the subject of faith-based belief. It is these issues that make such a subject so contentious and can cause someone so much offense, even when the Christian is being kind and caring – for in atheism we are not just dealing with a set of convictions, we are, in all likelihood, dealing with the emotional and experiential precursors that caused such convictions in the first place, and as we have seen from the above, some of these precursors are very challenging and personal. 

 

I suppose in various times throughout my life I have come into contact with many of these resistances myself, yet I usually sensed that such resistances were not really directly linked to knowledge or intelligence, more to self-honesty, or a lack of it. Many ask why God isn’t more obvious, but I tell you the truth – if atheists can bring themselves to ask some pretty honest questions regarding the above, I believe that they will soon begin to see what is holding them back from realising that they were created to know Christ, and see that it was the aforementioned doubts, fears, insecurities and anxieties that caused the resistances in the first place, and stopped one having the full life that Christ promises after those resistances are broken. Moreover, although we must be cautious in our assessments, if one is candid enough to reach wise conclusions about the resistances, they probably will see that most of them fall under the category of ‘making something very simple very difficult for oneself’; but this, as I have said, is as much the Devil’s doing as it is man’s. 

 

Once this is realised the Devil can be seen for what he really is – a defeated demon, whom God has already put on the road to ruin. All of his minor victories are pyrrhic victories– he wins only a few battles, the war has already been won by Christ. 

 

Despite every bad experience that any has had under a religious title, or with a religious label attached to it, or with an oppressive stigma, the wind sends all of them back the words ‘Jesus loves you’ - for He is God unveiled in the flesh - our God on the cross proclaiming victory. And those powerful words cut deeper than anything else in the world; the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead lives in you. There is no better news and there is nothing between Heaven and earth that can get in the way if you want to know Him.