Open Letter to Anne Rice
I know the Anne Rice thing is getting old. The story has been around for a few weeks now and I just can’t let it go. Like I did with Stephen Baldwin, I have written an open letter to Anne Rice. I am confident she will read it since she has been so accessible in the past. Let me know what you think before I will send it to her on Monday.
Dear Anne,
I was a big fan of your Vampire Chronicles growing up. My favorite book was Pandora. But when you had returned to Christianity I was crushed. I am glad that you left Christianity again, but I worry that the tentacles of the Christian system of belief still has such a hold on you.
Many of my atheist and humanist friends consider Christians to be stupid. They often think about the Fox News watching, fundamentalist, homophobes who blindly reiterate the talking points of their priests and popular fundamentalist apologists when they make such claims. I never really thought that Christians were stupid though. I have many Christian friends who are very intelligent and there are also many famous Christians who are obviously intelligent like Francis Collins. Of course, most atheists and humanists were also at one time Christians and yet many of these very same people are the ones calling Christians stupid.
The point I am trying to make here is that despite the fact that the Christian story has more plot holes that a Michael Bay film and is ridiculously stupid, it has created a system of belief which can bypass the intellect of moral people of all levels of intelligence.
It starts at a young age. Most people in our society are indoctrinated with religion before they are able to think clearly and independently. People learn about God before they even learn about Santa Claus. Even if some people like yourself are about to break away from this indoctrination, it is still there. It lies dormant and waits for the right moment to reassert itself. People don’t reason back into belief because the story of Christ is unreasonable. No, the belief waits until someone is in emotional turmoil. It waits for when a person’s emotions are clouding their intellectual abilities and then it reasserts itself as a callback to the time when the person was young and felt the joy and comfort of a child.
The comfort of our childhood is linked to our indoctrination in religious ideas and beliefs. So the brain is tricked into accepting these ridiculous ideas out of a craving for our youthful innocence and comfort. This is how religion gets people, Anne.
What happened in your life which brought you back to religion back in 1995? Were you in emotional turmoil or did you reason the Christian system of belief after reading the divine logic that is the Bible. Surely the vicarious redemption for wrong doing through barbaric blood sacrifice is not intellectually convincing? Such a convoluted scheme is not worthy of any all powerful deity and yet even though you have rejected Christianity, you still seem to cling to the belief that Jesus died for people’s sins.
The evil of the Christian system of belief is that it is extremely difficult to break from that belief system even when one breaks from the religion itself. While it is sometimes more comforting to believe in happy fairy tales, the reality of this world is infinitely more comforting in the long run. It is the knowledge that we are still learning and that we don’t yet have the certainty that religion claims o have. It is the knowledge of human potential and that while we were not created special by an all powerful being; we have the ability to become special through our continued education about the universe we live in.
Look at what we have learned about the universe we inhabit. We discovered these things as a species. This wasn’t divine knowledge passed to us passively. No, we figured this stuff out on our own and we are still figuring things out because we are smart and clever. We have devised a system that helps us to learn what is true and what is not. That system is the scientific method and it doesn’t rely on someone’s chaotic emotional state, but waits until someone is as clear minded and objective as one could be.
Faith and Science are in conflict Anne. Faith is belief based on things hoped for by yet not seen. It is belief with no evidence. Science and reason are based on the evidence.
We are all on a journey to find meaning in our lives and while I am happy that your journey has taken you away from Christianity, your journey has not yet come to an end. Please Anne, keep searching for meaning and keep examining your beliefs and re-examine your beliefs. Socrates once said that that un-examined life is not worth living. With that in mind, I wish you all the best on your journey.
In Reason,
-Staks Rosch
Filed under: conversation, de-conversion, faith, Religious Manipulation
