The following is an email interview, which will appear in some form in a future issue of the Family of Humanists newsletter.

1. You are or soon will be in China. Where are you (will you be) and what
are your professional plans and other ideas for using your time there?

I’m in Jinhua, a medium-size city in the middle of Zhejiang Province, just a four hour drive south of Shanghai. I’m teaching English classes at the university here, and my primary goal is to become more familiar with the language and culture. I’ve been contemplating a long-term stay here since I was first here in China eight years ago on a summer missions trip. I inherited an interest in Chinese culture from my father, and studied the language for three years as part of a linguistics major at UCSB. But because learning out of context is always hard and because I was also busy doing a physics major, the language didn’t stick as well as I had hoped. I didn’t come after I graduated college because I was feeling pretty ontologically lost as far as my worldview and the meaning of life, but I was still trying to work it out in a Christian framework. Over the last couple years I’ve grown increasingly discouraged about US culture, and felt stalled in my academics, so I decided it w as time to come. Next year, I plan to finish the computational linguistics masters program I was in at SDSU and enter a PhD program, probably in cognitive science.

2. You lived with your parents and siblings in South America for a number of years. Could you tell us about that time of your life and some significant experiences you had there?

That was most of my school-age years, but I’ve never been very good remembering stories. Being raised in a community of missionaries focused on linguistic research in Native American communities in Colombia has undoubtedly and profoundly shaped who I am. But it’s hard to describe.

3. I believe you have traveled quite a bit, as have your parents and your
siblings, what places have you visited and what have you observed and
learned about the peoples and places you’ve seen?

All of them have actually spent more time abroad than I have, and except for my older sister, they have all been more places. But I have travelled a fair amount. I spent a summer in northern China, another summer in Mexico City, and one summer the family did the tourist thing in Europe, with some time in Uzbekistan where my brother was working at the time. One thing that has struck me is how much people around the world are becoming more alike, sharing more and more physical culture, habits, and languages. Educated urban youth, especially, listen to a lot of the same music, wear similar clothes, enjoy many of the same activities, and have similar values and aspirations. On the one hand, that means we are losing our differences, making it easier to communicate with and understand distant members of the world community. On the other hand, we are losing our distinctiveness. A lot of local flavor and community is being washed away. We are becoming more connected with distant people and places, but becoming less connected with the people and places physically closest to us, and disconnected from the resources we consume and the waste we produce. I think this might help solve some of the perennial human problems, but it brings new ones. China in particular is an interesting place to watch it happen because it is now one of the most quickly changing countries in the world, and they have been dealing with some of these issues for over two millennia.

4. You’ve emailed some relatives who are members of the Family of Humanists
(FOH) that you now call yourself “a secular humanist”. How do you define
and describe that term and what it means to you?

I come to that term without much reflection or reading on it. I think I like the term because it emphasizes values (humanism) rather than a particular metaphysical stance. First principles and theoretical details can sometimes be important and often enough interesting to consider, but they’re quite difficult to evaluate, and awfully easy to disagree about. For the purpose of living life in community, what matters most is a core of common values, and I think that’s what the phrase “secular humanism” captures. “Humanism” because I believe life is most aptly framed in terms of people and their communities, and values that optimize their individual and collective health are the ideal core values. “Secular” because, though spiritualist traditions have captured elements of truth that are difficult to express in other terms, they are fundamentally intrinsically subjective, and thus easily mistaken.

People are prone to overgeneralization, and so religious-like thinking might perhaps be as inescapable as our “naive physics”, that is, our intuitive, flawed conceptualization of physical behaviors. For example, we intuit that heavy objects fall faster than light objects, overestimating the effects of wind resistance on our observations, and our intuitions about angular motion are often wrong, such as thinking that objects held to a circular path will move in a spiral path when released, or underestimating the effects of the angular momentum of a spinning object. People who develop better intuitions of these behaviors still have flawed intuitions of quantum mechanics and relativity. In much the same way, I think, people’s ability to identify patterns and causes spills over into superstitions that are difficult to distinguish from reality. Religions and superstitions might be unavoidable, but these ideas in the border zone, between ideas that we can evaluate externally and ideas that no one believes, have an important exploratory role. Religious traditions are a valuable source of concepts and theories, but they shouldn’t be trusted beyond what can be objectively evaluated, and they form a poor basis for social contracts.

5. Could you also give an idea of your philosophical / religious beliefs
and how this may make a difference in your daily life and future plans?

My perspective is that the religious traditions that surround us express truths about community health, in a way analogous to how naive physics or even early scientific theories express truth in an incomplete or superficial way. Human societies are very complex systems, and it is quite difficult for an individual to correctly and intuitively understand much about the behavior of such a system. Subtle truths that help maintain the society’s health get preserved within elaborate theories that are otherwise false, much the way a beneficial mutation may be preserved along with detrimental mutations within a genome. As such, religious beliefs are to be respected as valuable sources of truth, but they are also to be regarded with caution. In my daily life, this means my sense of ethics is largely unchanged from what it was when I was a Christian, though I am much less confident about the reliability of my intuitions. My future plans are pretty hazy, partly because I have a much weaker sense of life purpose.

6. You wrote “it was a long process, but the turning point was about three
years ago now”. Could you describe the process, tell us about the turning
point, and some incidents or persons that caused you to investigate your
previous ideas?
7. If there are any writers or publications that you find or have found
particularly helpful in your search for better understanding, could you
identify them, tell us about them, and what ideas you found provocative or
helpful?

I can remember late in high school being unable to understand how any Christian with a solid understanding of the faith could ever turn away from it, or how any intelligent person who seriously and honestly considered the evidence could possibly reject it. In college, for really the first time, I became good friends with non-believers, and in dialogues with them and with my uncle Devin, I started to realize that my worldview was not as coherent as I had perceived it to be. Having been raised in a Christian tradition that highly respected scholarship, I had many answers for difficulties that my Christian friends were dealing with, but it became increasingly clear to me that my faith was not as obvious as I had once believed it to be. Faced with several major questions that I could not answer satisfactorily, and feeling like the issues I had with metaphysical naturalism (that is, non-supernaturalism) were at least tractable, about 6 years ago I admitted to myself that I no longer believed, and I told a few people about my doubts, but I continued to search for solutions to my questions, and several months later I became convinced that I had overestimated the difficulties, and I decided to give Christianity another chance. Over the course of another two years I tried again to iron out my issues, but ultimately I was unable to find a faith I could believe. In the year after I graduated from college, I admitted to myself I could not continue as a Christian, and began to try to establish for myself what I did believe.

The books and articles I read were overwhelmingly those written from a Christian perspective, and the only strongly opposed view I remember reading was Ingersoll’s “Why I am not a Christian” but I do remember reading one of Michael Shermer’s books, either How We Believe, or Why People Believe Weird Things, and I read Robert Ingersoll’s “Why I am Agnostic”, which itself wasn’t very convincing, but I pegged it as representative of the questions and misperceptions that I as a Christian needed to be able to address. [Ed: "Why I am not a Christian" is an essay by Bertrand Russell, which I might have also read, but it didn't stick like Ingersoll's did.] The issues that most influenced me to leave Christianity were:

• understanding that many intelligent well-informed people honestly could not believe
• seeing group-think behaviors in the Christian communities I knew and in other close communities, both religious and non-religious, that enabled me to see my religious experience in a new light. (Shermer’s book might have been influential here.)
• realizing that as I attempted to integrate what I knew about the physical and spiritual worlds, the spiritual world increasingly resembled phenomenological description rather than a complementary reality or more fundamental reality, as I had previously seen it.
• I became convinced that if the gospels reliably represented early Christians’ experience of a death and resurrection of Jesus, his teachings about hell had to be taken seriously, which became overwhelmingly horrific, even understood according to C.S. Lewis’s fairly kind and sensible explanation.

8. Could you describe what you are looking for in life? Both short term and long term?

Compared with how I was as a Christian, I really don’t know. Even now I feel quite lost, sensing that there objectively is such a thing as wasting your life, but I have a pretty hazy idea of what a life well spent looks like. Perhaps there is simply a wider number of ways of living a life well. My heritage and upbringing has left a deep sense of responsibility to serve the less fortunate, but the problems we are facing are often overwhelming. I don’t think I am optimistic enough to deal directly with the most serious problems, and I need measureable signs of progress. Because of that, and because I am probably incorrigibly intellectual, I think I need to find a place for myself in academia, where I can do some public good without having to measure my life’s work against an insurmountable problem. I am searching for a role in the human community, suitable to my interests and abilities.