The Either/Or Problem with God

The Don't-Get-Duped Plan

You’ve likely heard the notion of a “false dilemma” (sometimes referred to as “false choice”, “either/or fallacy”, or “false dichotomy”), which presents a choice between two mutually exclusive options (typically opposites), implying that there are no other possibilities.

In case you need to brush up on your logical fallacies, here’s a more detailed description:

Often in religion, particularly for those who leave religion, people become trapped in a maze of false dilemmas. In this article, I want to mention a few. The reason I write a post like this is to address what is often referred to as “hermeneutical injustice” (or “epistemic injustice”). This is something I address with the non-religious spiritual directors who I train.

The word “hermeneutical” means “to interpret”, while “injustice” means a “lack of fairness”. Hermeneutical injustice is when a person interprets a situation to someone unfairly by withholding relevant or significant knowledge or information. 

For example, if you went to your doctor with an illness, and he prescribed an aggressive and risky treatment plan, which represented only one of several options that he never informed you about, this could be considered an injustice. Why? Because the doctor failed to represent the situation fairly in order for you to participate in making an informed decision.

Mary and Bob

Imagine the following imaginary conversation between Mary and Bob related to religious deconstruction:

“Hey, Bob. I am done with Christianity! I’m not sure if I believe in God anymore, and as far as I’m concerned, the Bible is nonsense. I read somewhere that it’s questionable if Jesus ever even existed. I’m ready to move on.”

“I understand, Mary. I think you’re on the right track. There’s a reason why a lot of people leave Christianity and become atheists. Who could possibly believe in a God who commands genocide and sends people to eternal Hell? The Bible predates modern science, and any critically thinking person couldn’t take the Bible seriously. And yes, the Bible is the only historical source that references Jesus, which is hardly legitimate proof that he was real.”

The above exchange is problematic on many levels. Bob is guilty of “hermeneutical injustice” by reinforcing Mary’s rejection of the “God” of her particular Christian upbringing, as if this is the only possible way of conceiving “God”. Do you see the false dilemma here? It’s as if the only two options available are: EITHER the God of genocide and eternal Hell OR atheism.

Whether a person does or doesn’t believe in God, is their free choice. But in some contexts, the above exchange would be unethical because it oversimplifies the choice by reducing it to only two. For example, the role of a Spiritual Director is to support a person’s spiritual process, first and foremost by respecting their autonomy and self-determination. A good Spiritual Director will not steer a person toward their own personal beliefs or impose their views upon them.

This imaginary exchange above is an example of “hermeneutical injustice” because Bob failed to represent the range of alternatives available in terms of understanding God, the Bible, and Jesus. Both Mary and Bob are operating within the logical fallacy of a “false dilemma”, which is essentially EITHER the God, Bible, Jesus of the Christian religion OR no God, Bible or Jesus at all.

It may be that Mary decides that no version of “God” makes sense to her, and she in fact becomes an atheist. She may decide to never read the Bible again and disbelieve Jesus ever existed. If that’s what she chooses for herself, great. However, this could be a problem if she chose this because of the false dilemma. There are many ways to think of God, the Bible sand Jesus outside the construct of Christian theism, which I have discussed previously in other articles.

Perhaps a better way to handle this would be for Bob to have said something like:

“I understand, Mary. Faith transitions are often volatile. Questioning long-held beliefs are certainly part of the journey. It’s often the case that our religious background limits our spiritual exploration. The good news is that you are free to explore, and discover what makes sense and is meaningful for you.”

The Mary and Bob conversation are chockful of false choices. I’ll mention four.

Four Deconstruction False Choices

False Choice #1: Christian God OR No God

Upon leaving religion, a person may decide to become an atheist. However, just because a person ceases believing in the “God” they learned at church, doesn’t automatically require them to conclude that no God exists at all. The false dilemma is the implication that the only two options are: either a Christian God, or no God. This false choice could prevent a person from exploring the range of possibilities outside this false dichotomy.

There’s a balance worth noting about one’s leaving-religion process. On the one hand, for some people damaged by religion, even the word “God” can be a trigger. On the other hand, deep-sixing any possibility of “God” as a reaction to a toxic version, may be detrimental. If I go to Baskin Robbins, sample Blossom’s Berry Twirl and hate it, and then conclude that the remaining 30 flavors are terrible, this isn’t exactly critical thinking.

Not all, but some who embrace atheism do so as a reaction to the absurdities they found in the version of “God” they encountered in religion. In this respect, even Jesus could be considered an atheist because he rejected the common conceptualizations of God in his religious tradition. Writing off any possibility of “God” as an either/or proposition is missing the landscape of options such as: progressive theism, pantheism, and panentheism. In my philosophy series, I published an article on the work of Jewish-Dutch philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, who was an atheist but still held a belief in “God”.

The options for conceiving of God cannot be adequately represented in an either/or proposition. The word “God” is loaded with baggage and may not be a useful term for many people, particularly those who leave religion. However, it can be a meaningful and liberating endeavor to explore what the term “God” most fundamentally represents, which is ultimate reality, transcendent experience, higher power, or theory of everything.

False Choice #2: Infallible Bible OR Worthless Bible

It only stands to reason that if a religion-leaver feels they were mentally, spiritually or psychologically harmed by how the Bible was taught, that they are likely to have an unfavorable view of it. Right? This is how I felt early on in my own deconstruction process many years ago. I had invested a lot of time, energy and money in my theological education, and for decades had taught the Bible as a pastor. But upon leaving religion, I packed up all my bibles and lugged them to the local library… as well as a few boxes of Christian books, theological commentaries and assortment of seminary textbooks. (I’m hoping my seminary professors Dr. Grudem, Dr. Magary and Dr. McKnight aren’t reading this!)

But many years removed from my religious life, I stumbled into a little thing called “biblical criticism”, which strangely was never a seminary class. Wooza! That was a game changer. This further led to my discovery of the Philosophy of Religion, which is where I learned that not everyone interprets the Bible the way I learned in divinity school. Additionally, I discovered that non-religious fields of knowledge such as psychology and literary studies find meaning and value in the Bible.

Suffice it to say, that what you learned in church the Bible means, may not be the gospel truth. I cover this topic in detail in my previous article, Which Bible Should You Read? The issue of the Bible is critical because it’s the sole source among Christians for their understanding of God.

The false choice with the Bible asserts that the Bible is either:

(a) the inerrant, infallible, exclusive, sole truth and Word of God to humankind

(b) a meaningless, toxic, pointless, corrupt, vile book

Perhaps you could say generally that Christians would tend to line up with option (a), and atheists, option (b).

So, is the Bible brilliant or bust?

Let me offer an alternative - option (c) - the Bible as ancient literature.

Option (c) involves seeing the overall format of the Bible as a literary anthology—a collection of varied literary genres written by multiple authors over the span of many centuries. It includes the genres of narrative, poetry, letters, myth, law and visionary writing. One could think of the Bible as an Epic, telling the saga of humankind’s existential struggles and relationship to ultimate reality. It speaks to the central themes of our existence, including life and death, good and evil, the nature of reality, meaning and purpose, the non-material or transcendent dimension, suffering and flourishing, love and hate, politics and religion. The saga includes both the ugly and beautiful things human beings do in the name of “God”. It’s a story that is still unfolding.

Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology, asserted that the Bible is an extraordinary writing in that it is full of themes, figures and stories that hold archetypal significance for all humankind. An archetype is a universal narrative, deeply imbedded ideas and patterns of thought, iconic figures and metamorphic images that are present in the collective unconscious and have sway over the lived human experience. Jung believed that the Bible is chock-full of these deeply rooted archetypes, which accounts for its enduring interest.

The originality of the story that the Bible tells is extraordinary. In the beginning God creates the universe, gives life and orders everything, gradually fades into the background, hands the keys over to a nobody in Palestine who cobbles together a small group of peasant followers, and single-handedly sparks a revolution against the institution of religion, which results in his execution.

The Bible tells this story based upon the construct of theism, and anthropomorphism is the primary literary vehicle for expressing this idea of “God.” Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities.

People view the Bible as absurd because they assume that the Biblical writers intended us to take sections like the creation story, Adam and Eve, the Fall, Noah's Ark, Jonah and the whale, virgin birth of Jesus etc., literally. If taken literally, one could see how a person might come to believe that there is a Gandalf-God in the sky who asked Abraham to kill his son as an act of devotion, commands holy troops into battles and wars, strikes down people dead for disobedience, and sends the bulk of humankind to eternal conscious torment for incorrect theology.

In my view, attacking the Bible because you think it's a joke that the biblical writers believed the creation story and Noah and the Ark as literal events, might just make us the joke for actually believing they thought this. Just as Christianity became something that was not the fault of Jesus, so the Bible may not be to blame just because some people have interpreted it in absurd ways.

John Dominic Crossan wrote about the Bible:

“My point is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.”

But even given all of that, if the Bible was misinterpreted to damage someone spiritually and psychologically, it may never be a piece of literature one will be able to embrace meaningfully. That’s okay too. It not required that a person read or study the Bible to know truth and have a spiritual life.

False Choice #3: Evangelical Jesus OR No Jesus

It’s a false choice to say that the only two options on Jesus are:

• David Koresh Jesus or No Jesus at All

• Jerry Falwell Jesus or No Jesus at All

• Joel Osteen Jesus or No Jesus at All

Regardless of one’s religious faith there is little doubt among contemporary historians that a figure (“Jesus Christ” in Christian literature) was a real person who lived in Palestine in the First Century. Historians agree that this person was an itinerant teacher who traveled and taught throughout Palestine gathering followers around him through the force of his personality and the compelling nature of his message.

There is general agreement that Jesus was perceived by the Roman occupiers of Palestine as a dangerous religious radical and a disturber of the peace. It didn’t help that Jesus infuriated the religious establishment for refusing to legitimize it. Consequently, he was arrested by the local authorities and summarily executed by the Romans in a public crucifixion, the standard method used by the Romans to deal with political troublemakers.

There is near unanimity among scholars that Jesus existed historically, although biblical scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the details of his life that have been described in the Gospels.

One answer to the question, “Did Jesus really exist?”, might be something like:

The Jesus of the Christian religion is a mythologized version of a historical Jesus who actually existed. On a larger scale, there is a legend about Jesus that came to represent to many people something profoundly meaningful, powerful and liberating. This isn't unique to Jesus or even to religious leaders. We perpetually mythologize historical figures of all kinds - Buddha, Joan of Arc, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Teresa, Michael Jordan, Princess Diana, Steve Jobs, etc.

There are people who have found Jesus to be significant outside the box of the Christian religion. For example, there is a very robust tradition of “Christian humanism,” emphasizing the humanity of Jesus, his social teachings and belief in universal human dignity, and his propensity to synthesize human spirituality and the material world. There has also been a “Christian anarchist” movement, most notably championed by Leo Tolstoy, who claims that anarchism is inherent in the life and teaching of Jesus. Jesus is far more radical than many would have you believe, and for good reason – it threatens the status quo and all religious and cultural institutions of authority and power.

I have offered alternatives to traditional Christianity’s teachings about Jesus in two of my books, Being Jesus in Nashville, and Inner Anarchy, as well as my Substack article, What if Jesus went undercover boss at Joel Osteen's Church?

False Choice #4: Christianity OR Atheism

Obviously, there is a wide spectrum of belief-systems represented among the world’s religions - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Baháʼí, to name a few. But there seems to be this thing, especially between Christianity and Atheism.

You may have noticed, especially if you are a paid subscriber, that I have been writing lately about the connections between Christianity and Atheism. Spotting significant bonds between the two, fueled my presentation at the 2024 Open and Relational Theology Conference at the Grand Tetons. I’m not going to re-hash what I shared there. If you’re interested, I have published seven articles to date that relate to the core ideas in my ORTCON 24 presentation:

• The Parable of the Only Person Alive: One Deconstruction to Rule Them All

• Not Ready for Prime Time: My Upcoming ORTCON 2024 Presentation

• A-theist Theology? Inventing New Words and What I Learned at ORTCON 2024 (Contains my ORTCON slideshow)

• What if God disappeared? The Bond Between Christianity and Atheism

• The Parable of the Only Person Alive (Part Two): The Death of God in Jesus

• A New Theology: 10 Failings of Theological Scholarship in the Modern World

• Did We Miss the Apocalypse? (Part One) Saving Christianity From Itself

My observation is that people who leave Christianity for Atheism had a flawed Christianity, and people who leave Atheism for Christianity has a flawed Atheism. I write about this in my article, The Case For (and Against) Cultural Christianity: Did Richard Dawkins Renege His Atheism? In my view, Christians and Atheists would both benefit greatly by doing theological work together.

Beyond the False Dilemma

Outside the either/or mentality, one discovers:

• You can believe in God, but not be a theist.

• You can find significance in Jesus, but not be a Christian.

• You can appreciate the Bible, but not believe it is the only or absolute truth.

• You can believe in eternal life, but not believe in streets of gold or flames of torment.

• You can accept you are capable of wrongdoing, but not believe you are a sinner.

• You can cultivate a meaningful, impactful and social spirituality, but not go to church.

• You can be drawn to a particular spiritual path, but not write off all the others.

It would be unfair for me not to mention that one could be guilty of the either/or fallacy by insisting that “religion” and “spirituality” are opposites or mutually exclusive. Anti-religion sentiment seems to be growing in the West, and too often religion is cast as antithetical to spirituality. By now, we’ve all heard of the SBNR designation - “spiritual but not religious”. I often use the term “non-religious spirituality”.

This language should not be taken to mean that one cannot cultivate a meaningful spirituality through religion, but rather that spirituality does not necessitate religious affiliation or participation in traditional religious belief-systems, frameworks or structures. Part of the problem is linguistic. For example, American philosopher and psychologist William James, used the word “religious” to identify what we now use the word “spirituality” to refer to. For James, the two terms could be interchangeable.

William James wrote:

“Were one to characterize religion in the broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto.”

That “unseen order” that James refers to doesn’t have to conform to orthodox Christian theology.

Religious deconstruction can be a volatile process. I have written extensively on the subject in articles such as: Undoing Religious Pathology, and The Leaving-Religion Do and Don't List. I also discuss the religious deconstruction process in a previous series I published, unChristian: Deconstruction for the Rest of Us.

People are often lured into toxic religion by the use of logical fallacies. I discuss this in my article, Is Religion a Rational Way to Seek Truth? Upon leaving religion, a person may still be led astray by these kinds of fallacies.

A Don’t-Get-Duped Plan

Logical fallacies are often used to manipulate people into toxic beliefs. Here are 10 ways to protect yourself from being duped:

1. Question those things that you were told never to question

2. Question those things that would never occur to you to question

3. Break your dependency on others to do your thinking for you

4. Break your tendency to externalize authority to sources outside yourself

5. Stop participating in hero worship and putting people on pedestals

6. Grow in confidence in listening to and trusting yourself

7. Hold your own in the face of criticism and disapproval

8. Invest time and energy in becoming a more knowledgeable person

9. Learn the steps involved for critical thinking and apply them often

10. Test and verify all “truth” by your own personal experience

A book to read to cultivate stronger critical thinking skills and protect yourself from logical fallacies: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

In Summary

• Whether it’s embracing religion or walking away from it, the use of critical thinking is paramount.

• Matters of ultimate significance are rarely (if ever) properly represented in binary choices.

• The pinball dynamic between Christianity and Atheism may be the result of a flawed Christianity and a flawed Atheism.

• Every person is free to hold their own beliefs and cultivate their own spirituality, hopefully it resulting in more love, compassion and humanity.

“By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.”
- Confucius