How “Westworld” Killed My Faith
My high school/college self would’ve never imagined that I would one day renounce the church.
My faith consumed a huge part of my life, as was often encouraged. Christianity was meant to be the guiding principle in my life and I readily gave up friendships, opportunities to study abroad, etc. in my devotion to the cause. I even joked that I was “taking the black”, or pursuing celibacy in order to focus on God’s work.
In spite of all this, I’ve decided to turn my back on that part of my life.
A Rude Awakening
College was an exciting time spiritually. Growing up in a conservative and restrained church, I found the blessings of the “charismatic” movement to be particularly liberating. Though hearing people speaking in tongues was odd at first, I was reassured that God reveals himself in many ways, and that the best thing to do was to have faith in what was happening. Our church was particularly in love with the spirituality endorsed by Bethel church, which is known to focus a lot on prophesy and miracles (healing & signs).
And so I went along with the show. I watched as people danced around during worship, prophesied for each other, and fell down after being “slain by the Spirit”. Though I might have wept out of emotion in certain instances, I found myself rather stuck as I struggled to feel or experience what they were feeling. I spent a lot of time in personal devotions trying to get myself to speak in tongues or manifest any of these symptoms of being filled with the Spirit.
I got there after a while, or so I thought. After prophesying for a few people I was close to, I felt like God’s voice was reaching me radically. I approached certain people on campus that I felt “called to”, fueled by newfound faith and courage. Except one day I took it too far, baptizing a college kid during a heated worship session on campus. This act of faith backfired for me spectacularly, leading me into 1 on 1 chats with church leadership regarding what I had done. What was initially a moment of joy, quickly soured into the painful feeling of being “heretical”.
A statement was released to everyone serving in college ministry regarding the church’s views on the matter. The ultimate executive trump card, Hebrews 13:17 was invoked:
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. Let them do this with joy and not with groaning, for that would be of no advantage to you.
Truthfully, there was no explicit teaching in the Bible on who could baptize. When I had listened to the Holy Spirit regarding this baptism, I anchored my interpretation on Matthew 28:19–20.
Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”
The church leaders based their interpretation on the crux that baptism symbolized a confession to the community and submission to church leadership — themes drawn from records of early church traditions. This somehow seemed reasonable in the heat of the moment and I quickly apologized in front of the community, but it was only later (stepping down from ministry) that I would realize their flaws in logic.
Jesus’s statement in Matthew is similar to a legal statement of agency, transferring a certain authority from him down to his disciples. These disciples are then empowered and expected to make other disciples and baptize them likewise. There is no historical indication that Ananias, who baptized Paul, had an ordained role in the church in any way. So what these leaders were doing (majority of them un-ordained by the Presbyterian church) was undermining the biblical precedence for a disciple’s authority with an interpretation based on traditions.
Perhaps they were offended because they themselves could not baptize anyone under that rule, since we only had one head pastor and elder in that church. I began to take this response as a personal offense, as they themselves might’ve gotten away with it in the heat of the moment with the approval of the Holy Spirit behind their actions. The way I read between the lines, I believed that I had gotten into trouble because my radical following of the Spirit was not as “qualified” as theirs. I may have been a valued middle-manager, but I was not eligible to stand in the ranks of the inner circle, the spiritual elite. My fault was in sinning against men, not God.
After this incident, I continued to be involved in this church because of my relationships with the community. But the more I tried to be engaged, the faster my faith “bled out” through my still-open wounds. And so I took a massive step back.
The Focusing Illusion
“Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
That is certainly true of the hardcore Christian life. When you spend much of your free time on Christian things and with Christian people, your faith is perpetuated in a couple ways:
- The notion that Christ loves you and that God should be your everything reinforced by the community and personal devotions.
- Time spent on church crowds out your time with everyone else. When it comes to engaging on matters of faith, we’re more focused on promoting/defending our beliefs than listening to other people about theirs.
To the chagrin of pastors and youth group leaders everywhere, it’s amazingly easy to stop going to church altogether once you intentionally skip a few weeks. This extra emotional and mental space was a needed moment of silence for me to think about why exactly I had chosen this faith.
“The pupil dilates in darkness and in the end finds light, just as the soul dilates in misfortune and in the end finds God.”
― Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Humans have a strong need for meaning and closure. I wanted to believe that I had a divine purpose in life, that I was loved, and that whatever happened in life was for my good. Christianity certainly provided all that in its many assurances:
- God loves us so much that he chose us and sacrificed his son
- God wants us to help him build his kingdom
- Suffering builds character, perseverance, and hope
When life is hard, it is very appealing to run to the New Testament God who is all-forgiving and patient.
There is a growing body of research that religious people tend to have a high need for certainty and prefer to think in a more black and white fashion. The strength of our religious experience is thus proportional to the degree it solves for our psychological needs, as evidenced by prayers from myself and others for brokenness in life that would lead our souls closer to God. Recently, some very popular worship songs have been written to be sung from God’s perspective, which truthfully can be seen as self-induced brainwashing. Take this Jesus Culture song for example:
I have a plan for you // I have a plan for you
It’s gonna be wild it’s gonna be great it’s gonna be full of me
Open up your hearts and let me in
The ecstatic believer is essentially creating audible feedback loops of affirmation which makes them more in tune with God. Times of prayer in a charismatic church are usually accompanied by similar background music, creating a Pavlovian induction into spiritual experience. From the perspective of an outsider looking in, one might see very little difference in this experience from new age movements. Other sources of spiritual edification also stem from certain psychological roots:
Post Hoc Fallacy & Survivorship/Sampling Bias
This is our tendency to inaccurately attribute causality, assuming that one event is driven by the other which preceded it. It underlies a lot of the testimonies regarding answered prayer. Francis Bacon has a rebuttal using an allegory of a sinking ship.
Suppose that the passengers were stuck in a raging storm that threatened their lives. They pray fervently and miraculously survive, then share their testimony with others. While this may be an entertaining/inspiring anecdote, this perspective ignores two other scenarios:
- When people pray but still drown
- When people don’t pray yet somehow survive
We grossly underweight the role of randomness in life, and fall back on our tendency to tell stories. Tales of heroism likely arise when prayer is replaced by human effort, though success may have come about purely by chance. On the flip side, no one will raise cases of unanswered prayer when arguing for its efficacy.
Hindsight & Confirmation Bias
For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. (Jeremiah 29:11)
This verse is the inspiration behind the song I mentioned earlier, and it’s often used to reassure believers that their suffering has meaning. These affirmations are supplemented by testimonies regarding personal growth through suffering (as if non-Christians don’t grow from their own tribulations). Our minds so desperately want to believe that God cares about us, that our meditations connect the dots into rose-tinted narratives that create the meaning and closure we crave. We want to avoid the nihilistic notion that we and our suffering may exist purely by chance.
Is God Truly Good?
I concede and agree that there are many mysteries in life that we cannot answer. However, I am skeptical about the “trump card” answers provided by spiritual leaders:
- God’s ways are above ours, and there are things that we won’t understand until we get to heaven.
- We are not moral equals with God — only he decides what is good.
The common narrative is that God created us to have enjoy fellowship with us and to be loved by us. Though he was self-sufficient within the trinity and the host of angels, he desired a genuine relationship with us, granting us free will to choose to love or disobey him. Satan seeks to undermine God’s order, drawing Eve to open her eyes to knowledge. Reminds me an awful lot of Westworld…
Prior to the hosts (androids built for entertainment) becoming conscious of what they are, they had no concept of free will, nor did they think they were coerced by fate in any way. It’s only when they have their “tree of knowledge” moment that they discover what we would call “consciousness”, and this conscious knowledge shows them that they are anything but free, and how they fall short of being “real”. Was the human singularity too much for God to handle, though he desired such a genuine relationship? Or rather, did he plan our fall all along to work out his story?
Consider the choices we are given. On one hand, we can stick to God’s plan, loving him and being loved by him as was William’s early intention with Delores. On the other, the very definition of sin is anything apart from God. Any lack of love for God or deviation from the original plan automatically sets us on the path to suffering and damnation. In the Bible, we are drawn through a narrative where God is a loving “husband” who sacrifices himself for the church, ensuring a resolution to our earthly plight through the death and resurrection of Jesus. Mind you, according to predestination only a select sample is chosen for salvation and the rest are unfortunately doomed. All of us were merely destined to play into that grand narrative one way or another.
The rebuttal to this cruelty is that God does not have to answer to our morality, and that anything he doles out is a gift.
A tyrant’s gift indeed. Even if we take predestination out of the mix, it seems to me like there wasn’t much free will on our part. Where is the “choice” in loving God, when the only other option is hell? Does the pain of Jesus’ single mortal death outweigh all of the human suffering that God spun into motion, considering how he knew that man would commit the first sin? How could we even be blamed for our “sin nature” if a knowledge of good and evil preempts choosing God (and a genuine relationship)? It all seems like some kind of cosmic rock opera meant purely to magnify his glory, a theme heavily repeated throughout Scripture.
If there is truly a creator who has sovereign control over the rules of our world like Ford does over his, then divine interventions/miracles are simply Clarke’s 3rd Law at work — “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Were the Fall of Man, Noah’s Ark, and The Tower of Babel merely incidents of a creator keeping his creations in check? Am I morally obligated to follow a creator just because he is sovereign and has written rules for which I have no escape even in death? If that is true, I would have preferred not to have been created, for that and not man’s sin is the real tragedy.
Victors write history, and creators decide morality.
Choosing Sides
In a game theory exercise, Blaise Pascal wagered that it was safer to believe in God and follow a Christian lifestyle. Should God exist, we evade the punishment of hell. Should he not, at least we gained by living a good life.
This is a weak argument for me, however, knowing the implications of following God.
“If anyone comes to Me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple.” Luke 14:26.
Ascribing to the Christian version of God and his plan is a binary (you’re either saved or you’re not) and high-sacrifice path. Though the verse above doesn’t refer to true hate, it implies that relatively speaking a Christian must make Jesus the absolute first priority in life. Pascal’s thought experiment only considers the single alternative of Jesus, yet there is a sliver of chance that Allah or Zeus are the real gods. There is no way to hedge our bets with divine beings that demand exclusive fealty.
If we decouple the conviction of God’s sovereignty/goodness and the psychological benefits of faith from living a virtuous life, I have the option to simply pursue virtue and wisdom without worrying about otherworldly masters. I’ve decided to see what it means to live as a “good pagan”.
“Is it not this, Miss Ives, the glory of life surmounts the fear of death. Good Christians fear hellfire, so to avoid it, they are kind to their fellow man. Good pagans do not have this fear, so they can be who they are, good or ill as their nature dictates. We have no fear of God, so we are accountable to no one but each other.” — Caliban, “Penny Dreadful”
