I suspect that I had doubts about Christianity building up for years.  I don’t really remember any specifically, but there were times that I went through a low period, where I would feel disconnected from God, and would emerge with a renewed faith and purpose.  I would always dismiss those times as the result of my own selfishness and unwillingness to accept God’s plan.  Any doubts that contributed to how I was feeling were pushed down or dismissed.

In June of 2009, I saw an online ad for “The Gabriel Method,” a book by Jon Gabriel about how he went from over 400 pounds to 184 pounds.  I know it’s kind of lame, but the before and after pictures were so amazing and I was able to find it on Amazon pretty cheap, so I bought it.

The book was interesting, but what’s relevant here is his focus on visualization.  He explained how he visualized his ideal body as part of his weight loss method.  This has actually been confirmed as effective in studies.

I started thinking about visualization and how powerful our minds are.  Then I started thinking about all of the different things that people believe and how that helps them cope with bad circumstances.  It’s like we can convince ourselves to believe anything.  If that’s true, what if I was only convincing myself that I had experienced God?  What if it was all in my head all along?

So, of course my first reaction was to put the book away because it was obviously satanic.  No, I’m serious.  That’s what I did.

But, what is done cannot be undone.

A few months later it started to come up again.  What if it was all in my head? What if I only felt God because I believed that I did?

But that’s just part of what was happening to me.  Around the same time that I read “The Gabriel Method,” I got interested in a book called “Teaching the Trivium,” which is about Christian classical home education.  One of the foundations of a classical education is logic.  I decided to brush up on logic myself before I started teaching it to the kids.  It had been like 15 years since I studied it in college.  In a Christian classical education, logic is used to defend Christianity.  But in my case, brushing up on logic started to unravel mine.  It brought up a lot of flaws in my thinking.

The final piece to this puzzle has to do with my son, the one with ADHD.  After years of trying to get his behavior under control, we finally had amazing success with a non-stimulant medication called Strattera.  It was like night and day.  His mood and attitude were completely changed and he was finally able to utilize all of the coping methods we had been teaching him.  It’s like it slowed down his impulsiveness enough to react appropriately to frustrating situations.

For years, the Christian community had told me to mistrust psychology and psychiatry because it would undermine my faith.  His behavior was a spiritual attack and we needed to pray for protection.

So, I prayed and prayed and prayed.  I trusted the Lord.  I looked at my struggle as a test of my faith.  Meanwhile, my son’s behavior got unbearable.  He was a wreck.  We all were wrecks.

When things finally got so bad that I broke down and took him in for a psychiatric evaluation, we finally got the help we needed.  We learned that he has ADHD and we learned how to be better parents – and it was not the strict, authoritarian, obedience-at-all-costs parenting advice that came from the Christian community.  And, eventually, we put him on medication, which is when all of the parenting efforts finally paid off and things got remarkably better.

Parenting, let alone homeschooling, a child with a neurobehavioral developmental disorder is extremely difficult.  When the parents have no idea what they are dealing with or how to deal with it, it can be a living nightmare.  Once my son’s ADHD was being managed, the stress level in the home went way down and I was able to actually think about things.

If a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor drug could make his erratic, unreasonable behavior almost non-existent, then it wasn’t a spiritual attack at all.  It had nothing to do with anything supernatural; it had to do with his brain chemistry and a lack of a specific type of neurotransmitter.  Despite my pleas for years, God did not help my son, but science did.

It was like the perfect storm – realizing how powerful our minds are, examining the logical problems with my beliefs, and experiencing the superiority of science over superstition in a way that was life-changing.  The floodgates opened and I began to question everything about this worldview I had believed in so deeply for years.

Needless to say, it did not withstand the scrutiny.

I was confused.  I was conflicted.  I didn’t understand what it would mean for my life if I wasn’t a Christian anymore.  I didn’t know what to think.

Then one morning, I was getting up and I just stopped.  I sat there on the edge of the bed and thought to myself, what would happen if I didn’t believe in God anymore?  I decided to spend that one day as if God did not exist and see what would happen.

I remember that the sun was shining brightly that day.  I felt relieved.  I felt alive.  I felt free.  I finally understood what a self-imposed prison the Christian religion is.  And I never went back.

I have a certain sentimentality about the internet, as some of you know, because it was there for me during what would otherwise have been a very isolating time in my life, when I left Christianity.

But, and there always is a but, the internet is killing our language.

Yes, yes, I know that language always evolves over time, but the internet allows that to happen at such a rapid pace, the bad changes, ie the mistakes and misuses, do not have time to get filtered out of the emerging lexicon.

I have a long and ever-growing list of internet language pet peeves, not the least of which is “yay,” but today I am going to focus on begging the question.

In my post the other day about Afghanistan, I closed with:

That raises an obvious question.  Why are we still there, if our actions are not leading to a more peaceful Afghanistan?

The train of thought that I was following raises that question; it does not beg the question.

Why not?

Begging the question is the name of a logical fallacy.  It does not mean to raise a question, or to beg for it to be raised, yet it is often used in that context.

This frequent and unrelenting misuse raises the ire of certain circles, so much so that there is even a website called, Beg the Question: Get It Right.

Is it really such a big deal for language to evolve in this way?  I am of the same school of thought as Grammar Girl on this particular language faux pas.

In fact, that wrong usage is so common some people will argue it’s not an error anymore (7). But I’m firmly in the camp that believes it’s worthwhile to stick to the formal definition. There are plenty of phrases writers can use when they mean “makes me wonder” or “raises the question.” There’s no hole in the English language that needs to be filled, so there’s no reason to use begs the question improperly.

So, what does “beg the question” actually mean?

From The Skeptic’s Dictionary,

Begging the question is what one does in an argument when one assumes what one claims to be proving.

There are several examples, if you follow that link. Here’s one.

The following argument begs the question.

We know God exists because we can see the perfect order of His Creation, an order which demonstrates supernatural intelligence in its design.

The conclusion of this argument is that God exists. The premise assumes a Creator and Designer of the universe exists, i.e., that God exists. In this argument, the arguer should not be granted the assumption that the universe exhibits intelligent design, but should be made to provide support for that claim.

There’s plenty of useful information and examples at all of the above links to help you stop begging the question – or at least stop misusing the phrase.