Letter to My Christian Family and Friends: Living Without God

By Darrel Newkirk MD, MPH

Darrel D. Newkirk MD, MPH was a devoted Christian for over 55 years. He believed God was calling him to be a medical missionary and subsequently he and his wife prepared to serve as foreign missionaries. They served 5 years in Zaire, Africa. After returning to the United States from Africa, he continued to serve actively in their Southern Baptist church. He and his wife helped to start a new mission Southern Baptist church in which he was active for over 20 years. But then he left not only that church, but Christianity itself.

LETTER TO MY CHRISTIAN FAMILY AND FRIENDS, Living Without God is the author's answer to the question, Why? Why did he leave the religion of his parents, family and friends after devotedly serving God and His church for over 55 years! The book reveals his answers to that question.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Apr 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483449135

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LETTER TO MY

CHRISTIAN

FAMILY AND

FRIENDS

Living without God

By

Darrel Newkirk MD, MPH

Why a devout Christian for over 55 years left Christianity

Copyright © 2016 Darrel Newkirk MD, MPH.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

This is a work of non-fiction.

Humanism and Its Aspirations © American Humanist Association. Reprinted by permission.

The Affirmations of Humanism © the Council for Secular Humanism, a program of the Center for Inquiry. Reprinted by permission.

Ten Central Propositions in the Humanist Philosophy © The Philosophy of Humanism, 8th edition, revised, by Corliss Lamont. Reprinted by permission.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4912-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4913-5 (e)

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 04/01/2016

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

PREFACE

Chapter 1 Letter To My Christian Family And Friends

Chapter 2 My Religious Odyssey

Chapter 3 My De-Conversion From Christianity

Chapter 4 Purposes

Chapter 5 Perspective

Chapter 6 The Inferiority Of Faith

Chapter 7 Thoughts On Religion

Chapter 8 Arguments Against God

Chapter 9 Secular Humanism

Chapter 10 Personal Messages To My Christian Family And Friends

Chapter 11 Conclusion

EPILOGUE

FOR MORE INFORMATION

BIOGRAPHY OF THE AUTHOR

DEDICATION

This book is lovingly dedicated to my wonderful, wonderful wife and life partner, June

FOREWORD

H onesty impels free thinkers and seekers of truth. They struggle to comprehend reality, using their minds to the fullest, with the most integrity they can summon. They know it is dishonest to proclaim supernatural things that are, in fact, unknowable. Therefore, clergy who claim knowledge of invisible gods, devils, heavens, hells, angels, demons, miracles, prophecies, magical incarnations, second comings, and the like - - with no actual evidence - - are dishonest. Preachers say they know things they really don’t. That’s menda city.

Dr. Darrel Newkirk is a shining example of honesty. After spending his life in churches, even serving as a medical missionary to Africa, he realized he no longer believed supernatural claims of religion. It was traumatic for him to hurt his church friends and pious relatives, but honesty compelled him to tell them the truth.

His small book is touching testimony of one man’s journey to honest thinking. It’s an admirable personal tale. I salute it.

When I was a young news reporter in Appalachia’s Bible Belt in the 1950s, my witty city editor laughed at whooping, bawling, hillbilly preachers. One day, as a naïve amateur philosopher, I asked him:

"You’re right that mountain Bible-thumpers are absurd -- but what’s the truth? If we reject their tales, what other explanations can we give? Why are we here? Why is the universe here? What is the meaning of existence? What honest response can a truthful person make?

The crusty old editor eyed me and said: You can say, ‘I don’t know.’

Bingo. Those three words rang a bell in my mind, and they still ring sixty years later. They taught me that an honest person can retain integrity by confessing an inability to comprehend profound mysteries beyond everyone’s grasp.

Later, through ardent reading, I learned that church truths are self-contradictory. If an all-loving, all-powerful, Father God created everything, why did he create twisters and earthquakes to kill people? -- or tsunamis to drown 100,000 children? -- or breast cancer to kill women? -- or leukemia to kill children? -- or ravenous foxes to rip rabbits apart? -- or spiders to devour flies? -- or pythons to crush pigs? A being who devised such horrors isn’t loving, but a monster.

Dr. Newkirk saw the same tragedy in Africa, where thousands of babies and children died, and their mothers were devastated.

Impelled by honesty, he made the only choice he could: to quit supernatural religion. I highly commend his sincere account.

James A. Haught, editor emeritus

The Charleston Gazette-Mail

Charleston, West Virginia, USA

PREFACE

T he bulk of this book was written in 2007 just prior to my resignation from the Southern Baptist church I had helped to form and been a member of for about 20 years and from Christianity itself. I wanted to be able to give to my Christian friends and family something that could answer their inevitable question, Why? This book contains the answer to that question.

CHAPTER 1

LETTER TO MY CHRISTIAN FAMILY

AND FRIENDS

Living Without God

Dear Christian Family and Friends,

T he purpose of this letter to my Christian family and friends is to let you know that I have become an atheistic agnostic. This will be a shock to all of you, because you have known me to be a devoted Southern Baptist Christian all my life. But that transformation in thinking and my perspective of the world (my worldview) has changed over the last many years, and I no longer believe in a supernatural god or gods. This transformation has not occurred because of some great crisis or tragedy in my life, or anger at God, but because of my open mindedness to reality. I consider myself an open-minded person, as I believe all human beings should be. And when I began to look critically at the claims of religion which I had been brought up to believe, I found them to be lacking in intellectual honesty. I, like many of you, was raised in a culture of religion, and my religious beliefs, like yours, were shaped for the most part by the society and culture in which we were raised. This is true for all humans. We are a product of the cultures and societies in which we are raised. If you were born into a devout Catholic family, you will almost certainly become a Catholic in your religious thinking. If you were raised in a Muslim culture, you will almost certainly live as a Muslim, and not as a Southern Baptist. I was raised a Southern Baptist and all of my life I have attended and faithfully served in Southern Baptist churches. I love a lot about my upbringing in the Southern Baptist church, and I love the people in the Southern Baptist churches I have attended. So I come to this new way of thinking not out of anger or bitterness against that denomination or any specific church, but because for me to continue believing in the myths promulgated by the church is intellectually dishonest. Writing this letter therefore to you is not easy. It is hard to reveal myself, because I am not an open person. But before I die, I felt I needed to reveal myself and to let you know that my thinking has changed about religion. I am not trying to change your thinking about religion, because if it’s working for you, that’s great. The purpose of this little letter is to explain to you why it was no longer working for me. Even though raised in a particular religious culture, each human has the power to believe or not. Because of the immensely strong cultural pressures to believe in a certain religion, each person usually believes in the religion in which he or she was raised, but yet each person still has the choice and the power to believe as he or she sees fit. I have taken that liberty to believe differently, and it feels great! But why not believe, you ask, and the remainder of this book will attempt to answer that question.

I have tried to write this book in a form that will be as readable as possible for the average person. These topics can be daunting and challenging to the average person, and I certainly consider myself in that category. I consider myself a simple person, not erudite or brilliant, and I have tried to write this material in a simple format that will be easy for most people to understand.

You probably couldn’t care less about what I believe, and certainly may not be interested in wading through this material which isn’t particularly funny or entertaining. It’s not a novel. But perhaps it will help to open your mind to other possibilities and to be more tolerant. There is so much intolerance these days, as there has been throughout history, and a lot of the blame for this must go to religions and religious leaders. Most people, for example, when they think of the word atheist think very negative thoughts. In our current American culture the word has bad connotations. We immediately think of words like communists or godless communists when we think of atheists. We think of them as being bad or evil people, responsible for the social ills of our day. They are monsters trying to lure our children down the path of social and moral destruction. In reality most atheists are good ethical people. I am a good person. I have not committed any serious crimes. I have worked hard all my life and as a physician have helped thousands of people. I am privileged to have been married to a most wonderful woman for over 40 years, and we have 2 wonderful daughters whom we love very much. So atheists can be good ethical human beings, and part of the purpose of this book is to encourage you to open your minds about this worldview. I feel I am writing this book without rancor or hard feeling toward my religion or denomination, and that I am a proper person to do so.

I was born to a mother and father both of whom were devoted Christians. Each came from a long line of hardy country people primarily in Arkansas who were hard-working rural people and who were active and stalwarts in their country churches. My parents followed their up-bringing and were also very active members of the Southern Baptist church in the town where I was born, Hot Springs, Arkansas. When I was growing up, we attended Central Baptist Church at least 3 times a week, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night prayer service. Both my father and mother were workers in the Sunday School, my father was Superintendent of the Sunday School and a Deacon for many years. I was active in the Youth program of the church and was Youth Pastor during Youth Week. I was converted to Christianity at the age of 10 years during a Vacation Bible School and was baptized shortly after. While in college I was active in the Baptist Student Union and served one summer as a summer missionary for the Baptist Student Union and would preach during Youth Revivals. I felt God was calling me to be a medical missionary and my wife and I planned for many years to follow that calling. As a result, I spent 5 years working in Zaire, Africa on public health programs part of the time based from a medical missionary hospital and working with wonderful medical and other missionaries. I have been a very active member of all the Southern Baptist churches I have ever been a member of serving in teaching and administrative capacities. I was ordained a Deacon in the church in 1969 and currently serve as Chairman of the Deacons of my church. So you can see that my heritage is deep in the church, and I feel in a way like Paul when he gave his background as a Pharisee of the Pharisees.

But I have come to be a heretic and an apostate. Even though I continue to attend church with my wife of 43 years, I am no longer a believer. For several years I kept this secret even from her, and continued to put up a good front for her, but as I am getting older and moving toward the end of my life, I felt it was time to come clean and to let her and the rest of my close family and friends know the truth, which I have done. This will not be easy for them nor for me. It would be easier to continue carrying on the charade and I could. But I feel I need to come out of the closet. I understand this could be costly. It could cost me in relationships. It could conceivably even cost me physically. I can hear the preachers now condemning me and this book as being from the Devil. But despite these costs I think the message needs to get out even though I am not naïve enough to think this little book will make any difference in any one’s thinking. But who knows, perhaps it will start someone thinking. Perhaps it will generate some additional tolerance in the world for people who don’t think or