Motivations behind the switch…

Bored in Vernal posted a great question in response to the Risk and Proof post: Is a person who has had a religious experience with a God in one tradition justified in looking into other religions… here’s my best crack at an answer that is more exploring the issue than actually answering it 🙂

What was the motivation for pursing another? If a person had real communication with a God from one faith tradition, why leave (or wander)? First of all, it might be easy to leave or look around because the God of one seems to be a similar God in another (such as is the case with Catholicism, Protestant Christianity, Mormonism, and Islam) – Every one of those faiths seem to believe in the same God of the Bible, but differ radically in the details. But even if the leaving is easy and would not be considered “adultery” in the OT sense, why leave or look elsewhere?

I guess there is a sense of studying other religions just to understand them while still believing in your current one, and this can’t be wrong, but what if one were actually trying to find truth in them. Even in this sense, it seems to me that there are certain truths found in most religions – such as certain virtues of martial fidelity, the view of life as sacred, not to steal or testify falsely in trial, etc. So in other religious that have a different God-like entity entirely – such as Buddhism or Hinduism in contrast to Judeo-Christian religions, some things are still the same.

Maybe I would need more clarity of the term “pursue.” If it means to believe and worship a god other than the Judeo-Christian one when you already believe and worship Him, than that would be considered adultery.

In my trips to Israel, I took a couple of courses on Israelite history, and one thing they mentioned was the rationale behind them (the Israelites) worshiping other gods when God told them specifically not to. When this happened, it was probably a case of curiosity mixed with a rational desire of wanting to cover their bases. If one god didn’t come through for them, then another might – especially when it came to bringing rain for the crops. Why put all your eggs in one basket? Its good to have a number of gods on hand in case an emergency comes up – strength in numbers is always more comforting. A more modern example I’ve heard was a man who switched to the occult because God was not revealing to him why his wife had left him, and he wanted to divine the answer through whatever means necessary – demonic magic included. And he did.

Another modern motivation might be curiosity mixed with a dissatisfaction with a certain version of Judeo-Christianity or a sub-sect of that version. Which version holds true to the most pure understanding of God? Maybe one doesn’t work out, so try another? To me it doesn’t seem to be adultery so much as finding one least-influenced by human corruption and re-interpretation and most pure in understanding how God really is. God might be in all of them to some lesser or greater degree, but which one is the closest to the truest understanding? I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but when a religious group has a bad concept of God, their whole society becomes corrupt and backward, and people seeing the corruption will want to get out.

However, it seems that sometimes a person’s dissatisfaction with a Judeo-Christian religion takes a heavy toll – their one sect was a really bad one, and their experience was so bad that scrapping the entire thing and going with another god entirely is the way they saw to go. This could be motivated by a person who clearly sees how corrupted religion is, and who feels that getting out entirely is the only way to spiritual sanity. This motivation doesn’t seem to be irrational to me. However, it seems more often to me in my limited experience that bad religious experiences also cause people to drift away from theism in general instead of just switching gods.

Of course the final motivation I can think of seems to be the most discouraging – this is one that knows the God of the Bible exists, and has felt His presence, but has decided that the relationship is not worth the effort, possibly motivated by a desire for independence or something selfish. This is just my guess (so take it with a grain of salt) but I imagine that this may draw people to a half-hearted belief in religions with non-conscious deities simply for the bonus of being able to dictate how they want to live without being bothered by what God thinks, because this god does not think at all. Most of the time, I could imagine that most people with these motivations drift more into agnosticism or atheism because it is so popular and prevalent in our culture – they have a comfortable safety net to fall into than other less liberal societies (i.e. the Muslim world.) In addition, atheism and agnosticism are so closely coupled with the virtues of rationalism, logic, and scientific study (which ironically is no less important in Christianity as I understand it) but has somehow marketed themselves as having staked a unique claim with them that no other belief system shares.