Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot"

It's a classic worth remembering from time to time:

Check out this picture:

It's easy to forget that our sun is but one star in the Milky Way galaxy, with billions and billions of other stars inside it. And our galaxy is but one in a universe with hundreds of billions of other galaxies. So the next time you think something really bad happened to you and it's going to ruin your life, just put it in perspective. Cosmic perspective.

Becoming an apostate is a hard thing to do

But Dr. Ken Pulliam did it anyway. Here's his bio:

I was "saved"(trusted Christ and Christ alone) at the age of 18 and was baptized in an independent Baptist Church in Georgia. I graduated from Baptist University of America (1981) with a B.A. in Theology. I earned an M.A.(1982)and a Ph.D. (1986) in Theology from Bob Jones University. After graduation, I taught at International Baptist College in Tempe, AZ for 9 years. After a few years of accumulating doubts, my Christian faith evaporated sometime during the course of 1996. I am no longer a believer. If I had to pigeon-hole myself, I would say I am agnostic.

Keep in mind that there are myths about such deconversions and more research needs to be done by scientists on the transition out of faith. On the flip side, a friend of mine writes about Ken's conversion:

As an apostate myself, I can imagine the pain this has caused him and his family. Ken has spent his entire life, earned and M.A. and a Ph.D. from Bob Jones University, and taught passionately for 40 years about the "truths" of the biblical account of humanity. And to live with this nagging feeling that "I think I may be wrong. I think I may be changing. I think that there may be more to life than this." is a devastating proposition to those who have not only built their lives around the faith but have built their careers around it too. I was 24 and had a much greater opportunity to start again. Ken, like another friend John Loftus, didn't have that luxury.

I just wanted to write this as I stand on the side of love with Dr. Pulliam and others and say you're not alone, you aren't a fake, you're not a fraud. For some people this is easy, for others it's the hardest thing you've ever done in your life. And know that there is life, even abundant life, as you put the pieces of your world back together.

And honestly, for me, after a while it became easier to live the life I always wanted, I became closer to people than ever before, I became more loving as I was able to move past an "us vs. them" worldview, I was able to more easily join people on their journey of life rather than be defensive against it, I discovered the compassion that Jesus, Buddha, and others had always talked about, and I spent less time focusing on the after-life and more time focusing on the now-life. I found out just how much I was missing.

To all apostates, and apostates-to-be, and Christians, and future Christians-to-be, whatever you do, don't live in fear of being the person you feel that you are right now.

On Ken's blog he does a lot of work refuting the notion that an innocent person (Jesus) can die in the place of a guilty person (sinners) in order to meet the demands of justice. This biblical concept is called the Penal Substitutionary Model of Atonement. It was definitely one of the most problematic ideas for me to swallow, especially when pastors used lame "courtroom" scenarios to try to sell it. Courts don't allow people who don't commit murder to sit in jail for people who do because they follow the law, which stipulates that the person guilty of a crime must be the one punished. More on that here.