Category: Spirituality

Sam Harris Podcast with Bart Ehrman – Part 1 – On Being Born Again

While the interview of Bart Ehrman by Sam Harris was an exercise in the pastor preaching to the choir, some interesting insights into his journey are apparent from the discussion.

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I recently listened to a podcast interview of Bart Ehrman by Sam Harris on What is Christianity? Bart Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and professor at North Carolina who, famously, journeyed from self-described fundamentalist Christian to self-described agnostic as he graduated from Moody Bible Institute, to Wheaton College, to Princeton.  Sam Harris is one of the so-called “new atheists” who have been evangelistic in their atheism. Following are some comments and thoughts that I have about the interview.

The first thing that strikes me is Sam Harris’s statement about approaching a subject with which he is familiar as if he were not familiar with it and getting re-acquainted with the subject. This, of course, is a good, scholarly and open-minded way of approaching any subject. What strikes me, though, is that this exercise for Sam Harris isn’t really what he makes it out to be.

Sam Harris is an atheist, and Bart Ehrman is a former believer, self-described agnostic. In that sense, Harris is not approaching Christianity from an unfamiliar position. He has brought into his studio someone who thinks the same way he does. Ehrman came preaching to the choir. It would be far more interesting for Sam Harris to adopt the same approach with a scholarly believer.

That aside, as I listened to Bart Ehrman tell his story, a couple of things immediately jumped out at me. One is that he describes his “born again” experience as a kind of social induction into a group (like pledging for a fraternity or something) orchestrated by a charismatic youth leader. Then he comments that he was “supposed to have been changed”, but he “wasn’t sure from what”.

These statements are telling. First, Ehrman doesn’t describe an experience with God, but an experience with a group of people to which he was drawn, presumably, by the “charismatic” youth leader. He wanted to be part of the group. Anyone who has had a born again experience knows that this is not an apt description for the experience.

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Rabbit Holes from Age to New Age

Truth matters. I could ignore the truth of gravity, but I do that to my own peril. The same is true of spiritual matters.

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From the Steven Bancarz YouTube channel

I have never been into New Age religion. I swerved close to it at one time. I was intrigued by Buddhism and tended toward Eastern religion in college before I became a Christian.

New age philosophy was also intriguing to me in those days, though I didn’t have a label for it. Buddhism has made for a good entre into New Age religions in the west, but my path took a turn away from New Age philosophy and Eastern religion a long time ago.

I have been a student of religion since I took a world religion class in college. For what it is worth, I have never thought that scientific truth and religious truth were incompatible, but I have never felt that one necessarily leads to (or excludes the other) the other.

Further, it seems self-evident that all truth is harmonious. Any contradiction between the science and religion, or one belief and another, is likely due to an errant interpretation of one or the other, or both.

Science deals with the realm of the natural world, matter, energy and all the things that we can touch, feel, measure and quantify. Religion deals in the metaphysical. Metaphysical reality is no less true for being hard to “grasp” (physically). Beauty is no less “true” than gravity, but they cannot be approached in the same way.

We all put our faith in something; though materialists don’t want to believe that. A materialist is someone who believes simply and only in the natural, material world and science, which reveals the truth of the natural world. So they say.

The materialist puts his confidence in the premise that nothing exists but for the time, space, matter and energy and entrusts himself to that proposition. Such a statement, ironically, is a metaphysical one for which the materialist can provide no scientific proof.

Such a premise and commitment to it is belief and requires faith as sure as anyone who believes in a god.

Truth matters.

I could ignore the truth of gravity, but I do that to my own peril. My disbelief in gravity at some point is likely to get me into trouble, and it might land me in the hospital.

Spiritual truth matters as well, though it is much more difficult to grab hold of for obvious reasons. So I am attracted to people who are able to reach some clarity in the realm of spiritual truth, like Steven Bancarz, a former expert in “spirit science”.

Steven Bacarz was the owner and editor of the Facebook page, Spirit Science and Metaphysics. He wrote for the largest New Age website on the Internet. Steven’s website was so successful that he had 150,000 to 200,000 views every day and “was making a killing off of ad revenue”.

Then, he terminated the webpage and now advocates a different way. He describes his “journey down the rabbit hole” that led him into the New Age movement and his change of direction in his own words in the following video:

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