It was something interesting in some of the discussions we had when I was in college. One thing that separates such “liberal” instituions as Walla Walla and La Sierra from their more conservative sister universities like Southern and Southwestern is the approach they take. Walla Walla teaches critical thinking skills and strongly suggest that you base all of that critical thinking on inspired texts like the Bible while Southern and the like teaches you what to believe.

It was interesting in the Seminary because there I had classmates from all these other schools who knew what to believe, but not how to ask questions to understand things at the core, which is something I did. A great example was my seminar on Gnosticism where we looked at actual Gnostic texts. I understood all of them better that who ever was presenting that week and usually better than the professor because I wanted to understand why they believed what they did, while my classmates focused on identifying dangerous heresy they could fight against.

They wanted to know what to believe, I refused to abstain from thinking for myself. Is it any wonder that I’m an atheist?

(On a side note, we recorded Atheist Nomads Episode 3 today and the sound quality is finally up to par!)