Born to fail

The apostasy of Matt Slick's daughter is making a big splash in both secular and Christian internet circles. I'm going to comment on her deconversion story. Keep in mind that we're only getting her side of the story, which may be exaggerated.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/15/the-atheist-daughter-of-a-notable-christian-apologist-shares-her-story/

I have two sisters, three and seven years younger than myself, and we were all homeschooled in a highly strict, regulated environment. Our A Beka schoolbooks taught the danger of evolution. Our friends were “good influences” on us, fellow homeschoolers whose mothers thought much alike. Obedience was paramount — if we did not respond immediately to being called, we were spanked ten to fifteen times with a strip of leather cut from the stuff they used to make shoe soles. Bad attitudes, lying, or slow obedience usually warranted the same — the slogan was “All the way, right away, and with a happy spirit.” We were extremely well-behaved children, and my dad would sometimes show us off to people he met in public by issuing commands that we automatically rushed to obey. 

i) I'm not opposed to corporal punishment. But if this is what happened, her parents went overboard. 

ii) If, moreover her father "would sometimes show us off to people he met in public by issuing commands that we automatically rushed to obey," then that's spiritually pretentious. It's like a "fundy" version of those twisted child beauty pageants.

It was around this time my dad began receiving death threats — though I didn’t find this out until later. Someone was sending him graphic pictures, descriptive threats of rape against his family, and Google images of locations near our house. He got the FBI involved. They eventually determined it was someone from across the globe and likely posed no risk to us. My parents installed a home security system after that, but it only reinforced the “us vs. them” mentality he already held. My dad spoke frequently about the people “out to destroy him” and how his “enemies” were determined to obscure and twist the truth.

I can understand how that would contribute to the bunker mentality.

I wasn’t privy to a great deal of what went on behind the scenes at CARM — likely because I too young to fully understand it. A few times a year there would usually be an “event” that would capture most of his ire. For a while, it was the Universalists who were destroying his forums. Another time, it would be his arch-nemeses in the field of women in ministry or “troublemaking” atheists. 

That suggests shoptalk was too dominant at home. 

Atheists frequently wonder how an otherwise rational Christian can live and die without seeing the light of science, and I believe the answer to this is usually environment. If every friend, authority figure, and informational source in your life constantly repeat the same ideas, it is difficult not to believe they’re onto something.

Of course, that mirrors her very provincial experience. Many Christians weren't raised in that environment. 

I informed my parents that I wanted an arranged marriage because love was a far too emotional and dangerous prospect, and I trusted them to make an informed choice for my future far better than I ever could. My romantic exploits through puberty were negligible.

That suggests her parents kept too tight a grip on the leash. A dog that's kept tethered in the backyard has no self-control. The tether is the control. Let it loose and the dog will run wild. 

It sounds as thought her parents didn't give their kids the breathing room to cultivate their own devotional life or explore the world on their own. Everything was regimented. No spontaneity. It's a cliche that the surest way to lose someone is to hold them too tightly.

This changed one day during a conversation with my friend Alex. I had a habit of bouncing theological questions off him, and one particular day, I asked him this: If God was absolutely moral, because morality was absolute, and if the nature of “right” and “wrong” surpassed space, time, and existence, and if it was as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?
Alex had no answer — and I realized I didn’t either. Everyone had always explained this problem away using the principle that Jesus’ sacrifice meant we wouldn’t have to follow those ancient laws. 
But that wasn’t an answer. In fact, by the very nature of the problem, there was no possible answer that would align with Christianity.

She seems to be operating with a starkly binary notion, where NT ethics totally abrogate OT ethics. But that's grossly simplistic. To begin with, some OT laws exemplify moral absolutes. Those commands and prohibitions remain in force.

However, the so-called ceremonial law was never based on moral absolutes. It was symbolic and typological. A means to an end. Their purpose was to prefigure the Messianic age.

I still remember sitting there in my dorm room bunk bed, staring at the cheap plywood desk, and feeling something horrible shift inside me, a vast chasm opening up beneath my identity, and I could only sit there and watch it fall away into darkness. The Bible is not infallible, logic whispered from the depths, and I had no defense against it. If it’s not infallible, you’ve been basing your life’s beliefs on the oral traditions of a Middle Eastern tribe. The Bible lied to you.
Everything I was, everything I knew, the structure of my reality, my society, and my sense of self suddenly crumbled away, and I was left naked.
I was no longer a Christian. That thought was a punch to the gut, a wave of nausea and terror. Who was I, now, when all this had gone away? What did I know? What did I have to cling to? Where was my comfort? 

Is she seriously telling us that all this was a result of asking "why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?"

Ironically, she's right about the price of apostasy. Pity she no longer takes that to heart.

For a long time I couldn’t have sex with my boyfriend (of over a year by this point) without crippling guilt. I had anxiety that I was going to Hell. I felt like I was standing upon glass, and, though I knew it was safe, every time I glanced down I saw death.

She's right. Sadly, she doesn't appreciate how right she is. 

I had trouble coping with the fact that my entire childhood education now essentially meant nothing — I had been schooled in a sham.

Based on her irrational overreaction. 

Eventually I worked up the courage to announce my choice on Facebook — which generated its own share of controversy. I’m fairly certain I broke my mother’s heart. Many people accused me of simply going through a rebellious stage and that I would come around soon. Countless people prayed for me. I don’t know how my dad reacted to my deconversion; I haven’t spoken to him since I left home.

The fact that her relationship with her father is that broken reveals the emotional turmoil just under the surface.

Someone once asked me if I would trade in my childhood for another, if I had the chance, and my answer was no, not for anything. My reason is that, without that childhood, I wouldn’t understand what freedom truly is — freedom from a life centered around obedience and submission, freedom to think anything, freedom from guilt and shame, freedom from the perpetual heavy obligation to keep every thought pure. Nothing I’ve ever encountered in my life has been so breathtakingly beautiful. Freedom is my God now, and I love this one a thousand times more than I ever loved the last one.

She's glamorizing nihilism, although she's far too jejune to realize what that kind of freedom entails, if taken to its logical conclusion.

Assuming that her account of her childhood is reasonably accurate, it points to a fatal mistake that some Christian parents make. Some Christian parents don't realize that one of the greatest gifts they can give their kids is a happy childhood. There's no substitute for a happy childhood. Nothing compares with a happy childhood. It primes you for life.

Some Christian parents are so duty-driven that they let that fall through the cracks. Don't underestimate the value of a happy childhood. Don't blow that opportunity. It only comes once.