As a teenager I left my Southern Baptist upbringing to follow a more charismatic faith. Later in life I left the protestant faith altogether and converted to Catholicism, having come to the studied conclusion that it was the most historically accurate iteration of Jesus’ and his disciples’ teachings. Throughout all of my transitions, however, I remained faithful to the core of Christianity. Yet I remember, on a few occasions, allowing doubt to surface.

What about people who are born into other religions? Would God punish them eternally in Hell for being born in a country where the social landscape was dominated by a different (read: false) religion? Regarding creation, I had always leaned towards theistic evolution, which was only inches away from pure evolution. At what point were humans given the “breath of life” and acquired souls? How did that evolve? Or were we plopped fully formed into an already evolving environment?

I asked a friend once ‘how could we know that any of this is real?’ My friend, who was educated in theology and philosophy wisely responded, “We can’t.” It was simply a belief that in the end we chose to believe out of desire and faith. He chose to adhere to the belief that the Christian god exists because otherwise he would fall into despair and debauchery, insisting that morality has always been the property of religion (poppycock!). While this somewhat diminished my perception of my long-time friend my faith and desire persisted. I continued to follow the path of Jesus.

Around this same time I had a child. My wife gave birth to a beautiful baby boy– ten fingers and ten toes and apparently both strong and stubborn since he had the nerve to remove an iv tube that doctors had inserted to get his iron leveled out. He developed normally, despite an early sinus infection, and was a happy, vibrant child. But at around one and a half years we began to notice that things weren’t necessarily as they should be–reduced eye contact, lagging language and lack of response to social cues that most babies his age had long since mastered. A year later, it was confirmed and diagnosed as autism.

I was working at a church at the time and was beginning to ask more questions about the source of their theology which brought up questions regarding theology at large. I started gobbling up every reputable church history book I could get my hands on and the more I read, the more I became convinced that the Catholic church had existed long before it had become the “Roman” Catholic church and that the basic infrastructure was the solid core of early Christianity, adapted from Judaism. Every other type of Christianity had branched off from the Catholic roots to become a diminished and weakened (in my opinion at the time) sect. I set about to quit my job as assistant pastor and worship leader to be confirmed into the Catholic Church.

As one would imagine, this didn’t go over to well with my employers. It was especially so since the Holy Spirit himself had given the pastor a verse-by-verse interpretation (his words, I kid you not) of the entire bible. And to make matters worse the pastor was my wife’s uncle. I was immediately dismissed and completely cut off socially. No one at the church would talk to me save the pastor who antagonized me through vicious hate emails for months on end. He never engaged me in person or even on the phone despite my requests for personal conversation. I was never rude and never made such claims as ‘The Catholic Church is the only true church” or any such nonsense. I tried to stay out of conversations centering on my choice. Nevertheless, my friends dismissed me, even to the point that I was labeled as a demoniac sent to sow dissension among the faithful. Still, I remained a faithful follower of Jesus, convinced that I was doing the right thing.

So I played in my band, which was becoming more and more lucrative as the months progressed. And I went to church. And I prayed for a miracle for my son, who was getting worse. The tantrums were getting more violent. He was becoming self-injurious to the point that we were frightened that any day we would get a call from CPS. I spent hours in prayer. I fasted. We were also going to doctors and trying different treatments and searching for the cure that we were certain God would lead us to. Well, we still haven’t found it. And God never performed the miracle we prayed for and our families prayed for and their churches prayed for. It was at this point that I started to get angry.

I began to challenge God. I cursed at him and I think I even went as far as to spit on a cross hanging on the wall. I wanted some kind of reaction. Any kind of reaction. If God would not heal my son, the way he healed the sons of pleading fathers in the bible, then perhaps he would at least have the decency to respond to a desperate challenge to his authority and existence. If I had the certainty of God’s existence, then I could develop a framework to support the struggles and suffering of my son and myself. I wanted desperately for God to exist. And not only exist, but to be present. To be the God I loved and was taught loved me and had mercy on the needy. But there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. I prayed for a sign. I pleaded to God for reassurance, that somehow he would communicate to me in an unmistakable way his existence and fatherly love for me, my wife and our unfortunate son. Nothing. No warm, spiritual embrace. No rebuke of my outbursts. Nothing.

As an aside, believers commonly state their knowledgeable opinion that atheists really don’t disbelieve—rather, they don’t like the idea of being held accountable to a higher authority so they’re just in rebellion. At least for myself, this could not be further from the truth! I loved God. I desperately wanted God! I wanted to know that my life’s pursuits had not been futile. I wanted to be accountable and know that God was there watching me and protecting me.

Somewhere during this period I began to shed the weight of faith. I’m not sure of the day that I ‘became an atheist’. I was unable to attend church for two reasons. My son was just too loud and distracting to bring into a service and most Catholic churches simply don’t have childcare during the service. Second, I was traveling so much with the band that I was never in a place to attend church. I was usually setting up for the show that evening or traveling to a new city.

This is where most Christians would begin to claim that I was just not strong enough to deal with my adversities. Or God is just trying to teach me something—which would imply of God that he is requiring my son to live in mental and physical torment until I learn some undisclosed lesson. Or my personal favorite, “God gives special children to special parents,” ignorantly implying that God has a cache of severely disabled souls in heaven that he’s waiting to give as children to unsuspecting parents who he deems “special” enough. Perhaps God was mistaken and I’m not as “special” as he thought.

I talked with my brother about the doubts and struggles. He listened and sympathized and we shed tears together. He gave me the only advice he could. He said that I should start going to Mass again and that my faith would return. I really wish it were that easy. I tried so many times, desperately seeking the God I wanted so badly to believe in, kneeling and crying in the chapel before the image of the crucified Jesus. I prayed the prayer of the father with the sick child in Mark, “I believe, help my unbelief”. Needless to say, my unbelief was never ‘helped’ unless it was helped to grow from a lack of response.

I began to wonder if I could still consider myself a Christian. I placed it in God’s hands—needing to believe that when I died if there indeed was a God I would throw myself upon his unfailing mercy because of my weakness and inability to understand what others could. I remember finally concluding that I was no longer a Christian. I was agnostic. Perhaps I was a Universalist. But I no longer believed in the strict limits of Christian salvation.

From there it was a fairly short jump via the already fertile channels of evolution and science to concluding that there is no god at all. And I’m fine with that. I don’t need a ‘first cause’ to believe in so that I can feel significant. I don’t need a creator to give me a divine purpose. I believe I have an earthly purpose and that it is mine to choose. I no longer need the promise of escaping this life to heaven. I believe that we have the opportunity to make our world a better place and that is far more beneficial than chasing after ‘eternal rewards’ in an afterlife while our fellow humans suffer. I believe that humans have inherited and developed the wonderful traits, reason and empathy, and that they are the two most powerful forces in the universe. I believe that with those two superpowers we can overcome all injustice, hatred, poverty and waste; without the guilt, sadness and repression of the doctrine of sin; without the fear of judgment and eternal punishment by a vengeful and jealous god; and (thank you, Douglas Adams) no one would have to get nailed to anything.

- PaleAle

(crossposted from deconversion.org)

Currently empathetic atheist with a appreciation for human wisdom whether pagan, christian, or buddhist (et. al), I grew up in a born-again household. We attended many, many churches, but were most comfortable among the Evangelical Free and Baptists. I’ll never forget the spurt of going up over the Canadian border every Sunday to attend a Mennonite Church. (wonderful ppl, btw)

I went forward and was baptized while in late elementary. I started singing for Jesus about that time and eventually became a camp counselor at a Baptist Bible camp, leading children to Christ. I faced doubts and strengthened my faith while at an Evangelical Lutheran college.

After college, I quickly left behind my english teaching career to pursue music and theatre in the Big Cities. But there was a catch. I filtered every artistic endeavour through my belief system. More than once I turned down artistic opportunites because the message conflicted with my theology. I wrote and performed Jesus music because I truly believed that my talent/curse was meant to be used to praise him. Never one for witnessing to total strangers or even friends, I found my music gave me a way to tell of Christ’s love and salvation without having to interact one on one. I was semi-shy offstage, but loved being onstage. I was determined to use my gifts for the glory of God and thankful that he had given me a platform on which to praise him.

Then about 7 years ago, a veil lifted. I got in a car accident that woke me up to my priorities about Life. I left my faith behind almost immediately. There was no in-between stage for me, and I pity, and am in awe, of christians who spend years and years agonizing over the “should I stay or should I go” question. I got out and have no regrets.

I know how believers respond to my leaving the faith. Who hasn’t heard the “you were tested and failed miserably” or “you were never a true believer to begin with” or “once saved, always saved?” The list goes on and on and on.

I blog about Jesus to help myself deprogram. I also encourage all de-converted to not be afraid to actively seek professional help or find a healthy support system of nonbelievers. I know what it’s like to lose the sense of community that belonging to christianity, a church, a family provides. I know what it’s like to experience vertigo while taking the leap from faith to solid ground.

I went from constantly censoring and double guessing every creative instinct to allowing myself to say pretty much anything I want. The blog also gives me an opportunity to practice imperfect writing. So yes, to some my attention to the sexual attractiveness of Jesus is pure blasphemy. I would like to say that being hot for Jesus is merely a schtick. After all, every good entertainer knows you gotta have a gimmick. But, honestly, though I’m quite familiar with the theology that questions Jesus’ historical hotness, I also want to publicly embrace with humor and honesty the fact that without a sexy god like Jesus, christianity would have been SOL.

I could yack for many more paragraphs about “hottie Jesus eye candy and indepth analysis of life before, during and after JC and company,” but suffice it to say, everyone has a story to tell, and I’m glad to see so many people have the courage to talk about their lack of faith, and what it was like to break up with Jesus. Thank you to the de-conversion site for creating a safe space for some of us to once again tell our story, chin up, loud and Proud.

Here’s to hoping that we not only remember to be compassionate, but to remember to laugh out loud at our former selves.

- Xtine
(www.hotforjesusformerfundie.blogspot.com)

For someone who is just now publicly “coming out” from a religious background as hopelessly fundamental and conservative as mine, it’s encouraging to find a faithless friend or two who can relate to my own experience. I hope that by sharing my own story, I can be of some encouragement to you as well, wherever you happen to be in your life.

Here we go…

The Missionary Kid

My story begins in the tropical jungle of north-central Brazil, where I was born and where I spent the majority of my childhood growing up as a missionary kid. My dad was a high school teacher, and my family lived on the campus of a boarding school that served to educate kids whose parents were off spreading the Christian Gospel. Some of these parents were Bible translators living with Indian tribes, others were support staff stationed in different cities in Brazil. Our little school was where they sent their kids to get an education. It was only a small school—during my time there, the student body probably averaged around 40 or so students every year, from first grade all the way through high school.

But I’ve gotta say, it was a pretty sweet place to grow up! Year-round tropical weather, jungle for camping and exploring as far as you could walk, and the murky Amazon River for fishing and swimming. If it sounds like a little boy’s paradise, that’s because it was. I learned from a very young age to love the sport of soccer (Brazilians like to say that “God plays soccer”). I had the chance to visit primitive Indian tribes. I managed to acquire a conversational level of Portuguese, even though we were somewhat isolated from Brazilian influence and culture. For example, to reach the city of Manaus, where we got our supplies, we had to travel by boat to a nearby village that had road access and then take a bus or taxi into the main city.

We did have interaction with the Brazilians around us, but it wasn’t quite the same as growing up completely immersed in their culture. One form of contact was a Sunday morning outreach ministry with a small community downriver. And we would often invite local soccer teams to come play soccer and volleyball games with us. But there was something so irreconcilably foreign about us. English was our default language. To be honest, we were our own little missionary community, a mostly-American boarding school that looked very much like a colony in a strange land.

My religious upbringing was very conservative, to put it nicely. Lots of people can say the same thing, I know. I don’t need to go into all the details. Let’s just say that at 25, I still have some trouble relating to the opposite sex because of the crazy legalistic restrictions that carefully crafted a pretty little Christian bubble around me as I grew up.

My background also added a certain amount of cultural confusion to the whole fundamentalism schtick. Like I said, our school was significantly isolated, enough to make me realize (much later in life) that I really couldn’t call myself a true Brazilian, even though I was born in Manaus and therefore possess full citizenship, voter and taxpayer cards, and military registration papers. I remember when I was eighteen, going into a building with a bunch of teenaged Brazilian guys I didn’t know, in order to get myself dismissed from mandatory military service. I was nervous, scared, and very uncertain. I was the only guy with white skin. I was the only one who got laughed at by the whole crowd when the uniformed officer called out my name and completely butchered it beyond recognition. Because he was Brazilian and couldn’t pronounce my American name.

I really wasn’t Brazilian. But what about American? I was only partly American, due to the almost complete ignorance regarding American culture that I grew up in. Two passports, one person, no country… So what was I?

Just a missionary kid, I guess, whose real culture was a uniquely structured boarding school sub-culture.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Growing up, all of this was okay with me. I had a loving family and plenty of fun stuff to do. We never lacked anything we needed. I was happy, and I grew up feeling somewhat privileged to experience the things I did. I have nothing negative at all to say about my parents, who nurtured me well and raised me up with plenty of love. I want to specifically point this out, because I know other ex-religious types who come from dysfunctional family backgrounds and were motivated to leave the faith for that reason. My experience wasn’t like that. My deconversion had nothing to do with any kind of abuse.

And while I’m at it, let me also point out that I’m not aiming to undermine any particular person at all, and I’m definitely not intending to direct any sort of bitter anger toward the wonderful little missionary school I grew up at. I used to be bitter. I’m not that way anymore—now, I’m just more willing to be vocal about my (un)beliefs. If people are offended, so be it, but I’m very much open to fair and respectful discussions.

Getting back on subject, my deconversion—which didn’t have anything to do with any sort of abuse—did have a lot to do with my experience as a missionary kid, which is why I took the time to write something about it.

The God Experience

I don’t know how many missionary kids struggle with self-identity. I’ve talked to some who certainly did. I know others who really don’t seem to have any problems adjusting at all. Good for them. I remember crying behind closed doors as I read a book called Third Culture Kids. I mostly kept my struggles to myself, but they were always very real. A cautious introvert, I usually chose to suffer by myself.

I eventually realized that I wasn’t much of a Brazilian because of the situation I grew up in. I wanted to be one; I wanted to have an identity, and the only identity I wanted was the Brazilian one—mainly because I simply could not relate to my American peers once I came to the States for Bible school.

And I really didn’t try that hard to relate, because by the time I had graduated from high school in Brazil, I was entirely convinced that the fundamental religion I’d been taught was the one and only Truth. It was part of my identity. I was a Christian. I was a Christian missionary kid, for the love of God! Far away from Brazil (which at the time still felt like my true home), I refused to call snowy, frozen Wisconsin anything but my temporary Bible school adventure. I fully intended to return to Brazil as a missionary.

But my ideas about God and life were too extreme even for most of the Christian friends I made in the States after high school, as I quickly discovered. My collection of unrealistic beliefs, combined with the social confusion I was feeling due to my radically different cultural background, incited some debilitating struggles.

The God experience, which up until my first year of college had been nothing more than casual acquiescence to doctrinal statements, now became a legalistic drive in a desperate effort to justify the things I knew to be true and carve out a place of acceptance for myself. I couldn’t relate to the culture I lived in. I was far away from the little sub-culture I was comfortable in. So I looked for God more sincerely than I ever had before. And I tried to do it all by myself.

For awhile I thought I had found him. I thought my daily devotions and prayers were what fueled the spiritual life. But things never seemed to line up in my head. I was aware of a tension early on, a strained feeling of exasperation as I racked up the brownie points with God. I was doing everything I had been taught to do in order to find God, and I could never seem to get as far with God as other people around me.

To be honest, I was a hopeless legalist. My religion was one of doctrinal statements and petty debates about theological foundations. My God was a powerless God. Technically, as is the case with so many fundamentalists, my god was not God but the Bible.

But once again, I’m getting ahead of myself. If I wasn’t finding God, I thought, then maybe I didn’t understand my doctrine correctly. And the result of weighing that one thought was pretty much the initiation of a long, despairing search for doctrinal cohesion that ended in apostasy.

And as I moved on through Bible school, eventually transferring from Wisconsin to a college in Chicago, I became more and more disillusioned with God—simply because the personal, all-powerful, loving God of theology was actually none of these things for me in my own life. My experience of God was nonexistent, and I was finally beginning to realize how incredibly problematic this was for my entire belief system. My God left me empty and hopeless. I could not find a reasonable place to stop my theological investigation, a place from which I could build a good solid doctrinal foundation—every doctrine debunked led directly to another one that had to be questioned. God never stepped in to help me out, so what was I supposed to do? It’s not like I didn’t pray for help.

My incessantly inquisitive mind kept right on inquiring, and it carried me straight into the darkest time of my entire life. And as I came up with question after question, the fear of condemnation always kept me from mentioning the thoughts that burned inside of me.

A Nihilistic Angst

My experience with depression started about the time I finished my studies at the Wisconsin Bible school. I lived in an apartment with some friends for a year, trying to make sense of what in the world was happening with my life. I had kept an infrequent journal in high school, but now I started writing a lot. Whenever I was depressed, I wrote. I basically wrote to stay alive. The only times I didn’t write were 1) the rare times I was really happy, and 2) the times when the simple task of writing required more motivation than my depressed mind could muster. Usually, writing was a very practical method of staying on top of things emotionally, because I could say whatever I wanted and keep it all to myself. Because I was able to write, I was able to talk myself out of all my suicidal thoughts and maintain the minimal amount of passion for life.

Because of my tendency towards legalism, I had gradually developed some pretty severe feelings of guilt, inconsistency, and failure because I simply could not live up to what I knew was right. I was evil. I was a sinner. I was supposed to be perfect, but I wasn’t. In time, I realized that these feelings were direct results of my religion, but not before discovering what it really meant to be depressed.

There’s nothing quite like it. I rode the roller coaster for awhile. Up and down. Climbing to spiritual highs, where I thought I was in close communion with God; sliding down to demonic depths that rocked my fragile faith and spun me into doubt and despair. I went back and forth between striving to believe in God and viciously hating him. I interpreted my struggle with depression through the fractured, darkened vision of a religion that led me to believe I was under demonic attack.

One memory from my time in Wisconsin stands out sharply in my mind. I was in my apartment, trying to deal with another bout of depression that had been bothering me all day and keeping me from getting anything done at all. As it grew worse, I became convinced that a very evil presence was with me in the room. I felt that something very evil was happening. I remember lying on my back on my roommate’s bed, staring at the ceiling, writhing around as the yellow lamp light seemed to fill the room, blurring my vision. I thought the ceiling was getting farther and farther away from me. And I knew right then that a demon was there, right next to me.

I don’t remember how it ended. I think the evil effect gradually died down and I eventually went to bed. But I felt this evil on a couple more occasions as well. Even as I moved on in life and transferred to the school in Chicago, I was still clinging to the idea that my depression was only a spiritual battle, and that I would conquer it one day. Right before I moved to Chicago, I experienced another session with despair. Here I was, getting ready to start at the school that would eventually award me my baccalaureate, and I was wondering if I should just kill myself instead. A fine situation for a Christian to be in!

As I continued my education, my investigation of Christian doctrine also continued. I was constantly reading extra-curricular material and writing down ideas, thoughts, and personal rants. The amount of disagreement I found among theologians and philosophers was quickly weighing down my mind (which doesn’t understand philosophy very well anyways), and causing me to ask very practical questions about the meaning of life and the ability of my Christian fundamental religion to really answer any of my questions satisfactorily. This is why I became disillusioned with God—I was sickened by all the petty debates and strained theo-philosophical arguments, which generally offered nothing to a mind starving for anything truly practical.

And all this time, God never spoke to me or helped me, even when I asked. Soon I started treating him like I treated most everybody else—I just stopped asking for help.

I could go on endlessly by listing questions that I was asking and not getting any answers for, but that’s not really necessary here. The most basic failures of my religion from my point of view were that 1) it simply could not offer purpose-giving answers to life’s questions, and 2) it often bluntly refused to even try to give those answers. I examined cessationism, I examined inerrancy, I researched eschatology. Everything I’d been taught was quickly scrapped. Doctrine after doctrine died a hopeless death, and I became a heretic in hiding.

As I entered my last year of Bible school, I was finally stabilizing both emotionally and intellectually. The intensity of my depression was waning and slowly transforming into a sort of nihilistic angst, prompted by my increasingly liberal theological decisions and the tiny, conservative Christian bubble in which those decisions were doomed to be housed, at least until I finished my degree program. Over time, I had realized that my struggles with doubt and despair were very much connected to both my cultural background and my fundamentalist upbringing. Before I even graduated, I knew I was no longer a Christian, and could never return to the faith.

Because all I wanted was something practical to help me live a normal life that everyone else seemed to be living. All I needed was the freedom to enjoy what normal people enjoyed. All I craved was release from the years of tension and hypocrisy that had followed me across thousands of miles of jungle, ocean, and snow-covered, frozen Midwestern landscapes.

And that’s my basic story. It’s been an interesting ride so far. I still have to deal with depression, but it’s nothing like the old familiar darkness. And the desperate writing that fueled my passion for life turned into a creative hobby that will stay with me until the day I die a happy death, free from the God who actually led me to consider suicide.

Now that I’ve rejected Christ, the joy that Christians always talked about experiencing is finally mine.

Faith failed me, but now I am saved by works.

Ancient manuscripts confused me and misled me, so now I write my own Scriptures.

And since turning my back on God, I’ve been amazed by how much new hope and meaning I’ve been able to find. My life without God is, without a doubt, the best life I’ve ever had.

Thanks for reading! Your thoughts are anticipated and appreciated.

- Brandt (guest contributor)
The Jesting Fool

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because of overbearing parents who left a bad impression of my religion. Even though I was initially “forced” into the church, when I started going back at the age of seventeen, it was entirely my decision. An easy one at that. Fear of Hell drove me into the pews. That’s the one thing Catholics (and later, I would realize, all Christians) are really good at—putting the fear of eternal damnation into you, just in case God’s love wasn’t enough. But once I came back, I was in all the way. I went to confession, received communion and prayed my Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s every single night. I met with my priest on several occasions. He was a good and saintly man, and he comforted and encouraged me in my faith while at the same time challenging me to go deeper.

I will always view that summer before college as the time when my faith was at its strongest, its most unshakeable. I read the Catechism. I stopped cursing. I received communion every week (sometimes several times) and went to confession as often as possible. As the ultimate act of devotion for a seventeen-year-old boy, I even gave up masturbation once I read it was a “mortal sin.” I had zero doubt I was on the right path and I couldn’t believe there were people in this world who didn’t believe in God.

Despite going to an incredibly liberal college in an incredibly liberal city, my faith remained strong, though I did begin to compromise on certain “social issues”. I drank, I cursed, I had gay friends. The masturbation thing went out the window after six months, as eventually did the no sex before marriage thing. By the time I graduated, you could probably have labeled me as just a general “theist.” Though I still identified myself as Catholic and continued to attend mass every Sunday, my general outlook on religion was that it didn’t matter which god you had faith in, so long as you had faith in something.

Then I met a girl. Her dad was an Evangelical preacher. Curious, I went to his church and was blown away by the service. The preaching. The music. The people. When Catholic Mass is all you’ve ever known, going to a church where the songs are fast, where the sermon is engaging, and where the people look genuinely happy to be there, is like a breath of fresh air. Of course, mixed in with all that came a whiff of sourness, since, according to my new girlfriend’s father, Jesus was the only way to God. The only way to Heaven. All other ways, by default, led to Hell. Throw in a couple of comments about the evils of homosexuality and I suddenly wondered if all that music and clapping were just pretty dressings on something otherwise ugly.

And yet, something in the way my future father-in-law preached a personal relationship with Jesus rang true to my soul. In the Catholic Church of my youth, God and Jesus were impersonal figures, entities you approached with solemnity via a priest or a pre-written prayer. The idea of going to God with boldness, with songs of praise, with a prayer you made up on the spot seemed somehow more… real. More true. I still couldn’t stomach the idea that so many people would be going to Hell simply because they’d picked the “wrong god”. But I was willing to table that feeling for the moment in order to figure out if Jesus really was “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” A few months later, I came up for my first altar call and asked Jesus into my heart.

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because the conviction of God made me run and hide in my own sin. When I became an Evangelical Christian, it was a conscious decision, something I did despite the parts that felt wrong. I recall having a conversation with a highly spiritual friend around this time who said I was becoming close-minded in my attitude toward religion. Even now, I tend to disagree. For the first time in my life my mind was opening to the possibility that maybe God really did only have one straight and narrow path. My friend said she refused to believe that any God would send people to Hell. To which I responded, “If God is an eternal and sovereign being, don’t you think He is who He is irrespective of what you think? Irrespective of whether or not you like it? Irrespective of whether or not it makes sense?”

I started reading the Bible for the first time in my life and the first thing I noticed was how wrong the Catholics had gotten it. Things like the divinity of Mary, the origin of the papacy, their theories concerning end times… none of it, as near as I could tell, was biblically based. The realizations were encouraging. Now that I was doing the work I could actually see results. At church I sang with feeling. I listened to sermons with rapt attention. When I prayed, I prayed with all my might. I spent a good deal of time online in Christian forums, asking questions and exploring my faith. A month before my wedding, I proved my commitment to Jesus by being baptized, and I looked forward to the day when the Holy Spirit Itself would baptize me, causing me to speak in tongues. I still had a hard time getting over the whole “Jesus or Hell” dogma, but I simply put faith in God and trusted that He would reveal the wisdom I needed when the time was right.

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because I refused to seek God where He was. As irony would have it, it was the very act of seeking a deeper knowledge of Him that eventually led me away from the faith. As I read my Bible, I would make notes about things that struck me, things that spoke to me, and things that confused me. Especially things that confused me. A pious man of God gave his daughters to an angry mob to be raped? God encouraged Hebrew warriors to slaughter every man, woman and child, but keep the virgins for themselves? David had how many wives? How many whores? How many egregious sins? And yet he was a man after God’s own heart?

But the most damaging passage of all came from the Gospel of Luke, where the writer gives the genealogy of Jesus all the way back to Adam. To Adam! The first man. It didn’t take a math whiz to realize there weren’t enough generations between Jesus and Adam to account for all of human history. I’d always assumed the Bible never really mentioned anything about the origins of humankind beyond the account in Genesis. I figured, if anything, it was just a bunch of vague fables and symbolic allegories that you could never really prove or refute. Yet here they were, providing us with a definitive timeline that even a seventh grade Western Civ student could identify as false.

I asked several “seasoned Christians” about the passage and they gave me some answers that weren’t really answers: “there’s a gap between Genesis 1 and 2… a day to the Lord is as a thousand years… we don’t know how long Adam and Eve were in the garden.” And when I asked what I considered to be natural follow-up questions, they responded the way one might deal with a petulant child. They’d tell me with a huff that I just needed to have faith, or that questions of origins “had no bearing on salvation.” Which struck me as the worst kind of cop out. After all, if even one verse in the inerrant Word of God could be called into question, how could you trust any of it?

This happened a lot over the next few years. Especially with pastors and people who fancied themselves biblical scholars. If something confused me, I could get in perhaps three questions (four if they were really patient) before they’d throw up their hands, assume I was being willfully difficult and end the discussion by telling me to pray on it, or by recommending a book by a Christian author… which usually did no better a job of answering my question than they had.

Mind you, I was never the kind of person who needed every confusing thing spelled out in order to believe. I understood that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In a lot of cases, I found the questions to be kind of exciting. For instance, who were these “sons of God” who could supposedly impregnate human women? What did the prophecies really say about the timing of the Rapture? Why did Satan rebel against God in the first place? After all, no matter how much pride you have, nobody picks a fight unless they’re pretty sure they can win. Speculating on questions like these actually fueled my spiritual curiosity and encouraged me to dig deeper.

Still, it did bother me that the Bible disagreed externally with science and history. Evolution aside, the Old Testament writers certainly seemed to be saying the earth was flat and the sun arced around it. And wasn’t it worrisome that no contemporary writers even mentioned Jesus or any of the miracles that put Judea into such an uproar? How does raising Lazarus from the dead not catch the attention of at least one historian? For that matter, how did it not catch the attention of the other three gospel writers? Turns out, what bothered me most was how the Bible disagreed internally with itself. Explain it away however you want, the four Gospels do give differing accounts of the crucifixion. Follow the footnotes whenever Jesus fulfills a prophesy and you realize that, quite often, the prophetic verse had nothing to do in context with whatever Jesus did to fulfill it.

Those questions which “had no bearing on salvation” eventually gave way to questions that did. Because salvation, according to the brand of Christianity I was following, depended entirely on believing in Jesus as your Lord and Savior. But it’s hard to believe when the book you base your faith on seems like nothing more than a bunch of well-intentioned fairy tales… or worse, a pack of outright lies. Taken out of context, even the Adam and Eve story is little more than some Greek myth entitled, “How the Snake Lost its Legs.” Taken out of context, the story of Jonah sounds no less a kid’s fable than “Pinocchio.” If someone from another religion were to pass along a similar tale from their own holy book, we’d laugh that smug little Christian laugh and marvel at how blinded from the Truth they were.

The more I read the Bible, the more it pointed me toward one scary conclusion: my entire faith had been founded on bullshit. I tried desperately not to believe it. I tried to believe that these deeper nagging questions, the ones I didn’t dare ask out loud, were simply the work of the devil sowing seeds of doubt.

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because I didn’t know the Word of God. I knew it. Certainly not as well as others who can (and do) quote Scripture at will. But I knew enough to recognize it was severely damaging my ability to believe. I gradually turned all spiritual attention toward prayer and first-person experience.

A lot of Christians will tell you “God isn’t a feeling.” You can’t depend on your human senses to reveal eternal Truth. Mind you, these are often the same people who fall on the floor, speak in tongues and claim their prayers have been answered simply because it “felt right.” But that’s beside the point. When God’s own instruction manual is pushing you farther and farther from the faith, all you can rely on is God Himself to bring you back. Call it a “feeling.” Call it an “experience.” Call it a “revelation.” All I knew was I needed something. Anything.

While I tended to look with annoyance and suspicion upon people who spoke in tongues and who worshiped Jesus with vocal abandon, the truth is I envied them. They really did believe they were experiencing something. I wanted a taste of that. I wanted it so badly. And so I prayed. I begged God to reveal Himself to me the way he had to them. The best I can say is I occasionally felt a pleasant kind of buzzing during times of prayer, a mild euphoria during worship. But these weren’t any different than the things I can feel while hiking to a vista, singing along at a rock concert or watching “Field of Dreams”.

My prayer mantra became a quote from the book of Mark: “Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.” A man says this prayer after Jesus tells him he can heal his daughter, “if only he believes.” This had always struck me as an amazingly honest prayer. What’s the point, after all, in lying to the Creator of the universe who knows your innermost thoughts anyway? If I was having trouble believing, surely God already knew that. And if there was any prayer that He would answer, certainly that would be it. And so I prayed over and over again, “I believe in you as much as my human self is able, Lord Jesus. But please God, you have to help me the rest of the way because I don’t think I can do it anymore.”

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because I never tried to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I cannot convey how much I wanted exactly that. It always amazed me how my fellow Christians could have such an abundant prayer life, such a close friendship with God. I don’t know if they were hearing back from Him in a way that I was not, but for me, the one-way pseudo-dialog had finally became too heartbreaking to continue.

Praying wasn’t working. The Bible wasn’t working. Talking to other Christians had proved fruitless years ago because they kept shoving increasingly useless books in my face and telling me to “just have more faith.” I know they meant well, but none of them could realize I’d reached a point where I had nothing to base my faith on. If I couldn’t base it on the Bible and I couldn’t base it on personal experience, was I to base my faith on faith? But how was I to know I was basing my faith on the right faith? Through faith? None of them could see the circular logic in that. Does one believe in something because they have faith? Or do they believe in it because it’s the Truth? And how do they know it’s the Truth? Faith?

Besides discussion forums on the internet, the only person I could talk to about these matters was my wife. Because, quite frankly, she was the only Christian I knew who wouldn’t play mental gymnastics with theology. If something didn’t make sense, she would come right out and admit, “Yeah, I don’t get that either.” It felt good to actually discuss these things, knowing I wouldn’t get a huffy “just pray on it” after asking one question too many. At the same time, I envied her the way I envied all Christians who were able to believe without question… or to believe in the face of questions.

I don’t think even I realized how close to the edge of unbelief I was. I can remember praying for several atheist friends one day and begging God to fill them with the Holy Spirit so they’d believe. I’d stopped asking Him to bless me with the gift of tongues long ago. After almost eight years, it felt like that prayer had been answered with a definitive “no.” Instead, I prayed, “Lord, I will never not believe in You. So please, bless my friends with that gift so that they might believe in You too.” I honestly believed that no matter how many questions I had, my faith was at least strong enough to survive all out atheism. The reality of God simply seemed more logical than the alternative.

Two months later, I followed a link to the following de-conversion story and everything unraveled. My only experience with atheists to that point involved people for whom religion had always been a patently crazy idea. But here was the story of somebody like me. His upbringing had been far more fundamentalist than mine, but the turmoil he experienced realizing he was losing his faith was identical. Tears sprung to my eyes and my entire body went numb as realization washed over me. “This is my story.” It put into words all the intangible fears and questions that had plagued my Christian faith since I first asked Jesus into my heart. After that, it was only a matter of time.

Fear of Hell was the only thing that kept me hanging on. Funny thing is, even when my faith was at its strongest, Hell never made sense to me. Christians would always say that Hell had to exist because “our God is just God and He can’t allow sin into His presence.” But sending somebody to Hell (or even “allowing them to choose Hell” as some Christians like to spin it) would be akin to a parent letting their three-year-old run away from home… then beating the shit out of them nonstop for the rest of their life and calling it “justice”. It simply doesn’t make sense, especially for a God who’s supposed to love us as a father loves his children. After all, what are we in the grand scheme of eternity but little kids who don’t know any better? But, as I’d said to my friend years before, God is who He is irrespective of what we think or whether or not it makes sense. And if it turned out that He was, in fact, willing to torture me for all eternity simply because I’d picked the wrong answer, well, didn’t I owe it to myself to give faith one more chance?

I waited until everyone in the house had gone to sleep, then got down on my knees and pleaded with God to pull me back from the brink. I begged him to be the Abba, Daddy, Father He claimed to be in the Bible. Because no father who loves his children would let them walk into a pit of fire. No matter how rotten my son had acted, no matter how rebellious, no matter how much of a pain in the ass he’d been even moments before, I would drop everything to save him. I would tackle him if necessary, wrap him in a bear hug and say, “I don’t care how much you hate me. I love you too much to let you do this.” It seems only reasonable to expect my eternal Father—who supposedly loves me more than anyone else in the whole universe—to do the same.

Christians will say I was testing God by demanding a sign. “Do you ask your own parents to prove they love you?” they ask rhetorically. No I don’t, but I have no doubt that they do, because they’ve shown me my entire life. I don’t want a sign from my Dad. I want a friggin’ hug! A real conversation. I want Him to tell me He loves me… and not via a “letter” He wrote and xeroxed to all His other “kids” before we were born.

Kneeling on the floor that night I squeezed my hands together and prayed: “I love you, Lord. I want to believe in you more than anything. I want to believe you love me too. Please, please help me. You say that a father will not give his son a rock when he asks for a piece of bread. Please don’t give me silence when all I need is comfort.”

The only response was my own voice reflecting off the walls.

A few months later, I read the popular Christian fiction book THE SHACK. In one scene, the lead character watches his dead daughter playing in a field of flowers in Heaven. Standing there next to him, God assures the man that they’ll be together again someday. It’s such a simple yet beautiful scene, and I suddenly found tears rolling down my face as the realization hit: it’s never going to happen. If something horrible happens to me or my family, there will be no comfort in Heaven, no joyous reunion in the clouds, no loving Father to wipe the tears from our eyes. It was at that moment I knew, without a doubt, I was no longer a Christian. No longer a believer. At least not in a God who cared one way or the other about me. It was, perhaps, the most hollow feeling of my entire life.

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because I wanted to. Losing faith broke my heart in ways I never thought possible. God had been such a constant throughout my life. He’d been a source of strength, comfort and hope. Knowing that all we see was just the prelude to something bigger and better encouraged and motivated me. I didn’t want to believe that this is all there was. I wanted to believe that once I was with my Father in Heaven, everything would be wonderful, amazing, perfect. But as I’d always known, as I’d always feared, God is who He is (or isn’t) irrespective of what I want.

Breaking the news to my wife wasn’t easy. But after the initial shock and kneejerk assumption that this would ruin our marriage and the lives of our children, she has been amazingly understanding, if not entirely empathetic. Not that I blame her. More than anything she feels genuinely sorry for me, for what I’ve lost. At the same time, I know she worries for my soul. I know because I used to worry the same way about friends and family who weren’t saved. Believing that your loved ones will be burned and tortured for all eternity, or even just believing you’ll never see them again after this life passes… it’s a gut-wrenching burden.

That’s why I don’t mind that she prays for me every day. Prays for me to come to my senses. Prays that God would reveal whatever it is I think I need in order to believe again. I’ve agreed to continue going to church and supporting our children’s Christian upbringing. At least for the time being. Our congregation doesn’t preach the kind of fire and brimstone you get at other churches. They don’t stand outside funeral homes chanting “God Hates Fags.” They’re refreshingly global with their missionary work, putting money into missions that do tangible good, as opposed to simply “spreading the message.” So I’m willing to play along at least until the kids are old enough to understand my decision and handle its emotional implications. Just like with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I have no interest in robbing them of their belief in magic and imaginary friends before they’re ready.

I tell you this so you’ll know, despite no longer believing in God, I understand how important belief is in people’s lives. I’m not on a crusade to convert others out of the faith. Nor, on the other hand, will I stand idly by while faith-based initiatives running counter to my ideals get pushed through Congress. My morals, my responsibilities, my sense of right and wrong no longer arise out of fear of divine retribution, but out of my own desire to make this world a better place. As Richard Dawkins once said: “We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” The same goes for Hell. As a Christian, I never had to fear the consequences of not being Muslim or not being Hindu, because I knew those beliefs to be false. Now I simply apply that mentality to the Hell of all religions, including the one I followed for thirty years.

Despite overcoming that mental hurdle, I know the road ahead won’t be easy. My de-conversion didn’t happen in a vacuum. I have a wife, children, family and friends. People I love very much. People who are going to worry themselves sick for as long as I walk “outside the light.” It’s not a matter of judgment or anger for them. They love and sincerely want the best for me, but it’s impossible not to feel a sense of dread when you believe someone so close to you will burn for all eternity. I will never fault them for that. If I thought it would do any good, I would pray comfort on their souls.

I tell you this so you’ll know, I didn’t de-convert because I had no good models of Christian living. Quite the contrary, despite the occasional personality conflict, the Christians I have known—Catholics and Evangelicals alike—were decent, intelligent, patently not crazy people. In their daily lives, they embodied the very model of Christ-like behavior that everyone else should emulate. They gave me a bed to sleep in when I had no money. They invited me to dinner when I was far from home. More often than not, they were friendly and compassionate, even to people they knew to be sinners. Their passion for God was infectious rather than off-putting. If anything, they are the reason I stuck with it as long as I did. But a story’s truth cannot exist on the strength of its storytellers alone. And as much as I hate breaking the hearts of the people I love, I simply cannot bring myself to believe their fairy tale, however well-intentioned, any longer.

- Brian (guest contributor)

This memoir could be sent to me directly at pfrancis@hds.harvard.edu or posted here. Questions about the project may also be directed to my email address.

The following are some basic guidelines and starter questions, but approach the writing anyway you like.

The memoir may be as short or long as you like and assume any form. It may be signed or anonymous.

Others have found it useful to structure their memoir as follows:

1. The Unsettling: reflect on your experience of the forces and factors that unsettled you from the system of beliefs and practices that you once held in a dogmatically unassailable manner. Were the arts in any way a part of this initial unsettling? Feel free to cite specific examples from the arts and literature, or your own creative projects.

2. The Liminality: reflect on your experience of the initial transition away from your previous system of beliefs and practices, the in-between space. Was there a time in which you had begun to disavow your previous religious beliefs and practices but had not yet established a new set of beliefs and practices? What was it like to dwell in that liminal, in-between space? Did the arts play a role in this phase?

3. The loss of faith: reflect on the experience of losing religious faith all together, or losing faith in a particular set of beliefs and practices, or a certain vision of God. And/or reflect on the various kinds of losses incurred in this process of disenchantment with Christianity (or some aspect of it). In all these experiences, was loss negotiated in any way by recourse to the arts, creativity and aesthetic experience?

4.The aftermath: reflect on your experience of the aftermath of disenchantment with Christianity (or with some other form of religious belief and practice). Have you found new forms of faith and practice? Have you found it unnecessary to construct new, fixed, systems of belief? Did your relationship to religious doubt, uncertainty and mystery change over the course of this experience?

What is the role of the arts in the aftermath of these experiences? Have the arts assumed any of the roles once played by your previous forms of religious faith?

In all aspects of this memoir I am most interested in hearing about your lived experience, not merely your rational, theological or philosophical justifications for leaving Christianity (or other), although I recognize that it is not always easy to separate the two.

Thanks very much for your contribution to this project.

All the best,

- Philip (pfrancis@hds.harvard.edu)

I don’t even know if I miss you. I don’t know who I’m supposed to miss.

Somehow, though, I still believe in you. Somehow, I still hope that you care and are doing something about the state of the world. It would be nice to know that you loved me and really did do some of the things they say you did. But I won’t hold my breath.

I don’t mean that in a sarcastic way, but I guess you know that. I mean that I’m not going to hold out for a sign from you before I live my life. I don’t think I’ll ever fully know or understand your will, so I don’t really see a point in continued attempts to grasp it through prayer and biblical interpretation. I’m just going to keep going, and keep hoping that it will all be okay with you in the end.

You might remember the conversation I had with M. (We’ve been going out. Fellow agnostic theist. It’s been awesome, thanks. ) We were talking about heaven, hell, and judgment. And I said that a usual scare tactic is a Bible verse about the “weeping and gnashing of teeth” by the people who are shut out, in darkness. Nobody wants to spend eternity weeping and gnashing their teeth, right?

But after a while, I realized that anyone who wept and gnashed their teeth did so out of regret. So I’m now set on living my life in order to have as little regret as possible. That way, if I get shut out, I could be calm enough to sit the hysterical blubberers down on the curb and pat them on the back till they feel better. Maybe together, we could figure out what to do.

You know, if eternity were like that, if I got shut out and had to wander dark streets – and if there were no one else around, if it were just me groping, alone – I wouldn’t mind. It would only be more of what I’ve already experienced, what I’m sure I have more to experience. Me, wandering, mostly alone, thinking. That doesn’t sound so bad. If I go mad, I have eternity to become sane again. If I become angry, I have eternity to become serene again. If I have sinned, I have eternity to become repentant again. If I have been confused, misguided, I have eternity to find you again.

But when I think about it now, I don’t see the point of an afterlife if it will be very much like the current life. It makes more sense to me to work this one to the bone and then be done. But what do I know, right? I’m not you. I won’t even know that I’m dead. You, on the other hand, already know everything.

So I’m not going to worry. I’m just going to do my best with what I do know and what I can control. You do your God thing, and I do my human thing, and I guess I’ll see you when this is over. (Or not.)

Thank you, by the way. And I say that with a smile on my face, God. I don’t know who I’m smiling at, where to face, and whether I should be thankful, but I am. It’s been lovely so far.

- Kat (guest contributor)

Note to d-C Contributors: I noticed that most of the stories posted here are by people who’ve given up belief entirely. I’ve been hoping to read someone who, like me, has retained at least the tiniest bit of belief, but maybe there aren’t that many of us…

Basically, I was brought up Catholic, the conservative kind. On the way I detoured into a Jesus People group, the Charismatic Movement, and a couple of others before I finally gave up on organized religion.

Ok, so why did I leave? Well, it is a long story. I have a condition called Asperger’s Syndrome. Some of you may be familiar with it, some of you may not. It is a form of autism. Except that when I was growing up they did not call it that. We Asperger’s people can be very intelligent but we suffer from social deficits. I did not realize that I was different until I started school. That’s when the persecution began (and I do not use the term lightly). Here is my view on school prayer: I went to a Catholic school where they went to Mass daily and I went to a secular public school where God was mentioned not at all, and I was treated equally badly in both. Not one adult in authority ever stood up and put a stop to what was going on. In fact I had one teacher who joined in the persecution and actually encouraged the class to pick on me. It was well known that this was her practice, to single out one student for such treatment and it is my understanding that she sent at least one student to the State Hospital by her actions. This happened BEFORE I entered her class, so obviously nothing was done to remove this seriously disturbed woman. As far I know she continued to teach for years.

While all this was going on I was learning about someone named Jesus who went out of his way to befriend society’s rejects. That Jesus I didn’t have much trouble with–at first. It was only natural that I would turn to religion for answers–why is this happening to me over and over.

Then came adolescence and puberty. I was hit with a double whammy. Sex was holy, sacred, saved for marriage; it was also sinful (to the point of being mortally so). Now not only could I go to hell for my own thoughts and actions (yes, even thinking about it was bad), I, because I was a woman, was now a source of temptation to men and could lead them into damnation as well. Well, I bought into the whole chastity thing hook line and sinker. I wanted to be good. I wanted to be pure. But the problem is God gave me size DD breasts. So now on top of the Asperger’s and its associated problems, I had sexual abuse to deal with. And it was my fault!

About that time I ran into a group of Jesus People who offered what looked to be a safe haven. So, instead of facing my problems I retreated into a cocoon of Bible studies and prayer meetings. Let me tell you it is so easy to surrender your thinking to a group. If it hadn’t been for outside intervention I don’t know where I would be today. The Jesus People were very nice people and probably very sincere, but they were not what this troubled adolescent needed. It did not bother them in the least that I was not acquiring critical social skills but instead retreating further and further from reality.

However, through all that time, a portion of my mind remained free. Little by little, I started realizing that the road that I was on was not working. I started reading, started searching. Jesus talked about a house built on sand not being able to stand, so I decided to start digging around the foundations called Christianity to see if indeed it was built on rock as was claimed. I wanted to find out the truth, not just what I had been told. I read the classic Christian authors, Lewis, et. al. I also read books written from “the other side’s” viewpoint. And I started studying the sciences, psychology, biology, evolution, etc. And what I was reading was making sense. It was from my SECULAR reading that I learned that the problem that had plagued me all my life was called Asperger’s. And with every new discovery, little by little the religious foundation weakened. I found I could no longer wholeheartedly believe in the God I had been taught to believe in. That is why I call myself Eve’s Apple, because I have bit into it and I cannot go back.

- Eve’s Apple (guest contributor)

For a long time, I simply just ignored those raging questions or accepted the Sunday School answer that god didn’t like it anymore than us, but that was just the way it had to be. As time went on it became more difficult to ignore. With each Sunday the questions screamed at me louder until I could not longer ignore or accept the answers given to me. Being born into “the faith,” I was attached to all the notions that Christianity (more so fundamentalist Christianity) had given me. Because of this I blamed the church first. I thought that the nature of sin had been distorted.

I rationalized that a sin is not so much an action that is inherently bad but rather it was the result of that action that granted it the classification of sin. I thought that a sin was something that brought us away from god. It made sense and was compatible with the life I wanted to live at that time. I clung to that notion for as long as I could. Slowly but surely my idea about what is good and what is bad slowly eroded. Well not exactly. They were never really my ideas. I always had my own feelings about right and wrong. Really those ideas of right and wrong I had adopted had been replacements for my true feelings on the subject.

One example was my thoughts on dinosaurs. I remember a Discovery Channel program which stated that dinosaurs existed millions of years ago. I remember saying this to my mother with excitement, only to have her dismiss this by saying “no they’re wrong. The earth isn’t even millions of years old…” blah blah etc… I can’t remember if I felt any disappointment. What I do remember is wondering how all the scientists were wrong about that and right about everything else. But mom is always right, so they must be wrong. You can redo this scenario with a multitude of things and the result would still be the same: I would make an assertion that seemed pretty reasonable, it would be rejected because it doesn’t fit the Bible, and I would half-heartedly accept the “Biblical” interpretation instead what I considered to be my true feelings on the subject.

Truth is a sticky thing, especially when it doesn’t fit in with the facts. This realization made it seem as if my sense of morality was eroding so I began to turn on the religion as a whole. Specifically I began to wonder the necessity of Christ. If right and wrong are subjective then how can I truly know what god wants? I realized even the New Testament was not really specific on a code of conduct. If there is no real code of conduct (or at least an explicit one), how can anyone know if they’re sinning? If they don’t know they’re sinning how can they be sinning? It would be as if you lived in a country with millions of laws and none of them written down or talked about. You just have to guess. What kind of law is that? I came to the conclusion that there must be no real sin then. Then all one must do to get to heaven is seek a relationship with god.

Finally I came to the question that led to my de-conversion. If all one must do is seek relationship with god, then who needs Jesus? If seeking god was the chief end of man, why did Christ have to come to “free” us from sin? Sin seems to be a pretty irrelevant notion then. Even accepting the Bible’s notion of sin, there is still this question: Why would god sacrifice itself to itself to change a rule that it made up?

These were some of the questions I wondered to which I found no sufficient answer. Nothing made sense to me anymore. A good friend once told me “if it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true.” That’s the conclusion I made. If the Bible was 100% true and infallible, then I wouldn’t have to bend over backward to justify and rectify the inconsistencies with what I knew was true. If god sent man a message, it wouldn’t be confusing. Satan is supposed to be the great confuser, not god. His message should be clear, but it wasn’t.

Finally I came to the question I now dwell on: Suppose god does exist. Why do I have any responsibility to god? I didn’t ask for existence. I wasn’t consulted. Why should I abide by rules I have no hope in changing? This is all I know. If there is a god, I have no responsibility to it. Conversely, I feel god has no responsibility to me in the same way I have no responsibility for an ant colony. I don’t need the ant colony. They don’t need me. I don’t need god. God doesn’t need me. I’m okay with this. I just wish everyone else was too.

- Thomas (guest contributor)

And so, I am going to continue on, explaining my spiritual development.

Through out my life, I gradually began to refute and dismiss certain religious claims.

I didn’t believe Jesus was a God. I didn’t believe I needed to confess to a Priest. I didn’t think St. Peter stood at the gates of Heaven with a book that listed who could enter. I didn’t believe in Creationism. I didn’t believe in the Garden of Eden, Noah’s flood, or Jesus’ resurrection.

It was just a matter of time before I contemplated rejecting religion all together.

Starting in high school, I started to identify myself as non-Christian. But I was still very much tied to a lot of the Catholic ethics and morals. The Catholic guilt ran through my mind everyday.

I was so conflicted with my Christianity. I didn’t go to church, and I felt extremely guilty for that. And although I didn’t believe in certain rules, and I felt guilty for not having faith. Whenever I was in desperate need of something, I would pray to God and say, “If you do this for me, I’ll be a better Christian, I swear!”

At my liberal university, I was introduced to lots of wonderful, non-Christian ideas. But I couldn’t adopt them because I could shake the strong hold Christianity had on me.

One summer while I was an undergrad, I was employed at a public library. One thing that interested me, was the liberal and left-wing stance that the library had. Left-wing on a social level, not an economic one, that is. The Chief Librarian was strictly against the notion of censorship. I was amazed to learn that the library carried things such as children’s books about homosexuality, women’s books about abortion, and many books of all kinds about Atheism.

In particular, it was the year “The DaVinci Code” was on the Best Seller’s list. My sister owned a copy and lent it to me. I remember, turning, page after page, gasping in the social mores being broken by the book. It was like Catharsis for my soul, just to have a published book on something so taboo in Christian society. Of course, I realized the book was only a novel. As thrilling as it was, it was fiction. But it definitely opened up the door to critical theology for me. I immediately borrowed a copy of “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” from the public library.

Now this book, that was liberating. I didn’t agree with everything the Holy Blood, Holy Grail put forth, but that single book effectively helped me to shed my Christian skin. It helped me to confirm that there are such a plethora of holes in Christianity, that I would need to be brain damaged to swallow it all. It made me realized that Christianity is no more than a fraudulent idolatry.

And so, in that summer, I was finally able to release myself from a lot of my Christian tendencies. I finally, coldly decided that I did not believe in Jesus as a divine figure. I would not worship Jesus at all. I would not worship Mary at all.

I started to realized that faith is not the utmost authority. I was part-way through my undergraduate degree, and my classes in anthropology, psychology, even philosophy had taught me to doubt a lot of what religion preached. I started to read more and more critical accounts of religion, and realize even more flaws. It fascinated me to poke more holes in religious dogma.

And so, I started to fall towards science and secularism. Atheism was an attractive concept. I don’t believe in a God the way that North American Christians believe in a God. I don’t believe in a human-like deity. But when I attempted to think more seriously about Atheism, I realized there was no way I could fully adopt that perspective. I found that I still believed in something even though I wasn’t sure what.

Sure, I accept evolution. I accept the big bang theory. But I also think that some force, or something must be behind all of this. Maybe the force is absent. Maybe the force is indifferent. But I know that I believe there was something, at some point.

Because of this belief, I could not identify myself as an Atheist. But I thought all the man-made version of God were pointless as well. So I didn’t feel like I belonged to a specific organized religion. And that was just my belief in a deity.

I also had many contradictory and confusing standpoints on things such as the afterlife, salvation, karma, morals & ethics, sexuality, divination, meditation, determinism, and the world in general. When I started to think about where I stood on all those issues, there was no way you could box me into a label. It was all so complex.

When I tried to explain this to my university friends, they just told me I was Agnostic. I thought Agnostic was just a soft Atheist, so I rejected the label. I felt that wasn’t right.

And even if I was Agnostic, what did that mean? What exactly did I believe in?

I felt I needed a spiritual side. I longed for a spiritual connection. I wanted to learn about a cosmology that made sense to me, that I could agree with.

And so, I temporarily accepted my Agnosticism, but I pushed forth in an attempt to find something else which was a better fit.

Over the next few years, I plan on sampling many different religious paths, and I will earn a minor in religious studies along the way.

- Modern Girl (Guest Contributor)

I grew up in a Christian home but…was not serious about my faith as a teenager at all. I was into drugs and alcohol quite a bit and I had a pretty bad experience on some heavy drugs which scared me into stopping. As I sobered up I had this intense feeling that I was not right with God. I felt that if I were to die that i was likely going to go to hell. I KNEW what I had to do to get right with God from my Christian upbringing and so after a few “divine appointments” of meeting people who invited me to church with them I accepted and went. I KNEW that this was the right thing to do and I FELT that as I heard the gospel and responded that I was forgiven of my sin and assured of eternal life because of the atoning sacrifice of Christ in my behalf on the cross. I accepted this by faith and my life totally changed.

I then wanted to study and know as much as i could about my faith. Not to prove it to be true, because i already knew that by faith, but to simply be able to “give an answer to everyone who asks for the hope that is within me”. I had a lot of friends at the time who were not Christians and who thought that my new found dogmatism in this narrow minded Christian faith was misguided. “Sure Jesus was fine, but how can you say that he is the only way” they would tell me. I wanted what I was experiencing with God to be my friends experience so i wanted to give them the best arguments that I could find to show them that Christianity was a rational belief. I read and listened to tapes by Josh McDowell, Normal Geisler, Henry Morris and any other apologetics that I could find who were popular at the time (about 1990 – 1991). Unable to “convince” my friends, I moved on with my life and immersed myself in the church and found all new Christian friends who were an encouragement to my faith rather than always wanting to attack me. I lived every day as if God was with me the whole day. Reading my Bible and praying and talking to God at work and throughout my days. I loved to worship God and felt especially close to the Lord during worship times at church. It seemed that God was answering my prayers and truly responding to me about daily things in my life. There were countless times that certain “coincidences” happened which seemed to show that God was truly working in my life. I had no doubts in my mind that Jesus was real and that my sins were forgiven.

In time I had opportunity to teach various bible studies adn realized how much I really did not know and so I went to a small Bible College in California for a few years. I felt a call to preach the gospel and to teach people about the faith. When i taught, people seemed to be encouraged and drawn closer to the Lord and many people told me about how much they were able to learn from my teaching. After Bible College, I took a position as a youth pastor for a few years and then taught in various capacities in different churches that I went to. I taught small group Bible studies, new believers classes at a larger church, preached in pulpits from time to time, and taught at various random times in different settings. During all of this time (about 8 years or so) I don’t remember EVER doubting that God was real or that He was near me every day. Although I struggled like anyone does when you feel distant from the Lord at times I always had faith and always knew without a doubt that I was following the truth and that my sins were forgiven.

I always worked with people who were not Christians and I loved to talk to people about my faith and try to persuade them that they should consider Christ. In about 1999, I worked with a few guys that I would talk to on a regular basis about Christianity. One of them in particular kept pushing me on some basic questions about knowing whether the Bible was true or not and some of their questions just stuck in the back of my head. At first, it just encouraged me to study more so that i could give a good answer to them and feel comfortable with the answer myself but as time went on, I started to become more and more concerned. I met with my pastor and other people from time to time to share with them the issues that I was having problems with and I would get a little better but end up coming back to these questions which seemed to be a real problem. I remember reading a book by John MacArthur on preaching and he was talking about various preachers of the past who had struggled with their faith. One guy, G. Cambel Morgan, had similar questions and just decided one day that if the Word of God was truly powerful, that he should be able to set all of his other books aside for a time and just read the Bible and if it was true, he would be convinced of it. He did this for a year and when the year was up, he emerged with a faith that was stronger than ever. I figured that I would try the same thing. I put my apologetics and theology books on the shelf and just focused on trying to read the Bible and better my relationship with God. I tried reading more devotional books that were meant to encourage my daily walk with Christ . Books by men like John Piper, Andrew Murray, A.W Tozer and others. My thought was that since I did not come to Christ through arguments and logic, why was I trying to keep my faith in that way. I came to Christ because i had an experience with God where I felt his presence and just knew that Jesus was real and could forgive my sins. It was as if God had written his truth on my heart and I didn’t need to do anything to figure it out, I just had to believe it.

I would go back and forth between the struggle with my intellectual doubts and my internal faith which seemed to come directly from God. Eventually, I felt as though I was avoiding my intellectual problems and I truly felt like I was not being honest with myself. I had to deal with these things. I had to face them head on. If the Bible was true then surely it would stand the test of intense scrutiny as has been the testimony of so many famous Christians like C.S Lewis, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobel and others. My problems and questions only got bigger the more I studied and looked into things. I realized that I was assuming the Christian faith to be true before I even started to find out of it was defensible. What bothered me was that when I was talking to other people who were Mormon’s or Jehovah’s Witnesses or Muslims I would not allow them to do that. They had to deal with the contradictions in their faith and show that there as good historical reasons to believe it. If a Mormon could assume the truth of the Book of Mormon at the beginning then anything that I showed them that tried to point out inconsistencies or errors in it could be resolved since they KNEW it was true in the first place because of an experience that they had with God. I realized that I was doing essentially the same thing and that it was really not an honest way to look at things. I had to look at the Christian faith from the outside and see if it was internally consistent like I would with any other religion or truth claim. Even though i felt as though I had a genuine experience with God and that he answered my prayers and showed himself to be real to me, I had to consider that many people of other faiths had the exact same experience with their “God”. How was I to distinguish between true experiences with God and false ones? Wasn’t it a little arrogant for me to expect that my experience with God was true while all of these other people’s was false without even looking at the facts? Was it possible that my experiences with God were imagined or that I might be the one who was believing the wrong things? I had to at least grant the POSSIBILITY that this could be true. I easily wrote off other people’s claims to answered prayers and religious truth since it did not agree with mine but was that truly justified?

The problem was that when I held the Christian faith to a strict a standard of logic and historical accuracy as I did Mormonism or Islam, it failed just like they did. The more I looked at it from that perspective, the more I saw that there was no more reason to believe Christianity then there was to believe that Mohamed was a prophet of God. And the likelihood of Mohamed being a prophet seemed pretty slim. I have continued to read and ask questions and talk to as many people who would talk to me (which often is not that many) about these things. I just came to a point where I realized that I really did not believe it any longer even though I am very open to the possibility of the Christian faith being true. I still like to think that I am open and willing to listen to what someone wants to say. I will listen and evaluate whether it seems likely to be true based on whether it is a logically consistent belief, whether it lines up with reality as we know it, and is consistent with History as far as we can tell. I can’t in good conscience just take religious claims on faith since there are so many competing religious claims that are asking me to do that. There has to be a way to distinguish them and to separate truth from error or else it would be too easy to drink a poisoned glass of Kool-aid to my own demise.

For more on the specific reasons that I have for not being a Christian, see the following post.

- Jeff