Now the details of the statements differ from reader to reader, some saying “if you’d really had faith,” others saying “if you’d really known the love of God,” or “if you’d really read the Bible with an open heart,” “if you really prayed honestly,” or even “if you were a true seeker you would have found the Lord.”

I’ve been struck by another thing recently as well: noticing that many de-converts were formerly in the ministry.

These two things made me think that maybe it’s being TOO dedicated, too devoted, too much a seeker that is the danger.

Here’s what I mean: Maybe we de-converts were more real in our Christianity than the people who can’t believe we eventually rejected “the truth.” We weren’t content with going to church on Sunday and Wednesday, or with going to confession once a week, or with saying our daily prayers and reading the Bible in a year every year — whatever the flavor of true devotion was in our particular version of Christianity.

We wanted more. I know that is true for myself. I wanted to see the power of God, the way it was described in the Bible. I wanted to experience what the apostles experienced on the day of Pentecost. I was hungry for more of God and I read the Bible every day, over and over again in several translations. I worshipped Jesus with all of my heart.

I know whatever I say here won’t convince anyone that I was a “real” Christian, because they can’t fathom that. But I bet that many of you who have also walked away can recognize my sentiment.

I became a worship leader because I wanted to help other people feel the presence of God in their lives and have the experiences of ecstasy that I’d experienced in worship services. I wanted to be a fisher of men. I wanted to fulfill God’s plan for my life. The more I “grew” in my faith, the more I was promoted in the ministry, the more I prayed and read the Bible and worshipped and witnessed, the less real it became to me. The more I obeyed God’s word and followed God’s will for my life, the less rewarding my Christian life was.

I was a true seeker but what I discovered was… nothing.

Watch out seekers. You may not like what you find.

- writerdd

It was my sister’s turn to ride in the front seat, so I climbed into the back. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but that wasn’t unusual, so I sat quietly as mom backed the station wagon out of the driveway.

I was thinking about the doctrine of the virgin birth, that it was simply impossible for Mary to get pregnant without “knowing a man.” I wasn’t stupid, after all. I had read the booklet that my mother gave me about the sperm and eggs joining to form a zygote; I had taken health class in seventh grade. I’d already known everything in the booklet that Mom had given me, but I hadn’t told her that. She was trying to be a good mother, it wasn’t my place to tell her that she was too late to teach me about the birds and the bees. And health class came even later, when I couldn’t think of even one kid in my class who didn’t already know the material that we were taught. We may have been immature, giggling and blushing behind our text books, but we already knew where babies came from. So now, sitting in the back seat of the car, I couldn’t stop thinking that it was impossible for Jesus to have been born of a virgin, it just didn’t make sense. But how could I be doubting such a basic Bible story, one I’d been taught for my entire life, the single fact that was considered true in every church I’d ever attended? I’d known about sex for years, yet I’d never had a problem believing in this miracle before.

My head hurt from the frown on my face, my clenched teeth, and the intense concentration of my mind. I could not come up with an answer but I knew I didn’t want to doubt. I wanted to have faith, even faith as small as a seed that could grow into a tree. If I could only muster up a tiny bit of faith…. but no. The doubt, the science of reproduction, was prevailing over my thoughts. My heart started pounding in my chest, and my breathing got faster and faster. In a few minutes, tears started flowing down my face. I tried to cry quietly so my mother and sister wouldn’t hear me. But they were used to my emotional outbursts by then and probably would have ignored me anyway, after asking what was wrong and getting no response.

Inside my head I began chanting, “Lord, I believe. Help thou my unbelief!” I couldn’t talk; my nose was completely stuffed up from the crying.

I felt like Thomas, who needed to see Jesus in the flesh after the resurrection. Thomas needed to touch the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side in order to believe. But God wanted us to believe without seeing. That was the whole point of faith, wasn’t it? If I couldn’t believe that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus, if I couldn’t believe that Jonah was actually swallowed by a huge fish and then vomited up alive several days later, if I couldn’t believe that God had created the earth in six twenty-four hour days just by speaking, how could I possibly believe that Jesus was raised from the dead and that he had the power to forgive my sins? How could I even be saved if I doubted something so fundamental? Maybe I was starting to slip away from the Lord, maybe I was going to backslide.

“I love you, Lord.” I kept praying, trying to catch my breath and to stop the scenes of doubt from replaying in my head every few seconds, “Please, please don’t let me backslide.”

Slowly, the panic started to fade and the crisis passed; I stopped crying, pulled a tissue out of my purse, and blew my nose. I pushed the doubt and fear into the back of my mind. Somehow I would force myself to believe. I had to.

I knew that Superman, Jughead, and the Joker were make-believe but the Christian comics made real life into a nightmare. The drawing style was disturbing, making even normal people look slightly deformed and nauseating, and the messages were terrifying. Evil was waiting at every door and “spells, astrology, occultic jewelry and rock music” were all traps that had to be avoided. The “Crusaders” were the superheroes in these Christian comics. Everyday people were the villains.

According to Jack Chick the Catholic Church—where Grandma went—was satanic. Mary and the saints were idols; the Catholic church was behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the Communist Party and the Third Reich were both formed by Jesuit priests led by Satan; and all Roman Catholics were going to burn in hell.

Evolution was almost as threatening to Jack Chick as Catholicism. According to Chick, there were no valid discoveries of transitory fossils. The comic Primal Man listed only a few fossil discoveries of early hominids, and claimed that all were faked, flawed, or fossils of modern humans. Evolution wasn’t real science, the comic declared. It was a misleading theory—an elaborate hoax—intended to disprove the Bible.

The characters in the tracts seemed insane. Teachers screamed and threw things at their students; everyone was frowning and crying except for the Christian Crusaders; and people changed their minds about important issues after five-minute conversations.

Jack Chick was over the top in his portrayal of the secular world, and I knew it. I went to school and brought my Bible with me. I put it on top of my textbooks on my desk because I didn’t want anyone to think I was ashamed of my faith. My science teachers never screamed at me or threatened to throw me out of class when I asked questions. I’d gone to the Catholic church. There were no sacrifices to Satan there. And Grandma certainly didn’t seem to me like she was being used by the devil.

I wasn’t sure why Chick was so angry and afraid or why he took the Bible so literally. I thought the Bible was the infallible Word of God, sure; but I didn’t see why God couldn’t have uses evolution to create the diverse life forms I saw at the Bronx Zoo. I didn’t believe the six days of creation were twenty-four hours each; the sun and moon weren’t even created until the fourth “day,” so how could the days be literal?

I didn’t actually think about the information in the Christian comics too much. I read them and put them in the pile with my old Archie and Superman books. I figured I could look things up at the library if I ever became interested enough to care that much. When I finally did, years later, I found the details surprisingly easy to refute. I discovered that the tracts were full of distortions of science and history, misinformation, and flat-out lies. What did that have to say about everything else I’d learned in church?

The book I’d purchased went through Paul’s letter to the church at Ephesus chapter by chapter, verse by verse. When I got to the middle of chapter 5, I read:

22 Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.

23 For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. 24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

Nothing in Ephesians chapter 5 was highlighted or underlined in my Bible. Well, I wasn’t a wife, so this didn’t apply to me, did it? I guessed it probably would in the future, but I’d never paid much attention to these verses before. Yet now I became curious about the other passages about women in the New Testament. It turned out that Paul had quite a bit to say about women, some of which was underlined in my Bible, including I Timothy 2, verses 9 through 12:

9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;

10 But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.

11 Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.

12 But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

I didn’t see Paul’s admonitions being practiced—or even preached—in the churches I attended. We women all spent a lot of time fixing our hair. We also wore jewelry and fancy dresses to church. Our “Sunday best” was modest all right, but not necessarily inexpensive. Married and single women were preaching, leading praise and worship, and teaching Bible classes. As I went through all of Paul’s letters to find what he had to say about women, I decided that I simply did not agree with him. This made me nervous. Was I in rebellion against God because I disagreed with something in the Bible?

It turns out that Paul himself let me off the hook when he noted twice in I Corinthians 7 that he was giving his own opinion, not God’s law. “But to the rest speak I, not the Lord,” and, “I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgment…” he wrote, specifically when giving advice to women (about whom he knew nothing, being single and allegedly celibate). Paul’s words, I saw, weren’t necessarily God’s words. Some things in the Bible were just opinions. Something cracked open in a back corner of my mind.

Concerned friends have since asked me if I was looking for an excuse not to believe, thinking that I must have wanted to live in sin and I was searching for a way to justify my disobedience to God’s commandments. But they were wrong. For most of my life I desperately wanted to believe the Bible was the infallible Word of God. For long stretches of time, I did believe. And I did my best to suppress the doubts that occasionally cropped up for almost twenty years, pushing them down deep inside. In the end, however, I stopped running from my fears. After twenty years of struggling, I finally embraced my doubt and found that it was doubt that could finally set me free.

Today I don’t think the Bible is the infallible, or even the inspired, Word of God. “The Bible,” as John Shelby Spong states in his book Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism, is “not a literal road map to reality, but a historic narrative of the journey our religious forebears made in the eternal human quest to understand life, the world, themselves, and God.” The Bible is the story of the early evolution of Jewish and Christian thought. The story is not finished, and it is not the only story worth listening to. Nor is it the greatest story ever told. Each of us must write that story for ourselves.

Previous Installments:

• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Born Again
• Part III: Was I saved or brainwashed?
• Part IV: Change Creeps in Unawares

Suddenly, after months of resistance, after exhaustion, after going to church six days a week, after listening to three hour sermons every night and skipping school when I was too tired to get up in the morning, suddenly I wanted to be what they were. I wanted to have what they had. Suddenly I understood what I was missing.

–

I close my bedroom door, sit on my bed, pull my knees up to my chest, and shut my eyes. In my mind, I picture a teenage girl standing at a makeshift altar at the front of a small basement arranged like a church.

Her lips move in silent prayer as tears stream down her face. Tom Shaffer, a visiting evangelist from Texas, lays hands on her, his ostrich-skin cowboy boots spread hip-width apart, firmly planted on the concrete floor, his pudgy fingers pressing down into her hair. His words are so loud, he doesn’t need a microphone in this small sanctuary. He hardly needs one when he preaches in the VFW or Oddfellow’s hall, either.

“Repeat this prayer after me,” Tom says. “Heavenly Father, I want to receive this power that Jesus spoke of. I ask you now to baptize me in the Holy Ghost.” The girl repeats, timidly at first, but getting louder with each sentence. “I say by faith that I receive Him now in all His fullness, and as the believers did on the day of Pentecost, I will speak in tongues as the Spirit gives me utterance.”

The people in the congregation pray with Tom. Those close to the girl place their hands on her shoulders. Those further away reach out toward the girl, as if sending waves of blessings to her through their outstretched hands. The air is thick with the murmur of prayers, as every person in the room concentrates on the girl and her desire to grow closer to God.

The girl starts sobbing now, her words are jumbled, she is ready to receive the gift of the Holy Ghost. Tom releases her head from his grip, and with a quick flip of the wrist, pops her on the forehead with the heel of his right hand. “In the NAME of Jesus, recEIVE ye the HOly Ghost!” he shouts. The girl shudders, her knees buckle, and she starts to fall. A man standing behind her catches her and gently lowers her to the ground; a woman standing to her side straightens the skirt around the girl’s legs. The girl is praying loudly now, but her words are not English. She has been baptized in the Holy Ghost and has received the gift of tongues. Oblivious to the people around her and the rest of the service, she is in communion with God, speaking in words only He can understand.

The congregation sighs in relief. “Praise the Lord!” several people shout at once. “Amen!” echoes across the small room. A few women jingle tambourines and dance in the aisle between the rows of metal folding chairs as Tommy and Chris start playing their guitars. “Glory to God!” “Hallelujah!”

In my bedroom, I imagine that the girl is me. I desperately want to be baptized in the Holy Ghost. No-one knows if I speak in tongues yet or not—not my mother, not Katie or Jimmy, not Tom—and I am embarrassed to admit that I can’t. As badly as I want it, I know I will never get hands laid on me in church. There’s no way I would be able to get up from my back-row seat and walk all the way up the aisle to the altar to be anointed. My feet would freeze to the floor; I would forget how to walk. I shudder just thinking about it in the privacy of my own bedroom.

I open my eyes and reach for the Bible on the floor beside my bed. I flip it open to the second chapter of Acts and begin reading at verse 1.

1 And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place.

2 And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

3 And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.

4 And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

I know the Lord wants to bless me with the gifts of His Spirit. I know that I love Jesus with all of my heart. I know that I am ready. I breathe deeply, opened my mouth, and whisper “I love you Jesus. I want to receive your power in my life. I open my heart to you. Please fill me with the Holy Ghost.” I wait.

That night, nothing happened, but I didn’t give up.

–

I don’t even remember how I changed, but at the beginning of 1976, I was a smart-ass, rebellious teenager and at the end I was a goody two-shoes Christian. At the beginning of the year I wanted to go roller skating with my girlfriends from school, at the end I only wanted to hang out with Jimmy and Katie, or with adults who were more fanatical than I was. At the beginning of the year, I wanted to skip ahead and take calculus and physics. At the end of the year, I quit biology to take music theory and what I wanted more than anything was to be able to speak in tongues.

Looking back, the periods of change in my life are foggy. It’s hard to remember how I morphed from nominal Christian to fanatic and, later, how I changed from true believer to agnostic to atheist. I look through my old journals from time to time, trying to unlock the clues. Lately I’ve been talking to old Christian friends on facebook, trying to awaken dormant memories. I haven’t remembered as much about my changes as I want to, but I have remembered my good friends and the good times that I had when I was a Christian. For a while, under the influence of the writings of the “new” atheists and the media attention given to ridiculous caricatures of Christians like Fred Phelps and James Dobson, I had forgotten everything positive about my past experiences.

I am just as certain today that God does not exist as I was that Jesus was the Lord of All when I was in my teens and twenties. Today, however, my own certainty does not carry with it the need to convince or convert others. Nor does it carry with it a mandate to save the world. Although I never would have chosen to stop believing, I am happy with the place where I find myself today. I can accept that people, seeing the same evidence, do not all come to the same conclusions. I can enjoy the company of my Christian friends again, even though I have no desire or intention to “return to the fold.”

Previous Installments:

• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Born Again
• Part III: Was I saved or brainwashed?

A few weeks ago, ironically when I’d been planning to speak at an atheist meeting, I went to church with evangelical friends. I almost called them fundies, but I’m not always sure what that means any more. These days it carries a connotation of negativity, so I’m choosing not to use it to describe my friends, although I’m pretty sure they still hold to the “five fundamentals” with which the name originated. These were friends from my teenage days in New York, when I was on fire for God, a spirit-filled, born again Christian with a mission.

The experience made me wonder how I got that way, because when I think back to my younger days, I was a nominal Christian. I was born again when I was nine, but I didn’t spend most of my time reading the Bible, praying, or witnessing. But when I was 14, all that was starting to change.

–

Friends from church invited us to their house to hear a preacher from Texas. Ernie greeted everyone at the door, and Helene ushered us down the stairs into the basement. The long, narrow room was filled with metal folding chairs lined up in rows facing a makeshift pulpit that was nothing more than a cheap music stand. There was no organ, but two electric guitars and a microphone stood in the corner of the room next to a small amplifier, and a tambourine waited silently at the foot of the pulpit.

My mother, as usual, found seats near the front. I turned around looking over the back of my chair as the small basement filled up. It seemed like each person brought a personal leather Bible. Many were wrapped in homemade fabric covers. Some of the women brought tambourines, too. I bit my lip with suspicion. I’d never been to a church without pews before and I wasn’t sure what to expect. In a few minutes a middle-aged woman dressed in a denim skirt, a Western-style blouse, and cowboy boots walked up to the podium and picked up the mic. Her dark auburn hair was curled in the tightest perm I’d ever seen, short on top and long around her shoulders.

“Praise the Lord, y’all,” she said.

The mic squealed with feedback and she moved away from the amplifier.

“Are you ready to worship Jesus tonight?”

She picked up the tambourine and shook it.

A few people in the audience echoed her “praise the Lord” or shouted out “hallelujah!”

Two teenage boys, also wearing cowboy boots and Western shirts, picked up the guitars and strummed a couple of chords. Another, much younger, boy remained in the front row when his mother and brothers got up to lead the worship service.

“My name is Shirley Shaffer and I’m here to praise the Lord!” the woman said. “Stand up and praise God with me.”

I looked around and everyone was standing up, so I did too. We usually stood up during the worship service at church, so nothing strange about that. The boys were strumming quickly now, and the woman started to sing. It was a song I’d never heard before.

I will sing unto the LORD,
for he hath triumphed gloriously:
the horse and rider thrown into the sea.

Bum-bum-bum went the guitars and tambourine in unison. “This song is from Exodus 15, verse 1,” Shirley said, “Open your Bibles and sing along.”

The Lord, my God, my strength, my song,
has now become my victor-ee-ee-ee.

The Lord, my God, my strength, my song,
has now become my victory!

The singing went on for a long time, perhaps an hour, with the music echoing off the concrete floor and bare basement walls. We sang fast songs and slow songs, loud songs and quiet songs, many with words out of the Bible and others with simple choruses that could be memorized quickly. And we sang each song enough times to memorize it. Five, ten, fifteen repeats of each chorus. As the music went on, some people fell into the rhythm and clapped their hands and jingled their own tambourines. Others looked a little nervous, used to singing hymns and quiet choruses to the accompaniment of the organ and piano.

When the singing finally ended, a chubby man with the same tightly permed, but shorter, auburn hair came up to the pulpit. He was dressed like the rest of his family, in Western wear and cowboy boots. His pants were a little too snug, and his tucked-in shirt didn’t hide his pot belly.

“Glory to GOD,” he hollered into the mic. “This place is like a house-a-fire!”

His pudgy fingers opened a huge, leather Bible and set it down on the pulpit. Before he started his sermon, he passed an offering plate around the room, collecting money to support his trip from Texas to New York to bring God’s word to us.

Three hours later, Tom was still preaching.

“Are you listenin’?” he’d yell every now and then, perhaps when he noticed someone nodding off in the back of the room.

Most of the adults were alert and awake, following along in their Bibles, taking notes, nodding in agreement, and yelling “amen, Brother,” from time to time. The younger kids were fidgeting in their seats or sleeping on the floor. My mind wandered and I didn’t even try to pay attention. I’d rather have been home in bed, but the extra time to daydream was just fine with me.

As Tom started to wind down, returning to the scripture verse he’d started with to remind us all of the theme of the sermon, the boys and their mother came back up to the front and got ready to sing some more. I looked at my watch and wondered how I’d be able to wake up for school the next morning. It was after midnight and I usually went to bed at nine.

Fortunately, it wasn’t much of a problem for me to be tired at school. I hardly paid attention anyway. Most of my classes were too easy, and I could read over the chapters we’d covered the night before the test and get an A every time. I was more concerned with being too tired to hang out with my friends. My mother liked what Tom had to say so much that we started going to services four or five nights a week, only going to Smithtown Tabernacle on Sunday mornings. I was glad when he disappeared and went back to Texas with his family so my life could get back to normal.

–

The Shaffers were back soon enough. They didn’t come in the dead of winter, but waited until the spring thaw. The nightly house meetings started up again, but at least I knew what to expect this time. Or almost.

One night a boy with the ice-blue eyes was there, talking to a girl with a high, tight ponytail. They were with a chubby boy who had brown curly hair. They were the only teenagers in the room.

“What the hell,” I thought, and went up to talk to them. I didn’t see anyone else near my age, and it wasn’t like I had anything better to do.

“Open your Bibles to 2nd Corinthians 10, verse 3,” Tom said after the singing was over and he’d taken the offering. He read the passage aloud:

For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: (For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strong holds;) Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.

Tom preached his messages in seasons, like TV shows, focusing on one verse or passage for months at a time. He’d start and end each sermon by reading his key passage, and in between he’d take us on a three-hour journey where, seemingly, no man had gone before. Night after night it was the same message, with different stories to illustrate the point: we couldn’t trust our own thoughts, we had to crush any thought that disagreed with the teachings of the Bible, we had to capture every idea that didn’t conform to the knowledge of God.

Jimmy and Katie—it turns out blue-eyed boy and ponytail girl had names—followed along in their Bibles, taking notes and paying attention to whatever Tom said. Their friend Mike was less interested.

Somewhere along the way, I’m not sure when, I started paying attention, too. I know this because the pages of the New Testament in my old Bible are like a rainbow. Jesus’ words, of course, are red. But I’ve highlighted, underlined, circled, and annotated verses in every book using every color pen and marker that I had. The verses of 2nd Corinthians 10:3–5 are highlighted in yellow, underlined in blue, and marked in the margin with a large parenthesis to draw attention to the passage.

I still had trouble getting up for school sometimes, but Mom decided if we were too tired my sister and I could stay home from school every now and then. Better to miss a math class than another night of preaching.

–

I didn’t know it yet, but I was on my way to fanaticism. Looking back, I can’t help think that I was brainwashed. The church we started attending was very cult-like. But at the time, it all seemed very natural. I was never forced to do anything against my will. But the peer pressure was very strong. My transition from lukewarm Christian to on-fire for God took about a year. In the next installation of this series, I’ll talk more about that transition. Was I saved or brainwashed? I still find it difficult, over 30 years later, to answer that question.

- writerdd

Previous Installments:

• My journey into and, later, out of Christianity (Introduction)
• My journey into and, later, out of Christianity (Born Again)

I went to church with my friends, and heard a guest speaker say in so many words that Christians had to fear for their lives now that the Democrats are in power in the US. And this week I read an atheist blogger saying the same things in reverse — how Christians are stockpiling guns and are out to “get us” liberals.

Someone has to break the cycle of terror. I don’t mean fear of terrorists, either. I mean fear of the “other” in our own country. The liberals (including most atheists) are terrorized by the idea that the religious right is going to make our country a theocracy and take all of our rights away the conservatives (including many Christians) are afraid the progressives are out to destroy morality, eliminate religious freedom, and take all of our rights away. Both positions are ridiculous in the extreme.

The scary part is that if we keep going in this cycle, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Someone has to tone down the rhetoric first. I want to be part of the group that spreads reason and hope instead of buying into fear mongering. I hope it’s not too late and I hope some of you will join me in trying to break out of the destructive cycle we’ve locked ourselves into.

- Donna

The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods

By Eric Maisel, Ph.D.

I see my new book The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without Gods as primarily providing a roadmap for non-believers who are looking for an answer to the question, “How can I invest my life with meaning if the universe takes no interest in me or in human affairs?” At the same time, I think it will serve the many believers who have questions about their belief system and who harbor a lurking doubt that believing in gods makes good sense. For both groups, I see The Atheist’s Way as providing real answers and a vision of an “atheist lifestyle” characterized by personal responsibility, meaning adventures, and joy.

In writing the book, I thought it wise to skip the arguments for the non-existence of gods. Those arguments have been presented many times already, sometimes thoughtfully, sometimes thunderously. From my point of view is made better sense simply to state that there are no gods and to proceed on to the really important next questions. For the non-existence of gods is a starting point, not an end point, and merely sets the stage for the play. On that stage, human beings must make sense of how they want to represent themselves, how they intend to construe meaning, and what value they want to invest in the next hour, the next month, and the next decade.

In The Atheist’s Way I focus on meaning, because meaning is the issue of our century. There were certain other areas that I wanted to touch on, for instance whether believers or atheists got more depressed, what the journey was like from belief to atheism, and the long and honorable history of the atheist tradition. I also wanted to provide a picture of the challenges that atheists face as they deal with family, friends, and society and as they deal with their own occasional supernatural enthusiasms. But those amount to tributaries; the main river is meaning.

When you have as your baseline the clear understanding that nature does not care about you or your species and that no spiritual enthusiasms are warranted, you must come up with your own language of meaning and your own robust vision of what your life is to mean or else feel bereft and depressed. In The Atheist’s Way I provide that language of meaning and I argue that the robust vision required is rooted in a certain paradigm shift. The paradigm shift I have in mind is the shift from seeking meaning to making meaning.

For thousands of years meaning has been thought of as something “out there” that, until found, is lost. It is past time to let go of that misconception. Meaning must be construed as a choice, not as a lost object. There is no meaning until a person decides to make meaning and to invest meaning in values, activities, and relationships. The flip side is that meaning is a renewable resource, since, as long as you are alive, you can make new meaning and engage in new meaning adventures. You treat your life as something in which you intend to take pride, you align your meaning choices with your cherished principles and values, you nominate yourself as the hero of your own story, and, by living this paradigm shift, you never run short of meaning again.

In my view, belief is a betrayal of our common humanity. As soon as people presume to know what gods want, decide to follow dogmatic laws provided from on high, and refuse to look the facts of existence in the eye, they align themselves against their neighbors and head down a slippery slope toward narcissism and grandiosity. There is no one grander or more narcissistic than the anointed believer who points to a passage in a book and exclaims, “God says you are evil!” It is time that, as a species, we stop promoting this self-serving arrogance. We must humbly admit that we come and we go—and that while we are here we have plenty of good work to accomplish.

Reasonable people know that it is time to eradicate god-talk and dismiss the pantheon of made-up gods from our common discourse and our communal lives. But a multitude of these reasonable people, if they are to make the leap to authenticity and rationality, need support in conceptualizing how they are to live once those gods have been banished. I hope that The Atheist’s Way provides that support by painting a clear, beautiful and vital picture of what living well without gods looks like.

Eric Maisel, PhD, is the author of more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Coaching the Artist Within,The Van Gogh Blues and A Writer’s San Francisco. Maisel is a creativity coach and creativity coach trainer who presents keynote addresses and workshops nationally and internationally. He holds undergraduate degrees in philosophy and psychology, master’s degrees in counseling and creative writing, and a doctorate in counseling psychology. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. His website is www.ericmaisel.com.

Based on the book The Atheist’s Way. Copyright © 2008 by Eric Maisel. Reprinted with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA.  www.newworldlibrary.com or 800/972-6657 ext. 52.

“Don’t be disappointed,” she said, “but you won’t be getting much for Christmas this year.”

“How do you know?” I asked. It was, after all, still summer. School hadn’t even started yet. Santa couldn’t have already decided if I’d been naughty or nice.

“We don’t have as much money since Daddy left. So I won’t be able to buy a lot of presents for you.”

I looked down at the pile of laundry and dug out a match to the sock in my hand. What could that possibly mean? Had my parents been buying my Christmas presents all along?

“You already know this,” my mother said, “but please don’t tell your sister that Santa Claus isn’t real.”

Even though I was only nine, I knew I couldn’t tell my mother that I had believed in Santa right up until that moment. I didn’t want to make her sad.

–

The afternoon sun shone in the two bedroom windows, intensifying the color of the yellow paint on the three walls opposite the windows. The huge orange and yellow wallpaper flowers on the fourth wall were not at all out of place this time of year, and would keep the room from becoming depressing in the bone chilling winter months to come. Months that would no longer be filled with the magic of Santa Claus and his flying reindeer. I finished matching up the socks, and went into my own room to do my homework.

That Christmas Eve we went to the candlelight service at Calvary Baptist Church after we finished the traditional fish dinner that Grandma made. The sanctuary, normally plain and barren of ornament compared to Infant Jesus Catholic Church, was decked with pine boughs, wreaths, and candles.

As we walked into the church a few minutes before the service started, the organist was playing Oh Come All Ye Faithful. We sat about halfway back on the right-hand side of the sanctuary. Every pew was adorned with a wreath and a flickering candle at each end and pine bows draped along the back of the seat, tacked to the wood with red velvet bows above the pockets of Bibles and hymnals. The chandeliers were dimmed and it was dark outside. Inside, the dancing candle flames made shadows on the high ceiling and the naked, white walls.

Unlike a normal Sunday service, no-one congregated in the aisles talking. Instead we all took our seats and hummed or sang along quietly as the organist played. After a few minutes Pastor F came to the pulpit, the light from the candelabras on either side of the altar barely illuminating his face. We all stood, turned to hymn number 72 in the Baptist Hymnal and began singing. Then Pastor F read the Christmas story from the Gospel of Luke.

Luke 2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. 2:2 (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) 2:3 And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) 2:5 To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with Child. 2:6 And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. 2:7 And she brought forth her firstborn Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling clothes, and laid Him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. 2:8 And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. 2:9 And, lo, the angel of the LORD came upon them, and the glory of the LORD shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. 2:10 And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. 2:11 For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the LORD. 2:12 And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the Babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger. 2:13 And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, 2:14 Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. 2:15 And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into Heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the LORD hath made known unto us. 2:16 And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the Babe lying in a manger. 2:17 And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this Child. 2:18 And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. 2:19 But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. 2:20 And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them. 2:21 And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the Child, His Name was called JESUS, which was so named of the angel before He was conceived in the womb.

After the reading, the pastor told us that Jesus was born of a virgin, died on the cross thirty-three years later, and rose again on the third day to save us from Hell. “We are all sinners,” Pastor F said, “We are all doomed to Hell and eternal damnation. But because God loves us, He sent his Son to Earth to be born, to suffer, and to die in our place.” If we would accept Jesus as our personal savior, he explained, we would go to heaven to be with God and Jesus forever when we died.

Jesus, it seemed, also knew if we were naughty or nice; but the consequences were more dire than whether I’d find an Easy Bake Oven under the Christmas tree, or a lump of dirty, black coal in my stocking in the morning.

Jesus loved us, the pastor said, and gave his life freely to save us from sin and hell. Wouldn’t anyone like to accept Jesus as their personal savior tonight, this holy night of Jesus’ birth? “If you would, get up out of your seat and come down to the altar, and pray with me now.”

I didn’t get up. I sat quietly in my seat as a few adults walked up to the front of the church to be saved. But when Pastor F had the new converts repeat the sinner’s prayer, I closed my eyes and said the words silently in my heart.

I was born again on December 24, 1971 in a middle pew on the right-hand side of the sanctuary in Calvary Baptist Church on Jayne Boulevard in Port Jefferson Station, New York, six months after I stopped believing in Santa Claus.

I didn’t tell my mother. I knew she was worried about me, sure that the christening I’d received in the Catholic church nine years before had not saved my soul. My sister was born again, too, and was baptized, dunked in the baptismal pool wearing a while robe like a tiny angel, several months later after she reached the age of reason on her seventh birthday. I wouldn’t expose myself like that, even though I was three years older. My belief in Jesus was private, like my belief in Santa had been. I didn’t cry when my parents got divorced, I didn’t shed a tear when Grandpa D died, and I didn’t publicize my conversion. No-one in the congregation at the Baptist Church had to know. Not even my mother. I felt bad that she was worried about me, but not bad enough to share the secret of my salvation.

–

It’s only now, decades later, as I write this that I see that I accepted Jesus the same year I discovered that Santa was not real. How could I not have seen this before? I think a few things were keeping me from seeing what happened.

First, I was a child. I believed what the adults in my world told me, even when the pieces of the puzzle didn’t quite fit together. Even when I thought I was being rebellious or creative in my thought, when I rejected Catholic dogma and was born again, I was still basically following the path set out for me by my mother. I was soaking up the messages of the pastor and my Sunday school teacher. And this is natural. Children live in a dangerous world. It is safer and healthier for them to believe what adults tell them about the perils that surround them. But eventually we have to outgrow that need and begin to understand the world for ourselves. At nine, I was not even near being ready to take this step.

Second, I had no critical thinking skills. Perhaps this is not surprising for a third grader. But even as I got older, and read about walking to the beat of a different drummer in Thoreau, I failed to realize that the drum beat I was actually following was in sync with the ones of almost everyone around me. I thought I was rebelling against secular society by following Jesus; I thought I was forging my own path; I thought I was being a non-conformist. But I was conforming so much that I barely had a thought of my own. I wouldn’t learn how to truly think critically until my thirties.

Finally, I wanted the world to be magical. I loved reading magical stories, and I wanted to believe them. Santa, and later Jesus, gave me a way to experience magic in my own life. It’s not only children who want to keep magic alive, many adults feel the same way. Evangelical Christian author Randall Balmer puts it this way:

As a person of faith, I decided years ago that I would refuse to allow the canons of Enlightenment Rationalism to be the final arbiter of truth. I elect to live in an enchanted universe where there are forces at work beyond my understanding and control — and where faith, not empiricism or complex apologetic proofs for the existence of God, serves ultimately as my guide.

For better or worse, desire is not the final arbiter of truth either. Some things are real and others are not. I wanted to believe as much as Balmer does. I wanted to live in an enchanted universe. In the end, the evidence for God just didn’t add up for me any more. Although the magic, as much as I desired it, just wasn’t real, I still find myself in a universe “where there are forces at work beyond my understanding and control.” I never chose to stop believing, but it happened anyway.

- writerdd

Previous Installments:

• My journey into and, later, out of Christianity (Introduction)

I was born into a multi-faith family. My mother was of Jewish heritage, although her father was an atheist and their family did not practice religion. My father was raised in the Catholic faith, and his mother was very devout. They went to Mass every week, said the rosary every day, and their home was filled with reminders of their faith.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve always been surrounded by friends and family members who were different than me. I never thought I was unusual in this way. Even with a start like that, I was still ignorant of the amount of diversity around me. I was six years old before I realized that not everyone was Catholic or Jewish.

–

I stood on the front stoop with my mother, looking down the block toward Trisha and Diane’s house. My two friends had invited me to go to Vacation Bible School with them, and since school was out for summer and I was bored, I wanted to go. My mother wasn’t so sure it was a good idea.

“It might seem strange to you,” mommy said. “They’re not Catholic.”

“Oh,” I said, “They’re Jewish?”

“No.”

I didn’t understand. How could someone be not Catholic and not Jewish at the same time? I didn’t ask.

“They’re Christians,” she said, which didn’t clear things up for me at all. Until that moment, my universe did not include anything besides Catholics, like Grandma and Grandpa Druchunas—and us—and Jews, like Grandma and Grandpa Tolen and half of the kids at school.

Vacation Bible School at the Protestant church turned out to be not all that different from Catholic catechism except that we met inside a church instead of at the teacher’s house. The classrooms were dark and dingy, with cinder block walls and small windows that were too high for five-year-olds to look out of. We sat in a semi-circle of miniature plastic chairs, and a the teacher stood by a big felt board covered in paper-doll cutouts. Instead of paper boys and girls with paper clothes, these dolls were characters from the Bible. As the teacher told us stories about Moses and the burning bush, Jonah in the belly of the whale, and Jesus feeding the five-thousand with the loaves and fishes, the little paper Moses and Jonah and Jesus and the whale skipped and swam across the felt board under the control of her fingers.

After the Bible story, we sang songs that were different than the ones we’d learned at school. Nothing with cheery melodies and words about the farmer who had a dog named B-I-N-G-O or the oink-oink here and the cluck-cluck there on Old MacDonald’s farm. Instead we sang a strange sounding song that I didn’t understand. The tune was easy to learn, and the words were repetitive.

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya,

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya-ah,

Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya,

Oh Lo-ord, kumbaya.

The other versus added some words I understood, one verse after another, building on the theme.

Someone’s sleeping Lord, kumbaya…

Someone’s crying Lord, kumbaya-ah…

Someone’s praying Lord, kumbaya…

Each verse ending the same way.

Oh Lo-ord, kumbaya.

The music made me feel happy and sad at the same time and I sang along and swayed to the music, even though I didn’t know what the words meant.

I kept humming the song to myself as we worked on a crafts project, making a cross out of noodles, coloring pictures of Jonah and the whale, or some similar childish artwork.

It wasn’t until we all went outside to play and have snack of cookies and Kool-aide that the sweet eeriness of the singing faded away in the sunshine as the noise of sugar-buzzed kids playing drowned out the tune lingering in my mind.

I didn’t think of Vacation Bible School much after the week was over, but I never forgot the new song we’d learned with the strange words and the haunting tune.

–

Growing up, I didn’t realize that one could choose one’s religion. Although my mother went to the Catholic church, she was still Jewish, wasn’t she? Religion was like nationality: something you were born with, something you shared with your family, something you didn’t — couldn’t — change. Religion wasn’t about belief. It was about tradition and heritage. I didn’t know that many people believed that their religion was “right” and everyone else was “wrong.” Religion, to me, was something you inherited from your parents and grandparents, like your eye color and the shape of your nose.

It was only later, when my mother was born again and when I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, that I started to see religion as something more personal. I would have said, “I’m not religious, I just love the Lord.” And perhaps that’s the crux of the matter. When religion becomes too personal, when it’s not about tradition and heritage and holiday celebrations, but when it’s about belief and salvation and personal sanctification, that it becomes dangerous. When I begin to feel threatened by those who don’t share my beliefs, I become dangerous to myself and others.

After I realized that not everyone was Catholic or Jewish, I found that I had many neighbors who were of differing faiths: Greek Orthodox, Buddhist, Protestant, and even unbelievers. We were all friendly and we all spent time together, focusing on the things we had in common. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about why it is often so difficult for people of different faiths to respect and befriend each other. When I read the news and blog posts, I feel like most people are surrounding themselves completely with others who are just like them, who believe the same things, and who have the same opinions. I can’t help but think that this trend is dangerous and stifling.

I never ask people what they believe in when I meet them. It eventually comes up, usually months, or even years, later, and by that point it’s irrelevant. Although I also became a born again Christian, and then left my faith behind, many years ago, I still keep in touch with my childhood friends and my evangelical Christian friends. I still like them. We are all still the same people we were all those years ago, even though we’ve followed different paths.

I feel like I’ve come full circle in my life. I was born into a diverse family, as a child I discovered that I was part of a diverse community, and today I find myself living in a diverse world. I would like to embrace that diversity. Over the past eight years, I’ve felt angry towards Christians, written blog posts that were rants against religious extremists, and forgotten that people who are different than me are still people. I’ve started to remember, and I hope you will remember, too. I hope the next eight years will be filled with discussion instead of debate, conversation instead of criticism, and acceptance and inclusiveness instead of anger and isolation.

I look forward to sharing more of my journey here throughout the year.

- writerdd

This year I’ve decided that I’m not sure I want to be called an atheist anymore, even though I don’t believe in god(s). I know according to the dictionary that I am an atheist, but I’ve become disillusioned with the atheist movement, which largely seems to thrive on making fun of believers and ignoring the desire for spiritual fulfillment that most people feel.

Although I have some Christian friends in America, over the past years, I have found myself viewing all religious people as some sort of monolithic negative stereotype, hell bent on controlling everything and everyone, and teetering on the edge of insanity. I spent the summer in Lithuania where I met people from all over the world, I found that I’d made new friends who were Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, Buddhist, agnostic, and “just spiritual.” Although we didn’t talk very much about religion, we engaged in meaningful and interesting conversations about many different topics. I found myself rethinking the stereotypes I’d come to accept, and wanting to engage more fully with people of differing backgrounds and philosophies. I want to be open to see where my own spiritual journey will take me next, and I am not willing to be pegged down by labels or stereotypes, even those of my own invention.

I’ve recently read pieces by two other women authors who are in places that I admire. I’d like to share a few of their words with you.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, aka The Yarn Harlot, is a well known knitting author who has outed herself as an atheist who can appreciate religion and spirituality.

I attended St. Paul’s Cathedral for the Sung Eucharist. Many of you will know that I often say that I am a godless heathen, which is to mean that I do not keep with any particular church, and that I am (gasp) an atheist. This doesn’t mean, however, that I don’t respect or enjoy religion in general, and as a matter of fact, there is a very great deal I find my personal moral code has in common with much of organized faith, particularly when it comes to the basic rules that almost all faiths…. and all good people, have in common. (It is the interpretation of those rules that defeats me. Stuff like “Thou shalt not kill” or “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”being interpreted as “Thou shalt not kill unless you happen to think that the other person isn’t really a person because of your own rules” or ” do unto others as you would have them do unto you unless you think that simply being a human isn’t a good enough reason to receive human rights” is a problem for me. I would have been invited to no parties at all during the Crusades.)

I loved the sermon (topic involved how being a good Christian must include being an environmentalist, should you respect the work of God at all) and was profoundly moved by almost all of the sentiment. When I was offered a sign of peace, and made that same sign to others, and the organ swelled and the choir sang, I was filled with an enormous feeling… A respect for the monumental force that is human faith. Although I don’t place my faith in a supreme being whom I believe to be sentient, I am faithful. I have faith in the goodness of people. Faith in the love I have for my friends and family, faith in the love they have for me. I have faith that people will almost always do the right thing, especially if they are not hungry or poor or homeless, or worried about becoming hungry or poor or homeless. I have faith that most poor human behaviour is driven by ignorance, not cruelty. I have a mountain of faith, and that was what I had in common with everyone else in that church. Faith. Different sorts of it, but faith nonetheless, and it was a very human and binding experience.

Sharman Apt Russell, another author I admire, has written the new book Standing in the Light: My Life as Pantheist. This book, which I’ve only begun to read, is giving me a glimpse into another, less conventional way, to explore spirituality — without superstition.

I am fifty-one years old, sliding toward death, and I don’t much like myself. I have failed at so many things–not the very best writer, not the very best wife or friend, not even the very best parent. I don’t much like the world either, which is too full of suffering and disease and war, as the world has always been. I am acutely aware of how my country has betrayed itself, refusing once again to fulfill its potential, to be wise and strong. I am acutely aware of how humanity has betrayed itself, poisoning the earth, heedless of the future we create for our children. As a Quaker, I have lost my sense of the Light. I dislike town. I don’t feel special. I am surrounded by miracles–the porch step, the blue sky, black ravens croaking and gurgling–only I don’t see the connection. What do they have to do with me?

Still, I feel hopeful. My husband and I have a house in the Gila Villey and a new view of mountains. Living in nature will restore me. This time, I will pay more attention. This time I will take along some friends, books I haven’t read for many years, some things I have forgotten. I will take along my science, my neglected pantheism, my neglected Quakerism. If I know anything, I know that I do not want to live in a universe devoid of community, mystery, and awe. I do not want to be alone in my brain, my timid and lazy personality, unconnected to the rest of the world. I cast my lot with Spinoza, Thoreau, and Einstein. I want to live every minute in a holy universe, so pleased and grateful to be part of this existence.

Of pantheism, I will ask the questions we must ask of any religion: How can I lead a better and more joyful life? How can I come to terms with my death and suffering? How should we live as humans on the earth? Ho can we be at home here?

These are the same questions we must ask of ourselves, those of us without religion. Desire, it seems, is the beginning of every journey. Whether we love or hate the current state of the world and of ourselves, if we can find the desire to grow and search, then — as they say in Lithuania — viskas bus gerai, everything will be all right. My own journey may be just beginning.

- writerdd

Cross posted on The Atheist’s Way.

I do support ID as a philosophy because it gives fundamentalist and evangelical kids a way to accept evolution. Born-again Christian kids are going to be taught some form of creationism whether skeptics and atheists and scientists like it or not. I for one would like that to include at least a rudimentary acceptance of evolution as a concept. And since ID is basically a “God of the gaps” theory, it will eventually collapse under scrutiny by those who take the time to think, and the individual may be left with naked evolution.

Literal young earth creationism on the other hand, is part of a mindset that does not leave much of a window for thought at all, and it is a much more insidious philosophy.

I can live with people thinking that God started the evolutionary ball rolling, and even with the idea that he tinkers with it a little bit — as long as they keep their religious beliefs out of public school science classrooms, unless they actually scientifically discover verifiable evidence of God’s tinkering. And so far, ID proponents have not done any real science. They seem to think that PR is adequate, that if they can get enough people on board, then they can skip the hard work of actually doing science.

A lot of bloggers find ID to be nothing more than a deceitful way to disguise creationism and get it into the classroom. While that may be the intention of people like Michael Behe, William Dembski, and other ID evangelists, I don’t think it’s true of the average Christian sitting in the pew. I’ve never found lay Christians to be anything like televangelists or well-known preachers. They are much more honest. If they want creationism to be taught in public schools, they will come out and say so. And it will get thrown out as the blatant constitutional violation that it is, just as it did in Dover when the ID evangelists were outed by the school board members who could not, or would not, hide the fact that their goal was entirely religious in nature.

I support ID but not in the science classroom. However, even if ID were taught in public schools, the world would not end and America would not turn into a third-world country. All kinds of garbage has been and is still being taught in public schools. Yes, I want to improve education, but I’m really tired of all the fear mongering of the left and skeptics over this stuff. I spent half of my life being afraid of liberals and secularists dragging the world to hell and I most certainly am not going to spend the second half of my life being afraid of conservatives and religionists dragging the world to hell. Let’s get a grip on the actual severity of these problems and stop blowing everything out of proportion.

I should clarify that I define intelligent design the way I believe most Christians do, as a form of theistic evolution. I in no way promote or condone the ID political movement that is striving to get creationism taught in public schools in the United States, nor do I support the work or goals of the Discovery Institute, Michael Behe, or William Dembski.

- writerdd