Answers to Questions

Thedonald left me a couple questions yesterday, and they are good questions, so I will try to answer them here.

What rocked your world? What derailed you, so to speak? You must have hit some kind of wall. You examined the evidence, probably more than I have, then you went the other way.

All those phrases–"rocked your world," "derailed you," and "hit some kind of wall"–are indicative of personal cataclysm. Many Christians, it seems from my experience, believe that people become atheists when these personal cataclysms hit. Their opinion is usually that if the "lost" person would have just stuck it out and had faith, the cataclysm would have passed and the road to atheism would have gone untraveled. Well-meaning as those folks are, they fundamentally misunderstand what it is like to become an atheist after having been religious.

My passage from Christian to atheist was not the result of a personal cataclysm (though it probably spawned a few personal cataclysms in the lives of some friends and relatives). Instead, it was a long process that took several years. Mostly, it just involved reading, writing, and thinking. For the most part, it was not an emotional process, but a rational one.

Usually, people who "lose the faith" because of some emotional disaster don't become atheists–they become wounded theists. These are people who still believe in god, but are angry or disillusioned at god, or feel that the moral or behavioral demands of god are just too much for them–better to just go party and live a "life of sin," they say. Invariably, wounded theists will find themselves back in the church someday, usually because of another emotional disaster–a crash of some kind, either literal, or psychological, or physiological. The classic "wounded theist" that always comes to my mind is the guy you find at church who tells stories about being in a gang, or being an alcoholic, or some flavor of criminal, and who is covered with tattoos and other scars of his "life of sin." That's just a composite caricature, but I think you'll know what I mean. There are other kinds of wounded theists, too. Sometimes a wounded theist is the result of a child dying, or some other "unjust" thing that happened. Those are the kinds of people who are targeted by Harold Kushner's book When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In some denominations, wounded theists are known as "backslidden Christians."

Wounded theists are not atheists; the two could not be much more different. Unfortunately, most Christians don't take this into account. They don't understand what it means to be a real atheist, and I have even heard some of them say that real atheists don't exist! The frustrating result is that most of the literature for Christians regarding atheists is inaccurate (or even downright dishonest) and misdirected. While you would have a good chance of success if you went to a wounded theist to evangelize, directing a similar attempt at a real atheist would be futile. Some of the myths about atheists is that they are sad without god, that they really want to believe but can't because of the evidence, and that they are totally immoral. Hence, much of the evangelistic material directed towards atheists is an attempt to address one of those myths–to show us the joy of god, to present evidence, or to convince us that we are morally bankrupt. The first one just makes us laugh, because we know that Christians have bad days just like we do, and are not, on the whole, happier or more secure than we are. The second one is based on the philosophical mistake that the existence of god can be proven. The third one is just an insult. When you go to people who are endeavoring every day to live well, and tell them that they are morally bankrupt, they are not going to listen to you. However, all three of those techniques are likely to work on wounded theists.

So, to finally answer the question, no, I did not hit a wall, derail, or have my world rocked. Actually, my path to atheism was just an extension of my path to try and understand my faith better. It started with my desire to really know why I believed, to have an answer for anyone. This was probably a natural thing for a Christian kid on a state university campus, suddenly exposed to all that evil secularism I had heard about in high school. Christian kids who go to public universities usually feel embattled. My solution was to dig in, to become as strong a Christian as I could, and go for the gold. Except it turns out that the more I read, and the more I thought, and the more I wrote down my thoughts in an attempt to sort them out, the more the whole system started to crumble in my hands. I remember writing out very long critiques of Christianity, in which the whole thing began to look utterly absurd. This was difficult for me, because I was still under the spell of those myths that non-belief would turn me into some lost soul, bereft in a sea of meaninglessness. It was a difficult spot–believe all this stuff that looks like hogwash, or give myself up to a meaningless, unbelieving life? But even then, it was not a cataclysm, or a wall to hit, or a derailment. Even then, I was still convinced that god existed, that Christianity was true, but that it had been corrupted by generations of people. So I got more liberal. The Bible wasn't literally true, I concluded. That eased the tension for a while. But then I had to start asking myself where I was getting the ability to judge which parts of the Bible were true. Sure, there were scholars and archaeologists to tell me which parts were more likely to be true, but still there were ethical decisions to be made. Why did I like most of the Sermon on the Mount, but find Leviticus repulsive? Certainly, there are lots of "answers" to that question within Christianity, but for various reasons, I rejected them all as nonsense. The further I got, the more I realized how little most of the Christians around me thought and knew about their faith. In Sunday school classes, I raised questions that made some people uncomfortable. A few people in the church actually went to the pastor and asked him to shut me down, to not let me ask certain questions. However, to be clear, understand that this social affront was not my reason for leaving. By that time, I just had to laugh at these people, how small-minded they seemed. I used to tell people that if their faith could not withstand any question, then it wasn't a faith worth keeping.

Eventually, I came to a place where the whole thing hung by a thread, and I had the option of cutting that thread. So I did. And, honestly, it was a scary moment. But I was surprised afterward how good it felt to be free of all that stuff. No longer would I have to deal with Christianity, and constantly be sorting things out in my head, trying to find bits of value here and there. I was free to look at the world through my own eyes. It felt good.

This will date me, but at about that time, the movie The Matrix came out. Sitting in a theater one day and watching Neo emerge from that pod of goo, then learn that the world where he grew up was just an illusion, a system of control, I couldn't help but see a metaphor for my own experience. Christianity was The Matrix and I was Neo. At last I felt free from belief, and when the words and ideas of Christians came at me as the bullets came at Neo, I was not worried.

Do you do this as a hobby, or job?

If I could get paid to do this, I would. Unfortunately, I get paid to do other things, and this is just a hobby.