On
October 3, 2006, I had been a Christian for 25 years. I taught Sunday
School, sang in the choir, and had even given a sermon. I was a Cub
Scout den leader. On October 4, all of that changed. I had not been
struggling with my faith. My life was and remains comfortable. I
suffered no terrible tragedy. My deconversion was not the result of
anything else other than my own personal thought.
I
struggle to describe how jarring this transition was for me. I have
been married for 14 years. I have 3 wonderful children. I am 38 years
old. This was a very big and very painful change for me to go through.
It has carried far reaching consequences, affecting everything about
the way I think about the world, and affecting all of my personal
relationships. I was not only Christian, but fundamentally so. I
believed in hell, and I fully believed that all non-believers would
suffer an eternity of torment. In the early 1990s I participated
extensively in Internet chat rooms as a Christian apologist. I was well
versed in all the arguments, had a compelling personal testimony, and
visited sites like this for the purpose of bringing God's love to those
who had turned away from him. My deconversion would mean for me to risk
the danger of eternal hellfire, threaten my relationship with my wife,
and admit that I had wasted 25 years of my life.
So
what happened?
I
thought.
In
order to better understand the point of view of others, I often
engage in thought exercises, where I argue the position from their
point of view. In this way, I enrich and enhance my own position, and
gain insights into how to better defend it. Such an exercise requires
honesty to be useful. As with any quest for knowledge, one must be
prepared to be wrong about something in order to learn anything. I now
see that this willingness to be wrong was the spark of my
enlightenment. If I did make a choice on October 4, 2006, it was to
admit to myself that truth may be something beyond me - that I might
not have all the answers.
The
question behind my thought exercise was this: Is God good or is
good God? Could I imagine a situation where God's will is in direct and
unequivocal opposition to morality? I posted it initially to
www.fark.com, but reposted it the next day on my journal at
slashdot.org. Here it is:
Thought
Exercise
Only
it wasn't just interesting. It was terrifying. I realized that not
only was it possible for God to be immoral, but that my entire belief
system was inherently immoral. The only resistance I could offer to
that realization was the fear of damnation. Heaven is a reward, and
damnation is a punishment. These are matters, therefore, of preference.
The only reason I could have for believing would be to prefer reward
over punishment. As I discovered in the thought exercise, this point of
view is not morally tenable. I cannot believe something I know is wrong
because I will get something out of it, or because I will avoid
something bad if I reject it. To do so would be self-absorbed, to the
tune of condemning most people in the world as deserving damnation.
"This
just can't be right", I thought to myself. I decided to give
myself time to think it over. Perhaps there was something I was
missing. The world continued to revolve. My prayers grew more and more
plaintive as I begged God to give me the piece of understanding I was
missing. After about a month, it became obvious to me that this wasn't
going away. I still wasn't completely sure where I stood. In her
performance, "Letting Go of God", Julia Sweeney describes this
experience as feeling like she was slipping off a raft. Everything
looked different. Everything I had taken for granted was gone.
But
other realizations also came to me in the weeks and months that
followed. I began to realize how transient and valuable life is. It
changed my understanding of everything. As my mind slowly unfurled from
years of constriction under the doctrine of Christianity, I began to
see that the world is a much more beautiful, important, and valuable
place without God in it. I never knew how terrible it was to constantly
monitor my thoughts to make sure that I was constantly prepared for the
second coming of Christ. It is one thing to torture someone - quite
another to convince them to be their own torturer. I came to understand
that I had been in hell these 25 years. Christianity teaches that one
must hate themselves, and suddenly free of this agony, I became aware
of how well I had followed that particularly odious doctrine.
I
lived as a closeted atheist for a year. I came out to my family and
friends just a few months ago, and I find myself living through the
anxiety of my deconversion all over again as they attempt to come to
terms with it. I wish I could say that they have come to terms with it.
I thought I was doing a good thing by keeping it from them for so long
- confronting the fact that you may be wrong about everything is
difficult to do, and I wanted to save the ones I love from that
difficulty. In actuality, they feel particularly betrayed because I had
kept something so significant to me from them for so long. It's hard to
know what might have happened had I come out earlier in my
deconversion. Atheists are thought of as inherently evil, so I can't
escape the thought that some other crime would be seized upon as an
excuse to condemn me.
Despite
the fact that I have freed my own mind from the shackles of
belief, the venom of Christianity still flows through my life. In the
mind of my beloved wife, I am now the enemy - to be hated and feared. I
am less than human because I cannot bring myself to accept that it is
right to send most people in the world to a lake of eternal fire and
torment.
If
there is anything I'd like to say in closing, it would be that
Christianity isn't harmless. It really is that bad. It may be too late
for me to live free of the damage it can cause. Perhaps by sharing
this, I can impress upon those for whom it is not too late the
importance of not allowing this hideous disease of the mind to gain any
foothold in your life.
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this testimonial