12.13.07
by Jason M. Coe
I’m a 26 year old recently-deconverted Christian (and no, Dawkins, Harris, nor Hitchens were responsible). I’ve been checking some of the stories other people have been posting about their deconversions (on another site) and I can see many are similar to mine. Some of this may be rehashed variants of other people’s stories but may be unique in other ways, so enjoy!The best way I can describe my deconversion from Christianity is to parallel it to a scene from The Matrix, when Morpheus is offering the Red Pill and the Blue Pill to Neo. Morpheus offered Neo the chance to see how the world really was (Red Pill) or to go on living the status quo life (Blue Pill) Neo was accustomed to.
I was raised in a Catholic household, my mom was a firm believer, sending me to Sunday school for years, getting me baptized, going to CCD, and then onto my Conformation. My dad on the other hand didn’t go to church with us, but never really talked about his spiritual beliefs. Basically, he as a quasi-deist/agnostic; however his beliefs never affected me growing up.
I couldn’t stand many aspects of the Catholic Church and only went because I was forced to. I didn’t like the way they treated women, gays, non-Catholics, etc. However, I was not skeptical of Christianity. I liked the teachings, regardless if they were philisophical or supernatural and accepted them. After I graduated high school, and I wasn’t forced to go to Mass anymore, I disavowed my faith in Catholicism and went church shopping. I ended up discovering non-denominational churches and a student at college got me to go to her church and I loved it. I went every Sunday and became an active member and hung out with the followers for a short period of time.
A few things started to develop in me over this course in time. First, I slowly began to develop a disdain for art and philosophy. Not because I hated them, but they seemed like acts done in vain, for it was pointless to ask questions about the world and how to live when the law of the world (the Bible) was right there, and the only choice was whether to accept them or not. Human expression, such as art , could potentially be a threat if it weren’t in deference to God. As I saw it, if you were expressing love for the human experience then you were showing love for the corrupted world.
I moved away and went to another college, never to go to that non-denominational church again. It seemed to change me in ways I didn’t like. My world view closed too much from going to it, and though I loved the followers there very much, especially the pastor, I couldn’t keep going. They just had a very narrow view of the world that I had problems with. There was one incident that stands out in my mind in particular, in which my pastor was preaching from a part in the Bible, skipped over a chapter that discussed Jesus telling slaves to obey their masters, and went onto the next chapter. I had no idea Jesus said that and was furious my pastor didn’t address it.
After I moved in with my new college dorm roommate, I found he was a youth group minister and he invited me to his church and to partake in prayer groups. It was also a non-denominational church, but VERY liberal. There were women giving sermons, rock bands playing, etc. It was a very positive atmosphere, one that I really enjoyed.
As life got busier for me, I slowly fell away from the church, and being separated from the flock got difficult for me. My faith slowly started to slip away and I grasped for any kind of justification. One thing that helped reinforce my faith was a book I found at work that argued against evolution. I don’t remember the name of the book, but it basically made this argument: “Imagine there was a soup of metal, plastic, and glass that was churning for millions of years, and eventually the soup produced a beautiful finely tuned watch. Next, imagine someone coming along the soup of materials and organizing them into a watch and them setting the time and tuning it. Which scenario seems more rational?” Of course, after reading it, I agreed with the author that evolution means highly complex structures popping out of chaos at random, and God as the source of all of creation was the only logical conclusion.
However, I remained skeptical of Christianity. Science and philosophy posed tough questions for it, and the more I read the Bible, the more confusing it became. I frequently visited apologetics sites (Chuck Missler and Mark Eastman were my favorites) for rationalization of brutal stories from the Bible and talked with churchgoers and pastors about contradictory passages. I got some poor answers, and many of my sources disagreed with the other. My beliefs were in a constant state of flux, and I really didn’t know what to do.
It was at this point (about a year ago) that I was faced with the Matrix scenario described earlier: I take the Blue Pill, I accept the vague answers of the church and apologists and go on living a semi-spiritual life. I take the Red Pill, then I dig deeper into the truth, do my OWN research, and listen to people who are critical of God and Christianity. I chose the Red Pill.
At first, I just paid more attention to people like George Carlin and Bill Maher. Obviously, these aren’t sources to go to when researching religion, but I allowed myself to have my beliefs questioned and criticised by guys like these.
Second, I started to read more about evolution. Not from apologists and pastors, but from ACTUAL SCHOLARS. After researching sciences such as physics and biology, I was ENRAGED at how much of a straw man the Christian world had made of evolution. They turned it into this foolish ideal that scientists promoted to disprove God, yet after studying it for myself I realized how elegant and well supported it was.
I then delved back into the wonderful world of philosophy that I was once critical of, and found that many of the riddles for God, such as Epicurius’ Riddle of Evil, had very poor answers from the Christian world. I also began to question the notions of; “Why should the cosmos have a divine creator? Is it necessary? Does Good and Evil exist, or is it just ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the relative sense?” These were issues that Christianity, nor theism in general have good answers for.
I then began to question the veracity of Christianity. Was it just for a God to infinitely punish someone for finite crimes, such as disbelief? Why allow the Bible , which has been rewritten and chosen by committee, to be the divine word that determines how we live, and therefore necessary to us in terms of determining how we get to Heaven? I read alot of works by Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russel, Mark Twain, and Robert G. Ingersoll at this point in time, and they were crucial in helping me analyze Christianity.
I didn’t like coming to these conclusions. I wanted to believe in God. But I just couldn’t. I wanted to believe in Santa when I was younger, but the evidence was everywhere…he just didn’t exist. It was painful at first. I was hurt by it and was in denial over it for a few months. I still considered myself a Christian, but soon started calling myself an agnostic. But the more I studied and thought about it, I thought to myself one day and said, “I am an atheist. I don’t believe in God or any gods. I suppose there may be some higher power, but there’s no reason to believe in it.”
One night as I was sitting at home and thought to myself on this issue. I basically talked to “God” for the last time and said, “I enjoyed having you in my life, and you helped me at times. However you’re not real and I’ve learned the truth.” Ironically, I thought of the following Bible passage -
1 Corinthians 13:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
I decided I had grown up and done the best I could to understand my beliefs. I followed the evidence, and the evidence led me to conclude that there was no reason to believe in God anymore. Its been about 9 months now since I’ve started calling myself an atheist and I feel absolutely fine about it.
I’m glad I went through this process, not necessarily because I came out an atheist, but for the first time in my life I feel intellectually honest about my beliefs. There isn’t the kind of second-guessing I had as a theist anymore, and I welcome criticism of my beliefs like I never did. In addition, I’m fine with admitting I don’t know something. I don’t feel the need to act as if I know everything as I did as a Christian. I’ve come to realize admitting what you don’t know for sure is a good thing, because it prompts analysis and investigation.
I still ask the same questions now as I did when I was a Christian, but instead of inserting God in as the answer, I use other things. How does the world work? I rely on science. How do we live with eachother and create a positive world? Philosophy. Openly question issues and create a free marketplace of ideas, and let the best ones win.
This study really hasn’t ended. I still enjoy religious discussion and I love to read and listen to other people’s opinions, especially those whom I disagree with. In addition, I live a very happy life and don’t feel any remorse for giving up the faith. All in all, I consider taking the Red Pill as one of the wisest, if not most fulfilling decision I have ever made in my life.
Comment from MPJ: This writer is still relatively young. But it seems he has put a lot of work into what he believes and in the past moved back and forth from blind belief to questioning - something a real Stage Two would have found too difficult. Maybe he was always destined to move away from traditional religion once he gained the strength to do so.
Now he is sounding mostly like a Stage Three. He has a rational and scientific worldview. He bases his beliefs on honesty and truth and is not willing to accept anything on blind faith. Yet, he is still seeking and is not turned off by hearing the views of others - especially those who disagree with him. Sooner or later, this seeking will point him toward some of the mysteries that are not explainable by science. I predict that this guy will move on to Stage Four at some point in the future.