Personal

How I Left God

A preacher’s kid loses faith.

Some people left Christianity because they were bored. Some, because they wanted to “sin freely.” Maybe they were angry with God. Maybe it was peer pressure. Maybe they were convinced by another religion. Maybe they were fed up with Christian hypocrisy. Maybe they’d had religion shoved down their throat.

Not me. I left because of clear thinking.

I liked being a Christian. I was in love with God. I got my joy and meaning in him. The best people I knew were Christians. I didn’t understand God and didn’t like Christian hypocrisy, but those were not reasons to leave.

Doubts

I wanted to understand other worldviews. So, I studied them, including atheism.

I listened to The Non-Prophets, a call-in radio show hosted by atheists.

Christians called in, gave their arguments for Christianity or against atheism, and the hosts responded. Hour after hour, the Christians spouted poorly reasoned nonsense and the atheists gave calm, fair, clearly reasoned answers.

Well, the atheists are trained debaters, I thought, and the Christian callers are just angry non-intellectuals. It’s not a fair setup. I’ll bet Christian philosophers can give good reasons for their faith.

So, I started reading Christian philosophers and apologists. William Lane Craig. J.P. Moreland. Mark Roberts. Alvin Plantinga. Richard Swinburne. Norman Geisler. N.T. Wright. Josh McDowell.

These guys did better than the radio show callers. But not much better. Their arguments used big words but not clear thinking.

Now I started to get scared. I did not want to start doubting God. I needed God. Without God, life would be meaningless, short, immoral, and cold. So I had been told.

So, I spent much more time reading smart Christians than reading atheists. I needed to find reasons to think that maybe Christians were right and atheists were wrong. But I couldn’t find any reasons to think Christianity was more than yet another irrational, ancient myth.

Crisis

That was a low point in my life.

I wouldn’t live forever. I didn’t have an all-powerful, invisible friend. The source of my joy was gone. I had no idea what morality could be without God.

Had there been a blue pillIn The Matrix, Neo faces a choice. If he swallows a red pill, he will remember the scary things he is about to learn about the real world. If he takes a blue pill, he will wake up to his normal life and not remember a thing., I might have taken it. I wanted to erase what I had learned and just be a happy, ignorant Christian. But I couldn’t.

I wrote to one of the atheist radio hosts, Matt Dillahunty:

Matt was kind and understanding. He started to explain how meaning, morality, and happiness do not require God. But I still felt like shit. I wanted my best friend back. I wanted God.

I started “limping” toward God, even if he wasn’t anything like the Christian God. I wrote a song about my pain. But after a while, I started to admit that I had searched and failed to find reasons to believe in any god.

Happiness

It was a hard time. But I recovered. In fact, I started to feel pretty good:

• I didn’t have to condemn people that God condemns, like gays.
• I didn’t have to think that a loving God tortures millions of innocent and good people for eternity.
• I didn’t have to arbitrarily interpret much of the Bible figuratively and other sections literally.
• I didn’t have to accept most science but reject a few facts that contradicted my faith.
• I didn’t have to feel ashamed about my natural urges and desires.
• I didn’t have to struggle through prayer when I knew it didn’t work.
• I was free to reason through morality, rather than accepting the morality of ancient desert barbarians who gleefully slaughtered their neighbors.
• I didn’t have to avoid thinking critically about God while thinking critically about everything else.
• I didn’t have to think it’s moral to punish someone for another’s mistakes.
• I didn’t have to be closed-minded anymore.

Yes, I didn’t have to be closed-minded. In fact, I could embrace Christianity again if new evidence supported it. So far that hasn’t happened. But at least all my beliefs are tenative now, not dogmatic.

So, I’m a happy atheist. I won’t give my rational arguments for atheism here. I just wanted to tell you my story. Thanks for listening.