Metaphors for Deconversion

Back when I was working on the Friendly Evangelism posts, I spent some time talking about the process of deconversion, and compared the experience to a romantic breakup.

This is, I think, a pretty apt comparison; but it's not the only one I've seen. So, for the benefit of anyone who's interested in how former believers describe the process of losing their faith, here are a couple of parables that I found interesting.

Rechelle (of Rechelle Unplugged) offers The Parable of the Hole in the Curtain. "One day, the woman noticed a small tear in one of the curtains. Afraid of accidentally seeing what was on the other side of the window and condemning herself to hell, she decided to completely ignore the tear so that her eyes might not stray and she would not be condemned. But the tear got bigger. Soon it was a hole. She tried to stitch the hole together without looking at it, but she was so afraid that she might glance at what was on the other side of the window, that she did a terrible job of patching the curtain and only made the situation worse. The hole grew larger and soon other holes appeared."

Bruce Gerencser has written quite a bit about his deconversion (across several blogs, most recently Fallen From Grace); it's fair to say that the process has been the focus of most of his writing for the last several years. The parable that caught my eye (and the catalyst for this post) was The Danger of Being In a Box and Why It All Makes Sense When You Are in a Box and its follow-up What I Found When I Left The Box: "Every time I left the box I found new and wondrous things. Things I had never heard about before. Things I had never experienced. The box I was in for 5 decades was a box where the dimensions of the box were clearly defined. There was no guessing about the length, width, or depth of the box."

I've said before that I don't really think of myself as having "deconverted". I was an odd kid, and Christianity was just another item in the long list of things that didn't make much sense to me but seemed very important to everyone else. (Other items on that list included fashion, sports, and cars.) It wasn't a (sudden or gradual)realization that something that I used to believe was wrong; it was... how to say this? ...it was a matter of concluding that that feeling {that Christianity didn't make sense} wasn't just a failure to understand on my part, but a legitimate reaction to the belief itself.

As a result, I tend to think of my journey away from Christianity in Fairy Tale terms: I was the kid who wandered off the path to see what was in the woods, and found that I was more comfortable out exploring than I was just following a path that someone else had set. Turns out that the wolves and boggans and other forest-dwellers are actually pretty friendly hereabouts.

Anybody have any other good parables or metaphors to throw in here?