Christian to non-Christian: how the transition happened for me

A little while back, somebody asked me how I got from being raised Christian, to being... well... not. It wasn't a simple process, so it seemed worthwhile to stop and write it out. And it really isn't meant as a defense of my present beliefs, or a condemnation of the beliefs I was raised with. Sill, for anyone who's interested in a bit of anecdotal personal history, here's my answer:

Okay, here goes: somewhere in there, Christianity just stopped making sense to me as a way of looking at the world.

Like I said, I was raised Episcopalian: the sky was blue, water was wet, and Jesus died for my sins. Like any kid in a church environment, I picked up bits and pieces of Christianity as I went along: Noah's Ark, David and Goliath, Adam and Eve, Jesus dying on the cross, Paul on the road to Damascus, Samson and Delilah; all jumbled together in an inchoate mass. I didn't even really think of it as Christianity; those were just the things I'd learned at church, and not much different from the things I learned in school.

(Somewhere in there I picked up the concept of Hell, but that never really frightened me. I think -- though I don't really trust my memory on this -- that almost in the same breath I picked up the idea that Jesus had already undone that for us, and that God expected us to do our best but also knew we'd make mistakes and wouldn't hold them against us. No, the bit of Christian doctrine that really creeped me out was the idea that God was all-seeing. I was -- what? Six? Eight? Five? -- and I was perfectly appalled by the idea of God watching me poop, or seeing me in the shower. Can't a fellow have a little privacy around here?)

Then, somewhere when I was around twelve or thirteen, I started trying to take all those pieces I'd been given and fit them together: stories, lessons, bits of doctrine, and some things that I suspect are more like Bible fan-fiction than actual Christian teaching. And it... didn't quite work. When I started trying to assemble all that into a coherent whole, it just didn't make a lot of sense to me.

I was kind of used to that. I think I've mentioned this before, too, but I was a weird kid. A lot of things that seemed compelling and important to other people really didn't make much sense to me: sports, cars, fashion. Christianity was just another item on the list, and naturally I assumed that the problem -- insofar as it was a problem, which it mostly wasn't -- was with me.

(True story: our priest -- our head priest, I should say, since at any given time we might have had one or two other priests and/or deacons -- our priest, who was a deeply sleazy and I suspect not-terribly-bright man, once took it upon himself to inform the youth group that we could safely ignore beliefs about things like walking under ladders or having a black cat cross one's path. Those, after all, were mere superstitions -- isolated beliefs with nothing to support them. I thought about that for all of maybe two seconds, and then asked him, "So the difference between a superstition and a religion is that a religion is complicated?" Deadpan. Perfectly serious question, in fact. Flustered him completely; I think he answered something along the lines of, "No, because Christianity is true," but I'm not sure. What sticks in my mind wasn't his answer, obviously; what I remember most clearly was how completely unprepared he was for the question -- for being questioned at all, I suspect, by a twelve-year-old.)

I think the first thing I really stumbled over (intellectually) was the Doctrine of the Trinity, and the dual nature of Jesus. Jesus, of course, is the Son of God -- but He is also, somehow, God Himself. Well, y'know, okay: an all-powerful being should be able to do things that would otherwise be impossible. Only, the more I thought about this, the more it bothered me. Not only was the whole idea starting to seem impossible in a way that no amount of Being All Powerful would fix, it also seemed to change according to which section of the Bible I was reading. And after going back and forth (and round and round) about it for a while, I started wondering if maybe it wasn't just me -- it maybe the text itself just didn't make sense.

Shortly after that, the entire concept of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross stopped making sense to me. As a child, it seemed glorious: Jesus dying horribly, but willingly, to save the whole world. To my teenage self, well... What did this have to do with me? How is somebody else dying supposed to affect the things that I'm responsible for?

And then there was the whole concept of Original Sin. If there was a sequence to that one, I don't remember it; but I got a kind of nuanced view of Genesis from a fairly early age. So that could have been before or after either of the other two, or it could have been one of those things that just never made sense to me; I just don't remember. The Christian doctrine that I understood said that, fundamentally, all of modern humanity was paying the price for a mistake made by a distant ancestor. That seemed... unjust. And God, whatever else he might or might not be, was supposed to be just. But if that wasn't the case, if the whole story of The Fall was a metaphor, then what exactly was Jesus' death on the cross supposed to be saving us from? Don't answer that, by the way. I realize that there are good, faithful answers to those questions, but leaping in to provide them would be missing my point. I already know those answers exist, and I already know they don't work for me.

I went back and forth for a few years, between This Is Something That's Really Important To A Lot Of People, Including People I Know And Love, and This Just Doesn't Make Any Sense To Me. I looked at other religions, other belief systems -- or the watered-down versions of them that get marketed to impressionable Westerners, anyway -- but I couldn't really get into them for the same basic reasons that I couldn't stay with Christianity: they didn't match the world I saw around me; they didn't offer any useful new insights or concepts; they didn't resonate. I went through an "Animist, Pantheist, Moon Worshipper" phase (which was only partly tongue-in-cheek), and eventually I settled into a sort of experiental materialism.

One of the issues I have with (some flavors of) Christianity is the idea that we choose our beliefs. In my experience, that's not how it works. We consider the evidence we find; we compare our thoughts and observations with other people; and we reach conclusions, whether we like them or not. (Given what I hear from a lot of former believers, the idea that maybe God isn't out there and never was is almost never a welcome, desired result.)

So, yeah: somewhere in there, Christianity just stopped making sense to me as a way of looking at the world. It's not that I have anything against it; it's that I just can't do it.

Baby's got an atom bomb 'cause it's cold outside.

As I was putting Firstborn into the car yesterday morning, I found myself singing a line -- the title, in fact -- from Baby, It's Cold Outside. Why? Well, partly because I'd just opened the garage door, so we were walking through a sudden wave of chilly air. Also, partly because I've been thinking about the social and historical context of the song lately.

Then we got into the car, and the stereo came up with Baby's Got An Atom Bomb...

...Whereupon Firstborn asked, "Is this song some kind of sequel to 'Baby, it's cold outside'?"

No. No, it's not. But it would be completely awesome if it were. Just imagine that storyline...

The first time I met her, she was a naive young girl, very proper. We hit it off -- boy, did we hit it off -- but she was worried about what her family would think.

When I ran into her again in Paris two years later, it was obvious things had changed. It wasn't just hair -- brunette replaced by a brilliant shade of purple -- or the fact that she'd obviously come into money. What really told me how much she'd changed was when she blocked my purchase of that black-market soviet warhead so she could acquire it herself. A good kid, like she was when we first met, well... she wouldn't have dreamed of doing something like that. Might cause talk.

Nice girls don't buy atom bombs. But she wasn't a nice girl any more. This was going to be... interesting.

Perchance to Dream

"In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad." ~H.P. Lovecraft, "The Descendant"

Somewhere in the suburbs of Dallas/Fort Worth, meanwhile, there is a man who really wants to scream at all the little sounds that keep interrupting the night. He'd like to be asleep; he'd like to be dreaming; but his house is far too silent. No buffer exists between his half-dozing awareness and the endless range of incidental sounds that keep pulling him back from the edge of real sleep. A car starts somewhere outside, and he stirs. The cat snores on the chair beneath his bed, and he rolls over, forcing himself to ignore it. The heater starts, pushing warm air through the vents, and he groans silently to himself; he groans again when it stops. A faint tickle comes and goes at the back of his throat, gathering itself each time he nears the sweet release of his nightly oblivion. Across the house, one of the children coughs or grinds his teeth, and he hears that too. His wife's iPad dings (randomly, loudly, somewhere in the darkness) and he twitches fully awake. There is no escape. He has been lying there, eyes closed, immobile, almost sleeping but never quite getting there, for the last two hours.

He changes beds, moving to his son's room where he can turn on an air filter and drown out everything else, but it's too late. He's missed his chance.

The house never settles. The house is never quiet. And while he used to sleep like a rock, for the last few nights every single sound (no matter how tiny or familiar) pulls at his attention, calls him back to the world.

He is restless, unsettled. In his younger days, he might have gone for a walk; but he's pretty sure there's no way he can get out of the house without waking everyone else. He could play video games, maybe burn off a little adrenaline that way, but the console is in the living room and the boys have taken that room over: they've both decided to sleep on the couch. Reading would pass the time, but it would get him no closer to sleep. The same can be said for watching a movie.

He thinks the holidays have about done him in. He worked all the days around them, taking no extra time off, and since the holidays fell in the middle of the week this year... Well, it's a day or two of work, off for a day or two, a day or two of work, a weekend, a day or three of work, off for a day, two days of work, another weekend... He barely knows if he's coming or going. All the holiday events have been lovely individually, but crowded together like this they were just too much. The boys have been staying up later, too -- Why not? It isn't as if they have to get up for school -- so trying to get them to settle down for bed is like being caught in one of those old Bugs Bunny cartoons.

So now he's sitting at the kitchen table, typing -- not working on a story, ha-ha, no, mustn't think we could get anything done -- and drinking a glass of milk. He's wondering if a glass of something stronger might help, but he's already had the two Benadryl; and anyway, he has to be at work in the morning. It's after midnight; so much for getting to sleep early and being bright and rested for tomorrow. So much for doing anything worthwhile, really. He'll just have to push on through, even though that makes it much more likely that tomorrow night will be a repeat of this one.

Somewhere in the suburbs of Dallas /Fort Worth is a man who really, really wishes he could sleep.

Secondborn is back at school, too.

Firstborn doesn't really draw -- or color, or stick stickers for that matter. Secondborn, on the other hand, will cheerfully draw, color, or stick stickers on any available surface. Yes, that's every bit as bad as it sounds.

The alarm clock! It burns!

The boys are back in their school and preschool today, and I have spent all night dreaming about things that keep me from going to sleep. Several different dreams, but believe me -- there was a very definite theme. Now the Beautiful Woman and I are up painfully early, making frozen waffles and refrigerated lunches and trying to get ready. Ouch.

Enough! No more!

Okay, that's it. No more mid-week holidays. With the way the schedule fell out this year, I've lost track of what day of the week it is, whether it's a holiday or whether I need to be at work, and what deadlines, if any, are approaching, and whether I need to go to bed early or on time. Are the kids in school today? Who can tell?

My boss just got back to work today (he had the good sense to take some vacation days and just make the whole stretch one big holiday) and asked me what he'd missed. I had to tell him that I just didn't know.

Thoughts on Ryan Bell's Year Without God

I recently ran across a post (which has since been deleted), wondering what people thought of Ryan Bell, the former Seventh Day Adventist pastor who just finished a "year without God". (Hemant Mehta has a decent overview of the whole thing here.) At the end of his year, he concluded that there really wasn't enough evidence for him to believe that God exists -- which led the author of the post to observe that...

"I've long wondered if he's been an atheist all along and the experiment was just his was of telling his family/friends."

Personally, I rather doubt it. This is one of those areas where the Christian language/perception of "choosing" beliefs becomes, I think, extremely misleading. Beliefs aren't, as a general thing, something we choose; they're conclusions we reach, based on our experiences and the information we gather. Most former believers (at least, the ones I know, including myself) go through a process somewhat like this -- something makes you doubt or question the things you've long expected; you start exploring, looking for answers or alternatives; and, maybe, the answers you find just don't work for you, or make sense to you; and you let go of your old beliefs. It doesn't have to end that way, of course; plenty of people go through much the same process, and find answers that do work for them, and return with their faith strengthened; other find new answers, and return with their faith changed.

Where Ryan Bell differs is that he undertook his exploration in an *intensely* public fashion and explicitly labeled it as "trying on atheism" -- an approach which gave the whole thing an uncomfortable whiff of Publicity Stunt (at least for me, and I presume you as well). But while I think he definitely started as someone who had reached a point where his old beliefs weren't working for him, I don't *think* the whole thing was scripted or that the "ending" (insofar as you can have such a thing, where people are concerned) was a foregone conclusion.

It's hard to tell, of course, when I'm talking about somebody I don't know, and whom I'm only observing at a distance; but I think his exploration was, well, genuinely exploring. I think the publicity-seeking was a separate issue.

I could easily be wrong, of course; I do have a tendency to extend the benefit of the doubt too far. Certainly, one of the comments in his NPR interview ("I don’t think that God exists. I think that makes the most sense of the evidence that I have and my experience. But I don’t think that’s necessarily the most interesting thing about me.") seems a little odd, given that he's clearly put some real effort into making himself publicly known for questioning his faith.