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Someone who is saddened by my non-belief in the Christian faith told me recently they hope one day I'll call and say, "I'm back!" Meaning of course back to faith. But I am indeed back. I'm back to myself. After a detour spanning from 1977 to 2006.
In August 1976 I began my university education at the University of Florida. I was 16. I admit I was lonely and afraid, excited and terrified at the same time by this new independence. I wanted to belong to something.
A group known as the Crossroads Church of Christ approached me through one of their members who lived two doors down from me in Broward Hall. His name was Wayne, he was ROTC and a nice person, so when he asked if I'd like to go to a bible study with him I said sure.
Recruiters of all fanatical variations know to go after prey when they're young, unformed, uninformed. Before I knew what I was doing, I was coming up out of the water of the church baptistry. A few months later I was living with members, dating members, changing my major to something easy so I could "train" for the ministry.
Eventually the church was my career. Try getting out of that after 23 years!
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The struggle to explain away inconsistencies, illogic, outright contradictions and plain silliness in the Bible and Christianity over the years, to myself and others, was mentally and emotionally exhausting. All in an effort to avoid the simple, obvious truth. There is no god.
In this regard, Occam's Razor is apt. As explained in good old Wikipedia, it holds that "the explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible, eliminating those that make no difference in the observable predictions of the explanatory hypothesis or theory." In other words, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Along these lines I found the following on ExChristian.net, written by Marcus:
Then finally I realized that the reason nothing made sense anymore was because clearly there is no God. That was the simplest, clearest, most obvious answer out of all the possibile conclusions. The contradictions and implausible, weak arguments and ridiculously flawed conclusions that consist of Christianity and any religion, they had been piling up in the back of my head all my life and I stubbornly ignored the facts and the obvious logic. This is already aside from the mountain of self-contradictions present in the Bible, and the oceans of additional contradictions in our various interpretations of it, something I had a hard time reconciling all through my life reading and studying it; trying to explain away to others (when I didn't know myself) why every church and sect cherry-pick the verses that suits their taste, why there's a verse to directly contradict every other verse; a myriad of scriptures directly refuting the established doctrine of every church denomination on earth, from the most orthodox Catholics to the wildest Pentecostals and everything in between. Let alone the simple lack of logic and common sense in the very basic story so far that even a child could point out in a matter of minutes of considering it.
Ultimately I realized I believed in God for the same reasons I used to believe in Santa Claus. Santa rewards you when you've been good but gives you a lump of coal when you've been bad. There's no evidence of his existence either, and the entire mythology of Santa is incredibly dubious, implausible, ridiculous and fantastic at best (traveling down the chimneys of every household in the entire world in one Christmas eve night? I'm pretty sure that violates the laws of Physics as well as common sense). The only difference is that children stop believing in Santa past a certain age. Ultimately there is literally no difference between God and Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, zombies, goblins, unicorns, etc. etc.
Bad things didn't happen because I did something wrong and God was punishing (sorry, "chastizing") me; good things weren't rewards (or in Christianese, "fruits") of good or right behavior. Wealth wasn't a sign of blessing, neither was poverty a mark of holiness. Things weren't "destined" to happen. God didn't have a will or plan for anyone's life. Guilt wasn't punishment from God or condemnation from the devil, just consequences of actions you don't feel good about later. Repenting of sin wasn't making me more holy; it was making me stupid and causing me not to learn from my mistakes and change on my own but rather depend on some external spiritual force to be a better person. Neither beauty nor tragedy required an explanation; neither did our existence itself. There's no meaning other than what we make. And we need neither God or Hell to motivate us to be good; we know why we should be good people already.
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I couldn't help but expose my thoughts to the light of day. I shared them all along my trek from christian fundamentalism, to calvinism, to atheism. And there were prices I paid as I made my way. Was it worth it? My feeling was and is, this is who I really am, take me or leave me. I must be true to that person.
Here's a bit of advice columnist Cary Tennis's take on it that I found sagacious:
One of the principles of “coming out” is the presumption of innocence — that we are innocent of our own existence, that we did not make ourselves and we did not make the world, and that in revealing who we are and what we see, we simply reveal what is already there. We are not confessing to a crime. We are revealing our existence.
What we ask for in doing so is simple recognition: We desire to be seen. We put aside for the time being the question of our effect on others. We leave it up to others what they should do about who we are.
That does not mean they will do what we want. If we have been sufficiently skillful in constructing our false self, those who love us may indeed love this false self, and may greet with consternation the arrival of what we consider to be our authentic self.
So in coming out we ask, Can you still love me, knowing who I am?
Perhaps the answer is no. Perhaps our partner has fallen in love with the character of our creation.
[...]
So you risk a lot. But you risk it for the biggest prize of all: to be loved for who you really are.
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