Fairy Tale Ending
I have found greater compassion outside of the pews, greater peace through science, and greater urgency to make my life matter by letting go of god.
I have a confession to make. I grew up in a Christian home. I led a Christian club in high school. I taught Sunday School to third graders. I worked at a Christian radio station for five years. I accepted that I was *not* a Christian shortly after I published my coming out post three years ago.
(The last statement isn’t a joke or a trick. I’m not going redefine myself as a person of faith who believes in the teachings of Jesus and just rejects the church by the end of this post. This post will explain my journey to atheism.)
Six years ago, the college group leader at my church in San Diego held a series on the science within Genesis. The series did not discuss “intelligent design”, but rather how Genesis could be a metaphor for evolution. This contradicted the teaching of my church in Virginia that Genesis was literal. The discussions prompted me to start validating the faith that I was told to not question if I really wanted to understand it (that’s “faith”).
Two years later at Emerson, I took two classes on evolution as part of the honors program. Professor Alan Hankin taught Biological Evolution and changed my life is so many ways. My internal struggle of faith became quite an external debate in his class. Alan, a proud atheist, often reminded the class that science is “the study of” everything around us. He lovingly asserted to me in our many conversations that truth wasn’t a destination.
I kept reading and learning. I applied critical thinking to everything I believed to be true, validating and invalidating along the way. The more that I read about biology, evolution, and sociology, the more I tried to reconcile my Christian faith with the observations by hundreds of studies in so many fields. After awhile, I could no longer defend Christianity with logic. I was defending Christianity with a desire to believe rather than its own merit. I wanted so desperately to believe my faith was worth believing.
I didn’t stop believing in god because of tele-evangalists, gay bashers, the Crusades, the church’s many institutional hypocrisies, or President Bush (though these are all valid reasons). I stopped believing in god because I finally recognized the Bible for what it really was.
Humans are narrative creatures. Mythology is useful as a point of reference along a long timeline of existence. The narrative of Christianity is comprised of metaphors to relate the human things we deeply understand, like pain and pleasure, to the things we don’t understand, like suffering and death. It can be useful for emotionally healing and morally guiding. I respect religion for this reason. However, metaphors and narrative still separate experience from reality. When the stories replace actuality and critical thinking, it’s intellectually dishonest.
My place in this world is no more important than an ant’s. I am just a living being, made of stardust, fortunate enough to live in a time when I don’t have to mythologize how I got here. I stand on the shoulders of giants, the knowledge accumulated by all humans over hundreds of thousands of years, and get to peak at what’s over the wall of not knowing.
Posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:00.
Good post Jeremiah.
I would however counter your claim that part of not believing in religion is the fact you can’t defend it logically. That’s the beauty and mystery of faith, you can’t necessarily defend it logically, you just have to trust.
That’s not to say that I even think the Bible is literal nor would I go so far to say it’s all made up mythology. But what I would challenge is that even if the Bible is nothing more than made up stories, that doesn’t disprove God or the existence of faith at least to me. The Bible is a tool, just like alot of other objects of faith.
If you’re religious upbringing was one of literal Biblical interpretation, it’s easy to see how as soon as that is shaken, it destroys any hope of belief. I guess since I never had that type of upbringing, it’s easier for me to accept that they are stories, but that doesn’t make my belief in God any less real.
Thanks Bryan for the comment. I’ll only add this:
When I was questioning (but still believing), I came to this scenario: If I had not been raised in a christian environment, how would I convince my hypothetical self to believe in christianity?
I struggled with this for weeks and I couldn’t come up with anything compelling. That’s when I knew I was being intellectually dishonest with myself, just as much as I had been when I denied my sexuality (also because of my religious upbringing).
Welcome to the world of rationality :-) I remember reading your coming-out post a couple of years ago and thinking it was a shame that you’d managed to ditch one set of damaging social impositions but not the other.
I don’t think homosexuality is incompatible with faith. I think faith is incompatible with rationality. One can be gay and irrational if one wants to be, but I’m glad you picked rationality.
Thanks for sharing this. My own journey from being a Christian to an agnostic was a bit longer and more convoluted, but like you, it wasn’t primarily because of George Bush or hypocrites in the church. Rather, it’s because it no longer added up intellectually, and being a queer male (and a human being in general), I found that my faith was the source of too much self-condemnation.
Like you, I still respect religion as a metaphor. In many ways, I still relate to the metaphors, as well as some of the key ethics of Christianity. I dearly love my Christian family members and friends. But when it comes to the things they believe, I can no longer defend the intellectually indefensible.
Cheers,
Bruce