Of all the essays I've written for Ebon Musings, one of my favorites is "Into the Clear Air": a chronicle of the stages of deconversion, as told by people who were going through them.
What shines through from these testimonies again and again is the pure relief, the freedom experienced by people who left behind their oppressive, confining religious beliefs and found exhilaration and joy in finally taking control of their own lives. Closely intertwined with this feeling is a newly arisen sense of awe and wonder at life, an atheist spirituality that is rooted in the grandeur of the cosmos, the intricacy and diversity of nature, and the poignancy and fragility of our conscious existence. Many newly deconverted atheists have found out, to their amazement, that this feeling equals or surpasses anything to be found in religion.
As one of my favorite deconversion stories puts it:
"Due to my total change of world view I also had some very weird experiences that were not like anything I had expected. I was struck enormously by what I called 'existential shock.' I was completely amazed at the mere fact of existence. Not in a 'wow that's impressive' manner but in a feeling that I only had religious words for. It was being struck by the amazing 'sacrament' of life - or the utter shock and opportunity of existence over its alternative. It was totally numinous and an almost disturbing feeling that existence is the case. I felt transformed, awed, excited - the whole world seemed more special than can ever be said. Life was far more poignant without Christianity than it had ever been with it. I was not expecting this to happen to me. I thought these experiences were what converted people to religion, not what you got when you left!"
I think testimonies like this are immensely helpful to our cause, demonstrating that atheism is a positive worldview in a more eloquent and compelling way than any merely academic argument ever could. That's why I've collected as many as I could find for Ebon Musings, but we can always use more.
With that in mind, I'm creating this open thread for what I hope will become an ongoing post series, chronicling the stories of people who've broken free of religion and found happiness and fulfillment by becoming an atheist or humanist. If you have such a story, I invite you to tell it here. You can also e-mail me with your story, if you're more comfortable with that. The best stories will ultimately be featured either here on Daylight Atheism or on Ebon Musings.
The full story is on my blog: http://anthroslug.blogspot.com/2008/06/my-deconversion.html, but here's a shortened version:
I was raised a Protestant Christian, though my family ceased attending church when I was around nine or ten. I remember the church we attended quite clearly – and can still find my way back to it when I visit my home town, despite the fact that I haven't set foot in it in over twenty years. I remember praying when I went to bed, I remember my parents telling us stories from the Bible, and I remember that this all went unquestioned for me. I considered the existence of God to be so clearly self-evident that I didn't understand how anyone could question it.
When I was in my early teens, I had an experience in which I found myself wondering if I was truly being a good Christian. I began to read the Bible, and though I had not attend church regularly in years, I did begin going with a friend's family from time-to-time. This was the time in my life when the fissures in the veneer of religion began to show themselves to me.
For example: in the Garden of Eden story, we are informed that Adam and Eve have to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge in order to understand good and evil. We are also told that in eating from the tree, they have committed a tremendous sin. However, the notion of sin implies that one intends to do evil. If one does not know what evil is, one can not intend to do evil, therefore one can not sin. Now, many people will respond to this question by stating that God told Adam and Eve not to eat the fruit from the tree, and therefore they knew it was wrong. However, God told them not to eat the fruit AND intentionally gave them no knowledge of good or evil, right or wrong, and therefore such a warning is meaningless because they could not have known it was wrong to disobey God because God had built them to not know what wrong was.
So, the Bible itself caused me to start questioning Christianity. I also routinely saw Christians engaging in acts of abuse towards anyone who was different from the norm. The number of times that I saw eggs or water balloons being thrown from a car with a Fish ornament on its bumper while the driver and passengers yelled something along the lines of "FAGS!", "MUSLIMS!", "JEWS!" or some other such thing was truly astounding.
So, it became obvious that the Bible was not an authority, as it was self-contradictory and didn't stand up to scrutiny, and Christians were not inherently more moral than anyone else, which they should be if most of their claims are true.
However, none of these things caused me to become disillusioned with religion in and of themselves, that was done by simply watching the world. The world did not fit the mold put forth in the Bible. Certainly this included scientific discoveries, but also events in the world at large. Watching the news, it was clear that violence in the Middle East was not building up towards a Biblical Armageddon, but was simply spiraling out of control. Famines struck millions of people, and prayer did nothing to aid them. Those who were clearly corrupt routinely got elected to political office, yet those who were honest and virtuous frequently received no reward. This was not the work of a just God, but it was also not the work of a world in the thralls of Satan – there was no method, and there was good in the world, and quite a lot of it, but it was just as likely to come from non-Christians as from Christians.
Even more troubling, I began to apply logic to propositions. Certainly, many different logical arguments have been propped up to justify belief in God, but all of them had fatal flaws in the arguments themselves (many times the argument actually worked against itself when you started thinking about it), and so there was nothing there. I began to realize that I had no reason to believe.
My Christian world view simply did not match the real world in any way shape or form, and slowly my belief began to fade away. It was slow and subtle enough, that I didn't even notice that it was happening, but one day I realized that I no longer believed, and that I hadn't for quite some time.
At first I tried to deny it, and then I tried to reclaim my faith. I prayed, I consulted scripture, I tried to find my way back to God. And I was afraid, but not that I had lost God. I was afraid because I was convinced that the world wouldn't make sense without God (I always managed to ignore that more rational part of me that would point at that world had made no sense with God), and I was afraid that I had become one of the damned.
And then, one day, it dawned on me. I had no reason to be frightened, for there was no reason to assume in the existence of God. The world did make sense, but you had to take it for what it was and work from there, and not try to cram it into a little box called "Christianity" (or any other religion for that matter). More importantly, if I stopped praying and started working, the world could become better. I began giving to charities, I began working to comfort friends, I stopped dividing the world into the righteous and unrighteous, and simply looked at people as people. The religious often like to say that "everyone is equal before God," and yet they also convince themselves that God will bring some to Heaven and banish others to Hell, meaning that clearly, not everyone is equal. However, without religion mucking up the works, everyone was equal in estimation, and what made the differences were our actions and intentions, not our alleged destinations. It was clear to me now that someone who serves other people and works for the betterment of the world was a good person regardless of their religious ties, and that someone who was abusive and destructive was a bad person regardless of their religious affiliation.
Comment #1 by: Anthroslug | April 5, 2009, 1:34 pm