A New Beginning

My family raised me to do four things. First, be a Christian. Second, read the Bible. Third, think critically. Fourth, be honest. For the past 27 years, I have worked hard to do these, but it has become impossible to do all of them. 


My struggles began when I was 13. At that age, I believed everything I was told, 100%. I just couldn’t make it work in my life. I prayed to God to help me with my impure thoughts, with my gluttony, and with my sloth, but I continued to fail. I knew from Jesus’s words that God gave the Holy Spirit to all who asked and any good in me came from God and any evil was my own, so I really struggled with my continual sin. Even though I was supposed to be reborn and regenerated, my sin nature, my real self, the part of me that deserved to be set on fire forever, kept on popping up over and over again, as if God wasn’t working within me at all. My inner spiritual life was interwoven with an intellectual life of learning about God. I had a 100% Christian education, which included creationist science textbooks, history books about God's plan for America, inspirational Christian literature, and field trips to creation museums. Outside of this, I chose Christian books to read myself, read through the Bible multiple times, and spent thousands of hours absorbing the teachings of James Dobson, Ravi Zacharias, David Jeremiah, Alister Begg, and others fundamentalist ministers, apologists and speakers on the radio. I really enjoyed this; it felt like I was learning the secrets of the universe. I also took it very seriously.


If Christianity is true, and I believed it was, it is not a breezy life philosophy. It means life is a challenging obstacle course that must be completed successfully or you will suffer eternal conscious torment. I tried my best to believe everything in the Bible, but I sometimes had a hard time knowing just what it was I was supposed to believe. I believed that the earth was 6,000 years old, that all of the miracles happened, and that Jesus would come back any day, but there were parts where I wasn't so sure what I was supposed to believe, even though I wanted to believe it very much. I couldn't make the resurrection narratives mesh, and reading the endings of the gospels together to strengthen my faith did not have the intended effect. I couldn't figure out where people went the moment they died (did the thief go to paradise with Jesus that day? I thought Jesus descended into hell? Do you go to heaven immediately? Or only after the general resurrection?) Most importantly, I couldn't clearly extrapolate Sola Scriputura what a person needed to do to be saved. I memorized the salvation passages from the gospels, Acts, and the epistles, but I couldn't make them cohere with each other or the fundamentalist ministers I believed and trusted. Nonetheless I believed it all, even the parts I didn't understand.


In college, I became acquainted with basic OT and NT scholarship, and the Bible made a lot more sense, but I couldn’t find God in it anymore. 


Still, I spent the next 8 years fighting to keep my faith. I did not want to let go. I looked across conservative Protestantism, liberal Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy for some version of Christianity that could work for me. I didn’t need to be able to prove it right. I needed to not know it was wrong. 


I talked to pastors, professors, and priests. I read significantly from Peter Abelard, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Stephen Arterburn, Rob Bell, Michael Bird, Charles Augustus Briggs, Marcus Borg, Barbara Taylor Brown, John Bunyan, John Calvin, Francis Chan, Oswald Chambers, Gary Chapman, GK Chesterton, John Chrysostom, Chuck Colson, Gary Demar, James DG Dunn, Jonathan Edwards, John Eldridge, Pete Enns, Jerry Falwell, Peter Gilquist, David Bentley Hart, Josh Harris, Tim Keller, Thomas a Kempis, John Henry Newman, Soren Kierkegaard, Kevin Leman, C. S. Lewis, Dale Martin, Alister McGrath, Mike McHargue, Patrick Morley, Elaine Pagels, Robin Parry, Michael Pearl, Alvin Plantinga, John Piper, Richard Rohr, Francis Schaefer, Lee Strobel, John Stott, RC Sproul, Richard Swinburne, RB Theime, JRR Tolkien, Paul Tillich, Leo Tolstoy, Kallistos Ware, BB Warfield, Rick Warren, John Wesley, Bruce Wilkinson, and NT Wright. Of course, I read and re-read the Bible with various translations and commentaries. 


Along with the above, there’s the many many many others who I don’t remember. I also read a LOT of early Christian primary sources, such as the Didache, the Shepherd of Hermas, the records of the Catholic and Orthodox church councils, various monastics, mystics, creeds, confessions, papal encyclicals, and Church Fathers. 


These still couldn’t provide me with a workable Christianity.  I looked at apologetics websites such as Cross Examined, Got Questions, the Gospel Coalition, Desiring God, and Reasonable Faith, and I spent MANY hours on the Catholic encyclopedia.  I also read from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, maybe a half dozen books by atheists (Dawkins, Ehrman, Paine, Hitchens, and Ingersoll) and I read three atheist blogs (Captain Cassidy, Camels with Hammers, and Godless in Dixie)


Along with my intake, I also had a large output. I prayed. I practiced spiritual disciplines. I listened for God. I asked for God’s guidance and assistance. I fellowshipped with Christians. I went to Bible studies. I attended the UMC for 13 years, a Wesleyan Holiness congregation for six years, an independent reformed baptist church for nine months, a house church for four years, the Eastern Orthodox church for one year, and the PCA and SBC for the remainder.  I took communion. I went to Bible study. I went to Sunday school. I even taught Sunday school classes with The Bible Project and Sandy Richter curriculum, and guest-preached at a friend’s church. 


As I did all this, I was trying to do all four of the things that I was taught, but I really could only do three. I couldn’t be honest. I knew that fundamentalism was untrue. I saw historical poison pills in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, so to remain a Christian, I tried to make it work as a liberal Protestant. I thought I could take a Kierkegaardian leap into faith, but I just ended up doing mealy-mouthed circular nonsense to try and justify something I wanted to believe but knew wasn’t true. 


I am no longer going to do that. I can only do three of the four things I was taught, and I have to be honest. I have read the Bible. I have thought critically. I am no longer a Christian. I am an atheist, specifically a secular humanist, and I am saying this because it is important to be honest. 


I am not evangelizing anyone, and I will not try to. I am not trying to challenge the validity of anyone else's spiritual experience, but I am explaining what mine has been and the conclusions I have drawn from it. My goal now is to flourish and help other people flourish, and I’m not going to keep working to meet an omnipotent deity halfway as he continues to express disinterest towards me. Neither am I going to spend my time attempting to persuade other people to change their minds if their beliefs are working well for them.


If you want to know what I believe and why, the following three books and two essays do a good job of explaining my experiences:

  1. “Good Without God” by Greg M. Epstein
  2. “How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now” by James Kugel (especially the appendix)
  3. “Jesus, Interrupted” by Bart Ehrman
  4. “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” by David Hume 
  5. Neil Carter's essay “Our Biggest Mistake: We Did As We Were Told”

Obviously, there are many other issues beyond what’s explored in the above, and I’m glad to discuss with anyone who has read those five items. I have put in so many years to make Christianity work from the inside before leaving it. It is only fair that others spend some time considering my opinions before challenging them.

 

 

 APPENDIX:


If you want to know on a deeper level why and how I got to where I am, the following writings are significant for me. They are not the only things that brought me to where I am today, but a lifetime of internal prayer cannot be put on the Internet, and my years of prayer journals won’t be. 



History

  1. “Christianity’s Dangerous Idea” by Alister McGrath
  2. "Forged" by Bart Ehrman
  3. Yale's online Old Testament course
  4. Yale's online New Testament course
  5. "Early Christianity: A Brief History" by Joseph Lynch 
  6. "The Orthodox Church" by Kallistos Ware
  7. “Biblical Cosmos” by Robin Parry
  8. "The Bible With and Without Jesus" by Amy Jill Levine

 

Christian documents from the past

  1. The Bible
  2. “Confessions” by Augustine of Hippore
  3. Records of the Council of Nicea
  4. Records of the Council of Chalcedon
  5. The Westminster Confession
  6. John Wesley's "The Cause and Cure of Earthquakes"
  7. "Counterfeit Miracles" by BB Warfield
  8. “A Grief Observed” by CS Lewis 


Important pieces of Christian fundamentalism

  1. God’s Not Dead
  2. The Left Behind Series
  3. Every Young Man’s Battle
  4. Last Days Madness by Gary Demar
  5. To Train Up a Child by Michael Pearl
  6. Sheet Music by Kevin Leman


Important pieces of Christian liberalism

  1. “How the Bible Actually Works” by Pete Enns, along with the critical review of it on the Gospel Coalition
  2. Biblical Truths by Dale Martin
  3. Being Consciousness Bliss by DBH
  4. "Reading the Bible Again For the First Time" by Marcus Borg

 

Atheist writings

  1. Dan's deconversion
  2. “Why I am Agnostic” and “A Few Mistakes of Moses” by Robert Ingersoll
  3. “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” by David Hume
  4. “Why won’t God Heal Amputees”
  5. J.L. Schellenberg’s divine hiddenness argument