Spirituality

I have to admit, those associated with my former faith were correct about one thing. Leaving religion leaves a unique restlessness and loneliness, or what I suppose is being spoken about with the "god shaped hole" paradigm.

I've grown up talking about god with, in my opinion, nearly unequaled passion. In my view, I was given a mind by god to seek out and understand reality, and all things, including philosophy, science, literature, history, and all branches thereof, done with excellence and seeking the truth, would lead any reasonable individual to god.

I've spoken about leaving christianity before, and I don't intend to do so at length again right now. Suffice it to say, my studies lead me to conclude that the existence of a god is improbable, and that the authority of the christian church was insufficient to justify faith in the christian god. With my decision and my persistent inability to keep my mouth shut about things of importance came many consequences. I believe I have lost a lot of respect in the eyes of some, and probably gained a lot in the eyes of others, among other things. As always, I am who I am, and I try to balance confidence with persistent introspection and self-criticism.

The biggest question I've come to, and possibly the biggest one I will for a long time to come, has been rather simple. Outside of the specific context of christianity, what does spirituality even mean? There are thousands of religions exploring one simple question: what more is there beyond what it is to be human?

We see a fraction of the spectrum of color, live for an infinitesimal period of time compared with the age of our universe, don't even possess all of the data regarding the way our brains work, and have theories regarding the universe that are constantly being revised with the discovery of new data. If there is other sentient life in the universe that is not on this planet, we have yet to discover it because we are stuck in one tiny corner of it. We are discovering mind blowing and revolutionary things every day about this universe that has existed for billions of years, a timespan that I can't even comprehend because of its' length and the tiny length of time I've lived.

I am put in awe just thinking of everything I've said. I feel spiritual wonder and awe about it, just as I do when I read some of the greatest minds our race has to offer in recent years. From Lewis to Nietzsche, Bell to Descartes, even just a cursory exploration of the casual to the complex of western philosophy is enough to leave one with more questions than answers, and amaze one about the differences people can hold while still perceiving that there is something more. That is to say nothing of the east, and of philosophy not influenced by christianity, platonism, the enlightenment, and so on.

There is much to explore without even leaving one's home, and yet every person is another world to explore, for they are full of ideas all their own, their own synthesis of experience, reason, knowledge, and emotion. The communication of all of this, much like how I'm writing now (and why I love it so much), creates ripples, dissonance, and some of the most interesting synthesis of ideology and collaborative thought at times. To think that one religion has a monopoly on what is true with regards to all of this seems, to me, to be fatally narrow, especially considering how little of a monopoly that the entire human race has on knowledge and truth.

It is possible that one day we will meet people that live on other worlds that have entirely different conceptions of religion, morality, science, and what it means to exist than we do. Our philosophy as a race could be rocked to the core because an entirely different kind of life exists, and we may even find it offensive until we escape our narrowness as a species. In the end, there is always more to explore and more to learn, no matter where you are or who you are.

I don't know if I've answered the question of what spirituality is, but at least to me, I think this all makes it very interesting to think about. I listen to music when I write, and if I stop to think, I realize I am just another type of artist. Writing is very much like music, with its' colors and moods and tones and counterpoints and melodies. Sometimes I write the equivalent of a symphony, whereas at other times I write metal or rock or ballads or pop or country or grindcore. I probably never write rap because I can't rhyme to save my life, but you get the idea.

If I really think about it, I think this is what I think of spirituality. I've been stuck in one genre for such a long time, that I don't even know how to appreciate another without understanding what it's all about, but I do know I enjoy the general exploration of it all. Maybe this music is what I long for, and to find out the music of others and see what kind of dissonance or harmony we can make. It's certainly interesting, to say the least.

"What We Talk About When We Talk About God," A (backwards) Review

This is an emotional review for me. Please indulge me, as I'm sure I'll tell a few stories.

My review of Rob Bell's previous book, "Love Wins," got a staggering (for me) amount of reads, presumably because this man is crazily popular and "Love Wins" was a firestorm within Christianity, igniting huge amounts of controversy for its' "radical" rethinking of the doctrine of Hell, mainly garnering the accusation of universalism from the more "traditional" in Christianity.

As my readers know, this will come from a different place as my previous one, as I no longer identify as a Christian.

For those of you who don't know, Rob Bell is the founding pastor of Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Michigan, and best-selling author of Velvet Elvis, Love Wins, among other works. He is also the sole Christian leader I have had continual respect for, for his unerring compassion and ability to engage in dialog about anything, seemingly without almost any agenda besides compassionate understanding. I've met him, and I have a signed copy of Velvet Elvis, a book that single-handedly saved my faith when I was all but finished with it many years ago.

Obviously, that was not something that lasted, for many reasons, but they are now actual reasons instead of emotions like anger and bitterness and frustration, which I would not consider to be good reasons to walk away from faith.

Though my respect for Bell remains as a person, this book was the moment that I knew would inevitably arrive. It is the moment when I pick up one of his books and, for once, put it down frustrated. I read "Velvet Elvis" within a week and it changed my life. I read "Love Wins" in two days. It took me nearly a month to get through "What We Talk About When We Talk About God," henceforth referred to as "the book" to avoid me typing it over and over.

Bell's Christianity is historic and time-honored, though not always mainstream. For this, he's been controversial and prominent. When he sticks to talking about historic Christianity and things of that nature, he is rock solid (though perhaps necessarily in possession of rose-tinted glasses at points). However, this book has an entire section devoted to science, and it's meant to be a book about everything.

Some of you already understand my frustration.

There are a few quotes that I think speak for themselves here. Let me first start with one from the very end. Spoiler alert!

"One morning recently I was surfing just after sunrise, and there was only one other surfer out. In between sets he and I started talking. He told me about his work and his family, and then, after about an hour in the water together, he told me how he'd been an alcoholic and a drug addict and an atheist and then he'd gotten clean and sober and found god in the process. As he sat there floating on his board next to me, a hundred or so yards from shore, with not a cloud in the sky and the surface of the water like glass, he looked around and said, "and now I see god everywhere."

Now that's what's I'm talking about."

Rob Bell has a consistent pattern of summing up his entire book at the very end, and this is no exception. If you grew up in Christianity like I did, you will immediately recognize the cliche of the atheist drug addict that found Jesus and now life is beautiful, a la finding a higher power in something like a twelve step program. You want to say something about their theology or their logic or something is just bugging you about the whole thing, but you can't because then you're an insensitive ass and you're not allowing the experience of hearing about this wonderful testimony to change you or some-such thing. You are being strong-armed by an emotional argument from an experience into agreeing with everything that person says, or you're a monster.

That is the feeling I had when reading this entire book, and that's why it took forever for me to finish it. Bell makes an impassioned argument for who God is and why it is reasonable to believe in him, but not for the existence of God. Like most contemporary theologians not stuck in Christianity's past, he admits that proving God scientifically or philosophically is likely impossible, and asserts that God must be intuitively understood. In other words, he would be in agreement with C.S. Lewis, who said: "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."

It's really his second chapter, "Open," that I have a big problem with, but it is foundational to the rest of the book. The entirety of the rest of the book is him speaking of a way of understanding god that leads to some very good things, like compassion and peace and caring for the poor and conversation and harmony. The problem is that these things have been irrevocably tied to god beforehand, which I find to be misleading at best. In other words, one can affirm all of what Bell speaks of here, but substitute the Christian god for something like an argument for the consequences of one's actions or another god or any number of other things. In other words, Bell speaks about things we all understand, but he asserts that god is part of it. Obviously, if someone disagrees, then they just have not seen god in it yet, or something of that nature, and around and around we go until we come back to whether there is a reason to believe in god at all.

The reason why it is asserted in the book that it is reasonable to believe in god is because scientists have discovered that everything is weird.

I wish I was kidding on this one.

Here are some quotes:

"We live in a very, very weird universe. One that is roughly 96 percent unknown."

"I'm talking about the kind of intellectually honest faith that is open-minded enough to admit that some phenomena have no rational explanation."

"Science shines when dealing with parts and piece, but it doesn't do all that well with soul."

"Which leads us to a crucial truth: there are other ways of knowing than only those of the intellect."

"But to believe that there's more going on here, that there may be reality beyond what we can comprehend--that's something else. That's being open."

Bell, unfortunately, seems to be speaking of a lot of classical science, along with some interesting newer twists. He speaks frequently of dark matter and of quantum theory, though curiously I found this extremely telling quote at the beginning of his chapter on science:

"Or more precisely, the universe?"

This is in the context of speaking of the expansion of our universe. I spent a good ten minutes reading and looking back to see if this was intentional or not, but I could not figure it out. So there are two possibilities: Bell does not know about multiverse theory, or he is specifically stating that it is false here. Given the implications of the multiverse theory and the amount of reading he's done prior to writing this book, I would not be surprised if the latter is true, as that casts some serious questions on his use of the "finely tuned dials" argument that point to a creator.

If our universe is the only one, then the fact that life exists at all can be more easily used to argue that a creator probably created it. However, if there are an infinite number of quantum universes (which there are, according to some of the latest research in dark matter/energy), then our universe just happens to be the one with life in it, among many that either don't support life or support a very different kind of life.

Of course, none of this is actually evidence for or against a creator, it is merely pointing at some things that could or could not be chance and saying "look, someone did that." If you want to know more on this, look up the Anthropic principle. Please.

Here is the problem. Bell's argument that science does not do very well when dealing with certain things is not relevant, and the rest of his argument falls into the classic "God of the gaps" paradigm.

No sane person would dispute that science does not have a very keen grasp on the entirety of existence. Science is more about questions than answers, and when it comes to things like love and our emotions and intuitions, we're still discovering things about how the human brain works. Does that mean there is a soul in the classical sense, something that we can never see or understand because it's immaterial? No, it does not. Maybe we'll come to think of the neural energy that inhabits our brain as a "soul" at some point, but this is leaps and bounds away from the "some phenomena have no rational explanation" that we're expected to go with here.

Now, understand one thing. I'm not attempting to say that Bell's intentionally misrepresenting science or has some kind of malicious purpose here. If anything, he appears to have read extensively on the topic, which is an excellent thing to do before writing about it. Indeed, he references evolutionary theory, the emergence of consciousness, the formation of life, and many other things that indicate that he has a functional understanding of current scientific theory.

The real hangup I have here is that he runs up against the questions which do not yet have answers, and immediately inserts his faith to fill in the gaps. In other words, because subatomic particles do things like disappear and reappear without traveling the distance in between and reality is just so weird and breaks some classical models of science, god. This is not only an exercise in begging the question, it has been done before and will continue to be done by those with religious faith.

All of this I can almost forgive, in light of what comes next.

You see, this is a book about faith, and why it's reasonable. Hence, all of this builds to an overriding point that everyone is a person of faith. To "believe" in the scientific method is the same as to "believe" in god. I won't bother rehashing my last post about faith here, but suffice it to say that this is a blurring of definition at very best. Go read my previous post about faith if you want the full rant. Atheists are not people of faith. For god sake.

Moving on.

This book is an overriding attack on skepticism, defining intellectually honest faith as the ability to say "you can't explain that" and calling it open-minded. Indeed, Bell uses this sort of reasoning later in the book when speaking of practices of slavery and misogyny in the Bible, citing it as being "unbelievably progressive" for its' time. The thing is, when Bell gets into the ancient Hebrew culture and the ancient near-east, he moves back to being spot on with his facts. He's correct that to marry a woman you essentially kidnapped from a culture you are at war with and give her full rights under your culture is progressive for the time. Of course, it's still barbaric, but God is about progressing humanity from barbarism to love and respect and peace.

It's not the facts I have a problem with, or even the observation that religion has sometimes been at the heart of progress. It's the logic. You see, when you continually cite specific examples in a verbose manner and then say "that's god," you're not talking about the historic Christian god anymore. This is why traditional Christians are going to absolutely lose their minds over this book, like all of Bell's other books. His definition of god is so unspecific and open to interpretation and intuitive that it simply lacks a definition other than the most basic philosophical definition of the greatest possible being and the platonic existence of good.

If you want to define god as something that is intuitively understood from the "hum of reverence" within us or our morality or the awe one feels when they look at the universe and how amazing it is, then why not substitute Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of Jesus?

Of course, Bell consistently references in his other works the "historic, orthodox christian faith" and how he is part of that "wide stream" of thought. He is correct in referencing this, and in saying that there has consistently been a group of people within christianity that are for progress and science and the truth wherever it lies. The world isn't divided in the way the christian religion would overridingly have us believe, into believers and non-believers. There are people who think, and there are people who are stuck on being told what to believe. Some who think are religious (christian, muslim, jewish, hindu, etc.), and they're good people, oftentimes in spite of what they have been taught by their religious upbringing, or with an understanding like Bell's. Christianity can be defined as peace in the same way many other religions can.

The problem is, once again, a problem of definition. If religion has consistently had to be corrected while claiming authority or correctness for thousands of years, and I am supposed to take my intuitive experiences and simply say there must be a god, then what exactly am I even talking about, and why does he have to exist or be the Christian god? It is simply impossible to define god intuitively and still be a Christian, because Jesus being god is not an intuitive claim, it is a historical and mythological claim, as well as being an irrational leap of faith and, for Bell, metaphysical.

The problem with Bell's reasoning isn't that he has too many of his facts wrong. The problem is that he is trying to have his cake and eat it too. He asserts that he is part of the wide stream of the historic, orthodox Christian faith, but then god must be intuitively understood. He asserts that the Christian god is progressive as a way of getting around the moral implications of his religion's very real and very bloody historic activity and that Yahweh was a god of war that commanded the death of women and children and then cites other examples. You simply cannot have it both ways. Either you trust in the authority of historic Christianity interpreted through one or a few of its' sects (protestant or lutheran in Bell's case), or you are talking about a god that is incoherent and defined from multiple, cherry-picked, sources. This is why conservatives/traditionalists are angry about Bell. They are purists, and Bell jumps off from the Bible into many other things and then plays semantical games until it is all god, a process that they term as "watering down" Christianity, but that Bell explains as seeing god in everything.

Not only is this book a case of a "god of the gaps" concept being brought forward in the context  of science, it is a case of a "god of the emotional gaps." Because I have an experience and I don't know why or I can't explain it or I feel awe or the presence of something mysterious, I am then inserting god as the explanation for it if I'm going by Bell's logic here.

All of that said, I echo what Bell says in the very beginning of his book in the exact opposite way he means it:

"Much of what I've written here comes directly out of my own doubt, skepticism and dark nights of the soul when I found myself questioning--to be honest--everything."

This entire book hurt me to read because I know exactly where Bell is coming from. I, too, have questioned everything, ever since I learned how to critically think. For that, I have lost friends, been told to "just have faith" in a way hauntingly similar to Bell's contention that all are people of faith, and lost a lot of sleep over what is true and what isn't and whether I would accidentally go to hell or suffer in some other way for asking questions. I still question absolutely everything, because it's how I live, and that nature outlasted my faith, unlike Bell. I've come to no longer trust in historic, orthodox Christianity, as well as the more liberal brand that he is at the center of. However, when I read this book, I see nothing short of desperation, and that he has also paid a very heavy price for being who he is. This is why I have not lost respect for this man. I do not believe this is a book full of good reasoning, but what it is full of is compassion and honesty and the heart of a very real struggle that I understand all too well.

I'd really like it if Bell's god existed. It would give the world a very unique type of hope, and it is very appealing. However, this book really frustrates me because it ignores or misinterprets evidence, equates skepticism with faith through some arguably blurry definitions, brings forward a god so incoherent and semantically flexible that he literally lacks a definition, and then promotes a hope that I would arguably term poisonous. Something can be good and beautiful and make you feel all sorts of good things, but the question is--is it true? If it is not true, that hope is poisonous to you. Think about it.

The Atheist Approach: On Faith

I wish to resume my discussion on atheism and just what it is and why I am here even writing this with you. To do so, I believe it is necessary to start over. I will thus be rehashing a lot of old ground here, hopefully in a way that makes more sense. Let's start with faith.

Faith has two definitions, one general and one more specific.

In general, faith is the complete trust of a thing. For instance, I trust that the chair I am sitting in will hold my body from falling onto the ground, I trust that our star will continue emitting solar radiation to keep us alive, and I trust that the computer I am typing on will transmit my message onto a location on the internet for others to read from their internet connection. I trust that certain things are true, even if I do not fully understand them, and even if those things could change, sometimes with drastic consequences. The reason I trust this is because there is a consistent response when I perform an action. I type into this website and it creates posts and I sometimes receive responses from others regarding them. I wake up in the morning or afternoon and I am still alive and not a solid block of ice from our star ceasing to provide warmth. I sit in my chair and I do not end up on the ground.

If I sit down and 10% of the time my chair decides to fall apart or I go through the chair or it is actually a raptor that attacks me, then the remaining 90% of the time when it functions normally and I am able to sit here and work or write or read or play video games are not enough for me to continue to trust the process. I will perform tests like touching it with my hand before placing my full weight on it. It's the same with people...if they let you down or are abusive to you or flake out, you rely on them less and less. It's the same with institutions. If they constantly say one thing and act completely differently, then you stop relying on that institution. This is a loss of trust. One can choose to trust regardless of the pattern because there is more to take into account, such as  screws needing to be tightened on my chair or it not existing beyond a formless projection or my definition of a chair needing to be adjusted to exclude extinct dinosaurs that are in my room for some reason, but in general, blindness is not a part of this trust. This is an active process, one that involves my reason, my senses, and my ability to understand. If I continually or sometimes fall through the chair, or even if I fall through it once or twice and it functions correctly 99% of the time, then I am going to investigate why this has sometimes happened and correct it. Perhaps I am unknowingly using holographic technology that was not adjusted to hold me up properly those few times, or perhaps I am in the Matrix and there was a glitch that caused problems that I will never be aware of, no matter how much I investigate. However, there is an explanation. To assume there is an explanation is part of the process of trust. It would be idiotic to say that the chair is a mystery that will never be understood because answers are not forthcoming. This is not because there might not be an answer, but because it is simply irrelevant. I don't care if it's a mystery why that chair doesn't work sometimes, I want an answer so I don't fall on my ass. In this case, I have lost faith in the chair and I am asking questions. This is not traumatic (unless I fell on a lego or something), it is part of how we interact with things. We find things that give us the results we want and we do them. To choose to "just have faith" in the chair when it has failed me may become a necessity if I cannot figure out why it has failed me (or I'll just buy a new chair), but it is not an acceptable answer when I am theoretically capable of assessing the situation, figuring out what the problem is, and fixing it.

To reiterate: general faith is one's trust in a thing, to "act in good faith" is to move toward answers using patterns and evidence, and when that trust is broken, one no longer has general faith in that thing until it can be re-established using a process that a person accepts as correcting the problem. When a problem becomes irrevocable with a thing one has put their trust in, then one has lost faith in that thing, and they move on. This is what the general definition of faith means.

Faith's special definition is to trust in the existence of God or in doctrines of a religion, based on strong apprehension as opposed to proof. Despite being reassured repeatedly by those with this faith that I either did not have the faith I claimed to have or that everyone has faith, especially those that say they don't, I'd like to think I understand this sort of faith as well. This is the sort of trust that some may characterize as blind. The thoughtful of those with faith will say that they have faith in their god or their doctrines because they work, or because it makes their lives better, or because they intuitively understand it. God's existence is apparent from the nature of the universe around them, for instance. Some may also say that God has been proven through a religious text or through witnessed miracles (like a chair not existing in a tangible sense 10% of the time) that should not be investigated, but should be marveled at, because of the mystery and wonder. This is faith, the thing that puts people in awe.

In other words, faith's general definition is complete trust in something that involves understanding, and faith's specific religious definition is necessarily subjective, intuitive, and lacking in objective proof. However, the common ground we see here is one of trust. Somewhere, for example, a person of religious faith received a message that God exists. This may have been from the natural world and their interpretation thereof, from organized religion, from a proselytizing friend, or wherever. Eventually, they made the choice to trust that person. Or, in the case that there is a god, they interacted directly with that deity and chose to trust in his existence. Considering the turmoil and conflict over which god we could be talking about or if that god exists, this would fall into the category of subjective proof. The point here is that religious faith falls into the same category as general faith because they both involve trust, which is probably why the same word is used for both. However, there is a distinction between the two that I wish to make clear.

It is true that trust is common to all people. However, religious faith is not. Because I trust that math is consistent and representative of reality or that the chair you're tired of me bringing up will hold me up or that weird things happen in our reality will be explained eventually given enough explanation does not make me religious, and it does not mean I have religious faith. Remember, religious faith is specific to something one does not have complete objective proof of. In other words, religious faith is a choice to trust. Though this may become actualized into a person and integrate into their personality, it initially starts with a choice. Perhaps that choice was given to them at an early age before they understood it, perhaps it was made under extreme emotional duress and they do not see the connection between trusting a person, a historic institution, or an event and implying the existence of a god, but that connection does indeed exist.

What we are talking about at this point is two difference mindsets. One says that you have to trust in something, you have to believe in something, and here is why what I believe is the best way. The other says that you do not have to believe anything beyond what you can perceive, understand, and reason through, and I will try to convince you based on the evidence available to me of how reality is. One is open to mystery, and the other is open to evidence.

I would stop trusting in the scientific process being used to gain greater understanding of reality if it began to be unreliable. In that case, we'd need another process. We'd need other theories, other data, and other ways of thinking. This is common sense for most things to most people, because everyone puts their trust in something. However, when this process is applied to religious faith, all sorts of outrage occur if it is rejected. This is because it is commonly understood that religious faith is an exemption, a belief necessarily and rightly held without objective evidence, and there is a special category created for it to exist.

Historically, the religious type of faith has been the only one to exist for a long time. When the crops received no rain, there was a real threat to survival, hence the higher power in control of weather needed to be appealed to. Personally, I can understand this type of thinking today through something as simple as driving. When I drive somewhere and every single traffic light I come to is red, I do not know enough about the way traffic lights work to assume anything other than the "god of traffic lights," or perhaps "fate" is angry with me and wants me to wait, or "traffic engineers" have designed these lights to screw me over. When there is a pattern, people want to find the reason for it so they can get what they want or need out of it. Somewhere in my mind I am also aware that my anger at "fate" or "traffic engineers" is idiotic and that traffic lights work a certain way and I am not being singled out. This is because I understand that there are holes in my understanding of what's going on, and if I studied it, I would find a way around it or at the very least new things to be mad about when it comes to traffic lights and how they operate. This does not make me special, it makes me a logical thinker.

At some point when you are investigating reality, things stop making sense. Whether this is through gaps in your understanding or gaps in our race's ability to understand or our lack of sensory or cognitive ability to grasp it, we sometimes cannot make sense out of things we run into. Great and wonderful or terrible things happen and there is seemingly no reason for it. Miracles seem to happen, we become emotionally invested in things happening around us, we feel strongly about things, and we come to conclusions that make sense to us. To some, God lives in those gaps, fed by the initial trust in the conveyor of the message regarding this god. So God lives in those gaps of our understanding, he is the light by which we see all other things (à la C.S. Lewis) and he is present in the mystery in our lives. This is religious faith.

Then we learn more things, intentionally or unintentionally, about reality. We come to more understanding about our universe, and those gaps get filled. So god lives in other gaps of our understanding, or he was the primal cause of that bit of reality we discovered, or he lives in any mystery that is left, or we become angry at "science" for having some agenda against God and rail against it for disrupting our world. Whatever the case, God has to exist because of religious faith, because one chooses to trust in his existence from a religious book or from the messages they received or from the way they choose to interpret things or from their feelings regarding the mysterious nature of the universe or from the voices in their head or from any other reason that humanity has yet to come to any consensus on whatsoever. We cannot even agree that there is a god, let alone what his name is, which translation of which book talks about him correctly, if any, or if he's not simply a force holding the universe together which is slowly being eliminated from our understanding by scientific and philosophical progress.

Regardless, it is a person's choice to have religious faith. However, not everyone makes that choice. Not everyone chooses to trust in the existence of god or in the truth of religious doctrines. There may be reasons for this if they were previously religious, but regardless, this is not religious faith. Choosing to trust in scientific processes or in oneself or in certain people or in only what they can perceive with their senses and understand empirically and philosophically is NOT the same type of faith as religious faith. It is looking for something that works, and moving forward with it until it doesn't.

For a great many people, myself included, it has become too much to ask to continue to trust in the religion of their upbringing, too much to ask to trust in things with no objective proof being put forward by an institution (or institutions and fragments thereof) with credibility that has been stretched beyond relief by modern scholarship and science. It has become an artifact of their past, and they have moved beyond their shattered religious faith. They require something to put their trust in, because the thing they trusted for a long time is no longer there, and they're realizing it never was in the first place. They still act in a tribal manner, they say "I am an atheist and I am angry at religion and it should be destroyed!" because they're still trying to move out of that mindset, and they feel lied to, betrayed, and like they've wasted a lot of time with pointless guilt and religious fanaticism. So instead of Jesus being their Messiah, Neil DeGrasse Tyson becomes that and they post every photo with a quote of him (real or imagined) they can find because they are trying desperately to trust in SOMETHING and they're driving everyone crazy doing it.

For me, I trusted exactly one leader in Christianity for a very long time, and that trust has recently come to an end. I will be exploring that further than I already have very soon, once I am no longer blindingly angry that the last vestige of my past has pulled the "you just have to have faith, you can't explain that!" card.

However, one must not mistake what it is to be an atheist, at its' core definition. It is to lack belief in gods. I lack that belief because I lack the trust in any of the "facts" I have been presented "proving" it, the institutions telling me that they exist, and I do not see any objective proof for the existence of gods. Questions are not proof, they are questions. Gaps are not proof, they are opportunities for understanding. Religious texts are not proof, they are usually ancient collections of writings preserved by institutions, or, if they are in recent historical memory, imaginative writings that no one is sure of their lasting power or influence.

Being an atheist is not being angry, it is not being anti-religion or anti-religious faith, it is simply not sharing in those things. It is not worshiping Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Richard Dawkins or any other prominent figure associated with atheism (after all, they have almost as little of an idea of what's going on as we do, they just have more data and particular talents for organizing and conveying it). Being an atheist does not mean having every answer and the arrogant certainty that there is no god. I would be happy if someone could prove to me that a god exists, because I miss religious faith a whole hell of a lot. But then, that wouldn't be true religious faith, would it?

The worst part of writing all of this is that I know nothing I say will put any of this discussion to rest by itself. I've heard "I'm not an atheist because I don't have enough faith" or some absurd variation thereof so many times I want to bash my face into my desk until I lose consciousness whenever I read it or hear it just to make it go away, and it won't stop anytime soon. People are too invested, and my voice is too small. However, luckily, I know I am not the only person making this sort of distinction. Those independent of myself, while seeking truth, also come to similar places. They also lose faith for good reasons, and they move on from it.

The atheist lacks religious faith, and no person, religious or not, is correct when they say that atheists are people of religious faith in any sense of the word. The only faith we have is trust in what we see working, the adaptive ability of humanity to seek answers and truth and survival, the ability to trust based on evidence. That should not even be called faith based on society's understanding of what faith is, but if we were to go that route then atheism isn't even a label I should claim because I'm not an anti-theist or think that religion is the sole cause of all of society's problems. C'est la vie.

I was told throughout college to "just have faith" when I had questions about theology. I was told that I should convert to Christianity and "just believe" while holding to the most sincere faith I have ever known and continually asking questions and coming to conclusions in the process. My faith was alive, vital, and full of questions and dizzying moments of ecstatic worship, and 95% of those I came in contact with had written me off entirely because I have a problem with authority and ask questions and most were more concerned about professors telling them, half of the time in class, that I do no believe in the Trinity. My college faith was an exercise in missing the point to most people, and I've come to agree with them for entirely different reasons. Now that I am no longer a person of faith, now that I am an atheist, I'm being told that I have faith because I have to because everyone has faith in something and they're more reasonable so have less faith because obviously God exists, or have different faith and their faith makes their life better than mine so believe in their god. Which god? The one they grew up hearing about or had an emotional experience regarding, of course. One would think that people could make up their mind, and perhaps esteem their primary reasoning for the existence of their god a little higher than ascribing it to their opponents when they claim the opposite, or blindly ascribing it to everyone using blurry definitions and fuzzy thought processes. At the very least, have a little respect. I am angry because people claim to know how I think when they don't have a clue, and people largely seem to lack the basic ability to listen and engage what's being said, because constructing a straw man and attacking it instead is a lot more fun, as are recreating definitions of words like faith until one can make a point that is not true or even relevant.

At this point, I do not give a damn if a single person listens. I write because it comes bursting out of me and I put it here for people to read because I enjoy sharing. If you're still reading, then please continue to do so in the coming weeks as I explore this topic more fully. I appreciate those of you that read what I have to say and if you want to have a conversation with me about it, I'm open to that, as always.

To sum it up: I am an atheist because I do not see evidence for the existence of gods, and every institution that has claimed that god or gods exist has been a dismal failure at convincing me of it. I am not a person of religious faith because I do not choose to believe in things that lack evidence, and I do not trust that the institutions or people telling me to have religious faith are correct.

As someone I knew once said, life's thrown a few curveballs my way lately. I'm not even on my feet at the moment, I'm still laying on the ground in a dazed state after some truly insane things happened. I want to continue my series regarding the atheist position, but I do not have the capability to do so until some healing has occurred. Every experience changes a person, and I hope I come through this with more ability to put my thoughts into words with generosity, critical thought, and with my usual edge intact. Perhaps I'll start what I was saying over, or perhaps I'll pick up where I left off. It's anyone's guess at this point. However, I will be back to the topic of deconversion, post-christianity, and atheism in time, count on it. It is far, far too important to me.

Sometimes I think the whole world has gone mad, and I will do no one a favor writing while I feel this way. Until next time.

The Atheist Position, Part 2: Ethical Science

About 14 billion years ago, existence as we know it emerged from a reality beyond our comprehension.

About 9 billion years later, our planet formed through accretion from the solar nebula, and life began to emerge from inorganic matter.

That life changed, evolved, and the natural forces of the universe formed it into what we have today.

Consciousness emerged and we realized we didn't understand anything going on. So humanity invented gods.

Eventually, some decided that there is only one god, and they killed anyone who disagreed.

2,000 years ago, a teacher from this religion created a new one, which remains influential to this day.

1,400 years ago, another teacher created a religion out of the original monotheism, and it also remains influential.

When man created the gods, they fought conceptual (and some very, very real) wars until some said there was only one god. We are still fighting wars over which god is the correct one, intellectual and military wars. Is it Allah? Yahweh? Jesus? Is God Tri-Une? Is there only one undivided god? Are there actually many gods and El/Yahweh/Allah/Jesus is just one of them that happens to be claiming their religious writings are the correct ones?

Could humanity have invented religion out of tribal fear, and subsequently created all of the gods?

This doesn't even begin to delve into the way religious adherents fight amongst themselves, splintering into many other groups, all with their own god or gods. Among those that believe in Jesus, some say that god is ultimately sovereign and has destined all of history according to his good pleasure. Some say that god, though ultimately sovereign, chooses to allow real choice in the matter of who we serve and what we do, though ultimately he will torture us for eternity (or allow us to torture ourselves) if we do not love him. Still others do not believe god is totally sovereign, and is limited in power, though he is still the greatest possible being, or the god. This is only three of dozens of extremely nuanced views within the wide stream of Christian thought about one particular aspect of its' theology: God's sovereignty.

If there is one ultimately uniting force to all of these religious movements, it is that of power. Love god or go to hell and burn for eternity, serve my god or die, believe how I do or be ostracized, we are against you. To argue against such things is to be dangerous indeed, but danger is inescapable because no one will ever placate all religious groups. By nature, they are tribal.

When one speaks of Christianity, for instance, the discussion is not about one thing, but about thousands to millions. Every church, every sect or denomination, even every person represents a tribal religion, influential only through conformity and the power of people.

This is not theory, it is historical fact about the emergence of religion. Religion exists because we don't understand everything about reality, so dogma sits in the gaps of our knowledge and tells us this god exists that can't be disproven, and is a sort of primal cause for all that we don't fully understand. Ra, the god of the Sun, is a popular and well understood example. Because no one understood that the sun is a massive ball of plasma powered by fusion and giving off solar radiation to keep us alive, it was a supernatural force. Now we understand it all too well, but other things evade our knowledge, such as the nature of reality as multiple universes, dark matter's complete influence, miraculous occurrences within the human body, and any other unexplained or supernatural phenomenon you can think of.

If you think about it, supernatural refers only to that which we do not have complete knowledge of. Otherwise, it is purely natural. The sun is natural, even though it was presumed to be supernatural for millennia.

You see, you can and should argue scientific conclusions. Please disprove anything I've said about the nature of reality, or even about religion if you want. It does not change that tribal religion's primary driving force is dogmatic, and it is not the only way to think.

Where the religious mind is dogmatic, the scientific mind is questioning. While historically religion has demanded drastic action that must be justified, science has been asserting things about the nature of reality, such as the fact that the Earth revolves around our star.

Some say that religion picks up where science leaves off, that science can only go so far until religion has to take over, otherwise we will lack morality and kill each other. Even if we ignore the bloody and violent history of religion, especially those claiming to be the nature of peace, this argument still ignores the incompatibility of the two's approaches to reality

Tribal religion is spawned from dogma, which must be defended. This is war.

Science is spawned from questions, which lead to answers. This is knowledge.

You do not attack someone that disagrees with your scientific theory, you run tests. If you are disproven you have learned something, you aren't imprisoned or killed or ostracized. Your ego may be bruised, but in general, you do not stab someone that disagrees with your theory, you think better and you come up with a better theory.

If that does not have moral implications, I don't know what does.

Our universe is on the order of 13.77 billion years old, and it is possible that there is a god that is the primal cause of this existence. However, this possibility only exists because we do not understand something. Lack of understanding does not constitute assertions about god, it constitutes questions. You can claim things, or you can ask questions.

The current god has become the primal cause and the personal god. More and more we keep finding out, through questioning, that things seem to all have natural explanations. More and more, our god is not the one that takes care of us, he's a creator and an inner voice. He must be let into our minds and souls and we must lose all of our self esteem and only esteem god because he simply cannot exist anywhere else but the beginning of our universe and the gaps in our knowledge.

When a person's conscience is given to them by god, anything can be justified. One need not ask questions or read history or participate in discussion when they simply need to read a holy book and allow their inner voice (holy spirit, conscience, intuitive perception of reality, whatever) to tell them what is right. Faith communities can work in this context only so far as groupthink goes, and anyone not part of that groupthink is ostracized by the offended group.

When a person's conscience is a product of their thinking, their doubts, their questions, and their continued research into the nature of reality, they are learning from others all the time, approaching others for more reasoning, more perspective, and they rejoice when they've been wrong, because they've learned something new.

No person is truly a scientific creature, and no person is truly a tribal creature. Rachel Evans, a popular Evangelical voice (http://rachelheldevans.com/ if you wanna check it out), possesses a keenly scientific way of thinking, but she claims Evangelical Christianity regardless of this. This creates a unique dissonance that I find very enjoyable to read, not to mention her incredible compassion and attention to morality.

Likewise, one need only look so far as the popular atheist voice to find that they are far from bereft of tribalistic thinking. The Christians are the enemy for the atheist in America, and a lot of them are very angry about it. Though I find the moral outrage good, and though I am also angry, it is dangerous to bring one's dogmatic thinking with them when leaving religion, lest one become angry at everyone and everything instead of coming to productive and natural conclusions through thought and dialog.

Regardless, there is a correct way to think, and that way is scientific, not tribal. This way is correct because the consequences of scientific thinking are life and knowledge, and the consequences of tribal thinking are death and war. The well-being of life must be furthered by our approach to life, because we are the most highly evolved beings on this planet.

Besides these consequences making scientific thinking the moral choice, true knowledge is, in and of itself, an end that we should all move toward for its' own sake.

God is dead, but we continue to create him wherever there are gaps, wherever there is dogma, and whenever we feel psychological pressure that requires relief. We create our god, and our god continually recreates us in his image.

The human mind is far from being fully understood, as are some very key things about existence itself. We can continue to create god in those gaps, ignore what understanding there is and assert god in spite of evidence, or we can continue to ask questions and find god, if he does truly exist.

I assert that the correct position is to ask questions, lose one's need to be right and control others, one's tribal nature, and begin to think scientifically about our reality and its' history, and it is correct because it is by nature compassionate and reasonable and in touch with reality.

The Atheist Position, Part 1: Definition

I've pondered a good bit over how to start saying what it is that I have to say next, and I've found that, as always, a direct approach is the most beneficial and, furthermore, the most necessary. I've always found that people are going to be mad about one's choices, especially if they are well thought out and without regard to sentiment or subjective experience. So, the question is, what sort of decision is this, and how have I come to it?

A cursory reading of the early days of this blog will tell you that I was a Christian and furthermore, regardless of what type of Christian I was or whether my beliefs fell in line with any definition of the word "Christian," I really and truly believed in the Christian God, and I had a lot to say because of it. One of my first posts was regarding the concept of Virginity and why I believe it is a bad concept. For a Christian to post that is risky indeed, and I paid for it.

Regardless, this blog has never been about maintaining the status quo. Cognitive dissonance, by its' very nature, is uncomfortable. When you are in a state such as this, your beliefs and your ideas are all thrown into chaos by realizations regarding how reality actually is. In other words, it is a rude awakening. This is what I've sought all my life, and I think I've finally found dissonance that has me overwhelmed.

What I really wish to address here is how I could go from being a theist and, indeed, a strongly believing Christian, to being an atheist. I've gone over and over this, and the answer is not at all a small nor a simple one. However, if you stick with me, I will endeavor to explain as completely as possible how such a thing could happen to the beliefs of a person like me, and why I'm sure that a reasonable approach to reality will lead people to agree with me.

I hope none of you take any of this personally. I still love all of you, and I wish to continue in dialog about philosophy, mythology, science, and to maintain the personal relationships I have with you. It grieves me every time personal differences come between me and another person, because I think anything short of direct disrespect can be looked past. I mean do direct disrespect to any of you, but I will criticize your religion. I criticize not out of anger or because I enjoy pissing people off, but because I must criticize that which I find to be worthy of its' sting.

One final disclaimer before I get started: This is not about my emotions, my experiences, my anger, or anything other than my informed opinion. Though I am all too aware of intuition and emotion's influence on the thoughts that one has, I believe the only way to explain what I mean is to reason with you, the reader, and invite you to follow my line of reasoning to the end. This will take us through many emotional issues, and you can expect a few rabbit trails into the emotional or experiential, but our main path in exploring this is one of a simple question: What is true? I choose to do this because I've never been primarily concerned with anything else when it comes to these things, and I don't believe that an exploration of my emotional state is necessary or beneficial at this time.

Very well then, on with it! The best place to start here is the question of what is true. This quickly became an overwhelming concern of mine in college when I came to reason that the Bible is not the cornerstone of truth.

Long story short, through countless hours of research, reasoning, and discovery, I concluded that the Bible is a legendary text, like many others, with an unbelievable amount of historic and scientific flaws. It has historically been used to justify many, many things, and modern society has come to see some of those things as evil, and some as good. Regardless of the fact that the Crusades seemed to be a good idea with Biblical grounding, we have come to realize that they were a terrible stain on an already filthy church history. Combine this with the reality that Jesus is not a unique historical or mythical figure, the Bible is not a book that has stood the test of time but one that has been revised over and over with time, and the many, many errors present in the book if you consider even other historical documents of the same age, and you come to a point of either accepting the book regardless of what you must conclude, or you come to a point of it being a flawed book. This is where I came to, the point of the Bible being a flawed but inspired text, and with it communicating who God is and the saving message clearly, but nothing else. A rather tenuous position that was open to so much criticism that a good portion of my college doubted my status as a Christian, but one that my faith and my reason demanded of me. In other words, I was concerned with both what I must believe and with what I had come to conclude by research and reasoning.

This is not new to anyone who's tried to do Philosophy or Theology in the context of a faith community. In fact, it is a relatively common struggle to those steeped in religion. Does faith or reason win out in the end?

For me, this question was already answered with another I'd been asking: What is true?

If my faith was to survive, then my reason must not disprove it. What I discover about reality, scientifically and philosophically, must not conflict with my faith. If it did, then my faith would be destroyed. There was only one choice, as far as I was concerned, when it comes to this sort of thing. Because I truly believed, however, my assertion was a little different. "If our faith is true then we have nothing to fear from science or from philosophy or thinking well. In fact, it is our calling to think better than any, for we know reality as it is!"

I could never understand why this made my fellow Christians uneasy. Why were they not agreeing when it was so obvious? Why did my nature as a doubter and one who asks questions make people uncomfortable and make me socially ostracized so many times? Did these people not have confidence in the truth of their beliefs?

I'm not one to portray myself as one of pure faith or as superior to anyone else, and I never have been. I've always been desperately aware of my own flaws of character and issues, even if they're ones that don't actually exist. However, in this case, I do believe that I demonstrably had such blind faith that I believed that science, philosophy, and reality itself would bend to the faith I so passionately held onto, and that if my beliefs needed to change it would be because I realized I was getting closer to understanding who God is and what reality is.

As it turns out, the more I discovered about the nature of reality, the farther and farther I moved from being what anyone would term a "Christian." I came to conclude that Evolution was the method by which humans have come to exist, and that church authority did not have any more power than any other political or religious force in history. I studied psychology and became a student of the human mind, only to come to the stark realization that humanity is vastly and scarily capable of self-delusion, many times without realizing it. The state of medicine, archeology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, and history had led me to vastly differing conclusions than those asserted by the people that tell me one God created reality and me along with it, and I was made to love him.

What's disturbing about this is not that science lead me away from faith, but that it very nearly didn't. You see, the more I learned, the more I believed that I was discovering things that humanity is meant to discover, and God exists in the gaps between my knowledge, or perhaps He exists somehow through this knowledge, as a primal cause of the universe.

The real problem at this point becomes one of presupposition. I presume that God exists, and so no matter what evidence comes my way about how reality works, no matter what new data comes to light about the people that have historically told us that the Christian God exists, and no matter how little evidence there is for a God existing, one can choose to believe what one wants to. The "God of the Gaps" can survive almost anything scientific or historic thrown at it, but one problem still remains that I had yet to realize.

The problem is Epistemology, or the way one relates to knowledge. You see, when you orient yourself to reality in such a way that truth acts on you, then you gain the ability to change your mind, should it become necessary. The "God of the Gaps" concept fails this Epistemic orientation spectacularly, for a few simple reasons. Firstly, if God must exist regardless of what one is discovering, then we are talking about asserting a truth claim, rather than discovering or reasoning to a truth claim. By its' very nature, this assertion is at the very least uncomfortable when accompanied by the way we understand reality as beginning in a large explosive event that lead to the formation of our universe and eventually our planet, which in its' cooling state began to generate organic matter that gave rise to life, gradually evolving to our present state.

This picture of reality not only has a pile of evidence and explains a whole laundry list of things about how our universe works, but it is something that I grew up being taught to be hostile toward, likely because it is scary to the mind that actually believes their faith can be deconstructed by such things (which it can and should be).

The real problem, however, is that when we have to believe in the "God of the Gaps," we are asserting a particular type of God. The type most commonly asserted in the nation I live is the Christian God. This is a problem because if we accept current scientific and historic data, God had nothing to do with the creation of the universe (or at the very least had very little to do with it beyond some sort of initial spark, AKA the Deistic God), and He's had nothing to do with reality henceforward, unless His objective has been to confuse us with differing legends regarding the God claim and fossils, all of which have much more readily available explanations.

To accept the "God of the Gaps" is to think badly, but one may do so at this point and be a Deist, if one wishes. At the very least, this god has nothing to do with the religions that exist today, and certainly nothing to do with any sort of Abrahamic religion, the exclusive market on monotheistic religions. The only other option is to ignore what we know about reality and put one's philosophical head in the sand, practicing the science of knowledge no more, and choosing one's own delusion over what is really true. Some days I wish this were an option for me, for it would be far less costly than where I've chosen to go. But I can be no other than who I am.

I'm not an atheist because I'm angry, I'm angry because I'm an atheist. It makes me angry that I've been lied to about science for the majority of my life, that I've been given false hope and poisonous fear when I should have grown up learning and wondering and being amazed at the way things are. It makes me angry that I have a degree polluted by religious thinking, when I could've studied something useful. But then, one can be angry about these things and change nothing whatsoever.

I choose to allow that to exist where it will, and to confine my pursuit of truth to the facts. I wish, and have always wished, to be proven wrong where I am wrong. I was wrong about Christianity being true, and it was proven to me by science, by philosophy, and by history. I plan on going into these things all separately, but for now, I wish to lay down a definition of what I mean when I say I am an atheist.

Atheism - The conclusion that there is a lack of evidence for a tenable belief in god or gods.

This is the only definition I wish for you to think of in my writings. I may fit the "angry atheist" paradigm at times, but I do not believe that it is necessary to be angry to be an atheist. It is, however, necessary to understand theism to be an atheist. Atheism, by its' very nature, is an opposite conclusion to theism. Theism says that there is a god or gods, atheism says that there is not.

Atheism has been associated with being a political force, at times. I do not have any interest, at this time, in making what I write or what my life represents political. Indeed, atheism is simply a statement regarding gods. Politically, I would align more as a secular humanist at this point, but one need not be a secular humanist to be an atheist. One need only come to the conclusion that gods do not exist.

Atheism is not a religion, it is a philosophical orientation. A religion is a specific belief system, and it says specific things. It is, in many ways, much much more specific than a philosophical orientation. One being a Christian or a Muslim or a Hindu is not a philosophical orientation, it is an alignment with a political religious force. In their cases, however, their philosophical orientation includes a type of theism, or an acceptance of gods or a god existing. Atheism is merely the opposite, the philosophical orientation that there are no gods. Whether Atheism has been used as a religion in our society is not something I wish to address at this point, because if I spent my blog posts addressing what every group does with the terms I use, I'd have a very different, and what I would consider to be a pointless, blog.

To reiterate and conclude what I have to say at this point: Atheism is a position I came to over a period of about 7 years of questioning, reasoning, and research. Atheism simply means that one has concluded that there is a lack of evidence for a tenable belief in god or gods. Atheism is a conclusion I came to by science, history, philosophy, and Cognitive Dissonance. More on these soon.

An Introduction: On Anger, and the Pursuit of Truth

My dear readers:

It has been a wild ride here lately. I've had a lot of changes coming for me, most of which have been a long time coming. I cannot properly express to you how much so many things have grieved me lately. I am a man consumed in sorrow and in joy all at once, feeling the necessity to make changes for no other reason than my pursuit of truth, and my pursuit of being happy in life. I take this to mean that I am being who I am correctly. However, I think that this has not been the norm for me for a long time. Allow me to explain why.

As much as I try to keep this blog impersonal, I must address something publicly that may or may not be relevant to you. It has been asserted that I am a very angry person lately. This is not the first time I have been told this, and I doubt it will be the last. However, this time presents an opportunity to explain some things.

I have been a person of faith for as long as I can remember. A lot of the reason I started on this path is because I was terrified of the divine being I was told about from a very young age throwing me into hell to burn and be tortured and alone for eternity. I still have panic episodes over this deeply engrained fear, for whatever reason. However, over time my faith became something I was very militant about, and something I became extremely passionate about. Even now, I can discuss Christian theology and spirituality with anyone that wants to.

Christianity has made me very angry for years. I used to be angry when people would attack my beliefs, and I used to be angry when people told me I wasn't really a Christian. As it turns out, the second group may have been correct all along. I became a very liberal Christian in college, and the reason I did is because Christian theology had become untenable. I looked at this book I'd been told to believe, I looked at history, I looked at alternate views, and I looked at my own reasoning. I then concluded that the Bible is a legendary text and nothing more, and that God is something separate from the religion of Christianity, even though I still believed in Jesus.

Understandably, a lot of people told me that I had watered down my faith, that I had taken all of its' "teeth" away from it. I had a professor at my college tell me publicly that I did not care about the truth because of my views, and any support I received from authority figures was very tentative, as most of them were either trying to save me, and the rest were trying to explain me. Very rarely was I straight up asked about things, and I was told it was because I'm a very intimidating person. This is perhaps true.

I was raised to be angry because I was raised in fear, which turned to militancy, which turned to feeling stepped on and excluded, which turned into resentment. It is not a good position to be in, and it has affected me more than I can possibly estimate. I can spend my time blaming people, but in the end, I blame the system. Christianity cannot escape its' abuses, and this is a very inflammatory view It is possible that all of my anger has become an issue lately merely because of my change of beliefs, so allow me to be blunt.

Yes, I am no longer a Christian, and yes, Christianity does make me angry. I am sure a lot of you feel like your beliefs are being attacked, but let me assure you: I never intend to attack someone's personal beliefs. If I stepped over that line, I am sorry. I endeavor to be objective when discussing these things, and sometimes my passion gets the best of me. There is a reason I tend not to say anything when certain things come up: I tend to go too far, and then everyone gets intimidated by my passion and my reasoning. I tend to be very transparent about these things, and it is my gift to people. I think that most people deserve the truth from me. I am very sorry if my anger has gotten involved and this has all gotten out of hand.

However, it is very important to me that you all understand one thing just as much. I have not made the decision not to be a Christian lately for any other reason than that I do not believe it is true. When I look at Evolution and the origin of biological life, when I look at sociology, history, psychology, archaeology, anthropology and when I really really think and read and research and question and conclude, I do not believe that Christianity is anything more than another historical religion that happens to be involved with the politics and culture of the country I live in.

I would not have decided to publicly leave the faith I grew up in for any other reason than that I do not think it is true. I have paid for it dearly by doing so, and I will continue to do so with friendships, the deterioration of my relationships with people that are religious, and with a lot of misunderstanding. I have paid for it with my mental and emotional state lately, and I have paid for it with my health. I will probably continue paying for it with some of these things, though I believe that the best thing for me to do at this point is to move on and live well, because I also believe that I am right and that I am living rightly.

This is an invitation to anyone that runs across this blog. I don't care if what you have to say is that you hate everything I am doing and think I'm wrong: I want to have conversations. I will not back down from my position without a very good reason, but if you give me a good reason to do so and I am convinced that it is the truth, I will in a second. Surely I have proven that by now, and I hope that I have proven that I respect other people, even if I've never done so perfectly.

Though I do hope you all understand how grieved I am that my relationships with some of you have suffered for the direction I've gone lately, I must make one thing perfectly clear.

I am right to be angry. I am not just angry, I am furiously enraged at the religion I grew up in, because I feel it is unjust, abusive, psychologically destructive, culturally and historically anachronistic, morally offensive, and a historical and political nightmare. What I have gone through is nothing compared to so many people that have been on the other end of religion in general, and I am grateful that the most I have to deal with is some odd emotional things and some awkward conversations with people. This is something that I feel even those that are a part of Christianity still can agree with, even if they are still "believers." Many would say that Christian history is bloody and it is an indication of man's "fallen" state. Where we differ is that I do not agree with that explanation, nor do I place the same trust in the historic Christian church as they do.

What you must understand is that anger is not an emotion that I feel toward Christians. My family's faith is still Christianity, with me being the sole exception. This could make me feel very alone, but I still love them very much, and they still love me very much. I respect many Christians I know very much, and believe they are very smart and educated people. Though I would not disagree with them if I didn't think I was right, this does not mean that I'm going to be hostile or degrading. That's not the person I have ever been, and though I've never been perfect in my goals to respect others, I try my best to do so, regardless of my position on issues, and I expect the same respect from people in discussions. I can no longer tolerate the imposed self-degradation I'm expected to take on in the name of being moral or holy.

I plan on making a series of posts in the next few weeks regarding my "deconversion" from Christianity, because I believe a lot of my regular readers are stunned and confused or angry about the seeming suddenness with which I have changed. It is important to me that you all understand where I'm coming from, and why things have ended up this way, and what my thoughts are.

Lastly, I wish to extend one final sentiment. Regardless of what one believes or how one deals with life, I believe we can all respect each other. It is my hope that the future of humanity is full of that respect, and that we can continue to grow together and leave behind all of that that would get in the way of truth and of love.