HomeSkepticism

February, 2004
I suppose my quest for truth started when I was around thirteen or fourteen, and our cat Alexandra died. Up until that time, I had never really given God or the afterlife much thought. I was vaguely an atheist, minus a two-week stint where I decided to become Catholic, but gave it up when I realized I didn't actually believe there was a God. But kneeling next to her, crying and shaking her body, I remember thinking "This isn't her. This isn't Alex, what made her who she was is gone." It's not the most earth-shattering revelation ever, but it started me on my journey that would, for the main part, always be characterized by one thing: need.

Over the next two or three years, my beliefs shifted rapidly. Atheist, theist, deist... always with an undercurrent of agnosticism, a willingness to admit that I just didn't know. Throughout this time, I was also severely depressed. Atheism struck me as the loneliest feeling in the world, and I said once I would give anything for some inner peace. When, at sixteen, I went to a Christian boarding school and was surrounded by friends who accepted me regardless of my beliefs, I think it was only natural for me to associate the people with the religion. Two months after I started at that school, November 2001, I converted to Christianity.

In many ways, it was a completely different world for me, and I threw myself right into it, determined to be a good Christian. To me, this meant fitting into a lot of the stereotypes that surrounded Christianity, including a belief that the Bible was inerrant and God had created the world in six days, six thousand years ago. As to actually studying evolution to find out whether it could be true or not... what was the point? After all, if the Bible is inerrant, why do I need to study something that clearly contradicts it? Though it did occur to me once that, for a secular theory, evolution really did make a certain amount of sense.

That oh-so-solid armor, designed to keep one inside Christianity and convince them to "turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge," first began to crack when I started college. It was Christian of course, but comparatively rather liberal. I took a class in the History of Israel, which my professor started off by telling us that we would have to confront many things in the next few months that might deeply change how we view the world. Around this time, I was also wrestling with thoughts such as "But... if the Bible is what's saying the Bible is inerrant and inspired by God...," so this was a rather good time to start presenting me with evidence the Bible did, in fact, have error. Suffice to say, by the end of the term, I had cast off my belief in Biblical inerrancy and started to seriously get down to doubting Christianity.

As a Christian, I had always seen that my "calling" was apologetics, defense of the faith, so I had been debating unbelievers for months by now. It wasn't until I dropped the Biblical inerrancy view though, that their objections really started to hit home with me, and become my own questions. How could we truly have the free will to choose God? Isn't our personality either determined by him or by chance, through the circumstances of our birth? Is roasting people in Hell for all eternity really all that just or merciful, especially this particular atheistic friend of mine I've been debating for the past six months? Eventually, Christianity was no longer making much sense to me, and I believe I would have left- but for one last detail. There's a common apologetic device that says, basically, if Christ hadn't truly resurrected from the dead, why would all those eyewitnesses have been martyred for their belief he had. This was all that kept me with Christianity, as my fear of Hell and need for God by now were mostly gone. Then one day, it occurred to me- had they actually died for that belief? Hadn't I better research the matter myself?

So I did so. One night I sat down and starting searching for material on the early martyrs, and quickly reached the conclusion that there was absolutely no evidence to say that anyone who would have been an eyewitness to the Resurrection had died for their faith in it. This was the deciding moment, and it really was quite a relief by this point, to be honest. With Christianity already crumbled away from the inside, I had already begun to strongly doubt that I would find evidence for it to be true, and luckily I turned out to be correct. I didn't say anything to anyone at this point, but the next day I went to my usual bulletin board for religious debate, and quietly slipped the fact of my deconversion into the middle of a post, as I wanted to avoid the type of attention I'd received for just airing my doubts the last few months.

Word spreads quickly. Within a day or two, practically everyone on the board seemed to know that I was no longer a Christian, and a few off the board as well, which rather mystified me. Back when I had first started to doubt the truth of Christianity, I had asked a few Christian friends of mine if they would remain my friends, regardless of what I believed; they answered yes, of course. The months of questioning and doubting had weeded out those who didn't feel this way, including my (now ex)fiancé who nearly broke up with me when I confided to him my doubts about the Bible being inerrant- something about us being unequally yoked. Altogether though, I was pretty sure that those who had been my friends thus far would remain so.

To a large part, they have. The support of my friends, both Christian and non, really has been invaluable to me at this point in my life. There has been a bit of backlash, yes- from accusations of doing this for approval from my atheist friends to being banned from a chat room I've frequented for months because they decided my patronage was suspect now that I don't believe in God and I was there to cause trouble (though I'll be allowed back in if I return to God, and humble myself and repent). But this is only more weeding out along the way, and those who befriend me or judge me by my beliefs are not the sort I'd want around anyway.

Looking back, the reason I believed in the first place is much more clear to me. I couldn't yet handle the world, and needed the emotional comfort of knowing that someone was there who loved me unconditionally, that there was a hope for the next life, and that I somehow mattered. That depressed teenage girl didn't love herself, and needed someone to show her how to do so. God provided that- I came to view myself as loveable, as capable, and overall as a person that I could like. In that sense, Christianity gave me more than I could ever repay. But now... I don't believe I need it for that anymore.

There are many now who urge me to return, to drop my pride and just have faith in God. I suppose, in some ways, that is why I left Christianity. It asked me to be something I could not, to believe something I did not, and that was too high a price for me. Some will say that I'm choosing the world over God, trusting in my own intellect over him, and as I don't think I could change their minds, I'm not going to try. But I do view believing now as selling myself out, losing my personal integrity. No, my questions will never all be answered, and there's not a whole lot of comfort available here- except this one thing. There's a saying that goes "To thine own self be true", and that I'll know I followed. Ultimately, that's all the comfort I think I'll need.