The free gift of salvation

This is roughly how the "gift of salvation" was presented to me as a child. Easy peasy, right?

Here's what's actually going on. Click to embiggen.

Things that should make Christians feel suspicious

Religion is masterful at encouraging doublethink among its followers, so some aspects of my faith really only make sense in hindsight, now that I've left it. Here are some things that, while not proofs against Christianity necessarily, should be given more consideration by church-goers. Some of these things have theological rationalizations or reasons behind them, varying from denomination to denomination and person to person. Some of these may not even apply to a particular denomination, but I'm writing this coming from a Calvinist/Baptist/Assemblies of God perspective according to how I was raised.

If you are a Christian, it should make you feel suspicious that

Religious leaders lie about why people leave Christianity. I can't recall a time when I was given an honest portrayal of an ordinary Christian apostate. Drifters were characterized as bitter against God, cowardly, weak in the flesh/sinful, or insufficiently indoctrinated in apologetics. There was no such thing as a reasonable atheist who had given religion their absolute best try but couldn't hang on due to a simple lack of evidence. Admitting this would humanize non-believers and make the Biblical position seem like it has potential weaknesses, and the believers can't have that. Christians want it both ways: they want people to take them as factually correct, except when evidence fails, in which case they ought to believe by blind faith. Either way atheists and other non-Christians get vilified.

People are constantly making excuses for the failures of an almighty, benevolent God. Beneficial happenstance is attributed to God's mercy. When calamities strike, God's plan becomes "mysterious" or the event is attributed to human fallenness. It seems awfully convenient that you can take half the evidence and say it proves God's goodness but wallpaper over the other half. See also Argument from incomplete devastation, which runs unquestioned in Christian circles.

One of the most important ways Christianity holds onto followers is by assuring them that if they do not believe, they will go to hell. Conveniently, hell is a place you only go after you die, so no one can give an accurate report on whether or not it's a real place. In order to be safe from it, you need to stay a Christian your entire life (and even then you may still be rejected by God, as anyone who has read Jesus's words knows). Of course we're assured it's quite miserable down there. Oh, and if you don't recruit other people to join the faith, they'll go to hell too. Ingenious.

The "unfailing moral standards" of the Bible are continually revised as society evolves. We can see this happening as issues like women's and gay rights are leaving churches with a choice between losing followers or updating their teachings to fit with the national conscience. Even in my fundamentalist Assembly of God church, many verses in the Bible were passed off as "of the times," like the requirement for men to have short hair and women to have long hair and head coverings. I don't know of any church that follows literally every Biblical, or even New Testament, mandate (such a congregation might exist, but please don't tell me about it). It should look suspicious that, while people may say the Bible guides their morals, it doesn't really.

There are no miracles anymore. Sometimes people will point to a marvelous coincidence as proof of a miracle. But walking on water wasn't a coincidence. Feeding a crowd with a loaf of bread and two fishes wasn't a coincidence. Parting the waters of a great sea wasn't a coincidence. Why doesn't God seem to do these kinds of miracles anymore? Other people may say that God cured their sickness, but how do we know it wasn't their body's own immune system? The placebo effect is widely known to science. Even diseases like cancer are known to spontaneously go into remission a fraction of the time, due to natural causes. Why can't God ever seem to regrow an amputated limb? Suspicious.

Christians rely heavily on the indoctrination of children to gain recruits. It's no secret that most people stick with the religion they were brought up in. And it makes sense that children are an easy target, since most of them receive religious instruction before they have well-formed critical thinking abilities, a strong sense of self, or resistance to authority. Shouldn't this trouble you, if you are a Christian? Shouldn't it worry you that the most relied-upon way to gain followers is to groom the same demographic of people who think that there are monsters in their closet?

Like I said, none of these are proofs and I could probably have constructed rationalizations for all of them when I was a Christian. What I'm getting at here is a bigger picture. I should have realized a lot sooner that the emperor has no clothes.

Why I will probably not reconvert

My reasons for deconverting from Christianity were not the most iron-clad reasons. They were good, good enough to get me out of religion, but in general they left a bit of wiggle-room for reconverting. But I've done some reading up on religion since deconverting, and my reasons for staying atheist, and in particular non-Christian, are much stronger now. I want to talk about them here.

First and foremost: I find the Christian God, as described in the Bible, detestable. He blatantly endorses slavery, rape, and genocide. I find all of those things morally abhorrent and can never worship a god, real or false, that does such monstrous things to people. Jesus, claiming to be one and the same with this God, is also therefore culpable for these injustices. As an atheist, I find that the old Biblical texts make a lot more sense in the light that they were dreamed up, edited, and amended by bronze-age people who worshiped a local creator deity named El and, later, a jealous war god named Yahweh who they merged into Elohim. The New Testament makes more sense as the frantic assemblage of at least one apocalyptic dead rabbi's teachings, spiced up and modified many years after eyewitness accounts had faded from memory. If I understand my research correctly, this is what historians think happened, and I can't go back to glibly assuming that the Bible was magically conjured from God himself.

Second: I have no understanding of how one would gain real knowledge of any god. Prayer strikes me as being wholly unreliable. I could list many contradictory, delusional, nonsensical, and often horrendous things people have sworn God has said to them. I and people I know have been driven to suicidal levels of depression because they were trying to do "what God told them." Personal prayer is thus a travesty, and intercessory prayer has not been proven to change anything. I know of no holy books that aren't just as flawed, contradictory, or nonsensical, or fabricated whole-cloth. Religious authority and tradition is similarly untrustworthy, even when they're not outright corrupt. Without relying on prayer, scriptures, or authority, I would not even know where to begin to try to conjure up knowledge of a deity that has any effect on my life.

Third: I am far happier as an atheist. It would take a monstrous level of evidence to convince me to return to the terrifying, guilt-inducing, anti-intellectual mindset I was trapped in for 20-odd years of my life. Intellectual honesty made me get out, and anything short of explicable evidence in the existence of deities will cause me to go back in. Otherwise I will feel like I'm lying to myself, and that's a feeling I can't stand.

Martyrdom

(Warning: content related to depression and suicide)

A popular trend when I was a church-going youth was Christian martyrdom. Jesus Freaks, a book containing gripping and harrowing stories of people past and present who died for their faith, had just come out and it was all the rage. The Columbine High School massacre was on the forefront of everyone's minds. "Would you die for your faith?" the pastors at my church would often ask. It was a sincere question. Many people in our brand of Christianity were convinced that the day was soon coming when some kind of upheaval would hit America and Christians would be routinely slaughtered. We imagined that anti-Christian laws, bands of enemies storming into churches with assault rifles, and barbed-wire camps were imminent.

I was seduced by the idea of martyrdom. It played directly into my tendency towards suicidal depression and my desperation to be worthwhile to God. I spent long nights imagining scenarios in which I would be asked to deny my Christian faith and heroically martyred. I thought of what it would be like to die by impalement, drowning, burning at the stake, or being shot. Having morbid tendencies isn't that unusual for teenagers, but I suspect my obsession with martyrdom was beyond normal.

Since I spent much of my time hardening myself for the inevitable persecution I was led to believe was coming, my viewpoint became very black-and-white. I read everything I could to bolster my extremist outlook. I fantasized about raiding abortion clinics and smashing their equipment to bits, and of bombing adult entertainment venues. I was disgusted by the Christians around me who had strong pro-life views but who, for all their hooplah about baby murder, didn't seem to really treat abortion the same way they would treat, say, the legalized killing of 6-year-olds.

Meeting actual non-Christians did a bit to temper my zeal, and I let my natural meekness edge its way back into my outlook. Ending my daily prayer habit did wonders for my mental health and by that point the Christian martyr craze had died down (in retrospect, perhaps because of the September 11 attacks, though I may be remembering my chronology incorrectly).

I'm grateful that, for the most part, my extremism never went any further than words. There were times when I would have gladly committed vandalism, or hurt myself for the cause of God. It makes me a little sick now to think of what would have happened if I'd been just a little more hard-hearted, rash, and/or self-destructive. Or if I'd been born into a family somewhere, at some time, that was even more extremist than mine was. Most of all, it troubles me that nobody I knew seemed to think there was anything wrong with my jihad-like mindset, which I made explicit on several occasions.

I'm an atheist now and I feel like a better person, but I'm still sort of fucked up from my religious death-wish mindset. I try to exercise extreme caution, now, in adopting any views which I can't justify to a reasonable person. I have to temper my discussions with good faith and a willingness to see other people's viewpoints. I don't know how good I am at this, since it's not easy to train your mind to think in color after so much black-and-white. But at least now I'm making the effort, I guess.

How to Close a Coffin

I think it's common that conversion to religion tends to happen in a swift, eager leap, while deconversion is painful, lengthy, and lonely. My deconversion from evangelical Christianity didn't happen because of a single revelation, event, or person. It takes more to close a coffin than the last nail.

Put briefly, I let go of Christianity and theism because I could no longer see any way to convince anyone it was true, especially myself.

Biblical Literalism fails to hold up

My foundation for my belief in God was in the inerrancy of the Bible. I was taught that the Bible was free of any kind of error and thus could be wholly trusted. There was very little emphasis on faith in my family's brand of Christianity. I accepted God, Jesus, and creationism because they were considered to be factual. There wasn't much wiggle room for compromise as far as doctrine went. I was taught very clearly, for example, that attempts to reconcile homosexuality with Christianity were wishy-washy, nothing more than rationalizations for weak-kneed liberals to avoid offending anyone. On top of this foundation of biblical inerrancy sat a load of tribalism, fear, and paranoia, the inevitable consequence of trying to maintain an indefensible belief.

It didn't take long for me to discover, via the Internet, that contradictions existed within the Bible. I knew theological rationalizations for some of them, but others were obviously bungled factual errors. I decided these were insignificant and didn't take anything away from the larger truths of the Bible. Soon I had also abandoned creationism and broad swaths of the Old Testament. I was uncomfortable with the endorsed rape and genocide in the older books and for the first time, I decided to trust myself to decide what was right instead of relying 100% on the Bible. I also realized that being opposed to homosexuality was far too damaging and cruel to continue to cling to, so I embraced gay rights. That was one decision I was happy to make, since even when I was a young girl the anti-gay verses in the Bible distressed me deeply.

I continued to take the gospels seriously for some time, but my faith in biblical inerrancy had eroded and would never make a recovery.

People defy expectations

When I was around 14 years old, I was at a Borders bookstore and a woman passed by me. She was butch in appearance and seemed to be headed for the LGBT section. I briefly made eye contact with her, a little nervous at encountering a (presumably) gay person in real life. She smiled at me. I smiled back. And in that quick moment, gay people suddenly stopped being an abstraction to me. I imagined telling that woman that her sexuality was sinful, how she would take that news. She would probably be annoyed and upset by it, but who wouldn't be? I knew a thing or two about suppressed sexuality and how much it hurt. Suddenly homophobia did not seem like something I could be flippant about. I still had many homophobic tropes stuck in my head, and I still thought being gay was a sin of sorts, but the glee and/or phoney-baloney concern with which my fellow Christians condemned gay people started to sicken me.

When I was in my early 20s, I was on the Internet reading a thread about religion and one person made a comment that stuck with me: "Since becoming an atheist, I have never been happier." This went against my expectations. The only conversion stories I knew about were people who had once been unhappy atheists but turned to Christianity and became happier. I also began to make friends with atheists who were creative, kind, optimistic, moral people. I started to notice that reality was not matching up with what Christianity promised: that people who were filled with God's grace would be empowered to be supernaturally righteous, while people who didn't have God were lost in darkness. It didn't look like that was the case. I began to wonder what the point of being a Christian was if it didn't make much of a difference in how you acted.

Running out of proof

I'm an emotional person, and one of the main appeals of religion, for me, was the overpowering feeling of awe and depth that I experienced. I enjoyed the tremors of my Christian rock music and the sublime shivers during Christmas. I had felt God on numerous occasions, usually when I was very tired or hungry. I spoke in tongues and I believed I had seen demonic apparitions as well. I assumed there was no way science could explain away these powerful, holy feelings I had. But that was before I found out that religious episodes are linked to frontal lobe seizures, and that the feeling of "God's presence" could be replicated with an electromagnet. Infrasound, I also learned, can cause people to feel as if something religious is happening. Once I found out there are natural sources for "feelings of God," the magic was diminished considerably. When I was honest with myself, I could remember getting "holy goosebumps" at non-religious stimuli, like a goofy children's song or an early-morning car trip. My religious feelings didn't prove anything.

I knew a lot of arguments for the existence of God and the divinity of Christ, and I had a little knowledge of apologetic doctrines. Some were stronger than others but I found all of them shallow when I thought them through or read up on differing opinions. C.S. Lewis's argument that those who go to hell choose it irked me. It was obvious to me that nobody would choose eternal torment if they were given a real chance to understand it, and no omnibenevolent figure would allow a person to choose it. How could God allow a punishment so cruel that I, as a fallible human, would not even wish on my worst enemy? His Liar, Lord, Lunatic trilemma was also inadequate to explain the divinity of Christ. Why couldn't Christ have been a slightly fanatical apocalyptic rabbi whose followers exaggerated the stories about him? Why exactly couldn't he have been a "lunatic" or liar? There has been no shortage of mentally ill or narcissistic self-appointed messiahs. The Argument from Desire was hard to let go of, but I increasingly began to feel that wishing that heaven or God was real was a sad replacement for knowing that they are.

I briefly toyed with the idea that knowledge of God cannot be understood with naturalism or reason and may in fact comfortably defy it, but that didn't leave me anywhere. If we can't use reason to at least guess at what God is like, which concept of god do we follow? Christian, Hindu, Shinto? Why? What affect could such an undetectable god be said to have on our day-to-day lives anyway?

There was a final nail

I came across a perfect turn of phrase on a website called lesswrong: "You're allowed to doubt.  You're just not allowed to successfully doubt." It perfectly summed up the panicked, trapped feelings I was experiencing as I tried to reconcile religion with reality. My doubts had come to a head. What made more sense: a world in which the all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God I had believed in was actually malevolent and enjoyed the fact that he could only be perceived by my willful ignorance or absurd mental gymnastics? Or a world where there simply was no God? I couldn't accept the former and feel intellectually honest. I gave myself permission to admit I was wrong, and change my mind. I began to call myself an atheist.

Life makes a lot more sense now.

The Fear of Knowledge

You can't trust everything, or can you?

Throughout my life, maintaining my Christian faith and evangelical identity was an exercise in constant self-censorship. When I was about six years old, I mentioned to my family that the movie The Land Before Time had inadequacies: Animals that existed during different geological periods were shown co-existing. I was really proud of this observation, but I was scolded: "There was no such thing as time periods. All the animals were created within seven days." I felt foolish. I had heard the Biblical creation story many times and I liked it, but I hadn't known that I was supposed to think it was really, factually true. I wasn't sure what to do about the fact that while most of the books I read said the earth was millions of years old, my family was telling me otherwise.

I learned to read with caution. Phrases like "6 billion years ago" or "the Pleistocene era" were taboo, so I skimmed over them. When issues of National Geographic came in, I avoided the articles about human evolution. I fast-forwarded the Rite of Spring segment in Disney's Fantasia. One time when I was about 9 years old, I had a clandestine peek at an encyclopedia article about evolution and was so convinced by the matter-of-fact way the idea was laid out, that I whispered to myself "Yes, evolution is true." Ashamed, I slammed the encyclopedia shut and said a prayer of apology to God for my momentary disbelief. I started to get increasingly worried that if I wasn't careful I would be brainwashed into believing evolution. I became more and more interested in creationist materials and read them any chance I got. My parents didn't overtly forbid me from reading about evolution-related topics, it was a self-driven censorship to a large extent, but they definitely encouraged the creationist materials and scoffed at evolution. I was homeschooled and all my schoolbooks were creationist, including the science books.

It's interesting to note that as I carefully dodged the evolutionary "conspiracy theory," I wasn't gaining a lick of healthy skepticism, it was done only out of fear of learning. I eagerly read, and believed, stories speculating about the existence of alien visitors, Bigfoot, and the Jersey Devil. And of course I loved all the creationist stories about possible modern-day dinosaur sightings. Anything that presented itself as conceivably factual was fair game, except for evolution or old-earth teachings.

Coming up short

When I got older and obtained access to the Internet, I decided to engage in some evolution-creationism debates and was flatly defeated. I was shaken up and disillusioned by this, and soon learned not to bring up creationism around thinking adults. In the meantime, I learned more about evolution and realized my initial childhood earnestness was correct: Evolution was a strong theory, there was no godless liberal conspiracy to silence the truth of creationism, and there was good reason to view old earth as actual fact. Even most Christians outside the U.S. found young-earth creationism silly. Gradually I stopped believing in creationism.

Even though I realized that my lack of knowledge about evolution was substantial (all those years of tuning out the "millions of years" had done its damage), I still felt theologically threatened by evolution and I didn't go out of my way to learn about it. Only now as an atheist is it something I want to examine more fully. I love animals and for the first time, I'm not afraid to learn everything I can. Questions that used to disgust or worry me as a creationist now seem fascinating: Why do humans seem predisposed to believe in gods? What were early hominids like compared to us? What kinds of human-like traits (like higher-level thinking) have non-human animals been shown to have?

Even though my faith was not destroyed by disbelief in creationism per se, my realization that carefully orchestrated self-censorship could not protect me from the truth was a raw wound. I began to wonder what other big questions I was shielding myself from. I had, with the help of a handful of creationist charlatans and my well-meaning but incorrect parents, locked my critical thinking and knowledge of the natural world in a box. Surely that was not the only box I was keeping myself in, I realized.

Theism starts to look suspicious

I warily eyed atheist books and Internet articles, reading some here and there but keeping them at arm's length for the most part, scared to death of having my worst doubts confirmed. I knew the anti-atheist scripts from all the Christian and creationist literature I had grown up with, but trusting them had been a bust and I was not about to leave my mind in their hands anymore. All I had to do was decide if I wanted to put my faith on the line and really and truly consider what the skeptics had to say.

My deconversion had already begun to happen by osmosis: finding out that feelings of God can be synthesized using an electromagnet, the realization that infinite punishment (hell) for finite crime is horrifically unjust, observing how closely my faith was tied to obvious logical fallacies. I learned that intercessory prayer makes no statistical difference in the outcome of hospital patients. The universe started to look suspiciously less like one that contained miracles and more like one where humans desperately wished it to be so. Amidst all these doubts, I couldn't shake the feeling of being trapped with religion. I was afraid of reading a convincing atheist quote or finding out some fact that would destroy my core beliefs. It was just like how I felt about creationism before I abandoned it. Deep inside I knew that a faith that's so fragile it can't stand up to an honest assessment is a worthless faith.

I didn't even need to read The God Delusion or God is Not Great to realize I was an atheist. Just the fact that I was afraid to was enough evidence for me. And since becoming an atheist, I have never felt happier about learning. There's no fact I need to be afraid of. I don't have the burden of the Christian agenda to support. The world is so much bigger outside the box and if I had known how freeing it would feel, I would have taken the leap much sooner. I can really and truly think.

I Prayed, Bitterly.

(Warning: content related to suicide, self-harm and depression)

Background:

I was about 5 years old when I said "The Sinner's Prayer." I was sitting in the car heading out on some trip with at least one of my siblings. While we talked, somehow it came to light that I had never officially accepted Jesus into my heart. My sibling (who it was eludes me) was astonished and informed me that I needed to ask Jesus to forgive my sins in order to go to heaven. I already felt like a Christian, so I was mildly offended that I still needed to be “saved” in this way, but I said the prayer. I don’t remember if I said it in my head or aloud. I was hurt at the implication that I wasn’t a Christian, so instead of a happy feeling I was just satisfied that it was over with and now nobody could question my faith.

I was raised in a fundamentalist/evangelical Christian hippie-esque homeschooling household in the Midwest US. My five siblings and I were raised by parents who believed strongly in the infallibility of the Bible and the next best thing: Keith Green’s Last Days Newsletters. My parents were involved in extremist pro-life organizations and were, along with 2 of my older siblings, arrested multiple times for blocking access to abortion clinics. Some of my earliest memories are of picketing against abortion with pro-life groups. The household consensus was that evolution was a lie, abortion was evil, gay people were going to hell, and environmentalists and feminists were delusional. I grew up thinking these views were quite ironclad. There was an environment of ridicule towards people who didn’t think the way we did. While my father was a gregarious person, my mother preferred to be a recluse and didn’t seem to get along with a lot of people. As a result, we didn’t have much contact with people outside the family and small social group of other homeschoolers.

God: "Don't lust, or else"

Strangely enough, even within this very Christian environment, and lip service to the idea that it's your relationship with God, not your point of view, that matters, our spiritual lives were private. We rarely prayed as a family and did not often inquire as to how any other family member's walk with God was going. I got a vibe of embarrassment about prayer and kept many of my spiritual thoughts to myself. 

Sex was a highly taboo topic. Going through puberty basically sucked for me, since I didn't have anyone to turn to with my questions. I was very disturbed by how often I thought about sex. I felt disgusting physically (since I was a greasy, pimply teenager) and spiritually (because I couldn't seem to stop "lusting" a.k.a. fantasizing).

One night, while I was earnestly praying, I felt as though I heard God's voice. I don't remember the exact words of what I heard, but it basically boiled down to "Stop having lustful thoughts or else." I panicked and cried. It was so, so hard not to have those thoughts. I turned off the lights and cried myself to sleep. The next morning, one of my pet gerbils was dead. I heard God's voice again. I felt him warning me that next time, it might not just be a pet. It might be one of my family members.

I was completely traumatized. I effectively shut down my own sexuality because I was terrified of God's judgment. I cried seemingly non-stop and self-harmed. Whenever I would linger too long on a sexual thought, I would think of my family members and how horrible I would feel if they died as a result of my own lust.

Due to the hush-hush nature of both spirituality and sex in our house, I never told anyone in my family about this. I didn't see how that would help, anyway, since no one would be able to talk me out of my situation. You weren't allowed to say someone's personal revelation wasn't from God, and lust was not acceptable in any case; Jesus himself forbade "adulterous thoughts." I felt trapped and I resented God. I didn't start to recover from this until I passed through puberty and my hormones calmed down. My sexual thoughts at least started to feel like they were under my control again, if not God's.

A stalemate

I had always been a depressed child and would run away from home often, fully intending to never come back, though I rarely got far. If I had understood what suicide was, I think I would have attempted to kill myself. When I was about 13 years old I had my first full-fledged depressive episode, triggered after losing a $10 bill at a waterpark. I sat in my room, feeling completely empty and worthless in a way I had never known before. My siblings took me out for ice cream to cheer me up and their kindness and material comfort helped a little, but it was obviously not enough to stave off the recurring depression and suicidal ideation that would ail me for the next 10 or more years of my life. My parents never sought help or treatment for me; my mother was horrendously depressed herself and I suppose she just thought that was a normal way to live.

 

For many years I had kept up a pretty solid habit of daily Bible reading and prayer. When I was about 17, I was stricken by another bad bout of depression, and it was during this time that I began to realize that praying was making my depression worse. I could be having a fairly happy day, but as soon as I began to open my heart to God, as I had been doing for years, I would collapse into a depressive suicidal fit. My survival instincts swiftly kicked in; as soon as I detected this pattern I stopped trying to listen to God and switched to simply reading the Bible and occasionally making emotionless requests to God in times of crisis. Interestingly, my mental health stabilized after I stopped my prayer habit. Then afterward, when the worst of the depression had passed, I tried to pick up the habit again, but it didn't feel the same as it once had. When before I had felt “God” talking to me, it had turned to feeling like just me talking to me. I was slightly bewildered by this and secretly wondered if all the times I’d thought I’d heard God, I was basically just making it all up.

God and I entered a stalemate: If he wouldn't talk to me, I wouldn't try to listen for him anymore.