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.