Zoot
12-30-2004, 10:44 PM
Everyone else is doing it, so I will too.
This was written three years ago.
--
The problem, just for a change, is that people read whatever you say though their own filter comprised of their prejudices, fears, desires and preconceptions. So when I say “I used to be a Christian” or “I’m not a Christian any more”, for me to really explain what I mean I have to explain what “being Christian” meant in the first place and what “not being one any more” now means.
Normally I don’t have the time or befuckedness to go into the whole thing, or I find myself entirely unable to communicate verbally and make a mental note to write the whole thing down sometime. Call it “Why I’m Not a Christian” or something similarly original.
The first frustrating thing to deal with is that if I say “I am not a Christian any more” to many Christians, their first thoughts or words are, “Well, then, you were never really one in the first place.” It’s entirely unhelpful to respond with “that’s what I would have said back when I was a Christian”, but I say it anyway. Aggravating or not, it’s the truth. I would have said just that.
The second frustrating thing to deal with is the assumption that if one used to be a Christian and one no longer is a Christian, then one is now an angry anti-Christian rebel bitter about how his religion failed him and looking down on people who are still Christians as inferior. This is an understandable assumption, since it occurs so frequently anyway. But no, I am still on fairly good terms with Christianity, even if we’re no longer sleeping in the same bed, so to speak.
I have to write this in a way that makes it succinct, accurate and still entertaining. Since religion is my life, writing about the evolution of my religious ideas is very close to becoming a long, boring and embarrassing autobiography. I’ll try to stick to the point.
I was raised a Christian and in many respects I was pretty good at it. Morality-wise, well, maybe not so much, but I could debate the fuck out of the beliefs. Naturally, I reconciled evolution with creation and opted for a figurative interpretation of the Genesis creation myth. I was cool with God’s existence not being provable because I understood God to be beyond both existence and non-existence. Stuff like that. I could deal with most of the usual objections to Christianity.
I was fairly happy to have some objections with which I couldn’t deal. I couldn’t explain how God could be infinite and yet incarnate in Jesus Christ. I couldn’t explain why God was unable to stop some chariots in an Old Testament story because they were made of iron. I certainly couldn’t explain hell, though in fairness to myself, I never really believed in hell anyway. This was fine with me, not being able to explain them. There had been things for which I had no explanation in the past, and as I had learned more I had become able to explain them. This other stuff I figured I would eventually be able to explain.
Had I remained a Christian, no doubt I eventually would have been able to explain everything.
The point is that I became very good at justifying and defending the beliefs I had already accepted as being true. I dealt repeatedly with objections that said Christian belief was impossible and didn’t make sense. To me, it made sense, and it still does. I had quite a neat and complete view of the world and when people questioned the plausibility of Christian beliefs it was, more often than not, because they didn’t understand what Christian beliefs actually were. Or they had only experienced Christianity in its most demented fundamentalist guises.
If someone had asked me, back then, why I believed Christianity was correct, I would say because it made sense to me, and because of certain spiritual experiences I’d had that I couldn’t really explain in words. I could explain the making-sense part and answered any questions that were given to me, often by people fairly bemused that an apparently sane and intelligent young man so readily accepted something they considered unquestionably insane and stupid.
This was true. It did make sense to me, and to a large extent still does, and I had had some spiritual experiences I interpreted in a Christian context. I admitted that these spiritual experiences didn’t necessarily confirm the absolute certainty of all Christian doctrine. They were mostly experiences of God in the present, which held no real evidence of the past.
I should probably explain what exactly I mean by “Christian”. A Christian is a person who believes that God was made flesh in the man Jesus Christ, who died on a cross for our sins and rose again, and dedicates his life to following, loving and serving this risen Lord. Following, loving and serving Christ meant loving and praising God and loving and serving my fellow man.
This is my definition of “Christian”, and I’d like to say that it is the definition of “Christian”, but these days there’s no central, universally recognised authority on what it means to be Christian. There are Roman Catholics who consider the Roman Catholic Church to be the measure of true Christianity; there are Greek Orthodox who say the same thing; there are Protestants who say that the Catholics and the Orthodox aren’t Christian; and there are Mormons calling themselves Christian and everyone else saying they’re not. Meanwhile, secular society is forced to just shrug and define “Christian” as “anyone who happens to call himself Christian,” which annoys the hell out of everyone.
By my definition, Catholics, Orthodox and most Protestants are all Christian, but Mormons are not, on account of how they deny the divinity of Christ and also consider “God” to be a powerful being of flesh and bone, rather than the supraconceptual reality affirmed by Catholic and Protestant theologians.
Looking again at my definition, it’s in two parts. The first part consists of what a Christian believes and the second part refers to how a Christian acts based on those beliefs. It’s important to note that the second part is voluntary, and is dependent on the first part.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that I considered myself a Christian, I fit that definition of a Christian – I believed that God was made flesh in the man Jesus Christ, who died on a cross and rose again, and I dedicated my life to following, loving and serving Christ
As I got deeper into Christianity, I found I was more and more interested in the experiential aspects of the religion, rather than the theoretical. In other words, I wanted to know God personally, feel God, rather than be able to argue well with people about God. I had stumbled across “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis and had gone on to read every book by Lewis I could find. After five or six, I hit “The Four Loves”, and found mention of “The Imitation of Christ” near the beginning. Intrigued, I found a copy of The Imitation and read it cover to cover, three times.
The Imitation of Christ is a devotional book, written five centuries ago by a monk, for monks. I was immediately attracted to the completeness of the submission to God that the book espoused. I became extremely interested in Christian monastic spirituality, and read everything I could about prayer from authors like St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, etc. I came across Thomas Keating and began practising centring prayer, which is a reiteration of the contemplative prayer tradition in Christianity.
I had grown up with the idea of prayer as asking God for things, whereas now I was experiencing prayer as a submission to God in Christ, and knowing Him personally.
My readings into the spiritual practices of Christianity inevitably led me to reading about some of the spiritual practices of other religions. I was struck by the similarity of the practices and the descriptions of the experiences of God. The love poetry of the Muslim called Rumi was impressive. Here was someone who obviously truly loved God – a God described in almost identical terms to those of the Christians’ experiences, and my own. Time and time again, I came across the writings of spiritual teachers of all religions (at least the theistic ones, like Judaism, Islam and Hinduism) that paralleled those of Christian teachers.
My problem with this was the uniqueness of Christ. In the Bible, Christ says, “No one comes to the Father but through me.” I was brought up being told that people who don’t believe in Christ are not going to Heaven, yet here are these writers, these people from other religions, who obviously are on intimate terms with the same God I’d come to know, the same God that Christians and come to know through Christ. It would be a cruel joke for God to get so intimate in life with people who wouldn’t be with Him in death. I determined that I had no idea what the requirements for entry to Heaven were, and that I would leave it up to God. I still considered Christianity supreme among the religions, with other religions being more accurate or less accurate approximations of the perfection that is the Christian faith.
As this was happening, my understanding of religion and spirituality as an increasing clarity in the apprehension of reality was growing. I had come to see, in the words of a dream I had, that truth was an end in itself. It was truth with which I was concerned, and God was truth, and truth was God.
During my readings, one particular quote from Meister Eckhart had stuck with me: “What is truth? Truth is something so great that if God Himself could diverge from it, I would leave God and cling to truth.” When I first read it, this passage made me uneasy. The thought of leaving God was alien to me, unthinkable. I comforted myself by pointing out that God is truth, and that if one were to leave something in order to cling to truth, that “something” could not have really been God. It must have been a mistaken idea about God.
Meanwhile, my experiences of God were having unusual effects on my beliefs regarding Him. I began to distinguish more clearly between my faith in God and my faith in beliefs about God. More than ever, I believed that God was all-powerful and all-loving, but other beliefs were becoming less and less important to me. Whether or not Hell existed was inconsequential to me. Whether or not Heaven existed became just as unimportant. I no longer cared what religion was “rightest”. More important to the topic at hand, my elationship with God hinged less and less on the belief that He was born in the flesh as the man Jesus Christ.
I still believed that Jesus was God, in theory, but I recognised that if the Bible disappeared tomorrow and I’d never heard of Jesus, my relationship with God would remain the same. My faith in God remained; my faith in the accuracy of Christianity was faltering.
It’s interesting to note that if I had not prayed and experienced God as a Christian, I would never have had the faith in God, in reality, to let go of my Christian beliefs. But that is what happened. As I gave more and clearer thought to why I believed Jesus was God, I realised that I had no real reasons. I had no reason to believe the Bible was flawlessly accurate and I had no reason to believe that those who claimed Jesus was God were any more clued up on the matter than I was, and I was not clued up at all. I recognised that I had no way of knowing whether or not Jesus was God.
Another interesting thing here is to compare what had happened to my beliefs with the ways I had defended those beliefs in the past. Let’s take the whole Christian belief structure as a worldview, a way that one believes the world to be. When one challenges a worldview, they accuse it of being one of two things: internally inconsistent or externally inconsistent. In responding to these accusations, the apologist asserts the internal and external consistency of the worldview.
Now, questioning the internal consistency of a worldview is questioning whether or not such a world is possible. To question the internal consistency of a worldview is to suggest that two or more statements made in the worldview are contradictory. When one is questioning the internal consistency of the Christian worldview, for example, one might ask how it is possible that God is both loving and sends people to Hell.
Questioning the external consistency of a worldview is questioning whether or not such a perspective matches up with reality as we experience it. To question the external consistency of a worldview is to suggest that there are observable phenomena left unexplained by the worldview, or that the explanations of the worldview are contrary to our experiences. When one is questioning the external consistency of some Christian worldviews, for example, one might point out that evidence suggests the world has been around a lot longer than the Bible implies.
Now, I was able to defend the Christian worldview against both of these kinds of accusations without too much trouble, because when taken as a whole and with a little twisting, the Christian worldview is both externally and internally consistent. It is possible that reality could be the way Christianity says it is, and it also explains all observable phenomena. The interesting thing is that once one sees the world from the perspective of a particular worldview, all observable phenomena appear to lend weight to the worldview. Having accepted a Christian worldview, every crime I see committed is yet more evidence of Christianity being right about original sin. If I had accepted, instead, a Buddhist perspective, every crime I saw would be yet more evidence of Buddhism being right about the ignorance of most people stuck in a samsaric view of the world.
In other words, once someone believes something, they keep believing it more and more. If the worldview is internally and externally consistent (both logically possible and fits with experience), then it cannot be proven incorrect. Once someone has all the answers, asking the questions will only reinforce their certainty, even though the same questions will elicit different answers from different people with different worldviews. A well-researched atheist can explain the universe coming from nothing in terms of quantum physics, just as a Christian can explain the universe coming from nothing in terms of God’s creation. Both can answer the question “Where did the universe come from?” to their satisfaction, even though both can’t be right. And, while there is no evidence one way or another on the matter, or while we can adapt our worldview to account for newly arising evidence, we cannot be proven wrong.
It’s for this reason that one can be a perfectly intelligent atheist or a perfectly intelligent Christian, or Muslim, or any other worldview that’s internally and externally consistent. Intelligence doesn’t matter, unless the worldview is inconsistent somehow, in which case the intelligent person is forced to either drop the worldview, or change it to make it fit. There are plenty of inconsistent worldviews, of course, and cognitive dissonance accounts for a lot of them. But only the consistent ones will withstand the force of serious intellectual examination, as all of the major world religions have.
It’s also for this reason that people can become so frustrated by arguments about religion. Both see their consistent worldviews as patently obvious, and attack the other person’s worldview by either trying to find inconsistencies (which may well not be there) or by stating how the other person’s worldview is inconsistent with their own, which hardly helps. (“Islam can’t be right, because it says Jesus was only a prophet, when Jesus was actually the son of God! Jesus is obviously the son of God, because the following observable phenomena are explained by the Christian worldview, which includes Jesus being the son of God. Blah blah.”)
What does all of this have to do with me no longer being Christian? Well, one day I just woke up and realised that while I couldn’t necessarily prove Christianity wrong, at the same time I had no particular reason to believe that it was right. With the realisation that I had no reason to believe many of the claims made by Christianity, the beliefs dropped away, I no longer believed them and no longer fit the definition of a Christian.
And I stopped calling myself a Christian, even though I still loved God and prayed and all that. I stopped calling myself a Christian because I knew how much it annoyed me in the past when people would call themselves Christian but not fit the definition. Like, “Oh, I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe Jesus was God and I believe in reincarnation.” No! You’re not a Christian! That’s like saying, “Oh, I’m a capitalist, but I believe all wealth should be distributed evenly throughout society.” You know? So I didn’t want to be annoying like that, so I stopped calling myself a Christian.
And that’s the end of my story of why I’m not a Christian any more. I’m sorry it got a bit technical towards the end, but if you followed all that, hopefully you see my point. It wasn’t a matter of “Why stop believing?” It was a matter of “Why believe in the first place?” Since realising I was no longer a Christian, I’ve drifted further and further towards Buddhism, which is, on the whole, much more practical than theoretical, which suits me down to the ground, since it was the theory of Christianity I had no reason to accept.
I’ll conclude by noting something that struck me during the whole process, about the difference between faith and belief. It took, for me, faith (trust) in God, faith (trust) in reality, to sincerely question and let go of my beliefs.
This was written three years ago.
--
The problem, just for a change, is that people read whatever you say though their own filter comprised of their prejudices, fears, desires and preconceptions. So when I say “I used to be a Christian” or “I’m not a Christian any more”, for me to really explain what I mean I have to explain what “being Christian” meant in the first place and what “not being one any more” now means.
Normally I don’t have the time or befuckedness to go into the whole thing, or I find myself entirely unable to communicate verbally and make a mental note to write the whole thing down sometime. Call it “Why I’m Not a Christian” or something similarly original.
The first frustrating thing to deal with is that if I say “I am not a Christian any more” to many Christians, their first thoughts or words are, “Well, then, you were never really one in the first place.” It’s entirely unhelpful to respond with “that’s what I would have said back when I was a Christian”, but I say it anyway. Aggravating or not, it’s the truth. I would have said just that.
The second frustrating thing to deal with is the assumption that if one used to be a Christian and one no longer is a Christian, then one is now an angry anti-Christian rebel bitter about how his religion failed him and looking down on people who are still Christians as inferior. This is an understandable assumption, since it occurs so frequently anyway. But no, I am still on fairly good terms with Christianity, even if we’re no longer sleeping in the same bed, so to speak.
I have to write this in a way that makes it succinct, accurate and still entertaining. Since religion is my life, writing about the evolution of my religious ideas is very close to becoming a long, boring and embarrassing autobiography. I’ll try to stick to the point.
I was raised a Christian and in many respects I was pretty good at it. Morality-wise, well, maybe not so much, but I could debate the fuck out of the beliefs. Naturally, I reconciled evolution with creation and opted for a figurative interpretation of the Genesis creation myth. I was cool with God’s existence not being provable because I understood God to be beyond both existence and non-existence. Stuff like that. I could deal with most of the usual objections to Christianity.
I was fairly happy to have some objections with which I couldn’t deal. I couldn’t explain how God could be infinite and yet incarnate in Jesus Christ. I couldn’t explain why God was unable to stop some chariots in an Old Testament story because they were made of iron. I certainly couldn’t explain hell, though in fairness to myself, I never really believed in hell anyway. This was fine with me, not being able to explain them. There had been things for which I had no explanation in the past, and as I had learned more I had become able to explain them. This other stuff I figured I would eventually be able to explain.
Had I remained a Christian, no doubt I eventually would have been able to explain everything.
The point is that I became very good at justifying and defending the beliefs I had already accepted as being true. I dealt repeatedly with objections that said Christian belief was impossible and didn’t make sense. To me, it made sense, and it still does. I had quite a neat and complete view of the world and when people questioned the plausibility of Christian beliefs it was, more often than not, because they didn’t understand what Christian beliefs actually were. Or they had only experienced Christianity in its most demented fundamentalist guises.
If someone had asked me, back then, why I believed Christianity was correct, I would say because it made sense to me, and because of certain spiritual experiences I’d had that I couldn’t really explain in words. I could explain the making-sense part and answered any questions that were given to me, often by people fairly bemused that an apparently sane and intelligent young man so readily accepted something they considered unquestionably insane and stupid.
This was true. It did make sense to me, and to a large extent still does, and I had had some spiritual experiences I interpreted in a Christian context. I admitted that these spiritual experiences didn’t necessarily confirm the absolute certainty of all Christian doctrine. They were mostly experiences of God in the present, which held no real evidence of the past.
I should probably explain what exactly I mean by “Christian”. A Christian is a person who believes that God was made flesh in the man Jesus Christ, who died on a cross for our sins and rose again, and dedicates his life to following, loving and serving this risen Lord. Following, loving and serving Christ meant loving and praising God and loving and serving my fellow man.
This is my definition of “Christian”, and I’d like to say that it is the definition of “Christian”, but these days there’s no central, universally recognised authority on what it means to be Christian. There are Roman Catholics who consider the Roman Catholic Church to be the measure of true Christianity; there are Greek Orthodox who say the same thing; there are Protestants who say that the Catholics and the Orthodox aren’t Christian; and there are Mormons calling themselves Christian and everyone else saying they’re not. Meanwhile, secular society is forced to just shrug and define “Christian” as “anyone who happens to call himself Christian,” which annoys the hell out of everyone.
By my definition, Catholics, Orthodox and most Protestants are all Christian, but Mormons are not, on account of how they deny the divinity of Christ and also consider “God” to be a powerful being of flesh and bone, rather than the supraconceptual reality affirmed by Catholic and Protestant theologians.
Looking again at my definition, it’s in two parts. The first part consists of what a Christian believes and the second part refers to how a Christian acts based on those beliefs. It’s important to note that the second part is voluntary, and is dependent on the first part.
Anyway, I digress. The point is that I considered myself a Christian, I fit that definition of a Christian – I believed that God was made flesh in the man Jesus Christ, who died on a cross and rose again, and I dedicated my life to following, loving and serving Christ
As I got deeper into Christianity, I found I was more and more interested in the experiential aspects of the religion, rather than the theoretical. In other words, I wanted to know God personally, feel God, rather than be able to argue well with people about God. I had stumbled across “Mere Christianity” by CS Lewis and had gone on to read every book by Lewis I could find. After five or six, I hit “The Four Loves”, and found mention of “The Imitation of Christ” near the beginning. Intrigued, I found a copy of The Imitation and read it cover to cover, three times.
The Imitation of Christ is a devotional book, written five centuries ago by a monk, for monks. I was immediately attracted to the completeness of the submission to God that the book espoused. I became extremely interested in Christian monastic spirituality, and read everything I could about prayer from authors like St John of the Cross, St Teresa of Avila, Brother Lawrence, Thomas Merton, etc. I came across Thomas Keating and began practising centring prayer, which is a reiteration of the contemplative prayer tradition in Christianity.
I had grown up with the idea of prayer as asking God for things, whereas now I was experiencing prayer as a submission to God in Christ, and knowing Him personally.
My readings into the spiritual practices of Christianity inevitably led me to reading about some of the spiritual practices of other religions. I was struck by the similarity of the practices and the descriptions of the experiences of God. The love poetry of the Muslim called Rumi was impressive. Here was someone who obviously truly loved God – a God described in almost identical terms to those of the Christians’ experiences, and my own. Time and time again, I came across the writings of spiritual teachers of all religions (at least the theistic ones, like Judaism, Islam and Hinduism) that paralleled those of Christian teachers.
My problem with this was the uniqueness of Christ. In the Bible, Christ says, “No one comes to the Father but through me.” I was brought up being told that people who don’t believe in Christ are not going to Heaven, yet here are these writers, these people from other religions, who obviously are on intimate terms with the same God I’d come to know, the same God that Christians and come to know through Christ. It would be a cruel joke for God to get so intimate in life with people who wouldn’t be with Him in death. I determined that I had no idea what the requirements for entry to Heaven were, and that I would leave it up to God. I still considered Christianity supreme among the religions, with other religions being more accurate or less accurate approximations of the perfection that is the Christian faith.
As this was happening, my understanding of religion and spirituality as an increasing clarity in the apprehension of reality was growing. I had come to see, in the words of a dream I had, that truth was an end in itself. It was truth with which I was concerned, and God was truth, and truth was God.
During my readings, one particular quote from Meister Eckhart had stuck with me: “What is truth? Truth is something so great that if God Himself could diverge from it, I would leave God and cling to truth.” When I first read it, this passage made me uneasy. The thought of leaving God was alien to me, unthinkable. I comforted myself by pointing out that God is truth, and that if one were to leave something in order to cling to truth, that “something” could not have really been God. It must have been a mistaken idea about God.
Meanwhile, my experiences of God were having unusual effects on my beliefs regarding Him. I began to distinguish more clearly between my faith in God and my faith in beliefs about God. More than ever, I believed that God was all-powerful and all-loving, but other beliefs were becoming less and less important to me. Whether or not Hell existed was inconsequential to me. Whether or not Heaven existed became just as unimportant. I no longer cared what religion was “rightest”. More important to the topic at hand, my elationship with God hinged less and less on the belief that He was born in the flesh as the man Jesus Christ.
I still believed that Jesus was God, in theory, but I recognised that if the Bible disappeared tomorrow and I’d never heard of Jesus, my relationship with God would remain the same. My faith in God remained; my faith in the accuracy of Christianity was faltering.
It’s interesting to note that if I had not prayed and experienced God as a Christian, I would never have had the faith in God, in reality, to let go of my Christian beliefs. But that is what happened. As I gave more and clearer thought to why I believed Jesus was God, I realised that I had no real reasons. I had no reason to believe the Bible was flawlessly accurate and I had no reason to believe that those who claimed Jesus was God were any more clued up on the matter than I was, and I was not clued up at all. I recognised that I had no way of knowing whether or not Jesus was God.
Another interesting thing here is to compare what had happened to my beliefs with the ways I had defended those beliefs in the past. Let’s take the whole Christian belief structure as a worldview, a way that one believes the world to be. When one challenges a worldview, they accuse it of being one of two things: internally inconsistent or externally inconsistent. In responding to these accusations, the apologist asserts the internal and external consistency of the worldview.
Now, questioning the internal consistency of a worldview is questioning whether or not such a world is possible. To question the internal consistency of a worldview is to suggest that two or more statements made in the worldview are contradictory. When one is questioning the internal consistency of the Christian worldview, for example, one might ask how it is possible that God is both loving and sends people to Hell.
Questioning the external consistency of a worldview is questioning whether or not such a perspective matches up with reality as we experience it. To question the external consistency of a worldview is to suggest that there are observable phenomena left unexplained by the worldview, or that the explanations of the worldview are contrary to our experiences. When one is questioning the external consistency of some Christian worldviews, for example, one might point out that evidence suggests the world has been around a lot longer than the Bible implies.
Now, I was able to defend the Christian worldview against both of these kinds of accusations without too much trouble, because when taken as a whole and with a little twisting, the Christian worldview is both externally and internally consistent. It is possible that reality could be the way Christianity says it is, and it also explains all observable phenomena. The interesting thing is that once one sees the world from the perspective of a particular worldview, all observable phenomena appear to lend weight to the worldview. Having accepted a Christian worldview, every crime I see committed is yet more evidence of Christianity being right about original sin. If I had accepted, instead, a Buddhist perspective, every crime I saw would be yet more evidence of Buddhism being right about the ignorance of most people stuck in a samsaric view of the world.
In other words, once someone believes something, they keep believing it more and more. If the worldview is internally and externally consistent (both logically possible and fits with experience), then it cannot be proven incorrect. Once someone has all the answers, asking the questions will only reinforce their certainty, even though the same questions will elicit different answers from different people with different worldviews. A well-researched atheist can explain the universe coming from nothing in terms of quantum physics, just as a Christian can explain the universe coming from nothing in terms of God’s creation. Both can answer the question “Where did the universe come from?” to their satisfaction, even though both can’t be right. And, while there is no evidence one way or another on the matter, or while we can adapt our worldview to account for newly arising evidence, we cannot be proven wrong.
It’s for this reason that one can be a perfectly intelligent atheist or a perfectly intelligent Christian, or Muslim, or any other worldview that’s internally and externally consistent. Intelligence doesn’t matter, unless the worldview is inconsistent somehow, in which case the intelligent person is forced to either drop the worldview, or change it to make it fit. There are plenty of inconsistent worldviews, of course, and cognitive dissonance accounts for a lot of them. But only the consistent ones will withstand the force of serious intellectual examination, as all of the major world religions have.
It’s also for this reason that people can become so frustrated by arguments about religion. Both see their consistent worldviews as patently obvious, and attack the other person’s worldview by either trying to find inconsistencies (which may well not be there) or by stating how the other person’s worldview is inconsistent with their own, which hardly helps. (“Islam can’t be right, because it says Jesus was only a prophet, when Jesus was actually the son of God! Jesus is obviously the son of God, because the following observable phenomena are explained by the Christian worldview, which includes Jesus being the son of God. Blah blah.”)
What does all of this have to do with me no longer being Christian? Well, one day I just woke up and realised that while I couldn’t necessarily prove Christianity wrong, at the same time I had no particular reason to believe that it was right. With the realisation that I had no reason to believe many of the claims made by Christianity, the beliefs dropped away, I no longer believed them and no longer fit the definition of a Christian.
And I stopped calling myself a Christian, even though I still loved God and prayed and all that. I stopped calling myself a Christian because I knew how much it annoyed me in the past when people would call themselves Christian but not fit the definition. Like, “Oh, I’m a Christian, but I don’t believe Jesus was God and I believe in reincarnation.” No! You’re not a Christian! That’s like saying, “Oh, I’m a capitalist, but I believe all wealth should be distributed evenly throughout society.” You know? So I didn’t want to be annoying like that, so I stopped calling myself a Christian.
And that’s the end of my story of why I’m not a Christian any more. I’m sorry it got a bit technical towards the end, but if you followed all that, hopefully you see my point. It wasn’t a matter of “Why stop believing?” It was a matter of “Why believe in the first place?” Since realising I was no longer a Christian, I’ve drifted further and further towards Buddhism, which is, on the whole, much more practical than theoretical, which suits me down to the ground, since it was the theory of Christianity I had no reason to accept.
I’ll conclude by noting something that struck me during the whole process, about the difference between faith and belief. It took, for me, faith (trust) in God, faith (trust) in reality, to sincerely question and let go of my beliefs.