This is the third post in my five part series about my journey to Christianity and back. Part one was how I became a Christian. Part two was about how I became even more Christian. This is part three, how my beliefs started to unravel and I stopped believing in God.
I suspect that I had doubts about Christianity building up for years. I don’t really remember any specifically, but there were times that I went through a low period, where I would feel disconnected from God, and would emerge with a renewed faith and purpose. I would always dismiss those times as the result of my own selfishness and unwillingness to accept God’s plan. Any doubts that contributed to how I was feeling were pushed down or dismissed.
In June of 2009, I saw an online ad for “The Gabriel Method,” a book by Jon Gabriel about how he went from over 400 pounds to 184 pounds. I know it’s kind of lame, but the before and after pictures were so amazing and I was able to find it on Amazon pretty cheap, so I bought it.
The book was interesting, but what’s relevant here is his focus on visualization. He explained how he visualized his ideal body as part of his weight loss method. This has actually been confirmed as effective in studies.
I started thinking about visualization and how powerful our minds are. Then I started thinking about all of the different things that people believe and how that helps them cope with bad circumstances. It’s like we can convince ourselves to believe anything. If that’s true, what if I was only convincing myself that I had experienced God? What if it was all in my head all along?
So, of course my first reaction was to put the book away because it was obviously satanic. No, I’m serious. That’s what I did.
But, what is done cannot be undone.
A few months later it started to come up again. What if it was all in my head? What if I only felt God because I believed that I did?
But that’s just part of what was happening to me. Around the same time that I read “The Gabriel Method,” I got interested in a book called “Teaching the Trivium,” which is about Christian classical home education. One of the foundations of a classical education is logic. I decided to brush up on logic myself before I started teaching it to the kids. It had been like 15 years since I studied it in college. In a Christian classical education, logic is used to defend Christianity. But in my case, brushing up on logic started to unravel mine. It brought up a lot of flaws in my thinking.
The final piece to this puzzle has to do with my son, the one with ADHD. After years of trying to get his behavior under control, we finally had amazing success with a non-stimulant medication called Strattera. It was like night and day. His mood and attitude were completely changed and he was finally able to utilize all of the coping methods we had been teaching him. It’s like it slowed down his impulsiveness enough to react appropriately to frustrating situations.
For years, the Christian community had told me to mistrust psychology and psychiatry because it would undermine my faith. His behavior was a spiritual attack and we needed to pray for protection.
So, I prayed and prayed and prayed. I trusted the Lord. I looked at my struggle as a test of my faith. Meanwhile, my son’s behavior got unbearable. He was a wreck. We all were wrecks.
When things finally got so bad that I broke down and took him in for a psychiatric evaluation, we finally got the help we needed. We learned that he has ADHD and we learned how to be better parents – and it was not the strict, authoritarian, obedience-at-all-costs parenting advice that came from the Christian community. And, eventually, we put him on medication, which is when all of the parenting efforts finally paid off and things got remarkably better.
Parenting, let alone homeschooling, a child with a neurobehavioral developmental disorder is extremely difficult. When the parents have no idea what they are dealing with or how to deal with it, it can be a living nightmare. Once my son’s ADHD was being managed, the stress level in the home went way down and I was able to actually think about things.
If a norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor drug could make his erratic, unreasonable behavior almost non-existent, then it wasn’t a spiritual attack at all. It had nothing to do with anything supernatural; it had to do with his brain chemistry and a lack of a specific type of neurotransmitter. Despite my pleas for years, God did not help my son, but science did.
It was like the perfect storm – realizing how powerful our minds are, examining the logical problems with my beliefs, and experiencing the superiority of science over superstition in a way that was life-changing. The floodgates opened and I began to question everything about this worldview I had believed in so deeply for years.
Needless to say, it did not withstand the scrutiny.
I was confused. I was conflicted. I didn’t understand what it would mean for my life if I wasn’t a Christian anymore. I didn’t know what to think.
Then one morning, I was getting up and I just stopped. I sat there on the edge of the bed and thought to myself, what would happen if I didn’t believe in God anymore? I decided to spend that one day as if God did not exist and see what would happen.
I remember that the sun was shining brightly that day. I felt relieved. I felt alive. I felt free. I finally understood what a self-imposed prison the Christian religion is. And I never went back.
So you said “what if I was only convincing myself that I had experienced God? What if it was all in my head all along?”
You make it sound as if this is a trivial thing “all in my head,” when in fact it is not so trivial.
I mean how do you know, for instance, that the whole of your existence is “not in your head”?
There is an interesting new field of science called neuro-theology. This is a much harder science then psychology and there are atheists, agnostics and “believers” involved with the research.
What they study is the brain and religious experience. Some titles are “Zen and the Brain” by Dr. James Austin (MIT Press) and “Why God Won’t Go Away” Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania. This last “use brain-imaging data they collected from Tibetan Buddhists lost in meditation and from Franciscan nuns deep in prayer”.
These are very interesting studies.
Consider this from the 2001 Newsweek article on the subject
Now I don’t know what you experienced, but all experience is understood within some context. Sometimes we misinterpret an experience because the context within which we understand it is incorrect. You experience may be genuine, but the context you used to understand your experience may be inappropriate to correctly understand it.
Or, it could have all been in your head…
“I mean how do you know, for instance, that the whole of your existence is “not in your head”?”
I don’t, but the point here is that I don’t believe that there is an actual physical entity that is involved in my life on a personal level, holds me to a certain code of conduct, and will subject me to eternal damnation if I don’t worship him.
I definitely had some genuine experiences, but I was definitely interpreting them in an incorrect context. I have been going through the process of sorting that all out, since I stopped believing in Christianity. That’s part of why I started writing this series.
Thanks for your interesting comment, Frank. Good to hear from you.
Charity said:
I don’t believe that there is an actual physical entity that is involved in my life on a personal level, holds me to a certain code of conduct, and will subject me to eternal damnation if I don’t worship him.
Yeah. That’s pretty unbelieveable.
I decided a long time ago that if the above were true, I work do my best to work against such a tyrant.
Years later, in my search, I ran across the Gnostics. Now the Gnostics are an interesting group of Christians whom, one could argue, are closer to the teaching of Jesus than modern day Christians.
Anyway, they believe that the God of the Bible, who they call the Demiurge, is actually a “fallen angel” who tried his hand at creation and screwed things up royally.
To them, Eve is the hero of Genesis and the Snake is the emissary of “The Real” who tries to inform Adam and Eve of the reality beyond the Demiurge’s “creation”.
Naturally once I heard about these guys it appealed to my own perverse perception of the Diety depicted by the Christian religion.
To the Gnostics (Gnosis means Knowledge in Greek), there was no need for Priests and such to act as intermediaries between man and “God”, that each individual could directly experience The Real.
Of course this made them “enemies of the State” with the State being the Catholic Church at the time. In fact the only Crusade to take place completely in Europe was to wipe out the Albigensians in France who were a form of Gnostics (known as the Albigensian Crusade).
Stangely, the more I learned and experienced, the more I could see that there was hidden symbolism with the Catholic Church (in which I was brought up) that pointed to deeeper realities than was generally understood by the congregation. And I thought that was curious.
Ryan, it’s just worth noting that a major concept in “Why God Won’t Go Away” (ant their more expansive “The Mystical Mind” is that all these “feelings of oneness” and other spiritual things may indeed be nothing more than biochemical reactions. Newberg points to this quite a bit, then, perhaps out of fear of offending the faithful, or perhaps because it seriously undermines his own belief system, he throws in that lousy apple analogy. If there’s serious evidence for the neurological component of the brain that handles spirituality no different than math or language, it’s kinda ridiculous to throw in that whole “but what if god is communicating to us through that way” nonsense.
JD said:
all these “feelings of oneness” and other spiritual things may indeed be nothing more than biochemical reactions.
Of course. But then again, so could “feelings” of love. And hate. Compassion, pity, happiness, sorrow, sadness. Etc.
Clearly we are bio-chemical robots with a quantum computer for a brain; responding chemically to stimuli in a non-deterministic manner that gives the illusion of free will (or random flailing depending on which side of the perceptual line you’re on).
Yes, we are clearly that, but is there something else as well? And the fact is, science can not answer that question because science can only come up with the electro-mechanical answer because that is what is observable. Science doesn’t do existential, it is not within it’s preview. If it turned out that invisible angels were in reality the cause of the phenomena known as gravity, science would never know, or care, so long as the angels conform to Fg = Gm1m2/r^2.
But it is a fact of quantum mechanics that an observer is required to collapse the wave of possibility. And this means that either each of us is a reality bubble, or there is another observer out there creating a seemless reality that we can all experience.
Dr Roger Penrose speculated that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of the universe precisely because the known laws of physics can not explain it (consciousness): precisely because humans can conceive of and grasp both mathematics and Godel’s theorem at the same time.
Frank said, “Science doesn’t do existential”
Exactly. That is one of the things I have in my queue of blogging topics. This is the reason, I think, that people still cling to religion. It fills a need that science just can’t.
Charity said
“This is the reason, I think, that people still cling to religion. It fills a need that science just can’t.”
I agree. But that need is not really, necessarily, spiritual. We are social animals. We psychologically desire a herd in which we can belong. All religions provide a herd to belong to thus fulfilling the need for a social network.
BTW, atheism serves the precise same function for many of its adherents.
Herds are dangerous to the independent intellectual. Herds by their very nature limit inquiry.