This is the fourth part in a five part series about my journey to Christianity and back. Here are part one, part two, and part three. Part three ends with me realizing that I no longer believed in the Christian god.
So there I was, not believing in Christianity any more, but still not really knowing what I believed in. And not really knowing what to do next. I was afraid to tell anyone because I didn’t know what would happen. This was such a big change in me.
I already told the story on my old blog about contacting my blog friend and atheist JD Ryan from the blog Five Before Chaos, so I won’t repeat it here. That was my first step toward coming out as a non-Christian. Now, it was real.
That night, after I talked to JD, I told my husband. That was hard. Among Christians, especially the conservative evangelical variety, everything good comes from God, so a life without God means a life without the things that are of God. If morals come from God, then atheists cannot have morals, at least, not the kind of morals that are grounded in the truth of what is right. So, of course, his first reaction was to think that something else bad was coming. It was a tough time getting through those first few weeks, but eventually we talked through what had happened to lead me away from the faith and he saw where I was coming from. He is still a believer in God and in Christ, but he is no longer being held hostage by the strict beliefs that we had.
Telling my family was not difficult at all, since they are not Christians, though it was interesting to hear what they thought of my little foray into evangelical Christianity.
The hardest part was telling my Christian friends. I actually had it relatively easy because the people in my close circle all recently moved out of state. I broke the news via facebook. A couple of people were deeply hurt and tried to talk me back. I was sent creationism links and told to think about my children and what would happen to them if I were wrong. It was assumed that I was angry at God, of course. The worst response I got was silence. That was hurtful.
I still haven’t told anyone from my church. I just stopped going.
After my big coming out on facebook, the reality set in. I was no longer a Christian. So now what? I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know what kind of music to listen to. I had let my religious beliefs dictate my thoughts and actions for years. It was like I needed to re-learn everything.
I spent the next coupe of months trying to get my bearings. I felt a little crazy at first. I started to believe that there are no morals without God. I went from looking at everything in terms of absolutes, to looking at everything as ambiguous, wondering if anything, short of obvious violations of other human beings physical bodies, is ever really wrong.
It sounds so ridiculous to me now. I mean, I new right from wrong before I was a Christian, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to know right from wrong after. Thankfully, I had a friend to point that out to me. It really saved me a lot of trouble reinventing the wheel.
Still, in those first months, I questioned everything about my life. My mind was overfilled with all of these life questions, big and small. It was miserable, but at the same time it was wonderful to have my mind working again.
After the excitement and relief at being free from my oppressive and thought-controlling religious beliefs started to subside, I went through a month or so of being depressed and kind of lost. Now that I was free from Christianity, I wasn’t really sure where to go.
When I left Christianity, I called myself an agnostic. I really wasn’t sure what I believed and I wasn’t really sure if we could ever really know god, even if there was one. But, it didn’t take long to start thinking of myself as an atheist. The more I thought about things, and the more I read about the experiences of other former Christians, ranging from atheist to agnostic to people who found some other religion, the more I realized that I didn’t really see the existence of any god as a likelihood or even a necessity to living a full life.
But still, something was missing, and I think that is why I became a bit depressed. The problem with atheism is that it lacks any sort of meaningful explanation for the experiences that I had as a Christian that seemed to transcend my being, the things that I had attributed to God.
Sure, I read things about probability and random chance and errors we make in reasoning when we attribute events to a supernatural force. But there still seemed to be something lacking in that explanation. I had felt things that were bigger than myself and I needed an explanation for that. I needed to figure out the meaning of my life without God.
(Read part five.)
