Shatter Nicely

Most of the ex-Christian community online (and in real life, too, I would assume) seems to be made up of people who were raised as Christians, questioned those beliefs, and left the faith altogether as adults, or even teens.

It is somewhat less common to find someone who accepted Christ as an adult, got very deeply into living a biblical lifestyle, but then left the faith.

It can be kind of lonely to be surrounded by people who, as teenagers, could see how logically inconsistent and improbable the Bible is, when you yourself believed in it wholeheartedly as a full grown adult who was not raised to believe it.

Sometimes, I feel kind of foolish.  Those are the good days.  The rest of the time, I feel like a complete idiot.

Thinking back to what my life was like then, and the circumstances that led me to Christianity in the first place, I realize that I should let myself off the hook a little for being so eager to accept it as the truth.

The thing is, I had reasons for needing god, for needing salvation, reasons that teenagers rarely have in their lives.  As time went on, I had reasons for needing to keep believing, again reasons that teenagers rarely have.

I always felt like becoming Christians saved our marriage and that, in a lot of ways, our beliefs were holding our marriage together.  I could not afford to really scrutinize those beliefs because I needed them to be true.

I also felt like my faith was what was helping me get through some very difficult challenges with my son who has some neurobehavioral/mental health disorders that at the time were undiagnosed and untreated.

My life was hanging by a thread at times during those years and I could not afford to lose my faith; I needed it.

Once things started to get better and really settle down, I could no longer ignore the problems with the beliefs I had clung so dearly to.  I didn’t want to lose my faith that had served me so well during those dark times, but I could not continue to believe in things that were so clearly not true.

Those months that I was struggling with those doubts and moments of outright disbelief were some of the hardest I have had to deal with because the outcome was inevitable, no matter how much I wanted it not to be so.

It’s a common belief among Christians that whenever things get tough an atheist will always run back to god.  It might seem from what I have said above that would be the case with me.  But, it won’t be.  It hasn’t been.

I came to Christ at a time when I was dealing with a lot of things that I did not know how to deal with.  I may even have had postpartum depression, making me even more vulnerable.  (That is something I would like to get into more in another post.)  I was looking for reasons to believe, so it took very little to answer the few questions and doubts I had.  “The Case for Christ,” by Lee Strobel settled most of them.  Then, once I had my first “God moment,” I was completely convinced.

But now, I have had a chance to really examine the claims of Christianity, and those of Strobel, when I was not in crisis, when I was not in dire need of god being real.  Those little niggling questions and doubts grew into full-blown disbelief.

Realizing that I no longer believed was a disappointment, to be sure.  I suffered a loss of something – of someone – that was a very important part of my life for so many years.  But, none of that mattered when it came to the truth, which was that it was all a fairy tale.

Now when I am faced with hard times, I cannot go back to that place where I can blindly believe that god is real.  I can’t just brush off doubts with a poorly reasoned book of Christian apologetics.  I am not in that naive place that I was back then.