That isn’t true and that isn’t the image I want people to have of me.

Even though I don’t believe in “god,” or really anything woo-woo, I still appreciate the wonder and magical feelings about our existence and our interrelatedness with each other and the world around us. I can relate to people’s need for a mystical explanation for things, even though I myself don’t feel like I need one. I don’t want people to make assumptions about what I think, feel, or believe based on their negative preconceptions about atheists.

There’s always agnostic, which is pretty innocuous to anyone who isn’t strictly religious. But that implies a level of uncertainty in my beliefs that I don’t have. Not to mention the flack I would catch from other atheists.

I have been playing with the word non-theist. Obviously, I am a non-theist, since atheists are a subset of non-theists, but so are agnostics, humanists, materialists, and others. So, at least the word non-theist leaves open to discussion what the nature of my belief – or unbelief – is, rather than subjecting myself to the negative baggage carried by the word atheist.

But then, many people equate non-theist with atheist, without recognizing the nuance, so that leaves me back where I started.

I guess I just have to accept the fact that people are not comfortable with atheism. I need to get used to it, and work on ways of engaging people to change their minds, rather than trying to hide behind a different label.

I have always thought there was immense value in marking the passing of time and important events with celebrations. Getting together with family and friends – especially when there is delicious food involved – is good for the soul (meaning, of course, our emotional/psychological well-being, not a literal soul, in the religious sense).

Living in Vermont, winter is long, cold, snowy, dark, and did I mention long? Spring is a season that just begs to be welcomed with a large celebration! And why wouldn’t we want to celebrate it? It is the time of the earth’s rebirth. The grass is turning green, the birds are returning, the trees are budding, the bulbs are blooming, and, most importantly, the snow has melted. Another long, snowy winter has come to an end. Pass the ham!

I noticed this year that a lot of stores have spring-themed decor, rather than just religious-themed, making it even easier to have a secular Easter celebration. Now I can have flower cupcake papers and butterfly serving dishes, alongside the traditional bunnies, eggs, and chicks.

Now, I know I don’t have to celebrate spring on Easter, but the vernal equinox is usually still way too cold, and it’s a convenient way to plan the date and make sure I don’t forget to mark this special time of year.

So, while Christians are thinking about their stories of the death and resurrection of Jesus and what it means to them, I will be taking a break from my hectic life to celebrate family and welcome spring, thankful that I no longer need to plan my cooking around the church service.

Have a happy Easter, and thanks for reading Shatter Nicely!

That annoyed me to no end. Here in Vermont, it was not beautiful, nor sunny. I thought, If god is smiling on Texas, then what’s he doing to Vermont?

That’s the implication of statements like that. If you believe god is showing you favor when things go well, then what does that mean when the opposite is true? If god answers your prayers when he cures your loved ones, then he’s ignoring the prayers of others whose loved ones are allowed to die.

I know, I know, god works in mysterious ways, et cetera, but I can’t help but feel like those ways are kind of dickish.

Anyway, this morning, I saw the headline, Texas burning ‘from border to border,’ and it reminded me of that facebook post.

So, if god was smiling on Texas that day, what’s he doing now?

At any rate, I thought I would throw this post up here as a place for any conversations that anyone wants to continue, or even new ones you want to start.

I want to add a couple things to my comments in the “Molecules” post.

First, I want to say that I am not here to debate theology. That’s not to say that I am so sure that I am right (that there is no god) that I would never listen to someone try and convince me, or anything like that. I am not closed-minded. It’s just not what this blog is about for me. I am not posting here to make an argument or convince anyone to become an atheist. I am not an evangelical. I don’t need converts.

This blog is just where I post about my feelings and experiences with Christianity (a very specific kind of Christianity, not every possible permutation of Christianity), my deconversion experience, and my thoughts about life, and other stuff, now that I am an atheist.

I don’t have the time, nor the inclination, to debate theology. I welcome all comments and I enjoy reading what others have to say on the matter, but I want to let you know that I will probably not participate much in the discussion. Don’t take it personally.

Speaking of not taking things personally, I know this blog is hard to read for anyone who is still a Christian. It feels like a personal attack. Know that it is not. If I am angry, snide, sarcastic, or in any other way unpleasant, it is toward the emotional harm that I brought to myself by believing things that I believed and doing things that I did, while I was a Christian.

This is about me. This blog is about me. Not you. Not god. But me. This blog is a place where I come to sort out my feelings and thoughts. Along the way, I have met other people who have had similar experiences. This blog is about them, too.

I know that Christianity is a very personal religion. As such, it is hard to separate a person’s dislike of or abandonment of the religion from that person’s feelings for you. I get that. I was there. I also experience it from the other side, now. I feel the pain of knowing that some of my relationships will never be the same again. I even still have friends and family members who do now know that I am an atheist because I am still afraid of what it will do to our relationship.

But, try to keep in mind that I do not have any bad feelings toward anyone for believing. I don’t think they are stupid or foolish. I understand that everyone is just trying to make sense of this crazy world we all live in, and we all do that the best way we know how.

Please respect that I am just doing the same thing.

First, let me post what I wrote. To set it up: I was responding to a question about how accepting that there is no god could change my political views. The commenter also said that I did not seem “comfortable” in my atheism, and suggested that I have second thoughts about it.

You ask why accepting that there is no god would change my politics. The reason is simple, if I could be wrong about something that was such a huge part of how I lived my life – it was my life! – then what else could I be wrong about? I have questioned EVERYTHING. My politics have changed a little, but my parenting has changed a lot. My marriage has changed a lot. The way I eat, the way I dress, the way I talk, what I watch, what I read, how I think about marriage and sexuality and money and life – EVERYTHING has changed! There is nothing, no area of life, where I have not challenged my thinking and what I have always accepted as right or the right way to think.

So, in a way, I am not comfortable. It is not atheism that I am uncomfortable with, though. I do not have doubts about that. I really do not question if I am wrong about god. I do not believe anymore that god exists. What I am uncomfortable about is that the foundations of my life have been shaken to the core! I have to rethink everything – nothing is certain! It has led me to a much better and more fulfilling life, but it is scary. It makes me uneasy. It is difficult to face uncertainty, but I have discovered so many wonderful things about myself and the world around me. And I wouldn’t have it any other way!

I have undergone some major life changes, any one of which would have been difficult. I have never really listed it out like that or though about just how many things have changed for me.

Geez, no wonder I get so overwhelmed at times!

It makes me feel better about it to look back and see how substantial of a change it really was. (And it makes me realize that I have left you guys out of the loop on a lot of things, things which I should be blogging about!)

When I left Christianity, I found myself with a lot of unanswered questions about life. The more I thought about those questions, the more I realized that I needed to start looking at things in a different way. I’ve lived most of my life just going along with what I thought was the normal or right way to look at things.

I didn’t come to a place of challenging my thinking on my own. It was a combination of influences from many different places, from an old high school acquaintance to atheist blogger extraordinaire Greta Christina, and everyone in between. Friends, family, people on facebook or twitter, bloggers, commenters on blogs, I have gathered wisdom from so many places and it has made me realize that there is a whole world out there of opinions and beliefs and experiences, and that to limit ourselves to one way of looking at the world is to deny ourselves a chance to really live the best life we can.

I feel like my life is much better than it was a year or two ago, as a direct result of stepping outside my comfort zone and asking myself some tough questions about, well, pretty much everything.

Don’t get me wrong, it was difficult. The days and weeks when I was not blogging were often times that I was struggling with things. But change is growth. And growth is a good thing.

So, what areas of your life changed when you left your religion? Or, if you haven’t had a de-conversion experience, when is the last time that you challenged one of your beliefs? What was the outcome? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

You don’t need God— to hope, to care, to love, to live.

The message will be spread via bus, billboard, and YouTube video.

The goal of this campaign is to dispel some of the false beliefs about atheists, namely that they are selfish, immoral people.

“One common myth is that the nonreligious lead empty, meaningless, selfish, self-centered lives. This is not only false, it’s ridiculous,” says CFI president and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay.

But, not everyone agrees that you can have a good life without god.

“You are talking about joy, and pleasure, and goodness and so on. If you’re employing words like that and you have no objective basis for the reality of those words … in other words, if you don’t believe in a moral law giver who actually gives meaning to the words good and evil, you can … put up billboards all day long and they mean nothing,” [Craig Hazen, director of the M.A. Program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in Southern California] told The Christian Post.

[...]

The only way to know good, joy and love or even pain is if there is a moral law giver who can actually communicate those things, he maintained.

“Apart from that, you make it up as you go.”

He’s right, in a sense. The Christian definition of “good” is “whatever God says,” and the definition of “bad” is “everything else.”

Old Testament-style rape and genocide=good!

Gender rolls that don’t respect women=good!

Fearthought=good!

Homosexuals are an abomination=good!

So, yeah, the word “good” does not mean the same to an atheist as it does to a Christian. In fact, most atheists wouldn’t want that definition of good.

The same goes for love. In Christianity, love comes from God. “We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19) So, creating humans and giving them a code of morality that you know they can’t follow, then punishing them when they don’t follow it, is love. Sending your son to be beaten and killed in order for you to forgive the beings you created for not being able to follow the rules you knew they couldn’t follow is love.

And then there’s joy! Joy means putting Jesus first, then others, then yourself! Joy means giving your life to serve the Lord, no matter what hardships it entails.

So, he’s right! We do have to make up our own definitions of those words!

Hazen went further to contend that an unbeliever is actually “borrowing the Christian worldview to give your atheist life meaning.”

“I just don’t know where they’re getting their concept of good. They are just random bags of molecules. Morality … does not apply to random bags of molecules,” he said.

I think I demonstrated above that we are not using the Christian definitions. And nothing about my life as an atheist has anything borrowed from the worldview I had as a Christian.

I don’t believe that I need to be a wife and mother, and nothing else. I don’t believe that I need to tithe to the church, even if that leaves us without enough money for food. I don’t believe that I need to chastise myself for thinking normal human thoughts, like “hey, that man (who isn’t my husband) is attractive” or “I don’t always like being around my kids.”

So, where are we getting our concept of good? I mean, after all, we’re just random bags of molecules.

Well, fortunately, we are random bags of molecules with sentience. All throughout human history, people have had a concept of good. More or less, the concept is the same. But, I don’t think they were all borrowing from Christianity.

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.

Well, today, I unexpectedly got to bring the kids to my mom’s house for a couple nights.  So, during the hour drive, I finally had some time alone.  Those first minutes alone that I get are usually spent decompressing, so I didn’t really think about anything specific, but I was still feeling pretty down.

The ride home was very rainy and dark, not unlike how I was feeling.  Then, about 30 minutes into it, I came around a corner to see a clear patch of blue sky and the sun shining through a break in the clouds.  It was amazing.  It was like seeing hope.  It was that moment of realization that it never rains forever, that the sun always comes out.

At that moment, I felt like God was with me again.

That was exactly how I used to feel when I was a believer and I was having a hard time and I would turn to God.  There would be a moment, not always right away, not always when I wanted it, but there would be a moment when I felt God with me and I knew that things would somehow be okay, that the sun would come out again.

But, that wasn’t God today.  And that wasn’t God then.  At least, I don’t believe it was.

For that moment, when I first felt that hope and it reminded me of the god I once believed in, I felt like I needed him again.  I felt like that would be the only way I would feel that hopeful again.

But, when I realized what I was saying, I realized how ridiculous that was.  Why can’t I have hope without God?  Will the sun never shine again, unless he makes it so?

I know that isn’t true.  This past year has been full of ups and downs.  When things get bad, it never lasts forever.  My whole life has been full of ups and downs, and things have always gotten better.

I’m not sure why it seems easier to trust in an invisible god than it is to trust in my own experience.  I know things never stay bad, so why doesn’t that alone give me something to hold on to?

The truth is, it does.  Sometimes I just need reminding.  Sometimes I need to actually see the sun to remember that it is still there.

Today, I saw this video posted with a note that it was not being played on major radio stations because it’s “politically incorrect.”  (Actually, it wasn’t that exact video, but it was a video for that song with the lyrics on the screen and various patriotic images.)

The song is “In God We Still Trust,” by Diamond Rio.  I’ll spare you having to listen to it (it’s country, and not even tolerable country) by posting part of the lyrics.

You place your hand on His Bible, when you swear to tell the Truth
His name is on our greatest Monuments, and all our money too,
And when we Pledge allegiance, there’s no doubt where we stand,
There is no separation, we’re one Nation under Him.

In God We Still Trust
Here in America
He’s the one we turn to every time
The goin’ gets rough
He is the source of all our Strength
The One who watches over us
Here in America
In God We Still Trust

Now there are those among us, who want to push Him out,
And erase His name from everything, this country’s all about,
From the Schoolhouse to the Courthouse, they’re Silencing His Word,
Now it’s time for all Believers, to make our Voices heard.

In God We Still Trust,
Here in America…

So, I made the following comment,

I don’t think it’s about political correctness. A radio station is a business and they need to appeal to the maximum audience. That song is very exclusive of people who don’t believe in that god, even implying they are not American enough. And, yes, the lyrics allude to a specific god. I know many people who would not want to hear that song on the radio.

Basically, I heard everything from “you can change the station” to “it’s a Christian Nation, get over it!”

While it is true, that I can change the station – and even truer that I would not be listening to a station that played country music in the first place! – people also have the right to complain.

That is not a song that merely mentions God; it goes as far as to imply that it is somehow not American to not believe in God.  It’s a fairly polarizing song that I can see a radio station wanting to avoid.

As it turns out, according to Snopes, it isn’t even true.

Still, the dust up got me thinking about the issue of public expressions of religion.  Obviously (or perhaps not), I think people have a right to express their faith.  But, people also have the right to protest things that are offensive.

Most religious-themed songs are not offensive to me, but this one kind of is.  I don’t like what it says about this being a Christian country.  I don’t like being told that I am less of an American because I don’t believe in God.

I also think that is a dangerous view that should be protested.

Last I checked, we had the freedom to have whatever religion we choose, or none at all.  We are not a Christian country; we are a free country.