It was the Summersault tour, which was put together by the Canadian band Our Lady Peace, and featured The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, A Perfect Circle, and others. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, and I saw the Montreal show.

I was just listening to the song “Judith,” by A Perfect Circle, a song that I had heard many times on the radio, but without the context that I now have, it carried no meaning for me.

Up until I was a Christian, I really didn’t know much about Christianity because my mom had such a traumatic experience with it. My childhood was virtually religion-free and, since I didn’t have any religious friends, nor did my mom, it just never came up.

Now that I have been a Christian, and left Christianity with some scarring of my own, this song has a lot more meaning.

According to Wikipedia, the song is about the lead singer’s mother, Judith, who had suffered a stroke and was left confined to a wheelchair.

These are the lyrics:

You’re such an inspiration
For the ways that I will
Never, ever choose to be
Oh so many ways for me to show you
How your savior has abandoned you

Fuck your God, your Lord, your Christ
He did this, took all you had and
Left you this way, still you pray, never stray, never
Taste of the fruit, never thought to question “Why?”

It’s not like you killed someone
It’s not like you drove a hateful spear into his side
Praise the one who left you broken down and paralyzed

He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…

Oh so many ways for me to show you
How your dogma has abandoned you

Pray to your Christ, to your God
Never taste of the fruit, never stray, never break, never
Choke on a lie even though he’s the one who
Did this to you, you never thought to question “Why?”

It’s not like you killed someone
It’s not like you drove a spiteful spear into his side
Talk to Jesus Christ as if he knows the reasons why

He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…
He did it all for you…

I can understand the frustration he must have felt at the idea that there is a loving god who nonetheless allowed this tragedy to happen to his mother.

I think we all have struggled with trying to reconcile that contradiction, whether we kept our faith in the end or not.

I still find it kind of strange that the message of that song didn’t even register in my mind back in 2000. I mean, the lyrics are pretty straight forward. But, then, I also did not understand the kind of faith he is talking about, either.

A lot can change in a decade.

In coaching, there are 9 guiding principles. The first is that people have something in common. When you are coaching, it is important that you come from a place where you are not judging your coachee. You arrive at that place by first acknowledging that we all share a common ground of being.

This principle has really resonated with me, especially as it applies to talking with people of a different religion.

As atheists, it is easy to convey an attitude of derision toward people who believe things that we find ridiculous. Some do so more than others, but even if we try to be nice, our language is often received as hostile by religious people.

I find that it is important for me to return to that common ground of being and remember that life is hard to make sense of sometimes, for all of us. Some of us need to believe in god in order to try and make sense of it. For others, including myself, life makes more sense without religion.

But, either way, we are all people trying to navigate our way through life, and when we remember that common place we all start from, it makes it easier to relate to each other on a meaningful level.

I am writing a paper this coming weekend about this guiding principle for one of my classes. It would be of tremendous help to me if you shared with me your thoughts about what you just read. You can comment here, or send me a private message using the “Contact” link above.

Some possible questions to answer for me: How do you identify your religious beliefs? Generally, how do you perceive or interact with people with different views than your own? Would it change the way you perceive or interact with others if you kept in mind that everyone has something in common? Or anything else you want to share.

Thanks for your help!

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.

I have yet to talk to my children about my deconversion. They do not know that I am an atheist. They don’t even know that I am not a Christian. They obviously know that we stopped going to church. And they are perfectly content not to rock that boat, lest they have to start going again.

They actually told me that when I asked them if they wondered why we stopped going, a few months after we stopped. They did wonder, but they thought if they brought it up, we would start going again, so they didn’t say anything. Yeah, like we stopped going because we forgot!

I ended up telling them that we wanted to take some time to think about what we believed. The previous summer (the year before I stopped believing), we spent some time checking out different churches, so our spiritual indecisiveness was nothing new to them.

I still haven’t checked back in with them about what I believe. And my guess is they still don’t want to bring it up, for fear of returning to church.

I often wonder how I should handle talking to them about religion. I don’t want them to grow up holding onto the beliefs I raised them with during the 5 and a half years I was a hardcore evangelical Christian. Yet, I also don’t want to convince them not to believe in anything. I feel like that’s their choice.

As it turns out, I think there is little concern that they will be evangelicals. That’s where Percy Jackson comes in.

My 14-year-old started reading the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series back when he was 10 or 11, when only the first two books in the series were released, long before the movie. He immediately loved the books. Not only is it a great series, but the titular character also has ADHD, which makes him better at battling monsters, and positive uses for ADHD can be hard to come by for a boy struggling with the disorder.  He was so interested in the stories that he also read books on Greek mythology, becoming very knowledgeable on the subject.

One day, my oldest two sons were having a conversation about Hell and my 12-year-old, who by this time had also read the Percy Jackson series, said, “How do we know that hell is like it says in the Bible? How do we know that it’s not like the underworld in Percy Jackson? No one can really know. Maybe there isn’t even a hell at all.”

I smiled when I heard this. I guess I underestimated their ability to think critically about religious belief.

Last night, my 12-year-old said something else reassuring. “I pray to whatever god may be up there…” That doesn’t sound like the kind of dogmatic religious belief that I don’t want them to have. Besides, I think he meant that figuratively.

One of these days, I will have to have a conversation with them about religion, probably several. But for now, I just need to keep doing what I have been, exposing them to different views and teaching them to think for themselves.

Addendum: This morning my 12-year-old created a facebook account and he listed his religion as “awesomeness.” Heh.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? – Matthew 6:26

I convinced myself so deeply of that, I completely stopped stressing about money.

Over the past year, the stress about money has crept back in, though, and now it is causing me sleepless nights and headaches.

Even with tithing, we were still doing better financially than we are now. Part of that is the cost of living going up, but most of it is the fact that we started letting ourselves have all the things we had been denying ourselves due to our beliefs. You know, the fun things.

It’s not fun to stress out about money, though, so I am working on getting my finances back in order. It looks like it will only be painful for about another month, and then things will be back on track. We should still have money for some fun stuff, but we will be having fun within our means.

This experience of having money troubles made me realize just how brainwashed I was. I really believed so strongly that God would take care of me that I did not even worry about anything.

I would love to be that carefree again, sometimes.

I am sure there is a way to worry less than I have been, and I am working on getting that under control, but I have to admit that there have been quite a few times that I wished I could have that child-like faith again, even if only for one night. At least I would be able to get some sleep.

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a few days now. Today, I read something that reminded me about it. I read books out loud to my 12- and 7-year-old sons. Right now we are reading, “The Lightning Thief,” the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, by Rick Riordan.

Chiron, the centaur teacher at a camp for children of gods, is explaining to Percy, who is a demigod, that humans will not notice if a monster is trying to kill him. He explains,

You will see things just as they are, being a half-blood, but humans will interpret things quite differently. Remarkable, really, the lengths to which humans will go to fit things into their version of reality.

Remarkable, indeed. I continue to be fascinated, and at times aghast, at the lengths to which I went to fit things into the Christian version of reality all those years.

Still, I can see why I and so many others choose to do so. Sometimes seeing things as they are can be a bit painful.

I agree that religion is not the same as race or sexual orientation (which themselves are not the same as each other).  But is religion a choice?

I say, no.  At least, not in the sense that one usually talks about something being a choice.

I didn’t choose to stop believing in god; I just did.  It was like a switch went off (or on).  Once it did, there was no going back.

I have read many deconversion stories since then and so many of the people who left Christianity – who stopped believing in Christianity – wanted badly to still believe.

If belief is a choice, then why couldn’t they go back to believing?

Belief is a complex process.  It is not as simple as choosing to believe or not.

A friend of my mother has been having some problems with her adult daughter.  She, the daughter, recently joined a cult, but then stopped believing what the cult believed.  Unfortunately, she had already married into the cult and is in need of her mother’s help to get out.  She feels like it wasn’t her fault that she believed all of that stuff, like she couldn’t help it.

I was discussing with my mom whether or not this is a case of “she got herself into this mess.”  (My mom’s the tough love type.)  I was trying to explain that when you really believe in a religion, it is almost like you have no control over your thoughts, but not exactly.

It’s really hard to explain.

When I look back on things that I believed, I can’t believe that was me.  I’ve taken to calling my 5 years as a Christian my “Jesus coma” because it was like my brain was shut off.

I’m not saying that people are not responsible for what they do when they are under the influence of religion, just that there is more to it than a simple, conscious choice.

So, if you’re an atheist, don’t get frustrated at the seemingly impenetrable layer of stupidity encasing the brains of religious people.  They are not deliberately choosing to be obtuse.

And keep the conversations going.  You would be amazed at the number of things people said to me in debates over the years – things that I had completely dismissed at the time – that came flooding back into my mind when I started to have serious doubts about my beliefs.

Even when you feel like you are not getting through, you are planting seeds, to borrow a biblical metaphor, that may some day yield fruit.