Over the past year, she has gotten to see the “new” non-Christian Charity, and she was intrigued. I seemed so different than the person she remembered. (I use new in quotes there because this isn’t the new me, it’s the old me, from before I was a Christian. I found myself again, and I like to make that distinction, for whatever reason.)

We visited for a few hours yesterday, talked about relationships and religion, and had a really nice time catching up. When she was leaving, she said that she always thought I was so stuck up, so robotic, and she really likes the person I am now.

That felt really good to hear, well bad, but good. It’s hard to be reminded of the person I turned into when I was a Christian. I didn’t like that person. I hate that person, in many ways. But, it’s great to be reminded of how different I am today, of how far I have come since those early days, after I left Christianity, when I was confused, alone, and afraid of what life was going to be like.

Today, I am a much stronger person, with a better sense of who I am. I hate to think about the person I was back then, how I had lost myself and lost focus of what I wanted out of life, how my personality was pushed down and replaced with that of a Stepford wife, how I was afraid of my own thoughts because, sometimes, they were unkind, lustful, prideful, or otherwise sinful. But, occasionally, it is good to be reminded of that person, so I can fully appreciate who I am today.

I haven’t been able to stop crying since I woke up and realized that today was the day. I can only being to imagine how they feel, my friend and her husband, but I bet that doesn’t even begin to come close.

And this is where I stop and say, I cannot believe in a personal god when things like this happen. I just can’t.

I know for some, their belief gets them through hard times. That’s good. I don’t want to try to take that away from anyone, really. I don’t seek to de-convert. Everyone needs to do what they need to do to get through this crazy thing called life. And, as long as you are not harming others, you can believe what you want. That goes double if it keeps you afloat when nothing else will.

But that isn’t where I am. That isn’t what I need. In fact, I find trying to believe that there is a personal god who loves us unconditionally too painful to reconcile with tragedies like this.

I get that I am not supposed to understand, god is too big, he works in mysterious ways, and all that. I get that. And I didn’t say it was too hard to understand; I said it was too painful.

The idea that this all-loving god created me specifically for his purpose, and his purpose involves causing me great pain so I can become how he wants me to be is, frankly, a kind of love I don’t want.

When someone I love experiences something painful, I want them to learn and grow from the experience. I want that good to come out of the bad they are forced to go through. But, I wouldn’t conclude that I wanted them to go through the painful experience in the first place. The growth is a positive outcome of something negative that could not be helped. But, if it could be helped, I think it should be.

To say that this person I love wouldn’t be good enough without the painful experience and subsequent growth is just too cruel. That is not the way in which I love people. That is not the way in which I want to be loved. I love you just how you are, but I want you to suffer, so you can grow into a more lovable person. No, thank you.

I just can’t believe in a personal god who is directly involved in our lives. And to believe in any other god beyond that is seemingly pointless.

So, here I am, just grieving for my friends and their loss. Hoping that they can find some peace and gain some wisdom from this tragedy, but knowing that there is no higher power who allowed this to happen for a reason. There is no reason that anyone should lose a child.

Things just happen, and we just try to get through them the best we can, making the most out of this life we have, with all of it’s joy and pain. And that’s really enough for me.

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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.

To those of you who once came out as an atheist to a number of people all at once, what did you say? Do you still have that note, letter, or email?

I first came out about my unbelief on my old blog She’s Right. Since it was a She’s Right reader, frequent commenter, and general antagonist who was the very first person I told that I no longer believed in Christianity, I thought it was only appropriate that I tell the entire She’s Right audience. (Although, I called my self an agnostic in that post.)

The first response? Wait for it…

Perhaps you were never a Christian…

Of course!

Anyway, I also came out to my closest Christian friends via bulk electronic communication. I sent them a facebook message. In my defense, they all had moved to Texas by that time, so my options were limited.

I pulled up the message, after reading the post at Friendly Atheist. I wrote this about two months after that post at She’s Right. By then, I was using the term “atheist” to describe myself.

If you are reading this message, then you are a person who played a role in my becoming a Christian. This is really hard for me to tell you, but I feel like I am being dishonest if I keep it to myself, so I am just going to blurt it out.

I am not a Christian anymore; I am an atheist.

I can’t really explain how it happened. I just had a lot of doubts about things that seemed inconsistent or false to me. The more questions I had, the more questions I found. Eventually, the doubts just piled up and I had to ask myself some tough questions about whether or not everything I believed was really true. I came to the conclusion that it is probably not.

At first, I considered myself agnostic, in the purest sense of “not knowing.” But as the weeks went on, I started to realize that I really don’t believe in anything.

It was hard for me to deal with the loss, because it is a loss. A loss of a god that I believed was a part of my life, a loss of the culture I had been a part of, a loss of the music I had been listening to, and other losses yet to be realized.

Right now I am going through a period of figuring out who I am and how to live life and make good, moral decisions in a world with no god. It’s really exciting and fascinating, not scary and bleak, as I feared it would be.

I wanted to just keep this to myself, but when I found myself privately telling a friend of mine that knows not to mention anything about it on facebook, I realized that I was sort of living a double life and I don‘t want to do that. I want to always be true to myself no matter how scary it is.

I sent this via facebook because I do not know everyone’s e-mail address. Bear in mind, if you reply to this, everyone who received it will see the reply.

I still love you guys and consider you good friends.

Peace,

Charity

It’s still hard for me to read that message. Mostly because it reminds me of the loss I still feel.

Most of the people I sent that message to didn’t even respond. That really hurt. I would rather be told I was wrong than be ignored. Reaching out to people who I care about, hoping they will still accept me, and then being ignored was one of the hardest parts of leaving Christianity. It was like I was shut out, without even so much as a word.

Since then, I have engaged in some small talk with most of them via facebook, but I still feel the sting of being out of the group. I know that we do not have the same relationship that we once did.

It’s not just with this group of friends, either. I feel that way about the group of Christian homeschoolers that I was close with online. I feel that way about the people I went to church with, too.

It’s a loss I feel like I never fully mourned. I still get sad when I think about it.

When I wrote that message, I was in the process of trying to figure things out. The funny thing is, I still feel like I am still trying to figure things out. That’s hard for me because I am the type of person that likes things to make sense. I always gravitated toward math and physics for that reason. I like neatness, equations, explanations. I like things to follow a pattern and make sense.

But the one thing I have learned this past 16 months or so is that life does not make sense. And I need to stop trying to make it fit into a neat little box, or I will never find peace.

I guess I am getting closer to figuring than I realized.

I don’t know about other women, but I have my own answer to that question.

Believe it or not (and some of you who know me will have no problem believing it), I never wanted to be a mom.

That’s a hard thing to say, since, well, I am a mom and I love my kids very much. I would do pretty much anything for them, and I have sacrificed a lot to try and give them the life I thought would be the best for them. Whether or not that was a good thing remains to be seen. But, one thing’s for sure, I would go to the mat for them, and even they know that.

To admit that I never wanted to be a mom feels a little bit like saying that I wish I never had my kids, or that I don’t love them, so it’s a hard thing for me to come to terms with, let alone tell the whole world.

A lot of little girls dream about becoming moms. They play house and pretend their dolls are real babies. They think about what kind of mom they will be. They imagine their perfect wedding day.

Not me. Ew. I was too busy playing with my chemistry set and imagining living alone in a fancy loft in NYC with no man, no kids, just my career and my social life.

But, I did become a mom, if unintentionally. And I don’t believe in doing anything half-assed, so I took my responsibility very seriously. So, I have always tried to be a good mom, a dedicated mom, a mom who is always there for her kids and doesn’t put her career first.

Still, every time I had to say no to a job offer because it required too many hours or, worse, decided to stay at home completely, I died a little inside. I had dreams, dreams that would never come to fruition.

Then, I found Christianity. Not only could I be forgiven for the indiscretions that led to my unintended pregnancy, I had found a culture that not only valued motherhood, but held it up as the highest calling for a woman.

You may call that sexist; I call it salvation.

This was the answer to all my problems. Finally, I would be able to put my ambitions aside and embrace motherhood with a sense of real purpose. I would be serving the lord in my home mission field, raising three young men who would go into the world and do three times the work building god’s kingdom that I could do. Instead of being an obstacle to being somebody important, motherhood was going to make me somebody important.

I poured all my energy into being a mother, wife, and homemaker, telling myself that I was honoring god and fulfilling my god-given purpose. I communed with other godly women online who reaffirmed each other in our dedication to serving the lord through motherhood and supported each other through our struggles against the temptations of our ambitions.

That worked for me… for a while. But then, as you can imagine, it still wasn’t enough. I still had these desires to be something other than a mother. Only now, I had a heaping helping of guilt to go along with it. A god-sized helping of guilt, and it almost crushed me.

For years I struggled to push these “worldly” ambitions aside and let god be enough.

But, being, you know, imaginary, god never was enough. What’s worse, I started to resent my kids. I never resented them before for mucking up my plans. They didn’t ask to be born and I freely chose to put them first. But now I wasn’t freely choosing; I was doing it because I thought that’s what god required of me, and I resented it. And, of course, I felt guilty for resenting it.

Needless to say, it did a number on my psyche.

Once I left Christianity, I thought about putting my kids in school and pursuing a career, but I decided that it wasn’t the best choice at that time for our family -for any of us, including me. But, that didn’t mean that being a mom was all I had to be, and I have been pursuing other interests.

And, what do you know, I don’t resent being a mom anymore. I actually even enjoy it sometimes!

I probably won’t ever have that fancy loft in NYC and the career and social life I dreamed about as a girl, but I am finally okay with that. I like my life, and I still have plenty of time to do a lot of things that will be fulfilling. I even get to raise three amazing (if not sometimes annoying, loud, and/or smelly) boys in the process.

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.

This year was different.  I have been happily without god for over a year.  Everyone (mostly) knows about it.  And I had no qualms about keeping Christ out of my Christmas.

And, it was fantastic!

It was just like the Christmases I remember as a kid, back when the reason for the season was giving and spending time with family.  My mom always loved Christmas and it was never a religious holiday.  It was always a time to give to others, including strangers in need.

I missed out on that while I was a Christian.  Sure, I still gave to strangers in need, but it was always about bringing glory to God, not just because it felt good to do.  Christmas seemed more like an obligation.  It’s the church’s biggest ministry opportunity of the year, you know!  (As we were reminded every year.)

How fun!  Let’s turn Christmas into a chore!

My first Christmas as a Christian, I bought everyone Bibles and/or Christian books, even my non-Christian family.  I kid you not.  Yeah, I was a real barrel of fun in those days.

Christmas was usually spent trying to minimize the materialism and gift-giving and keep the focus on Jesus.  As you can imagine, my love for the holiday faded away over the years.

This year, however, I actually enjoyed Christmas.  My husband, three sons, and I got up at 6AM and opened presents and then ate cinnamon rolls (which I made the night before and baked that morning).  My mother and sister and their significant others came over a few hours later and we hung out and opened presents and ate cinnamon rolls, applesauce cake, blueberry muffins, and fruit salad.  Then, we just sat around and spent time together all day, while grazing on the appetizers I set out and watching “Micky’s Christmas Carol” and “The Christmas Toy”.  We ate dinner in mid-afternoon and then everyone took desserts home because they were stuffed.  (I made a lot of food.)

It was a fantastic way to spend the day!

There was no guilt, no praying, no trying to find a parking space at the Christmas Eve service, no trying to share Jesus with my non-Christian relatives – just food, family, and fun, my favorite things!

I saw many comments on facebook and elsewhere about the “reason for the season.”  I have found the reason; it’s just not the one they were talking about.

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.