It's now over 10 years since I came to the realization that I could no longer call myself a Christian and that I could not honestly say I believed in any god. There are things I would do differently with regard to my interactions when I came out to family members (my parents especially), but looking back, if I had a magic button that would bottle up the doubts and erase the realizations that eroded my faith, I would not push that button.
I can't point to an exact date for my deconversion because it was a process. I can trace portions of the process back to doubts I initially had as a kid. My beliefs shifted and changed over the course of decades as I endeavored to make sense of the world.
The further away I get from those beliefs, the harder it is for me to understand why I ever thought they were real. When I'm around friends or family members who still believe, part of me feels embarrassed for them. I find myself thinking "you're still into those superstitions, huh?" and I let out a sigh.
I had a conversation with one family member the other day who preaches at me every time we visit. This particular time, my relative told me a story of how a former coworker had a child with epilepsy. The coworker prayed for his epileptic son and Jesus healed him. They went for a checkup with the boy's doctor. The instructions were that the boy was not supposed to be given medication before the visit so they could test his brain function while not on the medication. The doctor thought they had defied the instructions and given the boy the medication.
A 10 second google of epilepsy revealed to me that sometimes people with epilepsy just stop having seizures. I am sure with a little work, I could find people from just about every religious tradition with a similar story. It's funny how gods and goddesses always seem to do their best work on things that are demonstrated to sometimes go away on their own and miracles never seem to happen on par with the types of miraculous events reported in the Bible.
Honestly, it's like walking around with a bunch of adults saying they think the monster who hides under their bed made the sound they heard last night or who think that invisible magic elves make their garden grow. Did your beans die? Don't look to the soil, sun, water, or pests, you should appease the magic elves.
"Look at the beautiful sunset ...that Jesus made."
Uh huh. The sunset is pretty. [biting my tongue because I don't understand why anyone would think an ancient Jewish rabbi has something to do with a sunset]
"Let's pray that Jesus protects us on our ride home."
Is he going to stand by and watch you get killed or maimed in an accident if you don't remind him? If we do get into an accident, what does that mean?
"Bless this food to our bodies..."
Food has nutritional value whether you ask Jesus for his help or not. If it was processed and handled properly by the farmers and processors, and if you prepared it safely, food is going to supply you with whatever sustenance it has whether you pray or not. I'm pretty sure about that. I've tested it now for more than 10 years and food doesn't require your magic spell to imbue it with nutritional value nor to protect it from contamination.
I love my family and friends who are believers. That is why I have not severed ties with them. That is why I continue to interact with them and that is why I hold my tongue (on most occasions) rather than calling them out. It's frustrating though. I try to pick my battles.
I do not think their religious beliefs are an indication of a lack of intelligence (nor mental illness as some atheists regrettably say). I merely think they have made a mistake in their thinking processes in this facet of their lives. I didn't become more intelligent when I stopped believing. As I have indicated here and other places, the difference was that I allowed myself to apply the same skeptical standards I used in other areas of my life to the religious claims.
Here is the real kicker. This post was drafted in November of 2021, shortly after I had the conversation with the family member mentioned above. I don't know all of the sources he was getting information from, but he was a Covid-19 vaccine skeptic and refused to get vaccinated. I never got around to publishing this article because life got crazy shortly after that. That individual got Covid-19 from other (unvaccinated) family members at Thanksgiving. He resisted medical assistance and admittance to the hospital for weeks. He had become convinced that the hospitals were not to be trusted and Jesus would heal him. He waited so long to seek real medical assistance, that he was on the brink of organ failure and barely conscious before he was admitted to the hospital. I remain fairly certain that if he had been vaccinated, and if he had gone to get treatment immediately after getting
infected, he would have survived.
Magical thinking can bleed into other facets of a person's life. That is the problem. In this previous blog article, Ways I Used to Rationalize Absurd Things I Believed, I discuss how I rationalized things in order to preserve my beliefs. For me, it didn't have severe consequences. I missed a question on a test in a critical thinking class. In hindsight, I can see how slippery that kind of thinking can be, the broader you allow it to roam in your mind and life. Scientists and academia are conspiring to suppress creation science or evidence that supports the Bible. The media has a liberal bias. No, the media is printing outright lies. There is a global conspiracy related to Covid and the vaccines. Hospitals and doctors can't be trusted. It can snowball quickly. There is a podcast called "The Q Dropped". The podcast interviews a new individual every week who has had one or more family member get sucked into Q-Anon conspiracy craziness. Many of the people featured in the podcast can't even maintain a relationship with their family members because the family members have become so fearful, angry, obsessed with the conspiracies related to Q-Anon, that they have had to sever ties with the Q crazed family members.
Some people were convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, in part because of these conspiracy theories and Q-Anon, and some portion of those people attacked the US Congress on January 6th of 2021. This is a real world consequence of conspiracy thinking and an inability to discern credible information sources from nonsense floating around the Internet. I lost a family member in December of 2021 on Christmas morning because he was convinced that Covid vaccines were not trustworthy and that Jesus would protect him. He was wrong on both counts and it cost him his life.
When I started the draft of this post, that story about my deceased family member was intended just to be a starting point, but the discussion was supposed to be about being 10 years in since my deconversion (probably a bit more than that now) and how life is really quite good. But as I returned to the draft and realized what happened shortly after, what turned out to be one of the final conversations I would have with that person, I decided to change the direction of the post. Having said that, my only regret looking back, is that I lacked the courage to truly and honestly challenge my religious beliefs earlier in life. I think I would have saved myself a lot of unnecessary emotional turmoil and frustration.
As always, thanks for stopping by. If you haven't already noticed, I'm branching out with my blog subject matter a bit. It's my blog. I'm just going to roll with it and post about topics that interest me. It doesn't get enough traffic to yield income, so it's mainly an outlet for my own thoughts.
I am doing a bit of research in support of one of my backpacking posts, which meant digging into old personal journals from back when I was a devout believer. I may return to that source as subject matter for one or more articles here. It's painful to me to read my nonsense that I wrote however many years ago. There are other bloggers who have engaged in similar conversations with their former selves, so the idea isn't original, but, reading my thoughts from 20 years ago makes me wish I could go back in time and help myself out. As I indicated above, I realize now as I have read certain passages, how frustrated I was that I was not able to hear direction from the god I was doing my best to serve. Anyway, I don't want to go into that too much now. That is a topic for another post.
Cheers,
Gavagai
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