Facing the Unfaceable

If you were one of the few people who read my blog back when I regularly updated it, you probably remember that my writing predominantly focused on articulating and defending my Christian faith. The last time I published anything in this blog was almost 3.5 years ago. After my last published post, I stopped deciding to finish and publish the things that I was writing. The problem wasn't that I had run out of ideas to write about, it's that I found that I could no longer wrap my thoughts up neatly anymore and I always felt that there were far too many loose ends hanging from the topics I was trying to discuss. I had ideas that I wanted to express, but I could no longer feel that I could adequately defend those ideas with the kind of satisfaction that I had before. I had begun this quest for truth that eventually reached a velocity where, by the time I was finishing an essay, I either wasn't sure that I agreed anymore with the point I was trying to make or I didn't feel I was able to defend the point with an adequate amount of intellectual integrity. I was a music minister at a wonderful little church plant in Oakland, CA and I had just begun my venture into preaching, but then I stopped. I still did music, but I told my lead pastor that I didn't feel I was in a good place to be writing and delivering sermons. When I began this intellectual shift, I wasn't sure where exactly I would end up, but I had no idea that it would bring me to the beliefs I hold today.

Tension in the Family

Many would probably say that I came from a poster-child Christian family. I was the oldest of three boys, raised by parents who are still happily married to this day. We lived with financial stability in our happy little suburbs, homeschooled, and were active members of a local non-denominational church. My dad was a public school teacher who also played piano for the church's music program and my mom was stay-at-home, homeschooling supermom who actively participated in Bible studies and volunteered at the church library. To top it all off, my brothers and I all miraculously turned out without any major rebellious streaks that might have tainted our family name. We had a really good long run of being totally scandal free in our Christian community for close to thirty years.

Of all of the scandals that could have marred this magnificent reputation we had made for ourselves, I don't think one could have picked a more sinister means to make pariahs of us all. It started with my brother who was living in Hollywood at the time. He had embarked upon an intellectual journey that led to him confessing to our parents that he was an atheist. This news was completely unexpected and rocked us to our very cores. My dad and I set out to "talk some sense into him" and "bring him back to Jesus," but we realized that the extent of his research was beyond what we were prepared to face, so we each took our own steps to gear up for deeper conversations. We both took to the books, reading the works of Christian apologists like Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, C.S. Lewis, William Lane Craig, Norm Geisler, Ravi Zacharias, etc...; and also exploring the works of prominent seculars like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Michael Shermer, Daniel Dennett, and others.

I was a little nervous to confess to my dad that I didn't believe anymore until I realized that he had already arrived at that destination before me and hadn't said anything yet. I hadn't figured out how to tell my mom when she asked me about it while we were celebrating Mother's Day at Red Lobster. I told her the truth, even though it wasn't what she wanted to hear, and she cried the whole way home while I drove. This shift caused a tremendous amount of tension in my family, starting out by isolating my brother and then my mom instead. Many months of difficult conversations eventually led my mom to recognize the problems with Christian teaching and overcome her fear of venturing into unknown and mysterious intellectual territory. My other brother soon joined our heathen ranks once he had enough free time to investigate the topic himself.

In the course of a few months, my whole family of five had gone from being devout Christians to...

atheists! That title bore such a haunting, sinister gravity due to the lifelong demonization of this group of "others." Now we had become the "others." Knowing how harshly we had judged others who did the same thing, we had a pretty good idea of how our Christian peers were most likely going to view us. But the judgement isn't the scariest part: it's knowing that beyond being stripped of our status in the community that we used to call home, we would be stripped of our voice to the people who had once been our family. We grew up in a place where you are taught not to even listen to atheists. It doesn't matter that we walked this path with integrity and intellectual honesty: all that matters is that atheists are wrong and should be ignored because we're all lunatics. It made me understand why my secular friends wanted nothing to do with Church. We grew up hearing the hateful rhetoric about atheists. We now saw that we would be considered "the enemy," or at least representatives or puppets of the enemy.

The unfaceable

The social repercussions of our apostasy were troubling, but not necessarily the worst of our woes. If there's one thing that losing such a strong faith can cause, it's an existential crisis. I remember writing somewhere that if it were true that God didn't exist, I would rather live with the delusion that he does. I think that mindset is true for a lot of Christians, whether or not they possess the introspection to recognize it. But I've learned that living with the worldview that the universe is indifferent to our suffering, that life is a meaningless and paradoxical product of entropy, and that life after death is a fictional concept invented by mankind, is not as dark of an existence as our Christian teachers would have us believe. That is one of many topics I aim to address later at length. Just because a truth might not be what we consider ideal doesn't mean that we're better off believing lies.

What to do with this blog?

I've thought about starting a new blog and abandoning this one entirely, letting it rot in the catacombs of forgotten and largely unseen internet history, only to be rediscovered by myself for my own amusement. But I really don't want to do that. I'm not interested in presenting myself as someone with a static worldview and, since this blog already exists with a bunch of my old writing in it, this is an opportunity to give more insight into my intellectual life before and after my deconversion. If this blog can serve any useful purpose, I'd like it to show people what it looks like to face what seems unfaceable and to have the humility to admit to being wrong. Changing your mind is not easy, especially when you've invested so much in a worldview that you now see as erroneous, but it's an important thing that more people need to learn how to do. People can and should change and be ready to change again. Ultimately, if enough people can adopt a growth mentality and be willing to adapt their beliefs when faced with evidence, I think the world will be a better place.