The Unchristian

Part 0: Hi there.

Disclaimer: If you’ve come here from the random depths, hello there. This is one of my more thought-out pieces that is filled with a considerable amount of personal details, so if you feel uncomfy, it’s fine to click off. I don’t mind at all. If you’re still here, I’m glad you want to know more about the particular struggles I have had with faith, namely of the Christian variety.

First off, if you’re a Christian, or even simply a person of faith of some sort other than that, I implore you, please don’t click off this page. I know deconstruction is a rather scary word for many, but please give this a try; it took a lot of effort for me to even gather the courage to speak about this.

My goal is not to convince you of anything. Instead, I aim to simply tell a story, or more aptly for this context, a testimony. My testimony. This isn’t clickbait, I can promise that, so please, humor me, and feel free to contact me to talk about it after.

My journey through faith has been something that has followed me my entire lifetime. It’s been a wild ride, really, filled with ups and downs that are only matched by ungodly creations like the Euthanasia Coaster. Well, that may be hyperbolic, but I digress. Not only has it been wild, it has been a long time coming, and I think it’s time I talked about it.

This is a piece about my journey as someone who was raised in the Christian church. Over a long period of time, I’ve started to question the value of it all, and why I believe what I believe. This lead me down a painful journey of deconstruction that was almost 6 years in the making, and eventually led to my deconversion.

Part I: Faith

I was raised a Christian by my family. My mother was (and still is) a devout Christian, having converted when she was living in India along with her older sister; however, my dad was not. My older sister and I were raised in the church, and we were exposed to all the doctrines from early age; in fact, my mother even told me that the first book I learned to read was the Bible (I had a children’s version of it and would read it all the time; I even have vague recollections of doing this). I was fascinated by all the stories, and when I was told they were true and without errors, I believed it wholeheartedly.

My mother even told me that I myself was a miracle when I was grown up, that I was diagnosed with a whole swath of developmental disorders, but most of them had disappeared by the time I was four years old. I had no reason to doubt that, especially when I was young; after all, I knew I could kind of interact with people in a semi-coherent way, even though I still had problems with it.

From the beginning, I was taught to read my Bible. In fact, it was a fixture of my daily routine; in the morning, drink some warm water, brush your teeth, and open your Bible. Read one chapter per day, learn something new, every day. As a child, I did complain about this routine, but I later on grew to love it. It was my bread, just as the Lord’s Prayer spoke of; I lived by its words. It could speak of no wrong in my eyes, it was that foundational. After all, I read the magical words, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 22:39), and I was entranced in this moral direction; it can’t be wrong, can it? With all the things it gets right, I couldn’t even comprehend the idea that this could have been wrong; in fact, I never did for most of my life.

I went to a single non-denominational church for most of my life, and attended almost every week with my mother and sister. Since I was taught about the faith from an early age, I was already convinced of the idea that Jesus had died and resurrected for my sins. In fact, after I understood what a “baptism” was, and after my sister was baptized, I begged my mother for years upon years to do the same. Since I was in elementary school at the time, she simply told me “You’re not ready yet”; this cycle continued until 2016, when I was in middle school. I was baptized then, in an auditorium filled with people I knew.

At my baptism, I was asked a single question that many millions of people had been asked prior: “Do you believe Jesus Christ died for your sins and was resurrected from the dead?”

I replied, “Of course!” What, you think He didn’t?, I had in my mind. The auditorium laughed along in approval of my emphatic response. And underneath the water I went, and came back up to the sound of cheering. It felt magical, as if I had won the game of life while still being so young. Little did I know that my response to this question was one that I would laugh at myself for, given some time.

Regardless of that, after I came out of the water, I felt as if Jesus Himself had come down into the water and whispered into my ears, “Well done, my good and faithful servant!” (Matthew 25:23), and had opened a literal doorway in my chest. Nothing could replicate that. I was redeemed; a new child had been born out of the filth. It was time to rejoice in His presence!

Around this same time, I auditioned for my church’s worship band. I am an avid drummer, and contemporary Christian worship songs from artists like Hillsong and Elevation were extremely simple for me to pick up and learn on the drum kit. My worship pastor took me on, and I started playing music with them almost every single week. I connected with some people of faith that was almost divine in my eyes, and I was in awe of their abilities, as well as their disposition for faith, and aspired to be like them. Needless to say, I was a devout Christian for most of my young life, and there was no letting go of that, ever.

Or so I thought.

Part II: Doubt

Let’s rewind a few years back from here.

Around my fifth-grade year (2014), a close uncle of mine saw that I was a very curious person. I had always been since birth, asking questions about anything and everything, though unsurprisingly I never thought of doing the same thing in regard to my faith. He gave me a swath of books, all from an author named Ken Ham. I didn’t think much of this name, but I was addicted to reading, so naturally, I picked these books up after a while. I learned about the idea that there were people out there that didn’t have the same perspectives as me, and that I needed to defend myself against these people; I could defend myself using “knowledge!”¹ After all, there was a mountain of evidence for God’s existence, I needed just to “Fear not, for [He] is with me” (Isaiah 41:10).

I read these books front to back, arming myself with arguments against the people who dared to question God. How could these people question my faith?, I asked myself over and over again. Yet, it didn’t feel right as I was reading these books. Something was off. But I didn’t think much of it. Having been taught a literalist interpretation of the Bible, I regarded all types of doubt about my faith as demonic, and regarded Satan as a real, scary entity that could easily lead me to a cliff and throw me off into the valley of the shadow of death (Psalms 23:4).

Interestingly, this sentiment was not shaken even as I had my first encounter with an idea from the faith that I disagreed with. I listen to metal (and many other genres, check out my last.fm for some recs), and I first encountered it around my sixth grade school year (2014). When this same close uncle that gave me the Ken Ham books heard about this, he took me aside privately and started scolding me, telling me that “metal music was a way for the devil to find his way into my soul,” and that when the devil does that, his only goal is to “steal, kill, and destroy” (John 10:10). I took issue with this, as I loved my music, and was even listening to mostly Christian or Christian-influenced metal bands such as August Burns Red and Underoath (great bands, by the way; you should listen to them!). However, out of trust for this uncle, I tried to stop listening to my favorite bands, and transitioned over to other genres of music.

Spoiler alert: this transition to other types of music didn’t work; I still listen to metal today.

Coincidentally, I discovered many other bands through this process, like Saosin and other bands that I still listen to today, so maybe this was a blessing in disguise. Regardless, I was disheartened by this blatant dismissal of my own feelings around the music I loved to listen to, but my faith was still strong in spite of that; I just pushed those feelings to the back of my mind and continued on believing.

I held fast to a creationist, literalist view of the Bible, and this was not shaken at all by any teachings about “unbiblical” stuff like evolution that I was exposed to in my science classes until around my freshman year of high school (2017). I was having a conversation with one of my best friends on the phone, and we were just talking about random things. We veered into religion sometime during this (for context, he was a casually-practicing Hindu), and I brought up the fact that I believed in creationism and that God created the Earth in six 24-hour days. He simply laughed at me, saying:

You seriously believe in that shit, Varun?

I fought back against this, saying I had evidence, and tried to bring up what I had learned from the apologetics books I was given. This was my first active application of those concepts; I had to know what I was talking about, right? I left that conversation thinking I had won my case, but that first little seed of doubt was planted in my heart right then and there, and I was not aware at all of what havoc it would end up wreaking on my life.

A few weeks later, I still found myself mildly shaken up at this conversation. I decided to go on Google and just start going down rabbit holes, searching for anything related to what we were talking about. I started with searches like:

• “Why is evolution true?”
• “Why is creationism true?”
• “Why is evolution false?”
• “Why is creationism false?”

But this eventually turned into more of the following searches:

• “Contradictions in the Bible”
• “Refutations of contradictions in the Bible”
• “Why is the Bible true?”
• “How was the Bible made?”

Cut me some slack, I don’t remember the exact keywords. I don’t think 15-year-old me would have understood what “refutation” meant, but I digress. You get the idea, hopefully. I would go down these rabbit holes for hours a day, just reading, absorbing whatever information I could find. But that hole still remained in my heart, and I couldn’t understand why this was the case.

I didn’t know it at the time, but these were the beginnings of doubt, and it was something I had feared for a long time in this realm. I had always regarded hell as a literal entity, and was scared shitless of it; after all, I was just a kid. What would happen if I doubted, and that led me to commit the worst of all sins, the unpardonable sin (Luke 12:10)? So I kept reading my Bible, and kept trying to be devout. I struggled heavily with my mental health throughout all of my high school years, and these seeds of doubt were one of the primary contributors towards it. I also struggled with suicidal ideation, and tried to publically commit suicide when I was around 16 years old, which eventually led to me being placed on medications. This didn’t exactly help the case for my doubt.

On a side note: I still struggle with depression and suicidal ideation today, although it has been quite a while since I’ve acted on those urges. I’ve learned some strategies to deal with it through therapy and other forms of support, which is nice.

I kept reading my Bible, which was an annotated version from a pastor named David Jeremiah that I was gifted. While I wouldn’t mark it up, I kept its additional commentary in the margins close to my heart. Many times passed where I would read it front to back; One year, I attended Alpha, a course targeted at Christians and unbelievers alike to teach the fundamentals of the Christian faith. I was in a group with my campus lead pastor as the leader of it, and we were discussing quite often the core tenets of the Christian faith. Anything to quell the very doubt that would send me to the abyss, I thought.

My beliefs bled over to my high school environment as well, also in particularly unlikable ways. While I was in marching band, I developed a budding friendship with someone from the color guard that also happened to attend the same church that I did. We talked a lot, and ended up vibing so much that I even developed some slight feelings for her. She eventually told me that she was lesbian, and I was mortified. I couldn’t even comprehend how someone could attend church and simultaneously be part of the LGBTQ+ community. I was taught that these people are to be regarded as sinners. We ended up going back and forth about this multiple times, and eventually I let my true feelings at the time slip: the age-old adage of “Love the sin, hate the sinner.” I wouldn’t know at the time (much less why it would be the case), but she was hurt by that, and our friendship wilted slowly.

This nagged me for a while. I didn’t know what I did to hurt her, but I was still under the impression that people like her just wanted to live a life of sin. This contributed more to the doubts in my mind. Would Jesus seriously condone what I did to her? I, myself, was also a sinner, yet I cast the first stone. I forced myself to look at different perspectives, the same way I forced myself to look at the theory of evolution online. That’s all I could find solace in: learning.

The thoughts, experiences, and consequences as a result of these could never leave me alone. I was constantly thinking about them, and the impact that they had on my life, and as this happened, I finally realized I needed to do one thing, more than anything else: I needed to dig into my foundations to see what was buried in it, and if it was worth believing.

Part III: Deconstruction

So begins the journey of the often ill-fated term, “deconstruction”. I was frankly terrified of this concept at first; in fact, I didn’t even know what it truly meant or what the word for the process even was until a year into the process of starting it. I simply knew that I wanted reassurance that what I believed in what was correct, and that I could apply that truth to my life.

At the time, I was on Reddit a considerable amount, and often used it as a central forum of resources I could gather from. Subreddits like r/OpenChristian, r/Exvangelical, among others caught my eye, and I made posts there regularly about different topics, like how I had stopped seeing the “magic” in contemporary Christian music and other worship music after having played it live for so long², and how I could have better beliefs in certain topics while still having it reconcile with the Bible that I had always known.

One day, I was helping my church build out a new stage for worship, and the conversation among us shifted to the topic of evolution. When this came up, I finally mentioned that I really wanted to know how I could reconcile the Bible’s claims and the reality of certain scientific concepts like evolution. When I said that, my worship pastor looked at me, not in disapproval, but with a face of happiness. I was confused; wasn’t I doubting something that shouldn’t be doubted? He told me this:

Doubting and asking is good for your faith, Varun. God is more than willing to answer your questions.

That wasn’t the exact quote, but that was the essence I took away from the conversation we had. He recommended me a book to read, namely Irresistible, by Andy Stanley, a pastor. I Googled it, and to my initial dismay, most of the searches that came up were write-ups by conservative and fundamentalist organizations like the Gospel Coalition that warned me about the heretical beliefs that are supposedly espoused by Stanley in this book. That made me more intrigued than ever; I knew about infighting between Christians, but had never seen such vehement dismissal of certain ones before. The Streisand effect had taken me over, and it made me that much more excited to read this. So I bought the book³.

When I finished reading, I noticed a sense of catharsis that was hanging over my mind. It was freeing, almost as if I could think for myself regarding my own faith for the very first time. However, I was almost angry at my church, at the surrounding Christians that told me there was only one way in which I could follow my God. The teachings of Jesus were infinitely more important for me to follow than any Old Testament teachings; after all, the carpet with all the uncleanliness has been rolled up into heaven (Acts 10:9-16)! I felt deceived with this newfound ability to think. Knowledge was a curse, I thought; that’s the way ignorance is bliss, right? This anger did eventually settle, and the only feeling I was left with was peace. My faith was changed forever, but for the better.

After reading this book, I let go of the idea of Biblical inerrancy. I saw it for how limiting it was for my own knowledge, and even for my own faith. If the Bible was only inspired by God, but written by humans, the mistakes I saw from before actually make sense! I now understood Christianity through the lens of humanity, not just through the words of the Bible. Instead of reading the Bible in an eisegetical manner, I now sought to read it in an exegetical manner⁴. As for scientific concepts like evolution, I finally saw the evidence for them far outweighed the beliefs I had in the creationism and anti-scientific, fundamentalist variants of faith that I had once espoused. In summary, I was now a progressive Christian who deeply sympathized with the tenets of liberation theology. I even contacted the friend I had offended previously, and profusely thanked them for dealing with my own naivety with such a kind heart. I was ecstatic about all these developments; it meant a new era for my faith.

This did not spell the end of my deconstruction process, though. It was only the beginning.

At one point, I had to re-evaluate my perspectives on hell. I could not fundamentally reconcile this with the idea of a tri-omni God, and eventually I found the rationalizations for hell quite sickening and incoherent. There was no way in hell (pun intended) I could justify a God being simultaneously omnibenevolent and willing to judge an inferior creation of His to an infinite punishment for the finite crimes over less than 120 years, at maximum. After all, He will take care of us with more diligence so than He ever will for the simple sparrow (Matthew 6:25-34), no? Through more digging, I found the ideas of Christian universalism, and read about St. Augustine and his ideas surrounding the doctrine. I was again ecstatic to find that there were others out there that had the same ideas as I, and was convinced of the goodness of God once more. My mind was pliable, and ready to learn more and more.

The COVID pandemic only served to give me more time to ruminate about these ideas. With the many hours I had just lying around, I took the time to just research everything I possibly could. I found out about the Apocrypha, along with other non-canonical books such as the Gospel of Thomas and other Gnostic texts. My perspectives on faith were changing by the minute.

Around this time (c. 2020-2021), I graduated from high school, and I started to dig heavily into philosophy and other related subjects. I took a philosophy class at my community college, and it was radically eye-opening to the different epistemological perspectives that existed through the times, including those of non-Christian ones that I had not really familiarized myself with yet. I took the time to learn about Søren Kierkegaard, Albert Camus, Friedrich Nietzsche, and the likes of other existentialist philosophers, and held the reasoning of Descartes for why there was a good God dear to my heart, since it seemed like a bulletproof defense of the concept. However, the walls were falling down all around me as I was exposed to every single one of these ideas, and they were all so compelling in their explanatory power and prowess, without the ontological baggage of the Bible as a whole. I was at a crossroads⁵ for my beliefs, without even knowing it.

Part IV: End of an Era

I didn’t know it at the time, but I had subscribed to a “God of the gaps”-like theology⁶, and kept this way of thinking throughout my time at community college after I had graduated from high school. I couldn’t let go of the idea, even I knew in the back of my head this was a flawed presupposition to have. However, there was a big development that I had noticed over the times that my beliefs had changed. I found myself less convinced of some concepts that were in the Bible; there were parts of it that I had once accepted as being irrelevant to the current message that now seemed irreconcilable with the fundamental assumptions about the God I worshiped that I had:

• If there is a benevolent God, why is there so much evil that comes to those who do not deserve it (i.e. children)?
• If there is an omniscient and/or omnipotent God, how can he change His mind? Does that not make Him non-omniscient and/or non-omnipotent?
• Where is God, and why won’t he talk to me, despite my cries out to Him?

As you can tell, these were the fundamental questions of old; the problem of teleological evil, the Epicurean paradox, the problem of divine hiddenness, and the like. They were now questions that seemed completely unanswerable with even the most convoluted of theodicies. I was wrapping my head over and out in cognitive dissonance about the very fundamentals of the things that I believed. Sixth-grade me would have been terrified; however, I now had the desire to question even that which I was not to question. The “God of the gaps” theology I had at the time was still there in my mind, but that gap was shrinking, and it was shrinking fast.

What was also fundamentally different was that I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about God as if I believed in Him anymore. I would keep my faith status private, and when people asked me about it, I would just say it was a private matter, without elaborating further. I still went to church (and in fact was volunteering in some capacity almost every single week, whether it was playing drums, or running camera equipment, or something else). It was a little draining, since I didn’t exactly listen to the preaching, and didn’t share many of the same beliefs as I used to; after all, it was still a non-denominational church with relatively conservative beliefs. For almost a full year between 2022 and 2023, I kept going to church like this with no further problems⁷. I called myself an agnostic privately, saying that I was unable to truly know if there was a God or not since that idea was unfalsifiable; however, I wanted for it to be true, so that I didn’t have to lose my faith of old. There was one person at the same church I was going to that I confided this in, who himself had a similar view.

The principal problem that I initially failed to see was that the “God of the gaps”-like theology that I held was a black box; it stifled the desire to learn. I would be held back by the assumption that something is because of God, without the desire to go learn why that was regardless of God. The phrase that captures this the most is likely the tired, old adage that many Christians and atheists alike have heard at some point in their lives:

God works in mysterious ways.

This phrase was straight-up painful to hear after a while; it was as mentally painful as running straight into a brick wall. The sheer NUMBER of times I’ve heard this phrase is astounding, and it’s such a damn cop-out. How can you simultaneously claim to know God’s intentions through the Bible, and only resort to this adage when you can’t explain something within the framework that you have adopted? It’s as if the person who lets this phrase slip has a fear of the unknown. It has to work in some way because of my convictions. God absolutely had some sort of intention or causation behind this; we just didn’t know it yet, and we will once we do meet Him.

I had trouble squaring this thought with myself, but I simply just did for years upon end while I was still a Christian. I did this at all phases of my faith journey; it didn’t matter when I was a full-on young-earth creationist and fundamentalist, or when I was someone who leaned more towards an agnostic Christian perspective later on. Anything that I didn’t know a reason for was sent to a black box of fundamental assumptions I had about the nature of the world, never to be seen again, for God simply had a reason that I could not fathom, either for my own good or because I was not powerful enough to know; I did this for many of the questions I raised above. For a while, that is.

Until I couldn’t.

Divine hiddenness was the problem that pushed me over the edge. I prayed constantly in my head, even when I was agnostic. I just wanted what I considered to be a quite low expectation of an omnipotent being: a convincing explanation or experience that would unambiguously show me that this God that I had believed in for almost my entire life had a real presence. If you’ve ever heard the quote from William Lane Craig, of “If there’s one’s chance in a million that Christianity is true, it’s worth believing,” that was exactly what I had in mind. I prayed for signs, held on to my confirmation biases, held on to what my mother had told me when I was young: that I myself was a miracle in God’s eyes. I did it all. You would think that as an all-powerful being, He would be able to do this without overriding free will or whatever the next theodicy will like to claim; to say that this God cannot do something was simply a poverty of imagination on behalf of the apologist making the claim⁸.

But He never did, and that only made me incredibly sad. In my times of weakness, in my times when I wanted to throw myself off a bridge, or commit suicide in other ways, He was the defining example of silence. No response for my earnest efforts for proof in my darkest moments, when I was about to succumb to the worst act in regard to existence; in any other realm, I would have abandoned that idea for good, but why was I not doing that in this instance, where this God was so simultaneously incontrovertible in my head, yet effectively nonexistent?

I don’t remember when this happened, but I consciously came to the realization I was just uncomfortable with the words, “I don’t know”. I can say this phrase for so many other fields; the scientific realm, as a developer, as a drummer, composer, you name it. The unknowable is just that: unknowable. There’s nothing you can do; every proposition that is unknowable is in a superposition of sorts, but what effect can it have on me if that superposition can’t collapse into something knowable? Simply put:

You don’t have to know everything.

Being able to say that about things is magical. It’s lifting an epistemological load that I had to bear for years trying to justify what I couldn’t through convoluted chains of theodicies. I started getting content on my YouTube feed from absolutely phenomenal creators such as Forrest Valkai who changed my perspective radically on what it meant to even know something, and the theodicies started fading into the distance; I now found solace in the great unknown.

And so concluded my journey. I couldn’t answer the theological questions I put forth precisely because they looked like contradictions. And well…if it looks like a duck, walks like one, and quacks like one, then what else could it really be? If I truly wanted to decrease the amount of assumptions I held about the world, I had to let go of this untenable divine solution to a problem that we humans have created. There was no concrete day when this became the perspective that I became convinced of; it was just a thought I had in the back of my mind at first around the beginning of 2022, but it became stronger in its convincing power gradually. And as you can tell by the nature of this post, it prevailed.

I no longer believed in God (2023). God was dead to me, and I had killed him with my own hands. I had ripped him out of my throat⁹ after a 6-year battle with my own thoughts, from the end of 2017 to the end of 2023.¹⁰

There’s an important note to consider at the end of this process. This was not a choice that I consciously made. I simply was less and less convinced of the reality of the Christian god over time. I do not believe that you can choose your beliefs. Ironic, but my belief in this concept is most succinctly captured by this quote:

A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.

→ Arthur Schopenhauer

Part V: What Now?

Where do I go from here?

It’s not enough to say that I’ve stopped believing in the Christian god. This way of living had influenced my life for 20 years at this point, so how was I going to approach my newfound lack of faith that I had finally come to terms with in my own head?

That’s a hard question. I still don’t know¹¹, to be honest. I wish I had a simple answer, but there are quite a few circumstances I need to take into account.

For one, I’m already outing myself as an atheist on here. Since I live in the United States, and have many family members and friends that are quite devout Christians, this is more of a big deal than if I were to do this being raised in a primarily atheist environment like Germany or something like that. I’m sure that many of my relatives, including my mother and my sister, will be rather disappointed, and some may cry in response to reading this post. And for that, I’m truly sorry. But in truth, it’s better for both them and I to face reality than for me to keep pretending. It’s just kicking the can down the road. Maybe some of them will come to me and tell me to listen to their favorite apologists, or call me a fool for not believing (Psalms 14:1). However, it’s almost trivial to reconcile any contradictions in the Bible, or to come up with some sort of theodicy in response to a posed problem. The question is if it is tenable to hold this fragile stack of reconciliations and theodicies together, and I don’t think it is anymore. Feel free to converse with me if we want to have a productive conversation about this though, I’m always open to talk about faith even if it is not something I have anymore, and I will never, ever berate someone for being a believer like the atheist caricature depicts.

I am still playing in churches as a drummer, and still attend my first church almost every single week. Part of this is to keep up a ruse to my Christian loved ones, friends, and coworkers that nothing is wrong with my faith, but I will also be losing some relationships with people that I would prefer not to lose¹². I have come to terms with the fact that I will not be playing drums at churches anymore if I were to leave this church I attend, but I haven’t come to terms yet with potentially losing some of my friends that I still want to keep in touch with. Presumably, once I do come to terms with this, I will leave. I’ve already told myself that I want to leave at the end of the month twice in these past two months; perhaps the third time will be the charm. I will update this page once I end up leaving the church, but if you don’t see a notice below this paragraph telling you about this, I’m still going to church almost every Sunday because I don’t have the balls to end the relationship.

UPDATE: I have indeed left the church, on July 7, 2024. It took almost three months for me to pull myself together enough to do it. I guess I grew the pair of balls that I needed :}

Additionally, I’m working at a company right now whose express goals are to help churches, and most of my coworkers are all of Christian faith. I could potentially be losing out on relationships I’ve made at work, and I do have to keep in mind that I could be losing my job as well. So if you’re reading this, and you’re working at the same place as me, please don’t be alarmed by this post. I am still willing to work with anyone regardless of their faith and goals, provided I still see potential. My lack of faith should not hold you all back from being able to work with me to achieve your goals. If it does, then so be it, and I am sorry that this is the way it had to end.

There are many more external consequences for losing faith, but this is already long enough as it is. I also have to become comfortable with myself losing faith; after all, it took almost a year before I could come face to face with the thought that I had lost it in the first place. What are the frameworks that I will be using to continue living? Many religious people will often claim that as an atheist, I will have no moral framework, or that I will have no purpose in life, or other such claims. Unfortunately for them, religion does not have a monopoly on morals or meaning. How will I live my life then, you may ask? Great question.

As for morals, I’ve adopted a much more flexible look at them. Morals are an extremely nuanced subject; after all, we make moral decisions based on a large variety of factors, but they are still reasons for deeming something morally good or bad. I’m not going to deny it; emotions and rationality have everything to do with morality, and embracing that reality is only going to be a good thing. Doubting my own faculties for rationality is also a good exercise that I will continue to do. After all, the only thing I know is that I know nothing.

There are still some things I take away from my former faith. I am a huge fan of the idea that you should love your neighbor as yourself. However, now I don’t need to burden myself with the excess baggage of religious duties, faux humility¹³ in the whole “I am a sinner and not worthy” manner, and the historical and current atrocities done in the name of God; I can simply take the parts that are relevant and apply them to my life, just as we do with any other principle or situation we see in life. No need for special cases anymore and twisting my mind into a pretzel as to why God would allow slavery (Leviticus 25:44-46) or the killing of innocent children (Genesis 7:21-23, Numbers, 31:1-18, and many more), while forbidding genuine love (Leviticus 18:22, 20:13)¹⁴.

The second step I need to take is also going to be a lifelong process. You may have seen the little animated quote on the front page of this little place I write in:

I seek to be free from the concept of meaning, to carve my own reality.

But what does it mean to be free from meaning? I have yet to discover this, but as far as I know, I have abandoned the idea that there is any meaning that is prescribed to me by a divine being, or by the universe, or some other inconceivable thing. Instead, I want to free myself of the chains that society have placed upon me, that I must do something of “worth” in order for my life to have meaning. As for what that entails, I don’t know; I am simply willing to find out. I want to embrace my almost-lost inquisitiveness, the one I used to have as a child without any remorse, and let it take me on a journey.

“I don’t know” is indeed a beautiful statement. It’s not a cry to find out an answer, but only a gentle affirmation of the truth as it stands within a given context. I will be leaning back on this cornerstone for as long as I live.

I leave you with a quote that has influenced me through this entire journey:

Think about it, think! It ain’t illegal yet. Think!

→ Eddie Griffin

Footnotes

1. This wasn’t knowledge in the traditional sense of the word, but rather a strict regurgitation of arguments. I don’t think that most apologia is in good taste, and serves as post-hoc rationalization for pre-existing belief, rather than the primary reason for coming to faith. ↩

2. I really used to like playing contemporary Christian music and other worship music on stage. But after a while, I grew to hate the simplicity of it. It was just boring and felt uncreative. The “magic” I refer to here is the idea of feeling “the Holy Spirit” while listening to this music. The truth is, I felt much more emotion and much more alive listening to Pulse/Surreal by Lantlôs than I ever did to Christian music I played on stage, because I saw through the veil of how formulaic and uninspired it was. I could go on for days about this, to be honest. ↩

3. My sister bought the book for me. If you’re reading this, thanks dude. That was $15 that changed my life. ↩

4. It’s hard to draw the lines between what constitutes each one of these, which only adds to the cognitive turmoil I had. ↩

5. Ironically, the first church I went to was named Crossroads. Guess I really had it coming. ↩

6. In reality, “God of the gaps” is more a subset of the argument from ignorance logical fallacy. ↩

7. I don’t quite know why I kept going despite disagreeing with the faith. I was maybe interested in how people on the other side thought, and in how I myself used to think. Perhaps I was just trying to look through a window to the past. I’m not sure, even as of the time of writing. ↩

8. I mean this with full intention. Anyone saying that God does not have the power to do something, while simultaneously claiming said God is omnipotent simply does not know what they are talking about, or are loading their words with some other hidden connotations. I’d like to be proven wrong. ↩

9. I am a huge fan of Nietzsche’s story The Vision And The Enigma. There’s a depiction of a shepherd ripping a snake out of his throat, where the snake represented the eternal recurrence that the shepherd was scared of. I’m alluding to that here, since Nietzsche is one of the philosophers that most resonated with me post-deconversion. The prior “I killed him” reference is also from his writings. ↩

10. Notice the change in capitalization. Just a little Easter egg for you :}. ↩

11. I said “I don’t know”. That was the joke. Whoosh. ↩

12. Networking is already hard for software engineers, and I got my most recent connections through churches. Needless today, it’ll only become harder if I lose my existing connections. I would love to work for you if you are hiring, here’s my résumé just in case! ↩

13. If you have to express your humility in any way vocally that explicitly denigrates your own lack of worth or your own failings, it’s not humility anymore. It’s self-hate. Loving your own neighbor as yourself requires you to love yourself first; ironic coming from a dude who struggles with self-esteem issues, but that only makes it more poignant a point. ↩

14. I support the LGBTQ+ community. As an asexual dude, it’s hard not to. ↩