On the brink of atheism

"I picked a great night not to be a christian", I told my wife just seconds after leaving a dinner party that included a couple Campus Crusader missionaries.

No one is ever supposed to just stop being a christian and i certainly never imagined the thought would ever cross my mind. I've known christ practically all my life, been a part of all the christian things, prayed the big prayers and said all the right kinds of words. I stayed on the map all my life never venturing off, always believing no matter what. I've debated skeptics and atheists and prayed hard for my "unsaved" friends.

I wish I could say that it was something dramatic that provided the boost for me to reconsider my faith. It wasn't. It's just been a slow process and in some way allowed and mildly encouraged in by the emerging church. through that movement i've found that not everyone felt all gung-ho about saving the world through religious domination.

i'm sure someone could use that to damn the emerging church. "what!? you allowed someone to question?! and now they're questioning the most fundamental beliefs!?". yeah yeah.

it wasn't that though, and it wasn't any major life change or event or let down or anything. i heard about a book that promised to challenge perceptions and it sounded interesting. i drove to my local bookseller and started reading. i didn't realize how things were about to change. it wasn't so much the book than it was how the author confirmed things i had thought about my faith for a very long time.

within chrisitanity i've seen so many excesses and evil things. i've seen churches control their congregations and their congregants allow them so willingly. i've seen entire churches rise and fall, not for any reason other than their own pride. the formulas seem so cut and dry, everyone gets something for doing something. and so it has been easy to see church as grand misguided, albeit well intentioned, machine.

and as my view of church began to wane it wasn't so surprising that my bible reading ("devotions") became less and less. i know some would try to convince me that that was a cause not an effect, but i don't think that's the case.

i've had a bit of an interest lately in studying the church of scientology, not at all because i would ever want to join, but simply because i'm fascinated with how cults draw their people in and keep them. i've watched a friend loose almost everything to an MLM that works on similar principles. and i've questioned more and more how the modern church's tactics differ from either of those examples.

that's not to say it's all bad. i don't think it is. i think most christians i've known are well intentioned and not at all given to deceit. but then again nice things could be said about scientologists as well.

so all of this led up to my reading that book. it's a pretty simple little book where the main character tries to find the simplest most straight forward explanations for anything and everything. and you know what? after years and years in the church, after hearing thousands upon thousands of sermons, after reading countless volumes by the all the most respected theologeans, i was taken apart.

i sat in the near empty fluorescent lit bookstore listening to best muzak could offer at the moment, my faith dismantled word by word, page by page.

some might say, if that's all it took than i really had no faith to begin with. maybe, but why are we so quick to blame the lost rather than the beliefs?

what i found is that christianity, as it is most often known, hangs precariously on a few assumptions. while the occasional doubt had crossed my mind many times, i just assumed the need for a loving caring, all knowing, omnipotent being who sent his son in human form to take away my sins. much work had been done to convince me of this and to wrap my emotions into this mythology so that i could scarcely know myself apart from it.

i found myself asking why my reality required such a mythology. why does my reality require an omnipotent being, and why a virgin birth and why any of that? If God knows everything, sees everything and can do anything, what possible motive would he have to create anything? out of love? maybe, but it wasn't really making sense. it just isn't the simplest explanation for observable reality.

i began to wonder, though not for the first time, if the Bible and all of its truth was really just well refined wisdom passed down through the ages, a sort of way of saying, here's how to live a pretty good life and not get too messed up. and it does this in just the sort of way all religions do. i thought that maybe i could finally stop trying to defend every little thing that seems awry with the scripture and start living life as best i could.

i'm not eager to go dump the scriptures and it's moral teaching like a college student who is at last freed from parental rule. if anything, it's a harder life to live to not believe in God, but it does seem to be a good deal simpler than what i was trying to make work as a christian. i no longer have to worry about whether or not someone should be included or excluded, listened to or ignored, loved or rejected. i don't have to figure out if i'm living every little detail of my existence in accordance with a community i fear will judge my every weakness.

i can get on with living my life. to quote Penn Jillette:

"Believing there's no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I'm wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate."

i wasn't ever privy to this concept within the walls of Christianity. it was just fine with my community that i have no "unsaved" friends. besides, i figured i was just better off that way. and if i did befriend a worldly person, i needed to find every opportunity to let them know that i was a christian and they should be one too. i guess that explains why i didn't have so many unsaved friends.

if i had, maybe i would have heard some of these thoughts a little earlier. maybe i would have found out that the unsaved really weren't as lost in life as i had been led to believe.

now a few days have passed. i went to church on sunday and stood in the pews and sang the songs and listened to the sermon and had a sense of the sacred that i can't fully describe. i think i'm starting to get a little perspective on what i've experienced this week.

it's basically this. i'm so fed up with christianity as i have always known it. i've gone from being the kid that said all the right christian things to an adult on the brink of atheism. i've seen some great moments in the church. but more and more, i've seen that great moments are hardly exclusive to the church. in fact, christians are, on the whole, no different from the surrounding society.

i'm not alone in thinking this. and fortunately i seem to have found a church that proves there is an exception to the madness. it's the type of church that i feel like if i were to make the step into atheism i wouldn't be respected any less. that's refreshing. there is, for the first time in my experience, a community that i don't think is keen on judging my every action or belief.

on the whole though, i'm not sure i would recommend anyone become a christian if it means going to the types of churches i've grown up in. i would instead recommend reading about Jesus and making your mind up from there.

as the service progressed on sunday i considered my main question... why do we need a christian mythology at all? what is it about reality that necessitates all of that? isn't there a simpler, more up-to-date explanation for existence? I think that there is, but i'm not sure that explanation accounts for the sacred. i know this is circular logic, and christians are notorious for such logic. but there's something that defies logic in what we experience in the sacred.

so where am i with all of this? i'm not convinced that christianity as i have known it will ever have the answers i'm looking for, but i think that there's a new christianity on the horizon. one that somehow corrects the types of problems that have plagued my christian experience to date. one that is so true to what Christ taught that even the most enlightened monk, the most devout athiest, the most burned out evangelical or the most uninterested agnostic might find its truth compelling. it's happened in the past, and perhaps it's time for it to happen again.