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A old baseball friend, and terrific human, who knew me as one of the most (aggressive and obnoxiously) outspoken evangelical players on my college baseball team asked me what it took to leave our shared faith for atheism.
Here is my response.
Here is my response.
The answer is manifold. The long slow grind of a faith that is incongruent with itself and the world around it was tolerable, but not ignorable. However, I kept it up as any believer does: through a mix of compartmentalization and consuming only that which validated it.
A compounding factor were family's "concerns" about my son's spiritual future, which made me reflect on my own path; one of ostracism, judgement, hypocrisy, and futility. I found myself wondering if I wanted to "sign him up" without his consent for this or any belief system.
Additionally, Bonnie grew up in a fundamentalist cult. Then, watching Trump come to power on the back's of Christian evangelicals... I think we were both reeling from the cognitive dissonance at play in a quickly mainstreaming extremist Christian conservative power movement.
So I did something I'd not done since I became a Christian: I started studying about where the faith came from. Things like the Bible's historicity, contradictions, evolution. Roman history. Hebrew history. 78 books in total, ranging from Bible history to human psychology.
At the end of this (actually, near the middle) it was quite clear that the Bible is no more divine than any other ancient collection of books, and our "faith" more a matter of geography and culture than revelation. Beyond the tribal benefits, their were no reasons to keep it up.
So I shed it, and considering all the unnecessary suffering it, and systems like it, cause, I've done my best to speak out against it's over-reach, including dehumanizing genders, sanctioning racism, punishing sexual orientation, and undermining scientific progress.
A larger, startling, and lasting realization is just how little Christians know, or wish to know, about the origins of their own faith and the book(s) that make it. What's borrowed, edited, fake, and how it all compares to other systems its age and older.
In closing, all I can say is, I understand why you feel sad. I'd tell you not to, but I've left the fold - a fold that offers prayers and concerns for precisely this type of situation. So, all I'll say is, keep doing good, what pleases you, what helps, and live this life well.
