April 1st is always an important anniversary for me. I privately celebrate it each year. I had originally planned to post this on 4/1, but life got in the way. I usually refer to April 1st as my Epiphany Day, but this year I’ve decided to rename it Precipice Day, or maybe co-name it, because I feel precipice is a more descriptive word for why it’s such an important day to me. Precipice also has a less religulous ring to it. After reading this, I know that many of you will find it fitting that I have deemed April Fool’s Day as one of the more significant days in my escape from faith, and that is your prerogative. If it gives you joy to see it that way, so be it. The irony hasn’t been lost on me, though I would prefer to think of it as my escape from foolish thinking day, because if I must pick one single day, April 1, 2002 was possibly the most important single day in my deconversion from Christianity to atheism, even more so than 9/11, which I’ve discussed before. This is the story of why.
In an earlier post, I talked briefly about 4/1/2002 and its role in my deconversion, but I want to go a little more in depth, and try to explain a little more clearly what it meant to me. I had recently quit my unfulfilling job, and decided to take a little trip alone before I started the next job a week later. I settled on Lake Tahoe due to the combination of beauty, lots of stuff to do alone (gambling, hiking, etc), and good travel deals. I’d never traveled alone before, and I was looking forward to my four days away in a beautiful place I’d never been before. And I actually hoped it might be a good place to do some soul searching. Little did I know, the searching would begin in my own airport before I even took flight.
As random luck would have it, I was scheduled to fly out of Minneapolis on April 1st. On this particular April 1st, luck decided to throw in a little something extra, a lovely Spring-in-the-Upper-Midwest-Blizzard. Minnesotans this turbulent, and lingering Spring can identify. I ended up stranded at my own airport for twelve hours as I watched my flight keep getting delayed a couple of hours at a time, and finally canceled, forcing me to catch a different flight at around 1 am. This was the recent post-9/11 world of airport security. Even without the snow, leaving the airport would have been a colossal pain. A friend of mine nearly visited me, but the weather and security made it too difficult. So, I had a lot of down time to wander around the (actually pretty awesome) Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport to try to keep myself entertained. This was, after all, the pre-Smart Phone era.
I had been wrestling with my waning faith for quite some time by this point. I was certainly still a Christian*, but the terrorist attacks on 9/11 had rocked my religious world in a pivotal and unimaginable way. 9/11 hadn’t been the first thing to make me question my faith, but I think it was the first event to make me seriously question God’s existence, if only for a fleeting moment. By the time of my Tahoe trip in April 2002, I had not allowed that thought to germinate. It seemed too awful to really consider. Whenever it surfaced, I quickly shoved it aside, as something beyond comprehension. I had tried to never be blindly dogmatic in my religious beliefs. I have always found it important to seek the truth, and had usually found that truth within the pages of the bible, and in the fellowship of church. I believed the humans within the church were not infallible, so despite being raised Lutheran, I considered myself a Christian first. My goal in life had been to understand what God’s purpose for me was, and I took that mission seriously. It was because of that mission and constant learning that I eventually found myself in a crisis of faith. As I grew older, and educated myself more, the threads of the bible were pulled apart more and more by evidence, critical thinking, and science. Yet I was still not able to truly consider the idea that either God may not exist, or he may not be the god I worshiped, namely the Judeo-Christian god of the Old and New Testaments. To me, to do so bordered — and occasionally crossed — the boundaries of blasphemy.
I had hoped this solitary trip might help to clarify for me what exactly had been missing in my faith. I was even hopeful the trip might help me knit the threads of faith back together. Instead, sometime that evening as I wandered through the airport, I stumbled upon a discarded copy of Harper’s Magazine, and my world changed forever.
I noticed the cover of the magazine immediately. It highlighted an article about the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and raised questions about the existence of the Bible’s King David. I’ve always loved archaeology (majored in it for a time at college), so the fact that this was also an article about Biblical archaeology made it ripe for the picking. I devoured the article, and as I sat there absorbing all that I had read, I had a moment of clarity that I have never had before or since.
It was not the content of the article that convinced me of anything. I think it had some very interesting points, some of which could be highly debatable, some of which are more than likely truth. But it had questioned the existence of David, which caused a thought in me to click: If David may not have been real… Jesus’ lineage, ergo his divine legitimacy, would also be in question. The Bible had become a House of Cards in seconds. I had believed I was a fairly open-minded Christian, and I still believe I was as open minded as I could be within the boundaries of the faith. I wanted to hear other opinions. I believed it was important to question my faith, and consider other possibilities. I took Paul’s advice to be like the Bereans, to continuously ask questions, and check the scriptures rather than blindly follow. But until that moment in the airport, I had not realized how limited I was in my endeavor to explore all possibilities. It was as if I was able to go as far as the edge of a high precipice. At the bottom of the cliff was the fiery pit of Hell. If I leaned over, I could feel its warmth, but I couldn’t see the flames. I knew it was there, but didn’t know how far down it was, or if there were any safe places to land – perhaps an outcropping to stand on, or a branch jutting from the rock to grab — before I was consumed by the fire. Prior to finding that Harpers article, I only dared peek over the edge of the precipice, crawling on hands and knees, never really getting close to the edge. After reading it, I took a few steps back, took a deep breath, ran towards the edge…
… and I leaped.
From that moment on, as gravity pushed me toward the bottom of the unknown abyss, I was in complete peace knowing I was free to explore any and all possibilities of our existence and purpose. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: I felt as though a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. I felt like I was floating, drifting on the air like a feather with the wholly comforting thought that god may exist, or god may not exist, but I am now free to fully question his existence, and go wherever the truth leads me.
Come what may.
In that moment, I did not become an atheist. I still believed in “god” in the most abstract sense. But I was fairly certain that the Bible’s many versions of god were not accurate. My church’s version of god was not accurate. My version of god was not accurate. Along with these new confidences, I felt sure that if the god I had loved throughout my faith did in fact exist, and I was wrong, that he would be able to see into my heart and know that all I did was use the tools of reason and critical thinking that he gave me to arrive at whatever conclusion I came to. That I never sought to leave him. At one point, I would have died for him. That he would see that I am a good person who only wants to understand the truth. If at the end, I decided, that honesty gets me a final trip into Hell, then the god I loved is not the real god anyway, and there was nothing I could have done to change the outcome. For the god I loved, would not allow a good person to suffer an eternity in torture and despair.
After I took the leap off of the precipice, it was a relatively short trip from non-Christian, to agnostic, to agnostic-atheist. I even flirted with Buddhism for a microsecond, and then let that go for the same reasons I let Yahweh go. I could no longer un-see reality. Once you’re freed of dogma, (and the threat of eternal suffering), it’s amazing how reality constantly bangs you over the head. There’s no need to create elaborate explanations to make sense of events in nature, to conform them to what my church, or bible, or spiritual leaders have taught me. There is only the truth (and that’s truth, not Truth). It exists whether I believe in it or not. Occam’s Razor wins.
I’m still learning every day, but I’m no longer hindered by fear of eternal damnation in my pursuit of the truth. That has made all the difference. And I believe I am not alone. It’s a terrifying thing to let go of faith, even when your powers of reason tell you it’s the correct path. Our brains are wired to believe things that aren’t here. To believe that the things that go bump in the night will find us. To believe that the way to survive into a mythical next life is by latching onto a more powerful magical thing in the sky. To believe in supernatural agency, according to Dr. Michael Shermer, may be an evolutionary byproduct of patternicity, a thing that kept us from being eaten by lions in the tall African grasses. Fighting innate traits developed over millions of years is a difficult thing. It’s not easy to take that leap. But not doing so holds us back. Believing the lie is comforting. Believing in reality can be terrifying, but it’s also exhilarating, and freeing, and ultimately, the only way I want to live.
Cheers,
PersephoneK
*In my 9/11 10 Year Anniversary blog where I discussed 4/1/2002, I said that 9/11 was the day I became an atheist. I still believe that is true, from a metaphorical, or symbolic, point of view, but I only realized it much later. Strictly speaking though, I believed in god in some form or another, for quite some time following 9/11. Apologies if that was, or is, confusing.
