Motivation After Faith

Depression (and anxiety) is something that I’ve dealt with, at some level, for most of my life. I don’t think my story is particularly unique. I was the quiet kid. I was the daydreamer. The socially awkward kid—the weird kid. Right? Naturally, I had a difficult time making friends. Which led to a pretty lonely childhood.

Not to get too deep into that, I bring that up to say, when I lost my faith and started to question the meaning of existence, depression was nothing new to me.

“Hello darkness, my old friend.”

When I was a fundamentalist Christian, I remember talking about life without God being meaningless. “What’s the point if it’s all just going to end someday?” Even now as an atheist, it can be a difficult question to deal with.

When my theology began to shift toward a more progressive perspective, after I had convinced myself that a belief in hell was a ridiculous notion, I began to wonder about heaven, as well. “Isn’t heaven an equally ridiculous notion as hell?” I started thinking about the point of this world if there was a perfect world that is waiting for us when we pass. Fundamentalist beliefs say that the reason we have sin in the world is because of the Fall—when Adam and Eve ate from The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Right? The skeptical objection, and the question I was asking at the time, was, “why create a forbidden tree to begin with?” Free will, right? God had to allow a choice. Right? We could choose to follow him, or we could choose to seek knowledge and be “like gods”. Right? For a long time, this made perfect sense to me. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered, “Is there free will in heaven?” Of course there’s free will in heaven, how else did Lucifer rebel against God?

That got me thinking, if there’s free will in heaven that means we can still choose to rebel after we get there, right? So what’s the point of this world? God could’ve just created us in heaven and avoided this world all together. The excuse I used to give was, “then we wouldn’t need faith”. But what difference does that make? Lucifer didn’t need faith! He actually made a genuine choice as he knew God existed and still rejected him! Why do we need faith? And by the way, how ironic is it that an alleged “omnipotent” god needs something to accomplish his plan? The answer was becoming more and more clear to me then, and it is obvious to me now.

I’m reminded of the scene in the Wizard of Oz when the Tin Man, the Lion, the Scarecrow, and Dorothy were standing in front of The Great and Powerful Oz, and Toto pulls back the curtain and exposes the man behind the curtain. It’s so obvious to me now that it’s hard not to feel ashamed for ever having believed it.

While I, as an atheist, don’t have a better alternative than Christianity can offer (as far as heaven goes), the reality is, as a skeptic (and as I stated in a previous post), regardless of how much someone believes something—or wants to believe something—it doesn’t make it true. As a skeptic, I care about what’s true, regardless of how it makes me feel. Which is one of the reasons I decided to entertain the fact that Christianity might not be true. It’s the reason I entertain the fact that any idea I have might not be true.

I used to think that the only reason people didn’t want to believe in God is because they wanted to live a sinful life without any shame. Boy was I wrong. Losing my faith didn’t make my life easier. In some ways it did, sure, but in many ways, it made life much more complicated. I have fewer answers than before, not more. I have far less certainty about things that I thought I knew, not more. The fact that I no longer believe in an afterlife doesn’t make me feel free to live whatever way I want to live. It actually makes me feel as if I’m more responsible for my actions. More accountable. There’s no devil to blame for my problems anymore. I have to own my mistakes. I don’t have the comfort of knowing that God has my back and that “all things work together for good”. It definitely didn’t make my relationships any easier, as I’ll talk about shortly.

Nope, I didn’t become an atheist “so I can sin”. I didn’t become an atheist because it made my life easier. I became an atheist because it no longer made sense. I’m not entirely sure if it ever really did make sense.

Those of us that walked away, generally, are just tired of making excuses for a god that’s simply not there.

All the roads that I had been down, from six-day creationism, to YouTube conspiracy rabbit holes, to quantum woo, to progressive Christianity, was because I was trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole, and I finally saw the writing on the wall. My story isn’t entirely unique, either. There are differences in the details, but the overall narrative is generally the same. Those of us that walked away, generally, are just tired of making excuses for a god that’s simply not there.

Life got so complicated after losing my faith that I decided it was time to go to therapy. I needed to find some direction. Before I had a book, inspired by an all-knowing deity, to tell me what to think. Now, I had to figure it out on my own. I imagine that’s why a lot of people are drawn to religion.

. . .It’s hard to think for yourself. . .

Finding Secular Therapy

As some of you probably know, especially those of you that live in the Bible Belt, it’s not easy to find a secular therapist. Apparently it’s not good for business to publicly state that you’re a secular therapist, as most people want their therapists to be at least somewhat spiritual. It’s typically something you have to search around to find.

Eventually I reached out in the private (post-faith) Facebook group that I talked about in the last post. Thankfully, my friend Brian Peck, that is a licensed therapist, sent me a private message and offered to help me find a therapist in my area. I happily accepted the offer and within a few days he found one within a few miles of my house. (You can find Brian’s work at roomtothrive.org)

Therapy helped me work through issues that I had been dealing with my entire life. It helped me understand why I so easily bought into Christianity in the first place. As a Christian it was because I had a “God shaped hole in my heart”, right? As an atheist, it was because I needed to feel accepted—by people, not a god. That feeling never goes away. Like I said in the last post, we evolved to crave community. It’s an essential part of being a human. For many religious people, it’s not about making sense (because it doesn’t). It’s about the relationships; it’s about fitting in; it’s about connection. That’s why I initially wanted to believe it. It’s not because I was convinced of anything. The truth is we live in a culture where most people are some flavor of Christian and honestly, I wanted to feel included. If I could’ve shut off my brain and not looked for the man behind the curtain, I’d probably still be a believer.

It didn’t take long to work through some of the loss of direction stuff. Just talking about these things helped me realize that it was me in control the whole time. God was, more or less, a placebo. Anytime I got an answer from a prayer, it was me answering. Anytime I felt as though God helped me achieve something, it was me doing the work.

Being an atheist doesn’t change who you are anymore than being a Christian changes who you are. It’s the reason why we see the same things happening within both communities. You see sex abuse in the church as well as in atheist communities. You see good being done in the name of god, and you see good things being done by secular groups. In very similar ratios.

Believing in heaven didn’t make me feel better about death, and it didn’t give me more meaning. It actually did the opposite. I had no clue where I was going when I died because you could never be good enough. Which is how the game works. It’s a carrot and a stick game. Salvation was always just a little bit out of reach and every time you screwed up, you had to beg for forgiveness. There’s no appeasing the God of the Bible. That’s how they keep you coming back.

Believing in heaven definitely didn’t give me more meaning in this life, it made this life all but meaningless. All the focus was on getting to the “better place” when I died. Now that I know that this life is probably all I have, I have that much more motivation to make the best of it—not throw it all away.

However, my life didn’t really start to piece back together until after I was hit with a hard reality that my marriage was in trouble. Up to that point I was focused on me and my personal issues. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t being the husband that I should be. So, in therapy I began to shift my focus on my marriage.

I had a lot of things to work through that I don’t really need to get into. Some of it was my drinking that I was using for self medication when I was depressed, some of it was just not being present and being too much in my own head all the time. But a major hurdle was our differences in beliefs.

Eventually my wife and I decided to go to couples therapy. Which helped us set some clear boundaries, number one, and also helped us determine that shared beliefs weren’t nearly as important as shared values, number two. In a mixed-faith relationship, those two things are absolutely essential.

As I was saying before, becoming an atheist doesn’t change who a person is. Specifically, when dealing with the Bible, if I wanted to be hateful toward people, I could justify that hatred using the Bible. If I want to be good to people, I could use the Bible to justify that as well. A person that wants to do bad things is going to ignore the parts that is instructing them to be good, and a person that wants to do good things is going to ignore the parts that is instructing them to do bad things. (The Bible’s stance on homosexuality is one that immediately jumps out in my mind.) Even as a fundamentalist Christian, I remember having a major issue with people being blamed for something that had no control over. Much like I had no control over losing my faith. Becoming an atheist didn’t make me a worse person. In fact, in many ways, it made me a better person. An example of that is the fact that I no longer had to “love the sinner and hate the sin”, as the cliché goes. Now I could just love the person. That’s it.

The important thing that I was trying to communicate was that I was the same person that I was before I lost my faith. My values hadn’t changed.

Now I’m not going to sit here and say that my wife and I have it all figured out, because we don’t. We still have our disagreements on things. But I think the most important lesson that we could ever teach our children is that two people can love each other, live together, and believe different things, as long as the vast majority of their values are shared. While my wife and I certainly do not believe the same things as far as faith is concerned, we both value individual autonomy, and respect each other’s right to make up our own minds in that regard. I won’t pretend that it’s an easy task, but love is a powerful motivator. Maybe one day, hopefully, we can write a storybook ending.

Moving Forward

Losing my faith allowed me to start reading books that I never considered reading before. I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, God’s Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, Waking Up by Sam Harris, and many more. You know, the type of books that a person usually reads before they lose their faith. But one of the most important books that I read as an atheist was The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan. That book changed the way I think about almost everything. It’s the reason I started this blog to begin with. Carl Sagan woke the skeptic inside me. It’s something that I didn’t even know was in there! It’s something that I’m passionate about, it’s something that I can imagine calling myself, and working to get better at, for the rest of my life.

Moving forward with my blog, I’m going to be looking at several different topics. I’m going to be doing several deep dives on things such as climate change denial, alternative medicine (acupuncture, chiropractic, essential oils, etc), diet fads (such as low carb diets), young and old earth creationism, Loch Ness monster and Bigfoot, astrology and psychic ability, psychedelic and spiritual experiences, reincarnation and much more. I will probably start with talking about science and skepticism, why they go hand and hand, what their limitations consist of, and why they’re so reliable.

This is going to be a fun journey, and I’m excited to get into the first topic. I’m going to try to continue the weekly posts, but I’m afraid some of these topics will require a lot of research and reading, and I’m limited on time. With that said, I may end up going to a bi-monthly schedule with some of the heavier subjects. But I’ll try to make it worth the wait!

Stay tuned!

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Below are a list of resources for those of you that may be questioning your beliefs, have left your religion/cult but don’t know what to do next, or just need secular information or advice. There are people that want to help. Don’t go through this alone.

(If you have any resources that I can add to the list please leave them in the comments.)

Recovering from Religion: an international non-profit organisation, that helps people who have left or are in the process of leaving religion to deal with any impacts of leaving their faith by offering support groups, a telephone helpline and an online community for “people in their most urgent time of need”, as well as offering a range of online tools and practical resources.

RFR Resources For Secular Living – Coming Out Resources, Coming Out Stories, Finding Meaning, Find or Start a Local Group, Grief, Holidays, Maintaining Relationships with Believers, Secular Family Resources, Secular Weddings & Celebrants, Secular Funeral Planning, Secular Online Communities

RFR Demographic Groups – African American, Campus/Student, Cancer Support, Christian Scientists, Clergy Resources, Evangelical Christianity, Hispanic/Latino/Spanish, Humanists, Jehovah’s Witness, Jewish, LGBTQ+, Military, Mormon, Muslim/Islam, Seventh-Day Adventist, Women, Youth

RFR General Secular Resources – Audio/Video/Podcasts, Charitable, Events, Secular Organizations, Legal, Political, Think Tanks

RFR Learning topics – Cults, General Secular Education, Hell / Heaven / Satan / Death, Purity Culture, Religions, Science, Sex, Skepticism and Critical Thinking, etc.

The Clergy Project: a nonprofit organization based in the United States that provides peer support to current and former religious leaders who no longer have faith. The group’s focus is to provide private online forums for its participants, and assistance through career transition grants, hardship grants, and free sessions of psychotherapy.

Secular Therapy Project: Find secular, evidence-based mental health clinicians in your area.

Atheist Community of Austin: a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to promoting positive atheism and the separation of church and state. The ACA serves the local Austin community through outreach programs, providing informational resources and various volunteer activities. In addition, the ACA serves the community-at-large through free online portals including informational wikis, regular audio/video podcasts and interactive blogs.