Posted by Siamang on: 07.03.2007 /
Joshua M. Charles tells his journey from faith to atheism.
In a discussion on Friendly Atheist, someone asked if anyone’s life had been saved by atheism. I think Joshua’s in that category.
I especially like this description of that middle point, where his beliefs were shifting. I know many of us can relate to it.
Can you imagine what it’s like to go back and forth like this? The world right-side-up one moment, skewed the next, and backwards just a moment later. My mind couldn’t keep up. The depression I had been through before began to creep back up, but I didn’t want to go down that road. This time I had better tools in my pocket. I knew what I needed to do - gain perspective. So that’s what I did. I began reading everything I could get my hands on about Science, Skepticism, and Atheism, because I had the Christian perspective and I needed the opposite perspective.
In my readings, I began to see a pattern. Slowly, one by one, my precious beliefs were being dismantled.
-Siamang
Comment by: Doreen Mannion
1I’m curious, for those who self-describe as atheist who once self-described as Christians, what role did doubt have in the journey from faith to atheism? What causes the switch from doubting believer to atheist? Does doubt turn into “this is too much like believing in Santa Claus”?
Comment by: Siamang
2For me it was more that my beliefs were kind of running away with me… I believed so many supernatural things that I couldn’t demarkate between things I knew absolutely were false, and things I wanted to be true.
I started wondering what test I could use to seperate things that were true from things I wanted to be true but had no good reason to think actually was true.
And I started to have very strong suspicions that people who proclaimed to have knowlege of the afterlife and the spirit and the Creator… maybe didn’t know any more than I did about such things… they just CONVINCED themselves that they did.
I think that was really it for me… the feeling that authority figures of faith, priests, pastors, whatever… didn’t know what happens after we die any more than I did, yet THEY act as if they do. They make a living telling people they do! People are willing to live and even die by their rules to get into a heaven that nobody knows exists.
That was the start, for me. But the pieces were already in motion at that point.
Here’s my whole story, I tell it in more detail at this link:
http://off-the-map.org/ebayatheist/viewtopic.php?t=247
Comment by: Brendon Lake
3To be honest, I think Joshua had a faith that was very shallow to start with. From what he says I can’t help but get the impression that he mainly believed in God because his familly are Christians. He probably went to Church but never really considered his faith very deeply.
When he got separated from his familly and possibly a few friends who were Christians, then his faith which wasn’t very strong to begin with, collapsed when confronted by someone with a different view point.
That’s just this arm-chair psychologists best long-shot at a diagnosis.
Comment by: Josh Charles
4Long-shot indeed.
I suppose you have to deal with the cognitive dissonance somehow, because how could someone of serious faith ever leave it?
Yet, there are many better examples than I. Dan Barker comes to mind immediately.
I replied to your comments on my blog by e-mail because I wasn’t sure you would receive them otherwise.
However, I don’t doubt that you are honest in your impressions. Perhaps it’s a fair criticism that my post was not fairly descriptive of my faith as a Christian, and perhaps I need to write a follow-up to clarify that bit.
But there is one thing to point out. Someone who has a very shallow faith rarely takes the time to truly examine it.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
5Hi Josh, I’m so glad you have found a way to move beyond depression!
Maybe I can relate more than most - I have a mental health diagnosis (Bipolar). My personal belief is that my mental health is less at risk now I am almost an atheist rather than a Christian. I can’t prove it but I just passed a neat milestone - 4 years completely off medication with no recurrences.
I think your response to Brendon “perhaps I need to write a follow-up to clarify [my Christian experience” is an excellent one. Brendon’s response is very typical. It seems like the first things Christians look for, after reading an ex-Christian testimony is “Ah, but maybe that person never was a real Christian”.
I used to do it myself and I can tell you that when I read a testimony with a lot of detail about a person’s Christian experience, which forced me to say “Hmmm…it really does sound the same as mine!”, that was very powerful. It didn’t change my faith then but it was significant to me to learn that people with MY kind of faith did indeed sometimes walk away from it and become atheists.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
6Brendon, the problem with your argument is that it’s an argument from silence.
Josh evidently didn’t know what has become clear to me in observing Christian/ex-Christian dialog - that ex-Christians are generally suspected of not being real Christians by Christian and so in effect they end up having to defend how Christian they were.
I see that Josh includes the following in his article as reasons why he’s an atheist:
To get to all these questions I’d say he’s gone deeper than most Christians, in fact.
Anyway what about me? I’m almost an atheist now but I was a Christian. In response to your likely thought “she probably wasn’t a real Christian”:
1) I accepted Christ by praying the usual prayer, admitting I am a sinner, thanking Jesus for dying on the cross for my sins and asking Jesus to be Lord of my life. I didn’t think I was saved by good works; I believed only Jesus’ death on the cross could atone for my sins.
2) I felt God’s presence - so I thought - when I prayed that prayer - sort of in response to my prayer, so it seemed
3) My life changed a lot as I started reading the Bible and asking God what his will was and started going to church and other Christian events and listening to tapes on basic Bible doctrine
4)I sought God’s guidance in prayer, through the Bible, through open/closed doors, through the advice of Christian friends and believed I received it many many times
3) I believed I saw answered prayer many times
4) I memorized many Bible verses and carried a small Bible with me because I believed “Man doesn’t live by bread alone but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God
5) Other Christians believed I was one - they asked me to:
serve on the nursery committee
serve on the website committee, adding sermons to the website and moderating a prayer discussion board
play in the church orchestra
play solo music during communion
write a devotional for a special church booklet of devotionals written by church members
be a Bible study leader
6) We all fall short but I did my best to let God be in charge of my life/Jesus be Lord of my life, to obey him and please him
7) When I was in trouble I turned to him and when I was in the hospital psych unit locked in the ‘quiet room’ I turned to Jesus to ask “ok, I must have screwed up; tell me what to do”
So Brendon, was I a real Christian?
Actually I more run into the problem that Christians think I still am one. It’s the same Christian assumption coming into play that real Christians don’t deconvert. It’s “if you were one you must still be one” rather than “if you aren’t one now you must never have been one”.
In a way I know I haven’t changed much on the inside and so, people who assume I am still one sometimes get there by noticing that. At least it means they are paying attention to who I am rather than having a knee-jerk response to one or two things I could say. But the fact is, I don’t pray, I don’t read the Bible, I live my life without personal reference to God; I walked away from the personal relationship with Jesus deal as I understood it to be. If I have one now then it must be something everyone has because it doesn’t involve any talking to Jesus. Why would I talk to someone who might be a figment of my imagination? Especially given that the people who know me best all watch me closely looking for symptoms of mental illness such as delusionary thinking.
Comment by: Stephan
7Yes, unfortunately, the “He must not have been a real Christian” comment always comes up. I’m sure if I were to ever “deconvert” people could point to certain aspects of my current life and say, “See, he did that, so he wasn’t a real Christian.”
I admit I fall to the same temptation when reading deconversion stories, and I’m sure there is some element of truth in it. But I think it would be possible to look at anyone and find reasons why they are not a “real Christian”, so I try not to spend too much time there.
I think we all need to think that it couldn’t happen to me, so we find something in the story we cannot relate to and disregard the whole thing. But in reading these stories I find that there is more that I can relate to than I can’t. It doesn’t bother me, but it makes me take notice and examine my own faith more closely. Oddly, it has become stronger as a result.
Comment by: Brendon
8Whoa! So much to reply to, I doubt I can satisfy all your questions but I’ll reply as best I can.
Just a bit of background. I’m 25 years old, I’m a white guy and I’m from Zimbabwe, yes that’s in Africa, and yes I have lived here all my life.
First off, from Josh’s e-mail, and from your post Helen, I believe both of you have been Christians though you both clearly aren’t now. Why you both have left your faith is probably due to a failure within the Church as an organization to support you in your faith. In a recent magazine, I’ve read that this deficiency exists in a big way when it comes to ministering to those in their 20s.
In my own life, I’ve found quite often found it easy to turn my back on God from time to time. The thing about God is that he whispers to us in his “still, small voice” reassuring us & telling us that he’s not going to force us to follow him, it’s our own choice.
Meanwhile, the world is yelling at us and shoving down our throats what we must believe to fit in, shouting at me that if I don’t agree with it then I’m a deluded fool. I’ve read posts by Atheists who think the roles are reversed, that people are forced to believe by their churches, but I have never experienced this myself.
To close, I want to say that faced with the right (or wrong) set of circumstances I could easily have found myself in the same situation as both of you. Josh, I can really relate with the trouble you’ve had relating to people. For the whole of my time in junior & high school & also at my church youth group I felt like rather an odd-ball outcast. I’m doing a lot better now than I was, but I can see I still have a lot to learn when it comes to ‘opening up’ to people.
Through my tough times and even when I’m doubting God has always been faithfull to me and I pray you’ll find this true too, in time.
I really appreciate the sincerity of both replies & your honest interest in what I have to say
Comment by: Doreen A Mannion
9Wow. I’m really moved by this series of postings on not being a “real” Christian.
Is anyone a “real” Christian? What is one, and who gets to decide?
Siamang has helped me see so many similarities between the prejudice atheists face and the prejudices gays face. I’m seeing this again. For example, some lesbians tell other lesbians who have had or are having relationships with men, “You’re not a ‘real’ lesbian.”
If you’d just pray harder, you could be a real Christian.
If you’d just pray harder, you could stop being gay.
It’s all about labels, isn’t it? It’s all about judging others, isn’t it? Seems the Bible is pretty clear on that second one!
Many Christians believe that after you “become” one, you always are, or you didn’t really become one. That has not been my experience. I would have said I was a Christian when I was a child, I would have said so again when I was about 20. In some ways, I’m still not REALLY saying so again - I prefer to think of myself of a follower of Christ’s message. But there’s no way those other times I called myself a Christian I was NOT one.
It’s what’s in a person’s heart, not someone else’s definition.
I smell an entry on my blog coming up, LOL.
Comment by: Stephan
10Doreen, I love your blog, even though, as a conservative evangelical Christian, my background is very different. I am learning that the definition of “Christian” is quite a bit looser than I used to think. I have chosen to quit labeling others and just focus on my own walk. I allow others to label themselves.
Comment by: Siamang
11It’s strange… what’s so threatening about “This guy used to believe X, then he changed his mind and now believes Y”?
In the course of human lives, seems to me that must happen often.
Unless you’re our president, that is.
Comment by: Doreen A Mannion
12Thanks Stephan. I used to be a young Republican, college Republican, Calvary Chapel (home church, i.e., Costa Mesa) attender, Campus Crusade for Christ devotee, Ronald Reagan campaigner, etc., so while our beliefs may differ now, perhaps our backgrounds had some similarities at one point.
I moved from Calvary Chapel to Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral (before the huge cathedral, LOL). Then I did not attend church again for a few decades.
I still have friends from my college days who are still the way they were back in the day. Surprisingly, I’ve really only lost 1 friend along my journey, and that was caused by her husband. She married a Missionary & Christian Alliance seminarian. When they got their first church, she told me they did not allow a neighborhood family to attend or join, because the dad had AIDS (from a transfusion, but the reason did not seem to matter). I came out a few years later, and that was the end of our friendship.
Comment by: Karen
13Yes, of course it does. But within (at least some) Christian traditions, accepting Christ and converting is not perceived as just one of many serious decisions in life.
It is supposed to involve a supernatural event - Jesus coming into one’s heart, becoming a new creature in Christ, being “born again,” receiving the holy spirit, being sealed for eternity in god’s family. It’s “divine magic” and many Christians (my own tradition included) think it is irrevocable; i.e. the “once saved, always saved” doctrine.
So this is where the cognitive dissonance comes in that Josh mentions. If someone has divine guidance at one point, and then later declares that the magic was (or at least may have been) a hoax, that is seen by some Christians as invalidating the entire experience of the divine. Very threatening.
That’s why the knee jerk reaction is to say, “Oh, but you didn’t REALLY have the divine experience. You must have just gone along with your parents, or gone through the motions, but not experienced the real deal. Because if you had the real deal, you’d never walk away from it.”
I’ve gotten used to being told I wasn’t really a Christian. It happened to me just last week on another site, in fact, and I honestly just laughed because it’s so predictable. I certainly don’t have the inclination or the patience to lay out my “credentials” like Helen did so graciously, above.
But I remember the first time someone accused me of it, it really stung. It felt so terribly disrespectful for some stranger to tell me that 30 years of my life counted for nothing. I suppose that trying to understand what’s behind the accusation (fear) has helped me get beyond the hurt and anger when I hear those words.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
14Hi Brendon, thanks for your response.
With all due respect, it seems like you’re still looking for reasons and not really dealing with the change in our beliefs.
If I look out the window and see the sun shining, no amount of the church being nice to me will make me see raindrops.
Yesterday was the one year anniversary of a local newspaper publishing an article about me not going to church anymore. Reactions have been varied, but one stands out - a retired local Lutheran minister whose name I knew, but who I’d never met, responded to my article with a one of his own, with kindness, grace, respect and eloquence. This has developed into a dialog which is still going on. His latest response will probably be in next week’s newspaper.
Last fall he invited me to his house for tea and to chat about ‘things that matter’.
It’s been interesting, fun and meaningful, but - it hasn’t stopped me having doubts about whether Jesus exists.
Here are my blog posts relating to the dialog
Comment by: Karen
15Doreen, you were at big Calvary!?! I didn’t know that - I was too! Late 70s, early 80s for me. When were you there?
I also attended Schuller’s church with my mom for a few years pre-Crystal Cathedral. That was probably the mid-70s, when the most amazing thing there was the “drive-through” window that opened on cue during the call to worship. ;-)
Comment by: Siamang
16Doreen,
Calvary Chapel? SPOOOOOKY church there.
I’m glad you’re out of that. Yikes. I’ve read some doozys of deconversion stories from Calvary.
Comment by: Doreen A Mannion
17Hi Karen,
Oh yeah, Calvary & me, LOL. This was 1978-1980. Now just don’t tell me you went to Cal State Long Beach, lol.
Yes, I loved that “drive through” window. You should’ve heard me a few semesters ago when one of my profs claimed that Schuller was one of “those prosperity gospel” ministers. The church might be just a bit over the top, but I never heard any properity gospel preached within.
I’ve got hilarious photos somewhere of some non-religious friends (and by friends I don’t mean Quakers) pretending to preach from the altar of the new cathedral when we snuck in while it was under construction.
Comment by: Karen
18Ha! we probably sat next to each other a few times. :-) I only occasionally went on Sunday mornings but I was always at Greg Laurie’s mid-week (Monday night?) bible study, at a home bible study affiliated with Calvary on Tuesday nights and at the Christian concerts on Saturday nights. Don’t even get me started reminiscing about all the Maranatha Music groups of the day.
Nope, but I’m pretty sure somebody else here did. ;-) I went to UC Irvine and later USC.
Comment by: Karen
19Oh, and re Schuller: His thing was the power of positive thinking, ala Norman Vincent Peale. He also preached a lot on what he called “interactive” prayer, where you would pray in your head and then stop and wait for god to answer. So you were supposed to hear a small voice in your head talking back to you if you were praying with the right, “positive, expectant” attitude.
I never remember him getting into the prosperity gospel at all. But maybe it’s an understandable mistake, given the luxurious trappings like the cathedral and then the (even more ridiculous) spire or tower or whatever that thing is.
Comment by: Doreen A Mannion
20wow Karen, moving from an anteater to a trojan is QUITE the leap!
I think most of the Rev’s congregants could afford the Crystal Cathedral given what it cost even back then to live in Orange Co. I know most of TD Jakes attenders when I heard him here in DC could NOT afford the $723 he asked for, saying God told him to pray on some verse 7:23, therefore they should all bring $723 to the stage IMMEDIATELY. I was sick for days after that experience.
Comment by: Siamang
21I’m the 49er around here.
Comment by: Brendon
22Glad to see you haven’t completey kicked God and Christians out of your life Helen.
Dare I say it, there’s hope for you yet.
Comment by: Doreen Mannion
23Brendon,
Hope you stick around. You’ll see that most around here give hope to one another in many ways.
Comment by: Doreen Mannion
24Siamang wrote
Whoo-hoo. Just another reason to like ya!
Comment by: Stephan
25Siamang, are you an actual miner, or a fan of the San Francisco football team, or is that your chronological age? I’m a little confused.
Comment by: Ir (Helen)
26Brendon, I hope you said that tongue-in-cheek, knowing that not everyone here agrees with you on what means there’s hope for me.
Like Doreen I hope you stick around. I appreciate that you’ve taken time to engage with us.
Comment by: Doreen Mannion
27Hi Stephan, I believe that Siamang, like me, is an alum of Cal State Long Beach, whose mascot is a miner 49er. Hence, the 49er reference. (I seem to recall the school was also founded in 1949, but that may just be a hazy hazing memory….)
Comment by: Stephan
28Doreen, thanks for the clarification. Southern Cal is like a foreign land to me, and I plan to keep it that way.
Comment by: Siamang
29Doreen is correctamundo.