If you missed the first part of My Story, please click here.
As I sit down and try and piece together a chronological history of how came to lose my Christian faith I have come to realize how difficult and virtually impossible task it is, at least for me. The difficulty lies in the fact that I did not set out to lose my faith or even really examine it. There was no starting point on my journey. In fact what I have come to recognize is that for me losing faith has been a lifelong journey of thoughts, observations, and doubts—sometimes conscious, other times unconscious—that culminated a short time ago. Furthermore, I recognize that had the serendipitous confluence of events that led to the crumbling of my belief not taken place at the exact point in time and in the exact order that they did, I may still be a Christian today.
All of us would like to believe that we are rational human beings. We would like to believe that when we make important decisions about beliefs, worldviews, morality, and other matters of significance that we park our emotions at the front door. Yet the truth is that separating our rationality from our emotions is impossible and even undesirable. Studies have shown that people whose emotional center in the brain is damaged are able to analyze information yet unable use that information to make decisions.
The point is that few of us, including myself, adopted our faiths for purely rational reasons, and few of us will be argued out of our faiths for purely rational reasons. Most of us adopted the faiths of our parents, a faith that in many was more similar than not to the faiths of others in their geographical region. Our faith gained us membership into caring communities, provided a vehicle to celebrate life events and rights-of-passage, provided an instant worldview and a feeling of privilege and status in the cosmos. These are hard facts to give up.
Yet at some point for some of us events and emotions collide and impel us to reexamine the beliefs and views we once thought sacred, to reexamine them with the same rationality and skepticism as an outsider would. James Barr said that it often takes a crisis to knock someone into Christian fundamentalism and it will probably take a crisis to knock them out of it. For me there was no single crisis, rather a series of crises that eroded my beliefs. The rest of my story will look at some of these events in their own right, not necessarily temporally.
