My Story Part 2: Thoughts about Reason and Emotions

                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.

My Story Part 1: The Early Years

How did I come to have the faith that I eventually rejected? In short, it came from my mother.

Shortly after my mother and father married my mother began attending a local Baptist church in the small town in which I was born. This fact, even more than my father’s alcoholism, would be a constant point of tension in my youth. My father's entire extended family where I grew up were of the Catholic persuasion, my grandparents being very devout. Most of the town was Catholic (including nearly all of my school classmates) and I was even baptized as an infant at one of the local Catholic parishes.

Nevertheless as she took me to church every Sunday I quickly adopted the faith of my mother and the Second Baptist Church on Herman Avenue. I learned bible stories, sang songs, memorized bible verses by singing them, sang in the children’s choir, went to vacation bible school during the summer and even went to extra religious education during the school year.

When it came to doctrine and salvation Second Baptist spread the old time gospel. Ecumenicalism was not “in” at the time. You better have Jesus as your savior or hell was where you were headed when you died. Witnessing or “sharing my faith” took on a sense of urgency especially for me since most of my family, being Catholic, was headed straight for an eternity of eternal constant torment. Every time an extended family member passed away (and I have a lot of extended family members) I could not help but experience a brief moment of horror as I imagined how they must feel, thinking moments before they died that they would at least have some relief from the pains of this world only to wake up to a fiery torment.

I would have to say that the belief in hell was the first seed of doubt to be planted in my young brain. For my father who had no religious persuasion (as far as I could tell) he found the idea of hell particularly awful. “How could you believe in a God who would send someone to hell who never heard about your religion?” he would ask me. I had no answer except that my father’s life was so wrecked by alcoholism and “sin” that I had a hard time believing I could glean any meaningful metaphysical insights from him. Nevertheless I could not help but be disturbed at the thought—when I did think about it—that people that I loved, that loved me, cared for me, bought me birthday presents and came to my baseball games were on their way to an eternity of punishment. I believed it was true, because the Bible said so, but in so believing I had also planted the first seed of doubt about my faith.