Losing My Religion
How and when did my doubts begin?
They began with fervent religiosity, a dedication to serving God, and a lot of prayer. I was 13.
In the seventh grade, I had enrolled in a strict Christian school in South Carolina that frowned on girls wearing pants and introduced each science course with the claim that the Bible was infallible.
I had enrolled to escape bullies from the year before and credited God for helping me to get through that year. My mom had prayed with me in the car every day on the way to school because she knew what I would face when I went inside.
As a result, I had become religious and was aspiring for sainthood. I prayed many times during the day. I hungrily read the Corrie Tin Boom series about a devout woman who had risked her life to hide Jews during the Holocaust.
I read stories, too, about Christians who had bravely smuggled Bibles into repressed Communist countries. Those stories inspired me. I dreamed of becoming an intrepid missionary who smuggled Bibles into Romania, and I was ready to hide politically repressed people in my house if I ever stumbled across any.
However, I had a problem. At the same time that I was more religious than I had ever been, I was also in the grip of a severe adolescent depression – and something I had been taught at my school fueled it.
A Bible teacher, an ex-marine, at my school taught that there would be tears in heaven. He stressed that Christians, along with nonbelievers, would face the judgment of God at death. Your whole life would be reviewed on a celestial movie screen for everyone to see. God would review every action, every thought, in front of everybody.
I was a shy, self-conscious adolescent, hormone crazed, chronically confused, and there were plenty of thoughts I didn\’t want anyone to know about. The idea of being featured on a movie screen upset me. Did it include everything? Taking showers? Going to the bathroom?
In the shower scenes, would it reveal my bare chubby thighs, which filled me with so much shame I was afraid to wear a bathing suit?
The divine scrutiny of thoughts was even worse. With actions, I had some control. But thoughts sprung into my head like lightening flashes. I never planned them; they just happened.
And yet it was thoughts, not actions, that got you into heaven or sent you to hell. You could murder someone in cold blood and be forgiven – but if you had the wrong thoughts, disbelieving ones, you would be eternally boiled.
The idea of hell occupied my thoughts. Sometimes when I lowered myself into a bathtub and the water was too hot, I would think about how much hotter hell would be; I would imagine the heat of the tub magnified a thousandfold. I tried to imagine it going on forever, all screams, regrets, apologies, and pleas for mercy ignored. Forever. All because of a thought: there is no God.
In religion, it was clear that thoughts mattered – that faith, a thought, was everything to God.
This was my problem. Because I honestlybelieved God was watching my every thought, I tried to only have only good ones. And the harder I tried, the more impossible it became.
Every time I imagined God eavesdropping, my mind would go furiously to work devising brilliantly profane, lascivious images, forbidden combinations of words. My mind, it turned out, could perform acrobatic feats of perversity and depravity I had never dreamed possible.
I was constantly praying for forgiveness – but as soon as I did, a new torrent of profanities and images would rush onto my mental screen. My depression and my forbidden thoughts became intertwined – the notes in the musical composition of my misery.
Repeated prayers for them to end yielded nothing, and the feeling that God was ignoring my prayers made everything worse. Because he was the all powerful, morally flawless creator of the universe, I was eager to impress him. I now imagined that he was so shocked by my thoughts, he was rendered speechless.
At some point during my Bible reading, too, I had come across the idea of “blasphemy of the holy spirit,” the one unforgivable sin. I was sure at least one of my many thoughts had made the mark.
I imagined the the humiliation of the judgment; the sad disappointed eyes of Jesus; the charred scent of flesh, the infinite, unbearable agony that drove out all other thoughts.
I longed for the simpler days when I thought that God was a friend whose job was to protect me from bullies. I prayed for some sign that God did not hate me.
My war against my mind dominated my life. Profane images interrupted my prayers. I had stopped eating, lost a lot of weight, and had to see a psychiatrist because my dad thought I had anorexia. I struggled with suicidal thoughts and had frequent, terrible nightmares.
At the same time, I was reading the Bible all the way through. Instead of comforting me, much of what I read made me feel worse.
In particular was something the apostle Paul said: that God chooses who will believe in him. In Romans 9:18-22 Paul, anticipating an objection, makes an angry argument that goes something like this: “You say how is that fair? Foolish person! Know ye not that God is the potter and people are his pots? Can a potter not destroy his creations whenever, and however, he pleases?”
I was stunned. In what universe was that a good analogy? People were not pots. Pots could not suffer. God had created a place of eternal torture to punish people for having the wrong thought of disbelief – and yet he had chosen who had that thought.
Punishment of such magnitude had to be based on free will, and this verse threw it all into question. It was scandalous! Did God will for me to have the thoughts I had too? Is that why he never answered my prayers to make them stop?
I never spoke to anyone about my horror at this discovery. In general, when you told people about a disturbing verse in the Bible, they would smile wisely and say, “There are some things in the Bible that are too high for us. We were not meant to understand them.”
As a child I had accepted this explanation, but now I wondered: If we were not meant to understand certain passages, why did God includethem.
Despite all this, my belief did not vanish all at once. Instead, it gradually eroded away during the next couple of years. By the time I was fifteen, I was thoroughly exhausted and obsessively neurotic. I had endured three years of unrelenting depression.
I was teaching myself to type when I first allowed myself to consciously consider the thought that God did not exist. As I pressed the keys, the thought nudged at me and would not go away. This time it was not just a new deviant mental antic.
I kept thinking, why is faith a virtue? If it gave you knowledge, why did it lead people to so many different places? Reason was the best tool anyone had, but applying it to faith was forbidden. Why?
I did not let go of God easily I prayed a final prayer: “If I am wrong, let me know.”
There were no signs though, no lightening bolts, no divine chastisements. Just silence. By this point, I was okay with that. I was just relieved there was no hell, and that my thoughts had not been acts of evil.
Though I felt more vulnerable and unprotected than I ever had been, I became fully interested in everything around me.
By the time I had enrolled in a public school in the tenth grade, my obsessive thoughts had vanished. They were no longer “wrong,” so they had lost all of their power.
I had once seen nonbelievers, as through a glass wall, as people who did not think, as reckless people who foolishly risked their eternal fates, all for nothing.
Now I found myself on the other side of that glass wall, looking in to where I had been standing before, marveling at how different everything looked from here.
Rebuilding My World
A hush had fallen over my world. I felt as if I were waiting for something to happen to break the silence, a new surprise. Anything seemed possible now.
I was 15 and about to enroll in a public school.
At my old school, the chapel speakers had always warned against leaving Christian schools. They told of students who had left, only to have their lives spiral into a hell of addiction, prostitution, and violent criminal behavior.
I didn\’t do any of these things, or want to. What I did, instead, was study harder than I ever had in my life.
My world had dramatically changed, flipped, revealed new colors. It had turned inside out and the ceiling had become the floor. The earth was spinning faster on its axis, and rotating the opposite way. And I had no one to talk to.
I knew no nonbelievers in my small SC town. And if I told any of my friends or family, they would see me as either morally depraved or lost and desperate. How could I explain?
My new fascination with the world found focus in an odd place: an introductory tenth grade biology class.
It was odd because I had never cared about grades and particularly not science; I looked for any excuse not to do homework. The only reason I had everstudied was fear of being embarrassed. Most classes only required rote memorization. The teachers did explain things in their lectures, but my mind always wandered.
I was like a cat who sneakily eats around the the ringworm pill that has been hidden in its treats. I never tried to understand anything unless I had to. I read fiction, mostly religious, and that was enough for me.
Now, for the first time, science had meaning. On the first day of class, I opened biology textbook and saw the definition. Biology was the study of life.
Before, I had always been intimidated by unwieldy scientific terms. It also seemed boring because it was only about how things worked. Now there was a new, haunting question: why?
Why was life here at all? Somehow, not knowing why made the how more important.
I failed the first test because I was trying only to memorize as I had done before. But because the tests were standardized, I had to understand the material and use reason. Most of the students made no higher than a 69 on the tests, and the teacher curbed them. But even after the curb I had done badly.
I adjusted my studying methods. For the next test I opened my textbook to all the foreign sounding terms. This time I challenged them to make sense. I looked up every unfamiliar word. I tried to find meaning behind the imposing wall of terms.
I remember the moment when everything changed. I was studying for a quiz on mitosis, memorizing the phases of cell division. Interphase, metaphase, anaphase. The terms, recited one after another; they were melodic.
As I said the words to myself, a shift occurred in my mind. I was no longer just reciting phases, but envisioning what was happening in each. I could see the cells inside my head and picture the crosses of chromosomes coiling, folding, and shortening.
My imagination had been tempted out of hiding, with the thought that mitosis was happening inside me as I recited, that my life depended on it. The words, formerly cold, abstract, and unwieldy, now had dramatic meaning.
Once I knew I could understand science, I pushed myself harder. I stopped assuming that because a concept looked difficult, it was beyond my reach.
The more I read, the more I saw that the rules governing science were different than the rules of religion. Science was all about challenging and testing ideas. Here there were lab experiments so that students could see for themselves what the textbook claimed.
Science encouraged thinking. Doubt and skepticism were not forbidden or punished.
I sat on the front row in class and listened. I dove into each new chapter. I was astonished that I was understanding ideas I had thought were beyond me.
I set aside my shyness to ask questions after class. When I met a fuzzy concept, I resisted the urge to turn away. I probed. I reasoned. I sliced away at my confusion until all that was left was a bright gem of clarity.
I wanted to make an A. But I also longed for a new framework for understanding the world, and science offered a different viewpoint from the one I had lost.
I approached my other classes the same way. I felt like an alien who had been dropped onto the planet and knew nothing about it. Language, history – everything looked different from a secular viewpoint.
Unlike teachers at my Christian school, many at my new one encouraged you to challenge what they taught, as long as you could back up what you said. Whenever a teacher did this, I expected the principal to barge in during class, grab her by the shoulder, and scream “What are you doing?”
I had come from a place where thoughts could be sins, where obedience was a supreme virtue. Critical thinking was the opposite. It was subversive – and I embraced it.
I thought that if something was true, it could withstand all doubts, questions, and scrutiny. And this was the problem I had had with faith: If the Bible were true and infallible, why were doubts a threat to it?
My public school was predominantly Baptist, yet in many classes thinking was encouraged. Bad thoughts, good thoughts – anything went as long as it made sense.
In May I got my report card. I was euphoric. For the first time ever, I had earned a 4.0 for the year.
Despite the confidence this gave me, not everything about my high school was great. It was far from democratic. It seemed that way only because I had come from a place where thoughts were caged.
Not all teachers at my new school taught critical thinking. Some were disciplinarians deaf to reason. The school had its own propaganda too. There was a widespread belief among teachers that if you could not recite your alma mater, you were a bad student and person.
Studying did not always come easily. I often struggled with anxiety and poor concentration. Ahead of me was a severe manic episode that would cause me to spend most of my senior year on a home-bound learning program.
However, I remember those three years as the time when I stopped being hopelessly confused and began to make sense of things. For me, this was due to the scientific mindset of skeptical exploration.
Some complain that science robs the world of mystery; that it dissects; that it slams the door on important questions. For me, it did the opposite. It made me aware of the impermanence and strangeness of life. Until then, I had taken my life for granted.
Many years later, I know that the freedom to doubt comes a price. Sometimes I worry about losing the people I love. I know that when this happens, I will have nothing to buffer me from the full brunt of my grief.
But there are other days when, for a moment, I feel as if life is intensely meaningful and I am happy to be alive. When this happens, the religious teachings of my childhood sometimes rise to the surface, as if wanting to explain.
But they only stay a moment. I can find no bond between this feeling and a God who forbids thoughts, punishes doubt, and created hell.
Instead, I think of a moment long ago when, while typing, the wall of dogma fell away, and revealed the vast openness of space behind it, brimming with the priceless beauty of uncertainty. And I fondly remember my agonizing three-year depression that gave me that first awesome glimpse.