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I grew up in a nominally Anglican family. Nominal Anglicanism is the main variety to be found in England these days. It just means that on forms, in the box marked religion, you put C.of E. Otherwise apart form Christmas , Easter, Weddings, Christenings and Funerals you have no contact with the church. Its just there if and when you need it for seasonal festivities and rites of passage. People don't really ask themselves if what it proclaims is true. In fact the question is regarded as beside the point or even impolite.
I was sent at the age of eight to boarding school (this cruel and peculiar practice is unique to middle and upper class English families). I spent two thirds of the year away from home until the age of 18. The two schools I attended ('prep' school from 8 to 13, 'public school' from 13 to 18) were Anglican foundations and considerably more than nominal in that daily acts of worship took place and full scale chapel services wer held twice on Sundays. As an outwardly conformist child I did my best to follow the prescribed belief and behaviour patterns. I sang in the choir, read the lessons when required to and at the age of 15 went through confirmation. I considered myself a Christian, not being aware of any other option.
The following year I started on A level biology and the theory of evolution. Almost immediately I was hit by the stark discontinuity between a bible based view of man's place in the scheme of things and what scientific biology has to say on the matter. Science won! During the course of a single sleepless night I reasoned past the point at which the pope wants reason to stop ( the point in 'the time line' as he puts it, when an australopithecine evolved a soul) to the conclusion that there is no such thing as a soul, no heaven above , no after life , no hell below. With a great sense of liberation I became a hard line atheist. Subsequently I read Russell's 'Why I am not a Christian' and found myself in total agreement with every word of it. This put me in rather an odd position in a school where everyone else professed Christian belief.
To be fair no one hassled me about it. That teenagers will rebel against religion and come back to it later is a comforting fiction to encourage churchgoers, since virtually no teenagers go to church in the UK these days and hardly any come back later. Back in the fifties when I grew up the terminal decline of Christianity in England was just beginning but had nowhere reached the satisfying depths it has now plumbed right across the nation. My own apostasy was regarded quite benevolently as a temporary aberration.
I went to Medical School and was happy to find that most of my fellow students were cheerful non- believers or non-practisers of religion. There was a vocal minority of evangelicals mostly of the non-conformist variety. I found them quite unappealing personally and intellectually not worth talking to. Somehow I kept a soft spot for the high Anglicanism I grew up in and even acted the part of an alter server for a communion service at King's College in the Strand where my preclinical medical training happened to be located, along with a theological faculty . Through my early career and marriage I continued as an atheist but gradually stopped thinking at all about the scientific and philosophical basis of my avowed materialism. This was a mistake.
My marriage began to run into difficulties after the birth of our second child. My wife had a bout of what in retrospect was clearly post natal depression- then as now an under diagnosed condition. She battled with me and herself and threatened to leave me on numerous occasions for no obvious reason. However I stuck it out and we went to the States for a couple of happy years where I was in full time research. The change of geography actually did bring respite.
Returning to the UK the marital problems returned with renewed force. I never could get to the bottom of what made my wife unhappy. She would never go to counselling and always maintained that living in London (where I got a top job in my speciality) was only a temporary expedient. In a state of extreme uncertainty during my first year in London, when I was still not assured of a permanent job and my wife and children were living in a provincial city, we met up at the home of my parents . A row developed during the evening between my wife and my father (over his drinking) and she stormed out to go back home with the children and without me.
By bad luck (as I now see it) my father had been reading a book about C.S.Lewis , J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter) and gave it to me saying he found it so boring he could not read it. Intrigued I started to read. I couldn't put it down. Into the turmoil of my mind it brought the siren message that here were these highly interesting intellectuals who were all Christians! Was there something in it after all? It didn't occur to me then that they were all fantasy escapists who made a living by teaching in that hallowed centre of fantasy escapism- Oxford and wrote charming fantasies with only a tenuous if any connection to harsh reality.
No matter, I was started on the quest to find a solution to my marital and other life problems in the fantasy escapism called Christianity. I got the job (senior Lecturer in London teaching Hospital ), bought a house and as soon as we moved in went to a service at the local Anglican church. Again as misfortune would have it , it turned out to be one of the few thriving churches in North London. I was quickly welcomed in and became an active participant in numerous church activities. There actually was an intense buzz about 'coming in from the cold'. I did have a conversion experience with all the warm inner feelings, total trust in the church leaders etc.
My wife resolutely refused to convert but was happy to let me take the children to church and take part in any activities that also involved the children. That is how I became a Sunday school teacher, bible study group leader , camp leader and even preacher on one occasion! This phase of my spiritual life lasted 18 years. How did I do it? Simple- mental compartmentalisation. Just keep the science knowledge and logical parts of your mental activity separate from the church and faith parts. Read the bits of the bible selected for your edification and ignore the difficulties, inconsistnecies and outright nonsense it is full of. Once the children had grown up my church involvement began to taper off. My wife also 'grew up' and went away to another country. On my own again I had what seemed a further piece of bad luck. For the first time in my life I fell head over heels in love, with an ex-nun. That is another story but to cut it short the fall out from it was that due to severe mental conflicts of a religious nature working them selves out in the physical arena, the new relationship failed.
I went into full scale depression. I stopped sleeping, lost about 40 lbs in weight, had constant suicidal thoughts and finally did what I should have done 20 years before, went into psychotherapy. My therapist essentially saved my life by letting me examine it again in a non-judgemental context with her insights and a bit of light guidance. During the course of this process I was able to abandon the false comforts of religion and look to my own inner strengths. A very great help in deprogramming myself from religion was the Internet Infidels Web site- the secular web. I needed a completely intellectually rigorous deconstruction of the faith system that had damaged me so severely by leading me down the path of fantasy , away from the real world. You see I had come to blame myself for the failure of my marriage and the new relationship, to see those perfectly normal human developments as some kind of divine punishment. With the pessimistic distortions of depression I lost confidence.
It helped my recovery greatly that I met and have now married a very supportive wife who unlike my previous partners does not constantly criticise my alleged failings . She is a non- practising Jew, but finds my near obsession with trashing religion a bit heavy going. I feel that I am now coming out of that phase, although I still read II and buy atheistic philosophy books and write reviews on Amazon praising atheistic books and (soon I hope) trashing religious ones.
So there you have it, Christian to atheist to preacher and back to atheist.
Just wanted to add a line to my story.
One action that helped me break the links with the world of illusion (Xtianity) was to follow David Hume's advice "If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: For it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." I collected all my bibles and prayer books, all my commentaries and devotional tracts, all my biographies of missionaries and evangelist in to two large black plastic sacks and sent them to the local heating plant there to be converted to some useful energy.
| Sex | Male |
| Location | London, UK |
| Age I Joined | Child |
| Why I joined | No option, education, personal crisis |
| Age I Left | 15/50 |
| Why I left | evolution, religion was making my life hell |
| What I was | Church of England, Anglican |
| What I am now | Atheist, strict materialist |