"My metaphysics can be summarized as such: believer by birth, Christian by training, agnostic by reason, naturalist by profession." -- me

My divergence from my inherited religion is really a two-part story, with the two key events separated by over a decade. The first event was my doubting of the religious institution that had dominated my life as a child. The second was the revelation of my new world-view to my family. The first occurred when I was only 14 and the second when I was 26. In other words, I lived a lie for my family for over a decade. I know a lot of teenagers have to deal with this dilemma. I cannot make decisions for them, but I can tell my own experiences as flatly and objectively as possible.

The first event--the doubting of my inherited religion--was a difficult and powerful one. My parents had always attended conservative Baptist churches, and when I was eight, my family joined a large white, upper-middle-class, evangelistic, Christian-fundamentalist church in the Washington, D.C metro area. The church dominated every aspect of our lives. My parents had joined the church because it offered my mother a job as a teacher in its school. To retain employment, my mother had to enroll myself and my older sisters in the school, promise to be a faithful, witnessing member of the church, attend all the services, and so on. It seemed like we were always going to church. In addition to all the church-services, youth-activities, and canvassing/witnessing we did, my education was saturated with evangelistic preaching. Chapel three times a week, devotions as part of each class, and mandatory Bible memorization ensured that we heard the message they wanted us to hear.

That message was clear and repetitive: none of us are good enough and all of us are going to burn forever in eternity unless they accept the Bible's salvation plan (as interpreted by the church). It is therefore incumbent upon all of us who have received merciful salvation to fulfill the Great Commission and spread this "good news." In short, we were supposed to feel terribly guilty and humbly grateful for our good fortune in receiving this message, and out of a heart of pure servitude devote our lives to evangelism. Parents were supposed to encourage their children to become pastors, missionaries, or the wives of such. So, it was no surprise that by my late pre-teen years, I was fully accepting of this perspective and had fully internalized the need to spread the gospel to poor, dying souls. In summer-time, I attended evangelistic camps, designed to harness the ripe emotionalism of youth and win their devotion to the evangelistic mission. I joined the future-preachers club at school, and by the ninth grade, I had won both the school's Bible award and a state competition in preaching. Both my school principle and youth-pastor had singled me out as the up-and-coming youth leader in both the church and school.

The problem, however, is that the totalitarian education wasn't total. My mother had an interest in providing her children with opportunities not available in the limited church-school environment, and I had extra-church experiences in both music and in the boy-scouts--enough to make a boy curious about "outsiders." About the same time as I was being pushed into teenage evangelism and slightly exposed to an outside world, I was beginning to learn apologetics--the art of defending Bible doctrines and interpretation. I discovered that I could persuasively argue and rationalize what I already knew to be right. I aced my Bible history and Bible doctrine classes. They were easy for me. I had been listening attentively in church and chapel for years. It was easy to explain to people why we were right. I just laid out the prescribed explanations just as I had heard them repeated over and over. But could I do this with anything? Certainly I hadn't discovered any truths on my own. I was just learning how to defend why the church was right and why other people were wrong or "less-right." I wasn't learning how to derive knowledge from my own experience or how to think critically about my beliefs and my society.

At some point, I dared to doubt the whole thing. Could I doubt it? What would happen if I doubted? Would God strike me dead? Would I lose my salvation for which I had become so grateful up to this point? Would I become those apostates of which people spoke in hushed tones? An outcast? A black-sheep? Another string of questioning followed. What if my doubts come from Satan himself? What if the devil was trying to tempt me? Would I become a servant of Satan if I continued to doubt? What if I rejected the notion of God right-out?

These were big questions for a boy barely out of puberty. I also wrestled with many existential issues, such as whether I would I be able to tell my family, and if I did, what they would think. Also, I wondered why my sincere faith did not help me overcome many of my personal problems. The latter were "internal" issues, such as trying to purify my thoughts and emotions, something I was sure an almighty God living within me could help me with. The more that I asked these questions and tried to reconcile my empirical experiences--internal and external--with evangelical ideals, the more I realized that the questions I had were valid and demanded answers. On more than a few occasions, I approached church leaders, teachers, and my school principal with some of these questions. I once told my principal frankly that I was in the process of doubting the validity of the Bible and Christianity. From all these people, I received standard reassurances that I had already heard a hundred times. "Through prayer and patience, it would become clear." "These are issues that many adults still struggle with. Don't worry."

Finally I tore down the whole curtain of fear, realizing that if I didn't ask these questions directly, I could spend my whole life serving a sham institution. Many nights spent lying in bed or walking in a nearby park I contemplated the possibilities. If you ever see a young adolescent alone with his head in the clouds, don't just assume he is idle. He or she could be considering some weighty questions of existence or of life-changing decisions. The whole process took a couple of months, and I flip-flopped between clinging to my faith, trying to accept the "power of salvation" of which I had been assured many times over, and seeing the whole thing as remarkably shaky and shady. Some of my final decisive thoughts included the following issues: why God would destroy most of the life he had created without giving them a clear out, why there were so many different denominations, dispositions, and resentful disagreements within a single religion, how we "knew" that the canonized Scripture we had today was the "word of God," and how we could differentiate between the truth of one religion from the truth of another. I had been given many answers to these questions over the years, but they were unsatisfactory for me. I found that I needed faith to accept the answers designed to defend my faith. By the end of the whole period, I had reached a point of weary agnosticism (though I didn't know the name for it at the time). I had never had anyone try to "lead me astray" or plant ideas in my head. I had made the transition all on my own. I didn't have any non-Christian friends. All my friends and family (other than relatives) belonged to the church. I was 14 years old.

I prayed a prayer one night, perhaps one of the most profound and sincere prayers I had offered to date. "God, if you exist and my faith is true you are listening, if you don't than nothing I says matters anyhow. You know that I have accepted your teachings and followed your path. I have begged for forgiveness of my sin, accepted the blood of Jesus Christ, and repeatedly softened my heart to allow the Holy Spirit to work in me. I have dedicated my life to your service. By all the standards and teachings I have learned, I am your child. But I have since decided that many things about this don't make sense, and I've chosen to doubt your existence and the divine origins of the Bible. I am therefore going to live my life without this religion, because it doesn't make sense. It is mind-controlling, divided with controversy, and intolerant of rational argument. If I am wrong, I wish to die now or soon, because I do not want to live a life being wrong. Please kill me soon. If I am right in my decision, than I don't expect you to do anything and you can disregard this prayer, because you don't exist in the Christian sense."

Over a decade later, I am still alive. Those, of course, may not have been the exact words, but all the thoughts were definitely there. The next issue was my family. I decided at the time that I did not want to "rock the boat." I was especially concerned for my mother, because I knew she had spent her life believing these things and would not be able to change her thinking without extreme psychological and emotional consequences. I decided to pretend that I was a Christian. It didn't take long before I couldn't stand what was becoming increasingly obvious as a self-sustained, self-perpetuating sham. I was becoming increasingly good at math, science, and language and had decided that a career as a Navy officer would be ideal. It was a glamorous option. I wanted to go to the Naval Academy. To this ends, I begged my parents to send me to a high-school military boarding school for my last two years of high-school. They were sympathetic to my career hopes and conceded. I was getting out of my religion-soaked environment!

I found that I had extreme difficult adjusting to my new secular environment. Boys were constantly profane, hostile, mean, and obsessed with sex and loud music. Some seemed to be obsessed with sports. I made a few friends that first year, but no close ones. Many other boys thought I was simple and strange. Some tried to take advantage of this. Others tried to be nice to me. I was miserable, yet I never second-guessed my decision. I had made that decision much to rigorously to be unsure about. Whenever I returned home to see my family and go to church, I would be sickened by the ultra-emotional, super-friendly atmosphere. It was surreal. My mom had lost her job as a teacher for deciding My whole life was strange. No one could possibly understand me. I did adjust eventually. By my senior year, I felt more at home in military school than I did with my family at home. My sisters had both graduated from the fundamentalist-Christian college Bob Jones University, and one had married an up-and-coming minister. I could only relate to them by pretending to be a Christian. I told hundreds of lies about who I was and what I believed.

I failed to get into the Naval Academy and joined an ROTC program at a state university. Overcome with the freedom of college, I failed my first two semesters and dropped out. I lived with my parents for the next summer and a few months afterwards, but I quickly got sick of the religiously dominated life that my parents were still living. I felt more at home in my window-cleaning job with my long-haired, smoking work-mates than I did in the environment I had grown up with. They guys I worked with seemed much more "real." In a desperate effort to escape and make something of my own, I joined the Navy with a six year contract in the nuclear propulsion program.

I did very well in the Navy. I finally fit in somewhere. I performed excellently in the year-and-a-half long training program for reactor operators and spent the rest of my six years assigned to submarines. I didn't see a future in the Navy and after 6 years hadn't made any life-long friends and was all but celibate, so I decided to move back to with my family. My entire family, including both my sisters and their husbands had moved to Michigan, where my eldest sister's husband held a position at a fundamentalist church. I had forgotten how hard it was to live with my religion-oriented family and convinced myself that I could "pretend Christianity" while I worked on my bachelor's degree.

I found that my perspective was very different when I went home to live again, a full decade after I had left for military academy. As I began my education afresh, I once again found myself in utter conflict with the evangelistic mentality, where open-mindedness is scorned, intellectualism discouraged, and ninety percent of the world's population is going to hell to suffer for eternity. I had the additional conflict of majoring in geology at a state university, and the church rejected most of the concepts in that field (such as the geologic time-scale and evolution as the origin of species). During this time, I took classes in writing and critical thought and surveys of philosophy and sociology. These classes revived my critical thinking about my background and beliefs and drove me to explore further into my own assumptions.

I read voraciously about philosophy and comparative religion and sought out others on the internet and in real life who had had similar experiences. I took my questioning to levels I had never imagined, as I questioned everything from my own existence to the validity of rational thought. I read histories of philosophy, and argued with every philosopher I encountered. I discovered my own philosophy to be a piece meal of many different schools, each answering questions about existence that the others could not. After tiresome confusion and endless debate with myself, I have tentatively identified my metaphysics as skeptically agnostic, following in the empiricism of David Hume, yet carrying a deep respect for the existentialism of Sartre and others, which allows me to "get on with my life." I also have great respect for the Pragmatism of William James and use it to justify my practical position as a scientific naturalist, a position that could not otherwise withstand logically rigorous Humean empiricism.

After a deep and emotional discussion with a former philosophy professor, mentor, and friend, I finally convinced myself that I could no longer lie to my family about who I was. I was residing with my parents at the time and decided that moving out on my own would be best to relieve tensions. A couple weeks after I moved out, I sat down with my parents and informed them of why I would no longer attend church. I called my sisters the same day. Everyone was openly shaken or seriously concerned, except for my father. I informed them that I wanted to respect their ways by not attacking them, by joining hands with them when they pray at meals, and so-forth, but I have also learned to assert myself when they voice their contempt or offense at things that I accept or value or when they slight my beliefs. They know that I refuse to go to church with them, even on holidays.

I have since attended liberal or ecumenical churches on occasion, such as Universalist Unitarian or community churches, but I will never again attend an evangelical church. I have studied quite a bit of comparative religion now and have mellowed-out somewhat on the hard-core philosophy, realizing that life is complex enough to allow plenty of diversity and creativity in thought. In that spirit, I have become very tolerable of religion and spiritual belief in general. I'm just opposed to anyone who "knows" that they have the absolute Truth for everyone. The only thing that really offends me is arrogance.

I'm now in the process of trying to establish a life for myself apart from my religious history and controversy. I'm trying to move away from that realm that has dominated my thinking and my life. The issues have consumed me. I'm now in therapy resolving some obsessions, depressions, and self-defeating thought circles that have developed over the years--many of which have roots in the hard ideals and repetitive messages of evangelical fundamentalism. Though I'll never forget the importance of the path I've taken, I'm trying to move on to more practical pursuits in life, such as my own career and relationships.

Details