6 months ago I would have told you that I knew what that truth was and I would have also said that I was indeed free. For me, the truth was that Jesus was alive and living in my heart, guiding me through this life and beyond into a wondrous union with the creator of the Universe. I would have told you that were it not for Jesus I would be dead right now. I would have told you that I had ample proof of God’s existence and that the Holy Spirit had tangibly revealed the presence of God to me on a number of occasions. I would have told you that angels and demons were real. I would have also told you that I am a vastly better person through the on-going work of the Holy Spirit. And I would have done all I could to convince you that you needed to be "saved".
Today however, I have a very different view. Though I no longer can make the claim to know ‘The’ truth, I can say with sincerity that I believe I know what isn’t the truth and I can also tell you that until I embraced Atheism I had no inkling of what freedom really felt like. At first I felt very uneasy about rejecting Christianity – the majority of other born again Christians find it too hard to remove their Bible-coloured glasses, and it seemed that too many non-Christians were reluctant to discuss religious issues with me. This made it incredibly hard to find support during this kind of de-conversion process.
In the last few months however, I've found a particular internet forum to be extremely encouraging and helpful to me: (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/index.php). I found that there were many people to talk to there who had been through a very similar experience to myself. So before I go any further I want to thank all of the people who manage, moderate and frequent that site to bring such a valuable contribution. Particularly though, I want to thank "Christ-on-a-stick" whose testimony inspired me to make sure that I write what I'm writing now. Thank you!
And so, I write this testimony primarily so that others who are wrestling and suffering with the thought of leaving their faith will gain some encouragement in knowing that they are not alone. Finding out that there were many others like myself was a huge help to me. But I also write this so that all the people who were once encouraged by my life as a Christian will understand why I have made such a drastic turn. Actually writing this down has forced me to think my decision through in a careful and structured way and has also helped me to put the important factors of my life into perspective too.
Before I give you some insight into how and why I made the move into Atheism, it would be a good idea to put all that in context (a favourite cliché for Christians). You ought to understand my life before I was a Christians and then see just how deeply I became entrenched into a Born-again, fundamentalist culture. Then you need to know the factors that contributed to the U-turn and how I have been since then.
If you do happen to be a Christian who is teetering on the edge of seriously questioning your faith, you may need a little encouragement from your Bible to ensure that you’re not going to get deceived when you start your investigation! (you may not have the same issues as me). Here ya go...
"Always be prepared
to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope
that you have."
(1 Peter 3:15)
"Examine yourselves
to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves…"
(2 Corinthians
13:5)
This testimony is a result of that examination. Whether you know me or not, thank you for taking the time to trawl through all of this. It's very long so you'll notice that I've split into sections to make it a less painful read. I hope you find this interesting, or at least as useful as I have found it to be writing it.
A few years ago I decided it was about time I wrote down my testimony of how I became a Christian and some of the relevant details surrounding my conversion. Obviously, all of that is still relevant to my story about how I de-converted, so please forgive me as I rehash some of that original testimony in the next few sections...
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2) Jumping into the God Shaped Hole
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I was born into a family that had no involvement with organised religion. As far as I know, only my Grandmother on my father's side had any interest in spirituality. I had never met her but apparently she was involved with the occult - a classic gypsy who was a medium and a palmist but possibly also a Christian Spiritualist. She in turn taught my father some of her "talents" and so he had quite a deep interest in it too. He didn't really believe in God (not in the traditional Christian sense anyway), he thought that the simplest description of God was 'The Force' from 'Star Wars'. It was probably closer to a Buddhist viewpoint than anything else.
My mother was (and still is) agnostic: she isn't sure if there is or isn't a God but stays open minded about it. I also liked to think that I was fairly open minded about the whole thing myself but shifted from time to time between atheism and theism. When I did choose to think that God existed, I thought he was a sort of unsympathetic law enforcer who wagged his finger at you whenever you did something wrong, but refused to lift a finger to help. I think watching the Wizard of Oz did that to me! The translucent image of that big, green, angry face used to send me running behind the sofa when I was small. To me, that's what God was probably like - though perhaps not green! So you can see that I had a very warped view of God and didn’t know the first thing about Christianity or Jesus.
When I was about 12 my parents divorced and later re-married different people, so this obviously had an effect on my outlook and behaviour during my teenage years. Very few of my friends at school were in this situation, but as far as I could tell, it was supposed to be a very traumatic and distressing time for children who were in the centre of a family split. So, I did what I thought was expected of me and acted as if I was torn up by this turn of events. In reality I wasn’t – I was actually thrilled to bits that I had my Dad all to myself - It would be a great adventure! But, of course, things don’t quite work out the way you expect them to when you’re a kid. I began to see more and more flaws in my father, and gradually, for a number of reasons, a rift began to separate us. I think that the divorce had a terrible affect on him (as you’d expect). It seems that he was always an insecure person – not truly confident about himself deep down and the marriage break-up served to amplify that. A natural result of such insecurity led to quite a strange relationship between us. I imagine that most parents are quite proud of their children’s achievements, but with my father it seemed to be different. His feelings of pride at my achievements seemed to be overshadowed by a deep need to prove his own sense of self worth and ultimately this has led to him being very competitive with me. A side symptom of this is that almost everyone I know who knows him, sees him as a 'know-it-all'. Partly because of this, I now see arrogance as the primary thing to avoid. I despise it more than any other human frailty, and so, naturally I despise it when I see any sign of it in myself. I have to explain at this point (as it may appear that I’m simply having a rant about my father) that this has had a very profound impact on how I view myself and how I later viewed my faith – more on that later.
Years later, as a Christian, I was taught that everyone is born with a part of them that needs God. It seemed to make sense, especially in light of C.S. Lewis’ idea that every need has a corresponding fulfilment (odd logic when you really sit and think about it carefully). Apparently we were made that way so that we could have a relationship with God and If you don't have that relationship with God then without even thinking about it you'll try and fill the missing part with something else. Though you may work and strive to be happy in all sorts of ways you still can feel a nagging sense of unfulfillment? With this new philosophy in mind (the God shaped hole they call it) I began to look differently at how I’d lived out my life so far.
Throughout my teenage years and into my early twenties I grew up trying to unknowingly satisfy that need for fulfilment and purpose. Whatever it is you live for and base your life on - that is what keeps you going and holds you together. You have to have something to live for. If you find that all these things are stripped away you'll crumble - there's nothing to fill up that unsatisfied part of you. In 1988 I reached that point of crisis in my life when everything seemed pointless and life felt more like death. I was 19 and I doubt that I was going through anything much worse than most teenagers go through really, but you may know how it is, when you're in the middle of problems - sometimes it seems like there's no way out and that there never will be! I'd split up with my girlfriend, I was smoking about 40-60 cigarettes a day and I'd given up my night job. On top of that I was suffering from depression. I used to go through phases of depression before, but this was worse and it wouldn't leave me. Most of the time I felt as though I had a knife in my stomach that was slowly being turned. I was living with my mother and stepfather at the time: they tried to be understanding but I’m not sure if they knew what to do with a permanently sulking youth. All the doctor would suggest was to take vitamin B9 tablets! As far as I was concerned my life wasn't worth anything and I had nothing to motivate me or live for.
So, eventually I decided that I'd had enough and I wanted to end my life. I waited until everyone was out to work and then I took a bottle of paracetamol tablets, and also tried to cut my wrists. I say "tried" because I used a disposable razor and all that does is make a mess! Besides all that, I wasn't thinking rationally anyway. My stepfather, Alan, came home unexpectedly early and found me in a dazed, bloody heap in the bathroom. He took me straight to the hospital where they stitched me up (fortunately my stomach was also pumped before most of the tablets had been absorbed into my system). I was still in a mess emotionally but somehow I saw through that and recognised the hurt that I'd caused people around me that I cared about. I made a reluctant promise to my mother that I wouldn't do it again (partly because I also dreaded the thought of counselling and getting probed mentally).
I still felt very depressed.
Very soon I started to come to terms with the situation after this climax and decided that I would try somehow to get myself together again. I refused the counselling that was offered to me. Soon after that, my relationship was patched up and I thought that all this business was behind me - just buried and forgotten in the past - a momentary glitch of life. Could that have been a big mistake? There are things that people can keep buried deep within them and they just don't realise how it can affect their lives much later. That's what I tried to do - I tried to ignore my teenage trauma, but it was having an effect on me. Sometimes I felt I had to get it off my chest and talk to someone about it. Other times, just the mention of suicide, especially slashed wrists, really freaked me out and disturbed me! I did my best to suppress it all.
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About 4 years later
at the beginning of 1992 my relationship had finally ended. I'd had enough
and I still wasn't feeling happy or fulfilled - sometimes the depression
would try and follow me too. It was at that phase of my life that I started
to get interested in a young woman I knew at work named Ruth.
I decided to try and find out more about her (well that's one way of putting
it!) Some of the people that knew her said,
"ooo, you'd better watch her, she's religious and she goes to those funny
meetings on Wednesdays!"
Still wanting to
be open minded I said,
"That's OK, it's fine by me, she can do what she wants, perhaps there might
actually be a God!"
So after that, we started seeing each other. One night we went to the pub and I think at some point I brought the subject up about God. I knew it was one of her interests and so I thought it would be a useful chat up strategy! At this, she began to start talking to me about Jesus and how he had made it possible for us to have a relationship with God. Now, I didn't know the first thing about Christianity, I wasn't even sure that there was actually a God, and I certainly didn't think it was possible to really be his friend. I listened to what she had to say, still keeping an open mind and heart. She gave me a book to read and a couple of tapes to listen to. I took them home, read the book and listened to the tapes in bed.
One of the tapes was a guy explaining about how he became a Christian, and then something hit me... this guy sounded normal! Up until now, a Christian always brought thoughts to me of Mr Bean or sad men in tank tops preaching on a street corner, it never occurred to me that Christians could be normal people - but I'd met Ruth and she was normal, and this guy sounded normal as well. It was then that I decided that I would seriously find out more about Christianity, so I asked Ruth if I could come along to one of these meetings on a Wednesday. Obviously she said, "Yes".
As I mentioned before about my up-bringing, I'd never really set foot in a church except at weddings and things like that, let alone a Christian meeting like The Upper Room so I was quite nervous.
When I got there, I wondered what on earth I'd walked into - it was weird. There were people singing and clapping and getting excited about it and I thought, "who are these nutters?" But at the same time I knew they were excited about something and I knew they had something I didn't have, so I sat through it feeling self-conscious and trying to pretend I was one of them! A little later in the evening, a speaker came up to do a "talk", and I began to learn a bit more about Christianity. I began to learn the standard gospel message about how everyone has turned away from God and done things wrong and I learned that Jesus chose to go to the cross, actually to die for me, to take my place and pay the price for all the things that I'd ever done wrong. And he did it so that I could know God as my friend and fill up that need that was in me! That's when I put my foot on the spiritual banana skin and began my naive slide into what I can only now regard as a complex and elaborate fantasy world.
That night, February 5th 1992, I decided to become a Christian. All that really means is that I recognised that I had "sinned" and lived my life my way instead of God's "better" way. I decided to turn away from all that was wrong in my life and follow Jesus and ask him to help me be a better person. I felt that I didn't have the ability to do be the kind of person I wanted to be without help and that’s all the qualifications you need to become a Christian. From that point on, a new version of God was presented to me than the one I’d imagined. Not a frowning, white bearded, finger wagger, but a person who wanted to help me! How could I refuse? These seemed to be trustworthy people who had found out about something I didn’t know yet.
When I prayed that prayer and became a Christian, nothing miraculous happened to me. There were no lights coming out of the sky, no sudden feelings of euphoria and no overwhelming supernatural presence had revealed itself to me. But at that time I did have a sense that something inside me had changed, but I didn't know what.
The Bible says that when a heartfelt decision is made like that, the person becomes a "new creation", a new person on the inside - "born again". I had become a born-again Christian!
Of course, all that trouble I'd had four years ago was still buried deep somewhere and I thought that I was okay really. I thought it was all in the past, but it wasn't, it was still affecting me and very soon it would begin to rear its ugly head.
You could say to me, "Why didn't God just deal with that problem there and then when I became a Christian?" Well, the answer I’d come to understand at the time was that God won't force himself on us, and if we don't hand over our problems to him he can't deal with them. It can take time for us to be released from some things, not because God is slow, but because we are. It's a process, and my problems didn't surface again until September that year.
This is probably a very good place to point out one of the big flaws in the Christian viewpoint. The very way that I had originally viewed my conversion process demonstrates how much that a Christian has to re-interpret certain facts to make their story convincing. Its not done deliberately, but unfortunately there’s a tendency to overlook some things and highlight others because it happens to fit in with the grand plan. You’ll notice that the suicide attempt was back in 1988, the conversion didn’t happen ‘til 1992 and the apparent manifestation of the original problems didn’t happen until months later. In actual fact there is no real reason to link any of these events together at all!
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It was at that time that Ruth and I got married. Over the months I'd been learning more about God and my faith was growing but I still had that problem with my past. It was only about a week or two after the wedding that my personality began to change. I started to get really strange feelings come over me and I'd get upset and angry very quickly and easily. At first I thought it was the pressure of the wedding but things got much worse and sometimes I felt that I would burst unless I could scream. I had terrible recurring nightmares and all sorts of confusion was going on inside my mind. I remember one day I was washing up and I accidentally broke a glass in the sink. As I looked in the sink it was as if something in my mind was telling me to cut my wrists with it! I seemed to be experiencing suicidal tendencies again. I couldn't understand it. I wasn't depressed at that moment and I didn't want to kill myself at all, but for some reason I felt as though I were changing somehow!
Very soon, it actually reached the point where I attacked Ruth and then I knew I needed professional help. I don't really know why this problem decided to show itself at this time. From a Christian perspective I believed that a marriage has quite an affect at a spiritual level and it might have been this that brought it out. In retrospect I’m sure it was just a combination of stress, worry that I wasn’t doing the right thing and the fact that the house had been burgled two days before! Combine all this with someone who hadn’t matured properly yet and was still dealing with a few psychological issues and bingo!
I saw my local GP and I also saw my doctor at work and both of them advised me to get professional psychiatric help. I appeared to be having some kind of nervous breakdown.
Ruth and her family are all Christians, and they suggested that I get help from a professional Christian counsellor. So, I was given a contact name and I got in touch with him. His name was Miles Dempsey who runs the Prince of Peace community. I had a chat with him over the phone and I was booked up to see him the following Saturday.
During that week
I went with Ruth to the Wednesday Upper Room meeting as usual and
at the end of the meeting I went to see the speaker for prayer. I hadn't
told anyone there about my problem and all I told the speaker was that
I had a problem that was hopefully going to be seen to on Saturday. I'll
never forget what he said. He said, "Sometimes, old scars
have to be re-opened in order to be properly healed!" I was stunned. It
suddenly felt to me then that God really knew my trouble and that he was
going to help me.
So, that Saturday I went with Ruth to my "counselling" session. We sat
and chatted for a while, and within half an hour, the counsellor had determined
that it was my family’s connection with the Occult that had influenced
me to be suicidal in the past and also had caused the emotional problems
I was suffering from now. After some more conversation it came to the time
when he prayed for me. First I remember that he anointed my head with oil
(this is sometimes used for healing) and then he made sure that I was relaxed
and started praying. I didn't catch all the things he was saying when he
prayed, but in essence he was performing "an exorcism". I remember the
climax of emotions inside me at the time: at one point I felt an extreme
anger towards him and my top lip was actually curling up in a kind of snarl!
At the end of it all I felt very different, I was totally at peace, though
exhausted. All the frustration and fear had gone completely from me. I
had been part of a classic exorcism! For a long time, this event was a
huge piece of evidence that the Christian faith was true. However ludicrous
it sounded, if spiritual beings called demons were real and they were actually
driven out of a person by the name of Jesus, then this was quite convincing
to me. Especially as I had experienced this first hand!
Again, in retrospect I see something very different in that event now. Perhaps, after more than 10 years the power of that ordeal has faded from my memory to some extent, but I can’t help remembering what an emotional mess I was at the time. Whilst it may have felt like a demon was being driven out of me, its more likely that what I was experiencing was simply an emotional release of all the stress and tension I had been struggling with for the last few months. I knew I had gone there to get sorted out and I was already familiar with the New Testament accounts of demons being driven out of people. That expectancy was probably good enough for me to unknowingly conform to what was expected at a session like that. I will admit that since that day I have never felt depressed ever again, but I believe that is because I have not only matured as a person now, but also because I now choose not get depressed about things. Obviously I was under a great deal of pressure (not by others but by my own need) to make sure that the experience I had was validated. I’m sure that any Christians reading this would say that I was just in denial about what happened that day so that I can justify my current Atheistic stance. But I think that believing that a demon made me feel and act the way I did is a bit too convenient. When you take it all apart and analyse it piece by piece, there are rational answers to explain what I went through without having to resort to the supernatural.
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To tell the story of my deconversion properly I need to point out some key events that happened during my 12 years as a Christian. I’ll try and do them chronologically if I can.
After that first night at the Upper Room where I made my decision to become a Christian, I was completely awed by the magnitude of the gospel message. It was a perspective that I had never heard before and if it was true then it really would be the most fantastic thing that could happen to anyone, and it would have a tremendous impact on my life. At that point I had no reason to either believe or disbelieve it and one of my personal rules in life is always to give people the benefit of the doubt. The Christians I had spoken to so far and the material I had been given to read all came across with great sincerity and so I embraced it with a sort wild enthusiasm that I had never experienced before.
Armed with this sense of awe, I finally got around to opening a Bible for the first time. I had no real idea how to read it but had some vague knowledge that I was supposed to start somewhere in the New Testament – and that’s what I did. I sat alone in my bedroom, filled with a sense of nervous anticipation and opened it up at the book of Romans. Each part of the letter had little sub headings and one particular section caught my eye - "struggling with sin". I read through chapter 7 of Romans and became even more excited – I had not been disappointed by what I read. It was as if the very words had leapt off the page and lodged inside me. I felt as if the writer somehow knew me intimately, as if the author knew exactly how I thought and felt about myself and it heightened my sense of awe. It was like sitting around a campfire while people told spooky ghost stories and then suddenly being confronted by a real life ghost! Was Christianity real? At that moment it certainly felt that way. It was from that day on that I found myself to be completely engrossed in this book and it seemed that I was experiencing instantaneous changes in my life. I stopped swearing and had sudden creative bursts. Unfortunately I was soon to find out that this would quickly turn into a love hate relationship.
It wasn’t long after this that I started to attend a very liberal C of E church close to where Ruth was living. I was still going to the Wednesday Upper Room meetings but it also felt right to get a traditional helping of Sunday church too. As I was new to the faith I very soon found my self attending "confirmation classes". One night a week, I would find myself, Ruth, my father and one other guy spending an hour in the vicar's house. Here he would explain the gospel message in greater detail so that I could get confirmed into the church – and this was where I encountered my first real problem with Christianity.
One of the warnings that the vicar gave to me was "beware of the fundamentalists who believe that everything they read in the Bible is true". Immediately this rang alarm bells for several reasons.
Firstly, this contradicted everything that I had begun to learn. Up until this point all the Christian literature I had read and all the Christians I had started to get to know believed that the Bible was the final authority and that it should be taken, read and accepted exactly as it was written. This made perfect sense to me as I had already read something in there that had spoken to me so deeply. If God truly was the author of this book then why on earth shouldn’t it be taken literally? Wouldn’t this author (who apparently never changes) be consistent when he inspired it? Surely if one part of the Bible was to be taken at face value then the whole thing should. Obviously, I hadn't read that much of it at that point!
Secondly, his view caused me to feel uncomfortable because it highlighted quite strongly that the church, as a whole, was not united in its thinking. Who should you trust?
Thirdly, the vicar’s view caused me a theological problem. By this time I had come to understand the concept of original sin. The idea being that when Adam and Eve sinned against God, a fundamental flaw was then replicated in each and every one of their offspring - a bit like a defective gene. This had left mankind with a nature that caused every person to be born with a condition that rendered them powerless to avoid sinning and therefore separated them from God. Jesus’ sacrifice was supposed to have undone Adam’s sin and anyone who is "born again" receives a new nature that is not inclined towards sinning. The problem with the liberal view taking the Adam and Eve story as pure symbolism, is that it destroys the doctrine of original sin. If sin didn’t start with one man, how could a Christian defend or explain the point of view that every human being is born as a sinner? Thus, the sacrifice of Jesus may not be necessary for all people!
Fourthly, Jesus seemed to speak of Adam as a real person - he seemed to take the Old Testament literally.
And lastly, if only some parts of the Bible were to be taken at face value and not all of it, who decides which is which and how? This would surely be left to the skilful and wise insights of the theological scholar – and that would seem to suggest that the Bible is only for the elite.
I could not reconcile this. I had to make a choice at that point – do I believe the fundamentalist view or the liberal view? Inwardly I struggled. The fundamentalist view appeared to be the most logical approach but then again the fundamentalist view also demanded that some of the most fantastical stories in the Bible should be taken as fact! I chose to go with the ‘fundies’ and decided that somewhere down the line I would find rational explanations for stories like Noah’s ark and the Tower of Babel.
And although we continued attending the liberal church for a time, I now labelled myself as a fully-fledged fundamentalist Christian. There were many things I didn’t understand, but I trusted enough to believe that the answers would come eventually.
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6) Funny how things never happen!
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As the months went by I found myself going through a peculiar belief cycle. I would be fanatically enthusiastic about my faith to such an extent that I couldn’t help but ram it down people’s throats. One week I had to attend a team building course at work and the company gave me a car in which I had to transport some of the other employees. Rather than listen to music on the way there, those poor people had to endure hours of listening to cassettes of fundamentalist preaching! I thought it was great – they must have thought I’d lost the plot.
It would never take long for this enthusiasm to be dampened when difficult circumstances would come my way. Whether it would be financial difficulties or an argument with Ruth, I would find myself praying for answers or at least a sense of peace. On the occasions when I couldn’t make the circumstances appear to be the answers to my prayers (this wasn’t intentional of course) I would go through a mini crisis of faith, shake my fist at the heavens and start questioning whether my faith in God was real or even if God existed at all. Then, I would listen to some "wise" Christian friends, get my face back into the Bible and within a few days my unanswered prayers were swept under the proverbial carpet. I would discard my doubts and frustrations as deception and interference from the Devil, and rebuke myself for my lack of humility before a God who obviously could see a bigger picture than I could.
It was this cycle of faith that would go on and on in my life for many years. Every once in a while, some event or revelation would occur that would boost my confidence that I was on the right path and so I became more and more entrenched into the church culture. I began to notice a difference in myself as my Christian walk continued. My outlook on life became more mature and I encountered each new problem with much more wisdom than I had in the past. I was becoming a more contented and peaceful person, which I had always seen as strong evidence that the Christian message was real and good. In retrospect, I see the real cause for this self-improvement. Anyone who spends a great deal of time and effort examining their motives, their actions and their thoughts will naturally begin to improve. Self-improvement is simply a result of self-examination and in Christianity, self-examination is something you'd find very difficult to avoid if you were seriously committed. On top of that, when you become a Christian, you spend much more time with many others who are also seeking to improve themselves. As Jesus said - "A little yeast works through the dough."
I did however, have to deal with certain disappointments at unanswered prayers almost straight after my conversion. One of the first big shockers was Ruth telling me that her mother would often suffer from terrible Migraines.
"Oh, why doesn't she pray for God to heal her?" I asked innocently.
I don't remember what the answer was, but I remember feeling a little uncertain about it at the time. Knowing that I still had much to learn, I quickly found out that a Christian unconsciously learns to balance their prayers. There are some things that God can and will do for you (in other words, the things that can occur without any supernatural events and that have a good chance of happening anyway). And there are some things that God most likely won't do for you (things that are not possible in reality). If you don't want to put God in an awkward position for doing the impossible you don't pray for it! ;-) For example, if you really and truly knew that God could do anything wouldn't this be one of your prayers?
"Lord God, please grant us world peace right now."
Of course, Christians will come up with a plethora of reasons why this is an unreasonable request, but the bottom line is that on the occasions when they do pray for it, they'd be shell-shocked if it actually happened. When extraordinary prayers are requested, the disappointments are quickly swept aside.
Almost immediately after I had been "saved" I remember asking God to provide me with the money I needed to pay off my debts. Surprise, surprise, no cheque arrived on my doorstep and I had to erase my debts in the same way any other person does - paid employment and responsible use of money. Naturally, when my debts were finally under control I gave God the glory for my efforts! Some Christians might think that praying for a sudden influx of money is a ridiculous and naïve request - but perhaps they should think a little more carefully about why this seems ridiculous to them. There are too many convenient excuses for why the supernatural is not forthcoming.
At times, God's lack of involvement can be embarrassing at best, but devastating at worst. I remember a particularly terrible occasion when I was trying to help a Christian who had been born blind. We both believed that God heals, but despite many times where we would get together and ask God about it, we were never able to get any results. On one particular occasion I took him to a big Christian meeting expecting that this would be a time where he would receive some supernatural advice or encouragement from God or, dare I say it… a healing. What he received was very different. There we sat somewhere near the back amongst hundreds of others, and the speaker came to address the crowd with what would no doubt be an inspiring message.
"Hello everybody," he said, "Its lovely to see you all… well, its better than being blind isn't it?"
This got the ice-breaking laugh he wanted to start off his talk, but apparently the Holy Spirit, who was supposed to be inspiring his words, didn't think that a little joke like that would hurt my friend's feelings! My friend continued to be disappointed.
Obviously I still had much to learn about my new-found faith!
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7) Euphoria - The Presence of God
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There were times when I had become so entrenched in the Christian culture that the voices of inner doubt were drowned out by some very tangible experiences. Experiences so profound that some people find it incredible that I have now rejected my faith. Christians would identify each of these "religious experiences" as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.
Three particular
experiences out of many stand out to be the most memorable. The most significant
was during a time of ministry after a sermon had been preached at the Upper
Room where I first became a Christian. I remember that the message
was about God's grace. The message itself was not particularly uncommon
or overwhelming but my experience during the time of ministry afterwards
was. After the preaching had finished it was common practise for the congregation
to stand with their eyes closed and their hands open in a gesture of receiving
from God. Just as everyone else did, so did I, every time. As usual I would
spend that time in worship, either singing to God or just thinking about
him and speaking to him in tones of adoration. On this occasion something
happened to me that I find very hard to describe. The Christian is supposed
to be aware of the fact that their body is a temple of the Holy Spirit
and that He dwells within. This idea can seem so flippant and inconsequential
when read in a document like this, but that day I believed I experienced
that. Can you imagine what it would actually feel like for the Creator
of the Universe, the Almighty One with infinite power, might and life to
reveal himself to you internally? Can you imagine what it would feel like
for an infinite and eternal presence to be manifested right inside your
body? I felt that. I felt as if I was on fire and I dropped to my
knees in tears of dumbstruck awe. My whole body, from my head through to
my fingertips, tingled and I was beside myself.
Oddly, the best way I have ever been able to describe the emotion I felt
at that point was blasphemy! It felt like pure blasphemy that the God of
everything should suddenly make himself manifest within me. Me? Someone
like me? In comparison to this presence I felt defiled, ugly, dirty and
oh so small. But at the same time I felt awed, privileged and exalted.
It was profound to say the least, and to this day I have no idea why I
felt that - It served no purpose at the time other than to inspire me.
Any Christian might simply say that that is reason enough - maybe. But
maybe my memory of the event has been exaggerated since then. Humans have
an incredible capacity to embellish thoughts of times gone by. If it was
a powerful experience as I remember, then it still proves nothing - the
human body is capable of amazing things. This could simply have been nothing
more than a significant adrenaline rush, which was exaggerated by my devotional
thoughts at the time. I'm sure many people have felt something like this
on a lesser scale when listening to a particularly moving piece of music
or even in the gym when the endorphins kick in. What intensified the experience
to me was the notion that God might have been doing it. It was nothing
more than unintentional, self induced euphoria.
The second experience,
which comes to my mind, was equally as profound but in a different way.
I think it was around 1995 when a wave of hysteria washed over the fundamentalist
church as a whole. It was referred to as "The refreshing" by many and was
viewed as a move of the Holy Spirit upon the church to equip them for powerful
ministry whilst bringing them to an attitude of repentance and purging.
Ruth and I had been invited to a Vineyard meeting where this phenomenon
was in its infancy. The pastors had just returned from Pensi-Cola in Toronto
where this move of the Holy Spirit seemed to originate. Both of us had
already had experiences of the Holy Spirit and had already seen people
"slain in the Spirit" (falling over in spiritual ecstasy) or receive delivery
from demonic forces. We were familiar with unusual sights. However, what
greeted us in this Vineyard meeting was way beyond that. It was quite literally
organised hysteria. The meeting was being lead by the ministers who were
singing moving worship songs on stage, whilst other ministers walked around
the hall praying over different people as they felt lead. The hall was
full of people who were either staggering or lying down, weeping or laughing,
shouting or singing. This was of a magnitude greater than we had seen previously.
Unwilling to be perturbed by what others were doing, I stood there, eyes
closed with my hands opened to heaven inviting the Holy Spirit to do with
me whatever He wanted. I experienced nothing for the longest time even
after I was prayed for twice. Then, when I was just about to make the decision
to return home - it happened. It started from within my stomach and worked
its way up through my body - a huge belly laugh. I was in absolute hysterics
and fell to the floor shaking and rolling with tears falling from my cheeks.
I laughed and laughed until my body ached and my ribs hurt. I was in that
condition for about an hour until I was too exhausted to laugh anymore.
During that time I noticed that Ruth was also experiencing something similar.
The leader of the Upper Room, who was also there, came over to me,
looked and my face and laughed.
"Have you seen what you look like? Go and find a mirror!"
I did, and I stared back at myself in disbelief. I had been laughing so hard for so long that without realising it I had ruptured several small blood vessels in my face and left myself with skin that was blemished with a hundred, tiny purple spots. Again, this was a very profound experience, not just for me, but for almost everyone in that building that night. But which is more likely, that the Holy Spirit came to visit us and turn us all into uncontrolled, hysterical heaps? Or that the atmosphere was so overwhelming that it would be impossible not be caught up in the hysteria and leave unaffected? Perhaps this was no different to the hysteria that can be found amongst a thousand youths in a hyped up Rock concert?
The third tangible experience I remember most was not so pleasant but equally profound. This experience happened in a much smaller meeting. Every week we would meet together as a housegroup and discuss the Bible, chat and pray. One particular week, the pastor of the Upper Room had recorded a teaching on cassette about fatherhood. Because we call God "Father", many aspects of our earthly relationships with our physical fathers affect how we view our heavenly father. The talk went into some quite deep psychological analysis of the mind and heart and encouraged some quite deep thinking and introspection. Again, during the worship and ministry time, I experienced something which neither I nor Ruth, nor my housegroup leader were prepared for. Memories surfaced in my mind that I knew were real but for some peculiar reason had been completely hidden from my knowledge until that moment. All the memories were related to my relationship with my father. None of the memories were particularly traumatic or shocking, but for me they had suddenly become very significant indications of how my character had been shaped and influenced since childhood. The pain of this experience turned me into a wreck. I was a sobbing mess! The housegroup leader had no idea what had just been unleashed in me and was completely unprepared and ill equipped to handle it. All he could do was lead me in a weak prayer and finish with words along the lines of, "Well, see you Sunday then… Bye!". Ruth did her best to comfort me as she drove me home and I cried my heart out for the rest of the night, not understanding what this was or how to deal with it.
That experience took
a while to get over. Though my childhood wasn't ideal, it hardly warranted
the emotional outburst of that night or my confusion in the next few weeks.
I had some counselling with the housegroup leader who tried to help, but
unfortunately was clueless.
Eventually, when I read through a book called "Victory over the darkness"
I turned things around - and I place emphasis on the word "I".
The book, full of timeless wisdom extrapolated from various principles
interpreted from the Bible (though not exclusively found in the Bible),
helped me to view things in a different light. Its hard to say what happened,
but I remember making a decision to think differently about the way I viewed
my circumstances and my recovery was very swift. There was no visitation
from the Holy Spirit or the leadership of the church to help me - all that
happened was that I dusted myself off, pulled myself together and got on
with my life.
These three very different experiences may seem to reveal me as a very unstable emotional sort who is easily swayed - but it should be noted that these are just three incidents through a span of 12 years. There were other times when I believed the Holy Spirit was manifested in some way to me but not of the magnitude of those three occasions. But these events had nothing to do with demonic forces or the Holy Spirit. A combination of things can come into play that generate experiences like these:
- The desperate desire to hear from God.
- The euphoria created by emotionally charged worship or prayer.
- My emotional immaturity at the time.
- Adrenaline rushes and chemical reactions caused by excitement.
- Autosuggestion from others who had similar experiences.
- My unintentional exaggeration of the event in my memory.
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My interest in theology deepened, my knowledge of the Bible blossomed and I drank in as much information as I could. As I absorbed more and more, two things were happening, one of which I wasn’t consciously aware of at the time. What I saw at the time was that there was an extraordinary amount of wisdom in the Bible. There were viewpoints about life that I had never thought about very seriously before and seemed to make sense of the Universe I lived in. Yet, at the same time, I saw more and more in the Bible that would be ridiculous if you took it literally – e.g Samson killing thousands of people with the jawbone of an ass! Or for that matter a talking donkey!
Another factor that came into play which held me as a Christian was the increasing responsibility I took on within the church. Two different people on two different occasions had "prophesied" that I was called to be an evangelist. This affected me in several ways. It caused me to make certain choices in my Christian walk to move into that direction and find ways in which to train myself in the gifts and skills that were needed to "reach the lost". It gave me a real sense of determination and purpose as I sought to ensure that I was well versed in being able to make a good case for the validity of the Christian faith to sceptics. This goal filled me with both excitement and horror at the same time. I was excited because I felt that my faith was being strengthened and that I was being a good and faithful servant to the Lord. But I felt horror at the idea that this calling might inflate any feelings of pride or arrogance that was lurking in my nature. As I had already mentioned, these were attributes that I loathed, and the last thing I wanted was to become a big-head. I set aside my trepidation and pursued my calling in the direction that I felt God was leading me. I remember reading a particular passage of Scripture and experiencing a sense of awe as it seemed to be speaking to me directly, "Simon, I will make you a fisher of men."
Very soon I started up a fellowship meeting at lunchtimes at work, which I led for several years. We organised some successful Christmas Carol services and video lectures in which the gospel was preached without shame to the workforce. At the same time I had been trusted with leading a church house-group where it seemed that I was respected by those that attended and I was regularly asked to preach at the community services. I also got involved with a project called "The Drop Zone" which was a facility set up in the town centre to keep youths entertained and off the streets.
Things were looking up, and as my diary began to fill, there was little time to dwell on any doubts that were sneaking around deep underneath.
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Whilst flying a spiritual high, the Upper Room decided it was time for me to lead a church housegroup and I spent a great deal of time seeking God on the best way to go forward with it. It was a trend at that time for the Upper Room to choose amusing acronyms for the various courses they were running. Among these were K.G.B. (Know God Better) and F.B.I (Faith Building Instruction). I felt that our housegroup would be focussed on helping each member of the group to develop the "Spiritual Gifts" that the Holy Spirit empowers Christians with to build up the church. Our group was therefore named N.A.S.A (Nurturing Anointed Spiritual Abilities)! As we started to meet on a weekly basis things began to warm up. Relationships formed between us all, each of us were being strengthened in our faith as we worshiped God together and in the space of a few weeks, my closest friend, Tony became a Christian and joined the group - he was the life and soul of the party. The group appeared to be something of a success to the leadership and as the Upper Room community gathered popularity and increased in numbers, people were gradually being added to our group.
It has to be said, that I'm a terrible judge of character and as our group continued to develop I failed to notice something very important about one of the members. I won't use her real name here, but for the purposes of including her in my testimony I will refer to her as "Susan". Susan was a very flamboyant person. She was outgoing and some would say that she was more than a little eccentric. She was a very likeable person and we all enjoyed her presence at the group. But one particular day, something came to light concerning her that would eventually change my attitude to ministry in a significant way. Ruth and I had invited Susan to dinner one evening so that we could get to know her a little better and see how things were going for her in general. We knew that she was having difficulty with her home life and that her marriage was under some strain, but we really had no idea what we were about to get into or where it would lead us.
As we sat and ate, Susan confided to us that it was a relief to eat a nice meal in safety. She went on to explain that her husband (we'll call him John), was attempting to kill her and would often try and slip poison into her meals. Naturally we were horrified at this and knew that this situation would have to be handled with extreme caution. Fortunately, Ruth, who is a considerably better judge of character, suspected that there was more to this than met the eye. Having asked what her husband was trying to poison her with, Susan said that it was called Haloperidol. I wondered what the significance of this was but as Susan left I said to her, "If there's anything you need from us, anything at all, you just call us. Night or day, we'll be there for you."
Susan left seeming to be much more at ease knowing that she had a sympathetic ear, but after she had gone, Ruth and I discussed it. Ruth used to work in a hospital and knew that Haloperidol was a type of medication that was used for mental disorders. The obvious question was raised "Why on earth would her husband be trying to murder her with that kind of medication?"
After some more time and investigation we had discovered that Susan was in fact a Paranoid Schizophrenic who was currently being controlled with this drug under the supervision of her family. Quite often the only way her husband could get her to take the medication was to slip it into her food. Needless to say the illness caused considerable strain on the family and was not always under control and Susan had a history of admittance into care. By this time, we had committed ourselves to help - we were involved - and very Susan took us up on our offer. Only a few days later At about 4 a.m, we received a phone call from her telling us that she desperately needed us. She was in tears and sounded very depressed. I quickly told her to stay calm and that we would be there right away. Ruth and I threw on some clothes, drove to her house and still feeling groggy, knocked on her door not knowing what to expect.
Susan answered the door and beckoned us in - she was still in a state of despair. We did our best to calm her, and as Ruth held her, I did my best to give her some words of comfort. After a while she seemed to have composed herself enough to offer us a drink, and after we accepted she disappeared into the kitchen to make the drinks. She reappeared a few minutes later and her transformation was extremely unnerving. It was as if we were talking to a completely different person. Within the space of about three minutes she was upbeat, happy and positive. She spoke to us for a few more minutes in this mood until it seemed that she switched again! She began to rant and shout about her husband and by this time it was quite obvious that we were completely out of our depth. Once again, we did our best to calm her down and comfort her. I prayed, but as you can guess, there was no effect. We left later that morning not knowing what to do.
Naturally, we were not qualified to deal with this and I brought this to the attention of the leadership as quickly as I could. This had one effect - but not the effect I wanted. They had no constructive advice to offer other than to keep them informed in case they in turn needed to contact her family or at worst inform the authorities. Whilst she was on her medication and allowed to participate in normal society we should just proceed as normal and trust that the situation was safely in God's hands. The effect that I didn't need was the way in which the leadership responded to how we'd handled the situation so far. They were suitably impressed enough to realise that if others joined the Upper Room community that were in some way, shall we say, disturbed - our group was a good place for them to be settled!
And sure enough they came. The broken, the depressed, the abused and the type of people that had issues you really did not want to dig too deep into. I continued leading N.A.S.A for more than a year treading carefully as I went. The group continued to do well as far as the church was concerned, but as far as these individuals were concerned, did we really help them in any long-term practical way? No. My intentions were well placed but at the end of the day, I was leading a bunch of people that had some serious mental and emotional issues and I was feeding them with the notion that God would bring them to a place of wholeness.
Susan was eventually sectioned once again and a few months after I had felt that God had told me to stop leading the group to deal with some of my own issues, I received a phone call from one of the other members of the group. Susan had thrown herself from a balcony and killed herself. Of course, I know that this was not my fault, but I am forever haunted by two questions. Could I have done more to help her? And did my leadership of the group in anyway cause damage to her state of mind that contributed to her death? The answer is most likely no. But that still doesn't take away the tragedy, and it probably contributes to my doubts that there is a God who has an active involvement in the way this world is run.
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10) The Impossible Made Possible
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As time went by, The Upper Room eventually ended its meetings (it had only a 10-year vision, which had come to fruition) and we moved onto a new church. We spent a couple of years at a church called "Gateway" in which our involvement was lower key but still created a full diary.
It was around this time that a new hobby came into my life. I had already become a fanatical computer gamer, but very soon I had learned how to design my own levels and built myself a reputation in the gaming community. This would be the start of a period of backsliding in my Christian walk. Within a few months I was totally hooked and wanted to spend as much time on my computer designing new maps to release on the Internet. I wanted nothing more than to leave work and make money as a freelance level designer. As a born again Christian it was instilled into me that God should always be the very highest priority in life. A relationship with God was to be of primary importance - far above all other aspects of life: above family, friends and… hobbies. And indeed, if Christianity is real then this would be the correct perspective – for God would be the very source of all that pleases you and the ultimate provider of all that you need. Not that any of the other things are not important or that they should be rejected, but in your heart they shouldn’t take first place. I slowly realised with a sense of deepening guilt that this new hobby had become more important to me than God. I still attended church, I still prayed and read my Bible and I still sought the Holy Spirit for daily guidance but they no longer had the same pull that my computer did! What followed was a gradual decline in my devotional life and I became a back-slidden Christian. I had come to the point where I felt that if God told me to give up my hobby I just couldn’t do it.
The events that followed this realisation still resonate with me as something that I find very hard to explain other than there being a real God who has an active involvement in my life. Whether weeks or months had passed I can’t remember, but I do still remember the urge that came over me one day. More than ever, I felt an irresistible urge to pray – a sense that I would find no peace until I did. So, that lunchtime I left the office and made my way to the local church. I sat on a bench in the grounds and began to pray. I knew what it was I was being called to pray for – and it mortified me because I believed it would be impossible for me to do what I knew I had to do.
I continued praying
and then it happened. That still small voice inside spoke and said, "give
up the level design". And then the most amazing thing happened to me –
I said, "Okay" and it couldn’t have been easier! I said it, and I really
meant it. The one thing I had come to dread suddenly became so trivial,
I was shocked – the mountain had become a molehill. I went back to work
awe-struck. I had given up my favourite pass-time and felt over-the-moon.
Back in tune with God again, I went through the rest of my day at work
with a big smile on my face.This soon changed to confusion when I arrived
home.
I looked at my e-mail and there it was – an offer for a level design job
I had applied for months ago. I had already given up hope of getting it,
but now here it was, tempting me to go against the very decision I had
just been so ecstatic about making. The job would have meant moving to
Laguna Beach in the United States and spending all my working hours doing
something I absolutely loved.
"It’s the Devil,"
I said straight away. "Nothing could be a more blatant attempt to draw
me back away from Jesus," I thought.
I discussed it with
Ruth and she, being the wiser out of the two of us, told me not to be too
hasty but to pray about it. I did, but nothing came to me in prayer – I
simply started to feel very conflicted about the issue. I wrote back to
them and they told me that they would call me at 5pm a couple of days later
to hear my decision. Now I was in turmoil. What was this about? Should
I take it or not?
Once again I prayed.
I was not told "yes" or "no" but I felt I was told that by the time the company phoned me I would have peace in my heart and that I would know what decision to make as I spoke to them. This gave me some comfort, but I was still in turmoil about it, I really didn’t know what to do. For the next two days I fasted and prayed at every opportunity I could get but still the feeling of anxiety wouldn’t leave me. At 5pm on the day that I was to receive the phone call I was laying down and praying after a day of fasting – I felt no peace about it at all. Then the phone rang. Where was God? Where was this sense of peace that was promised to me? Perhaps I hadn’t heard from God after all. The doubts flooded through me as I picked the phone up. The conversation went something like this:
"Hello?" I said.
"Oh, Hello is that Simon?"
"Yes it is."
"I’m Richard’s secretary at ‘The Collective’. I’m sorry, but I’m afraid Richard can’t talk to you. He’s off sick… He’s never called in sick before but he just didn’t feel up to coming in. Can he call you tomorrow?"
"Ummm, yes, of course… Thank you!"
I was a little stunned by this. It certainly seemed like providence to me. I went back to praying with renewed confidence that God had not let me down, but instead he had shown me that he was in complete control of the situation. I still didn’t know what to do though.
The following day
I prayed, but this time at 5pm, I was completely at ease. I had no doubt
that when I would speak to my possible employer I would know that I was
going to make the right decision. He rang. We spoke and I accepted the
job with the exception that I would not be moving out to the U.S but working
across the Internet instead.
I very soon realised that what I had experienced was of the same type of
principle as Abraham had gone through when he was asked to sacrifice his
first born son, Isaac. Although, my situation wasn’t anywhere near the
same stress scale as Abraham’s, the story was similar. I had been told
to give up something very important to me. I made the decision to do it,
but as soon as I did, it was given right back to me, but even better than
it was before! My contract was not permanent, but this was just perfect
for me and I enjoyed every moment of the job.
Although this story might seem uninspired to a lot of people, this is one series of co-incidences that still seem amazing to me and I find no sensible explanation for it (answers on a postcard please).
The other event that
strikes me as being a rather odd co-incidence is the time when Ruth and
I wanted to move home. Ruth and I had reached a point where we were very
unsettled in the flat we were living in. We had been living there for more
than 7 years and the area had changed quite a bit. It was time for us to
move on.
Unfortunately, when we had found the place we really wanted to move to
we had already renewed the contract for the flat we currently renting for
another 6 months. This left us with a problem. If we really wanted to,
we could've done the dishonest thing and just moved out of the flat straight
away leaving the landlord high and dry without any notice. Obviously we
had no intention of doing this, but we really wanted to move. So, we brought
this problem to our church housegroup and we prayed about it (as we used
to pray about everything we could). We trusted that God would somehow help
us out, though we couldn't see what could be done about it.
The very next day we had our answer.
The phone rang and to my surprise it was the landlord. We had never heard from the landlord before - not even when we originally moved in. Everything was done through a letting agency so there was never any need for us to contact each other. The conversation soon revealed why the landlord called me directly: It went something like this:
"Hello?"
"Oh, hello. Is that Mr West-Bulford?"
"Yes it is, can I help you?"
"Well, I'm your landlord. Listen, I'm sorry for calling you like this and please forgive me if this question seems a bit rude, but have you been paying your rent?"
"Yes, of course. It comes straight out of my account as a standing order. Why, is there a problem?"
"Well, yes actually. I haven't received the rent money for the last 2 months."
"Oh, well I can assure you that it has been taken out of my account."
"Ah, I see. I was afraid of that."
"Why, what do you mean?"
"There's a problem with the agency. I haven't been able to contact them and it appears that the police are investigating them. They think that the agency has been struggling to stay in business and have been keeping everyone's rent money!"
"Oh!"
"Don't worry, I'm not going to chase you for the missing money, but I just wanted to make sure that you pay the money directly to me from now on. Can you make the arrangements, please?"
Instantly I realised what this meant. The contract that had been holding us there had been broken - and the very next day after the whole group had prayed too!
I then went on to explain the situation to the landlord and he seemed quite happy to let us go. With no binding contract there wasn't anything stopping us from moving.
A miracle from God? Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. To put things into perspective though, its important to note that Ruth and I often prayed about moving home, so maybe this wasn't such an amazing co-incidence after all. The main co-incidence is that this was one of the only times we had prayed about it within the housegroup.
With those things said, these few events still aren't a strong enough set of incidents to dislodge the deep-seated belief I’m facing up to that there isn’t a God up there getting involved in my day-to-day life. Sometimes evidence can be misleading. My favourite example is the theory of Evolution.
For the longest time, Evolution was not something widely known by people. Without this theory one is left to look at the marvels of nature and wonder how it all got here. Such amazing and complex ‘design’ - it just screams of some incredibly brilliant mind that has created it. Without evolution what other way could there be for all this stuff to be here? The only realistic looking option was that there was some sort of "God" or "gods" at work somewhere. If you were an atheist back then with no knowledge of today’s theory how could you explain it all? You probably couldn’t produce a convincing argument, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. And now, sure enough, whether you accept the theory as true or not, what you have to admit, is that there is now a workable alternative than there being a God.
This principle is no different for me with the events I just wrote about. There are a few things including the occurrences I’ve described above that I have no rational explanation for, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one (as in my example about evolution above).
I remember watching David Blaine recently as he hung over London bridge in a big Perspex box starving himself for more than 40 days. Speculation was in abundance about whether what he was doing was actually real or just a clever trick. Then I got thinking about some of the really cool illusions he has performed before people and something triggered in my mind. Deep down, this is what I believed about Christianity – so far, my experiences, my investigations and my understanding of theology had led me to a place where I could make sense of it all and reason my way around some of the awkward issues. But I couldn’t escape the nagging instinct that these things that Christianity presents just isn’t real. It was some sort of very intricate illusion dressed up to look like reality.
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I would often find that the times when my doubts would surface the most strongly was whenever Ruth and I would have a really bad row. In the early days of our marriage we struggled to hold things together, but as the years went by and as we matured, we learned how to resolve our conflicts in a far more mature way. Unfortunately rows do still happen occasionally and when the pressure is on it can be all too easy to lose one's temper. During my period of sulking over whatever issue it was, I would rebel against God, and on these occasions I would begin to allow the buried doubts about my faith rise to the surface. These were times when I would be seriously considering throwing in the towel and giving it all up. Each time, I would take some time calming down, Ruth and I would make up and I would dust myself off and get back to business again.
The last time we had a really bad row the usual thing would happen, but on this occasion I decided that my feelings of rebellion that occurred immediately after the row ought to be addressed. I spoke to one of the leaders at the church about it and told him that I was worried that these feelings might be a sign of a deeper problem that I've got. I recalled a parable that Jesus told his disciples about a man who was building his house on the sand.
"But anyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash." (Matthew 7:26-27)
Why was it that whenever I got into a bad argument with my wife my faith in God would crumble so easily? Was my foundation wrong? Had I in fact, built my house on sand rather than rock? Then the other Scripture would pop into my head:
"Not everyone who says to me, `Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, `Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, `I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Matthew 7:21-23)
The person I spoke to listened to what I had to say, but at the end of it all, he considered that I might be overestimating the significance of my doubts and feelings. Every Christian goes through episodes like this from time to time and its only natural. He felt that I was a mature and stable enough Christian that these occasional lapses were nothing to worry about - God was big enough to keep me on track. Considering my worldview today, that man may want to revise his original assessment.
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In March of 2003 something happened to me, which was to be the seeds of my deconversion. For those of you who are easily disturbed by stories of illness skip on to the next part of my story…
I woke up one day with a terrible fever and a stinking headache. I thought this was just a nasty cold I had picked up from somewhere, but this thought soon passed when I paid a visit to the toilet and began urinating blood! Obviously I was shocked and thought it would be a pretty good idea to get some advice from my doctor. I booked an appointment and decided to go to the practice when I felt a little better. Unfortunately that didn’t happen. Later that morning I began to experience some intense stomach pains, which seemed to be getting progressively worse as the time drew on. Eventually the pain reached such a crescendo that my wife decided it was time we drove to the hospital. Unfortunately I couldn’t even make it to the car and Ruth had to almost drag me back inside the house.
By this time I was not only finding the pain unbearable but I was getting very scared as I had no clue what was happening to me. I tried praying but that didn’t seem to help and Ruth wasted no time in calling the emergency services to request an ambulance. I was taken to accident & emergency and still the pain did not subside. The briefest of examinations led the doctor to conclude that I was simply making a fuss about a urinary infection. I was told to wait until an X-ray could be performed. By now I was beside myself – I had never experienced pain like it and found it impossible to cope with – but what choice did I have? There was no choice - I was forced to experience it and go through it… and the waiting continued.
After about an hour a doctor came to see me with an X-ray and said that it was very likely that I was suffering from a condition caused by kidney stones. Small mineral deposits mass together inside the kidneys and can build up for months without being detected. Eventually they can fragment into small stones, which are forced out into the urethra where they tear the lining and block the passage of urine. Naturally this causes intense pain and if left unattended will cause irreparable damage. The thought of having these kidney stones made my heart sink - I’d heard and read stories about the kind of ordeals people went through with this problem. I was admitted into the hospital and after many hours of more waiting and being dosed up with painkillers that seemed to have minimal effect, I was told what would need to be done to me to resolve the problem. A long tube would be inserted into my nether regions and up into the urethra where a minute hammer-like device is used to smash them up so that they can be extracted.
Obviously the prospect of this operation terrified me, especially when I was told that I would be in even worse pain once the ordeal was over! Still, I had the comfort of knowing that once it was done then the problem would be gone.
I prayed.
My wife prayed.
My family prayed
…and my church group prayed.
I even agreed in prayer with my fellow believers that when the surgeon came to operate, the stones would already be gone. There was a general feeling that God was with me and that all would go well - after all, I was in the hands of a professional who had done this many times.
The day came for the operation and I remember feeling confident that in a few hours time it would all be behind me. How very wrong I was! I woke from the anaesthetic feeling exactly how the specialist told me I would feel. I was experiencing the worst pain in my life. Passing water was hell and the medication they gave me for the pain did nothing. I remember lying in the hospital bed and praying. I knew that my faith was weakened to the point that I could no longer believe God for a healing - but surely at the very least I could trust Him to comfort me during my agony. But the opposite was true. When I needed God most, I was completely unaware of his presence and there was no sign of the "comforter" that would come along side me to strengthen and encourage me. No presence… Nothing.
When I finally saw the specialist again he informed me that, unfortunately the operation was unsuccessful. The stones were much too hard to break and all they succeeded in doing was to push them back up into the kidney where they were certain to come back out again. With the stones still there I had no choice but to have a "stent" left inside me which served as an alternative to the urethra in allowing the urine to be passed without blockage. Needless to say this was not comfortable at all. I was still in pain, but like a good Christian I chose not to blame God for not coming through for me. Like an abuse case trying to find an excuse for their abuser, I did what most Christians did and blamed myself. Somewhere my faith or my expectations were in error and I chose to use this experience to mould my character and praise God rather than let it get me down.
I continued to pray, as did everyone else I knew who was a believer.
The next step was a form of treatment known as Lithotripsy or shockwave therapy. In gaps of just under a second for thirty minutes, a pressurised jolt is aimed at the area in your body closest to the location of the stone in an attempt to smash it. The harder the jolt, the more chance there is of it breaking, and your pain threshold determines the intensity of the jolt. I was told that 9 out of 10 cases were successful and that it was likely it would be effective during this session. However, if for some reason it was unsuccessful then the procedure would be repeated every week for a maximum of three sessions.
The praying continued.
The shockwave therapy didn't work!
For each of the three sessions the therapy did not work. I was told that this was not unheard of and that stones can be made of many different types of deposits. Mine just happened to be extremely hard.
After another month, I was left with one last option. I was to be taken to Harley Street where another specialist would attempt a slightly different version of the original procedure to remove the stones (there were two in the original x-ray). Surely this time it would all be over with.
Again, the operation was performed. And, hallelujah… almost. One stone was removed. The other had broken up and left an unreachable shard, which was still too far up to be removed - it would have to be passed naturally. The trouble was not yet over, but at least progress was being made. The stent had now been removed, and only a manageable fragment was remaining. Passing it would still be agony, but there was no longer danger of a blockage. Two weeks later during the week that I returned to work, I did pass it. The pain was over.
I learned a valuable lesson from those three months - a lesson that I chose not to heed at the time, but acknowledged months later:
God did not comfort
me in my hour of need and by no stretch of interpretation could it be said
that God intervened to bring healing. I told people that this was not evidence
that God was at fault - I could not be that arrogant or unfaithful to the
creator of the Universe who obviously knows better and sees the bigger
picture. No, I saw this as an error on my part - in some way I had failed
- either in my faith or in my understanding of the way that God worked.
Of course, if you discount all incidents in which things don't go well
for you for one reason or another, the end result is still a belief in
a faith in which God never lets you down.
Amazing Christian
logic for you!
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13) Women should be seen and not heard!
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Gradually, like pieces of an invisible jigsaw puzzle coming together, I learned more and more lessons about my faith and Christianity in general that began to form a very uncomfortable picture for me.
One piece of the puzzle took me quite some time to recognise. During my years as a Christian I had issues with the way that women were portrayed in the Bible. Ruth already had strong views with this issue as did I. From a moral point of view, both of us felt strongly that, although there are fundamental differences between men and women, in regards to concepts like leadership, value, skills and gifting, both sexes should be seen as equal. Within the ministries we had come to respect we noticed that women played a prominent role within the church. They led meetings, preached sermons, exercised the gifts of the spirit and pastored men and women alike. This seemed only right, but there was one huge difficulty with this. The Biblical view of women in the Bible seems very misogynistic. The Old Testament is packed with examples of male leadership but women were often ignored or simply abused with apparently little or no concern by God. Likewise the New Testament has numerous Scriptures which discourage the view that women should be viewed as equal to men. Paul's advice to the churches seemed to be instructing them to make sure that women were not placed in positions of leadership, that they should be quiet in church, subordinate to their husbands and generally kept down. Not only did this view seem unjust to me, but it also didn't correspond to what I was seeing within the church. I saw women like Gloria Copeland preaching, teaching and leading with what seemed to be the power of God working through her. If God was using her, why was he contradicting his Word?
As a Christian I would always take the point of view that above anything else the Bible is the highest authority - it is inerrant and should be believed above and beyond anything else, even if the facts appeared to contradict it. This issue was one such area where I struggled greatly. On the one hand the Bible seemed to say women were lower than men, and on the other hand I saw evidence within the church to the contrary. In addition to this I had added incentive to see women as equals because Ruth (obviously) felt very strongly about this too. I desperately wanted to see women as having equal roles to men within the church, yet I knew that if the Bible message contradicted this I had to stand firm with the Bible, however hard that was. The logical step for me therefore, was to wade deeper into study regarding this sensitive issue and find out exactly what the Scriptures were really saying about it all. Were the Biblical interpretations wrong? Could the Scriptures have been translated by men wearing misogynistic glasses? I had to know the truth.
I began to pray and investigate and I started by reading a book called "Leadership is male" by a respected theologian named David Pawson. I wanted to see what the hard-line view on this subject was. If I could understand the strongest argument for this viewpoint I would have a good baseline to start from. After reading the book, to my immense disappointment I came to the conclusion that the Bible's stance on women was that women in fact were subordinate to men in matters of leadership within the church. For obvious reasons I was still not satisfied with this and decided to dig even deeper. I wrote a letter to Kenneth Copeland ministries hoping that they would provide some Biblical backing for their own theological view that women were equal in this area. They wrote back, but their defence from Scripture was weak and very unconvincing. I then spoke to the pastor of our church who had not only had no problem with women in leadership but also viewed the Bible as inerrant too. I asked how he reconciled the two and he produced some papers for me to read on the subject. These were excellent, and after some additional research on the internet I came to the satisfied conclusion that actually, despite how it looks at a cursory glance, the New Testament did support women in authoritative roles within the church.
I settled with that view, but the way I had come to this conclusion unsettled me. Regardless of the subject matter, my motivations and methods for finding out the truth had revealed something very interesting and disturbing.
I had already made my mind up about what I wanted to believe.
Had I been unbiased about this issue I would have probably prayed, read the Bible, read that book by David Pawson and settled on my initial conclusion that women were secondary to men in the eyes of God. However, I had vested interest for this not to be the case and I searched and investigated until I found the evidence that supported my desired view. When I found it I settled for that! If I had continued my search, would I have found still further evidence to dispute my new conclusions? Who knows? The point is, I did not attempt to investigate further, I settled for the view that was convenient for me and for Ruth. The way I had tackled this whole issue bothered me. Not because of the conclusions I had come to, but the way in which I had come by them and settled on them. It began to dawn on me that we have a tendency to only assimilate information that validates our beliefs. How many other aspects of theology had I settled on in a similar way? For that matter, had I used this method in other areas of my life too? The ramifications of this were huge and for the moment I set my worries aside deciding that there were more important things to worry about.
However, this was just one more piece of the giant jigsaw puzzle of doubt that was beginning to take shape within me.
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The next piece of the puzzle came much later. Until becoming a Christian I had always accepted evolution to be a solid scientific explanation for the way things were in the world. As a child I grew up, like most children, fascinated by the world of dinosaurs. I knew hundreds of dinosaur names and a truckload of facts about the prehistoric ages that they lived in. It never occurred to me that evolution was only a theory and not an established fact. I had no question in my mind that mankind had evolved over millions of years from ape like creatures and that the earth was billions of years old. To me it was as solid a fact as switching on a light switch and expecting to see light.
Discovering the fundamentalist view that the world was probably only 6000 years old, that the earth was surrounded by a huge celestial canopy and that mankind were the descendants of two people created directly by the hand of God was an enormous challenge to my thinking. I couldn't just accept this by faith. But I also understood that unless this was true, the fundamentalist view, which I had come to think of as truth, would fall apart. I was hungry for any information I could find that would make these ridiculous claims believable. I quickly found what I was looking for. Material came to me by Roger Price, Duane Gish and Carl Bough. All people who had backgrounds in science, astronomy and Geology. To someone like myself who had limited knowledge of science, their propositions for Creationism seemed very realistic. At the very least it shocked me from the view that I had always taken for granted for so long, and after plenty of study in this field, I came to what I believed to be a reasonable and believable model for a literal Creation. Not only that but I also began to study the Bible in the area of Chronology and found some remarkable patterns within the Scriptures that confirmed a very young age for the Earth. I held this view for a very long time and defended it ferociously if anyone spoke as if evolution were completely true. Less than a year ago however, I found once again that the view I had held so strongly was to be challenged greatly. Before I explain this further I need to digress…
In the last few years I threw myself into a church activity known as the "Alpha Course". The Alpha Course was designed as an evangelistic tool and has enjoyed tremendous success within the organised churches all the way from Catholicism through to fundamentalist churches like the one I was involved with. It was a 12-week course designed mainly to target non-Christians and explain the Christian faith in a light and non-threatening manner. The idea was that a member of the church invites a friend, neighbour or work colleague along to an event called the Alpha supper with no expectancy for commitment. The guest would come along and sit at a table with about 10 other guests that they didn't know, and share a well-prepared free meal together.
The table leader, who was a Christian, would sit at the table making sure that everyone felt at ease and that conversation would flow nicely as the people started to get to know each other. Following the meal, a guest speaker would appear on stage and present a half-hour talk entitled "Christianity - Boring, Irrelevant and Untrue?"
The talk was designed to present the non-Christians with the proposition that if there can be truth found in Christianity then it is of vital importance to everybody and that if it is followed correctly it would certainly not be boring. The talk was designed to cut down any misconceptions about the faith and persuade people that at the very least, it is worth their time to investigate. Following the talk there was about half an hour in which the guests would sit and discuss the presentation around the table and again, the table leader would make sure that everybody had a chance to speak and that nobody's views were ridiculed. Usually around fifty percent of the guests decided that they should at least give the course a try and come along to the remaining eleven sessions.
Each of the sessions took the same format and covered specific aspects of the Christian faith. One week, Jesus' sacrifice would be discussed, another week faith would be discussed, another week the debate about good and evil would be covered: all the "hot potatoes" were thoroughly examined and chatted about. In the space of 12 weeks, people would get to know each other, fascinating discussions would be talked through and many of the guests would decide that they wanted to become Christians. I was a table leader at 5 different Alpha courses and thoroughly enjoyed all of them. Not everyone decided to become Christians (though quite a few did) but to my knowledge everybody that attended came away from the course feeling as though it was a positive experience (not least because they had a free meal every Monday night!).
Some people would attend the course more than once and it became evident to some of us in the church that something more was needed. I quickly created and led something called the Beta Course in which guests who still wanted more questions answered could have sessions especially designed for them. The course turned out to be a success. On one occasion I left home to attend the Beta night and drove half way up the road when I believed I heard the Holy Spirit say to me, "go back home and get the salvation prayer. You're going to make use of it tonight." I turned the car around and went home to get it. Sure enough, that same night one of the guests told me that he wanted to become a Christian. We prayed together and he made his commitment to Jesus. It was a very special night to me.
It was whilst the Alpha and Beta courses were in full swing that I decided it was high time I revisited some of the issues that I had wrestled with in the past. Intellectually I felt rock solid and very strong in my faith but deep down the doubt monster still stirred. I needed to make sure that if guests at Alpha and Beta were going to ask difficult questions I would be fully prepared. This was something that my faith demanded and I felt confident in:
"Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect…" (1 Peter 3:15)
Not that I thought I had all the answers, but I wanted to make sure that I did as much as I could to be ready. In my searches for answers to date I had always seen God as being incredibly faithful. If I had read a part of the Bible that I couldn't understand or if I was presented with a particular part of theology that seemed confusing or difficult I would spend time in prayer and meditation before God asking the Holy Spirit to reveal the truth to me. Sometimes I would find a book or teaching cassette that would give me the answers I needed but the most amazing times would be when the answers came during prayer. These types of answers are commonly labelled by Christians to be "revelation knowledge". It was as though a sudden deposit would be made to your thoughts and something that first seemed perplexing would immediately become crystal clear. These moments of revelation would make you want to jump up and down with excitement - not just because you had been given the answer but because you knew that you had heard something from God. Revelation knowledge of this nature is something that only a born-again Christian is supposed to receive. Those that aren't believers cannot truly understand these things because they are revealed directly by God and if you are not born again, there is no connection to God whereby this information can reach you. Hence, this is why Christians so often fall back on this argument from Corinthians when they are unable to explain something clearly to a non-Christian in a debate!
"The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned." (1 Corinthians 2:14)
Armed with this confidence that God would give me all the answers and wisdom I needed, I set to work. My first strategy was to re-familiarise myself with what it was that non-Christians believed. Several times I had heard about a book called "The Blind Watchmaker" by Richard Dawkins being quoted. It was always used as a good exposition of the theory of evolution and so I decided to read it. If I was able to demonstrate to others that I wasn't ignorant about the subject, then it would make my Christian position that much more convincing. Unfortunately, to my horror, I found that I was completely ignorant.
Two shocking things happened to me when I read that book. Firstly, I realised that I had utterly misunderstood the theory of evolution. True, it was still just a theory, but as I read through Dawkin's work I realised just what a damn good theory it actually was.
All this time I had seen evolution as nature somehow acting intelligently about the environment life was existing in, and manipulating the next generation to make sure that it would cope with any new changes that had occurred. To me this was always a cop out because it required some form of intelligence behind the change and surely that would be God. What I now recognised was that this idea was not what evolution theory proposed at all. Instead, natural selection was a filter whereby anything that was not able to survive died out. The only survivors would therefore appear to be designed specifically for the new environment but in actual fact there was no design at all. Rather like the puddle claiming that the hole it was lying in matched its size and shape perfectly, therefore the hole must have been designed specifically for the puddle! It all seemed so clear to me now - and then, with another feeling of shock I realised something else - I had just received "Revelation knowledge".
But this knowledge was not something that supported my Christian faith. This amazed me because I suddenly realised that "revelation knowledge" was not something exclusive to Christianity, but it was something that could happen to anyone and Christians (or me) had over spiritualised it. The experience of "revelation knowledge" was no different at all to an unbeliever saying "Ah, I get it. I see now, the penny has dropped."
Why on earth didn't I recognise this before for what it was? As a teenager I remember learning how to play chess. I knew how all the pieces moved, I knew the rules and I knew how the game was won - but I didn't know how to play. I didn't understand how to apply strategy to the game and therefore would just move the pieces in the hope that something good would happen. Then one day, it just happened. It all clicked into place and I understood properly how the game was played. Was this revelation knowledge? Of course not. It was my mind suddenly reaching the point of comprehension. Biblical understanding is absolutely no different - it just seems more mystical because the subject matter itself is usually mystical. It involves God and all the timeless philosophical issues that people usually chat about when they're smashed on beer.
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During the course of my final year as a Christian I became much more aware of Christianity's failure to deliver on the promises and ideals it so strongly pushed. Whilst watching a director's commentary of one of my favourite sci-fi TV shows, I remember him saying that the longer a person was drawn into a cult or belief system, the harder it was to accept the idea that they may be wrong about what they believe. Although this was something I was well aware of, for some reason, hearing it this time struck a deeper chord than usual and this thought rattled around in my mind for some time. I concentrated on cultivating my desire for a deeper personal knowledge of Jesus and spent a lot of time focussing solely on the relationship - after all - this is what Christianity is really about. I deliberately tried to avoid using God as a sort of celestial vending machine to help me with my day to day problems and focussed on him alone - this is something that Christians remind themselves of from time to time.
In October 2003 the
final crunch came when a final set of circumstances brought everything
to a head and forced me to take a much harder look at what I believed and
why. Ruth and I had just returned from a holiday to find that our cat,
was very ill. He was 11 years old, so we knew he was getting old, but he
still should have had a few years left in him yet. The cat had a bloated
stomach and seemed listless, so we decided to take him to the vets for
a check up. We were told that he had a great deal of fluid in his lungs
and that they needed to operate. It was a 50/50 chance that he would make
it through the procedure and even then they may still have to put him to
sleep. Naturally, we prayed about it as we usually would. The cat had the
fluid drained and the operation appeared to be successful but they decided
that he should be kept in for a while longer for observation as there was
still a strong possibility that his lungs would fill up again. Naturally
we were still worried about the situation and continued to pray.
During prayer I had a strong sense that the cat should be removed from
the surgery and brought home. I also felt that there would be resistance
from the vet and that they would advise against this and suggest that he
be put down. At this stage there was no certainty that our pet would need
to be put to sleep, only a probability, but the suggestion during prayer
seemed to be quite firm. Receiving "words" from God is always difficult.
You can never really be sure if it is God that has spoken or if it was
something in your own imagination or instinct - the proof that it was God
would usually be shown if the word proved to be accurate retrospectively.
If nothing came of it then it obviously wasn't God! After hearing what
we thought was God's encouragement to bring our pet home, confirmation
of this word came when I spoke to the vet.
The news was bad. Unfortunately the fluid began to very quickly build up in his lungs again. The vet advised us that he ought to be put to sleep. This was exactly in line with what I heard in prayer and so I had to make my decision there and then. Should I trust in the medical opinion of a professional, or listen to what I believed was God's advice? My faith was tested, but I decided that I should follow God's lead and insisted that we take the cat home despite the vet's firm recommendation otherwise.
Later that day, we picked the cat up and took him home and it was obvious that this was a very sick animal - dosed up with pain killers and hardly conscious. He would not eat or respond to us and he just lay in the armchair making little movement. Holding fast to what we believed was a promise from God, we continued to believe for healing to be manifested but his condition deteriorated.
One last prayer before we knew we had to make a final decision.
We prayed for guidance again and asked the Holy Spirit to reveal to us if we were in error in any way, if we had not heard God correctly or if we should stand our ground and trust Him despite what we were seeing with our eyes. We asked him to give us a sense of peace and "rolled our cares onto him".
Silence.
I looked at the poor animal. He was obviously in pain and was suffering. I looked into Ruth's eyes and she was distraught - I really hated to see her in this much emotional pain. Some people may think it ridiculous that there could be so much emotional attachment to a pet, but to us, he had been part of the family for more than 10 years and we were losing someone we loved. This was no longer a case of faith being tested. A living creature was suffering and it would be cruel to continue with this simply to ensure that our faith was not compromised.
We called the vets and asked that they came to the house to put him to sleep. He died later that morning and we were devastated. Serious questions flooded my mind…
This was a painful enough experience as it was, but what if this had been another human being?
What if this had been a son or daughter? How much more severe would this have been?
We thought we had heard from God but we were wrong. How many other times had I been wrong?
How many other situations were made worse by my being wrong?
How could I be sure that I was really hearing from God on any of the other occasions when I felt so sure?
And how many times had I found out that I was wrong and swept the issue aside without investigating why it went wrong?
I was always keen to keep records of times when circumstances seemed to favour the view that prayer had been answered, but how many times had I swept failure under the carpet and conveniently forgotten about it?
The flood waters in my mind overflowed as I expanded my questions to cover all the other Christians I knew too. At the time, we were attending a weekly prayer group and I thought about each member of that group. One was going through a painful divorce, another was also experiencing the breakdown of a long term relationship, another suffered from arthritis of the hip, another was suffering from continuing migraines, another from partial deafness, another with financial difficulties and yet another was experiencing problem after problem with a house move.
Then I thought about all the Christians within the family:
Ruth was suffering from a recurring allergy problem which had reached a point where it could even be life threatening. She had also never had an answer concerning the supposed calling, which she had been baited with. Her father was receiving medical treatment for a life threatening condition that was compounded with additional complications. Her mother still suffered from debilitating migraines. Her brother had been out of work for years because of illness and had only just come through it.
Then I thought of our friends who were Christians.
My closest friend was struggling with areas of sin that he felt he had no control over. Two of our other friends who had recently become Christians through the Alpha course were having doubts simply because prayers were going unanswered.
I myself had just recovered from three months of medical procedures to remove kidney stones!
Every Christian I knew of was living a life with the same struggles that every other person goes through - there was no compelling evidence that there was a God intervening to help them with their problems. The Bible doesn't promise that life will be free from trouble when a person chooses to make Jesus their Lord, but it does promise that God answers prayer! Rather than there being continual reports of how God had moved in spectacular ways to answer prayer, we were all making continuous excuses for why God might not have come through, or where our lives were not right, or where our theology was wrong, or where our expectations were flawed. There was no evidence at all that any of us were any different to those who were not Christians. No difference apart from what we professed! A Scripture came nagging back to my mind. In Paul's second letter to Timothy he described a certain type of people that as far as God were concerned were rejected, and in that list were people just like us…
"Having a form of godliness but denying its power."
I saw the promises
of Jesus flash through my mind -
"You may ask for
anything in my name and I will do it,"(John 14:13-14)
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7)
"they will place there hands sick people and they will get well" (Mark 16:18)
"Don't be afraid, just believe". (Mark 5:36)
According to the book of Acts, supernatural moves of God were not uncommon. These early Christians did not have to continually make excuses for why God was not obviously present in their lives.
As all of this flushed through me, Ruth summed up my disappointment in a very succinct observation.
"We asked for an egg… and he gave us a scorpion."
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That was it. The final straw! It was not at this point that I rejected Christianity, rather I made a very firm decision. I wanted to know - really know, if what I had chosen to believe in 12 years ago was actually true or not. It was at this point I realised with a greater conviction than I ever had before that something was very wrong with my faith and I could go no further until it had been resolved either way. There are many Bible Scriptures that point to the reason for unanswered prayer as unbelief. As far as the Bible was concerned, if you were to expect to receive anything from God, doubt was something that absolutely had to go (Mark 11:22-24,James 1:6).
Was this the root cause of the problems? Who out of any of us were really and truly believing God and his promises. "Trust in the Lord but tie up your camel" was a phrase we often heard joked about. But if doubt and unbelief was something that seriously thwarted God's action in earthly matters, could this be the answer? Should I be working to eradicate all doubts completely? This was surely an insurmountable task. Everybody, even the most devoted Christians have doubts don't they?
I thought about this for a while. And then I thought about the deep-seated unbelief that had been lurking within me for so long. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps it was the underlying nagging doubt that was really restricting the activity and presence of God in my life. I had to face it.
Until now I had heard these doubts when they surfaced and quickly cast them aside from my mind with the thoughts that I need not concern myself with them. These adverse thoughts were either the same sort of inner duality that every human experiences when they think about something or it was the devil trying to distract me and lead me astray. I would therefore counter these opposing thoughts with Scripture and knuckle back down to the business at hand.
But now I realised I could no longer afford to do this. What if someone was to be seriously hurt by my failure to be sure of what I believed? For all I know this may have already happened (Susan being one possible example).
No, this time I had to face the music. The only way I could see to deal with this was to allow it all to surface and follow the trail - wherever it would take me. I was not prepared to simply sweep this under the carpet alongside the other disappointments. I had to find some new and objective way of validating my faith and so I started to put together an action plan of what I should do…
At this point, I decided that as long as I was still living out my usual Christian routine, my action plan would be less objective that it should be. I needed to step back completely and re-evaluate all of it. Besides, I was angry, disappointed and bitter and had no desire to worship this God who had let me and others down so many times recently. I decided from that point to stop praying, tithing, reading my Bible and attending the regular church meetings. The only commitment I decided to stick to was Alpha. Partly because I really didn't want to let anyone down, partly because I loved it, and partly because I hoped that if God was out there, then there was a chance he might be able to use this to reach out to me. After all, wasn't I fixing to be the lost sheep that Jesus might leave the other 99 for? We'd soon see.
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17) Down the Rabbit Hole I go…
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Aptly, the topic for Alpha that Monday night was "How can I be sure of my faith?". Perhaps this was no co-incidence. Perhaps I would turn up to the meeting, lead the discussion at the table as usual and have an amazing revelation from God that would turn my thinking back around again. Part of me hoped that this would happen, but another part hoped not.
The night did bring more than just one powerful revelation, but ironically in the complete opposite direction than I had thought about. The night continued as usual. We sat and chatted with each other about casual things across the table at dinner. I had not told the organiser of Alpha about my issues and I had not mentioned it to the guests either at this point. As far as they were concerned this was just another ordinary Alpha night. For this particular Alpha course, the invited guests were of a different background than usual. I had 8 people at my table, but as it happened, all of these guests turned out to be Christians who were looking to take a fresh look at their faith! How ironic? The roles at the table had completely reversed. Everyone at the table was a believer apart from the very person that was supposed to be helping people to grasp the gospel message - the table leader - me!
When the meal finished, John, the Alpha organiser played a video clip on the projector. It was a scene from "The Matrix" which is now often being used as a tool for evangelists to convert non-Christians. There was Morpheus sitting in his chair speaking to Neo. The conversation between the two when looked at from the perspective of Christianity is hoped to invoke a profound response in the viewers. And for me it certainly did - a profound realisation hit me as I listened to them. But this was not a realisation in favour of Christianity.
Morpheus: "I imagine that right now you're feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit hole, hmmm?"
Neo (and my thought): "You could say that."
Morpheus: "I can see it in your eyes. You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up… Ironically this is not far from the truth."
I thought: "A bit like me waking up from the Christian fairy tale?!"
Morpheus: "Do you believe in fate, Neo?"
Neo (and my thought): "No."
Morpheus: "Why not?"
Neo: "Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life"
My thought: "Yes! My life has been controlled by Christianity for so long."
Morpheus: "I know exactly what you mean..."
My thought: "Ooo, So do I!"
Morpheus: "Let me tell you why you're here..."
My thought: "Go on…"
Morpheus: "You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You felt it your entire life… that there's something wrong with the world - you don't know what it is - but it's there - like a splinter in your mind - driving you mad… It is this feeling that has brought you to me... Do you know what I'm talking about?"
My thought: "Whooooah! It's like he just saw in my head! For my entire Christian life I've felt that there was something not quite right. I could never quite believe it. Yes, just like a splinter in my mind driving me mad."
Neo: "The Matrix?"
My thought: "Okay, not the matrix… but real life? Common sense?"
Morpheus: "Do you want to know what it is?"
My thought: "Spell it out Morph…" (Neo nods)
Morpheus: "The matrix is everywhere, it is all around us - even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window, or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth."
My thought: "Okay, now this is really speaking to me - swap the word 'world' in that last sentence with the word 'church' and bingo! Carry on Morph…"
Neo (and my thought): "What truth?"
Morpheus: "That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind."
My thought: "Exactly! My mind has been imprisoned."
Morpheus: "Unfortunately no-one can be… told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself."
My thought: "You're so right! If anyone outside the church would have tried to persuade me, I would never have listened."
Morpheus: "This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill. The story ends - you wake up in your bed and you believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes."
My thought: "Yes. I want that red pill please! I want to wake up and open my eyes."
See how simple it is to get something like this to fit your own world view and then make it the agent of God's intent? The Christians were doing exactly what I just did but with the exact opposite conclusion. The only difference was I knew that there was no super-intelligent power quickening the words inside me. It was just me opening my eyes.
The realisation left me stunned as the speaker took to the stage to expand on the message with Christian overtones. I had heard the talk many times before so there was nothing new there. I won't go into details of the talk here about how the Christian can be so certain that their faith is true, but on this occasion, emphasis was placed on God's reliability and how we can always be sure that God will never let us down. No matter what the circumstances God always manages to turn everything to the good. Inwardly I laughed bitterly and wondered exactly how I was supposed to lead the table discussion in a constructive manner. Each of the guests knew each other a little by now and these were people that didn't seem to have a problem with vocalising what was on their minds.
I decided to try a little experiment and was saddened by the result.
"So," I asked the guests, "the speaker said that God will always be there for you and that he'll never let you down. I suppose that's a very good reason to believe that a Christian can trust that they're on the right track."
In my usual manner I put on my best encouraging smile and looked around at each of them before dropping my test question.
"Out of curiosity, can any of you think of a time when God did actually let you down?"
There were a few moments of silence as I scanned each of their faces. They were looking at each other, shrugging their shoulders and casting expressions that suggested they couldn't think of a thing. I looked directly at the woman to my right who was a member of our church. I repeated the question as I looked into her eyes. She returned the look with a frown, as she appeared to be sincerely trying to think of something. "No," she replied, "I can't think of anything."
My heart sank because I knew that whilst she said that, her brother-in-law had been the victim of a car accident very recently. For the past two or three weeks the church had been praying for him to be healed, but he woke from his coma only to experience life from now on as a vegetable. I don't believe she was lying to me when she denied that God had ever let her down - instead it became very clear to me, that this circumstance had been removed from her mind as being a failure. Somehow, in her mind, this dreadful accident was being worked out in God's grand scheme and would somehow work to the good! God had not let her down, it was either that she had failed in some way in her faith or that God's purposes in this had not yet been made clear to everyone!
I remember very little of the rest of the discussion. But I do remember that I left that night feeling much more convinced that Christianity was wrong than I ever had before. I was in the company of Christians attending a meeting specifically designed to bring revelation of the validity of their faith and it had served to do completely the opposite for me.
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At this point I decided that despite my commitment to Alpha, it would probably be unfair on the guests to continue to subject them to my wavering faith. For that matter, it appeared that it wasn't doing me any favours either!
The very next day I sent an e-mail to the Alpha organiser trying my best to explain my position. He was tactful in his response and suggested to me that it was not a good idea for me to continue on the course. He believed (as I once did) that any progress that can be made with anyone at Alpha is a result of prayer and the anointing of the Holy Spirit and not the material in the talks or the discussions - they were simply aids. As I had purposely removed these facets from my daily routine there was no reason to assume that I could add anything of value to the meetings. With great sadness I agreed to stop.
Having put a stop to this possible avenue for God to make his move I decided to proceed with my agenda.
Even as I attempted to put together some sort of agenda to try and identify the truth I realised something quite significant.
If the Christian God of the Bible is real, there is no information I could find out that would truly convince me God exists. Working out an agenda could only be an exercise that would not guarantee any positive outcome. You cannot prove or disprove that God exists on paper. In following my agenda I am attempting to give God an opportunity to reveal himself to me. Many would say that it would arrogant of me to expect God to reveal himself to me according to my criteria rather than his. I see the sense in this argument but in defence of my position I can say that to the best of my ability I have tried it "God's way" for the past 12 years and the result simply doesn't seem to cut the cheese. At the present time I can think of no better way to approach the issue. Some people may also say, "what else could God possibly do to convince you? You've even had tangible experiences!" Again, I can hold my hands up and say that I agree, but my central problem still exists - all of these so called evidences were simply not enough to crush the nagging internal belief that God is not in fact real.
It is internally that I must believe, and the only way that I can have this firm conviction is if God does something supernatural within me. If he is real, he too knows this, he knows I am sincere about where I'm at and he certainly has the ability to do it - after all he apparently did it with the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus, didn't he? If God is no respecter of persons as the Bible indicates, then I shouldn't be exempt from this kind of revelation.
Still others might say (rather blindly I might add) that if I've made my mind up not to believe then God will not intervene - otherwise I'd be nothing more than a puppet. Of course this thought has already occurred to me - what is it that I actually want to believe and does that affect my ability to make a sound decision?
At this stage I'm still not entirely sure what it is I would prefer to believe. I'd like the thought that one day I might spend eternity with an All powerful being that cares for me and wants to make me happy for ever and ever. But right here and now? I love the new freedom that my atheistic path is taking me on. As part of my conclusion I'll expound on the benefits I have seen since rejecting Christianity, but at the moment I feel that going back to living life as a Christian is not something I would enjoy in the way that I used to. So, actually, I've not fully decided whether I would like to believe that Christianity is true or not. I only know that in my heart of hearts I don't… can't believe in it.
As a Christian I'd always believed that our choices are completely up to us as individuals. I believed that any human being with a grasp of the facts presented to them can make the decision whether to believe if Christianity is true or not. Now I'm not so sure this is realistic.
Can we simply choose what we believe with the same simplicity as deciding whether to watch the TV or read a book? I may hold a knife in my hand and let go of it. I could make the decision to say that it will fall upwards and stick to the ceiling, I might even want to believe it, but actually, I know full well that it's going to hit the floor. For me, believing in Christianity is no different. I may have chosen to say the words that the Bible says will ensure my salvation. I may sincerely want to believe they are true and I may even be sincere that I trust the source of the claim, but does that mean that I can simply switch off what I really believe? No. I would need some extremely convincing evidence to change what I believe. It is not a matter of simply making a choice - it is a matter of that choice being something that is a realistic option. It is not simply a leap of faith either. A Christian believes God not simply out of blindly ignoring evidence, but because God has shown himself to the Christian that He can be trusted - as with any personal relationship.
I think that I knew this when I first made my commitment as a Christian, but I had hoped that in placing my life in the hands of the God that had asked this commitment from me, that he would reveal himself. The Bible would seem to agree with that too:
"Ask and it will be given to you, seek; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you" (Matthew 7:7)
"The Spirit himself (God) testifies with our spirit that we are God's children." (Romans 8:15)
"Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me." (Revelation 3:20)
I had come to understand that I had lived my life for more than twenty years being programmed to think in the way a fallen world had taught me to think, and it would therefore take time for my mind to be "renewed" to a new way of thinking that would eventually allow God to penetrate my heart and convince me that he was as real as real could be. In more than 12 years, despite devoting my life to Jesus, I have never been able to shake that fundamental doubt that God exists. With everything that had happened recently I could no longer carry on as a Christian with integrity and sincerity. The only way for this to change is if God can somehow break through my barrier of doubt and unbelief and give me the inward conviction that I would need to believe. Unfortunately, with the Bible's definition, I cannot expect to receive anything from God if I allow doubt and unbelief to be the dominant factor. However, I am incapable of changing this attitude unless God can do something miraculous in me. It's not about me being too proud to back down, or too stubborn, it's just the place I'm at. A place I can't get out of myself.
It would go against my character to simply lay back and leave this paradox as it stands. I remembered the situation that had developed in the past with my level design predicament. Back then I was also convinced that there was no way out of my dilemma but the solution apparently came. If God is real then this is the same principle. I can see no possible way for me to return to Christianity, but if God is real and if nothing is impossible for him, he'll find a way to help me, won't he? If he's real that is. And that's a big 'if'.
Until that happens (which I feel is extremely unlikely) I will continue to learn as much as I can. If Christianity is in fact true, I don't believe that reading books or having discussions on internet forums will be able to convince me of it, but I will leave it as an opening for God to move in if he chooses to. If, on the other hand Christianity is false, then continued investigation ought to start producing evidence that provides rational explanations for why Christianity has become such a huge movement. The evidence would start to demonstrate that Christianity is simply a myth at best. So far, I have found the latter to be the most convincing.
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My action plan involved keeping an organised record of all my mixed feelings and thoughts regarding my search for the truth - this testimony is part of that. I also wrote a piece called "The Cabinet" which I felt captured my feelings about how ridiculous the Christians' attitude to prayer has become.
I also decided to listen to tapes and read books from both sides of the argument. I found that there were two books that strongly re-enforced my atheist viewpoint. Ironically, one of those books should have strengthened the Christian perspective: "Jesus outside the New Testament" written by Robert E.Van Voorst who is a Christian scholar. I had often heard that it was ignorant to take the view that Jesus was not a real person and I decided to search for this evidence myself. Contrary to finding that other literature overwhelmingly supported the claims of Christianity, I was shocked to find that a historical Jesus was not a certainty. But greater than that, it was extremely difficult to verify that a historical Jesus could be matched up to the extraordinary claims made about him in the New Testament such as the miracles and especially the resurrection accounts.
Slightly taken aback by this I moved on to "The Jesus Mysteries" which was the other book, which further strengthened my Atheism. Whilst I recognised this to be a sensationalist work that I should read with a pinch of salt and carefully check their bibliography, I soon saw a very reasonable picture of how the gospels could simply be a deliberately well constructed mythology. Not that the authors of the New Testament set out to deceive, but that the story of Jesus was an intentional allegory composed of a collection of parables already well known in other ancient legends. This theory is often brushed aside by theologians and other biblical scholars as fanciful, but more and more research has been done in this area, and the theory becomes more credible as more evidence about the origins of Scripture is uncovered. (I am currently reading "Who wrote the New Testament?" by Burton L. Mack, which puts forward a very convincing argument for the gospels being mythology). To discuss this here would be too much of a distraction so I aim to deal with this elsewhere on my site at a later date.
To try and balance out my studies I have been reading other books that may help to support the Christian viewpoint. I read a book called "Life is not a rehearsal" which was a testimony by the person at my church who organised the Alpha courses.
I have good deal of respect for this man since I have come to know him, but recently I found correspondence with him to be less than inspiring. He is one of the few from the church that have taken the time to seek me out and challenge my decision, so I appreciate him taking time from his busy schedule to do this, but his viewpoint is typical of a Christian narrow mind, just as mine once was. He shared concern that if I spent too long outside the church environment that I would be seduced by the world and deceived by Satan enough that I wouldn't return or be badly damaged in some way. Such a view demonstrates the type of unintentional ignorance and fear that Christianity promotes, but it also doesn't take into account the advice given by Paul in the New Testament.
"…hand this man over to Satan, so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord." (1 Corinthians 5:5)
Paul was actually prepared for someone within the church to be handed over to the devil to make sure they would be okay in the end! My circumstances are slightly different, but it does demonstrate that I should not be afraid to challenge what the Christian faith asserts.
Another piece of
advice he gave to me after his exclamation that "he could not believe I
had lost my faith over the death of a cat!" was that I should swallow my
pride and turn back to God. This comment simply made me shake my head and
laugh in ironic disbelief. How little he understood what I had recently
been going through. To admit that I had been wrong for the past 12 years
about my faith when I had spent most of that time ferociously defending
it before so many people was the most humbling experience I have ever had
the misfortune to go through. Quite honestly, the looks on some people's
faces broke my heart when I told them I was rejecting Christianity. Some
of my friends, Christians and non-Christians alike had come to appreciate
the way that I had embraced my faith and my change of direction seemed
to be something of a blow to them.
Swallow my pride?
My pride had all but been crushed well before he'd made that statement.
Still, knowing that his intention was not to offend me but, in his own way encourage me, I decided to read his book. I know him fairly well and also know that he is a trustworthy person and not prone to flights of fancy. The book was a good read and although it gave me more insight into him as a person, there was nothing there that convinced me that Christianity was anything other than a very subtle self-help scheme that can inspire an individual to better themselves if applied correctly. There was a lot of anecdotal evidence among those pages, which I don't find convincing at all. I have plenty of experiences that seem supernatural but on closer examination the majority of them can be explained rationally without too much effort.
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During the time that Ruth and I were in the process of questioning our faith, there were others that attempted to help (though these were very brief healf-hearted attempts). The church we were attending, where I had been heavily involved in Alpha was in the process of planting a new church in our town which we would have been a part of. The man who was to be the pastor of this church is a very capable person, sound-minded, down-to-earth and very well educated theologically. I hadn't known him for very long but he was a likeable guy. Given the fact that he was the new pastor and one of his flock was in the process of jumping ship, he offered to help any way he could and asked if he could come to our house for a chat. I explained to him (as I did to any of the other Christians) that I was very happy to talk about my decision and that I would like to be convinced that I was mistaken and that Christianity is in fact the truth. I do not want to be as closed minded as I was when I was a Christian, but I could not give my life to something that I find impossible to believe in. Those days are over.
The pastor and his wife came to the house to discuss the issues that Ruth and I had. Naturally, he was very understanding and much of what he said was good and reasonable. Unfortunately, when it came to answering the fundamental questions about why an apparently trustworthy God could rarely be trusted to answer prayers for people in matters that were extremely important to them, there was little that they could say. His defence centred around the premise that there were some prayers in his life that were answered and some that weren't - we just don't have the capacity to understand the bigger picture that God is painting - but we will one day. For me this answer just won't do (for the reasons I put forward in my "cabinet" analogy). The evening ended with the pastor concluding that my understanding of Christian theology was fundamentally flawed leading me to have unrealistic expectations about my faith. Laying aside the notion that there probably isn't any single Christian group or denomination that can completely agree in the area of theology I was perfectly willing to accept his judgement. After all, this was my very first conclusion when I first decided to question my faith. Either Christianity was true or it wasn't. If it wasn't true I wanted to see some evidence for this and investigate further. But if it was true, I really needed to know where it was I was going wrong.
He suggested that I read a book called "Faith, Healing and Prosperity" which was a balanced critique by the Evangelical alliance against churches of the theological standpoint presented by the preachers such as Kenneth Copeland and Kenneth Hagin. These were Christians I had come to admire as men that really knew what they were talking about and saw big results in their ministries. The theology he was saying was incorrect, was a viewpoint I felt very strongly that I could back up Biblically - but I wasn't going to get into that debate there and then. Instead, I was willing to concede that my understanding could indeed be wrong and if I needed correcting then I was prepared to take it. And so, I added this book to the list of books I needed to read.
Once again, after reading this book I found that it did not have the desired effect. For all its claims, I didn't find the arguments convincing and I was sure I could prove this from the self same Bible they were quoting from. I wrote down volumes of notes ready to write a rebuttal to their critique. To take the views held by this book I would have to embrace a watered down version of Christianity that required no verifiable evidence that God was actively working in people's lives. Either the God of the Bible was real or he wasn't. If he was real then you would expect him to keep the promises he was making there - however farfetched they appeared to be. Sadly, because there is no God around to make good on these promises a myriad of excuses are used to explain away why God does not answer prayers. You either accept a liberal, watered down view of Christianity that has no power or you accept a purely uncompromising fundamentalist view and continually close your eyes to the stark facts that it doesn't work.
The book eventually only served as evidence to me that God is unable to speak with clarity to the church he supposedly set up himself! If he were able to reveal himself clearly to his church, there would not be continuous theological scrapping amongst the multitude of denominations. Yet, it is strange that all of these denominations seem to think that at one particular point in history God was able to direct his church with such perfect clarity that the canon of Scripture could be put together into a book called the Bible which is infallible! If he could do it then (and actually he didn't), why is it so difficult to provide the same divine intervention and clarity of communication today?
There were still others that tried (and still do try) to make me reconsider my decision. The most disappointing discussion was with Ruth's parents. It was disappointing because on this particular occasion I lost my temper. My decision to reject Christianity was still quite fresh at the time and I was still feeling vulnerable, upset and more than a little cynical about all things spiritual. The discussion was fine until Ruth's father touched on a sensitive nerve. Having misunderstood me when I explained that I don't think I ever really did believe that God is real, he proposed that I must therefore have been a charlatan for the last 12 years. I can understand why he thought this. It is difficult to explain the way in which I served God with genuine zeal and enthusiasm for so many years whilst trying to set aside the inner doubts as interference from the devil. Further unintentional salt was poured into the wound when he attempted to demonstrate that during my time as a Christian I had been of great encouragement and help to a lot of people, and it would be a shame to throw that away. This incensed me. He'd touched on one of the hardest parts of rejecting my faith, and that was seeing the expression on people's faces when I broke the news to them.
But what really bothered me about this statement was the insinuation that without my faith I could no longer be of any constructive help to anybody again! I spent the rest of the discussion ranting loudly at him in defence of my position. I don't regret what I said, but I do regret the way in which it was said. I'm glad to say that no lasting damage was done, I parted with them on good terms that day and we still get along fine despite our difference of opinion. However, his attitude exposed a very insidious characteristic of Christianity, which is very relevant for my penultimate chapter…
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21) A Dangerous Doctrine Exposed
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The claim that I
would no longer be of any constructive use as a non-Christian raised one
of the most dangerous aspects of Christianity that exists in my opinion.
It is the foundation for one of the worst kinds of evil - the devaluing
of humanity. Whilst Christianity makes the claim that every human being
is of infinite value to God, made in his image and worth the death of his
only Son - in reality there is a very subtle attack on the human soul.
In Christianity the individual can so easily lose their sense of identity
and self worth. The Christian is encouraged to emulate Christ. Indeed,
the Bible says that when he returns the Christian "will be like him" (1
John 3:2). Our will should be conformed to his will and we should all be
reflections and walking representations of Jesus to a rotten and depraved
world.
Paul exhorts the Christian to follow his example in Galatians 2:20 "I have
been crucified with Christ and I no longer live but Christ lives
in me. The life I live in the body I live by faith in the Son of God who
loved me and gave his life from me." I meditated on this Scripture so often
that I didn't need to refer to the Bible to write it in this testimony
- I know this and many Scriptures like it off by heart and I used to think
it a wonderful concept.
Ironically the real truth is that most of the power found in Christianity
is in the very opposite to what Christians believe they are preaching.
Christianity teaches that humans are depraved, sinful creatures that are
in desperate need of salvation. Upon obtaining this salvation the goal
is to lose their sense of self-identity and become a kind of Jesus clone.
They will try to deny this is the case, but then spend a whole night in
worship beseeching God to make them more like him! It is fascinating also
to see the startling contradiction that the Bible reveals in this doctrine.
In the Garden of Eden, Satan's tempting offer to Adam and Eve was that
if they ate from the forbidden tree they would "become like God". For following
up on this desire, they were punished by God. Isn't it odd that in stark
contradiction to this, Christians are now expected to aspire to be like
Jesus - who is apparently God?
It is therefore not very surprising that upon rejecting Christianity I was greatly surprised by what happened to me almost immediately afterwards.
At first I found it very difficult. I was afraid that withdrawing myself from God's protection would open me up to all sorts of dangers. I could be an open target for the devil. Perhaps the depression would come back to me again, or maybe I would fall to a serious accident. It didn't take me long to realise that in actual fact, God didn't do such a wonderful job of protecting my welfare whilst I did follow him anyway - 3 months of suffering from the effects of kidney stones was pretty strong evidence of that!
Changing my routine was also very strange. So many decisions would face me during a day - some trivial and occasionally some serious. Problems, challenges or awkward situations would come my way and my usual response would be to pray about it. It was a natural conditioned response to either "take authority" over a situation and "speak to the mountain" as Jesus commanded and/or to come before God and share the situation with him. To not do this any more was most unsettling, but I realised that if I were to ever really know that what I used to trust in had any real value this would be one way to find out. Would the absence of prayer result in a marked difference to my life?
You can be sure it did! Things changed for the better. Not in my circumstances, but on the inside of me. The fact that my circumstances did not get any worse or better was very revealing in itself. It was evidence that prayer did absolutely nothing to change anything that happened around me or anyone else. When I was a Christian sometimes good things would happen and sometimes bad things would happen. If bad things happened, I would pray about them. Sometimes the situations would be resolved, but sometimes they wouldn't. Now when bad things happen I don't pray about them. Sometimes the situations get resolved, but sometimes they don't. And hey presto! Sometimes good things happen to me even when I'm not a Christian! Evidently prayer made no difference what so ever, other than to give me the false impression that some higher power was at work behind the scenes weaving some giant metaphysical tapestry.
Christians often say that its surprising how many coincidences occur when you pray. I see now that this is a seriously flawed idea. Most Christians, whether they realise it or not, tend to pray about things in a way that it is likely that the prayer will appear to be answered. The prayer will either be a vague request on the lines of "Lord, please give me strength to say the right thing to Johnny today" or it will be a request that is very likely to happen anyway such as "Lord please make sure that I get home safely today."
When more daring prayer requests are made such as "Lord, this person next to me is very upset, please can you tell me what's wrong with them so that I can help them," the likelihood is that it won't get answered and then it will just get written off under the label "not God's will" or "I got something wrong somewhere".
I sincerely doubt that there are many Christians who pray a prayer like, "God, I really need to get to Scotland by tomorrow morning but I don't have any transport. Can you just pop a car on my drive, please?"
And why don't Christians pray a prayer like this even when they know that God is omnipotent and capable of anything? Simply because they know it just won't happen.
In actual fact, Christians make their own co-incidences. Am I denying that co-incidences happen? Not at all. I believe in them completely and I can provide a perfect example of one that happened to me fairly recently:
I love to play badminton. And I used to play badminton with other members of the church every Friday night if I could. However, since I rejected my faith, relationships with people at the church became a little awkward. Whilst these people had made a partial effort to reach out to me and help, absolutely no-one made any effort to reach out to Ruth as an individual. It would be useless to point this out to them as it would only produce an insincere and artificial effort to contact her once I'd said something. In principal it therefore became a lot more awkward to turn up at badminton on a Friday night knowing how they had ignored Ruth - why should I continue to associate with these people when they had effectively cast aside my wife who they'd known for years without a second thought.
And so, a little sadly, I resigned myself to the conclusion that I would no longer be playing badminton. But, by an amazing co-incidence, that very same week, I received an e-mail at work from the sports section. New badminton sessions were starting on Thursday night! Because it was at work it was free (I had to pay for Friday nights) and it was also an hour longer. Amazing! I was able to play badminton again and the dilemma was solved.
If this were something I had been praying about I would have been jumping up and down praising God for the ingenuity of his plan. As it happened I didn't so much as breath a word to God about it - this co-incidence happened all by itself!
This was another one of those startling revelations that came to me outside of a Christian influence. Perhaps not praying, not reading my Bible and not attending regular church meetings wouldn't be so dangerous after all?!
But the revelations were not over yet. I soon discovered a world of other unexpected good side effects after rejecting Christianity…
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Inner Peace
This is something that Christianity promises to those that make a commitment to Jesus. I know many people who claim this has taken effect after making that commitment and I believe for the vast majority it is true. There is an incredible amount of common sense, wisdom, good advice and positive perspectives in the Bible that can do wonders for the soul if taken on board. Jesus' advice about worry in Matthew 6 and Paul's advice about positive thinking in Philippians 4 have always been a tremendous encouragement to me and my attitudes to life became significantly better once I had adopted them. But, there is actually no need to be a Christian to use these philosophies.
One of the things that Christianity teaches, which I used as part of my original testimony, is that every human being has that "God shaped hole" which causes dissatisfaction in life until the Holy Spirit is allowed to live there. What is commonly less spoken about in Christian circles is that this general feeling of dissatisfaction never actually goes away when you become a Christian! During times of worship and prayer, you can often witness Christians reaching their hands upwards calling to their heavenly father and saying "more, Lord, I want more of you Lord." Christians are never satisfied and never reach that point where they can say, "That's it, I'm there, I've got plenty of him. Thanks very much!" Of course, to do that would be deplorable to a Christian, but its interesting how before becoming a Christian this dissatisfaction is seen as a negative thing, but when the hole is still there after being saved it is seen to be positive! It’s unintentional of course, but it is still a very subtle deception.
Now however, I can safely say that I have much more peace as an unbeliever, than I did as a Christian. Obviously I can't say this would be true for everyone who turns away from Christianity but it's true for me. Why? Simply because I am no longer battling that side of me that keeps saying "Come on, this is rubbish and you don't really believe it." I've come to accept what is really going on in my heart and in doing so I have breathed a momentous sigh of relief. That's not to say that I won't continue my search for truth, but now I'm not living out something that seems false to me.
Freedom
This was something I hadn't expected at all. My decision led me to an odd feeling of elation and freedom. I felt as though the world was my oyster! I'm just about sensible enough to know that this new sense of freedom won't turn me into a super-achiever on a roller-coaster road of success, but now God is no longer a part of the equation for my life I am free to pursue a path of my own choosing. As a Christian my primary goal was always to serve God and give him my best, and as such, almost every decision I made, every action I took and every thought I had would be brought before the boss. This has a tremendously restricting effect because you are never really sure if what you are doing is the right thing! The Bible provides general guidelines, but with the course of everyday life it is of no real help at all. The burden of getting the balance right for a Christian is terrible. If you try to hold back too far in seeking God's guidance you can be seen as a luke-warm Christian who is not serious about moving on with God. On the other hand, if you go too far in the opposite direction you can become over obsessive to the point of checking that even the very words you speak carelessly might influence your effectiveness as a fruitful Christian! Christians often swing back and forth between licentiousness and legalism. Now I don't have to worry about any of that. Of course, this new sense of freedom does have a price but it is a price that, in my opinion, is far outweighed by the benefits of living my own life my own way. What is that price? Read on…
Responsibility
One of the first things that struck me was the concept of responsibility - this is the cost of freedom. In Christianity it gets badly messed up. In the latter months of 2003 after I had chosen to reject Christianity, I was saddened to learn that a close family friend (who was a liberal Christian) was dying from cancer. She had very little time left when last I spoke to her but despite the outlook, she sounded very positive - confident that she would survive the ordeal. Just before the New Year she died and I attended the funeral. The priest had no answer for why the prayers of healing had not been answered and as I churned this over in my mind something hit me. If I had still been a Christian when I learned of her illness I would surely have been burdened by an unreasonable responsibility.
As a fundamentalist Christian I was of the opinion that healing was part of the salvation package provided to every human being through the sacrificial death of Jesus on the cross. All one had to do was believe that this healing belonged to them by faith and they should be healed. From this perspective I would have been wrestling with the idea that I should have visited her, laid my hands on her and commanded the sickness to leave in the Name of Jesus. I would then have been trying to understand why that healing had not taken place. Whether it was my fault or not that she didn't receive her healing, I would have been burdened with the idea that there still may have been something I could do, pray or believe that would have turned the situation around. This is a terrible thing to have on your conscience, but completely wrong and unnecessary also.
There is also a flip-side where responsibility is concerned.
When a Christian does fail in some way, there is always the assurance that God is there waiting and ready to forgive a truly repentant person. Hebrews 10:22 says that when a Christian is suffering from a guilty conscience they should come before God to repent and receive forgiveness. The guilt is then removed. The problem with this is that it removes something that is very vital to human beings. We feel guilt for a very good reason. If we know we have done something to hurt someone else, we ought to feel guilt - that's a good sign! It means that we recognise we are in the wrong and encourages us to try to do something to set things right and to take responsibility for our inconsiderate actions. If this sense of guilt is removed, there is a real danger that the offender is not properly motivated to act responsibly.
Taking the credit
As a Christian it is inappropriate to take credit for anything in your life apart from your failure. And even when you do fail, for the reasons I stated above, you are not encouraged to feel guilty about it!
It would be unfair to say that there is nowhere in the Bible that says a person cannot have pride in an achievement (Galatians 6:4 is one such example), but the main thrust of the Biblical message is that it is the Holy Spirit who uses people to affect good in the world. This being the case, only God should get the credit when something good happens - you are simply a tool for his use and deserve no credit for actually performing the act itself (note how the individual is devalued again)! This seems incredible to me now, but it is a doctrine that Christians stick to rigidly.
Since rejecting Christianity, I know that taking credit for positive actions is something I can do without shame. I can be proud of things I do well. I'm still having trouble with this, but this revelation is something that makes me feel better already.
Time and energy
A huge amount of my time was taken up in Christian activity, often to the detriment of other important things in life. My first priority aside from God has always been to Ruth, but our relationship has often suffered because of the amount of time and energy I spent doing church related activities. I almost always enjoyed my church activities, but this is hardly the point. If Christianity is untrue then spending too much time on church is ultimately of little value. Much of Christianity can be a big service to the community, but again, these can be done without the requirement to be a Christian.
Money
Finances have always been a controversial issue within the church. I used to give at least 15% of my income to the church and often more than that. I would think it obvious why I see rejecting Christianity and freeing up a large portion of my finances a bonus! I don't need to say any more about that.
More on the value of other people
Ironically, I seem to like people a lot more than I did when I was a Christian. This is strange because Christianity is supposed to encourage the believer to have unconditional love for everyone, even enemies. The Christian is supposed to be consumed with love for the people that are unsaved and on their way to hell! Is this actually the case? For some, yes, but for many it isn't. The reason, when analysed, is obvious. The Bible pushes a very strong message that every human being is born as a sinner with absolutely no way of bettering themselves without God's help. Humans apparently don't deserve anything from God - they are evil at the core of their hearts, completely self centred and actually deserve to go to hell. Conversely, the Bible also says that God loves each and every person with an amazing passion and that every follower of Christ should have the same view of people that Jesus does. This type of love, the Bible teaches, can only be appropriated by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, because there is no God, Christians cannot appropriate this "agape" love for others and are therefore left with the disturbing view that everyone around them that does not believe in God is a horrible sinner! With that view of another human being it is extremely difficult to see others as having the value that God apparently claims he places on them.
Now I am able to view people differently. Humanity is diverse. We are capable of great evil but we are also capable of great kindness. History can provide ample examples of both. Its just a statement of fact that there are nice Christians and there are nasty Christians; there are nice unbelievers and there are nasty unbelievers. Actually, the fact that they are unbelievers or Christians is altogether irrelevant – there are nice people and there are nasty people and that's all there is to it. I prefer to reserve my judgement about somebody's nature until I've got to know them, where as the Christian is influenced by the doctrine that there is nobody who is righteous. Hence this is why, a Christian will seem obsessed about getting "you" saved before they even know what they mean by "you"! Unfortunately, for all their platitudes, they are simply interested in doing God's will rather than getting know the "you" that they think needs saving.
As the weeks and months have gone by, I continue to find more convincing evidence that Christianity is untrue. But also I am finding more and more benefits that surface now that my life has turned around. Ironically I feel as though I have been "born again". Like a sinner who has just seen the light - I feel just the same way.
That's my story so
far and if you've taken the time to read through all of this then I appreciate
that very much and I thank you. If you want to comment on what I've written,
or if this testimony has encouraged you in any way I'd certainly appreciate
a couple of lines in an e-mail.
:-).
I hope this has been an interesting read, but most of all, if you are a
Christian on the brink of a decision to reject your faith, I sincerely
hope that this has helped in some way to know that you are not alone in
your struggle. Others have done what you are doing and have stepped through
into a world where life is a much more satisfying, fulfilling and pleasurable
experience.
Enjoy life - it's the only one you've got. Enjoy the moment - it will never come again.
--Paradox--
P.S...
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It has been over a year now since I first made the hard decision to reject Christianity and I thought there may be a few of you who are curious about where I am with it all since then.
My feelings about
it all are still fairly complex and I'm not sure I'll ever really understand
myself (who does?)
Two conflicting
emotions dominate my thinking where my spirituality is concerned.
Firstly I have to admit that I'm a little disappointed. Part of me hoped that by now I would have found out that actually Christianity is all true and that the embrace of my atheistic side was a brief detour. I'd secretly hoped that maybe I'd come back as a stronger Christian with a rock solid faith, an unshakable relationship with Jesus and a regular witness of miracles (as the early church are alleged to have seen). After all, wouldn't it be nice to know that salvation is real? That people really can be helped and healed through the application of spiritual laws set in place by a God who loves all of us? Wouldn't it be great if there really is an afterlife where you can spend an eternity experiencing real happiness? Who wouldn't really want that?
But sadly (and that's what this is all really about) I have to be brutally honest with myself. I am simply incapable of truly believing this in the way that the Bible demands.
So far, by what I've
wrote, you may be thinking that I'm rather dejected about the whole thing.
Actually I'm not. I'm far from that.
The thought of one
day maybe attaining a faith which fulfills those things I mentioned is
no more than a wish, like winning the lottery or finding out that I could
meet Gandalf who is actually a real bloke that Tolkein decided to write
about in a story book! It'd be nice, but its hardly a very realistic expectation
is it?
I'm enjoying my new found freedom. All the benefits of rejecting Christianity I listed in chapter 22 still hold today, and no disasters fell on me in the last year. In fact I'm doing quite well these days. Yes, life has its ups and downs, but no more and no less than when I tried to believe there was a Holy Spirit actively involved in my life. Now I no longer have to find excuses for why prayers aren't answered. If it's within my power to change something then that's down to me to act. If it isn't within my power I have to accept what life dishes out like any other normal person.
In the last year,
I haven't experienced one thing that indicates obviously or strongly
to me that there is a God out there who loves me so much that he wants
to bring the lost sheep back into the fold. I know that if someone who
I loved rejected me because I wasn't sure if they existed or not, I'd do
everything in my power to reveal myself. And if I (to hint at a principle
quoted in the Bible), as limited as I am, am willing to do that, then how
much more should an omnipotent God be able to? Believers might say that
I must have ignored attempts by God and that he always reaches out, but
for someone in my position, these attempts need to be blatant - that's
why I underlined the word "obvious" above.
That's not a statement
of arrogance, demanding God to do it my way. Rather, its an honest understanding
of what I know I'm capable of. And I know that I'm just not capable of
believing in God unless he does something obvious.
I'm not going to rule out the possibility that I'm mistaken about my Atheism, so I'll still continue to study and learn as much as I can. But, unless I see some extremely strong, consistent evidence to support Christianity I won't go back. After all, that's no different to what most Christians would demans to reject their faith, right? They'd want to see something pretty incredible to reject their faith (most confess that nothing would ever sway them), so would it be wrong for me to have the same attitude on the flip side?
As a matter of fact, I may very well be setting foot in a church again tomorrow morning. Ruth wants to wake up her spiritual side again and I don't want to stand in the way of that, so I'm going along too. And who knows, maybe God would even do something obvious to reveal himself to me! If anything does happen, I'll stick an update in here for you.
I have so much more to write, but unfortunately (or probably fortunately for you!) I'm too lazy too throw myself into all that right now. (Actually its more a case of giving priority to other things than writing stuff in here, but anyway... enough rambling...)
UPDATE:
I turned up at Church
on Sunday.
What would have
impressed me was if God spoke prophetically through one of the church members
and said something like, 'There's a guy in here by the name of Simon
who fell away from the church over a year ago. If he steps forward at the
end of the service I'll heal that pain he's had in his neck all weekend.'
If that happened
I would have given very serious thought to repenting and getting back on
to the faith road. Every born-again Christian would admit that God is capable
of doing something like this. So why doesn't he? Simple... He ain't there!
As one aside point.
It was ironic that the pastor's wife asked a question at the end in preparation
for next week...
"Who raised Jesus
from the dead"
Shouts from the
congregation was "God", "The Word" etc...
I eventually called
out "The Holy Spirit" to which she acknowledged that this was the correct
answer (according to the Bible anyway).
Isn't it sad that
the only person in that church that got the answer right was an unbeliever?!
It seems just as
apparent now as it did before that if there really is a Holy Spirit out
there he's not exactly very good with his communication skills. But rather than think that, it's far more believable that he isn't actually there at all.
