How I Got Religion, And Then Lost It
Faith Withers
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For the next few years, I tried to justify my belief that God was real and that Jesus had given the world some special insights into his nature. That, I now believed, was the essential message of Christianity. I thought the message had been obscured by the legendary and doctrinal accretions that early Christians picked up in the years after Jesus' martyrdom and eventually put into the books that became the New Testament. Eventually, I believed, those accretions overwhelmed Jesus' core message, little of which was left to be found in the Bible.
And that core message, I thought, was not unique to Christianity. The founders of all major religions, I thought, had discerned the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of mankind, the moral primacy of loving one's neighbor, and the responsibility of humankind for turning the present world into the kingdom of God.
I did not consider the Bible or any other book inspired in a revelatory sense. Some writers, I believed, were unusually gifted with insight or intuition about spiritual matters. These people were in some sense more in tune with God than other people. To me, a writing was inspired if it was inspiring, and it did not matter whether any organized religion had canonized it.
I had little opportunity, though, to do much more with these ideas than think about them and, when the opportunity arose, talk about them in Sunday school classes for young adults. About a year after leaving the Pentecostals, I joined the Navy and put most of my life's ambitions on hold for the next six years.
Life aboard ship in the peacetime Navy gives a sailor a lot of spare time, and I spent much of mine reading, and thinking about what I was reading. I learned some more science, and some sociology, and some history, and some philosophy. At some point I came across the book ESP, Seers, and Psychics, by professional magician Milbourne Christopher. It told me much about how easily well-educated people, even those well versed in science, can acquire false beliefs. I read Robert A. Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, where I encountered a reference to Occam's Razor and discerned how vital it was to the intellectual integrity of any belief system.
As I assimilated all this, the cumulative effect on my religious thinking was largely subliminal. I was not consciously thinking about any of its implications for Christianity as I understood it. I thought I had long ago abandoned all of its superstitious trappings and was embracing only its core truths.
I was 25 when my enlistment expired. Having acquired some electronics training, I found work in a TV repair shop for a few weeks before returning to college. One day during that period, my mind wandered onto religion while I was riding to a service call, and I realized that I didn't believe any of it any more. My belief in God was gone. There was no transcendent reality. The observable universe was the only reality, or at least the only one in which belief was justifiable.
I was back to the atheism of my early youth. But now, unlike then, I knew exactly what I did not believe, and I knew why I did not believe it.
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