I’ve been an atheist for some time now. I can’t provide an exact span of time because there was no singular date, no specific point, at which I suddenly said, “Oh, I’m an atheist!” That’s not really how it works when you’re deconverting from religion. It’s more gradual than that, more uncertain, more of a continuum than a specific set of data points.
I grew up a Christian — devout, sincere, faith-based, and Bible-believing. Over time and for a myriad of reasons, I began to think of myself as agnostic, though for a while I waffled between agnosticism and faith. But more and more and piece by piece, my faith fell away, and I was forced to admit to myself that I was an atheist. The God I grew up believing in no longer existed, certainly not in the way I was taught.
My journey away from faith and into atheism was long and hard and deeply traumatic. It took years to happen, and I fought it tooth and nail almost every step of the way. In losing my faith, I was losing my identity, my community, my hope for the future. For a long time I was lost, adrift on a dark sea of fear and anguish. It took me a long time to find my way out of that darkness, and I had to do it almost entirely alone.
By the time I acknowledged my atheism, I had worked through the vast majority of my fears and uncertainties. I had begun to forge a new identity, free of God, free of faith, free of religious oppression, free of the lies that had caused me to judge people unfairly, free of many unnecessary restrictions. This, too, took time, but ultimately it was work worth doing. I found greater freedom, greater joy, and greater contentment than I had ever discovered in my faith and religion as a Christian. I discovered a person within myself that I was happy with and found that I liked myself a lot more than I did when I had faith.
But relatively recently, I came to the realization that my atheism has been, up to now, primarily a reaction to my former Christianity. What I mean by this is that I have almost exclusively thought of my atheism as being “not Christian.” I no longer believe in God, which is to say Yahweh, the God of the Bible, or at least certainly not in the terms under which I was taught he existed or as he appears in the pages of Scripture.
And that was how my unbelief began — that God, if he exists, is almost certainly not the God I grew up believing in, not the God I heard about from my father’s pulpit three times a week, not the God as he was depicted in the passages of the Testaments, both Old and New alike. That understanding eventually gave way to not seeing evidence for God’s existence at all, of course, based on a variety of measures ranging from biblical to philosophical to scientific to personal and more.
But my point here is that I had always framed my atheism in terms of what it wasn’t, and what it wasn’t was Christianity. It wasn’t other religions, too, but for my immediate intents and personal experience, it was mostly that I was no longer a Believer, a follower of Christ, a Child of God.
So what I realized is that, for me, atheism had mostly become one half of a binary system. And I discovered that that left the door of my mind and heart wedged slightly open to the idea of other kinds of spirituality, things that, as a Christian, I might once have evaluated and rejected because they weren’t approved by Christianity in general, and certainly not by the brand of Christianity I grew up under.
Since coming to this realization, I’ve really started exploring spirituality, recognizing that I’m open to other possibilities. I’m not looking for a new “replacement” religion. I don’t necessarily need a belief system that includes a god (or gods), though if one comes along that fits into where I’m at, I’ll certainly allow myself to consider it and even embrace it. But the point is that I’m now more open to those possibilities. I’m still very rational, very science-driven, very hands-on with actual data and facts and such. But I’m also willing to entertain the idea that there may be more out there that we just don’t know for sure about, that science has yet to catch up to or, even, may not be able to know.
I’m in no hurry as I go on this journey. It took me literal years to find my identity as a non-Christian, as an atheist, as a… whatever it is I am now. It’s going to take time to continue to grow and shape my identity moving forward, and the important thing to note is that I have that time (and I have the most amazing partner to walk with during this time), so there’s no need to rush it. I’ll talk more about my journey as I go, and I hope you’ll come along. As always you can subscribe to my site to get updates as soon as I put them up, if that’s something you’re into.
