I was raised by Christians, grew up learning to believe what my parents believed. In middle school, I really started to get serious about what I believed. I decided that it really did matter what I believed and that I needed to take those beliefs seriously. I became very active in the church.
I continued to become more and more serious about what I believed, because I saw God as being the most important thing in my life, indeed, in the universe. It was around this time that I started listening to a preacher named “John Piper” who taught me that my purpose in life was to glorify God, and that God was most glorified in me when I was most satisfied in him.
Through middle school and high school I wanted only to be close to God, I tried to worship him and bring him glory in all that I did. I “prayed without ceasing”, as the Bible says.
In the hallways at school walking from class to class, before and after school I would walk the halls, praying over the school and asking God to do great works in that place. When I went home, I would read my Bible, which I carried with me at all times, in my backpack or pocket. At one point, I regularly spent 7 hours a day praying and reading the Bible and worshiping God. I downloaded sermons online. I read the Bible, and Bible study books. I went to church at least 3 times a week. Everything in my life was saturated with God and with my religion.
Additionally, I did everything I could to keep my mind and body “pure”. Whenever I failed, I felt ashamed and horrible and I was disgusted by myself for even thinking “sinful” thoughts.
Later in high school, I became more and more obsessed with religion. I wanted so desperately to feel close to God, that I started to convince myself that I was actually hearing the voice of God, and even the voice of Satan. God “revealed himself” to me in a variety of ways.
At first, it was just minor, relatively harmless things. I saw patterns in the world. Good things would happen that I would attribute to God, and bad things would happen that were either tests from God or attacks from Satan.
It wasn’t long before I started attributing thoughts to God. I externalized my thoughts and desires and attributed those to God, but at the time, I didn’t understand what I was doing, so I thought that God was actually planting these thoughts in my head.
Eventually, this became extremely dangerous. I started to hallucinate, and attribute those hallucinations to God’s work. I saw visions, I heard God and Satan speak audibly to me. I believed that both were at work in my life, and that I was caught in the middle of “spiritual warfare”.
I talked to several people in the church about this, and to my parents, and everyone I spoke to was encouraging of these thoughts. They believed that God was doing great things in me. They also believed, as I did, that Satan was trying to strike back at me because he saw what great potential I had to do good works in the name of God.
Eventually, God started to tell me some very strange things. For a long time, I had a crush on this girl who was a few years younger than me, but never acted upon it because of her age. In high school, I finally started talking to her, and we became fairly good friends. It was around this time that I really started to think that God was speaking to me, and I started to believe that God was telling me that I would fall in love with and marry this girl.
At some point, I told her this, and she probably thought I was crazy (who can blame her) so she stopped talking to me, and wanted nothing to do with me. I was so embarrassed by this that I stopped wanting to go to church. I still believed in God, and still spent hours reading my Bible and praying. But without the constant reinforcement that I received from my church, and now having the prophesies that God gave me proven false, I started to question what I really believed.
I still heard the voice of God from time to time, but I was less sure about aspects of religion that I had grown up believing. I started to question, and that led me into a depression, and then the voice of Satan started to become more powerful.
At its worst, I remember standing over a cliff in the middle of the Grand Canyon. I had climbed up a rocky hill in my sandals, tearing up my feet on the way, and heard the voice of Satan telling me that I was worthless and couldn’t do anything right, and that I might as well kill myself. I rejected that voice though.
At the time, I attributed the strength that saved me to God, but such attribution is unnecessary and unjustified. I saved myself from that fate. I knew in some part of my mind that I was just as worthy as any other person, and that I didn’t need the approval of anyone, much less this invisible force. But I couldn’t accept that knowledge yet, and so I continued to try to believe in God despite all that had happened.
I did start questioning what I believed though. I started reading the Bible and thinking about things from a different perspective. Rather than start with a conclusion, and look for supporting evidence, I started with the evidence and followed it where it led.
Stephen King has said, about writing, that it can’t be something that is forced, you can’t push characters along and railroad them into doing whatever you want them to. You must present them with a situation and allow them to play it out naturally. Knowledge and science must work the same way. We must start with evidence and see where it leads. I wasn’t ready to let go of God because I had known him all my life. I grew up with him. But I started asking “who is this ‘God’?” I wanted to get to know him honestly rather than project all of my own preconceptions onto him.
The first thing to go, was my belief in Hell. I decided that there was no way that any loving, intelligent, powerful creator would have any need for an eternal torture chamber. It’s just absurd, and if my God was truly loving and forgiving, everyone would be welcome into his heaven from myself, to Gandhi, to Adolf Hitler. In my search for who God was, though…all I seemed to figure out was a bunch of things that God couldn’t be. He wasn’t a God who sponsored any kind of Hell. He couldn’t be the God of the Bible, because the more I read of that God, the worse I realized he was. And he couldn’t be the God who had spoken his prophesies to me, because those prophesies had been proven false. So what God did I have left?
Maybe I couldn’t believe in any kind of God at all.
I wanted to believe in God, but the God I believed in didn’t match any kind of God I’d ever heard of before. The deistic God that I was left with didn’t have any use for me, and was indistinguishable from a God that didn’t exist. Maybe that was it after all. Maybe the God I believed in simply didn’t exist. After all, the God who I had believed in through high school certainly didn’t exist. As Richard Dawkins puts it I was an “atheist with regard to so many gods.” Maybe it was time for me to go “one God further”.
My first glimpse at godless philosophy came before this, actually. I think it was in my Junior year of high school. In an American Lit. class that year, I was exposed to transcendentalism, naturalism, and Edgar Allen Poe. These three very different things all had the same basic effect on me. They started to open my eyes to new ways of thinking. While I did not accept naturalism or transcendentalism as true, I was fascinated by the concepts, and some small parts of them did ring true to me.
Reading Edgar Allen Poe opened me up to the horror genre, which I fell in love with. I started reading authors like Stephen King and Chuck Palahniuk, who first introduced me to nihilism. I disagreed strongly with nihilism, as I thought my life had a very specific purpose, but something about it really attracted me from the very beginning.
Perhaps even then some part of me recognized the truth that there is no intrinsic meaning to life. The idea that we are simply here, and our lives are what we make of them, and we can give our lives meaning by living for what we love and value. Or perhaps I was just a rebellious youth who was fascinated by anything that went against the authority of what I believed.
I rather prefer to think it was the former.
When I finally started questioning what I believed, I remembered these things that I had been so interested in back then, and I looked them up again. I immediately threw out much of transcendentalism, because a lot of it is quasi-spiritual nonsense, but I kept coming back to nihilism.
So…what was left for me in this life? No God meant no meaning. No God meant no morality. No God meant no afterlife. No God meant this was all I had. But this life was awful. This life sucked. I was living this life just to get to the next, and what was the point if this was all I had.
I became very depressed following my realization that there was no God, but eventually, I came around and saw the beauty of the world. I realized that nothing had really changed in me except what I believed. And that had such great repercussions. It meant I was free. It meant I got to enjoy life now, and I didn’t have to wait for an afterlife. But I was still moral. I hadn’t gone out killing and stealing and committing crimes and sins and horrible deeds. I still had joy, I loved writing and reading and talking to friends.
I could live a better life now than I ever had with religion. I could love, I could live, I could laugh and enjoy life. I was free to live my life happily and to love others and do what I could to ensure that they were also free to be happy. And that is exactly what I intended to do.
