Nearing the end of 2011 now and it has been a good one in many respects. It has also been my first year as an official out-of-the-closet non-Christian. I’ve had some good discussions with some good people and a few non-discussions with some people who would rather not talk about it. Which is fine.
Something that has come up time and again is the question ‘what started your fall from faith?’ as people, mostly Christian friends and family try to understand where I am spiritually. I was asked this recently via email which gave me the oppertunity to type it out and so here is my response (slightly edited) for you to snoop.
His Question:
‘I would be interested to know if there was anything in particular that began your fall from faith, a particular topic or event?’
My response:
… I’ll try to be really brief here as I could write a lot on what I see as the catalyst for my departure from Christianity. It has taken quite a lot of soul searching to try to figure it all out, so bear with me:
I came to Uni full of energy, enthusiasm and most importantly, Faith. The few years before Uni, in YF and the URC, had been challenging but excellent. I had had a few odd experiences, a few ‘misses’ faith-wise, were I had thought God had wanted me to do something and it had fallen on it’s face but nothing too out-of-the-ordinary; I felt some kind of calling to mission, possibly Russia, I had some ‘words from God’ that didn’t materialise etc. but on the whole I was keen as a bean.
I searched ahead at the CU I was planning on going to and found out it was pretty small and their website was awful. A perfect opportunity for me to be involved in different ways. I jumped in to CU, was involved from the start in various things and took every opportunity I could. I got involved in worship leading, I became the evangelism secretary for the CU, was involved a lot in outreach, one-on-one discussions with strangers, evangelism training (both given and received), ran events at Uni; lunchtime talks, music events, an ALPHA equivalent that I can’t remember the name of and other joint events with different Unis as well as a few weekends away. I ran the CU for two years in difficult circumstances and I went to Russia on a mission trip with UCCF, which was in some way testing what I had felt before Uni. And I met a whole load of really nice people and a few not-so-nice ones.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to say ‘look at me, I was amazing’ or to say anything about working for/instead of grace. What I am trying to say is; basically I think I had just enough faith to be dangerous. I put it all on the line, I made big decisions based on my faith and I played my whole hand. I stepped out of the boat…
You see, I (and I’m sure you do too) believed in a God who ACTS, who is interested in our lives and actively engages in them though; worship, revelations through scripture and teaching, an ongoing transformation process (sanctification) and through a two-way communication (prayer/answered prayer).
But what I felt after 4 years of acting on this belief like I had never done before was that my experience of God did not match up to the above list. And that the promises of Christianity had not been delivered. That God had not acted at all.
This made me question a lot, and looking back over my adult life of being a Christian there was not really any experiences that I felt I had any confidence in at all. There have been times of ecstasy, of clarity, of teaching and wonder – but actually they could all be explained by other, more simple and plausible means.
At this point I spoke to my Dad and to Lewis and I asked them, very clearly, “What experiences do you have of God that you can pin your faith on? Does God act? How do you know this?”
This was important to me – does God act in our lives at all?
If he does not then he is a different God that the one I have believed in for 15 years. If he does not then there is no way of knowing if he exists or not as the rest (Bible, Church, Stories etc.) are simply the history left over from a barbaric and ignorant people in the middle of the dessert. If there is no personal ‘evidences’ at all, no relationship, no interest – then God becomes arbitrary. The Bible could be the word of God, but it could just as easily not be, it does not prove itself within it’s own pages, so it takes a God to interact, to let us know that he is there and that we should be engaging with him at all.
So why pray? Why do anything this God says we should do, why evangelise? If there is no relationship then he is simply a dictator, setting down laws and boundaries, many of which have caused pain, ignorance and death rather than being anything near an inspired moral code. And although there is reason to obey a dictator (pain of death for example) the only reason I believed that this God existed in the first place was because I thought he had reached into my life at the age of 10 (and subsequently) and personally revealed himself to me.
With this in mind Christianity started to look very, very different. I was still a Christian, I was still praying, involved in Church, loving God, desiring him. But I was very confused at what exactly this God was. With an ounce of analytical and critical thinking Christianity and the Church seemed to become increasingly odd – it seemed ritualistic (going through motions, inducing responses), shallow (surface level, ticking boxes, shying from difficult questions), and seemed to be feeding a perfect diet to it’s followers to keep them believing against all else.
Anything of merit that came out of Christianity seemed to be self-generated, self-adhered and self-perpetuated by Christians, who were trying their hardest to be, to act and become who God wanted them to be, with little actual interaction (what we recognise as a ‘real’ relationship) from God. And, of course, based on a book that is barbaric (even the NT), nonsensical and bereft of much merit let alone morality at all.
The post ‘Why I am not reading my bible’ may cover some of this.
This was Chapter 1 of my fall from faith.
To sum up in one sentence; I decided that the ‘relationship’ we have with God is unrecognisable from any human relationship we have with humans, not better, but much, much inferior. It is one-sided (we do all the work), uncertain (he answers when and if it suits him, if at all) and it disproves itself on it’s own terms (the scriptures set out a standard that is ultimately not met) – God does not work in our lives.
The next 9 months were Chapter 2 which took me to last Christmas.
This year, 2011, has been Chapter 3.
But they will have to wait until another night, or another blog post.
Speak soon,
Kyle
