Letter to a new Atheist

The following is work in progress, likely never to be released. I would appreciate if you keep it private, or ask before sharing with an individual, but certainly do not post the link publicly. If you are reading this I hope it found you well.

I had my first child at 20 years old, 5 years after my suicide attempt. I was married at 17, to a woman I was told was Gods perfect person for me. I was told we were meant to be one flesh, and that God had hand selected her for me.

The marriage was rocky. It was not clear then, but certainly became clear in the stunning clarity of hindsight, that we were never meant to be. We had been duped, the both of us, and pushed into the biggest decision most people make in their life with absolute naivety.

I took the trash out one night, down a few flights of stairs in the chill of mid-february, and I stood in the parking lot of my apartment complex. I imagined running away. I imagined a man getting in his car and disappearing intto the night, changing his name and moving to the west coast, finding work and creating a new life for himself, and then I walked back into the warmth of my little apartment and pretended everything was fine.

2 years earlier in 2015, I stood on a small farm in Bixby Oklahoma. It was June, not quite miserably hot yet. A cool wind whipped down the rows of tall grass before me, they beckoned me forward down the mown path toward a tributary of the Arkansas river. I had been nauseas for 7 months straight. I was 128lbs at 6ft tall. I could barely eat, or leave the house due to a constant obsessive worry that I would vomit at any moment. I had been to the doctor and been tested for tumors on my adrenal glands, along with a battery of other tests, I was in “perfect” health as far as we could tell.

I had not realized it yet, but I was not suffering from an illness which was not physical so much as psychiatric. I had a severe undiagnosed anxiety disorder. Fatefully, I would later discover nicotine was a bandaid solution for my ailment. 

But as I stood on that small farm with no cure in sight, no light at the end of the tunnel, I followed the beckoning grass. I looked into the gray sky as a storm blew into view and I asked God to say something… anything. Tears streamed down my face, I needed an answer to the suffering. What I heard back from the clouds astonished me and changed the course of my life: I heard nothing.

I reached the river bed and began filling my pockets with rocks, a piss poor plan for suicide; but my only recourse.

I would leap into the flowing river and let its murky water fill my lungs. I would be found miles from the house, hopefully by someone other than my family members or new wife. It was there that it hit me, a reason I should stay alive. I had an epiphany just as fateful as the silence I heard from the clouds: an image of street magician and masochist David Blaine convulsing after 17 minutes under water without oxygen, and his follow up interview where he explained in vivid detail how awful drowning would feel.

I am alive today not because I felt the radiant love of my creator in my darkest moment; but because I emptied my pockets full of rocks and made the embarrassing trek back home where I would not tell a soul what I had almost done until I met my therapist in 2020.

The Apartment

Back in 2017, I had decided to shelf my belief in God. Something I had held dear for as long as I could remember.

I had dreams during my childhood that Jesus carted me around Jerusalem, and asked me if I wanted good or the best. I answered him “the best”, and he told me “I am the best”.

It was no coincidence that the Jesus pulling my in his cart was in fact actor who plays Desmond in lost and Stephen in Scandal… and importantly Jesus in the Gospel of John series. We are all products of our surroundings, and I am no exception.

I read the 2:52 book series for boys, all 15+ of them, and begged my parents for the Archeologists edition of the bible (complete with images of the papyrus manuscripts and locations the Bible takes place in, along with historical data inline with the text).

I prayed over people and heard things lucidly, I “got words” for them as the saying went.

“Father I pray that this woman here, your daughter, would be healed of arthritis, that she would be able to… jump on a trampoline again father”, I said while praying over my then pastors wife.

She looked up at me beaming and said “How did you know, that I have always wanted to jump on a trampoline?”. My mom beamed even brighter off to the side, happy with me for producing such a profound look into this woman’s heart.

I spent more time in the Music section at Mardel than I did in a standard grocery store toy isle. And when one of the switchfoot songs briefly mentioned sex, I brought the CD lyric booklet to my Dad to make sure I could still listen to this album.

I saw visions of angels and demons, I felt the spirit of God touch me in the tabernacle (something I would later experience at an Above & Beyond DJ set in Dallas), I spoke to trees and heard things back.

I say this to illustrate a point: Atheists are not people who never experienced God. Not always.
In my darkest moment, however, I found no solace. I heard nothing. 

I pushed forward in my faith however, like you are meant to do. I was miserable, and could not put the pieces together. and I knew that losing my belief in God would mean far more than just no longer attending church: My entire marriage was a fabrication that only made sense in light of our shared belief, not just in God in the abstract, but the particular variety of my parents church.

So I did not denounce my faith, I just put it on the shelf so I could start over. I wanted to meet God again, and this time I wanted only what was real. I wanted to know with 100% that I was worshipping the right God with the right belief’s. I knew that certainty and faith are mutually exclusive, so I was not searching for absolute proof of Gods existence. But I needed to know the important stuff:

1. How do you stay out of hell and get to heaven, with absolute certainty?
2. How do i know that my interpretation of scripture was correct, and the other thousands denominations and sects were wrong?
3. What does God want me to do? with my life, for others, for myself?
4. What is actually a Sin, and what is not?

But before returning straight to Christ, I took a brief aside in the east. I bought and began reading a book from Thich Nhat Hanh called “The heart of the Buddha’s teaching”. I discovered quite quickly that Buddhism began with a couple hundred year oral tradition before anything was inked on paper. I could not believe anyone would believe in something so unstable, anyone who has played a game of telephone knows just how absurd this method of knowledge transfer is.

With a single stroke I wrote off the whole of buddhism, something which I did not even consider undoing for a few years.

“Good thing the bible was not written this way” I said, consoling myself, before starting a multi-year expedition into the depths of religious academia where i discovered that it was written exactly that way.

To be clear, this is not a letter to disprove religion, or Gods existence, or Jesus’ love (or the Buddha’s teaching for that matter, I have become quite fond of eastern paths, though I would not say I am a Buddhist). 

That would be an impossible essay to write, and it’s really not where I stand these days.

I say all of this to console you that no matter where you are or your reasons for deconstructing, you are not alone. To be sure: I left my religion kicking and screaming. I got divorced, and in the end started my life anew, though Im further than I would like to be from the west coast.

The pathless path

I spent years dedicating all of my free time to figuring this thing out. It was life and death for me, because thats what I was made to believe.

I became a “Capital A” Atheist for a while, writing dozens of essays about the moral failings for the devout, and the reasons I do not believe in the Christian God nor his alleged son. I read books from biblical scholars and pastors, people like Karen Armstrong and Bart Ehrman, but also John Mark Comer and Billy Graham. I took Yale and Harvard open courses on Biblical history, and watched countless debates between the likes of Frank Turek and the four horsemen of New Atheism (a term i’ve come to loathe), but specifically Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. I read college textbooks, I prayed, I worshipped, and in the end I left my belief on the shelf.

On the other end now I sit, having been a practicing atheist (in so much as one can practice nothing) for the better part of the last 6 years.

While this has been a satisfying way of living my life, a few things have troubled me:

1. I do find myself yearning for the mystic, the divine.
2. I have a life philosophy centered around “looking up” which is an essay for another time. It’s hard to fabricate something worth “looking up” toward, purely out of a materialistic universe. 
3. Though he was slammed for it, I think Jordan Peterson was right to suggest that Atheism may work great for the ivory tower, but the average person has far too much suffering and far too little time on their hands to contemplate life in these terms.
4. I still believe we are the arbiters of value in life (read: life is subjective), but there is a beauty in finding something unifying with strangers, and I miss this greatly.

There is no singularity

There is not a single religion, or belief, or philosophy, that is wholly complete. If that is what you are searching for, I am going to save you a lot of time here: stop.

Certainty is a smokescreen. The scientific method is far from certain (read the control group is out of control from Slate Star for a brief glimpse of this), religion is far from certain (I never found a definitive answer to the question of how to get to heaven, the bible has multiple mutually exclusive answers), only death and taxes are certain.

Since deconstructing I have found myself leaning less toward what is certain and more toward what is beneficial. For me, that seems to be something like Taoism and Zen Buddhism, but I am not married to anything in particular.

Christians and other devout members of abrahamic faiths resolve this conundrum through blind faith. This is just not compelling for me, we know far too much about these religions to pretend otherwise. God is rarely vague in the Bible, and it does feel like sophistry to pretend he is veiling his words. 

But that aside: my path is not for everyone, and the opposite is also true. 

Bad Ideas

I no longer feel the need to act the part of the man free from shackles in Plato’s allegory of the cave, that is the arrogance of the “capital A” variety of atheism I already mentioned. What I will always do, however, is criticize bad idea’s.

While everyone gets to choose their own path, some of them are bad for not just them but others as well. And though I will not be plunging into this dark cavern here: Islam truly is the mother-load of bad idea’s (As someone who has spent some extensive time studying the religion, reading the Quran and some of the Hadiths: I am no expert but I do think their work could use some revisions).

But Christianity is not free from bad idea’s either. 

Slavery was justified and abolished with the same book: this should scare us. You would be hard pressed to validate chattel slavery with the Harry Potter series, it is not that hard to outlaw it. And thats not even touching upon purity culture and the same breed of Christian romanticism that lead to my marriage that never should have been.

The Beneficial

This is another essay for another time, but my worldview is constructed of Goal Orientations and Pragmatism.

All of us want something (and usually that thing is close to the same), we want less suffering for us and for others, we are more happiness for us and for others. that encapsulates most of what people want.

I am going to ignore philosophical quagmires for now (like the “what if someone wants to kill people and it makes him happy” argument. we have a long history to understand that when the human brain functions properly it tends not to lead people toward pointless murder).

But I digress…

that is your goal orientation, you want X. your life’s goal is to solve for X. and you may find it early and discover it isn’t what you really wanted, and then find Y from there. but regardless of the turns on the path of life, we are oriented toward a life goal.

I am using this very loaded word loosely here, but my Pragmatic worldview posits that if you want X you should do more of that which gives you X and less of that which costs you X.

This is a very convoluted way to say: if inner peace is what you wants, and Buddhism provides inner peace, then you should be Buddhist.

Second order effects are important to measure here. Alcoholism brings you inner peace as well, but at a severe cost to yourself and your loved ones. I am not prescribing blind hedonism here. 

My point is: if being a Christian is hurting you, stop doing it. If the eight fold path is benefitting you, then continue on. 

Spirituality

While this is very much a work in progress, my view of spirituality is one that is comparable to my view on diet.

I measure it based on input and output for my emotional health, relational health, physical health, etc.

To have good spiritual hygiene is to maintain yourself on these frontiers. 

So its a bit contrary to the typical view that spirituality has to do with our relationship to a Deity, or the amount of praises we sing; rather my view is that Spiritual health is a measure of the strength of our relationships with ourselves, our loved ones, and the other inhabitants of this planet whom we do not know.

Things which benefit us spiritually are things which benefit our relationships broadly speaking, but I am more concerned with first order tasks with multi-layered benefits.

For example: I would consider working out (pick your flavor) to be a spiritual task. It isn’t just an aesthetic exercise (or one to look better physically), it is a sampling of suffering which builds perspective, it releases endorphins which help us see the world in a more positive light, it can be very bonding, it teaches us the benefits of incremental growth and delayed gratification. 

All of these things produce benefits that expand far outside of just the hour we spend in the gym. We can take these benefits with us into our relationships with others and with ourself.

Meditation, reading, writing, stretching and yoga, curating the media we consume, eating well, sharing experiences with others. These are all spiritual tasks. What I find so profound here is that our choice to view these things as spiritual is what makes them so. You can go to the gym and hate it, or you can take the spiritual path and feel fulfilled by in on many frontiers.

You can make dinner for your kids and feel stressed with the mess being made, or you can take the spiritual path and realize you are passing knowledge onto the next generation and bonding with them at the same time.

You can sit in silence for 10 minutes waiting for a timer to run out, or you can realize the non-dual nature of your mind (and this can be done fully as a materialist, no religion is required).

Whether or not you choose to adopt a religion (and there are truly some babies in the bath water there), you can still live a full spiritual life. You need not accept unprovable notions about the afterlife in order to view your life’s tasks as meaningful or experience awe.

Give yourself time

You may not have landed at bedrock yet. it may take you years before you are open to the idea of a spiritual life in any capacity. 

I find this analogous to a sports injury. After tearing your ACL, it may take time to heal before you can jump back into the same sport… but also into other sports. Allow yourself time to heal, and find a platform to jump from. not because you need to reconstruct into some progressive LA variant of christianity, but because you can lead a spiritual life from anywhere, if only you can look deeply enough and frame the world in the right way.