{"id":2022,"date":"2013-03-23T06:35:10","date_gmt":"2013-03-23T06:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/?p=2022"},"modified":"2013-03-23T18:39:34","modified_gmt":"2013-03-23T18:39:34","slug":"real-deconversion-story-5-counter-apologist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/tippling\/2013\/03\/23\/real-deconversion-story-5-counter-apologist\/","title":{"rendered":"Real Deconversion Story #5 – Counter Apologist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Here is another account in my series of real-life deconversion stories. They are often painful, psychological affairs. Counter Apologist has an excellent blog<\/a>, with some superb posts. Please check it out. Happy reading. The previous accounts can be found here:<\/p>\n

#1 \u2013 Lorna<\/a><\/p>\n

#2 \u2013 John<\/a><\/p>\n

#3 \u2013 Bryant Cody<\/a><\/p>\n

#4 – Mike D.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I was always in Catholic school or Evangelical Christian school up through high school.\u00a0\u00a0I pretty much did the AWANA where you get candy for memorizing bible verses, youth group, youth retreats, the whole nine yards.\u00a0\u00a0I had Young Earth Creationist science classes, Sunday school, church service, bible class, bible tests, and then weekly chapel at school.\u00a0\u00a0The point is, I knew my theology about as well as you could expect for someone who hadn\u2019t gone to seminary to understand theology.\u00a0\u00a0In fact I\u2019d put myself up against most Christians on a test of theological knowledge and I think I\u2019d come out ahead.<\/p>\n

Now I don\u2019t want to say this as a condemnation on my parents.\u00a0\u00a0They actually sacrificed quite a bit to send me to Christian schools.\u00a0\u00a0They were almost always a better option than the public schools and even when they weren\u2019t I was begging them to let me go.\u00a0\u00a0So they sacrificed a bit to do that for us and I have no right to complain about my childhood, it was very good.\u00a0\u00a0So this isn\u2019t anything on them.<\/p>\n

I went to college and I went to a non-Christian school for college because pretty much engineering programs at Christian colleges generally aren\u2019t all that good.\u00a0\u00a0Now you\u2019d think that this is where a Christian kid goes and loses his faith, but it\u2019s not.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I still believed even though I \u201cbackslid\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0I started having sex, largely because hormones are more powerful than Jesus, and there was a schism in the church I was in and my parents went through a divorce at the time.\u00a0\u00a0So things happened, and I wasn\u2019t going to church, but I still believed.<\/p>\n

Now in fact I actually had a renewal of my faith towards the end of my college experience.\u00a0So when I got out of college I took my girlfriend who\u2019s now my wife and I converted her to being an Evangelical Christian.\u00a0\u00a0We went looking for a church, we stopped having premarital sex, and then we got married.\u00a0\u00a0We settled into a very conservative Evangelical Presbyterian Church although I have to admit that by this point I was no longer a Young Earth Creationist, I actually had a Muslim professor explain how the big bang and evolution was still compatible with theism in general.\u00a0\u00a0The church we had was very conservative, but they were open minded enough to let that kind of a view in.<\/p>\n

So I got really involved in the church.\u00a0\u00a0I was their \u201csound guy\u201d for seven years, I was a trustee, I did small group bible studies, I worked in various ministries, and in general things were very good.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But there was one left over problem, my circle of friends expanded as a result of my wife and college.\u00a0\u00a0You see back before college, I didn\u2019t know anybody who wasn\u2019t my specific brand of Christian, let alone wasn\u2019t a Christian at all.\u00a0\u00a0Through the course of meeting someone and working with them at a Gamestop while I was in school, and they turned out to be friends with my wife, we became good friends.\u00a0\u00a0Eventually they came out as gay and I freaked.\u00a0\u00a0My wife pointed out \u201cyou\u2019re an asshole, you\u2019re not supposed to be freaking out about this\u201d and she pointed out that I had no problems with this person before he was gay and that I had no good reason to stop associating with him.\u00a0\u00a0So eventually after my wife and I got married, our friend found a partner.\u00a0\u00a0Us being geeks, we hung out more with our \u201cgeek friends\u201d more than our \u201cchurch friends\u201d which meant that they were hanging out with us all the time.\u00a0\u00a0We became very, very good friends with them and my church at the time said the way to deal with this was we were supposed to be a \u201clight for Jesus\u201d, you were supposed to live and be good, and your life would exemplify the values of Christianity, and that would eventually convert your friends who were gay.<\/p>\n

Now something you need to know about my growing up, someone being gay was pretty much the worst thing ever.\u00a0\u00a0They were pretty much the most out there \u201cdemonstrably wrong\u201d thing ever.\u00a0\u00a0So my wife actually did quite a bit of work making me not as bigoted towards gays and so did my friends.\u00a0\u00a0They put up with a lot of shit.\u00a0\u00a0I learned to stop using the word \u201cgay\u201d as an insult.\u00a0\u00a0I stopped using the word \u201cfaggot\u201d because that made people I cared about uncomfortable.<\/p>\n

So I stopped being a bigot, yay me!<\/p>\n

But then there was another problem.\u00a0\u00a0You see, I realized how much I was and am still in love with my wife.\u00a0\u00a0I knew what love was, and through my friends, let\u2019s call them Jason and Tom, that after knowing them for 8 years, it was clear they had the same kind of loving relationship that my wife and I had.\u00a0\u00a0They went through the same kind of couple issues, we were just so alike.\u00a0\u00a0Basically, I knew what love was, and it was clear as day that they had it.<\/p>\n

I could not call that wrong.\u00a0\u00a0There is no way you could tell me that love is wrong.\u00a0\u00a0Having a loving relationship is probably the most wonderful thing you could ever experience, and to call that wrong just doesn\u2019t compute for me.<\/p>\n

This view on their relationship is in direct contradiction with the bible.\u00a0\u00a0And it was about this time that I was going online and debating politics and eventually came across some criticism of religion.\u00a0\u00a0And while normally this is something I\u2019d blow off, but I couldn\u2019t do that once I started seeing problems with the bible.\u00a0\u00a0And I started finding lots of problems with the bible.<\/p>\n

The biggest problem I found with the bible was now that I actually had friends that I cared about that this applied to, my friends who were clearly in love, and were wrong for their love according to the bible, were going to hell \u2013 aka eternal conscious torture.<\/p>\n

And that shook me quite a bit.<\/p>\n

As a result all this criticism of religion stuff I read started to stick with me for once.\u00a0\u00a0What didn\u2019t help my faith was that this all came to a head for me while I had taken a temporary work assignment in another country for six months.\u00a0\u00a0During that time I was working so many hours that even though I had my wife with me, we ended up not going to church during that time just because the schedule was just insane.<\/p>\n

I was able to do a lot of reading however, though I kept it to myself.\u00a0\u00a0I started investigating arguments against theism and I finally broke through and asked myself a question that I realized I never asked in the 20+ years I was Christian: \u201cWhy do I believe in a god?\u201d<\/p>\n

I had no answer for this.\u00a0\u00a0Now one of the things I realized when I asked myself this question was that I was taught this Jesus stuff since I was an infant.\u00a0\u00a0In fact I was taught this by the same people who taught me more concrete things: Ice was frozen water, 2+2=4, and Jesus Christ was the son of god who died for my sins.<\/p>\n

Ultimately every argument I found for Christianity fell back on \u201cyou have to have faith\u201d or if it was a problem with Christianity it was \u201cWell we can\u2019t expect to know god\u2019s reasons because he\u2019s so far beyond us.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0And really that\u2019s not a satisfying answer.<\/p>\n

So I read the arguments, the counter arguments, the counter-counter arguments, and eventually when I came back home and started talking to my pastor and church friends about these doubts I was having, they really couldn\u2019t get past the first set of counter arguments and things came back down to the whole faith thing.<\/p>\n

The argument that did it for me was the argument from Hell.\u00a0\u00a0This is because if you believe in Christian theology, then the only thing that existed eternally is god. And eventually god had to decide to create the universe, and god knew that if he gave man free will, which apparently he really had to do, then he would have to create a hell.<\/p>\n

\u00a0So god is faced with a choice at this point either he creates the universe and create a hell, and according to Matthew 7:13-14 we\u2019re explicitly told that the majority of mankind will be condemned to hell; or not create.\u00a0\u00a0And for the vast majority of creation it\u2019s far better off to not have been created if you\u2019re going to eventually be condemned to eternal conscious torture.<\/p>\n

So why create? If god is the perfect being and before the creation of the universe he exists in a triune godhead of mutual fulfilling love in the most perfect state possible.\u00a0\u00a0He literally is perfection according to Christian theology.\u00a0\u00a0So he had to create for creation\u2019s benefit, not for his own benefit or any need or want on his end.<\/p>\n

But most of creation is better off not being created!\u00a0\u00a0Hell even if it was a small subset of creation that was better off not being created, the only moral choice is not to create anything!<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s pretty much the argument that made me lose my faith.<\/p>\n

One day I eventually broke down and started crying.\u00a0\u00a0I realized I didn\u2019t believe this crap and this was a problem because I converted my wife, the most important person in my life, to being an Evangelical Christian.<\/p>\n

It all hit me at once.\u00a0\u00a0My entire family was Christian.\u00a0\u00a0I realized I\u2019m not seeing my dead relatives ever again.\u00a0\u00a0I might get disowned, what was going to happen to my marriage? Why was I lied to my whole life? Why did I convert people to this terrible religion?<\/p>\n

All that hurt, but it was also freeing at the same time.\u00a0\u00a0Unfortunately, the \u201cfreeing\u201d part only lasted a little bit before the social fear took over.\u00a0\u00a0I told my wife and she became very upset. She still believed, she wasn\u2019t nearly as conservative as I was and so didn\u2019t see the problems I did since she didn\u2019t have the indoctrination that I had.<\/p>\n

So when I showed her things in the bible saying that \u201cNo see, hell has to exist.\u00a0\u00a0See, homosexuality is wrong, etc\u201d she was shaken but she still believed in a god and she was still a Christian.<\/p>\n

So I threw myself into apologetics. Hardcore.\u00a0\u00a0For two years.<\/p>\n

Trying to make myself go back and believe this shit again so my life could go back to normal.\u00a0\u00a0I spoke to pastors, I spoke to friends, I did everything you could think of \u2013 I read William Lane Craig, CS Lewis, Tim Keller, even more liberal theology stuff by like Kenton Sparks.\u00a0\u00a0I read debate after debate online, reading every possible argument I could get my hands on.\u00a0\u00a0I tried to go back, I really did.\u00a0\u00a0And it didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

There was no argument that could make me believe that shit again.<\/p>\n

Now fortunately for me everything eventually worked out.\u00a0\u00a0My wife and I had stopped talking about the religion thing after a while, but eventually one day my wife told me that she didn\u2019t believe anymore \u2013 she wasn\u2019t a Christian.\u00a0\u00a0She is more of an agnostic, but that\u2019s good enough for me.\u00a0\u00a0We spent a long time working out what we did and didn\u2019t agree on, specifically what to do if we had kids.<\/p>\n

That last part was good, because I can\u2019t tell you how happy I am that my wife and I were finally able to have kids, and it was after we deconverted, which is pretty much the best thing ever.<\/p>\n

We eventually did have to tell the extended family at that point, especially now that a kid was involved, that we weren\u2019t Christians.\u00a0\u00a0This has caused some problems, but it wasn\u2019t a disowning like I thought it might be.\u00a0\u00a0It\u2019s been kind of rough but we\u2019ve mostly been good.<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s pretty much it.\u00a0\u00a0As a result of all this I found out that I kind of like philosophy, and having read apologetics and seeing what bullshit it is, I want to help other people who might be going through what I went through.\u00a0\u00a0I want to let people know that it\u2019s OK, you can leave religion.\u00a0\u00a0Life is so much better without cognitive dissonance or thinking that the vast majority of people are going to be suffering eternal conscious torture.\u00a0\u00a0Now I think that there are better reasons than that to leave Christianity, but that\u2019s a topic for future posts\/videos.<\/p>\n

Pretty much I wanted to get this out there to let people know my deconversion story and why I\u2019m doing posts and videos.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0So if you\u2019ve made it this far through this story, thanks.<\/p>\n