Now it's personal

[JohnMBauer]

What do you think about your family members new identification?

To each their own. It doesn't change how I feel about him, really—which, of course, is something that I try to make very explicit and clear because he is highly sensitive to being ostracized by people of faith. I had also tried to suggest some plausible reasons for their pulling away from him that make good sense, with the hope that it would help lessen the blow somewhat (and it seemed to). You know, like how his falling away from the faith scares them, bringing to light things they're not prepared to deal with. Stuff like that.

It's also an opportunity to explore philosophy. I've studied it for many years, yet he had never so much as looked at it before. (He was raised in a home where the Bible was the only answer book to every question. And if the Bible didn't answer it, then it wasn't an intelligent question. Quite shameful, not to mention asinine.) As he tries on this new outfit, it's forcing upon him a new vocabulary and new questions (e.g., epistemology). And new values: He has suddenly become quite concerned about logic and critical thinking, which pleases me tremendously and I heartily encourage.

I hadn't heard 'deconstructing' as a term for losing religious faith before; I have heard it referred to as 'deconverting'.

Deconstructing basically amounts to examining the infrastructure of your religious belief system and critically analyzing it for coherence and consistency. The parts that fail get tossed. For many, deconverting is the end result of deconstructing. But not all: My deconstruction resulted in a more coherent and self-consistent biblical world-view.