New Ager to Christian to Atheist
January 13, 2015 at 5:38 pm
(This post was last modified: January 13, 2015 at 5:39 pm by Davka.)
This is the Cliffs Notes version of a 35-year story.
I was born in 1960 in Southern California. My parents were beatnik bohemian-types with no religious pretensions. I figured out on my own that I would die some day, which was pretty scary, but what could you do? I recall asking my Dad about God when I was around 10, and I got a classic answer: “I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either.”
I started smoking pot at age 13, and dropping acid at 15. Left home at 17 to hitchhike around the country, playing street music for change. Met a girl at 23, and we bummed around together, ending up on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1987. By this time I was a full-blown New Age hippy-type, into meditation and Zen and Taoism, pretty much every non-theistic groovy trippy nonsense there is. And then I had an acid trip that changed everything.
I was standing in an orchid field on a beautiful day, and had this incredible sense of oneness with everything. The grass, the flowers, the sky, the furthest galaxy in the universe – I could feel it all. And it occurred to me that I was the only one there. I laughed, and said out loud “I’m God!” And I believed it.
Then I freaked out.
Long story short, I had a psychotic break. I talked to God. 8 hours later, I was a Bible-believing Born-again Christian, and I had convinced my (Jewish) girlfriend to go to church with me the next day.
Looking back, I wonder how different things would have been if I had been anywhere other than the Big Island. People there are so laid-back, so accepting, that I felt right at home in that church. People greeted us at the door with big hugs, and were totally accepting of our barefoot-with-flipflops, cutoff-jeans look. We dove right in, and joined a Pastoral Training group at the church. We were taught how to delve into the historical context of the bible, as well as how to use tools such as Strong’s Concordance and Vine’s Expository Dictionary (Greek new Testament). We bought an interlinear Hebrew-English Bible and a parallel Greek-English New Testament.
We got married. I cut my hair. Shaved off my beard. Got a job. Went to college.
In 1992, we “heard God” tell us to move to Israel. My wife grew up there, so it was easy for me to tag along and become an Israeli citizen. I studied Hebrew, and soon we were connected to an Evangelical Jewish and Biblical Studies Institute, where we met and learned from some of the best teachers in the field of Jewish Roots of Christianity. I soaked it all in as fast as I could. I’ve always loved learning.
After 7 years in Israel, I could no longer stand living in a pressure-cooker, so we moved back to the States. Landed in Middle Tennessee (where “God told us” to go), and settled into the local church life.
But there were problems. For one thing, I kept hearing pastors using completely wrong translations of the Hebrew Bible. Not just off by a little bit, but totally off-base interpretations that made no sense at all. And when I tried to gently approach them to ask about their interpretations, they didn’t appreciate it. Seemed they had heard or read their crap interpretations form a trusted source, and that was the end of it as far as they were concerned.
At the same time, I was having problems with Christian doctrine. Hell, for example – why would a loving God condemn the vast majority of His children to eternal torment? Especially when the only thing they had really done was to be born in the “wrong” culture, to the “wrong” parents. Or the Trinity, which is nowhere in Scripture. Or the fact that, by taking a strong Republican political stance, the Evangelical Church is needlessly alienating half the country.
And I kept on studying. And discovered that eternal torment was not accepted by many of the Church Fathers. And that the RCC had gone so far as to insert passages into the Gospels to support the Trinity. And that numerous Biblical stories appear to be retellings of earlier stories, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the more I learned, the more questions I had for my pastors.
I got kicked out of a few churches for asking these questions. Well, really for rejecting the answers, which were at odds with empirical textual evidence. When I showed my sources to pastors, they tended to get red-faced and tell me I should submit to my elders.
Then one day at a church picnic, I had a sudden epiphany. All the information I had made perfect sense if I accepted one simple concept: There is no God, it’s just a bunch of stories that help people feel better about their own mortality.
This scared the piss out of me. I was going to lose my salvation, I was going to Hell, I was unworthy. But at the same time, I figured that if there is a God, He’s big enough to handle some tough questions. So I kept probing. And once I had thought “there is no God,” I couldn’t un-think it. After 18 years, I had finally come down from that Hawaiian acid trip.
It took the better part of a year, but I gradually went from terror at losing my faith to peace with reality. Yes, some day I will die, and that’s the end. But I’m satisfied with right here, right now. And I’m no longer tormented by my “sinful” thoughts, or suppressing my humanity in the name of godliness.
In 2005 I took the leap and declared myself an Atheist. And I’ve never looked back. Life is good, now that the cognitive dissonance is over.
May the FSM be with you.
I was born in 1960 in Southern California. My parents were beatnik bohemian-types with no religious pretensions. I figured out on my own that I would die some day, which was pretty scary, but what could you do? I recall asking my Dad about God when I was around 10, and I got a classic answer: “I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone else does either.”
I started smoking pot at age 13, and dropping acid at 15. Left home at 17 to hitchhike around the country, playing street music for change. Met a girl at 23, and we bummed around together, ending up on the Big Island of Hawaii in 1987. By this time I was a full-blown New Age hippy-type, into meditation and Zen and Taoism, pretty much every non-theistic groovy trippy nonsense there is. And then I had an acid trip that changed everything.
I was standing in an orchid field on a beautiful day, and had this incredible sense of oneness with everything. The grass, the flowers, the sky, the furthest galaxy in the universe – I could feel it all. And it occurred to me that I was the only one there. I laughed, and said out loud “I’m God!” And I believed it.
Then I freaked out.
Long story short, I had a psychotic break. I talked to God. 8 hours later, I was a Bible-believing Born-again Christian, and I had convinced my (Jewish) girlfriend to go to church with me the next day.
Looking back, I wonder how different things would have been if I had been anywhere other than the Big Island. People there are so laid-back, so accepting, that I felt right at home in that church. People greeted us at the door with big hugs, and were totally accepting of our barefoot-with-flipflops, cutoff-jeans look. We dove right in, and joined a Pastoral Training group at the church. We were taught how to delve into the historical context of the bible, as well as how to use tools such as Strong’s Concordance and Vine’s Expository Dictionary (Greek new Testament). We bought an interlinear Hebrew-English Bible and a parallel Greek-English New Testament.
We got married. I cut my hair. Shaved off my beard. Got a job. Went to college.
In 1992, we “heard God” tell us to move to Israel. My wife grew up there, so it was easy for me to tag along and become an Israeli citizen. I studied Hebrew, and soon we were connected to an Evangelical Jewish and Biblical Studies Institute, where we met and learned from some of the best teachers in the field of Jewish Roots of Christianity. I soaked it all in as fast as I could. I’ve always loved learning.
After 7 years in Israel, I could no longer stand living in a pressure-cooker, so we moved back to the States. Landed in Middle Tennessee (where “God told us” to go), and settled into the local church life.
But there were problems. For one thing, I kept hearing pastors using completely wrong translations of the Hebrew Bible. Not just off by a little bit, but totally off-base interpretations that made no sense at all. And when I tried to gently approach them to ask about their interpretations, they didn’t appreciate it. Seemed they had heard or read their crap interpretations form a trusted source, and that was the end of it as far as they were concerned.
At the same time, I was having problems with Christian doctrine. Hell, for example – why would a loving God condemn the vast majority of His children to eternal torment? Especially when the only thing they had really done was to be born in the “wrong” culture, to the “wrong” parents. Or the Trinity, which is nowhere in Scripture. Or the fact that, by taking a strong Republican political stance, the Evangelical Church is needlessly alienating half the country.
And I kept on studying. And discovered that eternal torment was not accepted by many of the Church Fathers. And that the RCC had gone so far as to insert passages into the Gospels to support the Trinity. And that numerous Biblical stories appear to be retellings of earlier stories, such as the Epic of Gilgamesh. And the more I learned, the more questions I had for my pastors.
I got kicked out of a few churches for asking these questions. Well, really for rejecting the answers, which were at odds with empirical textual evidence. When I showed my sources to pastors, they tended to get red-faced and tell me I should submit to my elders.
Then one day at a church picnic, I had a sudden epiphany. All the information I had made perfect sense if I accepted one simple concept: There is no God, it’s just a bunch of stories that help people feel better about their own mortality.
This scared the piss out of me. I was going to lose my salvation, I was going to Hell, I was unworthy. But at the same time, I figured that if there is a God, He’s big enough to handle some tough questions. So I kept probing. And once I had thought “there is no God,” I couldn’t un-think it. After 18 years, I had finally come down from that Hawaiian acid trip.
It took the better part of a year, but I gradually went from terror at losing my faith to peace with reality. Yes, some day I will die, and that’s the end. But I’m satisfied with right here, right now. And I’m no longer tormented by my “sinful” thoughts, or suppressing my humanity in the name of godliness.
In 2005 I took the leap and declared myself an Atheist. And I’ve never looked back. Life is good, now that the cognitive dissonance is over.
May the FSM be with you.
