A riff on believing and then believing something else
I don’t believe in God.1
I used to believe in the charismatic, evangelical Christian God. I even believed in God professionally for 21 years. For me, it took a lot of work and a definite commitment, but I did it. I did it well.
Until I didn’t.
One day, I realised I didn’t believe in God anymore. It wasn’t a sudden thing. It took 11½ years for my belief to go from about 97% down to zero. And I worked hard to hold onto my belief the whole way through. The end came one February night. I was sitting on the couch in our living room when I realised the belief was all the way gone. It felt like God had evaporated.
Because I am a man of courage and conviction, I immediately resolved to tell no one, for as long as possible.
My lack of belief didn’t bother me because it didn’t feel like a failure of my faith. The implications for my life did bother me. I worried how it would affect my relationship with my wife. I knew it would be terribly hard on my parents and sisters. It was a big problem for my job. One of the things you are definitely supposed to believe in when you are a pastor is God.
It would have been more convenient for me to carry on believing in God. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t. It was that I couldn’t. I think that’s how it is for our existential beliefs. People believe what they can, what they must. Believing something else is inconceivable.
The impossibility of believing something that you don’t is, I think, part of why we other people seem insane. How could a sane person believe a thing that is impossible to believe?
The people in charge of beliefs (that’s a weird thing, if you think about it) put a lot of energy into keeping people on their belief farms. They are not bad or evil; they are doing jobs they believe in. They want to protect people from believing something insane.2
One of the ways this is done inside Christianity is with stories about why people stop believing in God. The main stories are:
They want to have sex with people they aren’t supposed to
They have been hurt and didn’t deal with it properly
They have rejected discipline and accountability
They are wrong’uns (‘Bad soil’ is the jargon)
They never really believed in the first place
I used to accept those stories. But my belief didn’t disappear for any of those reasons. It went away as I kept growing. The more I grew, the less my concept of God made sense, the less it worked in real life. I updated my concepts of God a lot over those 11½ years. All of them were helpful for a while. Then I grew some more, and the concepts didn’t fit my real life anymore.
Here’s another thing I think. People who are growing outgrow their beliefs and have to upgrade. I don’t think this growth has to be in a particular direction. A person could start as an atheist and grow into a belief in God or gods. If you can imagine a trajectory of personal growth, someone has probably followed it. There is one thing that all the growers, the wise elders, the enlightened ones seem to have in common. They go beyond orthodoxy. They leave dogma behind. Sometimes they leave their tradition. Sometimes they stay within it. But they are never bound by it.
I’m still growing. I try to stay flexible and open. I try to align my beliefs as closely as possible with my best understanding of reality. I’m noticing that when it comes to the big questions about meaning and purpose and what’s behind it all, poetry helps more than facts and what I actually do matters way more that what I believe.
I guess that makes the first sentence of this post the least interesting or relevant part of what I’ve written here.
I want to write a bunch of caveats and explanations. I’m resisting.
There are other, less altruistic, explanations but let’s stick with what’s true for the the majority of spiritual leaders.
Wow, some really interesting ideas here that rarely get tackled. I feel we are brought up in our western culture (and maybe this is a universal I'm not sure) to have some kind of faith or belief. That belief is usually fixed or intransigent, and any digression from the "tribes" norm is punished by ridicule or persecution. Hence, we are encouraged to hold on to our beliefs firmly. However, as a human, as an individual, we are a constantly shifting mass of experience and emotion. How then should we hold beliefs that made sense to a version of ourselves that is 10 years out of date? Our relationship with ourselves, as it is with others such as life partners, is constantly in flux. How can we remain true to a fixed set of beliefs when we ourselves are so fluid? I've thought about this a lot of the years, about the innate spirituality we have, and our desire to hang it somewhere. The human condition demands a salve but we don't know where to find it. Religion and belief helps us feel that we are not alone in this lack. The irony, I believe, is that it is not a question of where we find it but how. Sorry, I've gone on there! Once again, great post!
What a brilliant piece of writing! (And thinking. And believing.)