Below is an excerpt from my journal back at the beginning of 2009 when I was deconverting from Christianity (losing my faith).
When I thought
back about it, it was true that everything in my life could have happened
without the intervention of a supernatural entity. I had never once had a “spiritual” encounter,
seen Jesus physically, or audibly heard God speaking to me. Likewise, never did I see Allah, fairies,
Vishnu, angelic beings, leprechauns, the Virgin Mary or Thor. The senses that God supposedly had given me
to investigate every possible aspect of my life, happened to be the very same
senses, when candidly applied, had never given me any access to the
supernatural realm.
After all, I had
never seen something like a miracle—an event that actually defied physical
laws. It didn't matter how much I
prayed or how intense my faith, there was never the movement of a mountain, or,
even on a far more diminutive scale, the revision of my psychologically
damaging acne scars and horrible skin conditions. In fact, the events in my life as well as in
the lives of others seemed to unfold exactly as they would from an entirely
physical, genetic, environmental—natural perspective. As I looked more closely at the (natural)
world, where people were born, their genetic traits (looks, intelligence,
health) as well as a dash of luck—all physical entities, are really what
appeared to be some of the most important aspects of one’s (a persons) life—and
these aspects really were what created the inequalities that were observed in
the world. Everything became easily
explained by physical, material reasons, not by supernatural and/or Biblical
reasons. When I began to flesh out the
dogma and ideology of religion and the entrapment's of spirituality and the
supernatural, life and its circumstances could be explained in a purely natural
manner.
Religion
became superfluous to reality. It
may have offered comfort to the mind, but ultimately it did not offer the truth
about reality that we could actually know,
and that is what I was looking for. Religion gave us conjectural possibilities
taught us to more thoroughly examine our motives, but it never provided
incontrovertible answers. There would always be exceptions as science marched
forward. Most of the time, religion would give overly simplistic answers to
very pressing, significant issues such as how best
to wield science for moral issues (the welfare of humanity—in all its
multiplicity of circumstances) as well environmental and climate issues.)
The world just
makes more sense without gods (or god)—without viewing it from a supernatural
context. Humanity cannot even agree on
single religious philosophy or much less how to properly form a family. Thus, the existence of religion more likely
attested to the varied expressions and dimensions of the human mind and its
mystification with the natural world—so many people grappling with their various
levels of experience, education and intelligence.
In a sense
religion is the human attempt to find meaning in themselves as they grapple
with their higher brain functions of the pre-frontal cortex and its ability to
judge the meaning of life/existence.
