When I LOST MY FAITH

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.