I started writing this in April of last year, and (after restarting six times) finished writing it in October. Then, I sat on it. For a long while, I wasn’t even sure if I was ever going to make this public, and on more than one occasion (last week, even) I decided that I would shut down my blog without this post ever seeing the light of day.

Everyone has things they believe and things they don’t. All my life I’ve felt like my beliefs were in a minority, no matter what those beliefs were. That being the case, I often feel like the best course of action is to stay relatively quiet. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had the occasional outburst, but on the whole I tend not to say as much as I feel I’d like to. People can believe whatever they’d like to believe, as long as those beliefs don’t infringe upon my own. And if no one wants to hear what I have to say, maybe it’s best to leave things unsaid.

What finally changed my mind was the recent death of a great intellectual, author, and general curmudgeon, Christopher Hitchens. The guy was a bastard, but I respected him greatly — I quoted him extensively at the end of the post. One of the things he had to say was this: “Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence.” I’m taking this to heart.

I’ll have a little more to say afterwards, but let’s dive in. Here is the conclusion to Lies My Pastor Told Me.

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“Which path should I take?” he asked. “Which one is safe?”

“Take one, and you cannot take the other,” she said. “But neither path is safe. Which way would you walk — the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?”

- Neil Gaiman, American Gods

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Every article needs to start with a good hook, and I’m going to go with this: when I was seventeen, a classmate of mine slit his step-mother’s throat, and then proceeded to burn his house down with her body inside. After he had done this, he immediately called the police and confessed his crime, and he’s been locked away ever since.

Obviously, these events shook our small community. The person responsible was well-known as a school bully, though it seemed like he had been making good progress putting those days behind him. I attended our church’s youth group with him, and he was having regular meetings with our associate pastor. He was someone interested in becoming a better person, and religion seemed to be helping with that.

And then there was the murder.

To the police — and at his trial — he described how he had awoken during the night with the terrible feeling that there were demons in the house, forces of evil that wished to do harm. He had no control over his actions. He killed his step-mother in her sleep, then woke his sister and ushered her out of the house. Then, he burnt the house down. The demons that had haunted him his whole life had finally won out.

This was an event that my religion told me was normal, almost expected. Demons stalked us night and day, and we needed to be vigilant in our defence against them. If we’re not vigilant, these are the things that happen — the demons take hold.

Only, no one I knew actually wanted to say that. It’s fine when it’s a story, something passed on by a missionary. Once, our pastor told us that years ago he had faced a demon-possessed girl, the demons making her body fly around the room. That was okay; that was still a story, something that happened at another time in another place. This was not. This was tangible. And it made everyone I knew profoundly uncomfortable.

——

When you’re born into a Christian family, you don’t really have a choice about your religion. As a Christian, it’s your duty to raise your children to be of the same faith. To not do so is the ultimate failing. And yet, I see a lot of my friends struggle with this. “I want to raise my child to be open-minded about religion,” I’ve been told by multiple people. “It’s important to me that my child draw their own conclusions about religion.” And then they post Facebook updates about how proud they are that their child is praying before the age of two, or accepted Jesus into their hearts at the age of three. They want their children to be raised open-minded, but with the assumption that they will naturally become Christians, as Christianity is the true religion. As Stephen Colbert so beautifully put it, “I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion — be you Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim, I believe there are infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal saviour.” I was five when I became a Christian, which as far as I knew was some kind of record — it seems like most of my friends were six or seven. Growing up, there’s never really a question of whether or not you’ll be a Christian. It’s all about finding the right moment to declare it — you can’t be so young that people won’t think you’re serious, but you can’t be so old that people think you aren’t dedicated to the cause.

It wasn’t until after the murder that I began to really question my faith in earnest. Before that, I had always had questions, but they were always of “how” rather than “if”. My parents indulged me as best they could, buying me books on Christian theology, philosophy, and prophecy, but reading these only confused me more — even at a young age, my bullshit detector was finely tuned. But the core of my faith remained steadfast.

After the murder, though, I started to look at my own religion a little more closely. I want to be perfectly clear: the murder wasn’t traumatising. It didn’t suddenly make me doubt the existence of God, or make me turn my back on the church, or fill me with anger towards religion. My faith wasn’t shaken. But it did produce an uneasiness in me, a tick on my bullshit detector. It was a precursor. There was a lot about Christianity that was confusing, and as I got older things only got muddier. I switched churches, went on a missions trip to Mexico, and eventually found myself attending Bible school — I knew that a life of ministry wasn’t in the cards for me, but I still wanted to spend at least of year of my life carefully dissecting my own beliefs. After all, if these were philosophies I was going to hold on to for the rest of my life, at the very least I could take a year or two to study the hell out of them.

In the freshmen year, everyone was required to take a class called “Spiritual Formations”. It was focused on discovering your personal connection to your faith and finding, hearing, and understanding the voice of God in your life. A loophole in the system allowed me to opt out, but I experienced it vicariously through my roommate. Once, after class, he stormed into the room — he was normally an extremely reserved person — and proclaimed that it was all bullshit.

In their latest class, they had all been told to find a quiet corner of the college and just sit and listen, making themselves “receptive” to whatever God wanted to tell them. “They said that if we waited,” he told me, “God would speak to us. I waited an hour. God didn’t speak to me. God has never spoken to me. Does God actually speak to people? Am I supposed to hear him? What is he supposed to sound like?”

While I totally understood what he was saying, I never had trouble hearing the voice of God. When I was thirteen, I was just starting to become interested in physics, and it was becoming all the rage to find scientific proof for unscientific concepts (around this time, my church was starting to become infatuated with Kent Hovind, a prominent young-earth creationist and “scientist” with an unaccredited PhD). I remember sketching some ideas down on paper on how, perhaps, heaven and hell were simply different dimensions, and God occupied a higher dimension than us, which explains why he could interact with us but also be unknowable. And then, God spoke to me. He told me that I was a heathen, a weak-willed sinner who was committing blasphemy by even allowing myself to have these ideas. I was demonstrating a lack of faith by feeling this need to explain God. He commanded me to shred the paper, and I did.

Once, driving home from the city, God commanded me to go to Walmart and ask the cashier about Moses and Aaron. I did, and she reminded me about the golden calf. I never really found out why God wanted me to do this.

These situations were normal for me. I’ve always heard the voice of God. And I still do. I still wake during the night, panicked, overcome with guilt for the sins I’ve committed, sins that God will no longer absolve for me. A voice in the back of my mind tells me that I’m disgusting, that I’ve lost my way. My Christian friends would say that this is God trying to get my attention, trying to draw me back to him. I know better. I know it’s a poison at the back of my mind, a poison that I once could live with in peaceful co-existence, but is now slowly killing me.

I was told my entire life that leaving Christianity is easy. The whole world is conspiring to tempt you, to draw you away. All you need to do is allow yourself to slip — to stop praying, to stop reading your Bible, to stop going to church, to stop your devotions — and you’ll be drawn down the wide road. It’s just that simple. But this was a lie. Leaving Christianity is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Every lie my pastor told me was another drop of poison into my mind, a time-released insurance policy in case I ever left the faith.

These poisons included an incredible degree of self-consciousness and low self-esteem — I’m a sinner, after all, prone to wallow in my fallen ways, and I’ve been told my whole life that I don’t have the power to overcome my faults on my own. I’m disgusting. One of the largest issues I’ve had to deal with is a completely broken sense of sexuality. My entire life I was told over and over that my own body was something I needed to fight against, that natural urges and impulses — from lust to masturbation to sex itself — were the devil trying to lead me astray. Learning to have a normal sex life when you despise your own body is something that’s taken a lot of effort, and I still struggle with occasional feelings of guilt.

(I can hear someone reading this and saying, “Well, it’s too bad that this has been your experience. I was never taught my body was disgusting! I was taught my body was a temple!” Yeah, I was taught my body was a temple. A temple you must keep sanctified and pure, and whose natural inclinations were disgusting and evil. I’m not sure there’s a Christian out there who could say they weren’t taught that lustful thoughts were traps laid to make you “stumble”, and that sex has exactly one context under which it’s acceptable (and is profane in anything but that context). Many people are Christians and aren’t screwed up sexually. But that doesn’t mean the teachings of Christianity foster healthy sexual relationships. I suspect that I am tragically normal.)

When I left college, I decided that what I wanted to do was write a book. It was going to be called “Daft Things”. My plan was to join up with a group called YWAM (Youth With A Mission), a missions group that tends to be a hotbed for extraordinary supernatural events — from faith healings to demon possessions to tangible miracles — and race from location to location, attempting to witness a “miracle” first hand. After all, no miracle has even been properly documented and analysed in the history of the world, and if miracles were supposedly so common, I felt like it would be awesome to write about attempts to confirm these extraordinary claims. I didn’t want to hear about the girl in a distant tribe who was possessed and made to float through the air — I wanted to see it. I wanted to take pictures. I wanted to write an awesome book about one man’s quest to search for, and ultimately fail to find, God. Honestly, I’d still kind of like to do that. But for fairly obvious reasons, I doubt YWAM would take me on anymore. They likely would have when I was fresh out of college. Now… not so much.

Maybe this was something I felt like I needed to do because I knew someone who claimed demons drove him to murder. Or maybe it was just a backlash resulting from my scepticism at the missionaries who visited our church (and once, our own pastor) making ludicrous claims about evil curses and the flying possessed that everyone seemed to believe. For the sake of my own sanity, these were things I needed to discredit. The worst-case scenario was actually stumbling on a real miracle, on something I couldn’t rationally explain — an impossibility in my mind, but still an enchanting thought. Man goes out to disprove God, ends up finding his own faith. It’s the oldest conversion story in the book. It’d be a guaranteed best-seller. I’m not sure what the audience for a failing-to-find-god book would be. Well, me, I guess. I’d read that.

The point is, I wanted to do this knowing that it would be a failing-to-find-god book. I didn’t believe that miracles actually happened. There was just no evidence for it. Even the so-called “miraculous healings” I ran into so often in my daily life had obvious medical explanations, if only you looked closely enough.

Studying the Bible tended to leave me with more questions about my faith than answers. It occurred to me that, even with church, devotions, Bible studies and Sunday school — despite all of this — precious few Christians have read the Bible and understand the basics of their own religion. Everyone around me seemed to have a basic knowledge of the texts, but then just haphazardly assembled their own beliefs based on random verses taken out of context, beliefs poached from their friends, and things they’ve heard said from the pulpit. There seems to be very little agreement as to what Christian beliefs are, but one thing everyone has in common is that their dogma has very little to do with what’s written in the Bible. At least among the people I know, it’s about a “personal relationship” and “simple faith”. Eventually, I grew to understand that everyone invents a god for themselves, much in the same way the early Jews assembled their own faith — taking bits and pieces of the various beliefs around them and wrapping it up into a neat, if not coherent, package. And gradually I grew to understand that these are the only gods there are.

There is no god other than the god we create for ourselves. Every religious person alive invents their own belief system and own god, picking and choosing what their scripture says. If a belief comforts you, gives you a sense of purpose, appends meaning to your existence, then it’s in. Does part of scripture make you uncomfortable? Congratulations, it doesn’t really mean what you think it meant, or it was translated weirdly, or it was written for people of another time.

In church, sermons and sayings tend to repeat, and one you’ll hear on at least an annual basis is this: “When people are asked why they don’t go to church, they say it’s because the church is full of hypocrites. It’s because we don’t practice what we preach!” But that’s not it at all. Somehow, this is one fundamental, overwhelming, all-encompassing point that every Christian seems to get wrong. People don’t think the church is full of hypocrites because the congregation doesn’t practice what they preach. They call them hypocrites because Christians are blissfully unaware of what the Bible even says. They pick and choose things that make them happy and discard things that don’t, all while attempting to say with a straight face that they’re “Bible-believing”. As Penn Jillette so eloquently put it, the fastest way to become an atheist is to read the Bible. So they don’t. They claim that their faith is more personal, more relational. They don’t need some silly, holy, life-encompassing book to tell them about their faith. No, they’re much more comfortable just making it up.

The result of this can be tricky. Religion is like a life-long game of Jenga. You start with a nice little tower, built with the help of your friends and family, and you’re told that it’s totally fine to poke and prod it a bit, but only because it will result in discovering ways to make the tower even stronger. However, it’s vitally important that you not actually alter the tower too much, lest you fall into the sin of redesigning it to suit your own needs. So, you sit there with this tower. Eventually, you start to notice that a couple blocks are out of place — sometimes God is okay with divorce, it’s a little nonsense to take a stand against evolution, and homosexuality isn’t the result of the devil’s lure. You pull out a few blocks and reposition them. Everything’s still okay. But you keep finding blocks that need to move, more and more. You start to realize that things you were taught were wrong, assumptions were incorrect. You keep changing and tweaking, but every time you do the tower becomes less steady. Over time, it starts to lose its structure, until you see that if you make any more changes the tower will fall completely. And then you sit back, look at the tower, and suddenly understand that there never was any tower, just a number of meaningless blocks cleverly arranged. And yet, this was something you’ve been working on your entire life. Simply pushing the tower over, letting it spill to the ground and walking away is… a difficult action.

Last year, I reached that point. I decided that what I wanted to do was attempt to slowly deconstruct the tower, brick by misplaced brick, in hopes of making sense of it all. I called my writings, collectively, “Lies My Pastor Told Me”. In reply to one of the comments left, I said that this was certainly not my coming out as an atheist. Rather, it was important for my sanity to draw attention to the problems I saw in religion, in hopes of saving my own faith.

It didn’t.

The tower fell.

When you first understand that god does not exist, the result is feeling simultaneously like you’re breathing for the first time in your life and the entire weight of the world is crushing you. Things suddenly make sense. A billion contradictions and paradoxes you’ve been trying to reconcile are blown away like dust. Every question you’ve had about god, about faith, about religion, is rendered null. And slowly, you feel the trickle of guilt — religion’s most potent tool — start to slowly dissipate.

But then there’s the crushing despair. You realize that you only have one life to live, and it is finite. When it is over, you return to the dust and your consciousness is no more. When you place a loved one in the ground, you will never share an existence with them again. There is no higher power to absolve you of your transgressions. If you give in to temptation, it is because you are a human being with no supernatural force to scapegoat. Your life has no meaning apart from the meaning you give it.

This is the reason religion exists. I want to run from these realizations. There is a safe place for me, where I can live in exact, calculated, blissful ignorance. Sometimes I dream that I’ve made a horrible miscalculation, that there is a god and an afterlife and everlasting love. When I wake the moment is gone, which brings with it a sad relief. There are so many things about religion and the supernatural that I desperately wish were true. But it is wrong. It is false. And while that may be perfectly fine for some people, it is not okay for me.

And then, things start to come in waves. The despair gives way to beautiful truths. You have a finite life, but we are all living finite lives together, conspiring to pass on our hopes, dreams, and memories in an effort to make existence better. We do not need a higher power to absolve us of our sins — we are both cerebrally and emotionally capable of doing that ourselves. And our lives have exactly the meaning we give it, a meaning we can chose for ourselves and don’t need to find in comforting and contrived lies.

This is followed by another crushing wave. Are these lofty goals? Does this all mean that existence is ultimately random and meaningless? Is the world so cold and mechanical, just atoms and electrical sparks?

C.S. Lewis spent his life as an on-again off-again atheist. Once, he described one of his bouts of atheism as having been a man very angry at God for not existing. I understand that. If only God would exist, I would have answers. I would have meaning. I would have comfort. The wide road was supposed to be the easy journey, but it’s religion that seduces you into false comforts.

And then I look at the world around me. I look at life, at plants and animals. I look at people. I look at rocks and planets and sunsets. I look at profoundly intricate systems a watchmaker could have never dreamed of, beautiful in their complexity and deranged in their execution. I look at tectonic plates pushing high into the air, changing seasons, ocean water that falls from the sky, photons bouncing off wet pavement, magnesium engulfed in flames. I sense invisible sound waves, heat from a distant sphere of plasma, the rush of nitrogen and oxygen through the ether.

And I see Caitlin, her eyes catching mine. She smiles, and I understand that I have meaning. I have comfort. My life has context, and I am now richer for it. There may not be a supernatural, everlasting love, but here on Earth we have something that can be even better.

God does not exist, and with that understanding comes pain and misery, but also hope, joy, and release. If the Christian God were to exist, he would by scriptural necessity be jealous, vengeful, violent, and schizophrenic. He would hate women, command genocides, condone rape, and eternally damn those who never hear his name. He would order his subjects to slit the throats of their own children as a test of their loyalty. He is a monster that commands the worship of billions who find reality to be less comfortable.

Late at night, I would lie awake with all these thoughts bubbling up inside me. “All I really want,” I would tell Caitlin over and over, “is to be done with it. To have religion no longer be a part of my life. I’ve spent so many years trying to understand, trying to come to terms with my own existence. All I want is to be free of this. To not have to think about it ever again, and to simply live my life. To be at peace.”

Today, I take that first step. I replace religion and dogma with wonder and discovery. I seek to understand the world as it is, not as I wish it to be. I embrace ethics and morality given to us not by a creator, but organically sewn into the human race. I return to a place of awe, a tiny spec in a system so large, so complicated, so vast and beautiful that it stretches through unknown times and spaces. It’s a system I have a place in, not as a mindless adherent to an unknown god, but as flesh and blood, a collection of molecules gathered from distant worlds to momentarily become me. From dust to dust. It’s beautiful, and exciting, and — for the moment — even unexpected.

I leave religion behind me. And finally, after so many years of questions and contradictions, I can be at peace.

“We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man’s most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be ‘holier’ than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago… We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.”

- Christopher Hitchens

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In the months since I’ve written this, I’m happy to say that the confliction and pangs of guilt have subsided. The further you find yourself from religion, the more absurd the beliefs you once held appear. You begin to find a meaning and rhythm that wasn’t there before. If faith is the abnegation of responsibility, truth is the practice of it. We are all responsible for our own actions, and there’s something wonderful about that. As a Christian, I heard so many times that the act of giving your burden to God was like having a massive weight lifted from your shoulders. But the weight of a God is infinite and crushing — I’m happy to report that I’m breathing lighter every day.

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I’ve compiled a short reading list, comprising of the things I’ve read these last few years that have influenced these articles and my own life. If you’d like to get a little further into my head, I highly suggest tracking these down:

How to Read the Bible, by James Kugel
This book should be required reading for anyone who claims to call themselves Christian. It’s an astounding and in-depth look at the books of the Old Testament, who wrote them, why they were written, and how they’ve changed over time.

Blankets, by Craig Thompson
I’m not normally a fan of graphic novels, but Craig Thompson’s autobiographical “Blankets” felt so familiar I couldn’t put it down. Actually — I’ll be honest — I torrented it because I heard it was good, read the first third of it, then actually drove to Chapters that evening to buy a copy. To steal the quote from Amazon: “Thompson himself is the protagonist, and this is his tale of growing up, falling in love (and realizing the physical and moral complications that can imply), discovering the texture and limits of his faith, and arriving at a point from which he can look back at those experiences.”

Foreskin’s Lament, by Shalom Auslander
I probably wouldn’t have started writing Lies My Pastor Told Me if it wasn’t for Auslander. His autobiography is mournful, angry, conflicted and paradoxical, and through it he taught me that struggling with religion isn’t something you have to do in private.

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Finally, I’m open to any and all comments. You can either leave them here on the blog, or you can e-mail me directly at me(at)aaronhildebrandt.com.