The “Wreck” Of The Hymenaeusalexander

[HymenaeusAlexander]

Greetings, Ex-C.

 

Here’s my first post and also my story. It may be a bit long as these go.

 

I believed the basic tenets of Christianity for as far back as I can remember. Growing up, there was never really any doubt that the Christian god existed, that Jesus Christ lived and died and rose again, that people had eternal souls that either went to heaven or hell after death, and that the Protestant Bible was the word of God and was absolutely true. Church attendance through my childhood may have been sporadic at times, but the aforementioned doctrines as first taught to me by my mother were always a given.

 

At six years old on Easter Sunday, after viewing some sort of dramatic choir presentation or quasi passion play in a church, I had some kind of emotional reaction and began sobbing uncontrollably in the pew where I sat. I don’t really remember much about it now, quite frankly. I remember being really upset that Jesus had to suffer and die and understanding that I was somehow responsible for that because of some stuff I had done. I don’t recall if I prayed a prayer and asked Jesus into my heart or not at the behest of the pastor. The details are fuzzy, but since I’m now about 30 years removed from those events it probably doesn’t matter. To my knowledge there was never any follow-up pushing me to be baptized.

 

In the version of Evangelical Christianity I was initially introduced to, there was great importance placed on personal testimonies of conversion and knowing the day you were converted. Recalling that experience as a six-year-old was my go-to story when people asked me when I “got saved.” Of course, truthfully I didn’t really know if that was when it happened. I had been through numerous end-of-sermon appeals or “altar calls” and prayed along with a number of different pastors asking Jesus to forgive me of my sins, come into my life and be my Personal Lord ‘N’ Savior™ so many times by the time I was 14 I was certain one of them must’ve taken.

 

I remember one sermon in particular based on the parable of the wheat and the tares that I now know the preacher at the time completely ripped off almost word for word from a semi-famous evangelist. It quite literally scared the hell out me. I wanted to make sure I got gathered into the metaphorical barn of heaven and not burned with the unquenchable fire of hell. I prayed the prayer really sincerely that time. Not long after, I was finally baptized into a Southern Baptist church.

 

From seventh through twelfth grade I attended a Christian school affiliated with an independent Fundamentalist Baptist church. In addition to Bible classes on Monday through Thursday, we had chapel services every Friday. At this time I also usually attended my own Southern Baptist church on Sunday mornings and evenings and on Wednesday nights. It was within walking distance of my house so I didn’t have to rely on rides. Couple that with youth group meetings, Sunday school and summer camps and needless to say, I heard quite a bit of preaching and Bible instruction during my teen years.

 

I believed it all. Oh sure, there were some doctrines I heard taught that I took issue with, but for the vast majority I agreed. I also did my best to live the stuff out too. I read through the Bible on my own. I had daily quiet times. Yeah, I wasn’t a perfect teenager and did some stupid stuff and some things I felt ashamed of, but I never stayed “in sin” for very long before I would feel convicted, hit my knees and seek forgiveness, usually for things that nobody else knew about and didn’t actually hurt anyone. I listened almost exclusively to Contemporary Christian Music, considered secular music to be ungodly and unedifying and faced derision for this from both my Christian and non-Christian peers.

 

When I entered the workforce at age 15 I made some attempts at sharing the good news with my non-Christian co-workers at my job. Of course, I tithed my earnings and until recently I gave over 10 percent of my before-tax income to the church. I’ve calculated that over the past 20 years my wife and I have contributed well over $100,000 combined to the two churches we’ve been members of. Of course, it now sickens me to think about what else we could’ve done with that money.

 

 My senior year in high school I was voted “Most Spiritual” by my peers and upon graduation the faculty awarded me a giant trophy called “The Christian Character Award.” In retrospect it occurs to me that perhaps granting such awards might be a really good way to manufacture self-righteous hypocrites, but I digress. Through my college years I continued to be actively involved in the church, teaching Sunday school and vacation Bible school and leading youth Bible studies. I met my wife in church. By the time I graduated, my wife and I were the only two young adults remaining from our youth group and I was the only one left from the relatively large group of 30 to 40 kids from the halcyon days of the of that particular church. The rest had either moved on to other churches or simply fallen away. My wife and I were the exception to the rule.

 

I went on to hold several leadership positions. I was chairman of the finance committee, Sunday school director and eventually a paid part-time youth and education minister. My wife served for a time as church secretary and treasurer. I preached sermons with some regularity and even provided pulpit supply on a couple of occasions for another church. I took the study of the Bible and theology very seriously and was encouraged to attend seminary. I was considering it with a view toward full time ministry right before I changed my views about baptism and church polity about the time our first child was born. This required a move from the Southern Baptist denomination to the PCA.

 

It wasn’t long before my wife and I were highly involved in that church as well. We began volunteering in the nursery, going on short-term foreign mission trips, teaching Sunday school and leading small group Bible studies among other things. We were actively involved there for over six years. That church emphasized the need for fathers to set aside time each day to lead their families in a time of worship. Our family practiced this regularly for six years. For about the first three years we read through the entire Bible together from cover to cover, reading roughly a chapter a night. When the kids got old enough to start understanding things we used a children’s story Bible, sang Psalms, did scripture memory and went through catechism questions with them. We were anything but one-day-a-week Christians. I’ve shared the gospel with co-workers, strangers on airplanes, acquaintances and people on two continents and in two languages. A few of those folks actually converted to Christianity to my knowledge. I even once helped convert a well-educated, self-proclaimed agnostic.

 

It seems strange that people like my wife and I with our upbringing and levels of participation in the church would just up and leave the faith, doesn’t it? Usually when I’d heard about other people leaving their faith it’s around the time they leave home for the first time and go off to college or get out on their own. It’s not usually people in their mid-thirties who’ve gotten married, settled into a career and had kids. This, of course, has only served to increase the level of shock that people who know us feel. It certainly wasn’t something we went looking for. There was no tragic event that made us angry with God. There was no immoral behavior we wanted to engage in and needed to find a way out so we could quiet our guilty consciences and happily pursue it. There were no religious leaders in our church engaged in hypocritical behavior that made us sour to Christianity. This has made it really hard for people to categorize our apostasy. Several still continue to offer their unsolicited guesses about our motives, fearing the obvious: that we simply found the claims of Christianity to be false.

 

This process did not happen overnight. I’ve had a fair amount of interest in Christian apologetics since college. Indeed it was the comforting reassurances of apologists like Norm Giesler and Josh McDowell that helped me push through periods of doubt while being presented with evidences against Christianity in those years as a student of History and Philosophy. When that didn’t always work it was sometimes Christian philosophers like Kierkegaard, Pascal or Aquinas.  When those failed it was pure fideism and an unflinching willingness to hold on to the faith no matter what.

 

Later, as my wife and I began to become more serious about Christianity, we moved more toward Reformed theology. In that transition, I discovered the presuppositional apologetic approaches of people like Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Clark and found much comfort and reassurance in their writings. These people seemed willing to acknowledge what I already suspected. Namely that the evidentialist techniques of people like Norm Giesler or the classical Thomistic arguments of Christian philosophy and natural theology would ultimately fail in the face of serious scrutiny coupled with “naturalistic presuppositions.” It was only beginning with believing the proposition that the Bible is the word of God that one could provide a comprehensive worldview that was capable of accounting for things like logic, induction and morality. It was asserted that unbelievers could not adequately account for these things, therefore Christianity must be true. Stated simply, Christianity is true because the Bible says it’s true and the Bible is the word of God and God is always true. Yeah, I knew it was a tautology, but then I would’ve also argued that any epistemology ultimately is.

 

That circular mind trick, appeal to consequences and argument from ignorance worked for quite some time. Eventually it failed when it became increasingly clear that Christianity and its foundational text were internally inconsistent and to no small degree either. For me this was, to borrow Alvin Plantinga’s terminology, a defeater for Christianity and suggested this belief may not have “warrant” after all. I could only hear someone interpret a Biblical text in a way that is so obviously contrary to what the text appears to be saying so many times before I began to get the sense that something’s not quite right. I could only hear the answer “mystery” so many times when asking rather obvious questions about why certain things don’t seem to make sense before I began to think that maybe this worldview doesn’t really provide as many solid answers or account for as many things about reality as was originally thought. If I did not constantly and willfully ignore, forget or distract from these things, eventually the dissonance piled up and the critical thinking portion of my brain would not let it go.

 

As I studied the Bible more and more and examined opposing viewpoints within Christianity itself about the Bible’s nature and interpretation, it seemed as though often many of the points of contention raised on all sides were very solid points. For example, when it came to the Bible, Catholics seemed to have some very solid criticisms about Protestant doctrines like Sola Scriptura, and likewise Protestants had some really good criticisms of Catholic doctrines surrounding things like papal and magisterial infallibility. It was similar with other groups within Christianity and their differing viewpoints about doctrine. Eventually the thought occurred to me that they might all be right in their criticisms of each other’s positions, but wrong in their conclusions. Since most of their positions were mutually exclusive they couldn’t all be right, but they could all be wrong. So what if all of them were wrong? That’s when the protective mental veneer came off and I began studying the Bible and Christian doctrine without ruling out the undesirable conclusions from the outset.

 

I began to be more and more open to examining the claims of those critical toward Christianity and seeing what outsiders and those with more skeptical viewpoints had to say on a broad range of things and not just whatever theological bee I had in my bonnet at the time. What they said made sense and when I went to check what apologists said on the points they raised I was sorely disappointed. Unlike in college, however, I refused to tear myself away and suppress the dissonance. If Christianity was false I owed it to my children to find out and not drag them down the road I had been on. More importantly, if it was true, I wanted to be able to give them the answers to the very tough questions that they would eventually have, knowing that at some point they would have access to a wealth of alternative viewpoints via things like the internet. It occurs to me that it had been thoughts about my children that were the driving force behind another major theological shift I had experienced. It was the birth of our first child that had ultimately prompted me to seriously re-evaluate my views on baptism and eventually pushed me toward a move to Presbyterianism with its doctrine of recognizing the children of professing believers as members.

 

I began looking at the Pentateuch with particular interest in the specific laws supposedly given at Sinai.  I started in Exodus 21 just after the giving of the Ten Commandments, which I thought I was abundantly familiar with, and instead focused on the other stuff in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Mostly out of boredom and lack of interest, I had before just kind of glossed over those things in my reading and not really paid much attention to them. After all, I believed most of that stuff didn’t really apply to the church anymore in the same way it did for the people of physical Israel. Why give it much attention? What I found upon examination shocked me. Furthermore when I compared some of those laws with other ancient law codes like Hammurabi’s code I noticed that Yahweh’s laws were, in many cases, more cruel and unjust sounding than his. The more I looked carefully the less I liked what I found. Beyond the laws themselves, a few narrative passages like Numbers 31 really shook me up.

 

I pictured the scenario given there playing out. These thousands of Midianite women and boys had just witnessed the slaughter of their fathers and husbands, some of whom may have even laid down their arms in surrender only to be executed. They watched while the victorious, rampaging Israelites burned their villages and gathered their stuff to haul it away. Everything that had ever been a part of their lives and civilization was wiped out before their eyes as foreign invaders rounded them up and dragged them away as captive slaves, like so much plunder.

 

I wondered if the Midianite women had heard romantic tales from the old women about a courageous and handsome Israelite exile from Egypt who had stood up to some shepherds that were bullying the helpless daughters of one their own Midianite priests (Ex. 2:16-19). Perhaps they knew this man was now leading their captors and perhaps they thought he would take pity on them. I imagined their horror when they got to the enemy’s camp and this furious old man ordered that all the mothers and little boys had to be executed as well. Only the virgin girls could be spared.

 

Postulating about how exactly they went about determining which ones were virgins and which ones weren’t brought to mind some rather weird scenarios. Surely they couldn’t simply take the women’s word for it, right? The smart ones would’ve immediately proclaimed their virginity. For many of them we’re left with either some kind of divination or an invasive manual inspection of each female’s genitals for signs that their virginity was intact. I don’t get the impression that any were given the benefit of the doubt. This would have been a massive undertaking as we find out that there were 32,000 who were found to be virgins. Once the determination was made, however, the slaughter could commence.

 

I found myself wondering if the mothers had to watch their little sons’ throats slit as the women awaited their vaginal inspections or if the confused and terrified little boys got to watch their mothers slaughtered first. Maybe it was all just a random mish mash of brutal butchery, terror, horror, wailing and bloodletting. If I was to treat this account as history, one thing was likely: the little girls probably did get to witness their little brothers and mothers being gutted before they themselves were dragged off to be enslaved, systematically divided up and maybe even in some cases, raped. Perhaps Yahweh was merciful and they didn’t have to watch at all and were far enough away so that they barely even heard the blood curdling screams of their mothers and baby brothers until, at last, the thousands of wailing voices were finally silenced.

 

It made me want to cry. However, regardless of how warped, twisted and disturbing all of that may have seemed, it was actually all morally right and good according to Divine Command Theory. Yahweh told the Israelites to do it. He’s the foundation of morality, so it must have been right and just and good. They deserved it. In fact, according to my theology at the time, those wicked idolaters had been burning in hell in torment for almost 3,500 years. This did not sit well, but my consolation came in reading the remainder of that chapter. A quick perusal of the numbers of animals that were said to have been among the plunder along with a search of some agriculture websites that gave figures for determining the land requirements for sustaining that much livestock quickly led me to believe that the whole thing may have just been a made up story after all.

 

I ran to the Gospels to try to salvage what was left of my Christianity, but the floodgates of my departure from the faith were open and intellectually I was not far removed from no longer being able to consider myself a Christian of any stripe. It was inevitable that with my background in History and Philosophy the collapse was imminent, especially now that the willful resistance to the uncomfortable truth was gone. Sometime later, I discussed these undesirable conclusions with my wife after letting it slip that I thought evolution was true. She was shaken, but we set the discussion of those matters aside for several months as she let me work through things. That all came to a head after she noticed that I avoided a question one of my children had asked about life after death. She confronted me that night and I laid it all out. I gave her space and later she asked me for a copy of my notes on the Pentateuch.

 

To my very pleasant surprise, she eventually came to agree that the Bible was not the word of any god and that the claims of Christianity were not true. We agreed that we could not fake our way through Christianity indefinitely if for no other reasons than for our own mental health and the impracticability of continuing to tell our children things we did not believe to be true. So we found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw from our church, tell our family members that we no longer believe as they do, risk losing valuable friendships, turn our lives upside down, and reevaluate a myriad of basic assumptions about the world around us. I don’t mind saying that at thirty-something that kind of sucks.

 

The last couple of months since we’ve gone public have been emotionally painful, anxiety-inducing and often infuriating, but it hasn’t all been bad. My best friend in the world and I are in this together and just knowing that our kids are much less likely to have to extricate themselves from the Christian delusion later in life is a very comforting and satisfying thought. Meanwhile, we seemingly daily fight battles with those around us who continue not to accept our departure from Christianity and fear for our souls and the souls of our children. We continue to live with the consequences of these people’s own imagined fears and refusal to deal with reality. It can be exhausting and stressful, but it’s all worth it knowing that I was able to get my wife and kids out of that nonsense. After decades we’re finally free of that self-deception and our unhealthy, abusive relationship with an imaginary being.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

HymenaeusAlexander

[Thought2Much]

Thanks for posting your story, and welcome to Ex-C!

 

What you have told about yourself will be familiar with many here. Again and again, you'll see people on this site who lost their faith when they got past their emotions and really started learning about the origin of their belief system, only to find out that there were no satisfactory answers to their tough questions, and that nothing they believed was based in reality.

 

I certainly hope to see more of your excellent writing and insight here in the future.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

Thanks for posting your story, and welcome to Ex-C!

 

What you have told about yourself will be familiar with many here. Again and again, you'll see people on this site who lost their faith when they got past their emotions and really started learning about the origin of their belief system, only to find out that there were no satisfactory answers to their tough questions, and that nothing they believed was based in reality.

 

I certainly hope to see more of your excellent writing and insight here in the future.

 

Thanks. I like your screen name. It appears that I too thought too much.

 

As a Star Wars fan, I like your avatar too. I think it's telling, though, that in the original quote Darth Vader was in the process of providing actual evidence for the skeptical Admiral Motti to consider and show that his "sorcerer's ways" may not be entirely imaginary. I might be willing to reconsider the claims of Christianity if my former pastor could force-choke me.

[Thought2Much]

Thanks. I like your screen name. It appears that I too thought too much.

 

It seems to be a common problem around here.

 

 

As a Star Wars fan, I like your avatar too. I think it's telling, though, that in the original quote Darth Vader was in the process of providing actual evidence for the skeptical Admiral Motti to consider and show that his "sorcerer's ways" may not be entirely imaginary. I might be willing to reconsider the claims of Christianity if my former pastor could force-choke me.

 

I'm of the opinion that even if the Christian God of the Bible were real and could provide evidence (such as reliable faith healing) of his existence, unless he could prove to me that he's a lot different from how he's portrayed in the Bible, I still wouldn't worship him because he's a complete and total dick.

[mymistake]

Welcome to ex-C.  Glad to hear your immedeate family is on board.  I hope your extended family takes the hint.  It's good to have you.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

unless he could prove to me that he's a lot different from how he's portrayed in the Bible, I still wouldn't worship him because he's a complete and total dick.

 

Yeah. John Stuart Mill and I are probably with you on that one:

 

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

Welcome to ex-C.  Glad to hear your immedeate family is on board.  I hope your extended family takes the hint.  It's good to have you.

 

Thanks. I'm not holding out much hope for my extended family in that regard, but I consider myself very fortunate to have my wife on board.

 

My son still claims to believe in god, but then again, he also insists that Santa is real even though his sister has informed him otherwise in addition to providing an alternate narrative that more easily accounts for the available evidence without a reliance upon the supernatural. After overhearing that conversation, I told her, "welcome to my world."

[mymistake]

Kids go through a natural development stage when the shed their child world view.  It will happen when they are ready.  If you support them it should all work out.

[Eugene39]

H.A., Your story was very enjoyable to read. The Bible is what led me to leave faith also. Welcome to Ex-C.

[Llwellyn]

AWESOME!

 

Thank you so much for this post.  I'm really grateful that you took the time to write it.  There was a time that I was a member of a PCA church.  Before that, I grew up as an "MK" -- missionary kid, living in a third world country for 15 years with my parents.  My parents are still missionaries.  I attended a Christian college in the midwest with a name familiar to you.  I myself had my moments with "Presuppositional apologetics."

 

My brother became a missionary about the same time as I became an atheist.  I was unable to see how I should be a Christian even assuming all of the doctrines.  

I'm especially pleased to hear that your wife deconverted along with you, without generating a lot of suffering for your family.

 

I know there are some books by exchristians out there, but I think you could write a good one.

[new2me]

Welcome, H.A.!

 

I enjoyed reading your story.  When I got to the part about the slaughter of the Midianites, along with the question about how they would determine whether women were virgins, it just took my breath away.  I can only hope that story is just as false as most (maybe all) of the Bible is.  If not, that is a truly horrifying event.

 

I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

H.A., Your story was very enjoyable to read. The Bible is what led me to leave faith also. Welcome to Ex-C.

 

Thank you. I recently encouraged one of my Christian friends to be sure to read his Bible and pay attention to what he's reading. I know it won't work for everyone, but I do agree with Isaac Asimov that properly read, the Bible is a potent force for unbelief.

 

 

AWESOME!

 

Thank you so much for this post.  I'm really grateful that you took the time to write it.  There was a time that I was a member of a PCA church.  Before that, I grew up as an "MK" -- missionary kid, living in a third world country for 15 years with my parents.  My parents are still missionaries.  I attended a Christian college in the midwest with a name familiar to you.  I myself had my moments with "Presuppositional apologetics."

 

My brother became a missionary about the same time as I became an atheist.  I was unable to see how I should be a Christian even assuming all of the doctrines.  

I'm especially pleased to hear that your wife deconverted along with you, without generating a lot of suffering for your family.

 

I know there are some books by exchristians out there, but I think you could write a good one.

 

 

Thank you. I can certainly relate to MKs. Most of my friends in high school were either PKs or MKs and my cousins are MKs. In fact, I just finished writing a response to a letter my uncle wrote me in which he argued for the historicity of the resurrection. He's currently on furlough in the states.

 

As far as ex-c books go, I'm flattered, but I'm about to finish Ken Daniels' book and I don't see how I could top that one. I'm probably verbose enough to crank out a few pages, though. My original extimony had about 1,500 more words than what you see above. My wife helped me edit it down.

 

Welcome, H.A.!

 

I enjoyed reading your story.  When I got to the part about the slaughter of the Midianites, along with the question about how they would determine whether women were virgins, it just took my breath away.  I can only hope that story is just as false as most (maybe all) of the Bible is.  If not, that is a truly horrifying event.

 

I'm really looking forward to hearing more from you.

 

Thank you. I think it's likely that atrocities similar to that were committed by the various tribes and kingdoms in the ANE, but perhaps we can gain some solace in the fact that it wasn't nearly on the scale that the biblical texts portray. At the very least we know a god didn't really order it.

[Positivist]

"We agreed that we could not fake our way through Christianity indefinitely if for no other reasons than for our own mental health and the impracticability of continuing to tell our children things we did not believe to be true. So we found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw from our church, tell our family members that we no longer believe as they do, risk losing valuable friendships, turn our lives upside down, and reevaluate a myriad of basic assumptions about the world around us. I don’t mind saying that at thirty-something that kind of sucks."

~~~~~~~~~~~

"After decades we’re finally free of that self-deception and our unhealthy, abusive relationship with an imaginary being."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Welcome to Ex-C, HA!

 

I loved your extimony! Our paths are similar, and I too am a "late bloomer" in terms of having the whole thing implode in my 30s--and on the highway of faith there were many exits I could have taken but did not. Deconverting was a rough but necessary journey. I am happy to tell you that "it get's better"!

 

Stick around. I'd love to hear more from you!

[Ellwood]

This was fantastic!!   My best wishes for you and your wife as you navigate the deconversion waters.   Been there and doing that.
 

[HymenaeusAlexander]

Welcome to Ex-C, HA!

 

I loved your extimony! Our paths are similar, and I too am a "late bloomer" in terms of having the whole thing implode in my 30s--and on the highway of faith there were many exits I could have taken but did not. Deconverting was a rough but necessary journey. I am happy to tell you that "it get's better"!

 

Stick around. I'd love to hear more from you!

 

 

Thanks. I'm glad to hear it gets better. Building new relationships with other non-religous people is not going to be easy this late in the game, I fear. Nearly everyone we know IRL that lives near us is religous with the exception of a handfull of my co-workers. My children have lost most of their friends along with us as most of the couples we used to hang out with had kids their age too. On the upside we've been spending a lot of time together as a family for the last couple of months.

 

This was fantastic!!   My best wishes for you and your wife as you navigate the deconversion waters.   Been there and doing that.

 

Now if I could only get my son attending the PCA seminary in Charlotte NC to read this and actually have it sink in!

 

Thank you. Coincidentally, I just recently finished reading a book by someone who may be one of your son's seminary professors. I read it at the urging of my former pastor. Needless to say, I didn't find it convincing and spelled out why in a ten page response that I passed along to the elders of the church. I'm sure my response will serve as exhibit A when they finally decide to stop pussy-footing around and excommunicate me.

[BDPApostate]

Greetings, Ex-C.

 

Here’s my first post and also my story. It may be a bit long as these go.

 

I believed the basic tenets of Christianity for as far back as I can remember. Growing up, there was never really any doubt that the Christian god existed, that Jesus Christ lived and died and rose again, that people had eternal souls that either went to heaven or hell after death, and that the Protestant Bible was the word of God and was absolutely true. Church attendance through my childhood may have been sporadic at times, but the aforementioned doctrines as first taught to me by my mother were always a given.

 

At six years old on Easter Sunday, after viewing some sort of dramatic choir presentation or quasi passion play in a church, I had some kind of emotional reaction and began sobbing uncontrollably in the pew where I sat. I don’t really remember much about it now, quite frankly. I remember being really upset that Jesus had to suffer and die and understanding that I was somehow responsible for that because of some stuff I had done. I don’t recall if I prayed a prayer and asked Jesus into my heart or not at the behest of the pastor. The details are fuzzy, but since I’m now about 30 years removed from those events it probably doesn’t matter. To my knowledge there was never any follow-up pushing me to be baptized.

 

In the version of Evangelical Christianity I was initially introduced to, there was great importance placed on personal testimonies of conversion and knowing the day you were converted. Recalling that experience as a six-year-old was my go-to story when people asked me when I “got saved.” Of course, truthfully I didn’t really know if that was when it happened. I had been through numerous end-of-sermon appeals or “altar calls” and prayed along with a number of different pastors asking Jesus to forgive me of my sins, come into my life and be my Personal Lord ‘N’ Savior™ so many times by the time I was 14 I was certain one of them must’ve taken.

 

I remember one sermon in particular based on the parable of the wheat and the tares that I now know the preacher at the time completely ripped off almost word for word from a semi-famous evangelist. It quite literally scared the hell out me. I wanted to make sure I got gathered into the metaphorical barn of heaven and not burned with the unquenchable fire of hell. I prayed the prayer really sincerely that time. Not long after, I was finally baptized into a Southern Baptist church.

 

From seventh through twelfth grade I attended a Christian school affiliated with an independent Fundamentalist Baptist church. In addition to Bible classes on Monday through Thursday, we had chapel services every Friday. At this time I also usually attended my own Southern Baptist church on Sunday mornings and evenings and on Wednesday nights. It was within walking distance of my house so I didn’t have to rely on rides. Couple that with youth group meetings, Sunday school and summer camps and needless to say, I heard quite a bit of preaching and Bible instruction during my teen years.

 

I believed it all. Oh sure, there were some doctrines I heard taught that I took issue with, but for the vast majority I agreed. I also did my best to live the stuff out too. I read through the Bible on my own. I had daily quiet times. Yeah, I wasn’t a perfect teenager and did some stupid stuff and some things I felt ashamed of, but I never stayed “in sin” for very long before I would feel convicted, hit my knees and seek forgiveness, usually for things that nobody else knew about and didn’t actually hurt anyone. I listened almost exclusively to Contemporary Christian Music, considered secular music to be ungodly and unedifying and faced derision for this from both my Christian and non-Christian peers.

 

When I entered the workforce at age 15 I made some attempts at sharing the good news with my non-Christian co-workers at my job. Of course, I tithed my earnings and until recently I gave over 10 percent of my before-tax income to the church. I’ve calculated that over the past 20 years my wife and I have contributed well over $100,000 combined to the two churches we’ve been members of. Of course, it now sickens me to think about what else we could’ve done with that money.

 

 My senior year in high school I was voted “Most Spiritual” by my peers and upon graduation the faculty awarded me a giant trophy called “The Christian Character Award.” In retrospect it occurs to me that perhaps granting such awards might be a really good way to manufacture self-righteous hypocrites, but I digress. Through my college years I continued to be actively involved in the church, teaching Sunday school and vacation Bible school and leading youth Bible studies. I met my wife in church. By the time I graduated, my wife and I were the only two young adults remaining from our youth group and I was the only one left from the relatively large group of 30 to 40 kids from the halcyon days of the of that particular church. The rest had either moved on to other churches or simply fallen away. My wife and I were the exception to the rule.

 

I went on to hold several leadership positions. I was chairman of the finance committee, Sunday school director and eventually a paid part-time youth and education minister. My wife served for a time as church secretary and treasurer. I preached sermons with some regularity and even provided pulpit supply on a couple of occasions for another church. I took the study of the Bible and theology very seriously and was encouraged to attend seminary. I was considering it with a view toward full time ministry right before I changed my views about baptism and church polity about the time our first child was born. This required a move from the Southern Baptist denomination to the PCA.

 

It wasn’t long before my wife and I were highly involved in that church as well. We began volunteering in the nursery, going on short-term foreign mission trips, teaching Sunday school and leading small group Bible studies among other things. We were actively involved there for over six years. That church emphasized the need for fathers to set aside time each day to lead their families in a time of worship. Our family practiced this regularly for six years. For about the first three years we read through the entire Bible together from cover to cover, reading roughly a chapter a night. When the kids got old enough to start understanding things we used a children’s story Bible, sang Psalms, did scripture memory and went through catechism questions with them. We were anything but one-day-a-week Christians. I’ve shared the gospel with co-workers, strangers on airplanes, acquaintances and people on two continents and in two languages. A few of those folks actually converted to Christianity to my knowledge. I even once helped convert a well-educated, self-proclaimed agnostic.

 

It seems strange that people like my wife and I with our upbringing and levels of participation in the church would just up and leave the faith, doesn’t it? Usually when I’d heard about other people leaving their faith it’s around the time they leave home for the first time and go off to college or get out on their own. It’s not usually people in their mid-thirties who’ve gotten married, settled into a career and had kids. This, of course, has only served to increase the level of shock that people who know us feel. It certainly wasn’t something we went looking for. There was no tragic event that made us angry with God. There was no immoral behavior we wanted to engage in and needed to find a way out so we could quiet our guilty consciences and happily pursue it. There were no religious leaders in our church engaged in hypocritical behavior that made us sour to Christianity. This has made it really hard for people to categorize our apostasy. Several still continue to offer their unsolicited guesses about our motives, fearing the obvious: that we simply found the claims of Christianity to be false.

 

This process did not happen overnight. I’ve had a fair amount of interest in Christian apologetics since college. Indeed it was the comforting reassurances of apologists like Norm Giesler and Josh McDowell that helped me push through periods of doubt while being presented with evidences against Christianity in those years as a student of History and Philosophy. When that didn’t always work it was sometimes Christian philosophers like Kierkegaard, Pascal or Aquinas.  When those failed it was pure fideism and an unflinching willingness to hold on to the faith no matter what.

 

Later, as my wife and I began to become more serious about Christianity, we moved more toward Reformed theology. In that transition, I discovered the presuppositional apologetic approaches of people like Cornelius Van Til, Greg Bahnsen and Gordon Clark and found much comfort and reassurance in their writings. These people seemed willing to acknowledge what I already suspected. Namely that the evidentialist techniques of people like Norm Giesler or the classical Thomistic arguments of Christian philosophy and natural theology would ultimately fail in the face of serious scrutiny coupled with “naturalistic presuppositions.” It was only beginning with believing the proposition that the Bible is the word of God that one could provide a comprehensive worldview that was capable of accounting for things like logic, induction and morality. It was asserted that unbelievers could not adequately account for these things, therefore Christianity must be true. Stated simply, Christianity is true because the Bible says it’s true and the Bible is the word of God and God is always true. Yeah, I knew it was a tautology, but then I would’ve also argued that any epistemology ultimately is.

 

That circular mind trick, appeal to consequences and argument from ignorance worked for quite some time. Eventually it failed when it became increasingly clear that Christianity and its foundational text were internally inconsistent and to no small degree either. For me this was, to borrow Alvin Plantinga’s terminology, a defeater for Christianity and suggested this belief may not have “warrant” after all. I could only hear someone interpret a Biblical text in a way that is so obviously contrary to what the text appears to be saying so many times before I began to get the sense that something’s not quite right. I could only hear the answer “mystery” so many times when asking rather obvious questions about why certain things don’t seem to make sense before I began to think that maybe this worldview doesn’t really provide as many solid answers or account for as many things about reality as was originally thought. If I did not constantly and willfully ignore, forget or distract from these things, eventually the dissonance piled up and the critical thinking portion of my brain would not let it go.

 

As I studied the Bible more and more and examined opposing viewpoints within Christianity itself about the Bible’s nature and interpretation, it seemed as though often many of the points of contention raised on all sides were very solid points. For example, when it came to the Bible, Catholics seemed to have some very solid criticisms about Protestant doctrines like Sola Scriptura, and likewise Protestants had some really good criticisms of Catholic doctrines surrounding things like papal and magisterial infallibility. It was similar with other groups within Christianity and their differing viewpoints about doctrine. Eventually the thought occurred to me that they might all be right in their criticisms of each other’s positions, but wrong in their conclusions. Since most of their positions were mutually exclusive they couldn’t all be right, but they could all be wrong. So what if all of them were wrong? That’s when the protective mental veneer came off and I began studying the Bible and Christian doctrine without ruling out the undesirable conclusions from the outset.

 

I began to be more and more open to examining the claims of those critical toward Christianity and seeing what outsiders and those with more skeptical viewpoints had to say on a broad range of things and not just whatever theological bee I had in my bonnet at the time. What they said made sense and when I went to check what apologists said on the points they raised I was sorely disappointed. Unlike in college, however, I refused to tear myself away and suppress the dissonance. If Christianity was false I owed it to my children to find out and not drag them down the road I had been on. More importantly, if it was true, I wanted to be able to give them the answers to the very tough questions that they would eventually have, knowing that at some point they would have access to a wealth of alternative viewpoints via things like the internet. It occurs to me that it had been thoughts about my children that were the driving force behind another major theological shift I had experienced. It was the birth of our first child that had ultimately prompted me to seriously re-evaluate my views on baptism and eventually pushed me toward a move to Presbyterianism with its doctrine of recognizing the children of professing believers as members.

 

I began looking at the Pentateuch with particular interest in the specific laws supposedly given at Sinai.  I started in Exodus 21 just after the giving of the Ten Commandments, which I thought I was abundantly familiar with, and instead focused on the other stuff in Exodus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Mostly out of boredom and lack of interest, I had before just kind of glossed over those things in my reading and not really paid much attention to them. After all, I believed most of that stuff didn’t really apply to the church anymore in the same way it did for the people of physical Israel. Why give it much attention? What I found upon examination shocked me. Furthermore when I compared some of those laws with other ancient law codes like Hammurabi’s code I noticed that Yahweh’s laws were, in many cases, more cruel and unjust sounding than his. The more I looked carefully the less I liked what I found. Beyond the laws themselves, a few narrative passages like Numbers 31 really shook me up.

 

I pictured the scenario given there playing out. These thousands of Midianite women and boys had just witnessed the slaughter of their fathers and husbands, some of whom may have even laid down their arms in surrender only to be executed. They watched while the victorious, rampaging Israelites burned their villages and gathered their stuff to haul it away. Everything that had ever been a part of their lives and civilization was wiped out before their eyes as foreign invaders rounded them up and dragged them away as captive slaves, like so much plunder.

 

I wondered if the Midianite women had heard romantic tales from the old women about a courageous and handsome Israelite exile from Egypt who had stood up to some shepherds that were bullying the helpless daughters of one their own Midianite priests (Ex. 2:16-19). Perhaps they knew this man was now leading their captors and perhaps they thought he would take pity on them. I imagined their horror when they got to the enemy’s camp and this furious old man ordered that all the mothers and little boys had to be executed as well. Only the virgin girls could be spared.

 

Postulating about how exactly they went about determining which ones were virgins and which ones weren’t brought to mind some rather weird scenarios. Surely they couldn’t simply take the women’s word for it, right? The smart ones would’ve immediately proclaimed their virginity. For many of them we’re left with either some kind of divination or an invasive manual inspection of each female’s genitals for signs that their virginity was intact. I don’t get the impression that any were given the benefit of the doubt. This would have been a massive undertaking as we find out that there were 32,000 who were found to be virgins. Once the determination was made, however, the slaughter could commence.

 

I found myself wondering if the mothers had to watch their little sons’ throats slit as the women awaited their vaginal inspections or if the confused and terrified little boys got to watch their mothers slaughtered first. Maybe it was all just a random mish mash of brutal butchery, terror, horror, wailing and bloodletting. If I was to treat this account as history, one thing was likely: the little girls probably did get to witness their little brothers and mothers being gutted before they themselves were dragged off to be enslaved, systematically divided up and maybe even in some cases, raped. Perhaps Yahweh was merciful and they didn’t have to watch at all and were far enough away so that they barely even heard the blood curdling screams of their mothers and baby brothers until, at last, the thousands of wailing voices were finally silenced.

 

It made me want to cry. However, regardless of how warped, twisted and disturbing all of that may have seemed, it was actually all morally right and good according to Divine Command Theory. Yahweh told the Israelites to do it. He’s the foundation of morality, so it must have been right and just and good. They deserved it. In fact, according to my theology at the time, those wicked idolaters had been burning in hell in torment for almost 3,500 years. This did not sit well, but my consolation came in reading the remainder of that chapter. A quick perusal of the numbers of animals that were said to have been among the plunder along with a search of some agriculture websites that gave figures for determining the land requirements for sustaining that much livestock quickly led me to believe that the whole thing may have just been a made up story after all.

 

I ran to the Gospels to try to salvage what was left of my Christianity, but the floodgates of my departure from the faith were open and intellectually I was not far removed from no longer being able to consider myself a Christian of any stripe. It was inevitable that with my background in History and Philosophy the collapse was imminent, especially now that the willful resistance to the uncomfortable truth was gone. Sometime later, I discussed these undesirable conclusions with my wife after letting it slip that I thought evolution was true. She was shaken, but we set the discussion of those matters aside for several months as she let me work through things. That all came to a head after she noticed that I avoided a question one of my children had asked about life after death. She confronted me that night and I laid it all out. I gave her space and later she asked me for a copy of my notes on the Pentateuch.

 

To my very pleasant surprise, she eventually came to agree that the Bible was not the word of any god and that the claims of Christianity were not true. We agreed that we could not fake our way through Christianity indefinitely if for no other reasons than for our own mental health and the impracticability of continuing to tell our children things we did not believe to be true. So we found ourselves in the uncomfortable position of having to withdraw from our church, tell our family members that we no longer believe as they do, risk losing valuable friendships, turn our lives upside down, and reevaluate a myriad of basic assumptions about the world around us. I don’t mind saying that at thirty-something that kind of sucks.

 

The last couple of months since we’ve gone public have been emotionally painful, anxiety-inducing and often infuriating, but it hasn’t all been bad. My best friend in the world and I are in this together and just knowing that our kids are much less likely to have to extricate themselves from the Christian delusion later in life is a very comforting and satisfying thought. Meanwhile, we seemingly daily fight battles with those around us who continue not to accept our departure from Christianity and fear for our souls and the souls of our children. We continue to live with the consequences of these people’s own imagined fears and refusal to deal with reality. It can be exhausting and stressful, but it’s all worth it knowing that I was able to get my wife and kids out of that nonsense. After decades we’re finally free of that self-deception and our unhealthy, abusive relationship with an imaginary being.

 

Thanks for reading,

 

HymenaeusAlexander

An excellent telling of your story. The way you came to non-belief is so similar to many of us here on this site. I am especially happy that both you and your wife are on the same page with this. That will prevent terrible frustrations down the road.

Welcome to the site!

[FeelHappy]

Welcome and thanks for the introduction.

 

Do you happen to have those Torah notes in electronic format? I'd like to read them myself.

 

I was 30 when I started to lose my faith, like you everything and everyone I knew revolved around Church. 

[alpha centauri]

Welcome to the boards! It was also a careful examination of the Bible that was instrumental in my deconversion. No wonder the Catholic church centuries ago didn't want people to read the Bible.

 

I wish you, your wife and your kids all the best. I know it won't be easy, but embracing the truth and walking away from belief in make-believe has a price, unfortunately.

 

It's too bad there aren't more secular groups that foster the kind of camaraderie that exists in churches. I'm sure there are some, but they just aren't as well-known, and they don't usually have buildings with signs outside inviting newcomers.

 

Obviously, one of the main reasons churches do this (although they'll deny it) is to get more money. One church my wife and I attended sent us numerous donation envelopes with my name (and not hers) on it. The church's greed was undisguised, and on top of that, the church holds to the archaic vision that the woman is secondary (or worse) to the male "head of household."

 

Anyway, I'm glad you and your wife have been able to embrace the truth together. All too often, when one spouse deconverts, the other spouse stubbornly clings to the faith, which leads to all sorts of messy situations.

 

But Jesus said he came to divide families, didn't he? And Jesus proclaimed that if you didn't hate your family, according to Luke 14:26, you're unworthy of Christ. Not exactly the type of family values that most Christians like to go on about.

 

It's good to have another rational freethinker who has examined the evidence and found it wanting -- and ridiculous.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

An excellent telling of your story. The way you came to non-belief is so similar to many of us here on this site. I am especially happy that both you and your wife are on the same page with this. That will prevent terrible frustrations down the road.

Welcome to the site!

 

Thank you. After reading some of the coming out to spouse threads I feel very fortunate. This is hard enough with her on board. I can't fathom how difficult it would be for me if my wife would've just doubled-down on the crazy the rest of my friends and family have.

 

Welcome and thanks for the introduction.

 

Do you happen to have those Torah notes in electronic format? I'd like to read them myself.

 

I was 30 when I started to lose my faith, like you everything and everyone I knew revolved around Church. 

 

I'll drop a link in a PM to you in sec. They're not finished yet. I've still got most of the Jacob narratives in Genesis to finish and then I want to go back and re-do some stuff about the so-called Ten Commandments in Exodus 20. Best to keep a browser window open with Biblegateway or something when you're going through them because all I do is give the reference and then proceed with my rantings and ramblings. If you make use of any of the stuff be sure to credit "some guy on the internet."

 

It's too bad there aren't more secular groups that foster the kind of camaraderie that exists in churches. I'm sure there are some, but they just aren't as well-known, and they don't usually have buildings with signs outside inviting newcomers.

 

Thanks for the kind words. Maybe at some point my wife and I will just start our own secular group in our area. I'll probably be the old fogey since it seems the vast majority of nones are in their teens and twenties. I'll just spend more time on Reddit so I can figure out what the kids are into these days.

[TrueFreedom]

Great story, HA!  I'm interested in reading your notes as well.  Perhaps you can contribute to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com!

[HymenaeusAlexander]

Great story, HA!  I'm interested in reading your notes as well.  Perhaps you can contribute to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com!

 

Thanks. My notes might be a bit cumbersome and extended for a format like SAB. You'll see what I mean. I'll hit up your inbox.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

 

Great story, HA!  I'm interested in reading your notes as well.  Perhaps you can contribute to http://skepticsannotatedbible.com!

 

Thanks. My notes might be a bit cumbersome and extended for a format like SAB. You'll see what I mean. I'll hit up your inbox.

 

 

Or not. Let me know when it's no longer full.

[Akheia]

That was breathtaking. I wept when I read your account of the Midianites. I'd always known about this story; it's part of why I regard the Bible's god as a monstrosity. But I'd never thought about it in such terms.

 

It was especially good to see that your wife and family came out of that bondage with you. You are fortunate beyond telling--both you and your wife.

 

Welcome, and thank you for letting me walk with you.

[HymenaeusAlexander]

That was breathtaking. I wept when I read your account of the Midianites. I'd always known about this story; it's part of why I regard the Bible's god as a monstrosity. But I'd never thought about it in such terms.

 

It was especially good to see that your wife and family came out of that bondage with you. You are fortunate beyond telling--both you and your wife.

 

Welcome, and thank you for letting me walk with you.

 

Thank you for the welcome. I'm sorry I made you cry. To make up for it I'll share with you what I wrote about one of the most unrecognized miracles in the Bible as described in Genesis 19:31-36. Maybe it will help show what I think is the real reason why some of these people wrote horrible things about the rival cultures around them...and perhaps be good for a laugh.

Lot’s older daughter, for whatever reason, concludes that there’s not a man left on earth other than their father that can get them pregnant and preserve the family line. It’s not clear why she would conclude this, nor is it clear why she would propose such drastic measures. It’s also not clear why men are so difficult to come by, yet getting their hands on enough wine to get their father so drunk that he doesn’t even realize he’s having sex with his own daughters on two occasions doesn’t seem to be a problem.

 

This plan is incredibly flawed. Lot is hardly in the prime of his youth and excessive alcohol consumption typically makes getting and maintaining an erection along with ejaculation quite difficult, particularly when a guy is so hammered that he doesn’t even realize he’s having sex. Add to those problems the fact that these two girls are supposed to be inexperienced virgins and this plan now seems destined to failure. The plan could totally work if the roles are reversed, but that wouldn’t make Lot out to be a hapless victim or make his daughters out to be desperate, conniving little incestuous sluts and that just doesn’t fit our storyteller’s prejudices about Ammonites and Moabites now, does it?

 

Even if these sexually inexperienced sisters can get their dad erect, keep him erect and stimulate him enough to get him to ejaculate in them all while he’s so slobbering drunk he doesn’t know what’s going on, they still would have incredibly long odds on getting pregnant on the very first try. Our storyteller makes the odds even longer by having this occur on consecutive nights. People who study human reproduction will tell you that often men have a better chance at having a full contingent of swimmers when they’ve had a couple of days to resupply.

 

Amazingly the plan works both times. This has to be one of the greatest, most unrecognized miracles of Yahweh in the entire Bible! It’s not, of course. It’s fairly obvious what the purpose of this story is when we learn in verses 37 and 38 that the Ammonites and Moabites are all descended from these two children who are the products of this scandalous, incestuous union. Our storyteller clearly wants to portray a couple of Judah and Israel’s most infamous rivals rather negatively. Additionally there’s much ado about how Moabite and Ammonite women should be avoided in later passages of the Bible and here’s a great story that helps illustrate why. This is nothing more than jingoistic propaganda.

 

It’s noteworthy that another storyteller will use this motif and have Ruth, a Moabitess, wait for Boaz to get drunk and pass out on a grain heap then go over, uncover his genitals and lay down with him in order to get him to marry her (Ruth 3:7-14). A real chip off the old block, that Ruth turns out to be.

[alpha centauri]

Very interesting and insightful view of the scenario between Lot and his daughters.

 

There's also some good insight into the Scriptures in the Skeptic's Annotated Bible and in the humorous and thought-provoking Brick Testament, which uses Lego characters to portray Bible stotries.