Responding to No Way’s comment after I mentioned my relief when I stopped being a Christian:
Now that intriques me. I would love to see that post sometime soon. After all, if I stopped believing the feeling would be the complete opposite of relief.
I’ve written about it in the past (interestingly, in one of this blog’s earliest posts, How I’ve become an atheist), but I’ll try to answer your question specifically: why the relief?
Well, first consider this: what if Christians are wrong and Muslims are right? If that is so, Allah will send you to “the fire”. Scared yet? There are so many religions (and variations of each religion) out there that the odds of picking up the right one are very, very small. And most of them say their gods are “jealous”, so you can’t pick several at the same time. The fact that you’re a Christian and not a Jew or Muslim or Hindu, or that you’re, say, a Protestant instead of a Catholic, depends just on one thing: where you were born. And while you may have a more liberal theology (“anyone who accepts Jesus is saved”, or even “God wouldn’t send anyone to hell, even though it says he does in the holy books”), that’s a relatively recent thing, and you’re probably in the minority, not to mention that the holy books don’t agree with you. So, statistically, if there is a god or gods and there is a hell, then each individual has very good odds of ending up in it — and of that happening just by chance, because you were born in the “wrong” place and raised in the “wrong” faith. To me, that would be very, very scary indeed, and losing that fear would certainly be a relief. Most believers (including myself, when I was one) avoid living in constant fear of their statistically probable eternal damnation simply by not thinking about this at all; their faith is the “right” one, automatically, because they were raised in it, and it’s “obvious”, so, end of story.
However, my own relief was more related to intellectual honesty; I was always inquisitive, with “the soul of a scientist”, so to say, and only managed to keep my faith by not thinking critically about it, by stopping myself whenever I started to consider the implications, before going “too far” — and, with time, the lines of thought I had to avoid became more and more in number. I knew, subconsciously, that if I thought about it, I would lose my belief, and come to the natural conclusion: that all religions are man-made, self-contradictory, and teach morally wrong — sometimes even repugnant — things. And that the reasons I had for not believing in every other religion could apply perfectly to my own. So, my mind served me so well at school, at college, at work, and to solve problems regularly in life, but it had to be “chained” for me to keep a belief that would not survive a good, hard look? Can you imagine how dishonest, how “fake” that made me feel? To have a part of my life that I had to constantly avoid thinking rationally about? To have two separate standards of reasoning, one I applied to reality and life, and the other to a belief that I just “had” to keep… or else? And yet I blamed myself, not the belief — because I had been taught so.
It’s as Martin Luther said, reason is the enemy of faith. I just disagree with him on which side to pick.
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I recall experiencing a feeling of relief myself.
It was the moment I finally admitted out loud (though I was the only person present) that I really no longer had any belief at all. Given that I had been calling myself agnostic for a while before then, that might not seem like much cause for relief, but it was amazing how much relief I felt at the time. It was like a weight that I had never realized I had been carrying was suddenly lifted from me!
Pedro,
Jews, Muslims and Christians all ultimately believe in the same one God.
I don’t care much about the denominations of faith because I think they only occur out of our human weakness. In fact, I believe in a broader universal church.
BTW, I was not raised in a faith. I was a practicing Buddhist before I became a Christian and have studied a multitude of religions in a more-or-less “scholarly” way. So, my faith is not “right” because I was born into it. But, I do see that kind of position for many people who don’t care to know their faith very deeply.
While I understand you second paragraph and can at least empathize with your decision. I do need to ask, did you ever consider posing your concerns and questions to someone that was deeply involved in the faith, that was well studied and seemed to live the life of Christ out if front of you?
Here is why I ask. I have had experiences that science will never be able to explain in a fundamentally believable way (sort of like the origin of the conscious and consciousness). I have prayed in silence and solitude then, the very next moment I was in public, had people walk up to me and literally say. “Here, God told me to give this to you. You asked for it and He wants you to have it.”
Now, I know you could and should never accept that as anything but my story. That kind of thing can never come close to being proof for anyone but the person that it happens (often) to. My question is this. If that kind of thing happened to you what would you think?
I whole-heartedly disagree with Martin Luther.
I would say that if you step back and look at the wider picture, a perfectly plausible explanation is already available.
(i) there’s a lot of people walking around saying stuff like “Here, God want me to give you this” (and myriad other variations. I have had people say something broadly like this to me dozens of times), when handing out religious or otherwise inspirational literature.
(ii) there’s also lots of people that pray in silence and solitude. Millions every day.
Given that, the number of people to which something like (ii) happens, and then something like (i) happens within a short enough time period that they’d be able to draw a connection will be quite large.
There’s no denying that this kind of event could have a large effect on many people, particularly one that is searching for answers.
There are in fact scientific explanations for why people find this kind of event as convincing as they do.
Efrique
This is, of course, the only rational position for you to have if you have not directly experienced it yourself.
However, given the specificity of many offerings (where not talking Jesus is Lord brochures), the immediacy of the offerings (the first person I run into at a mall after asking in my car) and the uncanny regularity (several times a month) that these things happen to me I cannot have that opinion.
See, I’m not talking about a “short enough time period”, in many cases I mean the shortest possible time period.
Thank you for an eloquent and well-stated explanation of what happened to me around 2002. I was a Baptist believer, “saved” in 1995, professed my faith through Baptism and “walked the walk” for seven years!
I can think of no better way to explain it than the fact that I too had to ignore what my brain was telling me in deference to what my heart wanted to be true.
Thanks for letting me know I am not alone.