“Is all of this true?” For many non-religious converts,
this, or a slight variation of it, is the question that initiates the notorious
process of losing faith. Some non-religious folks, like me, were actually quite
serious with their faith before losing it. This isn’t so hard to imagine; I was
born in a Christian home, and taught Christian stories and values. This
extremely exposure to Christianity made me grow up to believe everything in my
version of Christianity as perfectly inerrant and completely apodictic; for me
Christianity had epistemological primacy. This is perfectly natural, humans
generally do not go about questioning the fundamental things they learnt from
infancy.
As I grew into adolescence my belief grew along. I never
at any point in time seriously considered the idea that I could be wrong.
Consequently I tried to live according the tenets I believed in: God had
extreme influence on whatever happened to me, and he was most important factor,
in my life; eternity was real, and Jesus could come at any time. Due to this
beliefs, I took my faith very seriously, it didn’t make sense for me not to,
when I believed that God had so much influence over my life and after. I
couldn’t understand people who claimed to also believe but appeared not to give
thought to it in their living. I still don’t understand them. I mean, if you
believe that the world could end at any time, and that your eternity would
depend, at least in part, on how you lived your life, then you should at least
make an effort to make sure you’re on the safe side of eternity. I placed a
high premium on ‘my relationship with God’ and all things related to it. I
lived a good part of my adolescent like this, and all of it was based on the
implicit idea that my opinions about the world was, without a doubt, correct. I
pitied people of other faiths because of their impending, unavoidable perdition, and I
always hoped that at some point they would come to into the knowledge of, what
I thought was, the truth.
I continued like this until at a certain point in time
when, for no tangible reasons, I started asking myself ‘how do I know that what
I believe is the truth’. At this point, I had not started doubting my beliefs.
I believed so much that they were correct. I was just wondering how I could be
certain of it. It was like having only an intuitive answer to a mathematics
question and looking for a rigorous solution. The more I thought about it, the
more I realised that I didn’t have any reason for believing, that was exclusive
to my own beliefs. All the reasons I had for believing: a sacred text,
historicity, ‘supernatural’ events, and even the almighty faith, were not
exclusive to Christianity. I tried as hard as I could to find one factor, one
thing that was completely exclusive to my faith, but I couldn’t. As my search
continued, I gradually started sub-consciously doubting my faith, and after a
while, these doubts became conscious. At
this point. I tried desperately to find something irrefutable, something
tangible, something, anything I could sincerely hold on to. My feeble attempt
ended in futility and with this came a massive case of cognitive dissonance. My
psyche could not cope with the thought that one of the fundamental facts on
which I lived my life was wrong, so I experienced a lot of mental anxiety,
fear, and heavy depressions. As with all things, the passage of time made it
less intense. I started questioning my beliefs about two years and two months
ago, and I became a self-acclaimed atheist nine months after that.
Losing my faith
changed not only my religious beliefs and activities, it changed me
fundamentally. It made me more humble about my opinions and ideas, it granted
me a sort of intellectual modesty. Losing belief on something I believed so
strongly made realise that whatever I opinion I have, regardless of how
strongly I believe it, could be wrong. It also made me become stricter with
believing in general. I realised that people generally believed things without
having strong reasons for doing so. I started demanding more evidence before
believing, and in the absence of convincing evidence, I’d just rather be
without an opinion. As one of my favourite literary characters, Lord Henry
(Picture of Dorian Gray) said “I never approve, or disapprove, of anything. It
is an absurd attitude to take towards life. We are not sent into the world to
air our prejudices.”
