The Question.

 “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.”