My Deconversion Story (or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Think for Myself)

Deconversion - that's a big, heavy sounding word isn't it? It sounds much grander than I intend this post to be. It also brings to mind images of a Damascene anti-revelation where the unGod shows up as a totally normal non-burning bush and sucks all of the faith out of me (I make no apologies for mixing up my biblical references there). That absolutely isn't what I'm going to describe here. What I am going to tell you about is my slow journey from being a simple if slightly unorthodox Christian believer to being what I am now, a quietly atheistic non-believer. As I start writing this I have no idea how long it is going to be or how long it is going to take me to write so make yourself a nice cup of tea, this might be a long one.

The last time I told this story to someone I told them it started when I read a book sitting on a park bench while waiting for my car to be serviced but after 12 months or so further reflection I actually think it started earlier than that. So I'm going to start at the very beginning. I will come back to the book later though. 

I was brought up as a christian and over the years my family and I were members of quite a few different churches. I felt most comfortable at the United Reformed church but we spent time as members of the Church of England and an evangelical church. I was never very comfortable at the evangelical church because there was people "speaking in tongues" and falling on to the floor every week there. I found it difficult to believe that could happen every Sunday in a small church in County Durham and always suspected that somebody was making stuff up. I equally wasn't very comfortable at the Church of England because although I enjoyed the youth groups they ran and had a lot of friends there, I found the church itself stuffy and too hung up on ceremony and procedure. There was far too much "bobbing and ducking" and weird call and response chanting that everyone just seemed to be repeating robotically without thinking about it. It all felt too much like it had been made up by humans and had very little to do with Jesus' teachings.

It was during my time at the Church of England that the first seed of doubt was sown. I must have been about 13 and the church youth group I was a member of at the time went on a visit to another church where some form of christian drama group were holding some sort of workshop. Towards the end of this there was a sort of question and answer time where they asked us things to find out what we knew about God, Jesus and the Bible. One of the young men (he must have been about 20) asked something along the lines of "Will Heaven and Earth ever come to an end?" Well, I knew the answer to this, I hadn't read the whole Bible but I knew Revelations had a bit about the end of the world and the dead rising from the grave, Jesus returning  and all of us good christians living in a paradise for ever with God. That surely meant that Heaven and Earth as we know them today must come to an end to be replaced by something better I reasoned, so up went my hand. When I was picked to answer I said something along the lines of the above and the young man's response was "No, heaven is eternal. Who told you that?" and I think I said something like "It's in Revelations at the end of the Bible isn't it? My dad told me." His response was "Well your dad is wrong." and moved on. This annoyed me for three reasons: a) he had made no attempt to look into and explain my misunderstanding to me b) he had insulted my dad (and I'm sorry, you don't get to do that) and (most importantly) c) I realised that, hang on, these people don't know their Bible. I thought back to what I had learned about the Bible over the years and realised that all we ever got told were the nice bits. People were either not telling us about or actually didn't know about the not so nice bits and they seemed to expect us not to have read the whole thing by ourselves. Even at that age I thought it was wrong that people who didn't seem to know everything about the Bible were trying to teach us about this religion we all shared that was based on the Bible!

Now at that time I hadn't read the whole Bible myself and I'm willing to accept that on that day at the age of 13 I may have been misinterpreting something I had only a vague knowledge of, but that is part of my point, I only had a vague knowledge of this important if slightly distasteful bit of the Bible and nobody was putting me right. They were just going back to the old "God is love" line that they always did at these things. This didn't actually put me off though and I kept going to church and continued to count myself as a Christian.

Meanwhile away from church I was learning about science. Not just at school, where to be honest I wasn't the most scholarly of pupils, but at home I would devour any documentary about science, history or nature I possibly could. I still mis QED and proper episodes of Horizon from the TV schedules. I learned about evolution this way and to be honest I just accepted it. It seemed so sensible and obvious I just assumed everyone accepted it and it didn't occur to me that it contradicted my religion at all. It did eventually cross my mind at some point but I just sort of thought "Oh well, Genesis was always a bit far fetched, that must be one of the bits we don't take too seriously". It wasn't until I came across some people (I can't remember where) seriously objecting to evolution that I realised there was a problem here. As I said, evolution seemed so obvious to me, it seemed so simple and clear that I was dumb struck some people objected to it. So I went home and thought about it and this is when I came up with an idea I'm sure a lot of creationists and apologists have come up with but to teenaged me it seemed like a ground breaking theory. It went something like this: God is a lot cleverer than us, he's all powerful and all knowing, what's to stop him putting some animals on the planet and then letting them change? Letting them evolve? It doesn't say in the Bible that he didn't do that. Maybe that's how he did creation? Who are we to ask? Why do we think he would do something as simple as just making everything out of plasticine and dumping it fully formed onto the planet? That's what we simple humans would do. Surely God would do something much more complex and clever than that - he's God for gods sake! This kept me happy for a long time. It seemed to cover everything. Something in science seems to contradict something in my religion? That must just be the way God did it. We're thinking he would do things the simple human way when actually he would do it the complicated godly way. I honestly kept thinking like this for years, into my 30's actually.

Remember though, there's this little seed growing in my mind, this little thing that keeps telling me "these people don't seem to have read all of the Bible. Why are they just telling us the same bland bits over and over again?" Then one day I took my car to be serviced. It was a FIAT and FIAT's tend to take a long time to be serviced. So I dropped it off at the garage and then wandered off down the park to read my book while waiting for them to call me when it was finished. The book was Douglas Adams' "The Salmon of Doubt." I'm a big Douglas Adams fan, I've read all of his books multiple times and they still make me laugh every time. The Salmon of Doubt was the novel he was partway through writing when he died, so when they published it to make it worth publishing they included some of his essays, early writing and short stories and while reading these essays it became clear to me that he wasn't just an atheist, he was quite a vocal atheist and he put forward a lot of good, well thought out arguments that I had never thought of. I won't go into them now because to be honest I can't remember them well enough to do them justice and I'd rather you just went and found the book for yourself. The more people who read Douglas Adams the better in my opinion. There was one thing he said that has and did stick in my mind though. I'm going to paraphrase this a bit but he asked why do we give religious thought more respect than any other form of thought? If someone says "I believe in God and that Jesus was his son" or "I believe in Allah and Mohammed is his prophet" or anything else along those lines, that's it, we say ok and leave it. No questioning, no debate. If a scientist says "I think man made carbon dioxide is causing the world to get warmer and hey, this might be a problem" instant debate. Everyone questions them. What if someone says "I don't believe in man made global warming because the Bible tells me it isn't happening"? Can we not question that person because they've based their "scientific" opinion on their religion? No, I think as a society we wouldn't. And this was his argument, he thought this was wrong. And after a short period of thinking so did I.

This little thing written by my favourite author made that little seed of doubt in my mind germinate into a seedling of doubt. Now, I could have gone onto the internet or gone to the library and looked stuff up on atheism at this point but I didn't. What I decided to do was read the Bible from cover to cover. Something I had still never done. I decided to read it dispassionately, with an analytic eye in the same way I would read a history book. 

Now if there's any religious people reading this who, like me at the time, have a little seed of doubt in them  there is nothing that is going to make your seed explode into a tree more than reading the Bible from cover to cover. I heartily recommend it. The first thing I realised was just how badly it's written, but then what do you expect from a book written by some bronze age shepherds? Then I started to notice the editing or lack thereof. On multiple occasions the same story is repeated at least once, sometimes twice, but with different names, within a page or two of each other. Either these characters were particularly stupid, not learning from history and repeating the same mistakes or someone wasn't keeping an eye on the continuity in this thing. The really big thing that started to make itself apparent though, was the basic, childish spitefulness of God. This all powerful, all knowing being who remember has planned all of history ahead of time, decides to do things like test his most ardent believer to the point of almost killing his own son just to see if his belief is true. Surely an all knowing god that can read our thoughts and can see the future would know if his belief was true or not. He doesn't seem to be powerful or all seeing enough to predict that earth is going to go to hell in a handcart but is powerful enough to flood the whole world and kill everything on it (almost) instead of just stopping it getting out of hand in the first place. I mean what was he doing? Was he distracted? Was he having a snooze somewhere? In all seriousness he acts like a petulant child or perhaps more accurately, he acts like a Bronze Age tribal chieftain might - jealous, insecure and weilding his power arbitrarily and inconsistently to keep his subjects in line. It's almost like the people writing it just based it all on things they knew and could relate to at the time. You know - this is how powerful people act so if we just turn it up to 11 this must be how a god would act too. Looking back at it he acts in the same sort of spiteful way other gods who's stories we know were said to act. Look at the Norse gods or the Greek gods, they all acted in the same sort of weird, inconsistent way. I started to wonder what the difference was. Why did we, and more importantly why did I see this god as special as compared to Zeus or Thor? In the end I couldn't read it all. I read all of the Old Testament and up to Acts in the New Testament and just had to stop. I was just seeing problems everywhere and decided I couldn't take any more of it. I wanted to look at better evidence but what better evidence was there for God than the Bible?

Skip forward in time a year or so and at work I have moved on to a new team and on this team there are two people, one of whom I had been friends with for a long time and another I knew to talk to but not very well. They were both atheists and were both interested in science in the same way I am and would both talk about both subjects a lot. I've got to say I didn't join in a lot but I was sitting there just soaking it up. They mentioned certain writers, commentators, books, blogs and websites which I went home and devoured. I started with Ben Goldacre and his Bad Science blog (mainly for the science and his anti-pseudo science stuff) and then moved onto people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I also did a little research of my own - I read up on who historians thought had written the Bible and when and I've got to say doing that explained a lot. Again I won't go into it now as it is way too long and there's no way I would do it justice but to find out just how that book was stitched together by a huge number of different people all with their own political, economic and spiritual agendas explained a lot about inconsistencies and outright contradictions in it. I also found lot of stuff on YouTube like The Thinking Atheist and The Atheist Experience as well as individuals like DarkMatter2525, Thunderf00t, Laci Green and JaclynGlenn. I don't necessarily agree with absolutely everything they say but I could see that a lot of people had had similar experiences I had and had come to the same sort of conclusions but were all a lot better at communicating it than I am!

I heard all of these different arguments, ones that I had thought of myself, ones that never would have crossed my mind but seem obvious now like this one: if God is love then why does he allow otherwise good people to be tortured for eternity in Hell for having the unfortunate bad luck to have been born in a country where Christianity is not the main religion? Why would he not do a better job of trying to convert them? He obviously isn't very loving at all. I had never even contemplated that but bloody hell, that is an incredibly good point. A very powerful one in my mind.

So here I am, writing this now and it just seems so obvious that there is no supernatural power controlling everything. We don't have souls that go to Heaven or Hell or get reincarnated into the body of a slug or an ox. There is no afterlife. All we get is this one and it's up to us to make the best of it and just not be dicks to each other. We just have to look at what we as a species knows about physics and biology to see that we have better ways of explaining the world around us than to have to resort to stuff that simple, understandably ignorant, Bronze Age tribespeople came up with to try and explain it to themselves. We can look at thousands of years worth of history to see that there's no plan, that religion just causes trouble. It's always just been either an excuse for different "tribes" of people to be awful to "others" or a way of making elites rich and controlling the mob. And just to say something specifically about Christianity - Jesus has had over 2000 years to come back now. Not only has he not come back but he's also stopped even getting in touch. If he really loves us maybe he should put in a proper appearance instead of just making statues cry and turning up on slices of toast. Either that or perhaps it's time we all, like I have, accept that he's not there and move on.