Why I Am Not An Atheist

Kullervo
June 30, 2007
https://byzantium.wordpress.com/2007/06/30/why-i-am-not-an-atheist/

One of the funny things about this blog, wherein I document my spiritual journey to some kind
of truth or meaning or whatever, is that whichever twist or turn I take, there’s always a chorus of
cheerleaders telling me I’m doing the right thing. That’s why when my journey then takes me
away from whatever detour it had me wandering through, I’m often reluctant to say so, in fear of
disappointing the people who were excited that I stopped by.

I first noticed this with paganism. When I was looking into neopaganism and druidry, I attracted
many neopagans and druids who were excited by the path my journey was leading me down.
When it then led me back away from paganism, they mostly kind of faded into the woodwork
(with some exceptions- I’ve picked up some good friends along the way). And I was sad to say
that I didn’t think paganism or druidry was going to be where I ended up, because I knew those
people would be let down in a sense. On the other hand, pagans tend to be really nice,
nonjudgmental people, and as long as I’m not making fun of them or damning them to Hel, I’m
pretty sure they’ve still got my back.

However, this dilemma was much more acute with atheism. When I ultimately spiralled into
nonbelief, I was greeted with accolades and cheers from some of the internet’s atheists, for
finally freeing myself from the shackles of atheism and being a mature human being who didn’t
need deities as crutches anymore. When I decided that atheism wasn’t going to really work for
me, I was reluctant to say so. For starters, accolades are nice. And the opposite of accolades is
scorn, and I didn’t really want that.

Of course, I wasn’t really going to let how other people decide how I believe or don’t believe,
but there was a minute where I was at least a little bit cagey about saying anything. I was getting
so much support for declaring my atheism, and when I recanted, that support would probably
vanish.

I say all of that by way of introduction to this post. My goal here is to explain why I stopped
believing in God and why I started again. This might be a long post, so hang on to your hats.

When I first started seriously questioning the Mormon church last summer, my initial criticisms
were centered around my feeling that Mormonism wasn’t Christian enough- Mormonism and
Mormon scripture didn’t track closely enough with what I thought Christianity was all about
(based on the New Testament, Church history, and the true Christians that I had come across
over time). I felt like Mormonism was not leading me closer to Christ, but actually keeping me
away from Him. Thus, in leaving Mormonism, my initial question was “what kind of Christian
should I be?”

When I started this blog, my wife and I had only recently decided to actually leave Mormonism
behind us, after struggling with it for some six months. I had also just read Donald Miller’s Blue
Like Jazz, and I felt like becoming a Christian was something I wanted to do, but I wasn’t sure

1
how to go about doing it. For some reason I didn’t feel like I already was a Christian, like I was
already really committed to Jesus.

The problem was that my reasons for believing in Jesus, and in fact my reasons for believing in
God at all, were basically the same reasons I believed in Mormonism. That is, I had simply been
raised to assume that they were true, and this assumption was backed up by emotional “spiritual”
confirmations. In deciding that those bases were insufficient for continued belief in Mormonism,
I also took out the foundation, as flimsy as it may have been, for my entire belief in God. In other
words, the same conclusions that made me question my belief in Mormonism made me
ultimately question my belief in Jesus Christ and in any kind of God whatesoever.

I was waiting for some kind of mystical experience, some kind of contact with the divine that
was the real deal, not the easy “warm fuzzy” self-delusion of Mormonism’s Holy Ghost. I was
waiting for God to reach out and shake me, to let me know that he was real, to give me some
kind of contact. But it kept not happening.

With that in mind, I began giving a loud voice to my inner skeptic. I started reading Ebon
Musings’s essays on atheism, which are honestly extremely compelling and very difficult to
dispute. Eventually, I was in a place where I had to admit that I had no real reason to believe in
God other than wishful thinking, and if I was to be honest with myself, I would have to admit
that I simply did not believe.

It seemed like a destination of sorts. It wasn’t what I was shooting for when I set out towards
Byzantium, but maybe the place we intend to be is often a lot less realistic than the place we
really wind up. I wasn’t a nihilist or anything; I still had some core beliefs that I was more or less
confident in. But I could not say that I affirmatively believed in God.

The thing was, I wasn’t happy. I didn’t really want to be an atheist. I actually like religion!
Specifically, I was (and still am) convinced that while an atheist can be a very good and moral
person, and that a religious person can be a complete jerkwad, nevertheless for me personally,
religion in general and Christianity in specific were going to have a much greater potential to
make me the kind of person that I wished I was. I could be a good person and an atheist, that was
never in question. But no atheist philosophy was going to actually transform me into a New Man.
And Christianity made that promise.

But my problem was that if I was going to believe something, it would have to be more
intellectually honest than my beliefs had previously been. No putting doubts on the shelf. No
convincing myself until I was convinced. Nothing like that. I wanted to believe, but I didn’t want
it so bad that i was willing to delude myself into believing.

So I went about tentatively trying to figure out how I could believe in God despite my loud
internal skeptic (but without squashing him and pretending he didn’t exist) and despite the very
good and compelling logical arguments against God’s existence, and the generally weak and
limp logical arguments for God’s existence.

2
I read some Kierkegaard. I thought about how God and logic would interact, if there was a God.
I thought about doubt, and whether there was a place for it within faith. I read Brian
McLaren’s Finding Faith. I thought about hope.

In the end, I made a place where I thought I could theoretically believe in God. I had room for
God in my framework again. However, having room for God, i.e., acknowledging the possibility
of God, doesn’t equal belief in God. If, at that point, I had simply declared myself a believer, I
would have been guilty of doing the very thing I was most loathe to do: talking myself into
believing. Instead, I let it simmer for awhile.

At the same time, I started thinking seriously about Jesus Christ, and I found him extremely
compelling. Christianity still kind of gave me the heebie jeebies, so I was still reluctant to even
express interest in the religion. But the man? The more I thought about Jesus, the more I felt like
there was something to him. Something more. I wasn’t really sure what it was, but I knew I liked
it, and maybe I even needed it.

I then let this stew for a bit. The more I thought about God, the more I thought that maybe God
exists after all, despite my efforts to logic him out of existence. And the more I thought about
Jesus, the more he seemed electrifying, powerful, important. Much more so than a simple wise
moral philosopher, however great he may have been.

When I read C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, I finished the book and realized that after reading
it, there was no way I could ever say that I do not believe in God. I can’t explain it very well,
because the book touched me on an extremely personal, maybe even primal level. But it
completely evaporated all of my defenses. It didn’t resolve my concerns or wipe away all of my
doubts or anything, but it spoke loud and clear to me: nevertheless, there is a God. It was a life-
changing experience that I can’t do justice in writing or even in speaking- it was so strange and
powerful that I have a hard time articulating exactly what it was about the book that changed my
whole way of looking at God.

Once I had made room for the possibility of God, Till We Have Faces showed me that God was a
sure thing. All of my anger, my logic, my insecurity, my waffling, and my careful arguments are
made completely insignificant when faced with God’s existence.

In any case, that’s where I am now. I am sure that there is a God, and I suspect that Jesus might
actually have been God. I’ve not got a lot more than that. I suppose it’s a start. I can’t really be
the poster child for honest atheism anymore, but I probably never should have been. I’m not at
my destination yet- in fact I don’t know if I’ll ever really “have arrived”- but I like where I’m
sailing right now, and I’m interested and excited to see what’s ahead.