How I became a Christian and then lost my faith

I was born and raised in the Bible Belt, specifically, Texas. In my community it was taken for granted that the Bible is the word of God. From the earliest age I remember going to church and saying this prayer before bedtime, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord, my soul to take.”

Other than going to church, buying Christian themed decorations and quoting a few select Bible verses, nobody in my community lived like Jesus or the Apostles. They lived like modern Americans. So I adopted their lukewarm approach to Christianity as well. I tried not to lie, steal, lust, hate, miss church or masturbate, and I felt profoundly guilty when I committed these sins. Sometimes I prayed and put a few dollars in the offering plate at church. Outside of Sunday school I never read the Bible.

My real life revolved around going to school, trying to make friends, figuring out life and coping with the drama that life throws at you. I had a very rocky childhood, and my life started sliding out of control before I got to high school. I started hanging out with the rejects at school, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, stealing, committing petty crimes, running from the cops, and listening to heavy metal music.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I did all of those self-destructive things because I was looking for meaningful connections to life. I hung out with the rejects, because they accepted me without judgment. I poisoned my body, because that was the only other thing outside of my friends that made me feel alive. I binge-listened to angry musicians, because they understood my emptiness and pain.

By my sophomore year I was basically never sober. The farther from sobriety I ran, the more I lost touch with reality. I lived in a dream land. Sometimes I danced through Technicolor flower fields, but mostly I wandered in the dark looking for a lighted path that would take me back to the happiness and wholeness I felt as a child.

As my life spiraled downward, I had two near-death experiences on drugs and almost got arrested when a house I was doing hallucinogens at got raided by the police. Before things could get worse, my mother kicked me out of her house for doing drugs, and I had to move from Paris, TX, to my father’s house, eight hours away in Jourdanton, TX. The only Bible verse I ever heard my father quote was, “Spare the rod; spoil the child.”

Having lost all my friends and all meaningful connections in my life, my soul drifted in free fall. I felt like I was in outer space. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I didn’t want to spend time with my father. So I stayed in my room and listened to songs that reminded me of my friends. The only book in my room was a copy of Nave’s Topical Bible, which listed Bible verses according to topic. Having a lot of anger at God and nothing else to do, I read what God had to say about love, hate and forgiveness.

I didn’t understand the context of any of the passages or the passages themselves, but they fascinated me. There was a murky message of love and salvation, both of which I needed badly. These thoughts percolated in my brain for months until I had the opportunity to go back to Paris and see my friends. We got together like old times and did drugs. It was refreshing but painfully nostalgic. At the end of the night, everyone else went to sleep, and I stayed up for several more hours day dreaming intoxicated visions.

That night I had a vision of God. His body was in the shape of a human but made of glowing love. He looked like one of the aliens on the movie, “Cocoon.” We had a long conversation in which He told me I was loved and accepted. Everything is fine, and everything is going to work out. Life is important, and we all have something important to do without our lives. I could still fulfill the meaning of life. I just have to give up my hedonistic ways. So the next morning I threw away my cigarettes and quit all my poisons cold turkey.

I made up my mind that it was time to get serious about God. So I started going to church regularly, and I got a real Bible. I read the New Testament cover to cover several times. In 1997 I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and savior at a Billy Graham convention in San Antonio. A few months later I was baptized in a Southern Baptist church in Charlotte, TX.

By the time I graduated high school I was convinced I should become a pastor. So I scheduled a meeting with the man who had baptized me, Brother Sewell. We met at a Dairy Queen and talked about seminary school. Brother Sewell said that if there’s anything else I could imagine being happier doing than preaching, then I should do that thing. Reluctantly, I admitted, I would be happier teaching art or being a comic book artist. So he told me to go do that.

I took his advice not to go to seminary school and preach in a church, but I knew I had a nack for explaining things. So I compromised and decided I would use books and comics as my pulpit. I wasn’t a good (or rich) enough artist to go to art school, and I wanted to work in a profession that helped people directly.

So when I graduated high school, I chose to study social work at the University of Mary~Hardin Baylor, a Christian university with a reputation for being unapologetically serious about Jesus Christ. Every event on campus opened with a prayer, and every student had to attend mandatory church services. There were always student-led Bible studies going on somewhere on campus. Every student also had to take at least one semester in religious studies.

I chose to take the hardest course they offered, a year-long, in depth survey of The Torah. I wanted to know every detail about how my religion came into existence, and The Torah was so boring and confusing, I figured this was my best shot at understanding it.

This decision wasn’t just for my benefit. I felt confident that if I could master the basics of Christianity then I could write the proof to end all proofs that would convince any Atheist that the Bible was the true word of God.

My professor was a genius named Dr. Stephen Von Wyrick. He spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin fluently. He spent his summers in Israel excavating religious ruins. The textbooks he taught from weren’t Christian propaganda. They were gigantic, rigorous, boring history books. Dr. Von Wyrick knew as much as a human being can know about the historical context of the The Torah.

He also believed wholeheartedly in the divinity of the entire Bible. So I’m sure he would be appalled by the fact that, more than anyone else, he was responsible for me losing my faith. He took my class through the Torah line by line and explained everything that was happening. He showed how to tell when different authors had written different passages within the same book. He explained how miracles could often be attributed to naturally occurring events. He explained all the barbaric cultural practices of ancient Middle Eastern churches and their symbiotic relationship with ancient Middle Eastern culture in general.

Even without understanding all the background information, simply reading the entire Torah from cover to cover shook my faith in unexpected ways. It did not contain a message of love and acceptance. The original covenant God had with mankind, was for humans to slaughter animals for God to bask in their blood, and for God to kill the enemies of the Jewish state. The laws God commanded His people to follow were barbaric or trivial. The whole story was so chaotically thrown together, there was no hope of reconciling all its contradictions, scientific inaccuracies and psychotic moral code.

Making sense of the Bible is even more difficult when you try connecting the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Torah arguably never prophesied about the coming of Jesus. Even if Jesus was the Son of God, that still doesn’t explain why God changed from approving of slavery and preaching destruction to approving of slavery and preaching love (most of the time).

So I asked every educated Christian I could how I could reconcile the problems I’d found in the Bible. Without exception, every single person told me to, “Just have faith.” They couldn’t explain any of the problems and didn’t want to. This infuriated me, because if we didn’t understand the Bible, that meant we didn’t understand what we believed in. So when we witnessed to non-believers, we were telling them, “I don’t know what I believe in, but you have to believe it too.”

The further I pursued my questions, the more I found myself piecing together an explanation of why the Bible is just a standard, archaic mythology produced by a primitive culture and not the word of God. This scared me to the depth of my soul. I was afraid God would send me to Hell for entertaining those thoughts, let alone believing them.

The more I dove back into the Bible to find the clues I’d missed, the more mythology I found. It was like watching a train wreck. I watched it until I couldn’t take it anymore. I shut my Bible one last time and let out a huge defeated sigh as I accepted the undeniable truth staring me in the face: Christianity is mythology, and I would never find salvation in it. Even then, it took me over a year to admit out loud that I’d lost my faith.

That happened at the age of twenty. It wasn’t until seven years later that I began writing down my argument for why Christianity is mythology. I’ve been posting those on my blog ever since. In 2015 I consolidated them into a stand alone E-book that you can purchase on Amazon. You can still read them individually for free on The Wise Sloth.

After leaving the church I didn’t think of myself as an atheist. All I knew was that I was lost. If I had to label myself at the time, I would have called myself an Existentialist, or simply a searcher. Search I did. As depressed and disconnected as I felt, I wasn’t suicidal. I didn’t know what life was for, but I knew a lot of trouble went into creating it, and I believed life was some kind of opportunity with some kind of potential.

Desperate for any glimmer of direction, I read most of the other religious books the world follows. Without exception, I found the same patterns of inconsistencies, incoherencies, inaccuracies, absurdities and culturally relative morals I’d found in the Bible.

Like the Bible, they all also contained useful information. You could even find patterns in some of their wisdom that different religions agreed on. I didn’t take this as evidence that God had a hand in every book, but rather that some morals are self-evident. If you were going to make your own religion, probably the first rule you’d pick is, “Don’t go around killing people.”

Simply proving mythological gods don’t exist, doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist. Since I know that I don’t know the first thing about the universe, I’m not qualified to state emphatically that there is no God. The ingeniously elegant patterns in nature give me reason to suspect a higher force could have played a hand at creating the universe, but that force seems to have left us on our own to sink or swim.

I would like a more cut and dried answer to life’s questions, but the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that we’re here, and our lives are our responsibility to figure out using the tools we’ve been given. I’ve been trying to do that as best I can. I’m constantly updating my conclusions, which you can find listed below and on my Table of Contents:

The Bible is mythology

Christianity is bad for you and society

Churches and Christian Culture

Life

Agnosticism and Atheism

Thinking

Ethics

Personal Growth

Personal Behavior