Made in Our Image
How I began my journey away from religion
In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James talks a lot about the conversion experience. One thing he emphasizes is that conversion doesn’t just happen. A whole lot of other experiences have to lay the foundation for it. You could say the same thing about deconversion.
I can distinctly remember the first time I seriously questioned whether the Catholic faith I had been raised in was true. I was in my early teens, maybe a freshman in high school. I was standing at the edge of a path leading from my backyard into the forest behind our house, and I was struck by a powerful image. But just as James suggests, to really understand that moment and what it meant to me, you have to go back several years and look at the way earlier experiences set the stage.
I learned to read when I was five, and like many kids that age I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I read as many books as I could find, and I was particularly drawn to books that explained the scientific basis for our knowledge about dinosaurs, what they looked like, how they behaved, and so on. In that way I was first introduced to the idea of evolution by means of natural selection, years before my classmates and I would take it up in high school biology. And that idea made a deep impression on me.
