It's been a little over a year since I left Christianity in August of 2025 (it is October of 2026, as I write this). I wanted to reflect further on my Christianity, my Theism, and what led me to such an intense obsession with religion during my teenage and early adult life.
If there is one thing that can be said to have dominated my life up to this point, it is my overwhelming fear of death. I remember as a kid - maybe only 6 or 7 years old - being tremendously upset at the prospect of my parents dying. I don't know why it struck me particularly hard then. But I felt confronted very strongly with such an ugly part of reality, which I felt an extremely strong aversion to.
I think that in response to that rather horrible feeling, I became extraordinarily eager, or "primed" to accept any answer which would protect me from the finality of death, and loss. I felt that it simply could not be reality that my loved ones would die, that I would end, and most horrible of all, that there would be no "happy ending" to reality. I wouldn't have put it in those words, of course, back then. But I had a powerful and persistent intuition that almost wanted to "debunk" that life would end, and that I would lose those who I loved.
Of course, as a kid, I had no formalized theology. I believed in God because my family did, and later, as I went to Catholic school, my friends did as well. It wasn't until high school that I remember actually scrutinizing my beliefs regarding the existence of God, and my worldview. I remember a brief spell of study when I was a freshman. But it wouldn't be until my junior year, when I read a section on Pascal's Wager in my European history book, that I became intensely fascinated with philosophy and religion, and began to re-examine things in earnest.
I was 16 years old when I read that section in my history book on Pascal's Wager. That led to researching other philosophical arguments for belief in God at home, and to watching debates on the existence of God. In short order, I became very convinced by Christian apologetics, and dove headlong into fundamentalist Christianity.
Here, I found not only assurance of belief in God, but of Salvation. And that meant everything to me. And I do mean everything. I must have driven my family insane during this period of time. It felt so indescribably good to have finally put death in its place. In my finer moments (more on this in a moment), I felt a sense of peace that cannot be rivaled by anything on earth. My friends would not have to leave me. I would not have to say goodbye. Everything would turn out alright in the end (well - if you believed in Jesus).
However, because this meant so much to me, I became tremendously defensive of it, and extremely upset by the prospect of it not being true. As a result, I felt a strong compulsion to verify and ensure that what I believed was irrefutably true. And, this led to a very difficult and exhausting period in my life, from which it would take a very long time to finally emerge.
I will tell you how most of my days went from ages 16 to 26:
For years, and years. This desperate cycle, during this time, was something completely normal to me. It felt so necessary, and so urgent. It was constantly lurking in the background, at all times. So, more research. More articles. More books on apologetics. More debates, and more thinking.
I look back now, and feel a tremendous sense of pity for the person that I was then. I now see that I was very scared, and even though the search exhausted me, the alternative seemed so scary that I would go to any length to avoid it. It makes me cry to think about that person, and the people who I interacted with, and listened to, who were in many cases very similar to me - fearful, and holding onto something which made the pain go away. It meant so much to me, words cannot describe it, and any attempt to convey it in writing will always fall so far short of doing it justice.
At the root of all of it was the fear of death. The refusal of death, and abhorrence of it. That is what spurred me on for that period of obsession. I had found my cure, and was not about to let it go for anything.
When I was 26 years old, the weight of cognitive dissonance had become immense. I now knew far too much about the Bible to hold to any form of fundamentalism. And, I always regarded liberal Christians as hypocrites - so I refused to become that. Instead, I sat in a strange sort of middle position, holding extremely nuanced and idiosyncratic beliefs, desperately trying to assemble it all into something that seemed compelling. And yet, I knew in my mind that I was very likely wrong, and that Christianity had so many serious problems that it was probably not true.
It is hard to communicate how devastating this felt. The balm for my sadness - the cure which allowed me to wrestle control back from death, and undo how it had "cheated" me - had become unbelievable to me, and I knew that I could no longer say that I believed in it. Losing this was infinitely worse than losing a family member. A family member would be there for me in the Heaven that I believed in. Losing the entire framework for how I understood the world and reality, and that served as the foundation for my ultimate hope, was something incomparably awful.
I still grieve this loss. I really did want Christianity to be true. And, I diligently searched for proof that it was. But unfortunately, it did not pan out, and I knew that. Continuing to be Christian was no longer a choice for me at this point. It was simply a fact that I had crossed the "point of no return", so to speak, with regard to belief in the Bible.
After I left Christianity, I retained a belief in God (Theism). These days, I don't know what to believe. I can see that both Atheism and Theism have merit. On the whole, I would say that the strongest arguments for Atheism would be the silence of God, and the problem of evil. The strongest arguments for Theism would be the intuition regarding the "fine-tuning" of the universe, and the utter, eternal strangeness of reality under Atheism.
In any case, reality is profoundly, indescribably strange. And the situation that a human being is placed into is very difficult. We are faced with mortality, injustice, a massive, silent universe which we cannot traverse, and so many unanswered questions. I don't blame younger me for desperately clinging to something which made sense to him at the time, in the face of all of that. How could I? I am only glad that I spent 10 years, rather than 30, trapped in the worst of it (the miserable cycle mentioned earlier).
To my fear of death - I can't say that I have a clean resolution, or that I think that there is one to be found. I will die one day, of course, that is absolutely certain. I hope that there is something afterwards. If there is not, I will not know it, nor be there to grieve my loss, but it will be a loss nonetheless. Reality should have a happy ending - not only for me, but for all life. I still feel the weight of that intuition.
But if mortality was ultimately unsolvable, then I cannot fault myself for losing an unwinnable game. I will say that if God does not exist, then reality basically dissolves into nonsense - an eternal unconscious object which exists for no reason, and then causes a reality which contains so many distinct and complex features. How any of that could be possible would never make sense to me, and anyone in that system would be put in an essentially impossible situation with respect to making sense of it. If that view of reality turns out to be true, then I never had a chance of figuring things out anyway, because at base, reality would be inexplicable and arbitrary.1
Going forward, I think that the healthiest way to live involves occupying one's time with things that they love to do, and people whose company they enjoy. If a finite life is all there is, then it is one's duty to themselves to try to enjoy it. If one chooses to hold out hope for something more after death, that is fine, but I would strongly guard against letting it dominate one's life, as it dominated mine.
If there is a Creator of all things, they will clarify things in the end. If there is not, then busying oneself with these types of questions only tends toward a feeling of powerlessness, akin to watching the news, and becoming terribly upset about things over which one has no real control. That is not a good way to live, and does not actually help anything. I know very well (I feel comfortable saying, "better than most") how rumination can feel productive, but ultimately, it does more harm than good.
In closing, I want to express that I am thankful that I exist, even in spite of these profoundly difficult questions about reality. Though life is finite, it is a gift. And, even though good times end, it is far better that they happened, as opposed to them never having happened at all. I think it is better to think of life that way, so that the past and future do not rob today of its potential.
1. Suppose that the universe - that is, the unconscious collection of all physical things that exist - is all that exists. Then, there would be a tremendous amount of causeless complexity and arbitrariness in reality. For example, why should gravity exist, and have the precise value that it has? Why should quarks exist, and have their precise characteristics? Etc., etc.
On the other hand, suppose God is all that exists, and God is a necessary being embodying the pinnacle of the "great-making" characteristics - omnipotence, omniscience, and so on. There would be basically no arbitrariness in that picture at all, because all of God's characteristics would be what they are because they instantiate whatever "perfection" means for that characteristic, rather than some unexplained, limited degree.
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