FYI<\/em><\/span>: This post was written as a response to this written request that I made of the author: \u201c<\/em>Your <\/em>blog<\/em><\/a> offers vivid descriptions about how becoming an atheist affects your life, but it doesn\u2019t focus much on how you actually got to be an atheist. Please tell me about that.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n ============================<\/strong><\/p>\n By \u201cJohn Jameson\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n The \u201chow\u201d of becoming an atheist is difficult to decipher because there weren\u2019t one or two things that pointed me away from faith.\u00a0 My faith died a death of a thousand cuts.\u00a0 It was a complete collapse of my entire belief system.\u00a0 What I can say is that my realization that I had become an atheist certainly had waypoints.\u00a0 It was January 2013 when NPR (I\u2019m an avid NPR fan) did a weeklong series on \u201cLosing our Religion<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s when I first heard of pastors in the pulpit coming out as atheists, which I found fascinating in a moth-to-a-flame kind of way.\u00a0 It filled me with the same kind of questions I\u2019m sure many readers of this blog have.<\/p>\n Why would a pastor become an atheist?<\/p>\n How do they find employment?<\/p>\n What happens to their social life?\u00a0 Their kids?\u00a0 Their spouses?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I believe the NPR series was when I first heard of the Clergy Project.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t the pastors\u2019 stories that I found most threatening.\u00a0It was a rock band in the series that gave me goose bumps.<\/p>\n Out of Austin, Texas there is a band called \u201cQuiet Company\u201d which is fronted by an ex-Christian.\u00a0 They made \u201cWe Are All Where We Belong\u201d<\/a> as sort of a break-up album.\u00a0 The singer was breaking up with God.\u00a0 Most of the atheism-inspired rock I\u2019ve listened to is angst directed against religious institutions.\u00a0 But this album expressed the raw emotions of a man who had come to realize that God did not exist.\u00a0 You hear his hurt, his rage, his fears and his epiphanies.\u00a0 All of this is accompanied by really solid rock ballads.\u00a0 Hell, I\u2019d still listen to it if the lyric topic was romance. The music is just that good.\u00a0 The album is epic.\u00a0 And I was afraid to listen to it.<\/p>\n My heart raced just hearing about the album and listening to the singer being interviewed.<\/p>\n This was my story.<\/p>\n This was my disappointment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And if I wasn\u2019t careful, I\u2019d accidently allow myself to feel everything this man is singing about.<\/p>\n But I still maintained some intellectual honesty.\u00a0 If I refused to listen to this album, then I was conceding defeat, and I couldn\u2019t do that.\u00a0 So I listened to the album, one song at a time, with days in between listening sessions.\u00a0 I processed his feelings, convinced myself that I was different and then moved on with my day.\u00a0 But I couldn\u2019t leave that album behind. I kept coming back to it.\u00a0 So I repressed the intellect that was telling my emotions that perhaps there is no God and I continued a forced belief in God.<\/p>\n A couple of years later I met my friend Mark, whom I\u2019ve talked about<\/a> on my blog.\u00a0 He\u2019s an atheist ex-pastor.\u00a0 After he left his ministry he moved with his pregnant wife to take a job near where I live.\u00a0 His wife was looking for a church to attend, so I invited her to my wife\u2019s bible study.\u00a0 Later, we had them over for dinner.<\/p>\n Mark turned out to be a guy of absolute dizzying intellect. He was a true scholar of biblical studies.\u00a0 This was not your average atheist troll; this was a man who knew the Bible better than I did, who had taught the Bible better than I had, who eventually realized that he couldn\u2019t believe anymore.\u00a0 Mark\u2019s life was tragically hard due to his deconversion. He and his wife split and now his baby lives clear across the country.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want that to happen to me.\u00a0 But it bugged me that all my reasoning and \u201canswers\u201d were absolute crap in this man\u2019s hands.\u00a0 I had secretly known it but refused to believe it until I posed my arguments to someone who could easily defeat them.<\/p>\n I told him that debating with him was like bringing a knife to a nuclear war<\/strong>.<\/p>\n With minimal debate, I saw that a reasonable man who had once truly believed had walked away from belief and there was no way I could blame him or find fault in his reasoning.\u00a0 But because his lack of belief had cost him his wife and child, I further suppressed my doubts in an attempt to avoid the same fate.<\/p>\n Then last fall I had my own existential crisis.\u00a0 I could no longer deny that it felt like no one was listening to my prayers.\u00a0 Whether or not I prayed, things were going to turn out the way they were going to turn out.\u00a0 What\u2019s worse, I had long prayed for God to help me with my depression.\u00a0 I was experiencing a strong depressive moment praying for God to help me when I got angry that God had never done anything about it.\u00a0 Was he even listening to me?\u00a0 Did he care about my family and me?\u00a0 Why couldn\u2019t he help me?\u00a0 Then I admitted that maybe the reason why my prayers were unanswered was because there was no one there to listen to them.<\/p>\n At that moment I became a deist.<\/p>\n After sitting with my deism long enough, I decided to go back to \u201cWe Are All Where We Belong\u201d and listen to it from the first note to the last.\u00a0 Then I had it on repeat.\u00a0 I listened to it for weeks straight, playing no other music when I was alone.\u00a0 And I processed what it meant to no longer have a god who cares about me.<\/p>\n So it was time for me to move forward and start considering other career options.\u00a0 That\u2019s when I remembered the Clergy Project.\u00a0 However, deists have no place with TCP.\u00a0 According to its public website<\/a>, members embrace an entirely natural explanation for the universe, and as a deist I couldn\u2019t do that.\u00a0 But then I thought, \u201cWhy is deism different from atheism?\u201d\u00a0 Well, deism says that there is a supernatural force that started the universe on its natural path.\u00a0 Was there any evidence of this supernatural force?\u00a0 Nope.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n =====================<\/strong><\/p>\n \u00a0**Editor\u2019s Questions**<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>According to your count, how many and what types of media contributed to his move from faith to no faith? How does this differ from your experience? Any guesses about likely future influences?<\/p>\n ===================<\/strong><\/p>\n Bio: \u201cJohn Jameson\u201d <\/strong>is currently the pastor a conservative non-denominational Evangelical Church.\u00a0 He attended a moderately liberal seminary and is a member of The Clergy Project.\u00a0 He blogs about his experiences at https:\/\/pastornofaith.wordpress.com<\/a><\/p>\n >>>>>>>>Photo Credits:<\/p>\n![\"NPR](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/468\/2015\/06\/NPR-News-logo.png\"){kind=logo}
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<\/a>Bam \u2014 atheist.<\/p>\n