The Personal Testimony of a Fallen Christian

I believe that the process that I went through to reach my state of disbelief represents the biggest challenge to Christianity. I began my religious excursion when I was about 11 years old. My best friend was a born again Christian who had brought a mutual friend of ours to his church and Sunday school. I can remember them working on their Sunday school lesson together as I sat on the side feeling left out.

When that summer rolled around I was invited to a weekend Christian camp for games, horseback riding, hiking, and a good mixture of proselytizing. It was at this camp that I became a "born again Christian" and got to join the "crowd," so to speak. Now I was able to attend the Sunday school with my friends and was able to make a lot of new friends, including, what was new for me at the time, girls! I even had the additional benefit of being Jewish by birth, which among many fundamentalists Christians was considered an extra blessing.

One tends to think of a Christian community as somewhat tight knit and reinforcing but this is not always the case. Many Christians live most of their time in the secular world and only associate with other Christians at specific times. For them, and me, frequent reinforcement is necessary. This is provided for among youths with various camps and outings. During my high school years I attended winter and summer camp on six occasions to get this reinforcement but found the "mountain top" effect wore off fairly quickly. I would settle down to a more latent Christianity that was part of my life but did not dominate it.

This would change for me when I began attending college. As a high school senior I considered attending a Christian university and was actually accepted for admittance. I elected, instead, to attend a secular university with a better reputation for producing employment after graduation. In my initial semester I took a course in political theory. It was in this course that I was first exposed to the historical Jesus, not simply the Jesus of Christianity. It was the first time I learned of the historicity of the Bible stories as opposed to spiritual mythology taught in church. There was actually a context and tangible component to the religion which went far beyond my faith based teaching encapsulated in John 3:16.

By my second semester I was taking science classes including geology, astronomy, and anthropology. What these courses were teaching was not easily reconcilable with the reality being taught in the Church I still attended each Sunday. On one of these Sundays I picked up a Bible tract which gave the Christian view of evolution. I read it with amazement. It was, on the one hand, so simplistic as to be laughable. On the other hand, it posed counter explanations that were at least 100 years out-of-date, using arguments I knew to be ridiculous even before learning how the scientific method actually functions. What struck me at the time was how pathetically naive they were and how much effort was required to reconcile the Bible with empirical evidence. Even today I can recapture this amazement by reading the explanations presented in Answers In Genesis (http://www.answersingenesis.com).

It was at this point that I realized that the only way the Christian faith made any sense was if one completely ignores the real world. The more I was exposed to the natural world the more nonsensical the Christian explanations for that world became. By the middle of my first year in college I stopped attending church.

By about my third year I had an occasion to date a girl from my old high school church days. She had gone from high school to cosmetology school and had a decent job and her own apartment. On one of these dates we met up with a few from the "old gang" from the church. It was during this evening of ice cream and reminiscing that I realized how far I'd grown and how little they had changed. I stopped referring to myself as a Christian.

I went on to attend graduate school and finally learned how the scientific method actually works. Eventually I would earn my PhD. I had become a non-believer without having to try very hard. I did not have to know that much about science. At the time I didn't even know that much about Christian theology. All that was needed was to put the two explanations of natural phenomena next to each other. Once I could overcome the need for that reassurance that justice would somehow be achieved in an after life, I knew that I was a non-believer. I also understand that many people of science do not want to give up on the concept of a just state in this world or the next, and so hang on to a portion of religion that provides this reassurance.

In my subsequent years studying the different religions; the texts they hold as sacred; as well as the history behind those texts; I have not learned anything that has made me less of a believer. Certainly, nothing has made me more of a believers (in any of the faiths, let alone Christianity). Nothing beyond my initial exploration has pushed me farther away. It has just confirmed what I learned then.

I have come to understand that years of education and study are just overkill. Just a small fragment of education and a willingness to explore one's religion is all that is necessary for the process of disbelief to begin. If everyone had to earn a PhD before they became skeptical of the fundamentals of religion there would be very few non-believers. This ultimately is the biggest challenge to religious faith. Scientific progress is making the universe both more understandable and more entertaining to learn about. At the same time more and new questions arise producing more people wanting to learn about them. This is a deadly combination. The excitement of learning about natural phenomena is encouraging children to take those steps toward education and understanding. Christians are correct in seeing the education of their children as a path towards their extinction. Teaching about dinosaurs and biology and evolution is the surest way out of the bronze age faith. As I hope I have illustrated, it only takes a few small steps and the door starts to open wide.