What It Was Like To Lose Faith

I ask myself

How can I describe how it felt to someone else?

What did it feel like to lose faith?

To lose belief in God?

How can I help another person understand?

Did I just want to sin?

Did I just want him gone?

Am I a self-exile?

A pariah seeking attention?

No

The pain was real

I held on to the chains that bound me

Until my hands bled

I only let go of the chains

When I realized that the anchor was not there

 

For me

It was as though my best friend died

And on his deathbed

I learned of his grave betrayal

I loved him and yet…

I was hurt by him

And after he died

More lies and betrayal kept coming to light

The secrets left in the dark

Being revealed as I searched

Yes I still loved him even so

 

Yet with each new piece of knowledge

It was like a dagger piercing my heart

How can this be the one I loved?

How could he have not been who I thought he was?

Except with God

I must conclude that he never was to begin with

For if God is good and truthful

The Word is not his

But if the Word is his

God is not the one I loved

Either way

There is some illusion that must be pierced through

 

Can I be angry at him?

No

If he doesn’t exist

The lies told to me were not his lies

They were the lies of men

And if he does exist

Do the words even belong to him?

 

Can I be angry at those who taught me about God?

No

The lies are not their lies.

They believed them

Just like the ones who came before them

 

Can I be angry at the author?

The ones who penned the words on the page?

I’m not sure I could ever fathom why they wrote those words

I think they believed what they were writing

They wrote what they believed to be good and just

Can I even call the words lies?

Was there any intent to deceive?

 

Can I be angry at myself?

I was stubbornly unwilling to question my beliefs

Even when I knew that the teachings were hurting the LGBT community…

Even when I realized that the “evolutionists” were not evil pawns of Satan…

Even when I realized that no one actually had a coherent doctrine of the bible…

Even when I realized that the “Spirit” seemed to be different to different people…

Even when I heard the preachers speak lies from ignorance…

Even when I read the atrocities of the Bible…

Even when I found myself disgusted by “the Law,” supposed commands of God…

I held on for dear life to my beliefs

Doubt was weakness

Faith was strength

So I turned my brain off

And kept the faith

 

Until the doubt was too much to handle

Until the preacher man wouldn’t let me keep my doubts locked away

Until the church followed after Trump

Until Young Earth Creationism collapsed under the weight of real science

Until I saw the glory of the ostracized living as their true selves

 

That Chief Doubt came back to the surface

I had wrestled him down years ago

When I first realized that the voice in my head was my own

He was born

That Chief Doubt festered

Growing as the years went on

But the Experiences were there

Those moments where I thought I felt God

The Experiences fought back the Chief Doubt

God was real

I was just a bad Christian

 

I took the job I thought God wanted for me

I boarded that sinking ship

And almost went down with it

In that place I heard many voices

I had escaped from the echo chamber

And arrived at a place of confusion

Some believed one way

While others another

The voices assailed me

But each one assured me that they knew the Truth

How long can I listen to those voices without doubt?

How long does it take to hear them for the ignorance they are?

 

In that place my doubts were unleashed

And the Chief Doubt returned

But this time the Experiences could not protect me

For I had seen the fallacy of my thinking

I could not base my beliefs on the Experiences alone

For it seemed to me that those who have experienced

Still have not known Truth

So how can I say that my Experiences showed me Truth?

I still needed answers

Real and tangible answers

 

So I set out to defeat my doubts once and for all

I told myself that I would never be any use to God

Unless I could conquer my doubts

I thought they were a shackle

Holding me down

But they would become the key

That would set me free

 

And since I broke free

Can I be angry at myself?

No

I did see the light

I did overcome the indoctrination

 

It started with just one verse

“Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water”

And the vault separated the water under from the water above

Water above?

Water below?

Separated by what?

God called the vault “sky”

Sky?

The sky separates waters above from waters below?

How had I not noticed this before?

Surely I had

But this time I was paying attention

What is the water above?

The clouds?

A thought most vexing grew in my mind

The blue sky does indeed look like an ocean

I looked for the apologetic answers of course

Clouds?

A canopy of water?

 

No

I found the answer somewhere else

Not from the apologetics

I couldn’t shake the ocean above the sky from my mind

That’s when I found it

The dome

The flat earth

The ancients’ view of the world

And can I blame them for looking up into the sky

And seeing an ocean blue?

The rains had to come from somewhere

 

Suddenly not just this verse

But the entire creation myth made sense to me

And just like Adam and Eve

My eyes were opened

The knowledge had laid my naked and shameful beliefs bare before me

I could finally see the talking snake and the fruit for the myths they were

And just like Adam and Eve

I found myself exiled from the garden

No longer could I have faith

No more would I walk blindly

For I had believed a lie on faith

I had been a blind man being led by the blind

 

There had never been any inclination in my mind that Genesis was a myth

The Holy Spirit had never guided me to the Truth

No

My ignorance was encouraged by the God in my heart

The God within my mind had always told me to stand firm to the Word

My God said that not accepting the whole Word was compromising myself

But in that moment

That God was either a liar or not real

 

“What about prophecy?” I asked myself

Surely Isaiah could show me the inspiration of God

But then I saw the sign given to Ahaz

“The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel”

I know this verse… but why is it here?

“Before the boy knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right…”

Wait, what? What is this?

“The land of the two kings you dread will be laid to waste”

Oh… It wasn’t talking about Jesus at all

But why Matthew?

Why tell me that this is a prophecy about Jesus?

I kept reading

I kept seeing familiar passages

But I never really saw Jesus in them

Isaiah delivered his oracles

But soon I found myself perplexed

It seemed as though I was reading a different book

I thought I was going crazy

But no, the book did not read the same anymore

I was sure of it

I read the Suffering Servant

And I saw Jesus there at first

But then I saw Israel

And when I reached the end of Isaiah

I found myself with more doubt than before

I needed the prophecies to save my faith

But instead they let it die

 

For this was a sign unto me:

“The New Testament has taken these words out of context”

I am old enough to know the wrong from the right

But instead of honey and curds

I am fed only disappointment

In that moment my faith was gone

No not my belief

But my faith

 

And so God was put on his deathbed

As my faith died he grew sickly

I knew I had to listen to other voices

I chased the Doubt instead of locking him away

And so I consumed videos and debates

Like a hungry dog I devoured more and more

I wanted someone to show me

Prove to me that Christianity was true

But over the course of time

I found that God was dead

 

I suppose I know the moment he died

It was the last conversation with “God” that I had

I interrogated the voice in my head

Picking it apart piece by piece

But when the belief was gone

The voice didn’t speak to me as God

It spoke to me as myself

I asked him, “Why did you speak to me as God?”

He replied, “Because you believed that I was”

And just like that

My God was dead

 

I prayed once more

I prayed for God to speak to me

I tried to gather as much sincerity as I could

I wanted God to say something

Anything at all

But the voice was my own

Tears rolled down my eyes

I asked God to flicker the lights

Or do anything external to myself

At one time in my life

I would have laughed at such a ridiculous request

But I wasn’t laughing this time

And when nothing happened

I screamed

I pounded my fist against the wall

That was the last time I prayed

My God was dead

 

As I learned more

It seemed as though the truth spoke ill of the dead

And the dagger pierced deeper and deeper

The friend I had known and loved

Now started to look more like a cheating spouse

Lies and betrayal…

No

There never was a truth there to begin with

I wasn’t betrayed

God was never there

 

And so, much like the Dreamer from the novel I am writing

I am cast adrift.

I find myself cast out into the Wasteland

I am chased by the demons of man and God

They shout to me words that taunt my innermost core

Lair!

Deserter!

Blasphemer!

Evil One!

Dead!

Poisonous!

And the place I have found refuge is an unfamiliar world

Here I find I must pick up the pieces and find myself

But I do not know who I am

 

There is another voice

The Stranger

He hates who I am

He is a demon

Yet he is me

He is a shadow of that past life

And he is the dying embers

Threatening to violently combust

He echoes what the believers around me would think of me

If they only knew

We must share a body

He and I

And we are both strangers in this foreign world

For we are like two faces that see each other in a mirror

But when I see him

I don’t see myself

And when he sees me

He doesn’t see himself

So the two of us are aliens in our own lives

One of us loves

The other hates

One of us is proud

The other is humiliated

One of us has travelled to new horizons

The other is in stasis

 

There is one thing I know

I am Lucid Crow

I am the one who realized that I was dreaming

I am the one who sprouted wings and took flight

I am the one who travels this dark night

I am the one who gazes into the stars in wonder

Where I will find myself I do not know

But I know that I will keep flying