An Essay on Losing My Religion

This is a slightly censored version of a "definition essay" that I recently wrote for my critical writing class. I have some misgivings about posting this, but I think I know who reads this blog and I think you may be interested in this part of my journey. I was defining the word apostate but I was really attempting to convey the feelings of insanity that I endured as I went through my apostasy. This process started about three years ago and the time that I'm specifically writing about is two years ago when I was living with Audrey, James, Kristin, and Pete.

I was trying to plug the leaks with the company of diverting friends, long hours of work, and consuming movies. These things helped but I just couldn't control my thoughts. When I directly thought about what was happening to me the doors flew open. A boundless emptiness shrieked with a shrill whistle through my mind and dizziness would overcome me. I had to slam the heavy doors shut and try to plug the leaks again. Anything but that netherworld where I was spinning with intense vertigo, nauseously hopping from one disintegrating chunk of reality to the next as everything that I had previously believed to be true dissolved beneath me.

When I became convinced that the foundations of my religion were fallacious, things began to destabilize. There was always this little nagging suspicion but I'm very adept at pushing things away when I need to. Eventually the questions started getting louder and becoming more personal and I read the books I had been avoiding for the last ten or fifteen years. These books exposed the founder of the church as, at best, a well-intentioned charlatan. I had relied on my faith like the leaders told me to, and never read anything that was "anti literature" as they called it. In part, I guess I can blame the higher education system for the controlled demolition that occurred after I read those books. Maybe it was the Human Sexuality class, or the class in Paranormal Psychology that forced me to ask the right (or wrong, depending on where you stand) questions. Line upon line, precept upon precept was obliterated as I read those books. I knew it was over; I had to abandon my religion.

The last vestiges of my testimony came down with a mighty crash leaving me standing forlorn at ground zero. I lost my religion, most of my social life, and my credibility with many of my friends and family members. In the eyes of the Church, when someone leaves there is never a valid reason. The apostasy of a Church member is either explained as seditious; a lack of commitment, a desire to partake of the carnal pleasures of the world, or as confused; trapped in the snare of the devil, confounded by the philosophies of man. Many say that it is a difficult life to be a Mormon and some people just aren't God's elect; "it's such a pity, poor Paul, he was doing so well," they said. The irony is that it would have been far easier for me to avoid the subsequent trauma caused by my departure than if I had just stayed in and not asked the questions. It irked me that I lost my credibility because I had the integrity to ask the difficult questions and to act on the answers that I found. I stood alone, covered in dust, in the epicenter of the collapse of my beliefs, an apostate.

There was a time when I was so perfectly insulated against such a catastrophe that it would have been unthinkable. I had the proper training as a young man, the Sunday church meetings, early morning seminary, youth groups, summer camps, family prayers, the two year missionary stint, the indoctrination, the family legends, the traditions, expectations, and guilt trips. I must have received a thousand lessons on faith and I probably taught a hundred. I was converted for heaven's sake. How could this happen to me? I had a vision of an encounter with my younger self. He condescendingly inquired how I could give up eternal life for a life of mere temporal possibility. He scorningly said that I took the easy way. He reviled me, called me a reprobate, a fool, and whispered "apostate" as he walked away. My decision haunted me but I had already crossed a kind of intellectual Rubicon and there was no going back. The ashes of my life as a Mormon streamed down my smudged face and I knew that it was time to move on.

I eventually got used to the idea that there could be another source of meaning that could replace Mormonism. I had been bamboozled and the resulting shame that I felt extinguished my desire to be a part of any organized religion. I thought that perhaps I could be "spiritual but not religious." I had heard the phrase often and I thought maybe I could fit into that category. I began exploring various spiritual practices on my own and with a fellow apostate through a spiritual discussion group. After coping with my decision for a few months I expected that I would adjust and that things would get better; instead they got much worse.

I was like the kid that found out that Santa Claus is really his Mom and Dad and suddenly the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny seemed pretty dubious too. All of the different spiritual practices that I was exploring seemed like different forms of the same bunk I had fallen for before. I began to feverishly read psychology and science books in an attempt to find the truth about belief in the unknown.

I read a book about the hypnotic trance state, its presence in almost every religious and spiritual practice, and how it can be easily triggered using very simple stimuli. I learned about death anxiety and the paranormal belief imperative. These psychological hypotheses suggest that humans need to create supernatural explanations to create meaning out the chaos of their lives to assuage the constant fear of death. I discovered that certain parts of the brain can be physically manipulated to create a spiritual experience of God. I studied how other parts of the brain can be manipulated to cause out-of-body and near death experiences under controlled conditions. These books seemed to expose more than the particulars of a certain religion, they exposed belief in the paranormal in general.

I realized with panic that I was apostatizing from more than Mormonism, I was losing all the meaning that religion gave me. I was losing life after death and the idea that I was fore ordained to serve some purpose in the grand scheme of the universe. I was losing the comfort of God. I realized that being an apostate meant more than just walking away from my religion, it meant that everything I had ever believed in was subject to scrutiny. This realization brought on a wave of nausea that left me in a ball on the floor trying to be so, so still.

I read in spurts until I became paralyzed by what I was reading. I couldn't write anything for school, I was failing all of my classes, and I could barely function at all through the shroud of terror that was suffocating me. I read a passage from Thornton Wilder's The Eighth Day that described the state that I found myself in when I thought too much about the pressing questions,

You are having the dream of universal nothingness. You walk down, down, into valleys of nothing, of chalk. You stare into pits where all is cold. You wake up cold. You think you will never be warm again. And there is nothing – and this nothing laughs, like teeth striking together. You open the door of a cupboard, of a room, and there is nothing there but this laughing. The floor is not a floor. The walls are not walls. You wake up and you cannot stop your trembling. Life has no sense. Life is an idiot laughing. Why did you lie to me?

I reeled with each discovery, feeling more and more lost in my bleak new reality. Ernest Becker's words from The Denial of Death "a full apprehension of man's condition would drive him insane" both terrified and electrified me. I wanted the truth so badly at that point that I was regularly staying up all night reading and writing like a bi-polar manic on a meth binge. I couldn't get enough and I needed to stop at the same time. I was beginning to subscribe to the sentiment of Niko Kazantzakis's that "hope is a rotten-thighed whore," and getting pretty grim about everything when I was inspired by another quote from Becker. "If we have a passion for the truth, we shall encounter a temporary period of forlornness." He added that "joy awaits us on the other side of this forlornness" and that "disillusionment must come before wisdom." I was encouraged, and although I felt at times as though I was mentally unraveling I continued my pursuit of reality.

I continued reading but shifted my focus to having a greater understanding of the way the world works. I read books about evolution and the cosmos and I began to understand that there doesn't need to be a God. These books seemed to give me something solid to stand on. I didn't have to have faith to believe these things; they were supported by empirical evidence. They palliated that unwieldy feeling of spinning that kept creeping back into my head but they forced me to deal directly with the question of whether there is a God. For a short time I surmised that I could be an agnostic since I didn't really know that there was no God. This was a comforting temporary position but then I read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Dawkins' argument that "What matters is not whether God is disprovable (he isn't) but whether his existence is probable" persuaded me to rethink the idea of agnosticism. I determined that based on all the evidence I could find, it was much more improbable that there is a God than not. My apostasy was about more than just a particular religion, I was an apostate from God.

The last year and a half I have become comfortable in my beliefs. The vertigo and nausea subsided long ago and I see the word apostate differently than I used to. The word that I used to wear as a mark of shame has transformed into a badge of distinction. It is a scar of a hard fought battle that almost cost me my sanity. I now think of an apostate as someone who summons the courage to go to that sickening scary place in their mind where they let go of the protective cloak of the beliefs they were raised with, and stand naked shuddering in the icy wind of empirical reality. I'm not sure that I've found the joy that Becker promised but I do hear more than the idiot laughing now.