From Christian to Atheist: Part 4

In high school, I was on a full roll with the whole ESP/UFO/Supernatural thing. I remember one of my teachers and I having a talk about it after class. Robert Pierle was my history/social studies teacher at Royal High School in Simi. I liked him. He managed to make history and social issues interesting, and to some extent repaired the damage a social studies teacher at Sinaloa managed to do. We were talking about the things I believed, in this case, ESP and telekinesis, and he wasn’t buying my arguments. The problem for me was, I still had no evidence for any of this stuff. I had bought many books on how to develop ESP and psychic powers, how to contact the dead, how to test for ESP (even managed to get a deck of Zener cards from Duke University) and still nothing. He told me that when I got my proof, or could demonstrate one of these abilities, to come back and show him. Then, and only then, would he accept it, because then I would have evidence.

Royal is where I was when I started losing my belief in Jesus. I still attended church, and still enjoyed Rev. Talberts sermons, but as I examined religion, and explored other areas of belief, I found it harder and harder to hold on to the basic beliefs of Christianity. Given how far out some of the other things were that I latched onto, it seems odd that an old staple like Jesus would crumble, but Jesus didn’t survive the conflict with evolution and the age of the earth. I had long ago accepted that evolution had occurred, and that there was no historical Adam and Eve; no Garden of Eden. It took me a while to put all that together and realize that without those two things, and without original sin, there was no real reason for Jesus or his alleged sacrifice.

One night, shortly after sundown, I went outside and stood in my back yard next to the juniper bushes on the patio, and while I was thinking about religion, Jesus, God and a few other things, I said, out loud, “I don’t believe Jesus is the Son of God”. It was the first time I admitted this aloud, and waited a beat for any special effects like lightning strikes, but none came. I was no longer a Christian. I still believed in a god, though he was morphing out of necessity. After all, I had just fired his son, and that kinda left me with the understanding that the Bible must have a few holes in it if it was wrong about Jesus (which is what the entire second act of the Bible was all about.) Of course I also had major issues about many of the events in the first act as well, so no surprise that it was all falling apart rather quickly.

During this time, I started picking up other ideas about gods, powerful beings and what happens after death. God started taking on a less defined form and became more an entity of power. There were people who were advanced spirits and such. All of this was still mashed up with ESP, UFOs and way too much other stuff to account for it all. If my beliefs had been on a map, they would have covered several counties, if not a few states.

My last year at Royal became an important one in all of this. I met my future wife Linda, and found myself feeling abandoned by my best friend, both of which played their part in my continued move toward atheism. I still attended church, and still, even with my belief system all over the place, was a believer, just not a Christian. A bit more to go before this story is done.