From Christian to Atheist: Part 5

At the point that I was a senior at Royal High, I had effectively stopped being a Christian. I still believed in a god, and an afterlife, as well as a whole lot of other things, like ESP, ghosts, UFOs and chances are if it was even vaguely “mystical” I was a believer. I even gave the Bible a selective pass on some of the things in it if there were explanations that fit what I had come to see as within the psychic/mystical. Ezekiel’s visions were UFOs, Jesus could perform miracles…but so could many other “mythical” people of the time. If monks could fly, Jesus could walk on water. If there was Kool-aide to drink, I drank it.

Around this time the Jesus movement was really getting big on campuses all over the States. They had high jacked the coffee house/hippy vibe and created a kind of “cool” atmosphere for young Christians. Hell, they even took Beatles songs like Nowhere Man and tried to make that carry a Jesusy feeling.

Now it’s important to understand, before I go further, that I was done with Christianity. While I might have been near certifiable regarding all the other crap I bought into, I had realized the Old Testament was full of holes and The New Testament was nearly as easy to dismiss. That was not a ride I was going to buy a ticket for again. So naturally, at some point along the way I discovered that the person I thought of as my best friend had bought it “hook, line and sinker”, and somehow had not bothered to tell me about it. I was not a happy camper.

Talk about a catch-22. Jim couldn’t have honestly come out of this without looking bad no matter what he did. On the one hand, he’d kept the whole thing from me, and on the other hand, I wasn’t going to drink from that cup again. Period. Ever. A "Kobayashi Maru" situation with no cheat possible. As it turns out, there were several other members of the circle we ran around in that had been sucked into the abyss along with him. I think the effect could have been less bothersome (or hurtful) if I had been invited near the start of the thing and simply turned it down, but that didn’t happen, and truthfully, I don’t know that I would have responded any better.

I thought of Jim as my best friend, but I honestly don’t know that Jim felt the same way. I was certainly on the list of his friends, and maybe near the top, but perception is usually a one way street. I would often find myself being brought into things he was doing after they were already in motion. Again, I have to be careful here because what I saw as so, might have not been so. I was not a very good reader of social situations. 

But I felt betrayed, and it was the beginning of a string of events over the next few years that would ultimately cause me to close the door on that friendship. As I said, I don’t know that he stood a chance.

What all that did was make me uber aware of the things I saw in the Christian community that were false, and cautious about the overly “happy” nature of Christians in general. There was everything in that movement that clambered cult or brain washing to me. The idea that these kids (or any adults I saw involved in the Jesus movement) were any better off or different was silly. I went to school with them, and push come to shove, they hadn’t really changed all that much. They had just decided that now that they believed in Jesus, they were happier than everyone else, and while they could cheer about forgiveness, they were still the same in most other ways. I didn’t buy it, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

I really was done with organized religion by this point, but I wasn’t done with belief, and I still had one more major influence that I haven’t talked about yet. This last influence was the one that would set me on a path toward atheism, because this is, I think, the first time the word came up in any conversation for me. Next time, I talk about Linda.