Taking New Paths
Excerpts
Dedication
This book is dedicated to all those who have experienced, are experiencing, or will experience the deep internal confusion of re-evaluating the traditions and beliefs they grew up with, and the sense of loneliness that too often goes with that process. May you take some courage in knowing that you are not at all alone; you can grow past that feeling. And if you are one of those who nearly immediately found the intellectual freedom to question and freely explore, to be meaningful and joy-giving, may you still help others who might more slowly find that it does get better.
Preface
First, this book is not written for strong believers with the hope of convincing them to change. It is intended to help those who are living through the fog of re-evaluation, and are feeling alone. Today, as the numbers of people who find themselves midstream in this state of affairs significantly increases, many are seeking guidance and it can be appreciated when coming from others who share their struggle.
Changing religious identity can, and does, go in many directions. I’ve known Christians who became Muslim, Hindus who became Christian, and Buddhists who became Evangelical—we can all imagine the many possibilities—but this is not a book about changing religions; rather it is about leaving them behind and following a new path.
It is easy to see how outside observers may underestimate the degree of disorientation or even trauma that can go with abandoning the entirety of one’s previous beliefs, understanding of life, sense of self, and social network. Many of these writers spent years feeling lost and isolated, confused, and not understood. Their stories may help others avoid feeling alone in their search as they find themselves ignored by old friends and family, and paralyzed by not knowing how to seek a new path, new connections. While some of these contributors felt a need to use a pseudonym, this in no way lessens the value of their experiences.
Several points discussed in Enstedt, Larsson, and Mantsinen’s Handbook on Leaving Religion (2019) explain that leaving involves more personally powerful factors than dogma. It involves “core identities,” forming “new selves,” “an overhaul of one’s previous conception of self, a re-creation of one’s way of being in the world.” It can be a “crash,” a “pulverization of my fortress,” and because of this “it is rarely smooth.” This earthshaking remake is not trivial or remotely easy. For anyone feeling an acute sense of need for professional help in this matter, you might consider The Secular Therapy Project; seculartherapy.org.
Amidst the wide-ranging variety of religious backgrounds, the length of the re-evaluative process, and age at the point of writing (some in their twenties extending to one man in his nineties) also vary greatly. And besides a good number of Americans, this book also includes stories of re-evaluation and change in people from Bangladesh, Canada, India, Iran, Lebanon, Singapore, South Africa, and the United Kingdom.
Within these varied religious and cultural backgrounds, each struggle is unique, with those shared here merely revealing similarities in the search for a personal truth. Hopefully, some journeys may provide meaningful connections to what readers may be experiencing.
You will find that most of these authors have either mentioned, mid-chapter, various books that they found helpful, or at the end of their chapter provided a short list of books that they found to be perhaps disturbingly thought provoking, or simply helpful.
This book may also encourage those who remain in their faith to become cognizant of the risks that have historically gone with strong, unmoderated beliefs, and lead them to self-monitor so as to avoid those risks becoming realities in their own lives.
These personal stories of sincere struggle may also increase the public understanding of people who no longer claim any faith, and decrease the fears and suspicions toward such people. Being able to hear their stories is certainly one important way of coming to understand us.
Introduction
In collecting these stories I have found too many personal narratives of change to include them all in this first volume. By way of introducing some of the thoughts of people reflecting on this process, I am sharing here snippets from several stories not included.
One gentleman, writing in his eighties, shared this crystal clear memory from his first decade of life:
“My family was a member of the First Baptist Church, and we were very active participants in our church community. My first test of faith and reason was during a drive around the countryside after church one Sunday when I was about nine years old. My buddy’s church was having a fair that weekend to raise money. I suggested we go to the fair, but my folks said it was a sin to gamble and drink and that we shouldn’t go and be tempted by God. Sinning was the pathway to Hell. This blunt response startled me. “My buddy was a Catholic and I said, ‘Jim’s not going to Hell.’”
“My Mom said, ‘Oh, yes, I am afraid he is. You see, all Catholics are going to Hell, because they have not accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as their savior.’
‘“Jim was baptized as a baby,” I said.
‘“But that doesn’t count. He didn’t make that decision himself.’
I thought, "hmm, he didn’t make a decision to be in that family either, nor did I make a decision to be in my family. We just are. What makes my parents’ views right and his parents’ views wrong? His parents love him just as much as my parents love me. That question lingered for years and forged a wedge of doubt.”
A woman shared that, from an unusually early age, her motto was “Question everything.” As she matured, she added “Do no harm, but take no shit.” She admits to sensing an urgency, “because life is too short for prolonged mistakes, years lost.”
Facing that she can be “raw and blunt, because why waste time and beat around the bush?” she tells of hearing some friends from backgrounds of strong faith describe abuse they had endured, and then being very bugged “that some of them were still deeply involved to the point of raising their children that way, even after such horrible experiences.”
Pointing to a very different problem, she calls religion the “peddler’s disease” because it’s like “an earworm that, in a sense, can whisper in one’s mind when one is in their loneliest or most desperate hour.”
Evaluating her motives, she notes that, “I volunteer in my free time not for a so-called afterlife in heaven, but because I can and want to help people, and feel useful.” Recognizing that some are amazed at her willingness to critique religion, she observes that, “There was a time when people were killed for speaking out against the churches and religions of the world. People still are killed in other countries.” Looking back at historical context, she states simply, “Religion has taken millions of lives.”
Another person shared a more politicized view that today’s combination of Christianity and capitalism which have come to strike her as very incongruous because of the “unrealistic economic ideals for everyone to attain, and unsustainable extraction, use, and pollution of natural resources. Mother Earth is weeping, weeping, weeping,” she concludes.
For her there is a further contradiction in “all this heavy militarization of the world by the ‘Superpowers’ as the United States proclaims itself to be. From what I hear from Christians, Jesus is the true Super Power. So why would a country like the U.S. with a government that claims to be representative of a ‘Christian’ country—there’s no hiding it—go military-obsessed around the world, establishing some eight hundred bases, spending the largest percentage of U.S. taxpayer money on military proliferation?” She goes on:
“What in the world does spirituality, and religion specifically, have to do with military might? I think of the military as devoid of spirituality, blind to the disastrous actions and consequences. Spiritually bankrupt. Stuck in the primal brain of fear. Destructive power with no saving grace. I cannot buy into any religion, organization, or belief, that is arrogant, violent, greedy, and duplicitous.”
These isolated personal statements give the reader little life context in which to begin to understand the writer’s experiences and reasoning. It is my expectation that the chapters that fill this book will do that.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 Leaving Islam..................................................................... 15
Background: Sunni Islam
Chapter 2 My Deconversion............................................................... 25
Background: Evangelical Baptist
Chapter 3 My Exodus to Ex-Mormonism........................................... 31
Background: Latter Day Saints
Chapter 4 Leaving Catholicism and Christianity............................... 42
Background: Catholic
Chapter 5 Evidence............................................................................. 52
Background: Ultra-Orthodox Judaism
Chapter 6 My Journey of Life............................................................. 86
Background: Hindu
Chapter 7 My Roots, My Journey, My Present................................... 91
Background: Seventh-Day Adventist
Chapter 8 From Mind Control to Freely Thinking........................... 129
Background: Jehovah’s Witness
Chapter 9 My Tapestry of Change..................................................... 147
Background: Shia Islam
Chapter 10 Who Am I?....................................................................... 155
Background: Maronite Christian
Chapter 11 Precarious Faith............................................................... 166
Background: Buddhist
Chapter 12 Two Changes Before a Final Exit.................................... 184
Background: Latter Day Saints
Chapter 13 Comparing and Questioning........................................... 209
Background Hindu & Sikh
Chapter 14 From Shattered Pieces to Freedom and Inner Peace...... 215
Background: Seventh-Day Adventist
Chapter 15 My Journey as a Muslim Apostate.................................. 236
Background: Sunni Islam
Chapter 16 Out of Watchtower.......................................................... 243
Background: Jehovah’s Witness
Chapter 17 A Turbulent Journey from Judaism and Orthodoxy...... 250
Background: Modern Orthodox Judaism
Chapter 18 My Anthology of Influences and Choices....................... 273
Background: Christian Science