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Religious belief is credible only from the inside, and once we've seen its absurdities from the outside, it's hard to crawl back in
The question: How did you find your faith, or lose it?
"I think I've reached some very interesting conclusions," announced Bishop O'Neill, after a discussion about religion with a fellow cleric. "It's nonsense isn't it? Think about it: very little evidence. Blind faith, that's all we have to go on. There's not a shred of proof anywhere, nothing."
Real life, however, is not like an episode of Father Ted, where the rapidly defrocking bishop added, "Aliens? Now there's something that might just be possible." The comedy depends on the fact that such sudden and clear road-from-Damascus moments just don't happen. Yet those who lose their faith make the same journey as Bishop O'Neill, only more slowly. They do come to see as absurd beliefs which once seemed clearly true, or deeply mysterious.
That was certainly true for me. As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers. For example, I was baffled by the role of intercessory prayer in church services. Surely, if God were good, and it was good to help someone recover from illness, he wouldn't wait until someone asked him to do so. Yet no one gave me a decent answer to even this simple question. One intellectually complacent preacher simply said that since in the Gospels Jesus told us to pray, we should just do so. In fact, the Lord's Prayer, the only prayer Jesus commended, contains not a single plea to intervene to help others, so the preacher's reply failed even on its own terms.
Questions like these tend to be dismissed as simplistic, but that kind of response is no answer at all. It's like when people roll their eyes when you raise the problem of evil: how can a good God allow so much suffering in the world? Yes, the problem is old, but it's not the challenge that's tired: it's the person who has given up trying to give it a decent answer.
So bit by bit, my faith waned. I'm sure I'm not unusual in this. It tends to happen gradually because certain core beliefs seem so strong and certain that even if one supporting strut looks feeble, you survey the entire edifice and conclude that either that strut isn't required to hold it up, or the strut must be stronger than it looks. It takes time to see that, in fact, the whole thing is being held up by threads.
However, there was one moment which confirmed my loss of faith. I was at the Methodist Association of Youth Clubs' London Weekend, and I had been vomiting since we had got off the bus. That meant I got to take part in the Sunday worship at the Royal Albert Hall from the balcony, not feeling too great. Instead of being caught up in the emotion, I was observing at a distance. That confirmed the perceptual shift from believer to non-believer was now complete. For what from the inside had looked like the holy spirit at work, looked from where I now stood like a humanly-constructed exercise in mass hysteria.
And that, in a nutshell, is I think what makes deconversion more robust than conversion. To simplify a little, the convert adopts a religious faith because he or she comes to inhabit it from the inside. The infidel rejects it because she or he comes to see it from the outside. And the further you zoom back from religion and see the big picture, the more absurd it seems.
For instance, one of the objections to Christianity that moved Bishop O'Neill to change his mind was, "And what about when you weren't allowed to eat meat on Fridays? How comes that's alright now but it wasn't back then. I mean, the people who ate meat on Fridays back then, do they all go to hell, or what? It's mad!" For true believers, this is baby-level theology, and Father Dougal McGuire is indeed a simpleton. But that's the joke: orthodox religion really is so loopy that even an idiot can see it is, that is, unless they are so wrapped up in it that they cannot see it objectively. That's why so many intelligent defenders of faith actually agree with Dougal, rejecting "literal" belief, or claiming that religion is really about practice and not dogma. Good luck to them, but they should at least admit that those among the faithful who disagree – which is most of them – believe nonsense.
This work by crabsallover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
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