Coming Out & 'Creation'

About a week ago, I sat down with one of the couples my wife and I know and told them, rather bluntly, that I'm no longer a Christian. While I had anticipated a number of questions from them—since he's a minister and she is a fellow graduate student at the seminary—I didn't anticipate the silence. The problem was, I think, that I never really let either of them in on my journey. For all they knew, I was just as deeply committed to the Christian faith as they were.

A few days later, my fellow student emailed me a list of questions, trying to be more constructive than simple expressing shock. It was nice of her to make the attempt, and I felt like I was able to say more clearly what changed and why. Even more, I think she realized that any sadness I expressed in my "coming out" was due, on the one hand, to my recognition of their sadness, and on the other, to a real sense that God has "died." I've lived for almost 30 years thinking that God was there, helping me along, hearing my prayers, etc., and now I'm forcing myself to think about the world apart from the help of God—at least the God talked about within Christianity—and that transition carries with it a sense of grief.


(More on this and 'Creation' after the jump...)

Death and Dying

One of the most difficult things about living life without a religious framework is getting my head around not living. I've always been aware that death comes to all things, but when a person is deeply entrenched in the Christian faith, death is always a semicolon; something always comes after it (i.e., heaven). But now that "after" has fallen away along with the rest of my religious worldview, I wonder how to think about death.

On the one hand, I see death as a sort of liberation, a freedom from the pains, anxieties, and hardships of life. I think of so many who suffer their entire lives from innumerable wrongs, injustices, and suffering, and I see a hope in death for them. No longer will they be confined to this life and its evils. Even for folks who live a relatively comfortable life, like me, the end of life is a positive event, a point at which all worries and pains wash away.

Yet that doesn't entirely mute the sadness of death.