An Emotional Journey

If I’m being honest, my loss of faith was motivated by emotions. The reasons I left Christianity are quite different to the reasons I’m still an atheist. I can think of two major experiences that most likely initiated my conversion.

Photo by me.

Firstly, I felt betrayed when I discovered my science knowledge from school was completely different to real science. During my childhood, scientists were generally presented to me as arrogant types who thought they knew everything about the universe. Many scientific theories, especially evolution by natural selection and the big bang theory, were flippantly dismissed as nonsense due to their perceived contradiction to the Bible. Based on what I’d been told, I believed that these theories had very little evidence. I thought scientists only backed these theories because they had no other explanation, or because they didn’t want to admit that the Bible was the truth. Moreover, there are a lot of Christian books that try to debunk scientific theories in favour of biblical explanations. The existence of these books encouraged me.

When I finally began my science degree at university, it became clear very early on (refer to my post about scientific philosophy) that science was very different to what I had thought. I realised that (i) scientists are constantly changing their mind in light of evidence and (ii) both evolution and the big bang theory had mountains of evidence. I felt deeply betrayed. My teachers had so confidently told me things that were wrong. On top of this, there were a bunch of Christian people in the world who had no idea about this stuff, yet still published books about it! What kind of a community was I a part of?!

Secondly (this was the biggest blow), I felt tainted and unworthy after losing my virginity to my first boyfriend. I never thought that I would EVER be one of those girls who had sex before marriage. In school, our sex education was a series of sessions teaching us that abstinence was the best and only option if you wanted to lead a godly life. The final session was a candlelit ceremony where we all signed an agreement with God to be virgins until our wedding night. After I left home, it turned out that my sex drive had other ideas. My first sexual experiences were a series of steamy interactions followed by heavy guilt and shame.

When I eventually told my mum about it, I got the impression I had ruined my life. Consequently, letting go of my Christianity (and knowing I could move on from the guilt and shame) felt amazing when I eventually did it.