On March 12, 1991, R.E.M. released Out of Time. Possibly R.E.M.'s greatest hit was off this album, Losing my Religion, which actually isn't about abandoning your religion at all, but rather a creepy stalker-like love song a la Sting's Every Breath You Take. The phrase "Losing your religion" is actually a southern phrase for losing your temper. Go figure.

I am going to talk about losing my religion, which is to say, my faith. As I mention in my About Neal post, I am an atheist. In Part I of Losing my Religion, I will lay out where I'm coming from.

Background:

My father has a Ph.D. in New Testament Theology and was a pastor. Around the age of five, I chose to be baptized; I attended a large moderate Baptist church until I was eighteen. I grew up a Christian professing Christian beliefs until I was around 20. By "professing Christian beliefs," I mean attending church functions up to around four times a week, leading youth worship services through playing guitar and singing, taking two mission trips to Brazil, visiting the Holy Land, taking multiple choir tours, preaching a sermon to around 500 people at age eighteen and carrying a pocket Bible around in my back pocket for about a year, among other things. I was well-known and well-received as a model young Christian.

As a Christian, a life worshipping God and His Son was deeply important to me. I understood Christianity as a belief in Jesus as the Son of God where God was love, mercy, grace and forgiveness. In keeping with my father's teachings, I approached the Bible as a window into understanding God. However, God/Jesus was bigger than the Bible, thus Biblical teachings that were inconsistent with my understanding of God/Jesus required intense study and interpretation. I frequently took issue with conservative Christian beliefs such as submission by women to their husbands and a strict seven-day creation. By not taking the Bible literally, I was already a fairly moderate Christian. As accepting the Bible as fallacious document, I moved to the bleeding edge of Christianity. Such was this moderate Christian's existence: my moderate views were perceived as extreme in comparison to Christian fundamentalism.

I love my parents. I believe they did a wonderful job in rearing me to be an educated, responsible and indepedent human being. One of the greatest gifts my father gave me was teaching me that I had a direct line to understanding anything I wanted to understand. This gift came in two pieces. For the first, I could see behind the Wizard's curtain. Because my pastor was also my father, I had no misgivings about my father's humanity or his connection to God or Jesus. I could understand everything that he could. Second, my dad taught me that understanding was critical to having meaningful faith. He exposed me to alternative interpretations of Biblical passages: he was not afraid to point out incongruencies in the Bible or challenge the mainstream paradigm. And so it is through these things that I stood on my father's shoulders.

The irony is that his endowment of a critical, challenging and searching mind led me to a place he would not go: I eventually determined that Christianity and a belief in God/Jesus was not necessary for life - the best life. The tragedy is that he often believes that he failed as a Christian and a father because of my conclusions. Naturally, I disagree: I think who I am is proof of his success. I hope he will one day see it as I do.

In Part II of Losing my Religion I will discuss certain key factors that led to my abandonment of the Christian faith and rejection of belief in any meaningful definition of God.