Category: Deconversion

Fear of no longer existing anymore

Dave UnderwoodLeave a comment
In 1979 four members of the band Joy Division stand on a snow-covered Epping Walk Bridge in Manchester. Photograph by Kevin Cummins.
(above) Joy Division, photographed by Kevin Cummins on Epping Walk Bridge in Manchester, 1979

“What feeling do you have when you wake up in the morning, when your feet touch the floor? Or before that when you’re lying there, thinking about your feet hitting the floor? What feeling do you have, what does that feel like for you?” – The Rover (2014)

A long time ago I watched a Grand Designs episode where the man who was building a house said that he woke up each morning thinking “Still alive! I get to do this living thing for another day.” I think about him often. I envy his comfort with his mortality and his openness to living or dying. I do not have that – I have fear of death.

Perhaps more specifically I have fear of no longer existing any more. While dying in my sleep somewhat appeals as a less scary way to go, more scary for me is the thought of my life ending in the blink of an eye. No waking up. No reflection. No existing. No more Dave.

As I’ve talked about before, perhaps being an ex-Christian makes it harder for me to face no longer existing. As a Christian you anticipate living forever, when you give that up suddenly you have to reckon with your mortality and what, in comparison to forever, feels like a very short life. I am in awe of how people just go on with their daily lives knowing death awaits them. I’ve asked a lot of people how they do it and the answer seems to be mostly distraction; ignore the feeling and eventually it goes away.

In his book This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, philosopher Martin Hägglund posits our lives are meaningful, precious, and interesting precisely because they are limited. I have to be honest and say that this perspective does not bring me relief or consolation. I would rather have immortality with the option to die if I want to than the burden of mortality with no options.

Ultimately I can pontificate as much as I like but it’s not going to change the fact I am mortal and will not live to be 200 years old. Maybe better is to find what relief and consolation from death that I can find while I am still alive. I tell my therapist that my hope is if I get to live to be old enough, eventually I might be that kind of Very Old where you feel so very tired and start to think that you would like things to stop at some point. That is what I hope anyway, that one day instead of trying to find distraction I will actually welcome the end.

“Thoughts & prayers” is really just “thoughts”

Dave UnderwoodLeave a comment
A photograph of an open notebook. On one page it says "Here we go" and on another page the words "I will sell out the Roger Center" are written on every line of the page.

Recently I found myself watching a documentary about Shawn Mendes, a Canadian pop singer/song-writer. During the documentary we learn about Shawn’s ambition to not just play at but to sell out a stadium in Toronto called the Rogers Center. Part of the film showing us this journey is seeing a journal where Shawn has written the same thing again and again: ‘I will sell out the Rogers Center’. What was he doing, and why was he doing it?

Apparently, this is something called manifesting, which has recently been given a boost thanks to the pandemic and the Tiktokification of information. Manifesting has become a very broad term and means different things to people. On one hand you have the concept of “if you believe in it enough it will happen”, the “law of attraction” and books like The Secret. But more recently the definition of manifesting has expanded to include such things as CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), planning, visualising, and positive thinking. For this reason I think a better term for the pernicious type of manifesting is “magical thinking“.

Given this, where does Shawn Mendes writing the same thing again & again sit on the manifesting spectrum? I’m not sure to be honest, probably somewhere in the middle. Pretty harmless but best not indulged too seriously. Because as others have written, magical thinking has a risky downward spiral built into it which is: if your dreams don’t happen for you, maybe you didn’t want them/believe in them enough. But at the same time, Shawn Mendes combines his manifesting with action, and in the film does end up selling out the Rogers Center. Good for him I suppose.

When I was a Christian there was a thing called a “testimony”, this was your story of “how you became a Christian” and was often used in recruitment, trying to get other people to become Christians. Part of my testimony when I was a Christian was how on my very first day when I started working for the Church of England we had a guy called John Mumford speak at staff meeting and he prayed for the entire staff. And while he was doing that he said “now some of you your hands or your top lip will be tingling right now” and if that was you you were to come forward to get prayed for. Now my top lip was tingling which I thought was amazing, and later on I used to tell this story as part of my testimony & highlight how God had got my attention by causing my top lip to tingle. Then one day a Christian friend heard that story and said “oh the tingling lip thing, yeah John’s been doing that for years”. And it turns out getting pins and needles or tingling sensations in your body, especially during moments of high emotion is not uncommon. And I remember feeling like a sucker, and later on when I deconverted realising that this guy had just been using normal body reactions but putting a Christian veneer over them.

Really, with a sufficient understanding of confirmation bias most secular people would understand that prayer is just magical thinking with a different name. There is a specific type of groupthink that goes on that allows prayer (the kind of prayer that the Christian God supposedly answers) to persist. I’m stealing this from a very good YouTube video that I haven’t been able to find, but it goes like this: if you pray to God, and he answers your prayer, God is real and good; if you pray to God, and he doesn’t answer your prayer, then either God is real and there is a good reason he hasn’t answered your prayer, or God is real and you need to Wait and there is a good reason you need to wait. So you see if you submit to this idea of prayer God is real and he never fails.

I don’t know how many Christians know that they have tested empirically whether prayer works and the results were incredibly underwhelming. But then I suppose Christians would argue that the Bible says “do not test the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 6:16), which is convenient. But then the Bible also says to “test everything” (1 Thessalonians 5:21) so who knows.

In the world I see one day we will be post-religion and we will use the phrase “I’m thinking of you” instead of “I’m praying for you”. And we will back up our words with caring action when we can, instead of petitioning a deity we have created in our minds.

Book review: The Denial of Death, Escape From Evil

Dave UnderwoodLeave a comment
Book covers of two books by Ernest Becker: The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil.
(above) The Denial of Death and Escape From Evil, both by Ernest Becker

My background for wanting to read these books is deconverting from my Fundamentalist Christian beliefs in 2017. I knew I wasn’t going to Heaven, so suddenly death was final & more scary. When I first read The best books on Fear of Death recommended by Sheldon Solomon from Five Books I felt some encouragement that there were people out there thinking about death & wrestling with what it means.

From the Five Books article it is clear Sheldon Solomon thinks Becker is an important stop on the road to understanding fear of death. I tried to read Escape From Evil first but because I had done so little reading on this topic I lacked the background to understand it easily, so reading Denial first seemed mandatory. Denial of Death comes first chronologically and is the one he completed before he died (his widow published Escape). Denial of Death I think lays the platform for Escape. Escape From Evil is the better, more concise book, but I think Denial is essential reading to get the most out of it.

In Denial of Death Becker makes his case for fear of death affecting all areas of our lives. He sees the major breakthrough in understanding this as being Freud’s, but, writing in the 1970s, he thought Otto Rank (a disciple of Freud) had built the most on Freud’s work on existentialism. Becker makes a compelling case but stops short in Denial of suggesting a way forward. You get the feeling he felt compelled to have a go, and Escape was probably going to be his attempt.

Denial of Death is over 50 years old now. The stuff in there about mental health feels very outdated. I don’t know where he was coming from about homosexuality & transvestism. The attempt to psychoanalyse Freud’s two known fainting spells feels too long. The summaries of Kierkegaard and Rank’s bodies of work are fascinating; as is his conclusion that those two thinkers thought that the cosmic heroism embedded in religion was the best treatment for the fear of death. Indeed, Becker goes as far as to say ‘The urge to cosmic heroism, then, is sacred and mysterious and not to be neatly ordered and rationalized by science and secularism. Science, after all, is a credo that has attempted to absorb into itself and to deny the fear of life and death; and it is only one more competitor in the spectrum of roles for cosmic heroics.’

Combined together, Denial of Death & Escape From Evil are the most important books I have read in the last 10 years. They are still massively relevant today and our reckoning with their questions & challenges as a species is way overdue. Chapters 1 and 2 of Escape From Evil seemed to me to be mostly an attempt to provide the reader with some of the background he covered in Denial. Readers of Denial of Death can probably pick up from chapter 3 onwards. Becker takes as his starting point that fear of death shrouds & affects all our waking moments, and goes on to show how inequality, status, genocide, the accumulation of capital/possessions/power are all symptoms of our failure to ultimately reckon with death-terror. Reading the last chapter, Becker seems caught between humility and honesty. He says ‘No one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as a prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities.’ But then on the same page he says ‘Yet I think that there is a solid minimum achievement’. Becker’s prescription? Progressive politics and a “science of society”. I was underwhelmed by this but I was probably expecting too much.

Losing my religion

Dave Underwood7 Comments
A scan of the painting 'Agony in the Garden' by Corregio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_%28Correggio%29. "[T]he painting was admired by Vasari in Reggio Emilia - he described it as: a small painting one foot tall, the rarest and most beautiful thing, in which can be seen his small figures and Christ in the garden - the painting is set at night, with the angel appearing and by the light of his splendor illuminating Christ, who is shown so real and so true that it is impossible to imagine him being expressed better. At the foot of the mountain, on level ground, are three sleeping apostles, above whom he shows Christ praying, which gives an impossible strength to the figures; and even more so, in the background, he shows dawn rising and soldiers coming with Judas from one side of the painting: and in such smallness and with such intensity does he show this story, there is no work that is its parallel for patience and hard work."
Agony in the Garden by Correggio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_%28Correggio%29

I identified as a Christian for my whole life until two weeks in 2017 changed all that. In the subsequent seven years since then I’ve been trying to work out whether I really deconverted then or if that train had been a long time coming. I still don’t really know, but it’s probably more the latter than the former.

As I’ve blogged about before, I was indoctrinated into Christianity from birth. The particular version of Christianity I grew up in was what I call Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. The way I define this is it was Fundamentalist in that we believed the Bible was the literal “Word of God”. And Evangelical in that the type of church my family attended was of the Evangelical tradition, meaning it was different to say Baptist or Presbyterian traditions.

What that means is that I grew up under the eye of God. I understood that God knew everything, that everything came from Him, and He had a plan for my life. And although I might stray from this plan, and naturally rebel at times, I should expect to always find myself coming back to Him, apologising for straying, and recommitting myself to His plan for me. Looking back now, I wonder why I didn’t leave Christianity as I got older and could think more for myself. Some days I tell myself it was because I wasn’t equipped with the critical thinking skills necessary to do that. But other days I think I may have wanted the things Christianity promised me too.

Doubt in God is built into the Christian system. You are taught, even expected in a way, that you will have doubt about your faith from time to time. But you will always find your way back to God, along with a stronger faith because you’ve learnt that God was there all along. No doubt you’ve heard or seen about the classic Christian poster of two sets of footprints in the sand. So in 2016 when I started having doubts about my Christian faith, a part of me assumed I was just suffering a classic seasonal bout of the doubting blues.

Christian belief, in the Fundamentalist form, is a completely different interpretation and understanding of reality. God created the universe, he created all living things, he created humans with free will, but his humans chose to use this free will to live differently to the way God intended – they were living in sin. So God sent Jesus Christ to allow his humans to apologise for being sinful; Christians are taught that Jesus takes their sins so God “sees” Christians as being free from sin. Why is this important? Well the stakes are eternal, live in sin and when you die you are separated from God for eternity, but repent of your sin through Jesus Christ and when you die you live with God & Jesus Christ in Heaven for eternity.

As I’ve gotten older, and particularly since I deconverted from Christianity, I’ve learnt that some Christians didn’t have eternal stakes on their mind much at all. Some Christians were focused on just trying to live how God wanted them to, to get to Sunday feeling like they were mostly doing their best. But growing up I was a conscientious, intellectual young man whose mild OCD manifested in a strong, often overwhelming, desire to be right with God and to play my part in the eternal battle of good and evil. God had sent Jesus to share the Good News, the Devil wanted to deceive people, how was I going to make sure people heard the Good News? How should I serve God with my life?

So early in my 2016 season of doubt I didn’t anticipate I was going to abandon my faith at all. I reassured my Christian wife I was just going through a period of doubt, nothing to worry about. I talked to Christian friends, I prayed, I saw my pastor who recommended some books to read.

But the books didn’t serve their intended purpose. The tone of my concerns began to get more panicky. I can remember evenings outlining my issues with a certain fact of Christian theology and my wife’s worried face looking back at me. My therapist wasn’t any help either, although since he wasn’t a believer I didn’t expect him to understand or be able to help me.

What I found myself saying was that I was starting to believe the whole thing was made up. When Christians talked about the “still small voice of God” they were talking about the sound of their own mind talking back to them. For me the bottom had fallen out of my faith. I thought that if the foundation of it, whether there was actually a God who really existed, was false I didn’t see how I could continue believing.

As I wrote that last paragraph I got a warning from my Apple Watch that my resting heart rate had risen above 100 bpm. And that’s what it was like at the time: sweating bullets while well-meaning Christians tried to tell me I just needed to see the present darkness through. But it’s one thing to overcome your present troubles, it’s another thing to look back upon your life and start asking yourself “What was that? Could I have been raised with an illusion? And then taught how to produce the illusion for myself?”

After all, we convince ourselves of things all the time. That democracy is good. The government is in control. That she loves you. That things are going to get better. But time passes and we see things differently. Democracy is imperfect. Our governments lie. If she did love you, she doesn’t anymore. And I thought, if the question is do I want to believe in something because of the benefits it gives me, regardless of whether or not it’s real, then for me the answer was becoming clearer & clearer. The same young man that grew up a zealous Christian wasn’t going to be zealous when something that wasn’t real, wasn’t true.

My wife and I were living at the time in a place called Worcester Park in London in the UK. Because of my chronic illness I wasn’t well enough to work so I found myself going for long walks at the park and through the local woods, looking at the treetops and thinking about cosmology. One day, walking on a cloudy day, I thought to myself “What if I got onto my knees and prayed right now, would that be a sufficient act of devotion and desperation for God to reveal Himself to me?” Right then I knew that there would be no point. God couldn’t reveal himself if he didn’t exist.

I showed up at my next therapy session freaking out. What if I didn’t believe? What would that do to my marriage? My relationships with my parents? My brother and sister? I had never shown up to therapy that desperate or emotional before, it felt like the sky was falling and I was powerless to stop it. Looking back, that was the high water mark. The next therapist session I showed up still stressed but also still alive & breathing. The sky was still kind of falling, but on some level I was also happy to be finally acknowledging where I was at. I wasn’t pretending anymore and that felt good.

Eventually I settled on a kind of trial break. Maybe for a week or two, I wouldn’t be anything, not Christian, or non-Christian, I would just exist with my current beliefs and doubts and not force myself to believe in anything. Incredibly, those two weeks passed without incident. More weeks passed. Eventually I would realise in fact I had been on a long journey towards not believing and I had finally arrived. It was a strange kind of peace. I felt like I had been believing impossible things for so long because my marriage, my relationship with my parents, my whole life was based on it. It felt very uncomfortable but at least it didn’t feel insane anymore.

Much later on with distance, time, therapy, and healing I was able to take the well-meaning things Christians were saying to me. I now found myself on the other side of Christian culture and felt ashamed that once upon a time I had said those same well-meaning things. There was a feeling of fresh evangelism for my new (non)beliefs and a desire to convert Christians to them. In time I have found this desire has faded a little too. While I wish Christians didn’t believe the things they do, and didn’t raise their children in those beliefs without giving them the choice, I also understand these are not easy decisions to make. After all, if you feel powerfully that your beliefs are true and life affirming and transformative, why wouldn’t you share them with your children? I find myself looking at fundamentalist Christians these days and thinking, I guess you need Christianity, and maybe one day, like me, you won’t.

Resource: How not to talk to former Christians

Dave Underwood2 Comments

One of the things I have been frustrated by, as a recovering former Fundamentalist Christian, has been the way still-practising Christian friends & family speak to me about what I believe now. Fundamentalist Christians seem to believe they can still “speak into my life” with a “Word from God” the same way they would when I was a believer. It’s arrogant and disrespectful and very unpleasant.

It’s made me realise how insufferable I must have been when I was preaching or “evangelising” to non-Christians when I was a Christian 😕

The resource below from Chrissy Stroop is the best thing I have seen that describes this experience of how practising Fundamentalist Christian friends & family speak to me about my agnosticism. It articulates and explains things in a way that has been helpful to my mental health. I recommend it to all ex-Christians 👍

This graphic is reproduced here for non-commercial purposes. Chrissy’s website is cstroop.com.

How not to talk to former Christians. Progressive Christian Allyship Depends on Respect for Moral Autonomy. By Chrissy Stroop.
Source: https://twitter.com/C_Stroop/status/1491788107443671045/photo/1

Resource: Religious beliefs to unlearn

Dave Underwood2 Comments

For many ex-Christians like myself, deprogramming from toxic religious indoctrination takes time. I recently came across this graphic from the team at Happy Whole Way. I think it speaks to a number of the things former fundamentalist believers have to unlearn.

This graphic is republished here with their permission. You can find out more about who they are & what they do on their website: www.happywholeway.com.

Religious beliefs to unlearn from www.happywholeway.com
Source: https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca0QHDkvIRh/