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This post is a continuation of my series on why I am no longer a Christian. In my last post, I explored how I came to doubt the core miraculous and supernatural claims of Christianity. I invite you to read that post, but it isn’t required to follow what I’m arguing for here.

Before we carry on with the festivities, though, I want to make something clear: I don’t think Christians are stupid or bad people. Some of the wisest, kindest, and smartest people I know are Christians. I also truly love aspects of the Christian tradition, and I continue to have a deep engagement with Christianity.

This must be said because a certain breed of mid-2000s atheist wasn’t content to just critique ideas, which is challenging enough, but also attack the intelligence and character of anyone who believes in God. I have no interest in that behavior. I think that belief in the Christian God is contrary to reason, and many Christians consider my view equally misguided. We can go about this disagreement in a collegial way without questioning each other’s motives. With that out of the way, let’s continue.

The problem with experiencing God

So, if miracles are suspect, what do we have left? We have an experience of God — a knowing, a bliss, an intimacy with the divine that is interior and invisible. More than anything else, I believe, it is these interior experiences that reinforce belief.

For some, their belief is reinforced by going on a hike and seeing the marvels of the created order. For others, it is worship, speaking in tongues, or engaging in religious devotion. For me, it was the times spent reading scripture that filled me with an inexplicable certainty. When I read the letters of Paul, I would simply know to the depths of my being that what I was reading was true.

If there is one thing that my upbringing gave me, it was a deep respect for altered states of consciousness. Learning to speak in tongues, pray, and worship as a child and young adult revealed to me that consciousness is anything but mundane. I have retained a fascination with, and practice of, altered states of consciousness.

I don’t want to dismiss interior experiences as useless. On the contrary, I believe that an examination of one’s own consciousness is among the most important projects. But interior experiences also deceive us and lead us to a multiplicity of beliefs that cannot all be true. The sheer force of an inner revelation is no testimony to its truth. Here are just a few examples of people I’ve known:

A pagan who had a radical encounter with Thor on a mountaintop. He committed himself to following Thor and completely altered his life to do so.
Someone who was filled with the mystical conviction that she was an alien. Not figuratively – quite literally. She believes herself to be an extraterrestrial and divine being who came to earth to bless humanity.
A number of holistic healers who, despite the dearth of evidence for their practice, persist in their craft because of the inner knowing that it works.
A man who told me, with real tears and horror, that he had a vision of a past life in which he was burned at the stake as a witch.

Every belief that seems completely foreign and untenable to you is backed up by a profound first-person inner knowing. Practitioners of different religions and spiritualities — be it witches, alien religionists, wholistic healers, psychedelic shamans, Muslims, or Christians — aren’t lying, and most of them aren’t mentally ill. They are giving an accurate report of their interior experience.

When you point out the fallibility of interior experience, you are inevitably met with a report that the experience is so all-consuming and life-altering that it simply cannot not be true and that you simply do not grasp the sheer force of the revelation.

Nothing to break the tie

I had numerous mountaintop experiences with the Christian god that kept my faith alive for years. But as I surveyed the religious landscape, and got to know people from many different backgrounds, I began to realize that my revelations of Christ were equal in force and clarity to the revelations of other religions. This broke my brain, and I realized that I had no reason to believe the first-person inner knowing if I had no external measure to break the tie for truth between, say, myself and the neo-pagans who worship Hecate.

I have no reason to conclude that the inner experience of Christ is more reflective of truth than an inner revelation from Loki, an alien entity, Allah, Pan, or a dead relative. Paul’s Damascus Road encounter is no more proof of the Christian God than Muhammad’s encounter with the angel Gabriel is proof of the Muslim God.

When I turned my attention to material evidence for Christianity — an external measure to break the tie presented by inner experience — I found it terrifyingly lacking.

There are some troubling conclusions to be drawn from this fact, and one is this: the human mind is not a perfect window onto the world, and sheer force of conviction has no bearing on whether a claim is true. This is an uncomfortable fact that we’d rather relegate to schizophrenics: only mentally ill people can have delusions so deep, but not the rest of us.

Plot Twist

There’s an important plot twist that needs to be acknowledged here: since leaving the Christian faith, I have had my own mystical experiences that have drastically changed my perspective of the world. For years after my deconversion from Christianity, I was solidly a materialist. I took for granted that consciousness was just the brain doing mysterious mechanistic brain things.

My meditation practice has changed all that. I have had first-person experiences of consciousness as eternal, boundless, and fundamental. These experiences are so forceful and compelling that I am now agnostic on the nature of consciousness. I still suspect that a materialist explanation for consciousness is the correct one, but I am now more willing to entertain theories like panpsychism. I now take the “hard problem of consciousness” very seriously, and I have no answer for it.

It would be hypocritical of me to talk about the limits of inner revelation without acknowledging the ways in which first-person contemplative experience have shaped my life. Despite all that, though, I still strive for restrained agnosticism when it comes to truth claims about the material world. If I did not have this restraint, I have no doubt that I would be led down the garden path of wild claims. Mystical practice is necessary but dangerous. Necessary, because it cultivates meaning, compassion, and self-knowledge. Dangerous, because without proper grounding in reason, it can lead us to dangerous absurdities.

The clever Christian will read this analysis so far and point out that my reasons to not believe are woefully American, protestant, and Charismatic – they are based on the absence of external experiences (miracles) and the unreliability of internal experiences (revelation.) They will argue that I’m not meaningfully engaging with the rich tradition of theology that might constitute its own proof. Fair enough. I am a creature of my time and place and that is, without question, an individualistic society that values rationality and ecstatic experience. This is an exploration of why I don’t believe, not why you shouldn’t believe.

But that’s just me. What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, and I might feature them in an upcoming post. Subscribe if you haven’t already, share this post with friends to rise on the leaderboard, and join the cult … I mean Discord server.