Tag: God

I Never Stopped Being a Christian

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ Leave a comment


A mother once wrote to C.S. Lewis on behalf of her concerned son, who was worried that he loved Aslan, the lion Christ figure from Lewis’s children’s series, more than Jesus himself. Lewis wrote back with this consolation:

Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before.

Lewis obviously meant this literally: Jesus is a real, living, breathing, present being, and the third person of the Trinity. But, even if we don’t take a literal view of the Christ myth, there is truth in Lewis’s words, if only at a cultural and psychological level. Imagine my bewilderment in realizing that I, a 35-year-old secular atheist, am the little boy Lewis was writing to.

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Can I Return to Christianity?

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I sometimes think doctrinal Christianity is like drug addiction. After growing up in the magisterial order of Christianity, glimpsing the vastness of a triune God and the revolutionary beauty of a self-sacrificing god-man, the secular world is a pale place by comparison. I feel a raging maw in the center of my core nothing else fills. No matter how good my life is — and my life is very good — there is an insatiable restlessness.

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Why I am Not a Christian: The Problem with Fearing Godlessness

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Note: I have moved to Substack! Please subscribe to my work there.

This is the third installment in my Why I am Not a Christian series. I invite you to read the other articles, but they are not necessary to follow what I will argue in this post.

One of the things that kept me from accepting my disbelief for so long was a fear of what the universe would be like without God. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote in Fear and Trembling:

“If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”

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Why I Am Not a Christian: The Problem With Experiencing God

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Note: I have moved to Substack. Please subscribe to my work there!

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.

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Why I am Not A Christian: The Problem of Miracles

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 1 Comment

NOTE: I have moved to Substack! Please subscribe to my work there.

In a recent podcast with my Christian sister, she pressed me on the reasons why I don’t believe. I always struggle with answering this question because the reasons are so complicated that I’m never prepared to give a succinct answer.

Instead, I gave a more meta answer: doubt is something that happened to me. I can’t say what it was that made me the skeptic, and why my skepticism was so relentless when others in my life were content to just believe. That is a mystery of temperament. To this day, I continue to believe that, ultimately, faith and lack of faith are not conscious choices, but forces beyond our control that emerge from the depths beneath conscious cognition.

But the questions keep coming, and they probably won’t stop. Prompted by my sister’s question, I decided to sit down and write out my post hoc reasons and the story I tell myself about why I lost my Christian faith. The document started to run long, though, and this is just one portion. If readers enjoy this essay, I might release the other segments.

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Sibling Rivalry: What is God? | Elizabeth Schultz

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NOTE: I am moving to Substack! Please subscribe to my work there.

In this episode of Sacred Tension, I’m joined by my sister Elizabeth Schultz. Elizabeth is a conservative Christian, classical educator, and homesteader. She asks me probing questions about my agnostic atheist worldview, and we compare and contrast our perspectives. We get into a lively discussion about God, why we do and don’t believe in him, whether it is possible to have a moral foundation without him, how we might find common ground across our worldview divides, and much more.

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Breaking Down God

~ Stephen Bradford Long ~ 15 Comments

I live in a strange, interstitial space between atheism and theism. While I no longer consider myself a Christian, I refuse to cut ties with the Christian world and my progressive Christian community. At the same time, I feel a great deal of kinship with the pagan and witchcraft communities, as well as the atheist and skeptical communities. My own religious home is The Satanic Temple, and I consider myself a practicing Satanist. I call myself a nontheist and reject unverified claims of the supernatural.

To many people, the question of God’s existence is simple: either there is a magical sky daddy or there isn’t. For me, however, this question is getting increasingly complicated. God is about more than just existence or nonexistence: it is also about definitions, worldview, and culture.

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David Bentley Hart and Theological Gaslighting

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I hoped that I was done commenting on David Bentley Hart’s tiresome book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, but as I’m nearing the end of the book I think I have one more complaint that I need to put to writing. It’s a complaint that I’m starting to have with a great number of more “progressive” or “sophisticated” theologians. While I do generally think that their vision of God, humanity, and the cosmos is better than most of what’s out there, I find this particular trend aggravating.

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