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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.