First brave step out

Until about eight months ago the only person who knew I was going through a theological transition was me. During the time leading up to that I played in my church's praise team and participated in a lot of church events.
I remember specifically one of the more active members in my church asked me how my relationship with God was. I'm not much for lying, but I didn't want to come out and say "I'm trying to figure out whether God really exists or not," so I told him about the things I was doing in the church. He told me it was easy to get caught up in doing things but not really progressing spiritually. He went on to invite me to a small group which I declined, but I was impressed with his ability to perceive the way I skirted the issue. He was actually quite right. I wasn't growing spiritually, I was relearning reality.
I did struggle with some things along the way. The biggest one might have been my relationship with my wife.
My wife is the nicest person I have ever met. She is amazing in so many ways and is absolutely my balancing force in life. When I'm stuck in zig, she suggests zag. When I think black, she reminds me of white. No matter what, she is always there for me though.
During my transition I felt like I couldn't say anything to her. I'm the one who fed her knowledge about why the creation story was true. She was a huge encouragement in my return to faith. I had no desire whatsoever in sending her down this crazy path I was on.
The problem was I spent quite a bit of time studying and analyzing everything I was learning and I'm not big about talking about work which meant that the deep meaningful conversations about nothing and everything she was used to us having were conspicuously absent.
It was obvious to her that I was being unusually silent.
To complicate things more she was pregnant and I know she knew I was hiding something but she didn't know what. I'm sure a million things went through her head and she would ask me to just talk sometimes and my brain would strain under the enormous weight of my secret.
We were on a long drive one day. The ride was fairly silent because the radio was low to keep my son from waking up and I was sitting in the driver's seat trying to build up the courage to tell her what I was going through.
I remember looking over at her pregnant belly and she said "So.... do you want to talk about something?"
I felt like I might throw up. I had felt this way many times in trying to bring this topic up. I have the ability to think very strategically and remain calm in the most grave of situations, but telling the woman of my dreams what I was going through was scary.
I was scared she might have doubts about our whole relationship. Or that this might be something about me she couldn't accept. Or she just wouldn't understand. We were about to have a baby, how would she react to my change of heart? Would she even see me as the man she married?
I got the first few words out one at a time with an unsure pause between each one as if I was going to just stop talking. I finally got the first sentence out. Then a second.
She was attentive, calm, not upset at all.
I spent about 30 minutes talking about the entire process before we arrived at our destination.
It was a relief for both of us. I had prefaced everything I said by telling her I had no desire to change her beliefs and I still don't. I love that she is more free spirited than I am. She is my window to the fantastical and I would never want to suppress that.
I couldn't believe how well the conversation went and it definitely reopened a flood gate of communication between us and I was relieved at least one person knew my secret and having told her I was a little sad that I had held it in for so long.
I also explained how it changed my view of our marriage, changes that I am constantly evaluating through new eyes.
I don't think of our marriage as a three-way promise between my wife, God and myself anymore. It's just my promise to her and hers to me. I can be assured that every loving action comes from myself, and not out of some spiritual obligation.
For someone who is quite disconnected from faith, the difference may seem irrelevant, but I assure you it is massive. It comes with freedoms and fears, but I know in the end my love and commitment to my wife is my own. Can it be shaken? Maybe, but my commitment to her goes well beyond what I could hope to  understand in such a short lifetime. There are no stories of courage without fear and I truly look forward to the development of our story every day whether it's boring or intensely exciting. That's what courageous love is all about.
I am with her because I sincerely choose to be.
Since then she has continued to be amazingly supportive and understanding and I have continued to be open with her about what's going on with me.
It really opened my eyes to how homosexuals must feel and I very much related to a ted talk covering just that issue. It was my first step out of my closet and it felt great.
But how would everyone else react to my change?

I think I owe someone an apology

It was over a year and a half ago when my long journey in transition began and during that time there has been a gigantic shift in the way I think about things.
As a believer, a lot of how and what I thought was based completely on the Bible.
The whole reason I started down the road of study which lead me to here is because I was honestly concerned for my uncle and his family. Sometimes he would post things to facebook about how thanking God after a natural disaster was like thanking a serial killer, or that religion was a geographic birth lottery, or comments of stories about religion around the world killing people and having barbaric practices. I butted heads with him more than once needless to say.
It made me mad on some levels as well as being concerned. I'm not one to sit idly by while something happens that i don't like. I HAD to do something and staying silent just isn't me. I accused him of being without morale compass because that compass comes from God, or so I thought. I pressed him about how logical our faith was and that we didn't lack the reason to make an informed decision.
I think what really put it over the top for me though was when my uncle declared he was now an evangelist for atheism.
This was in stark contrast to who he was before. He had spent a lot of time trying to get into Christian ministry. He went to church and participated in the band. He had a degree from a Christian college.
His explanation was that he hadn't lost his fervor for spreading the truth, he just learned new truth.
I had received messages from other family members thanking me for standing up for our faith, because we were concerned as a collective for my uncle's whole family.
Being on the other side now, I understand how alienating that must have been and probably still is.  There must have been a long line of difficult choices that lead up to that point. Don't get me wrong, my whole family still loves them and would do anything for them, but they also are eager to have the opportunity to minister to them. What's really awkward about it, is that it's genuinely out of love. Its because they care. I'm nearly certain that this is why my uncle's family didn't go to our reunion. I'm sure they would have loved most of it, but maybe just didn't want to have to hear all the religious talk and ministering that went with it.
At the time I honestly didn't consider that though. What I really thought was that my uncle's life wasn't going the way he would like for it to, which made him angry with God, which lead him to atheism. I think most Christians probably think this way. I think people will think the same thing of me when I do "come out" so to speak. A perfect example of this is the movie "God's not Dead."
The problem is that for my uncle, or anyone else for that matter, to be mad at God, he had to believe in God.
To further complicate the matter, I'm sure there are a few "atheists" which fit into the category of being mad at God, and there are a lot of atheists who devote their time to attacking the church with anger which certainly gives off the same appearance to a Christian.
I guess before I transitioned I couldn't identify with someone who didn't believe God existed at all.
Now it could be that my uncle's life wasn't going as he planned, and maybe that's what lead him to the realization of the truth, but I don't know, we've never had that conversation. It may have been he was trying to figure out the meaning of some passage, got confused and went down a similar road of research.
I wonder if people will think I was mad at God? I'm financially more stable than I've ever been, I was about to have my second child and everything in my life is still on an upward swing I feel.
I was also upset because his two boys were definitely believers before. How would this affect them psychologically and spiritually? I felt like it was so unfair to his children for him to put such a big change on them.
Really I was the one being unfair though. Who am I to judge how he parents and what is best for his kids? I know for a fact not everyone will agree with how I raise my kids, but I do look out for what's best for them. I'm not a perfect parent, and neither is my uncle, but its definitely not my place to think hes in the wrong for telling his kids what he thinks is true.
I doubt it will have any lasting psychological effects either. I eventually found out (spoiler alert) that Santa Claus, the easter bunny, and the tooth fairy were all fictitious, and I still turned out (relatively) fine. No one knows his children better than he does and his love for them compels him to do his best, even when it is tough.
As a Christian I just couldn't empathize with how he was thinking at the time though. In hindsight the saddest part of all to me is that, at least on some level, he felt like the family couldn't accept him and I was the prime example of why he felt that way. Even with my good intentions I was actually working against the greater good.
I honestly don't even know whether to say I was wrong. Is it wrong to show concern for some one's soul? My gut reaction is to justify my concern because it was out of love, but does that make it okay?
Its a tricky question because I still think treating your neighbor as yourself applies. As a Christian I would have wanted someone to confront me, but from this side, I could see how it might be uncomfortable, especially if you're getting a mini-sermon every time you turn around. Obviously I'm still philosophically exploring these ideas because at the moment, when people discuss religious matters I have no issue discussing things and honestly, I'm happy for them. Seriously. I lost something in this transition: the belief in the impossible. Something every true believer still has. I enjoy seeing their delight at it and I truly don't find it offensive. But I also haven't had anyone try to bring me back to 'the truth' either and I know I don't want a constant barrage of it.
So I think I owe an apology, because what I thought and did in the end was at least in part out of anger and most definitely did not promote the unconditional love family should have for one another.

Back to the Bible

If you are a Christian and do not wish to have doubts in your faith, STOP READING NOW. I have no intent of dissuading others from their belief for reasons I will outline later, but in this post I'll be discussing what happened when I looked back to the Bible to see if I was denying absolute truth.
I believed with certainty, before I started down this road, that the Bible was perfect, absolute truth and the word of God. I had a lot of doubts in not believing it. I still had a nagging fear that I might be wrong about everything.... again.
If you've made this transition, I'm sure you know exactly what I'm talking about. A lifetime of thinking one way doesn't change overnight.
It was about a year ago that I went back to the Bible to study. Part of me hoped I would find it as a perfect whole.
But it's not.
The reason why it needs to be perfect is because where ever it is not perfect truth, it is not the word of God. If I can prove some parts are false, what does it say about all the other sections which I cannot verify, parts which could only be verified by being there at the time? Errancy shows that while the Bible may have some great things to say, it's not absolute truth. It proves the Bible is the words of men.
I started by looking into prophecy.
I learned in christian college that prophets who were wrong were stoned to death because it meant they were false prophets. So all prophecy in the Bible should be 100 percent accurate, not just because a prophet said it, but because it is the word of God. So what happens if they aren't all absolute truth?
When I was young, I asked my mom about psychics. Ms. Cleo might have been popular at the time and I wondered how she convinced everyone she knew the future. My mom's reply was that it's easy to convince people you know the future if you speak vaguely because people will look for anything that can be interpreted as the prediction. She also commented that prophets in the Bible were specific and always right which is how we knew they spoke for God.

Ezekial 26

7 “For thus says the Lord God: ‘Behold, I will bring against Tyre from the north Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses, with chariots, and with horsemen, and an army with many people. 8 He will slay with the sword your daughter villages in the fields; he will heap up a siege mound against you, build a wall against you, and raise a defense against you. 9 He will direct his battering rams against your walls, and with his axes he will break down your towers.10 Because of the abundance of his horses, their dust will cover you; your walls will shake at the noise of the horsemen, the wagons, and the chariots, when he enters your gates, as men enter a city that has been breached. 11 With the hooves of his horses he will trample all your streets; he will slay your people by the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground. 12 They will plunder your riches and pillage your merchandise; they will break down your walls and destroy your pleasant houses; they will lay your stones, your timber, and your soil in the midst of the water. 13 I will put an end to the sound of your songs, and the sound of your harps shall be heard no more. 14 I will make you like the top of a rock; you shall be a place for spreading nets, and you shall never be rebuilt, for I the Lord have spoken,’ says the Lord God.
This prophecy is pretty darn specific. Nebuchadnezzar is going to destroy Tyre and it's never coming back.
But Tyre was never destroyed and still is an active city to this day.
Now there is A LOT of prophecy in the Bible, and many are accurate in the complete story, so how were they able to make such accurate predictions?
The authors of the New testament were quite familiar with the prophecies of the old testament and looked for opportunities to fulfill them. And if you think it was all on the up and up, check out this verse.

Matthew 2

13 When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”

14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt,15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

The 'prophecy' here is from Hosea 11:1 and actually reads:
"When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son."
The passage is very clearly talking about the Israelites exodus from Egypt, not a prediction of future events.
Which brings me to my next point. The easiest way to fulfill a prophecy, is just to write down that it happened.
Belief in all aspects of the Bible require a supreme trust in "historical science" as the creationist community say. You cannot repeat the events and so you must rely on the accuracy of the person that wrote it down. Archaeologists on the other hand rely on hard observable data left behind, like pottery, clay tablets, graves and anything really that tells the story of the past.
It may surprise you to learn that there has been no evidence ever to even suggest that the Jews were enslaved by Egypt outside of the pages of the Bible. A whole generation of people died out in the desert without one grave being left. The Egyptians apparently ate or burned every slave after death so as to hide the truth from us. A whole population which the Egyptians never recorded. There is also no circumstantial evidence such as a large change in population,  an economic downturn or a shortage of workers to help this story along. To be fair, Pharaohs had a lot of power and would try to erase events from the record of their people. Amazingly enough, threes always someone devoted enough to leave something behind for us to find.
How much of the Bible is pure fiction? How much is historically factual?
I feel like this line is pretty blurry and I no longer care enough to try to sort it out. At every turn there is a sham. Don't believe me? What did God make the birds from, dirt or water? Check both stories in Genesis. Why do we need four gospels and is it even possible for all 4 to be completely accurate? If even the gospels, the most crucial evidence of the ministry of Jesus are not important enough for God to inspire accurately, how important was it?
I try to keep in mind that it is so easy to believe the Bible. There are a ton of resources out there from people who support the Bible's claims whole heatedly, and with the best of intentions. They are genuinely concerned for the eternal consequences of your soul and feel genuine sorrow for the perceived grief God feels. The real tragedy is that they simply do not know that the story they are being told is not real. Up until a several months ago I was in that same ark.
If the blind lead the blind...

Have I been wrong all along?

I believed the Bible was absolute truth. As the word of God it should be perfect. What was i supposed to think when the evidence showed something contrary to the words i trusted implicitly?
The real turn in this story came from whales ability to smell, or lack there of.
Evolutionary biology shows the direct genetic link between animals. The theory of evolution predicts that the genes of ancestors will be present in some form in the DNA of creatures today.
The evolution of whales comes from land mammals which came from some aquatic critters further down the line (these aren't exactly the most technical terms but you get the idea.)
While I dint have time to discuss the entire lineage, and as far as fossils are concerned, there are some large gaps, but you can fill those gaps with whale DNA.
Because land animals evolved from a distant ancestor they have the genes for olfactory receptors which function under water only, but the genes are switched off in most terrestrial creatures. But what about whales? If they evolved from sea to land to sea again what do you think their genes would say?
Toothy whales have both genes for aquatic and airborne olfactory receptors, but they're all turned off.
I believed that God made everything. Why would he add junk genes to a creature? Genes it didn't need or use and indicated quite specifically the lineage of a creature's evolutionary process.
When I didn't know too much about genes, I assumed they all did something whether we knew it or not, but that's not the case. Organisms do not need every gene. Pseudogenes are abundant in organisms. This idea brought up an image of God sitting at a computer hitting "copy" and "paste" like a maniac as he created.
So if God presents the truth in a way that indicates a lie, is He lying?
Is it a lie for God to create every organism as if it had evolved even though it didn't?
Let me warn you now, from here I only find more lies that creationists shift their theories and stance on quite often to keep the position that their faith is grounded in truth. The reason this is such a hot topic to Christians is because the entire Bible must be true in order for the whole belief to not fall apart.
How can we inherit sin from Adam, if there was no Adam? If the creation story is false, why would Jesus, being God in flesh, mention it? I know that the domino effect is quite over used, but it applies overwhelmingly here.
Deep time is a term to describe the massive expanses of time, which are so mind-boggling large that they are difficult to truly comprehend, that make up the history of the universe.
I had never believed the universe to be older than 6,000 years, so how can we see stars billions of light years away?
Some of the creationist answers were as archaic as the Bible itself, such as the light-in-transit model which postulated that everything beyond 6,000 light years from us was played out like a movie on a galactic screen.
I immediately doubted the veracity of the claims of the distance of stars... until I studied how we find those distances through magnitude, parralax, and redshift. These methods give us an approximation which creationist argue with shifts in light travel fluctuations, but the theories are completely unfounded in reality, and it still leads to the same problem of "appearance of age."
Did God just make it appear old? Why would he form the cosmos in a way that alludes to an old universe? Maybe it wasn't in his plan for us to be able to measure those distances, but then why are we still here if it's not in his plan?
Over a period of months, which I am recounting in a single post, my faith was falling apart like a Jenga tower. I was pulling blocks to fill holes, but I was only creating new holes in my faith and my worldview.
The moment I realized that what I had been taught was untrue was the most profoundly lonely moment I have ever experienced.
Up until then I had imagined that we were all spiritually connected in a way that transcends belief or faith. That the souls of humanity existed on a plane indiscriminate of time or place.
What made it so profound for me was that for the first time ever I was alone in my mind. It was the first time I had ever conceived that God was not watching everything that went on in my mind like a continuous facebook feed filled with pictures, statuses and videos.
I was alone.
There were people nearby, but I was truly alone. It was frightening and liberating at the same time.
Even after all this I still felt the need to be sure. What if I was wrong? We're talking about ETERNAL consequences here. This goes well beyond the idea of deep time and was truly a concern. Had I been deceived? Was I lured away from my faith by the devil? What if the reason I felt so alone was actually separation from God? Am i just to dumb to see the message God has for me? Had i fallen into the same trap as my uncle and was i failing in my mission to win him back for Christ? Is the Bible absolute truth?
To answer these questions I had to turn back to the scriptures.