The following is a guest post from Alexandra, an ex-Christian.

I have tried to narrow down precisely what it was that led me to abandon my faith many times, in vain. This is because there was not one idea, there was not one final nail in the coffin – rather my faith was buried in a deluge of realizations that happened in a relatively short period of a few months. This article recounts just one of them.

My work in the spring before my deconversion led me to learn a lot about autism – and typical child development. One of the concepts I had never heard of prior to this was Theory of Mind, defined by S. Baron-Cohen as: “being able to infer the full range of mental states (beliefs, desires, intentions, imagination, emotions, etc.) that cause action. In brief, having a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds.” More specifically, I was led to investigate the idea of false beliefs. Until then I had never realized that very young children cannot understand – until around the age of four for typically-developing children – that others may have false beliefs about the world.

From Wikipedia, here is a description of the Sally-Anne test:

In the most common version of the false-belief task (often called the “‘Sally-Anne’ test” or “‘Sally-Anne’ task”), children are told or shown a story involving two characters. For example, the child is shown two dolls, Sally and Anne, who have a basket and a box, respectively. Sally also has a marble, which she places in her basket, and then leaves the room. While she is out of the room, Anne takes the marble from the basket and puts it in the box. Sally returns, and the child is then asked where Sally will look for the marble. The child passes the task if she answers that Sally will look in the basket, where she put the marble; the child fails the task if she answers that Sally will look in the box, where the child knows the marble is hidden, even though Sally cannot know this, since she did not see it hidden there. To pass the task, the child must be able to understand that another’s mental representation of the situation is different from their own, and the child must be able to predict behavior based on that understanding.

Children develop their Theory of Mind in several stages beginning as young as age three. One paper I read included findings that only 23.8% of 5-year-olds passed a level 3 TOM test, whereas 80% of 11-12-year-olds were successful. This means that the theory of mind is only fully-developed in some typical children at the onset of puberty! (Reference The TOM Test: A New Instrument For Assessing Theory of Mind in Normal Children and Children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders; Muris et. Al, 1999)

I first prayed the Sinner’s Prayer at the age of three – and my mother always told me that even at that very young age, I had a good understanding of the Gospel. I had never really questioned this. I was a young parent at the time I was looking into Theory of Mind, my own daughter was just learning to roll over, and I had little experience with other people’s young children since I am one of the first of my circle of friends to become a parent. So I had this fairly naïve perception that children’s brains are for the most part capable of the same types of understanding of the world as adult brains.

In Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, he recounts psychologist George Tamarin’s study of more than a thousand Israeli schoolchildren between the ages of eight and fourteen and their reactions to the story of the battle of Jericho. Dawkins did not make the connection I made when I read that 66% of the children gave total approval to Joshua’s actions.

When I read this passage I remembered being a child in that age group and hoisting Joshua up to a “hero of faith” status in my mind. If I were to tell the story in the way I perceived it as a child, it would go something like this. “Joshua was a brave hero who obeyed God and led his people into the land God promised them, driving out the people who had stolen it.”

Clearly, the key word in there for me was The Promised Land. I was very young when I was first introduced to this story – probably about five years old. In my mind, God had promised that land to his people, his children. I viewed this story much as I would have viewed a story in which a parent promised one child a shiny toy car – only to have her mean kid sister steal it from the shelf and refuse to give it back. Of course, when the parent punishes the sister, restoring the car to its rightful owner, that is only justice. Naïve – yes. But I was a child, a child of privilege, unaware of the horrors of war, death and destruction – and those aspects of the story were deliberately obscured by the adults in my life recounting the story to me. A far cry from the understanding I had as a young child.

In my mind, the people of Jericho were fully aware that they were occupying the land God had promised to his people and stubbornly refused to return it to them. Now of course, in actuality, the people of Jericho were regular people just living and going about their business in the land where they were born and where their families were likely born, laboring in their fields, decorating their homes, telling stories to their children around the fireplace, singing, dancing, loving – entirely unaware of any “promises” any deity may have made to another nation – and entirely uninvolved in the injustice the Isrealites supposedly suffered at the hands of the Egyptians. The story goes on to describe the destruction of their city along with “every living thing in it” – men, women, children and cattle. The ruins were plundered for tribute to this deity.

While Veggie Tales was not around when I was a young child, this should give you an idea of how I perceived it then:

This is not to take away from Dawkins’ interpretation of those results, which I think is equally valid, this is just a glimpse into my perspective at the time and to the dots connecting in my mind.

Making this connection solidified in my mind that I was emphatically not capable of informed consent to convert to Christianity when I did, and that the very first song I remember learning, “I have decided to follow Jesus”, was wholly inappropriate; akin to holding a person to their career choice at the ripe old age of three, or to make them marry the first person they had a crush on in grade-school when they come of age. No turning back, no turning back…

This was a guest post from Alexandra, an ex-Christian. Unless otherwise noted, Camels With Hammers guest posts are not subject to editing for either content or style beyond minor corrections, so guest contributors speak for themselves and not for me (Daniel Fincke). To be considered at all, posts must conform to The Camels With Hammers Civility Pledge and I must see enough intellectual merit in their opinions to choose to publish them, but no further endorsement is implied. If you would like to submit an article for consideration because you think it would be in keeping with the interests or general philosophy of this blog, please write me at camelswithhammers@ .

