I’m not sure it’s possible to do anything that’s not selfish — every act needs motivation, and it seems like motivation for what you do would come from somewhere inside of yourself, seeing as you’d be the one doing it. So, on some level, everything you did was what you wanted to do out of the options available to you at that time. Strictly logically speaking, everything you do is probably selfish.

Still, I find myself shaking my head when someone says accuses me of leaving Christianity for selfish reasons. Although it may not be possible to perform an unselfish deed, I can honestly say that leaving Christianity is the least selfish thing I’ve ever done.

One of the reasons I say this is that I doubted God in the face of threats of hellfire that I, on some level, still believed.

A lot of Christians say they can’t imagine being afraid of hell, so let me explain what I mean.

Most Christians seem to view hell (or separation from God, or however the particular Christian defines it) a bit like it’s an electric fence — on one side is heaven, and if you cross the line (which is often hard to figure) you’re in Satan’s territory, so to speak, and you’re going to experience hell. It’s why Christians often say that atheists believe in the devil, I think — they believe that if you are opposed to God you’re automatically in hell’s camp. So, here’s the thing: when you’re far away from the “electric fence” and enjoying the green grass within its borders, you don’t really have a conscious fear of it. It’s only when you travel near the electric fence that you begin to be concerned — it’s when you are thinking about going beyond the wire that the question of whether or not it’s safe really concerns you.

That’s what leaving Christianity was like for me. When I didn’t have serious doubts, hell was the last thing on my mind. But then I began to develop more of a heart for those supposedly in danger of going to hell…it wasn’t enough for me to do that thing some Christians do and “leave it up to God.” I had to challenge my thinking and get to the bottom of things. And that brought me nearer to that fence…and the fears came.

So, much of what motivated me to leave Christianity, in spite of this fear, is that I was uncomfortable with the fact that people I was developing a heart for were going to hell. If they were actually going to hell, the care in my heart made it absolutely necessary for me to warn them — but I also worried that warning them would make them unnecessarily afraid if I were wrong. It would also be saying that they deserved to go there if they didn’t believe in the same story I supposedly believed in.

(Note: I’m not saying that this emotional argument alone made me leave — I left primarily because I looked at the evidence carefully and found it to be against Christianity being true. But my fuel for leaving consisted, largely, of a realization regarding others’ fear of hell).

I could have kept going to church. I could have hung out with friends there, and focused on heaven without really thinking about the possibility that other people were going to hell. I would still be close to my family, I would still be close to my Christian friends (I didn’t really have atheist friends at the time), I eventually would have (perhaps, after distancing myself from the evidence I’d found) selfishly focused on the joys of heaven, and I would have lived a relatively happy life.

But I cared too much about how bad it would be to stand behind this Christianity, if it was false. And, in my latter couple years as a Christian, I began to suspect that the way I was caring about myself was amazingly selfish. How could I be happy that I was going to heaven when I worshiped a God who seemed, in the Bible, to threaten people I cared about with punishment and hell? How could I follow the rules of someone who seemed to ask people I cared about to act against their desires, especially their desires for people they loved? How could I urge people to hold on to Jesus and say that Jesus was the answer for their emotional struggles if I suspected, deep down, that Jesus should be disregarded and that careful studies should inform the way people deal with such struggles, and that a “just trust Jesus” often encouraged more guilt than comfort in people?

And so on.

So what I’m saying is that the way I thought of myself became a little less selfish, and I became a bit more focused on other people, and that led to me becoming more and more uncomfortable with the thought that others were going to hell.

So I studied the concept of hell. And I saw, even here, that there was room for compromise. I could make it so that hell wasn’t THAT bad, and still call myself a Christian without really condemning those outside the faith. But that was increasingly dishonest to me, because when I forced myself to give a hard, straightforward look at the concept of hell, I found that there didn’t really seem to be evidence for its existence.

If I told people that they deserved eternity in hell, I’d be lying to them. If I told them they could trust in Jesus, I’d be lying to them. If I told them to follow God because He cared, I’d be lying to them.

I could have done that. I could have “faked” it. I know people who do. And, to be fair, the price of leaving Christianity is often high — I think that some people aren’t at a point in their lives where they can come out and be public about how they don’t believe it.

But then again, I couldn’t fake it, because I cared about other people and the truth too much.

There’s a short story called “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by a woman named Ursula Le Guin. It starts out with a description of a perfect utopia. But in this utopia, there is one small child who is continually beaten, without mercy. And the utopia of the town depends on that one small child being beaten.

That’s what heaven and hell seemed like to me. Not just in the afterlife, but here — the separation, I could see, created rifts between families and friends, especially in this US culture, where atheists are only about 3% of the population.

Many people stayed in Omelas, in Le Guin’s story. But every once in a while, someone would get restless and leave.

(Ursula Le Guin is an atheist, by the way. Maybe that’s part of why her analogy explained my own experience so well.)

That’s basically what I did. I got restless and packed my bags. Except, more than that, I decided to still keep up discourse with the city and tell them to stop worshiping any God who would privilege love of Himself over love of people (especially if this God was found in the Bible).

It hasn’t been easy. It’s been a difficult road.

But the love this beating heart can share gives me a smile that’s worth it. And in leaving, I’ve found a community of people who say “me, too,” and it warms my heart every time, because I didn’t know what I would find.

As Ursula Le Guin put it:

People who spend their lives sewing doll clothes for a figment of their imagination [they call “God”] have no business running a country, making laws, interfering in people’s sex lives, teaching in public schools, or getting us into wars against people who make a different kind of doll clothes for a different figment of the imagination. Let the tailors of the garments of God sit in their tailor shops and stitch away, but let them stay there in their temples, out of government, out of the schools. And we who live among real people—real, badly dressed people, people wearing rags, people wearing army uniforms, people sleeping on our streets without a blanket to cover them —let us have true charity: Let us look to our people, and work to clothe them better.

Thank you, and thanks for reading.