Tell me straight out, I call on you — answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifoce on the foundation of her unrequited tears — would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I tend to hesitate when a Christian asks why I left Christianity, because they’re usually looking for a silver bullet. There isn’t one. Leaving Christianity was a long, painful process that came after (and even during) periods of very sincere faith — and I know it might sound a bit arrogant, but upon leaving I had already explored many of the different alternatives for “real” Christianity and found them horribly inadequate.

So when I finally left Christianity, there was nothing within the religion to hold onto. The archaeological evidence was missing, the emotional appeals were unappealing (and many were downright disturbing), the Bible was unreliable, scriptures seem contradictory, God as a concept made as much logical sense to me as a square circle, and so on. As a small sample, I wrote down 78 reasons that Christianity fueled my leaving, which hardly scratch the surface.

But that doesn’t fit in nice, polite, teatable conversation.

So I’ve come up more focused answer that seems to satisfy many Christians. It has a lot to do with my attempts to follow the Bible’s two greatest commandments: “Love God with all your heart, soul, and mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The love of God made me hungry for more knowledge of Him and how He worked. And this led to more and more questions…

People may say I didn’t take God seriously enough, but I think it was just the opposite. I think, sometimes, if I had taken God less seriously, I might still be a Christian. But I was really trying to dedicate myself to someone I though was real and was my best friend, which gave me an unsatiable curiosity and drive to get to know Him better. I often wonder why more Christians aren’t obsessed with learning about God (unless, of course, they don’t really believe it).

An Illustration from MTV

There’s this MTV show called Catfish.

To be “catfished” is to be tricked into thinking that a fake profile online is real. In the show, people fall in love with someone online who they thought, at first, was real. But the more they love them and care about them, the more they want to get to know them. It’s not like the lover is looking to disprove this person’s existence — far from it. They WANT the person to exist. And that fuels their drive for closer contact with them.

It was like that with me and God. I wanted to touch God, to feel Him, to be closer to Him. I wanted the Gospels to come to life for me. I wanted to know the definition of His love more profoundly in what I called my “soul.” And the more I did that, the more I noticed patterns that didn’t fit. Just as the person being “catfished” in the MTV show may eventually notice that the person they talk to is showing signs of not even being real…I began to notice several aspects of God that indicated it might all be a fraud. And the more I looked into it, the more it seemed to be true.

My love for God, for a while, was (I thought) enabling my ability to love for people. And this is where the discussion gets somewhat difficult, because Christians constantly say that the problem is that I valued people more than I valued God. But the thing is — people actually existed. I could touch them, feel them, talk to them, understand them. That didn’t happen with God. The less God appeared to be real, the more real people became for me. “Love your neighbor as yourself” and “Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” were commands working against each other. The more I sought to love God, the more his lack of existence tended to become apparent. The more I strove to love people, the more I began to see that they were more real than God, and it became more and more difficult — and eventually impossible — to love a God who didn’t exist and people who did at the same time.

As a side note, I get terribly angry at the attitude that God must be heeded above people nowadays, because it effectively puts tape over my mouth and keeps me from expressing myself to many people I care about. They will ignore my words, my attitudes, my experiences, if they don’t correlate with what they think God is telling them. That bothers me greatly now, and I could feel, as a Christian, that this bothered many of the non-Christians I was beginning to talk to and befriend.

Eventually, in the last few months of my being a Christian, my suspicion that God didn’t exist was at a high. I still suspected He did, at the time, but the reality of other people’s existence — including people who were not Christian — was pressing on my consciousness. And my insatiable curiosity regarding His existence, based on my intense love of God at the time, made me increasingly uncomfortable, especially when I noticed indications that God was not as beautiful as I had thought He was — that he might have been a puppet or a dream of men that had several dark corners in his imaginary psyche.

And so, I walked away from Omelas, so to speak.

Walking Away From Omelas

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a short story written by Ursula Le Guin (who, incidentally, is also an atheist).

Basically, there’s this Utopia. Everything in this Utopia is perfect. Le Guin paints it in fantastic colors, giving it incredible definition and beautiful scenery. The people are always happy — no guilt, and all full of pleasure and beauty. It’s like heaven.

But between the ages of 8 and 12, each child in this Utopia is told that, in this Utopia, is a room.

In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits haunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval – sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

And everyone in the city knows that the child is there, and that, for some reason, it has to be. Some people can figure the reason out; some can’t. And yet the child remains. And they are all disturbed upon finding out about the child. Le Guin states:

They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed. The terms are strict and absolute; there may not even be a kind word spoken to the child. Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years.

But eventually most of them rationalize a way out of it. After all — this is the best way things can work. And the knowledge of this poor child is what fuels a lot of their generosity. The knowledge that the child is in such a terrible place causes them to appreciate their own children, to appreciate the beauty of their own lives, to love their neighbors more, to embrace the fullness of what life has to offer, to make Omelas a better place.

I think Christianity works similarly. The knowledge that we all deserve hell (and, arguably, that some are going there) causes many Christians — myself included, once — to live vibrant lives, full of love for their fellowman and appreciation for beauty and God and existence. The more I knew the hell I was saved from, the more my appreciation grew.

And yet…Le Guin goes on to narrate there are some in Omelas who, after a time, grow quiet and disturbed. And one day, without much warning, they leave the city. Resolutely. Alone. Through the beautiful heaven and vibrant community…right through the gates, and the keep walking, as if they know where they are going, and they don’t come back. As Le Guin states:

They go on. They leave Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

That story is one I read 7-8 years before I left Christianity, but it took the last few months of Christianity for it to really make its mark on my consciousness. As I strove to love my neighbor as myself, it became harder and harder to live a life of beauty based on the concept that some of the people I dearly loved would spend eternity in a place of torment, worse than the boy in Omelas.

And I grew gradually uncomfortable about this, and this was a major factor fueling my research, my analysis. Because if Christianity was true, I had to know and try to save as many as I could. It would take over the entirety of my life. And if it wasn’t, I could not base the entirety of my life on a fairy tale.

Now that I’ve walked a good ways from the myth of Heaven’s “Omelas,” so to speak, I tend to think I would not want to live based on a theology that said so many were sinners headed for hell. Even if it did exist. And it really is disturbing to know that the entirety of the supposed goodness of Christianity is based, for the most part, on the concept that its heaven depends on my, as an unbeliever, being tormented in hell forever. I followed a God who I thought was love and sought to love him and, like the catfished lover, I eventually found out that behind the persona was a fraud that took away from the relationships I could be having with people who did exist — and, in many cases, was actively hurting those relationships and my attitudes towards other people.

This is why I’m incredulous when Christians say, “Atheism is depressing. You die and that’s it.”

It seems so obviously better for me to die and perish than for me to do and go to heaven while someone else goes to hell. To say otherwise speaks of a disturbing heartlessness beneath the smiles and “love.”

So, for that and other reasons, I walked away to experience love, to more truthfully love my neighbor as myself. And for that love — as people walked away from Omelas, I walked away from God. Yes, both Omelas and God are myths. But were they real, I’d like to think I’d be uncomfortable with both if it meant suffering for my fellowman.

I’ll close out with a quote from Ursula Le Guin:

I agree with you with all my heart that people who spend their lives sewing doll clothes for a figment of their imagination 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.

Amen.