“Why do you talk so much about Christianity? If you didn’t really believe it, you wouldn’t talk about it. There must be something in you that still believes.”

I’ve noticed that this sentiment is not only shared by many Christians — it is also shared, to varying extents, by many atheists. I talk about Christianity quite a bit, and while it goes without saying that doing seems to confuse many Christians who think I should have moved on by now, I’ve also found that many atheists have told me that I should stop bashing Christianity so much; I should just move on and shut up about it.

It turns out that’s probably not intellectually healthy.

Why? Because our brains don’t work like computers.

If you input data into a computer, and the computer pops out a certain answer…you can change that answer by changing some of the data, as the computer will automatically update all of its “thinking” to reflect the new data. So, if you told a computer running as if Christianity was right, “There is no God,” it would immediately update all the programming based on God’s existence, removing every single implication of God’s existence in its programming and replacing it with implications based on the fact that God doesn’t exist.

In an instant. Boom.

That’s why a computer-brain wouldn’t have to talk about God after leaving Christianity. God would be completely and totally erased from the entire programming mind. Gone — assuming the computer doesn’t have glitches.

It turns out the human brain doesn’t work that way.

If you’ve lived all your life as if Christianity is right, and suddenly are told “There is no God,” your beliefs don’t automatically update.

For example, as Julia Galef explains in the video below, you may believe there is no God…but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll automatically act as if what the God you worshipped supposedly said about promiscuity being wrong is irrelevant — it may still be a thought stuck in your brain on some level. If you don’t talk about the absence of Christianity, you may eventually forget that the idea of promiscuity being wrong is based on the nonexistent God you left, and think that it’s based on “just so” facts.

If you do talk about the absence of Christianity in your life, all those extra beliefs you have that were connected to that belief will have an easier time coming to the surface. It’s really awesome, actually — the first year after I left Christianity, I felt like every day was a new Eureka.

Now, when you do things that used to be rationalized as “God says that’s what I should do” after you stop believing in a nonexistent God, that doesn’t mean you suddenly believe in God again. Those are just leftover habits, like muscle memory — kinda like when you just moved and you’re going home to your new place…and because you’re not really paying attention you find yourself in front of your old apartment.

That doesn’t mean you still think you live there.

I mean, there is a bunch of stuff you do that clearly shows that you know you don’t live there (like a ton of paperwork you filled out and that higher rent). It’s just that you’ve been going home the same way for ten years and your thinking hasn’t been fully updated.

So…I was in church all my life till 28, and I was one of those C.S. Lewis Christians — the “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else” type. Fundamentalist Christianity informed almost everything I did. When I found out God wasn’t real, I thought my “system” would automatically update — but I kept finding things that weren’t true, that I had to adjust to — scattered beliefs and tendencies here and there. And I wrote about them, as I did so. And I still have things that I’m striving past — muscle memory that I have to erase. And I know this because I talked, a lot, about the implications of God not being real.

Talking about things in this way was how I went from being a fundamentalist Christian to becoming an atheist in the first place. I kept getting new information, and I forced myself to update my thinking based on the information coming in. It wasn’t always easy. It was often excruciatingly difficult, because I was pretty deep in it. It was suicidally difficult at times — although I never actually attempted suicide, I came close several times, and am glad I lived to tell the tale. The dominos falling gave me pretty bad anxiety at times. It was not easy.

One thing that would have eased the transition is realizing that this is normal. You’re not wrong for continuing to criticize and tease out the implications of beliefs you found out were false. It is a necessary aspect of being human, of being less wrong about the world you’re living in. So…this is something I learned the hard way.

And I think there are larger implications here — society-wide. When you live in a predominantly Christian society, there are often assumptions about how the world works and how people should think that we may gather without realizing how influenced by Christianity they are. Revealing that these beliefs have their source in Christianity can show how the beliefs are based on incorrect assumptions — but we can’t do that if criticizing Christianity is off limits.

There are many beliefs that need to be updated due to the powerful evidence we have that Christianity is not true. We as an increasingly post-religious society in the West need to talk about the implications of Christianity not being true so that we have fewer vestigial tendencies that are based on the false, and often harmful, beliefs within the religion.

And not just Christianity — other beliefs, too, like the belief that global warming isn’t happening (which is arguably based on the belief that God will take care of the earth), or the belief that people are the gender they are assigned at birth (which seems based on the belief that some God-figure made us and decides what gender we are), or the belief that “alternative” medicine is more effective than prescription medicine (which seems based on the assumption that God made nature for us, so that human modification of what God made somehow makes things worse). We need to talk about the beliefs we’re rejecting for ourselves, and also for others in order to weed out connected harmful tendencies and work towards a world that is free of them.

Thank you for reading.