Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? – Douglas Adams

I first read that quote in Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I know, I know… as embarrassing as it is to admit now, I once loved his work. As a Christian, indulging in his work was a way of demonstrating how open-minded I was to the ideas of the “other side”, and as a new atheist brimming with convert’s zeal and with a hole in my heart that I was desperate to fill, it became my new scripture.

Anyway, it’s a quote which really sums up my journey out of Christianity. For me, it’s been all about letting go of my love for the fairies, and replacing it with sheer awe for the garden, which is beautiful and mysterious just for what it is. It’s been about recognising that the beauty I found in religion doesn’t equate to it’s truth, and about identifying the true beauty that Christianity had caused me to miss. That’s what I want to talk about in this post: how leaving the Church can change somebody’s whole world.

For me, I think my attachment to Christianity was almost entirely an emotional one. I really could feel God’s presence with me in the hymns that I sang and the prayers that I said, and I could see Him working in my life. For that reason it was the only thing in the world that made sense to me, and it was the essential part of my worldview from which all other beliefs had to spring. The emotional connection I felt to God was the foundation on which my entire belief system, worldview, ethics and day-to-day life were built – so, naturally, the removal of those foundations was far from an easy process and I resisted it every step of the way.

I don’t want to get too deeply into the reasons behind my loss of faith (that’s deserving of it’s own post entirely), but it was essentially the realisation that I had so many burning questions for which I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. As somebody who had never been able to contemplate the possibility of a world where God didn’t exist, it was quite frankly terrifying. I wasn’t scared of Hell as most exChristians seem to be (I went to a lovely Methodist church where everyone all but ignored the doctrine of Hell), but rather of the world I was already living in: without God, it became a much scarier place. The comfortable ‘everything happens for a reason’ which had got me through the untimely and sudden death of a friend not long before, had suddenly disappeared and now people could just… die. That was it. No rhyme or reason. No hope of reunion. The people I cared about could just fall into oblivion and that scared me.

On top of that, I had the biggest, most cliché existential crisis imaginable, and studying Nietzsche in A-Level Theology can’t have helped. I was so consumed with the big question: what is the point? Before that, I’d been working incredibly hard at my A-Levels, extracurricular Greek and philsophy lessons, preparation for an interview and university career in Cambridge, orchestras, Girl Guiding – all because I thought that they were a part of God’s plan for me. Working hard was easy when I was complicit in a divine plan. Once the divine plan was stripped away, it became much harder to care. I didn’t get into Cambridge (probably unavoidable), and stopped striving for the top. Average became okay for me.

And then there was the question of feeling loved: who could ever love me like God did? This is one that I still struggle with from time to time: I’m very lucky to have a lot of people who care about me, but when you believe in the all-consuming and unconditional love to which human love doesn’t compare, it becomes that much harder to appreciate human love. I know that my parents, siblings, boyfriend and best friends have all provided for me and would do a lot for me, and I am truly grateful to have them in my life, but… they’re not God. They’ll never match up to the love I thought that I had, and that’s a tough thing for an 18 year-old to deal with.

It’s not all bad, though. 3 and a half years ago as I was beginning to leave Christianity, I met my current boyfriend Liam, who has my eternal gratitude for showing me how beautiful the world can be just for what it is, and that I could be even happier without my faith than I was with it. A short and finite life is a precious thing which I no longer take for granted – I am a healthier, more adventurous, more loving person for this knowledge. A world which came into being organically is so mysterious and incredible that it dwarfs Paley’s claim of a mechanical, designed world.