For those who are losing their faith one of the strangest parts of it is the changing of your world view. If you grow up in a conservative religious tradition you will view everything good as being the work of God so the beauty of nature, kind acts from others, friendships, and relationships will all seem to be the outpouring of God’s love. Pain, suffering, and anything bad will alternatively be viewed as the work of the Devil.
When you go through the process of losing your faith it all begins to change as you shift to a more naturalistic worldview. It’s not a black and white switch, it tends to be a gradual process as you attribute less and less to the supernatural until you finally view everything as being the product of natural causes.
It can make things you used to enjoy difficult to continue to enjoy since it lost the meaning it once had, such as the awe and majesty of nature. I found that it can even make it difficult to think back to some memories of your past life of faith. I wrote the following almost three months ago and am now sharing it with you:
This part of my story has been surprisingly difficult to write, in spite of it’s limited scope. This is due to how highly subjective and personal it is. I have tried to make it as clear as I can, but I’m not sure how clear it is even to me. I would be interested to know if anybody else who has experienced a radical conversion one way or another can relate.
In the fall of 2007 I was having a hard time adapting to life outside of the Adventist subculture. On some lonely afternoons I found myself reflecting on the life I had lived before I accepted that I had lost my faith and I had an odd realization, my memories had all of a sudden become foggy. For this statement to have it’s full significance, its worth noting that I have a really good memory, enough so that it has really annoyed girlfriends and employees who would wish that I could forget things, so this was odd. Events from 5 years ago that I had been able to remember in vivid detail just a few months before were now not so clear. Almost everything from before Jordan seemed to have been in a deep, almost dream like fog. It was so surreal that it almost seemed like those weren’t even my experiences. There were exceptions but these were mostly moments of clarity from my periods of intense doubt or the few events that didn’t really tie into my world view at all.
As time has gone on I have been able to see a more clear distinction. Everything since I called it quits is clear, everything before that is in the fog, with the aforementioned periods of doubt and a few other events, including my time in Jordan being in a much lighter fog. With the perspective allowed by the passage of time, some, but not all of the memories seem less surreal. This is one reason why my opening blog series focused on the periods of doubt. They are more clear. When I recall the memories from deep in the fog I am able to get to almost the same level of detail, but it takes just a bit more focus. I also don’t like to pull those back up since it brings the emotions with them and the inherently irrational nature of faith, the prejudices I had been brainwashed into accepting, and the general ignorance of real science seem so foreign and almost shameful.
This fog should not seem surprising, after all my world view changed. I traded faith for reason and myth for science. Everything then was in a fog, now I can enjoy the clear skies of freethought!