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Originally Posted by Cheese
If you dont mind the ask...was there a specific turning or tipping point, or was it just a time-driven experience?
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Definitely a time-driven experience.
1. Ten years ago my critical disposition honed from years of post-graduate research had preconditioned me to pose my questions much more broadly beyond the historical claims of Christianity to all manner of history, sociology, psychology, etc.
2. Beginning in 2012, while living for three years in Norway, my family stopped attending church. At first this was because of the language barrier. Over time—and after enduring an enormous amount of guilt, we lost any motivation to return.
3. In the final year of my Norwegian contract in 2015, my wife and kids returned to Canada, and she took a job here in BC. Functioning as a single parent and with an auto-immune disease, she also became simply too exhausted to attend church on Sundays, or any other day.
4. I have become progressively more and more disillusioned by the integration of Christianity in academics at the confessional school where I have been employed. The power dynamics are the same, if not more pronounced.
5. I think if there was a tipping point, it was in the course of hours of interviews with a reporter from CNN in 2017. At one point he basically called me out, and it started becoming impossible to deny where I had arrived.
I don't know that this makes me a happier person. It has a direct impact on my livelihood, my circle of friends, my relationships with my extended family. But like I told my mother, I can't choose what I believe, and I am not going to lie about it.