From time to time it hits me just how relieved I am to have relinquished faith.

My lovely bride and I were chatting about this the other day. For years she was plagued by guilt. She tried everything she could think of to assuage, dispel, or otherwise properly deal with such guilt.

It wasn’t guilt about anything in particular, mind you. She had committed no crime, sullied no character. Guilt just kind of hung in the air, like a fog.

For me, pride and discipline comprised my personal cats-’o-nine-tails. I beat myself up over the continuing presence of these scourges on my character, my failure to meet the humility modeled by and demanded by the Savior.

Unlike my bride, I felt like I gained some ground in my personal struggles. She, unfortunately, remained plagued as ever.

And then…

And then we discovered the awful truth about Jesus, about religion. Jesus was just a guy (and maybe not even that; some say he may never have actually existed). Religion is just a man-made fill-in-the-gaps type of mental and cultural device. The Bible is just an old book, and not a particularly wonderful one at that. So we chucked god.

And, God!, does that feel good! The Mrs. has not felt guilty hardly at all since then. My pride and discipline issues are less imposing, less concerning than they were before.

The relief we both feel, seven years hence, is hard to overstate. Like anything, we have adapted to our new normal and so have been desensitized to it. But like grief at a loved one lost, or laughter at the memory of an old joke, or melancholy about times past, every now and then the relief sweeps over me anew. And I am reminded of the great liberation that comes from releasing (and being released from) faith.

And it is good.

Driving in the car the other day, my lovely bride happened to ask my seven year old son whether he knew what Easter was. The holiday was fast approaching and it seemed appropriate to have a “good parent” moment and provide the boy with some context.

“It’s the bunny, right?”

Ah. Well, not exactly. She proceeded to inform the boy about the Christian belief that Jesus was crucified on a Friday, died, was buried, and then rose again on Sunday. Upon relating this to me, she observed, “When I was telling him about Easter it occurred to me how crazy and ridiculous this story is.” She had never really thought about it too much.

I think that happens to us when we’re growing up. If you’re steeped in a particular culture, you tend to just accept certain things, no matter their absurdity or strangeness. That’s because they are not strange; they’re familiar, like your mom’s china pattern or the wallpaper in that one room of your grandparents’ house.

So many of our beliefs and traditions just make up the cosmic background of our lives. We do not question them because they are just there.

Later, at the lunch table, we talked about my bride’s attempt at retelling the Easter story, which prompted to me to ask both kids what they knew. Daughter, nine, and son both said they didn’t really get what it was about.

I retold the story. Here’s approximately how it went down:

Me: “Jesus, whom Christians believed to be God, was crucified, which means killed by a particular kind of torture, on a Friday.”

Son: “Jesus…the god-man?”

Me: “Yes.”

Daughter: “Well sort of.”

Me: “Christians believe he was fully God and fully man.”

Daughter: “Whaaaaat?”

Son: “How could he be God and man?”

Me: “I don’t know. Anyway, when he died on Friday, he went to Hell. Hell is not thought of as a physical place; it’s a spiritual place. It means separated from God.”

Daughter: “Wait, was he split in half?”

Me (flummoxed): “Um…I don’t know.”

Daughter: “If he was God but then was separated from God…what…?”

Son: “Yeah, how could he be God and separ-…”

Me: “I don’t know. Anyway, three days later, on Sunday, he rose from the dead and then appeared to several people over the course of thirty days or so.”

[We digressed into a side conversation about the Hebrew conception of "three days" wherein 72 hours gets cut down to, say, 36 hours.]

Me: “At the end of the thirty days, he was taken up directly to Heaven.”

Daughter: “Where’s Heaven?”

Me: “Well, like I said, just like Hell, Heaven isn’t a physical place. It’s a spiritual place. It means communion with God or being with God.”

Daughter: “Where did his body go?”

Me: “He was taken up directly to Heaven. He didn’t leave a body behind.”

Daughter: “But I thought Heaven wasn’t a physical place.”

Me: “That’s what Christians believe.”

Daughter and Son: [Confused looks remain on their faces.]

At the outset, I’ll grant that I’m giving my children a biased and piecemeal presentation of “the gospel.” However, in seventeen years of being a committed, hard-core, studious Christian, I never thought about the blatantly obvious things that my goofy kids did.

How could Jesus, if he was God, also be separated from God? This doesn’t pass any kind of smell test. At all. Think about it. How awful is it for you to be away from your kids or your parents for a day and a half? Maybe you miss them, but it’s bearable.

That’s how long Jesus was away from his father (and the Holy Spirit, to boot!), who is also himself. In all the descriptions of Hell that I’ve heard, it is supposed to be an awful, horrible state of existence, which awfulness is a result of separation from God. But how terrible could it be if you knew that it was going to end in a day and half anyway? After all, aren’t we already in a state of Hell here on Earth if we do not believe in God? We’re separated from Him, right? Yet I find life quite bearable, enjoyable, even.

Plus, how could Jesus still be Jesus and not Jesus? That is, how could he be God and not God? This is basic logic: You cannot be both A and not A, unless you’re subject to the U.S. Tax Code.

Further, in the modern Christian conception of Hell as a spiritual place, what DID happen to Jesus’ body? Did it dematerialize? Did it travel through the stratosphere, swing around the Moon, and shoot off through the Oort Cloud? And why would it need to do this anyway, if Heaven is a spiritual place? We all leave our bodies behind when we go to Heaven or Hell, why couldn’t Jesus?

Children. They provide such a refreshing perspective, don’t they?

The Emperor, it seems, has no new clothes.

WARNING: This blog post starts easily enough but turns wonky. Also, I don’t think it’s finished, but I’m posting anyway. Proceed at your own risk.

I’ve been doing CrossFit lately. After three and a half weeks of it, I finally have those perfect abs! You’ll just have to believe me, here, as my camera seems broken. Ahem.

Anyway, what’s intriguing to me about CrossFit is the impressively scientific approach that Greg Glassman, the founder of CrossFit, has taken to defining fitness. In a nutshell, according to Glassman fitness is the ability to move loads (weights), with some speed, in different ways. (I’m paraphrasing.) Health, in turn, is an individual’s fitness over that person’s age. That is, fitness is a snapshot in time — like the weather on a given day or a company’s balance sheet at the end of the quarter — while health is the compilation of that person’s fitness through time as he ages — like climate is a compilation of weather and an income statement is a compendium (in some sense) of balance sheets.

Let me see if I can “draw” it out for you as Glassman does. Imagine a simple graph. On the vertical axis on the left you’ve got power: the ability to move stuff. At the bottom on the horizontal axis you have duration: how long you keep moving stuff. Now, as you do squats or power cleans or sprints, you record as points on the graph the power you exerted and how long you exerted it. Plot a bunch of those points and you get a curve. The area under the curve is your fitness. But we’re not done. Now add a third axis to the graph, coming straight out toward you. This is your age. The volume under the curve — your fitness plotted over time — is your health.

Ok, so fitness means you can move stuff around in different ways and health means you can keep doing so over time. Everybody got it?

Well, this got me thinking about morality, naturally. I have long contended — at least since 2002, while I was still firmly a believer — that “moral good” is that which increases net human happiness. Sam Harris similarly said morality has to do with human and animal well-being. One problem, as Harris notes very well in The Moral Landscape, is that we don’t really know what “well-being” means, just as we don’t know what “health” means.

But thanks to Glassman, we do know what health means (at least, we know what physical health means), and in a scientifically measurable way to boot. So, could we do the same with morality, with goodness?

I’m just spitballing here, but it seems to me that we could come up with at least two general conceptions of goodness as they relate to an individual. Let’s call them happiness and joy, roughly analogous to fitness and health, respectively. For my purposes here, let’s say that happiness refers to our ability to extract pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction out of life experiences, and that joy is a measure of how happy a person is over the course of his life. On our vertical axis, we might plot points depicting how much self-reported pleasure we obtain from a particular activity or life experience, and the horizontal axis may measure how long such pleasure lasts per experience. We’d need some kind of composite score of not just pleasure, though, as we’d need to incorporate the concepts of meaning and satisfaction as well. With such a composite graphed over two dimensions, we could integrate the curve they create, and the resulting area under the curve would be an objective measure of our subjective happiness. Now when we extend the third axis, age, toward us, the volume under the curve would be a measure of the joy we have in life.

The result of this, theoretically, would be scientifically verifiable and measurable notions of happiness and joy, which have until now (as far as I know) been pretty elusive concepts. We might even go one step further and assert that the term wellbeing, when used to refer to an individual, could refer to a composite of the concepts of health, as taken from Glassman, and joy, as discussed here. In turn the goodness of a person would be some amalgamation of the individual’s wellbeing and his contribution to the wellbeing of others.

Let me pause for a moment just to point out a few things. First, in this conception, happiness is a skill. It’s not something that “just is”; instead you have to develop an ability, a technical know-how, related to extracting pleasure, meaning, and satisfaction from life. While some individuals may be more naturally gifted than others, the maximization of happiness requires careful training and practice. By extension, then, joy is a meta-skill. Second, tradeoffs will need to be made in order to maximize happiness and joy. A bully, for example, may derive extreme pleasure from beating up a younger kid and taking his lunch money. However, meaning and satisfaction may be sacrificed in the process. Further, the pleasure may diminish rather quickly over time, both in the sense of an immediate bullying encounter and of the habitual bullying of several kids. As pleasure diminishes (assuming for the moment that it would indeed do so) and as satisfaction and meaning continue to be sacrificed, happiness and joy suffer, for the bully. Thus, we may find, via repeatable and verifiably scientific measurement and analysis, that bullying is not an efficient strategy for maximizing one’s own happiness and joy.

Now, how does all this relate to “goodness”? Well, note that “goodness” is not something experienced only in isolation. That is, for something to be morally good, we can’t just look at an individual’s happiness and joy. At the very least we need to look at an individual’s interaction with a community of people at some scale. To call something good it must increase net human happiness or joy, which means that it must increase either an individual’s happiness or the happiness of several individuals, or both — all in a way that more than offsets any decrease in human happiness or joy (which I would call evil) caused by that something. Thus, good is measured by the extent to which something causes people to be happy.

Taking our previous notion that happiness is a skill, we must also recognize that — despite whatever skill we have — the actions of others (and of animals, and of weather, etc.) affect our happiness in ways we cannot necessarily control. Nevertheless, with the tools I’ve outlined here, theoretically, we can define and measure whether someone or someone’s actions are good or evil. Further, we may even be able to identify over time those actions that tend to be good and in what circumstances they are so, allowing us to move from simply observing what is to prescribing what ought to be.

Sorry to wax taxonomic with you, but…well…I thought it might be good to do so.

Why won’t you change?

You know what I mean. Here are the facts: You will admit you’re not perfect. You will readily concede that you are far from it, in fact. When pressed, you may even grant that you are not as happy as you would like to be. What’s more, you might have a bead on the steps you need to take to make you happy. But you don’t, won’t, follow them. Why?

We are wired this way, for some reason. I could speculate on the evolutionary reasons why our brains naturally steer us away from change and keep us in line with the herd or lead us to risk aversion, but let’s reserve that pop-science conversation for a dinner party some time.

Instead, let’s focus on this: There is no good reason for avoiding change that is good for us. That is, there are explanatory factors for this risk-avoiding, change-evading behavior, but the behavior itself is not based on rationality. Here’s an example of what I mean: You have heard that eating large amounts of fast food isn’t good for you, but — if you’re a normal American — you do it anyway. Does it make you happier? If so, is that a fleeting happiness later offset by guilt or despair (or indigestion)? If your answer is yes, then there exists no good reason to eat fast food. But you do it anyway.

If something does not make you happier — either immediately or in the future — why do it?

Last May I had the privilege of teaching a business and economics course to a class of seventh grade girls. After six one-hour sessions with these wonderful students, I huddled them all up for some final thoughts. Sitting in a semicircle, we reviewed some of the lessons we had learned, and after a piece I asked them this: “What’s the point?”

They looked at me, silent. “Why did we study all of this?” I said.

“So we can handle money,” said one student.

“So we know how to get jobs,” chimed in another.

“Yes, but what’s the point of being able to handle money or of getting a job?” I pressed. Again, confused silence, and then:

“So we can buy stuff.”

“What’s the point of buying stuff?”

Long pause. And then one of the more animated students, thinking hard but speaking timidly took a guess. “So we can be happy?”

“Yes! And there you have it. School is about your happiness!” They looked at me like I was an alien. But what is school about if it is not about the happiness — in this case, by and large the future happiness — of the students? It cannot be about anything else.

The trick, of course, is to balance future and present happiness, but the larger point is that happiness is the purpose, the end, the telos of life. Love is about happiness, as is earning money, as is any purposeful relationship, activity, or action, even if misguided.

And very often happiness requires change. We must always be willing to change if that will increase our happiness. We know this. Deep down in our guts we know that change is necessary to keep us happy or to make us happier, yet for some reason our instinct is to resist any and all change.

Maybe our brains are wired this way, but we also have the ability to counteract instinct. We can choose. We can choose to change. We can decide to take the path that leads to greater happiness.

For me, a recent move to Hawaii reflected my willingness to change to maintain or increase my happiness. The same analysis applied to my exit from faith, which was enormously hard. My next personal challenge consists of making those changes necessary to improve my happiness through proper diet and exercise. Will I do what makes me happy? Will you do what makes you happy?

Why? Or why not?

We spread the ashes of my friend’s father today. The rain fell, the birds sang, the mountain received its dusting. Though I did not know the departed, I wept.

My own father passed some twenty-six years ago, when he was two months older than I am now: 38 (or so). In another twenty-six-ish years, my friend will be as old as his father was when he passed a few months ago: 80 (or thereabouts).

This week has given plenty of cause for reflection on death…and life. It is hard, I have found, to strike the right balance between the somber weight of death and the joy of living a full life. As C.S. Lewis – a well-known Christian author – said of his late wife, “The pain now is part of the joy then.” But which do I acknowledge and when? Is there joy to be found in death?

We Americans tend toward the awkward in dealing with the inevitable. We do not train our children, or ourselves, to see death as a necessary part of life, the part that accentuates and gives urgency to the rest. Instead, we ignore it. Or get blindsided by it, or wallow in it. Or perhaps we let the nerd inside show a bit too much, making uncomfortable statements, seriously or in jest. Would that we could incorporate the reality of death healthily into our ethos.

~ ~ ~

My friend told a story while we were on the mountain. He spoke of an incident many years ago when he and his father were called upon to rescue a woman off of a cliff near where we were hiking. The father had lowered my friend on a rope, and my friend had wrapped his arms and legs around the woman to secure her. The father, with assistance from others, was going to pull them both up on the rope. But the woman would not let go. No matter what they did, she simply did not want to leave the perceived safety – the certainty – of the rock. And then…the father said in the sweetest voice, “You are safe. Let go.” And she did.

For my friend, a believer through and through, the story spoke of the nature of man and his resistance to faith, and it was a sweet reminiscence on the kindness of his father as a model of the Father. I understand that. For me, the story also spoke of faith. For my friend, the rock was our own (mis)understanding of the world, at odds with what God has in mind for us. For me the rock was faith itself. In either case the proper move was to let go. And in either case, letting go was the scariest thing you could do.

~ ~ ~

When my friend spread his father’s ashes in that beautiful spot on the mountain, I wept. Partly this was because I am a big fat weeping wimp, who will cry like a little girl at a particularly moving detergent commercial. But part of it was because I know what it is like to be without a father, and this was the final farewell for my friend to his.

And as I was standing there in the rain watching the ashes find their home in the nooks and crannies of the mountain, the vibrant, green, joyous sense of life was overwhelming. The birds were chirping, the squirrels and minibears were darting, and the trees and grass and flowers were drinking in the sweet nectar from the sky. All around this death ceremony life was being lived. A white-haired widow was saying goodbye as my six year old son was shifting restlessly and working his tongue around his first loose tooth.

Death was present, yes, but for me it served only to emphasize the raw vivacity that surrounds us, and the joy to be found there.

When you hear the word “integrity” generally you think of honesty, trustworthiness, and character. However, I want to focus on another aspect of integrity: self-awareness.

Integrity is oneness, consistency, among what you believe, what you do, and what you say. A friend of mine actually coined an adjective version that think is catchy: integritous. Like so many of the good-guy words “integrity” gets bandied about a bit, sometimes used and abused. But let’s stop a moment and consider what integrity requires.

First, of course, in order to have some consistency among your beliefs, actions, and words, you’ve got to actually believe something, do something, and say something. Now, the latter two don’t require a whole lot of effort for most of us – we engage in such things every day – but believing something, or believing in something, can be a more nebulous and hard-to-define task. If you say, for example, that you believe in “God”, that’s fine on its own, but now you’ve got to think about what “God” means. If you say you believe in truth, tell me of what truth is made. This can be surprisingly hard.

Second, with exceedingly rare exceptions, to have integrity one must be self-aware. That is, you must know what it is you believe, you must be intentional about how you act, and you must train yourself to speak accordingly. You have to have some semblance of the ability to monitor yourself, to know when you’re not acting or speaking in consonance with your professed belief, or to be able to evaluate what you believe to see if it’s really consistent with what you do and say.

This kind of self-awareness is hard. I was just asked by a dear Christian friend to read a book, Can a Smart Person Believe in God?, by Michael Guillen. Guillen is a theoretical physicist who became a network TV science correspondent. The point of his book is to encourage people, especially Christian believers, to embrace scientific “IQ” and spiritual intelligence (“SQ”). Guillen attempts to categorize atheists, refute their perceived objections to faith, and show that the “ideal” person is a person of faith and science.

Here we have an unquestionably smart guy. From what I could tell he is also a genuine person, actually concerned about the wellbeing of others. He believes in a faith that talks about speck and plank, the Golden Rule, and loving your neighbor. And yet…

And yet, on page after page, Guillen shows a lack of integrity. He decries “Arrogant Atheists” and displays arrogance. He claims to value logic, reason, and science, but he uses ad hominem, straw men, red herrings, and appeals to authority through his book – all logical fallacies. (Indeed, almost the entire book seems to consist of such fallacies.) Even worse, he assumes the conclusion that God must exist, or at the very least, that man must have “faith” in something.

This travesty of a book was given to my wife and me by someone I love dearly. It was accompanied by a note that read in part as follows: “From what [I've] observed about your life and actions, [I'm] really not sure that you are real atheists.”

Well…

I do not doubt (well, not much) that Guillen is well-intentioned. Nor do I doubt that my friend was, too. In fact, my friend was trying to compliment Joy and me, I think. I think it is a fairly safe assumption that both of these folks strive for integrity. It is also pretty clear that their self-awareness – a necessary prerequisite for integrity – is lacking. To illustrate, imagine a scenario with me:

A brilliant biologist – let’s call him Dick Dawkins – writes a book called Can a Smart Person be a Scientist? Dawkins explores how Christian faith is teeming with arrogant people who dismiss science as something only for the spiritually ignorant. He uses many quotes from people who used to be totally committed Christians and, though they still believe, profess their need to supplement their faith with science experiments because faith is simply incomplete without scientific knowledge. The book explores how crucial it is to have science as a part of your life in order to make you whole. Dawkins concludes that, yes, you can love God, too, but you really must commit yourself to the scientific method.

And now imagine I gave this book to my friend with a note that read, “From what I’ve observed about your life and actions, I’m really not sure that you are a real Christian.”

Such a book would seem farcical, not to mention unnecessary, and surely my friend would take offense at my note. Yet, the imagined book and note parallel reality quite nicely. Guillen and my friend have failed to be self-aware. They have not noticed that they have violated the Golden Rule; that is, they have not treated me as they would have me treat them. Guillen is commanded by his god to love people, but he does not do so with his book. Instead, he employs impressively puerile argumentation in order to confirm his own biases and those of his readers. Indeed, his book is much more about him than it is about me or any other reader. My friend has failed to realize that by saying I’m not a real atheist, it was the equivalent of saying that I am not a real jerk. But, my friend would never have intentionally called me a jerk, just as Guillen probably did not intend to engage in wanton narcissism.

Self-awareness is hard. It sometimes means looking at yourself and recognizing that you do not speak or act in a manner consistent with what you believe. And sometimes it means looking at how you speak and act and realizing that you do not believe what you thought you believed.

If we are to have integrity, however – if we are to be integritous – we must know ourselves.

And now the obvious questions are these: Have I displayed integrity in the authorship and publication of this article? Have you done so in your reaction to the article?

“Where is your heart?” It’s a question I’ve been asked a time or two by believers trying to make sense of my de-conversion.

I get where it’s coming from. They worry about me…and maybe a bit about themselves, too. Though it may not be an explicit thought, atheism, leaving the faith, “backsliding”, straying — all of these things are associated in the modern evangelical’s mind with bitterness, disappointment, anger, and disillusionment. Given that, it’s only natural to worry about a friend’s overt renouncing of his faith.

I’ve heard it said that, deep down, atheists tend to have one thing in common: anger. (I’ve heard the same thing said about homosexuals.) To be frank, I think there’s some truth to that. One has to fight anger at many turns. When so many see you as misguided or lost, it’s natural to become defensive. When you can so clearly see the folly of faith but cannot adequately communicate it to others, it’s hard to avoid frustration. When good people simply shut you out or dismiss you out of hand or condescend, maintaining a loving and positive attitude presents a supreme challenge, and it’s difficult not to return the favor.

So, yes, anger accompanies atheism and de-conversion. But as I’ve said before, anger — like all things in life — needs to be properly tended. The believer must always be on guard against selfishness, dishonesty, inappropriate lust, and other temptations. Well, an atheist’s experience is quite similar. If we fail to properly tend to our character — no matter what our core beliefs — we run the risk of bitter hearts and damaged relationships.

Atheists stink, frankly, at character development, at encouragement, and at community-building. Part of it is that atheism, being an “anti” kind of thing, isn’t made for unity. It simply defines you as what you are not and is not designed to define you for what you are. My hope is that “atheism” goes by the wayside and simply becomes “normal.” That will make it easier to sketch out what each of us, individually and perhaps collectively, stand for. At least I hope it does. Christians, by contrast, by and large coalesce around certain basic ideas: Jesus died for you, He loves you, and He was raised from the dead, for example. Those ideas have a unifying effect, though that religion’s history speaks to the imperfection of the unity.

In the meantime, while humanity gradually discards superstition and slowly develops a more coherent (and hopefully unifying) set of moral standards based on reason, here’s what I — me, Luke, this guy here speaking only for himself — stand for:

• Love.
• Goodness.
• Doing what is right (i.e., doing what increases net human wellbeing).
• Conscientiousness.
• Kindness.
• All things funny.
• (Ok, and perhaps a bit of smarminess.)

I want to spend the rest of my days loving my wife and my kids, hoping that we will live long lives together. I want to show love to friends in the hope that they will do the same. And I want to remain committed to truth, no matter where it takes me.

That’s where my heart is.