I Re-Read the Book That Helped Me Leave Christianity

[00:00:00]Just over 13 years ago, I read a book that changed the course of my existence.

[00:00:04]Many people have left the religion they grew up in, like myself. But not everyone remembers the exact moment they stopped believing. I do. I remember the moment I realized I wasn't a Christian anymore. And it's all thanks to two books I was reading at the time. And today, we're going to talk about one of those books. That book is Atlas Shrugged by Ein Rand. Now, there's a lot that's going to go into this conversation because Ein Rand is quite a character in the in the in the project of human civilization. Einrand is one of the most interesting minds I personally think.

[00:00:40]And one thing I want to point out before we get too deep into this conversation, couple of things here. Um, Einrand is very, very, very pro- capitalist and a lot of her ideology throughout the entire book that I read, like a big part of it is framing the benefits of a capitalist system, mostly from the lens of prioritizing like selfishness over selflessness. Now, that's going to be important context later. I do want to take a moment and say that as much as I have Einrand to thank for helping me in my deconversion moment away from Christianity, which I will never never regret. Um I I'm not saying I align with everything that she stands for. Um she's also like not a feminist. She she's very she was very outspoken against like this feminism um that creates like women as equal to men. I don't think that she really aligned with that and I do. So, I want to warn you there's going to be a lot of nuance in this conversation, but I was really glad I reread this book because, okay, so going back to 13 years ago, the two books I was reading kind of simultaneously was a book by CS Lewis, who is a Christian author. You might know him for The Chronicles of Narnia.

[00:01:56]That was like the young adult um fantasy series that a lot of us grew up reading.

[00:02:00]I grew up reading. We love the movies, whatever. and they he also wrote a trilogy like a science fiction fiction trilogy mostly for an adult audience and I was reading that at the same time I was reading um Atlas Shrugged and the reason that I kind of had like a capital M moment for realizing I wasn't a Christian anymore was really like if we're being totally honest here it was a long long long journey to get to that moment. There are a lot of ways that the scaffolding of my Christian beliefs were kind of keeping me under the identity of Christian and it and it just happened to be these two books that I was reading.

[00:02:41]More more specifically, it was Atlas Shrugged. But reading them both at the same time really like unlocked a few key things that helped me realize that I was just not a Christian anymore. And that's what it was was a realization that I wasn't a Christian anymore. Because one thing that a lot of Christians don't really wrap their minds around is is the just the answer to the question whether or not we can choose our beliefs. I didn't decide that I want to be didn't want to be a Christian anymore. I didn't decide that I wanted to throw away my religious identity. I was a very curious person and I loved to read. And throughout the course of me trying to read more and more books to actually prove the validity of the Bible as this perfectly infallible declaration of the creator of the known universe along that journey of trying to continue to bolster and like strengthen my faith, it started to break down. And when I read, the more I read, the more I like pursued my curiosity. I want us to remember that.

[00:03:41]The more I pursued my curiosity, the more I realized like, oh, I don't think that a lot of the logic behind the Bible being the perfectly written word of God, he him pronouns actually makes sense.

[00:03:55]And the reason it all really broke down for me is because, okay, so CS Lewis and Einrand are two very different, they have two very different worldviews and in fact in a lot of ways opposing worldviews. CS Lewis was very very Christian. He believed in the Bible. He wanted more people to become Christian.

[00:04:15]Ein Rand very much an atheist, very much anti- relligion, anti-theism, saw it as like a way of um controlling the masses and keeping human progress from flourishing and evolving.

[00:04:31]And I read these two authors at the same time. And what really really broke the the fine like broke the straw in the camel straw that what was the straw that broke the camel's back? Apologies. Um was the fact that both of these two opposing worldviews were infused into the fiction works of both of these authors. And I saw their perspectives. I saw the perspective of CS Lewis and all of the ways that he was framing this sci-fi trilogy, which I I do recommend even though I'm not a Christian anymore.

[00:05:03]It's like a really interesting read and I'm reading his thoughts on how, you know, even with all of the wonders of the universe and all of the advancement and technology that humans are capable of pursuing and creating, with all of that, there's still a creator of the known universe who wants us to live good lives, right? Like that's the crux of CS Lewis's ideology. And I really resonated with that perspective while I was reading his fiction novel. I rand I just like picked it out of the library for no reason. I had no context for who she was, what she believed, whatever. I was just trying to pursue my curiosity and read as much as possible. I think I remember seeing Ein Rand on like a random list of a 100 authors you need to read like and and remember this is like early 2000s mid 2010s like no early 2000s. It's like in the first decade of the 2000s because I read this when I was six. No, no, no. I read, sorry, hold on.

[00:06:01]I read Atlas Shrugged when I was like 21, but I read Einrand the Fountain Head for the first time when I was 16, which is a crazy crazy decision. That's when I discovered Einrand and just decided to to pick up one of the books from the library. years later, I picked up Atlas Shrugged because I actually really liked The Fountain Head and there was a lot and without really understanding a lot of what was going on. Like there was some non-consensual stuff going on in The Fountain Head and I was still reading it at 16. We can just unpack that another time. But I remember liking it for a million other reasons besides that obviously. And I picked up Atlas Shrugged when I was 21. And reading it simultaneously with CS Lewis really had me understanding that there are always agendas behind why humans write the write become authors. That's what did it for me. and all of these questions I was having about like, oh, okay, well, at the time when I was reading this, I had just, you know, I was a few years into my college education after growing up really sheltered in a fundamentalist non-denominational private high school, going to the mega church, going to the school affiliated with the mega church.

[00:07:16]I was like in this like religious indoctrination compound every day of my entire life. go off to public school in a different state and I'm still trying to hold on to the this religious identity, right? Well, you can imagine no new church is ever going to replace the connection I felt with like my classmates going to the same church and hanging out with them all the time. And it was this like bubble that I will never find a replacement for. I still miss it to this day. But I as I was like going around all of these churches in this new state and trying to like find that feeling again, I had I started having all of these like conceptual conversations in my head of like, okay, well, it's not the churches that are perfect. It's the word of God and I just have to trust that eventually I will find my way to a religious community that I identify with and like can replicate the filling of my upbringing.

[00:08:06]And in that, it just kind of brought me down this path of all of the ways that the Bible is actually what brought me the feeling of feeling like I belonged.

[00:08:17]And so I just need to rely on the Bible.

[00:08:19]So then I start taking religious studies courses at this public university trying to again prove the validity prove through the historical like textual analysis of the documents that create that make up the Bible how the Bible is in fact the inspired word of the creator of the known universe. Like that was my honest efforts. And so as I'm going through all of that and like doing all of this logic in my head of like, well, obviously humans got in the way of writing the Bible and translating it for their own personal gains, but it's still is all was all manipulated by the creator of the known universe and all of this all of this like attempt to try and convince myself that the Bible, the one that we have now, even though it's been translated a million times, even though it came from a million different authors and we don't know who the author authors aren't all of them. I just like happened to trust that it was in fact the perfect word of the creator of the known universe. Like it it was a lot of work to keep trying and convincing myself of that. And so then it it comes down to me reading these two books of two authors who have very opposing world views to realize that I don't think I can trust all of the authors and translators of the Bible that we have today to not infuse their own agendas. And like as much as I would like to believe that there is a creator of the known universe who look at the dog who has the power to make sure that the Bible is perfect according to that creator's will and desire like it. I did not see the proof.

[00:10:01]The proof was not in the pudding. Like there is too much at stake when humans are translating and writing and they have their own agendas and world views.

[00:10:10]And it just broke down like it all of the all of the lack of evidence, all of the the the notion of truth itself because then I had to ask myself this and this was maybe really the crux of how this book helped me walk away from Christianity. I had to really ask myself why I thought the Bible was so true.

[00:10:33]Because it's it's one thing to believe that the creator of the known universe has the ability and desire to make sure a specific document is the perfect iteration of what they're trying to communicate to us. That's one thing.

[00:10:49]Okay. But and maybe that could be the case. But take that into the application of what that would look like and it would still be through other people telling me that like there's no way that this book of called the Bible happened to get specifically the absolute word of the creator of the known the entire universe down to these individuals who decided that it was the perfect iteration who decided that this is actually what the creator of the noniverse known universe said to all of you guys the readers. We actually decided that this is what what God said. I could not square that. No matter how it came about, I was trusting the word of someone else to trust that this was the word of God. Does that make sense? Like I I didn't just become an a child and then an adult and this just like happened to fall into my lap like, "Oh, wow. Look, here sprung the Bible out of nowhere." No, I have you have to if you're going to accept that a book like that is the word of God, you have to accept what other pe you have to accept that based on other people telling you that. Period. Period.

[00:12:12]There's just no way around that. And I couldn't I couldn't square that. Now, I'm not I'm not trying to like hate on you if you still believe that the Bible is a perfect word of God. Like, that's that's not what this video is about. I'm not doing it. The point is I started really unpacking a lot of that, all of that really, and really got to the meat of my lack of religious identity due mostly to reading Atlas Shrugged by Ein Rand. There's a there's a lot of other components that really like just you know how stuff like that works like you're you're having all of these different questions. You have all of these different you know avenues of curiosity and then they all come together in the moment in like one moment when you I I felt like I had been frustrated with this for months trying to figure out all of these different questions or whatever and out of nowhere reading this a a lot of things just like clicked for me and I realized like what am I doing? What am I doing calling myself a Christian? Trying to hold on to this feeling. It does not make sense to me anymore. It makes no sense to me. So then I took like copious notes when I was reading this book the first time.

[00:13:22]Like one of my journals has just like pages and pages of quotes I was pulling out because it really it really struck with stuck with me. And so now like 13 years later I read it again just mostly because I was curious. I really, it really hit me. Again, it hit me so hard for a couple different components that I want to talk about here. Again, this is a great book for nuance. I don't align with Rand politically, but I can see where she's coming from. And again, there's so much about her worldview here that helped me question the beliefs I was raised in. And I do think it's important. I want to talk about her worldview for one more second. One of the things that I try and talk about a lot on my platform is again that we can't necessarily choose our beliefs or I I should say this. I'm not convinced that we can just decide what we want to believe. I'm still exploring that. I'm not really sure if we can just trick our minds into believing what we want to believe. I just don't know. And that kind of goes into the question of free will. I don't know. I'm not going to pretend to know that have that answer.

[00:14:26]So a lot of people use Ein Rand as like the forerunner of what I understand to be um libertarian politics which is essentially very very heavy dose of capitalism and individualism and the free market in order to allow the human spirit to participate to its fullest extent without having to be more focused on helping others along the journey.

[00:14:54]Now, that sounds a little bit like especially in the climate in which we live right now, it's like we're not doing individualism right now. We're trying to bring everyone with us into the future. And I do stand by those values. I think it's important especially for right now in the context in which we live to consider why someone like Ein Rand who has an incredible in intellectual mind and is a power this is like 800 page a thousand pages of really intense reasoning and um attempts at trying to figure out the best way to be a human. Like we've got to give her that. And it's like it really does bring the question to me why why was she so adamant about capitalism?

[00:15:39]And I think in large part this is because of her background. She grew up in from my understanding communist Soviet Union era. And I do remember reading the story of her father's shop.

[00:15:52]She he was like a pharmacist or an apothecary of some kind. And the communists came in and took the the the the political party in power, I should say, came in and took ownership of his shop that he had built from the ground up or something like, you know, he had done some pursuit of his own desires in order to contribute to the collective and they took it from him like as part of a this is the property of the rest of the community now or something like that. I'm I'm not quoting the story perfectly, but I do know that her father's shop getting taken from right out right out from under him provides the context to as to her adamant love of capitalism as a reaction to that upbringing. But also, I do think like I think that her explanation and her understanding of capitalism as like the the counter to the harmful environment that she was raised in also helps us maybe understand why people in the United States are still just like blindly following capitalism without really understanding it. Because a lot of ways that the the system of capitalism is upheld is by convincing people that they deserve to get what they work for, right? And other people don't deserve what you work for. And I do I just want to bring this up because like I do think there is something to like going all the way back to in middle school how frustrated I would get being the studious student graduate, you know, like I I was the studio like I was the nerd. I I did the work. I was really good at school work. That just happened to be one of my skills. I don't think it's a measure of perfect intelligence.

[00:17:40]That just like was my skill. I was good at school work. And I do remember like doing all of a group project and getting taken advantage of and it was frustrating that yeah all four of us would get an A but I did all of the work and that is that honestly at the end of the the day selfish and egotistical.

[00:17:57]Yeah it is. My point is here's where the nuance nuance comes in. Take deep breaths. My point is, I think that if we're really going to have any kind of class consciousness, if we're really going to have any kind of, you know, no more left and right, it's up versus, if we're going to have any conversations like that, we I do think we have to understand where people are coming from when they're they're reacting from a a very fair fear in this scarcity, in this world of scarcity or that which is being engineered as if it were a scarce world when in reality, we probably I think we have enough resources right now for all the people on the planet to be safe, hungry, and fed, but we're just not distributing it right. All that to say, I it scarcity is a very fair fear. Like, I will not begrudge anyone for feeling like resources are at a premium right now. Grocery costs are going up. And I think that as much as I look at the system of capitalism intertwined with white supremacy, patriarchy, and religion, as much as I'm looking at it and I'm like, this is not good. This is the direction this is going is not ideal. Guys, cut it out. As much as I do maintain that, I I I would not be me if I couldn't even try to see the the perspective of the other side. Because guess what? Trying to see the perspective of other people who are very different from me got me out of an indoctrination that I will never regret. And that's really what I wanted to talk about today is the fact that I was actively pursuing my curiosity even though it kind of went against everything I believed. I just considered for a second. Let's put the capitalism and politics aside. Let's do the religious part. And throughout her book, throughout Atlas Shrugged, more so I would say than in The Fountain Head.

[00:19:51]Remember that was the first book I read from Einrand. I read this one at at 21 and throughout this book there is so much of her work outlining how religion is not good for us as humans. There is so much about selfishness versus selflessness.

[00:20:13]And this I think is also relevant here and it really stuck out to me. I wrote I wrote down a lot of the quotes about selfishness when I read this the first time at 21. And I've talked about this before, but being raised as a woman in Christianity in conservative Christianity in the United States where every like thousands of people, not just, you know, I wasn't there wasn't weren't just a few dozen of us in the middle of the woods somewhere. Thousands of people in Tulsa, Oklahoma believe like this. Thousands of people around me pro propping up the conservative Christian regime. Right? Like this is all I knew. And even then I saw that as a woman in that world I was taught more to be submissive, to give up, to be selfless than the men around me. And it was very much very clear to me at a young age that God apparently had different sets of values for men to pursue and different sets of values for women to pursue. And I did not like the values that I was told to pursue. I did not like being told to submit to the me.

[00:21:22]By the way, I could be in a group project with three of the men in my three of the guys in my class. I'm pulling all of the weight and they get an A. That come on. Like it was frustrating. Whatever story. My point is there is an entire world that tells women to be selfless and tells men to be selfish. And that really unlocked for me when I considered considering when I when I decided to consider selfishness as a possible virtue and and and that's really Einran loves propping up selfishness as a virtue instead of as a moral failure because like I guess in her perfect utopia everyone is pursuing their own self-interest and then the collective by default um it flourishes because everyone is contributing in in the way that's most authentic to them. That sentence alone doesn't sound terrible. It doesn't sound terrible. The the result of the way the system actually ends up working when you have like a libertarian model though is essentially what we're getting today, right? Like I just don't think it's as simple as saying this is how human society should be from either end of the spectrum. And there's going to be a lot of leftists that hate me for that. And I'm not saying I have the answer here, but I do know one thing. And I know what it's like to grow up in an extreme environment. I know what it's like to view the world in black and white and to say that there is only one right way to believe. There is only one right way to be a good person. And I am simply not doing that anymore. So if and moving forward, my channel will not have a lot of room for putting people into groups and saying they're bad people. I have not been perfect at this. Okay? I have struggled a lot with how to navigate being around so many Christians in the United States when Christianity is like the part of my life that I despise the most. Like it it it's something that I don't want to re like be around. I don't want to be around Christianity. But it's everywhere. And I I've had to really figure out how to be okay with being not just being around Christians, but like working wi with them to build a better society, right? And so I that is really my intention moving forward. And it's through opening my perspective and trying to understand like the core the fears and the core values of why someone has what seems to be an opposing world view. And that's going to take a lot of nuance and that's going to take a lot of research and understanding. And that's what I wanted to leave you guys with is is just to talk about how whenever we challenge the perspectives that we hold so close to our personal identity as humans, pursuing our curiosity really can open up avenues for our worldview to shift into something more productive.

[00:24:31]Because again, do I agree with everything Einran said? No, I don't. I really don't. One time I I saw an interview or I read an interview or something. I've I've read so much about Einrand over the years that so much sticks out but I couldn't like point to when I came across this but I remember she said the ideal and this is paraphrase the ideal man is a hero and the ideal woman is a hero worshipper.

[00:24:59]I will never I will ne you will never catch me promoting something like that.

[00:25:05]I that's not I'm not doing it. That's not I don't re I don't I don't resonate with everything Einran says. I don't think a perfectly free like literally free market no regulation capitalism could possibly work. There's no what capital the capitalist project I think it got us to where we are. Cool. We need to figure out something else. So I just wanted to leave us with that. I wanted to to encourage all of us to not just read more books, but read books that actually like challenge our perspectives in a way that could allow us to actually see the humanity in someone on the other side of the aisle. So, with that, I love you guys. I have a lot of really cool um ideas planned for this platform. Please keep an eye out and subscribe. Um, and we will keep learning and growing