Episode 6 - Lost and Found (Part 1)

[transcript automatically generated - cleanup in progress]

do you wanna think of an intro would it be weird to start with uh what was it like to lose god for you i'll start crying immediately all right i can say without any irony or without any hesitation that like growing up god was my best friend you know nerdy lonely pathetic kid and god was the guy who wouldn't make fun of me and who always wanted to talk so for me to decide somehow that god didn't exist um i don't know i felt like my dad died the amount of grief and the amount of angst and the amount of fear is difficult to articulate and it's impossible for someone who has never been deeply religious to understand how something that so many people believe is imaginary can be so real and it's made worse by the fact at least in my case that i couldn't tell anybody so it was like my dad died and i had to hide my grief and never tell a soul jeez today on allergist podcast we're doing something a little different normally we look at a subject through the lens of faith art and science today kind of going under the surface of why we do that um it's mike here science mike and me michael gunger and we are in uh where are we at canton ohio yeah in ohio and we're doing a show here and we happen to be in the same town and uh thought we would just sit down and talk for this episode uh because we've referred to kind of our stories and some of the work that we've done as liturgists so far but a lot of you don't actually know um kind of the story of of how we have journeyed through some of these ideas of science and faith and for me how my art has been impacted by it so we're just going to talk kind of about our story uh with god and how science and all these things have the reason we're so passionate about finding helpful conversation about them is because we've both experienced great angst and loss because we didn't know how to deal with those things in the past so that's what we're going to be talking about today is our stories and being lost and being found to the liturgist podcast [Music] so mikey i remember meeting you in that living room in denver and that was a it was an interesting as we as we were talking about doing this episode this afternoon um i was kind of just thinking of my story as a whole and what an interesting time for me to meet you because uh i remember the first time i feel like my loss of god my experience the dark knight of the soul of the loss of my ground and belief happened uh i remember the first time it happened actually was before we came out with the record beautiful things we were traveling um and pretty much center of everything to me um i remember i remember as a kid really wondering to myself like is is there anybody on earth that loves god as much as me i remember thinking that like i i was so madly in love with jesus i went you know that's my worship was everything to me this church and i'm looking around i'm like there's just so much of this that seems so weird once you see behind the curtain of church life a lot of times it's disappointing what you find there uh and so we've seen so many churches and so many pastors and so many people that are one way on the stage and in a service in another way other times and you kind of see the mechanism of how everything works and the manipulation and the darkness uh that masquerades as light that's unfortunately too common in the world and i just remember like i was just in a funk and before the show we'd always try to pray together and stuff and i i just wasn't even in the mood so i just went by myself to this back chapel i found this in this church and was um i got on my knees to pray and all of a sudden it was like this falling out of i had no faith and it was such a weird thing like i had no one to pray to i had nothing to say and it was like terrifying and i desperately tried to cling back on to belief and for a moment i had nothing and that's what that song please be my strength it was about i don't have the faith and that was a theme on the beautiful things album um you have me out on the farthest edge uh and i felt like i kind of had had this moment where i felt the loss of god and it was terrifying and i i managed to pick myself out of it with like or to be picked up out of it whatever theologically uh you'd like to imply there but the calvinist armenians can find in the comments uh yeah but so from that i mean that was i don't know six years ago seven years ago i don't know from then until 2013 was like constant battle of trying to hold on and i'd have moments where i couldn't and moments i mean not you know i i never really fully let go well before i get ahead of myself by the time i met you in that room at the rob bell party uh was that a it's the best sentence ever [Laughter] it was a rough bella phantom we were at he hung out with these friends afterwards but yeah so that was at a very unique time for me and your axioms gosh where how we're gonna get into all this so much to talk about it's a long story it's a long story uh but they were they were pretty life-changing for me and and uh helped me come into a new phase of my faith journey for sure uh but let's get more into that i want to hear more about your childhood and your relationship with god growing up and well i was a fat kid um with a penchant for hawaiian shirts and science and computer programming and in the 1980s that was not the best way to be a popular kid um so i was bullied constantly pretty brutally i the weird thing is is um and like whenever i tell this story people get really sad i'm not gonna sit here and cry because i'm i've processed all this stuff but um so please don't think this is like endless lament right now but it's not exaggerating to say i had no friends at school from kindergarten to fifth grade that's just a factual statement um so when you don't have any friends at all and all your encounters with other children are either sort of benign um people ignoring you or people actively sort of tormenting you um that's obviously tough especially for someone who's like me who's very very extroverted i'm not naturally shy so to to be trained to avoid the contact of people is is strange for an extrovert but um when i was seven i i grew up in the southern baptist tradition so when i was seven i was saved and that was something that was volitional something i chose to do it was actually something at my age that my church discouraged because i was too young i didn't meet uh the the criteria for being able to understand things but one night i had this experience um i'm an excellent sleeper i have a tremendous aptitude for sleeping and falling asleep i often tell people that if i was it was an olympic sport i'd be a gold medalist because as soon as i close my eyes i fall asleep that's really nice it's amazing but this one night i said my prayers with my mom and i closed my eyes and i couldn't sleep because i had this unresolved tension and this energy now i don't remember this but my mom tells me that i interviewed her and my dad for like an hour and a half about what does salvation mean what happens what do i say what does god do why does god do that and i had just like grilled him for an hour and a half seven so apparently whatever they said satisfied me curiosity enough that after mom left to go see a prayer as my sister i kind of tiptoed out of bed and i told her i wanted to know jesus to meet jesus and we said the sinner's prayer together and i can remember the feeling of immense peace that came with saying that prayer [Music] and so uh when i'd go to school um i decided to tell everybody about the love of god so i told every boy and every girl in my second grade class that i love them um which horrified them and got me sent to the principal's office um and great public school yeah public school not christian school yeah um so when recess time would come everybody would run for the best playground equipment that was like the mission but i learned if i tried to do that number one i was fat and slow so i'd never make it and number two when i did make it the bullying would start so instead i would run at a 90 degree angle to the other kids to the tree line that was next to the playground and i would just hide for 27 minutes because out of sight out of mind and so what i would do would be to play by myself and pray so like imagine like a second grader hiding in the woods praying so it's not like i was a casual believer yeah so you imagine by the time i got to high school the amount of reinforcement that god is real that god listens to prayer that god cares for me this was like really deeply embedded stuff um and uh i pretty much like total baptist like i married a good baptist girl i became the youngest deacon in my church um i taught sunday school i played bass in the praise band doing nothing but straight eights like a good baptist bass player and it was actually awesome that's the weird thing that people don't get like when you're totally in evangelicalism and you really live it and life fits a certain equation it's it's fantastic like you're serving the one true living god you know your life has good objective purpose and you're accomplishing things and like i had a really great marriage and sweet kids and my dad was the music minister at church and so i sat with my family every sunday and these were all fantastic things and then um my dad called a family meeting which we'd never had a family meeting before and i didn't really know what one was and we get there and none of you listening know my dad so the first thing i want you to know and this is really important is that i love him and we're close friends and we ride motorcycles together and the second thing is i'm a nerdy computer programmer who cleans his keyboard with alcohol to make sure my hands don't get dirty and my dad is like a rugged manly man athlete like played football um he broke his hand once playing basketball and still scored 60 points in the game when i was a kid like just super tough um and we sit in this family meeting and i idolized my dad and i was totally intimidated by him because i'm like a natural beta male consensus person and my dad like literally walks in a meeting and like governors of states defer to him and so he starts talking in this meeting and he says that he's fallen in love with another woman and the heart wants what the heart wants and he and mom are getting a divorce and uh and they're still gonna be friends it's gonna be fine we'll still see each other on christmas as a family but it's over and i wasn't there was no like suspicion for me this wasn't something i saw coming so i was completely floored and so i immediately processed it through what i viewed as the ultimate authority in life and that was the bible and i thought about the verses relating to marriage and divorce in the old and new testament and the moral and ethical calculus was pretty simple dad could not get an affair and by even trying to get an affair he was sort of abandoning his post as head of household and so i had this brilliant idea uh and so i said dad are you a christian not the question that i was expecting after his speech and he said yeah i'm a christian i said well then your life is not your own it doesn't belong to you it belongs to god and the bible speaks really clearly about divorce and the heart wants what the heart wants is not one of the criteria so you can't get divorced if mom still wants you so i said mom do you still want to be married to dad she says yes i do so i said sorry bud you're not getting divorced and like now i see how ridiculous and twisted and strange that is but at the time i felt really really justified and uh i told dad i would counsel him through reconciliation that was my plan me in my 20s new dad i'm going to counsel a man who's been married 27 years on reconciliation it sounds so prideful from this perspective but at the time it seemed just and right so um i wanted to do it right though i wanted to give dad god's opinion and not my opinion so i decided to read the whole bible not like a study on divorce not a study on marriage but the whole bible cover to cover and i read really fast because i'm a nerd so i read the whole bible in three months and i did that again and again and again i read the bible four times in one year and the reason i kept reading it over and over is because it didn't make any sense so i'm a baptist or i was at the time and so i believe that the bible was inerrant and infallible and the word of god like the divine dictaphone to these authors directly to us from the mind of god and they call me science mike for a reason so when i read genesis 1 and i've read genesis 1 a lot in my life but this time i guess i was just so desperately wanting to get what the bible really says i was reading very carefully and um i didn't get past firmament before i started being like wait what yeah like there's no firmament it's not there explain and explain to people what first so a firmament um in in the hebrew is depending on what part of history you're talking about essentially is a dome in the sky that holds back the waters and stars are holes in the firmament where the light of heaven shines through and that was pretty cutting edge astrophysics a few thousand years ago i was taught in christian school that the firmament broke on the flood oh man that's i'm actually i'm not kidding i have sort of a thing where i have favorite creationist justifications is that a good one and before you said that my favorite one was things were made old but the firmament broke with the flood is awesome [Laughter] and i don't mean that ironically by the way if anyone's listening and you're a creationist like what if you find out what if we found out someday that's true be pretty awesome so as an empiricist show me the data and i'll buy it you show me pieces of firmament let's do this so yeah but there's no firmament at least as far as i can tell and just so i can cover a couple of those things the voyager spacecraft left our solar system and it never hit anything the hubble space telescope has imaged galaxies that are over 13 billion light years away and the wmap probe and the planck probe and other spacecraft have measured precisely the cosmic microwave background radiation there's no firmament now i sort of prayed about it because as i'm reading the bible i'm praying and i ask god for guidance and i realized if god were to describe cosmic microwave background radiation the edge of the visible universe to a sheep herder in the desert pre-enlightenment you might get something like firmament so i gave that a pass but then in genesis 1 it says that trees were made before stars that was more of a problem because trees are made out of stars that's where trees come from stars explode that's how we have things other than hydrogen and helium so that really threw me and i know for a lot of you listening that sounds ridiculous but that was that was a serious sort of angst for me so i prayed about it and i looked at apologetics and i didn't really like the answers apologists gave me but i just figured god's perfect and holy and infinite and i'm just like a dude who doesn't even have any college degree i could be wrong on this so i decided to just figure that out later but i opened excel and i started keeping notes of verses that troubled me um which is the best way to study the bible is with microsoft excel but so genesis 2 starts over and tells the creation story again and now things happen in a different sequence so i could like handle like maybe the scientists and historians have it wrong and god's right i couldn't handle god contradicting god that was the first like whoa what and i didn't resolve that one like i spent weeks praying and studying on that and i couldn't resolve it so i just decided like well the creation of the universe doesn't have any bearing on my parents marriage so i'm just going to note it and excel and just return to it later and then i get to like the flood and god drowns all of humanity and by this time i'm a father and so i picture like because i'm so wicked god drowns my two daughters i was like that's not cool and then i get to the exodus and pharaoh's heart being hardened by god and then all these israelite firstborns being or excuse me egyptian firstborn is being killed because of that and that didn't seem ethically just to me and yeah i could continue and we could this be a five hour podcast but thing after thing after thing made me think god in the bible seems kind of cruel and evil so a friend of mine um i started to talk to him about this for a friend you can't see my air quotes and he told me that there's a guy named rob bell who wrote about things and i should read a book called velvet elvis and did he invite you to a rob bell party much later literally um and uh foreshadowing um and then another friend told me that there's this guy don miller i just had to check out and as a baptist i've heard of those guys and they were what i called dangerous dangerous but i was desperate so i read velvet elvis and i read blue like jazz and it really helped like oh the bible's this story of god and man it's not actually all about a bunch of facts and historical details it's about how we relate to god and god relates to us and the important thing from genesis is that god created everything so um and then i also got into divine command theory for a while that's pretty esoteric though essentially because i just realized our listeners actually care about this stuff divine command theory says that if there's a god anything he commands is automatically moral and just so if god decides these people need to be killed well he made them it's his call right that's pretty dark though oh it's super dark but i was really desperate yeah so that you know what i mean like i'll take whatever thing will fall your morality is is so subjective and human you can't trust it right god who knows god's purpose um yes the divine command theory is pretty dark but at the time whatever it helped so i went from being like a very confident conservative evangelical to like an over-the-top confident progressive evangelical until a friend of mine who i've known for years and he is just the most ardent atheist you've ever met and he and i are great friends we never talked about religion he was never interested we talked about other stuff but he heard me talking about and raving about velvet elvis and he says hey i'll read velvet elvis if you read the god delusion and we'll share notes and i thought yeah that sounds awesome because i'd read the selfish gene which is dawkins book on evolution when i was in high school loved it thought he was a great scientist i'd seen him on the daily show talking about the god delusion and i thought well i know science really well nothing this guy's going to say he's going to shake me up and i might get to convert my atheist friend and see him get baptized so that'd be a jesus sale this week so i did it i read the god delusion he read velvet elvis and spoiler alert my friend is still an atheist um to this day um but i read the god delusion and i read the first chapter and i remember thinking this is like the weakest lamest like how is he selling any copies of this book and then i read chapter two and it broke my nose and then i had chapter three and i got a concussion and the further i got in this book the more it hurt especially when he talked about prayer being a kid whose faith was based a lot on hiding from kids and praying having a scientist pick apart prayer that's tough i mean to give you an exam this is real my grandmother got cancer and we all got together as a family and prayed for her and her cancer went away like he was going to start a treatment and they x-rayed her and the tumors were gone so in my brain answered prayer but the god delusion had an answer for that like it literally sort of talked about when people get healed through prayer that some percentage of diseases go into remission and when people are praying for that and it happens they credit it to god he said but what happens and you know this has happened reader when you pray for the sick person they don't get healed you just say that's god's will we just covered both possibilities either way god answered prayer so he said let's look at these studies and these studies show that when we take control groups we'll take three people people who know they're being prayed for people who don't know they're being prayed for and people who are not being prayed for at all and we're going to study their recovery rates and the don't know and not pray for recovery rates were the same and the know they're being prayed for rates were slightly lower and the authors of the study proposed that it was from the stress of trying to deliver a recovery that impaired their ability to heal [Music] which would have required another study to verify that by the way don't go quoting me saying that um because it's that wouldn't be good science but the science did show and this was like uh funded by the a christian organization by the way um and a large sample size it's a pretty good study no effect on prayer on recovery and that cratered me like cratered me um and so i started really really really reading apologetics and theology um but i had this new curiosity and i wanted to make sure i was really having a balanced perspective by the way by now i've forgotten all about my parents marriage whatever you guys are on your own um so i start reading all the writings of the new atheists and even some old atheists like there's some pretty like there's a guy named robert ingersoll mack who wrote some mistakes of moses in the 20s and it's it's pretty powerful um but i read you know daniel dennett and sam harris and christopher hitchens and dawkins and all those guys and like every every book just all of them hundreds and hundreds of books on my kindle and every time i travel for work on the airplane i just read books for or against god and what these books would do a bit at a time is they would take some part of god from me that god answers prayer so i would say okay then prayer connects us to god or that you know god created the earth as described in genesis well god created us through evolution and genesis is metaphorical what i didn't realize is every one of these erosions was destroying my neurological model of god i had no idea i also didn't realize that by being so analytical all the time my prefrontal cortex which is the part of your brain for decision making and rational analysis was actually slowly destroying my feelings associated with god because it was like retraining my brain to not have those feelings because it was always analysis and i remember my wife was out of town uh at her parents house and had the girls and what i do when i have bachelor time is read science books and uh so i was reading pale blue dot by carl sagan and i was reading the chapter on geocentrism man now carl sagan is a fantastic scientist and writes beautifully i mean his books are half science half poetry and um if you've listened to vapor there's a passage in there that now i find quite beautiful and affirming but at the time made me think boy i'm really stupid for believing in god and then the chapter after that there's a quote from carl sagan's wife she says imagine for a moment pick any star in the sky and now imagine circling that star as a planet like earth and on that planet are intelligent beings and they believe that the universe was created just for them how seriously on earth do you take their claim and i lost it um i had to stop reading like i couldn't see the i couldn't see my kindle anymore i couldn't even see the pages and i just went to bed and just laid down and i cried myself to sleep [Music] and um my whole life i started every single day with prayer since like i was seven i got up in the morning and as i'm going through all this doubt and deconstruction guys you have to understand i was praying to god about all of it and i was asking to be delivered and asking to be rescued and telling god that all i wanted to do was serve him and uh i was praying and about to walk out the front door of the house i said you know god i don't even know why i'm praying because you aren't real and i went to a dark place in that moment two things happened first the feeling i'd always associated with the presence of god left me like a like like you flipped a switch the lights went out and the second thing happened and i've heard a few other testimonies of deconversion where people mention this and i think it's interesting that they use the same phrase i felt like a trap door opened underneath my feet like i just free fell because all of a sudden i realized there is no objective purpose to my life or anyone's life that no matter what kind of a father i was or husband i was or what good i did in the world in 4 billion years the sun's going to swell into a red giant and consume the earth second thing i realized was that my dreams of being reunited with my loved ones in heaven one day were ridiculous fantasies because not only was there no hell there was no heaven and there was no afterlife and i had this dizzying rapid series of realizations that come from there is no god and i became an existential nihilist like instantly i didn't believe in anything and i thought well what's the point of living a good life why shouldn't i just do what i please why should i go to work today and i didn't i called in sick why should i do anything i don't want to do i should just like rent movies today and eat pizza and whatever nothing matters and to some people that sounds crazy um but my morality was based on god and on scripture it really was because i've heard some atheists say well you guys your reality is not really based on god mine was [Music] and then like no sooner am i going to pieces i realize like i can't tell anybody because i'm a deacon and a sunday school teacher and i play in the praise band i'm a leader in my church in my community i'm known as a religious leader non-religious people often ask me to pray with them and offer them insights from scripture and their problems and my wife's a christian i could lose my marriage so i decide to like can pretend to be a christian while being an atheist [Music] and that's the loneliest i've ever felt in my life going to church every sunday playing the music teaching the lessons by the way i did some great sunday school lessons you learn a lot about the bible destroying it so you didn't buy the part of dawkins argument that religion was inherently bad no not at all not for a second and i never have religion does bad things but i think everything that religion does bad is authoritarianism when religion is authoritarian it can be quite dangerous but in my own life here's what i've seen i've seen marriages that were seemed hopeless healed i've literally seen addicts give up hard drugs cold after a salvation experience right like i've seen so much good i've seen what happens when christians die and their church surrounds a family and takes care of them that's not bad there's nothing bad about it so i was fine like if jesus made other people better people i was okay with that now at the same time i learned about secular humanism because i did what people in crisis do in our times i asked google about my problems and i found communities of formerly religious people online and uh people kind of introduced me to humanism and i thought it was beautiful this idea that we we don't wait for god to create a meaning we create our own meaning we make the world better because we can i loved it so by day in person i was a christian i'd talk to high school students about their doubts and help them reconcile the problems of scripture and all this kind of stuff i led my oldest daughter to christ and saw her baptized as an atheist talk about a head trip yeah and i um also talked to people who were losing their faith online and told them there was hope and humanism like at the same time yeah and i could have got away with it or weren't for my wife being perceptive it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists so how how long was your deconstruction phase or whatever like altogether the deconstruction phase was months oh wow that's super fast super i don't i do i go big or go home yeah see i i wonder because we have fairly different like it's funny there's a lot of similarities in our stories i i have my rededication experience i think when i was seven again uh and you're advanced rededicating it rededicating but it was it was yeah i was afraid for my salvation because i wasn't sure it was real the first time because i was too young and i didn't really understand what salvation was when i first did it and so at seven i you know went to my dad and was in tears and said i don't know if i'm gonna go to heaven i don't know if i was too young i didn't understand i remember sitting on his lap and crying and uh he led me you know in the sinner's prayer again and we got me a little red bible that i had through my whole childhood and marked down my spiritual birthday as that day and i would carry that bible all over but bring it to dinner or bring it down you know but i'm i think my deconstruction phase i i didn't pull the band-aid off as fast as you did seems like i was i slowly peeled it because uh not only i had the same personal and existential losses uh knowing like if i lose my faith i lose in every area like my relationships pretty much all my relationships are christians and people that are base a lot of them are ministry relationships um my relationship with my wife we were always like um one of our first my first major presents that i bought lisa was a bible with her name and silver on it and inside i underlined our verse and how jesus was always going to be the center of our relationship erosion in the bible whatever it's always going to be the center so center of everything was my faith all my relationships all my and for me it was also my career it's like i get paid to believe basically you know i get paid to lead worship and to help other people believe and so like i always knew for me not to believe i lose everything i can it's not something i can cavalry so i always had this huge elephant of doubt plodding through my mind and me like just whipping that thing like get back get back no way i'm going to read those dawkins books and the sam harrison i'm not gonna read those things because i know i'm gonna become an atheist and right now our atheist listeners are cheering so it was like i had you know i had gone to college and seen you know taking the science class and had my genesis view deconstructed and and the morality issue and going to go you know traveling and seeing going to europe and going to auschwitz and and coming face to face with the evil and going to africa and seeing these kids that are these orphans and hearing their stories and knowing their brothers and are in the child soldier army under coney and knowing that like this is the world this is god's good world and there's this owl powerful all-loving being and this is what he makes and this is what he wants and then you read the bible and this is how he like how is this a good god you know so what i found interesting in both of our stories was on some level it was the actual pursuit of god that led to the loss of god it wasn't screw this i'm gonna go do drugs and have sex confess sin yeah it was like it wasn't a rebellion of i know this is what's right but i'm gonna do my own thing it was like i want truth more than anything i believe jesus is the way the truth and the life and how can i ever if i'm going to pursue jesus that's to pursue whatever is the most true and i'm going to trust that at the end of the truth game is jesus and um wow so i just pursued it to a point not reading that again well because i also assuming i'm not i am influenced and colored by what i take in and i know that i know that if i only read nihilistic stuff i'm probably whether it's more true or not i'm influenced by my surroundings i'm influenced by the people that i perceive to be smart and if i perceive these people to be smart and i know they are smart and i have my own insecurities and i'm and i don't want to be stupid i don't want to be the foolish one so i know if i'm going to continue like engaging in this reading of all these things and i don't have answers for some of their questions i know it's going to influence me a certain way and that in that way is going to be towards my destruction um but at the same time do i trust that jesus is the way the truth and the life so i it was actually what would make me pursue the truth was actually a desire for jesus and the times that i would read things that would challenge me uh would actually be an act of devotion on some weird way you know like it was trust that by trusting you'll be delivered yeah and that that there will be an answer to those questions or that there will be at least god's presence or god's that he'll grace to be able to at least look death in the face and know what it is you know the walking through the valley of the shadow of the death of death and fearing no evil going just going through it you know not avoiding the valley of the shadow of death but walking through it um but so for me it was it was a long process and that's why i think some of those early existential crises that i had that were more the bottom dropped out a little bit but then i found a way to climb back up somehow um but so i went through kind of same same books i laughed when we first started talking and it was the rob bell books and the don miller books and this is probably confirming some fundamentalist [Laughter] fears out there like that's why you shouldn't read rob bell books but i want to say the alternative was not ring those books and just not believing that's true that's true they were not they didn't deconstruct my faith they helped they were a life line in a time for me the first book i remember was brian mclaren's new kind of christian and i was like oh oh you can be a christian in a different kind of way and not you know not not hate science or not be afraid of science or whatever so i went through i remember uh so that was four beautiful things that happened and then before our second record goes upon the earth i came to kind of another similar it's funny every record so far has sort of been i didn't realize that until right now sort of uh inspired by an existential falling out a little bit um so i had another one before go spawn the earth and i wasn't able to write anymore i wasn't i actually wrote a book uh inspired by some of this as well and so i went to assisi because i well i've i googled best spiritual retreats in the world i mean i was ready to go anywhere i was gonna go i thought i was gonna go up like to the himalayas and like some buddhist temple or something like that and i found this retreat in italy and i didn't want it to be at this point of my deconstruction i wasn't if it was going to be too christian i knew i would be like not cool with it it was going to be super it did it needed to not be narrow for sure it needed to be broad and inclusive for me to even take it seriously at that point so it was this simple way um it was interreligious and you could just go and just be in silence and we'd meditate in the day and and just in silence spent a week in silence and then from there i knew i didn't want just one week i went on a pilgrimage after that i was like uh on the camino de santiago in front in spain to like do a real pilgrimage where you like stamp you get this passport and you stamp it and the church the catholic church like says you've done a pilgrimage you know so we started doing this meditation and stuff and that that was new to me and a little bit i had done a little bit of meditation before but not not like that not like hours at a time and uh and i was having these amazing spiritual experiences and really some enlightening things that like i remember writing um in my journal like god in this moment god is not something to believe in or to not believe in i'm just present with reality god just is god is what and as i think about and i've gone back to those journals like i've felt like this real spiritual clarity in those moments of like this awe inspiring i i would i remember going to these cathedrals and different places in assisi where saint francis had been and lived and they have a lot of like sacred areas and stuff and i remember the art just speaking like i could look i was just in this present spiritually alive and awake place and a painting i could sit there and stare at it for 20 minutes and get all this stuff from it just all this inspiration and i remember staring yeah this one like sculpture and i just sit there and like it's just speaking to me and like god was and i'd would use the language that god was speaking to me just through everything and it was amazing and uh i remember that was my beginning of my infatuation with the catholic church actually because i remember going to um saint francis's tomb and walking in there and just feeling this energy anointing however you want to put it but like what is like just i feel like this guy's bones it's like haunted like a good haunting or something like it was like this amazing thing um and so i felt totally revived and we wrote this album goes upon the earth based you know on a lot of my spiritual awakening and enlightenment meant that it happened there uh but then it's still coming back home and getting back into the grind and having these grand ideas about god being the reality and the ground of all being and is-ness and everything but i still kept coming back to the morality questions to the prayer questions and it got me back into this just weird i don't know it was like i had this ideal life that i wanted to live and it was a life that i perceived that the life that jesus talked about the life of loving one's enemies and a life of forgiveness and caring for the poor and living a life of righteousness and anytime i would try to engage it was getting to the point where like with that life with prayer with being a christian it's like i would get so stuck in my head and that big elephant in my head just would roar and i didn't i kept losing ground to it and and it was getting the point where it's like paralyzing me like i couldn't live the life i wanted to live without i was con like i started battling depression and started um all those nihilistic feelings that you came into very quickly by just tearing the band-aid off i i tried to push back for years and experience them slowly and at different they'd come barging in the door and i'd push them back out for a minute and then i remember i i had this moment it was december uh 2013. and i had this spa that in denver that i would go to in some of my darker uh ex you know angsty times like it was just a place that was just a quiet room you'd go sit in this sauna and then sit in this hot tub and then they just had this like uh quiet room there's hardly anybody ever there and i would go there and just be in silence and pray and meditate or whatever and i tried to do that and so i was there and i'm in my bathrobe and i'm meditating i'm drinking some hot tea just trying to relax and try to clear my mind and trying to experience god and trying to pray and it's just not happening for me i'm just it's just empty space again and uh because i just keep thinking and it's anytime i'm trying to pray i'm like how why would why would i pray for this like if you answer this prayer i'm actually going to be a little pissed because why would you care if this little thing goes well for me but you don't care that those millions of people in darfur are living the lives that they're living right now to do something about that and it was like that's where my mind would immediately go trying to pray anything you know like how can i even justify praying for this little stupid thing that i care about morally and so i'm sitting there and i'm like maybe so you know i've i tried to become catholic i talked to a priest and because i've experienced so much beautiful stuff in their liturgy and through their the work and then the architecture and everything that i'd experienced in assisi and my pilgrimage and but they told me i had to believe everything and i had to confess that i believe all the teachings of the church and i'm like oh i'm kind of i i don't believe any everything of anything at this point i'm not going to be able to say that uh so i was i failed um becoming a catholic i failed you know i we had started a church in denver and i'm a pastor and i'm a my job as a worship leader and a christian artist on some level um and it just was the weight was so much and it was like i was on this um the best picture i can imagine is i'm hanging i'm in a river and i'm holding on to this branch with like white knuckles for years and i'm just holding on i have to hold on to this branch or my life is over i'm i'm in my robe in this spa and the thing that kind of triggered this was uh i was watching homeland and and the guy becomes those homeland like the this guy takes gets taken hostage by muslims and uh becomes muslim eventually and he's praying in his garage bowing down and it gets me thinking about like islam and i'm like you know they seem to have this kind of humility and submission and obedience thing that i have totally rejected as a westernized individualized christian in the united states of america where i'm empowered to be an individual and and have my own beliefs my own ideas and maybe there's something about that eastern thing and even what is you know i'd i'd gained from meditation which has some you know christian but also you know buddhist and stuff influences i'd really been enlightened spiritually that way so maybe there's something about islam that i that could teach me something about jesus and something about spirituality and something about god and so i get down on my bathrobe and i start trying to do what i would assume some sort of islamic bow with my hands like i kind of impersonated what the guy on the homeland was doing and then i like kind of like i don't think i've ever told anybody that actually that's beautiful um so i kind of like see myself you know like i look at i kind of see myself in this bathrobe in this spa impersonating a muslim person and uh and i'm like what am i doing with my life i am so desperate [Music] and it's getting kind of pathetic like i'm in this bathroom trying to be a muslim i don't know anything about islam really i'm trying to i'm just grasping for straws i'm i am and that's where that image kind of of the branch kind of came to me and i'm seeing i'm in this river and i my hands are just i've been holding on so long and i've lost feeling in them now and i can't i see my fingers slipping and i'm like uh maybe what if what if the river's good and letting go and trusting like if there is a god and i don't know at this point what he she or it would be but certainly he she or it could uh handle me not believing you know like reality is not going to stop the river's not going to stop and this is killing me i can't function i remember it was a day my brother was in town and i should i could have been hanging out with him but i was like i had to take some moment to try to get the strength to be alive just to function in my world so i had to go away to this spa just to other just to not be in total depression and and nihilism you know and so i was like maybe what if i just let go and like i said i've experienced moments where i didn't find faith i wasn't able to have faith but that even in those moments i'm grasping in the dark for faith this was the first time that i let go of faith and said okay i don't i'm not going to try to believe anything anymore [Music] and uh for me interestingly enough that was a very freeing experience and all of a sudden i like i had that same fear of if i ever actually let go what would happen to my morality at this point because it's been years of me thinking through morality and thinking through uh these issues it was like i was surprised i found this tremendous i kind of like realized that i still in that moment had this tremendous burden and desire for good i remember thinking my brother's in town i need to call him i don't get to see him that often i want to be a good brother i want to be a good i remember leaving and talking to the girl at the front desk and who i didn't pay any attention to going in because i was just in my own head and i'm like she's a human being we're like these human beings that share this space and we interact and i i want her to be happy and so i'll be nice to her and i want to be happy myself and i still had this tremendous desire for good um and that was surprising to me but then i so then that period uh only was a was it a month or something before i met you i think uh did i meet you in january maybe or february i have no sense yeah you told me um interestingly enough though i like i i was supposed to preach like that weekend and at my church and because this was such a long story in progress like and i knew my heart through the whole thing i knew like i so i had options i could either bs my way through the message cancel or just tell them i just decided to tell them like hey i had this experience and i don't really believe anything right now but you know what i'm here because i'm i would never i've never not been open and even longing for god on some like even in that letting go it was a letting go to god if you're there if you're real if you do hear if you do interact with the universe i am totally open to telling phrase i'm i am fully as long as you're good as long as you're not that weird crazy guy that i've rejected for good reason long ago if you're cthulhu i'm out yeah i'm not into that but if you're the if you are the source of love and beauty and goodness and the god that we see in jesus that gives his life for humanity and for the poor and the hurting and the one who says you'll find god in prison and if if that's the god that we're talking about i am fully open i just don't have the strength to believe in you because it's gonna kill me and i actually can think i think i'm probably a better christian not believing in you i thought they'd take it uh i was surprised they took it pretty well one lady pretty justifiably so said i she's she emailed andrew the pastor and said i'm leaving this church i'm never giving this church again i can't believe you'll let somebody talk about like that basically and i went through a yeah a time of like the loss of uh it was a weird it was a weird the loss but also kind of the finding of uh the kind of life i wanted to live even towards jesus i still always was intrigued with jesus and loved what i knew about jesus and um [Music] so anyway when i met you i was in a strange i was kind of like i was feeling better about my life uh i wasn't an angst anymore but all of a sudden but i did i was starting to miss because i was going to church and i found it hard to know why i was there or what i was doing there you know like i missed worshipping and i missed prayer and i missed that impetus to good that not just good but like to the transcendent and to the infinite and to i mean there's something about faith that can be so amazing and so inspiring and i was missing pieces of that um by not necessarily believing in anything uh even though i was still there because i was still open right to it being real and i still knew that i was with you and i still think there's value to this even if it's all bs there's some sort of value here on a human level and all my friends are here and i'm not shut down to god i'm totally open to god i just don't know that i can believe in god right now um so i'm gonna keep showing up and that's why i just kept showing up but there was this longing for spiritual practice for spiritual community for worship for transcendence for the eucharist i missed believing in the eucharist like uh and so then i met mike at a rob bell party why were you why was science mike the atheist at a rob bell party well um because i wasn't an atheist anymore um because of a rob bell party not that rob bell party um yeah i so you kind of bottomed out like maybe a hopeful agnosticism you never went full on i reject any belief in a god or gods i never rejected i didn't believe anymore but i guess it would still be maybe sort of agnostic i don't know it was a decision to not try to believe in it right well acknowledgement would be more like an assumption okay no but in those moments at least i did i did try on the ass i'm going to assume that there's not i did have that i did have like i'm going to assume yeah a weak atheism i'm going to assume that there's no benevolent power that's over doing anything i'm just going to be a human being as a temporary it's probably like a 5.5 or six on the docking scale you guys can google that if you don't know the docking scale um wow so in the time michael was letting go of the branch um i was swimming in the sea i guess uh i i was an atheist for two years two full years and i only know that by doing forensic research into my own life someone reading the excel files yeah look at the excel file read my journal which is time stamped you know i literally had to go and research my own life to figure that out but two for it was like 23 months wow so not fully two years um and my wife figured it out and confronted me and then she told my mom and my mom confronted me and my mom my wife was just like crushed like because i i knew more about the bible than my wife before i obsessively studied it so i like obsessed it was just such an uneven discussion but my mom is like you know like she's read the bible all the way through since she was a kid yeah over and over so she was more prepared for the conversation but she wasn't prepared for the onslaught of empiricism and secular philosophy so she said you know you just have an answer to everything don't you and like that's not cool to hear your mom say yeah and i didn't want to be a jerk to my mom but like she wouldn't let me just not answer the questions so then she said she's going to pray that god moves so powerfully in my life that i couldn't deny it which i thought poor mom that's a sweet sentiment thanks for thinking of me but you'd be really disappointed and then i got invited to go to nasa and they're doing a social media summit for people who had high scores and space science influence on twitter how specific a thing is that you have a really high influence score for space science on twitter would you like to come to a facility that's never been over to the public yes because that's like nerd heaven like nasa um and then like after i booked the flight the same friend who told me about rob bell was now working for rob on his web team and he's like hey rob's gonna do small conferences and we're kind of piloting it so if you can help us work out the kinks in the store we'd love you to just come so i was the first person to ever sign up for a two day with rob bell event as i tested the store and uh so i was like yeah cause i work in advertising and rob like i don't care what you think about rob um he's a great communicator i don't care if you believe in god or if you think rob's a heretic he's an unbelievable communicator and i thought i'd love to he just seems to have this endless creativity and at the time i was leading creative people and advertising and always feeling like i just had my last idea like the next meeting is the one where i'm gonna go i got nothing and get fired so i was just gonna go apis creativity but it was really weird i was gonna be at nasa thursday friday and rob's event was like monday tuesday or tuesday wednesday in the same part of the country so i didn't have to rebook a flight i just moved the return flight i didn't have to like it's a pretty good gig so um i went to this rob conference as an atheist a closet freaking atheist the only two people that know my wife and my mom as we drive out of the conference i tell my buddy in this truck as we're going to the conference that i don't believe it in god anymore and i'm meaning like his boss really you know it's such a weird twisted thing and like when you were talking about feeling trapped in some way because your livelihood depended on this like what a weird thing we do is trap people in belief what a strange construct that is um and i've learned through this experience how many people are in that state yeah how many pastors and priests yeah it's common and artists and i mean my email box is full of people you've heard of saying i just don't know if i believe any of this stuff and and then like this witch hunt is the response yeah which makes it worse it's crazy i mean that's this is not the way the gospel happens but sorry i was gonna get i was about to take a seat that's good all right so i go to the rob bell conference and it was awesome like rob just talks about creativity how to be creative and um you the last episode of this podcast wouldn't exist if it weren't for this conference because i would have never heard of spiral dynamics and uh it was amazing until rob started talking about atheism and i remember he said evolution is interesting or evolutionist can tell you why you don't have a tail but it can't tell you why you find that interesting it's like and he's he had these like like very raw uh quips but i thought they were all wrong because i was like well we're curious because we have a large prefrontal cortex that came from evolution via natural selection like that's the whole point of evolution and so like in my mind i would like knock back whatever rob said but i remember feeling defeated because i was like i was dumb to put i was embarrassed that i had ever believed in god in that room and this was like a bunch of really pretty smart dialed in christians um and i finally just i stood up i raised my hand and i told rob why i thought he was wrong about atheism i told him i was a southern baptist atheist and i deconstructed everything he had said in the last 20 minutes and then i ended it by saying so rob how can anyone who understands how the universe functions possibly believe in any god in a room of pastors um and uh rob thanked me and that's really key listeners who believe in god when i gave my deepest darkest secret and fear and put it on the table rob said thank you we all needed to hear that he didn't tell me i was wicked he didn't bunch of scriptures he thanked me yeah so powerful so i get asked all the time how do i deal with someone who just told me they don't believe in god you give them a hug yes so tired over and then he told me that i was obviously very smart and i obviously knew a whole lot about science that i even knew more about science than he did and he'd been studying it for a book he was working on and he said that obviously the way because i'm so smart i dealt with life was by mastering it by categorizing it through science that i could put everything in a bucket and it all made sense and he said but there's something in your life that you can't put in a bucket because you flew across the country to meet with a pastor and you told me that you won't tell your friends you don't believe in god because you don't want to hurt their faith he said that's not exactly the new atheist mo hiding atheism so he said here's what i challenge you to do is i want you get a bigger bucket in your mind and on that i want you to put all the questions you can't answer in that bucket where did we come from why are we here and on that bucket i want you to write god and that's all you can do i'm gonna tell you what no one else has told you that that's enough and for like a second i felt god again i mean like a second and it was gone was it like like you saw a color that you haven't seen in a long time sort of thing it was like you've been on a diet and you bite a cheeseburger you know that feeling of just absolute everything is okay yeah just life is good i like beef and cheddar um i take everything to food i'm a fat guy so um but the reverence the little humming reverence vanished again but i was like that's an odd feeling and then we did the next day to end the conference with the eucharist and i thought she's a youth group lame and um but then and i don't want to ramble for like five hours so i'll just tell you i heard jesus talk to me which is crazy like i almost hate that part of the story because it makes me less credible you know what i mean like as much as it's beautiful and every time like people have seen me tell the story every time i get to that part i cry because it was so powerful like i don't have to pretend no i know you've you've told us so many times but we're in this story you gotta tell it all right i just ruined the punchline so rob serves the eucharist and i'm feeling so cynical and jaded about it and he he starts on about physics to introduce the eucharist and i'm like what like i've never heard someone say photon or cork in the context of the eucharist so good marketing and so i listen and then after his intro he talks about how the final act of christ was to watch the feet of his followers before the crucifixion and that in doing so he was setting them aside and making the sacred in the same way we set aside the bread and the wine really i mean that was a good intro yeah well compost but he said so if you don't know what to pray right now just pray how can i be broken and poured out for others like christ was broken and poured out for me and i thought that's very nice sentiment that sounds like humanism so like i like super awkwardly like i've forgotten how to pray right now yeah like it felt weird like i bowed my head and felt very self-conscious and i remember thinking like what do i do like how do you how do you do this so i literally just said like whispered how can i be broken and poured out for others and i didn't do the like jesus part i was like this is so manipulative yeah you know what i mean yeah so and then like people get up and it's kind of a weird dynamic because like a lot of these people like really like rob bell's teaching it's a big deal for them to get the eucharist from him so some people walk up and just take the eucharist as a sacred moment but other people have like their moment with rob and i'm like ah this is this is strange i don't know if i can do this um but finally i get up because there's like a lull in the eucharistic and i start walking up to rob and as i start to walk up rob's eyes turn all red and teary and i remember thinking like strange but as i'm thinking that i was tears were running down my face and i didn't even know that like my friend later told me that i had tears running down my face that's how dissociated i was and uh so i walk up and rob holds out this piece of bread he says mike this is the body of christ broken for you there's a couple things i want to mention here one is this is an act the way the eucharist is done where this is a thing offered that you have to then take they don't just like drop it in your hands they don't toss it to you they hold it out and you take it and i've had this moment of moral conviction because i was like i can't take a piece of bread that represents a body i don't think existed when you're wrestling with the idea of whether god is real or are past wrestling that jesus was just either an ordinary rabbi who was pumped up through a game of telephone or a myth without god jesus is just not very interesting so i'd spent no time thinking about jesus and only thought about god and so i was like i can't take this bread it's not it's a piece of bread and if i take this i'm lying to all these people they're gonna feel like they've had this big moment where this atheist has become a christian again and they're gonna tell their friends and i'm not that guy and i'm not going to do it just for social pressure so i actually went to turn and leave and here's the part that's insane this is crazy it ruins the credibility of the story but it happened so i have to retell it i heard a voice and that voice said i was here when you were eight and i'm here now jesus like i lost it i took the bread i dipped in the wine i ate it and i literally ran from the room and i go to my hotel room and it's a surfer hotel so it's just like beds and a place to put surfboards there's not even a desk and i want i don't know why but i wanted my my journal my notebook so i get it i have this really nice pen i got in san francisco that's an odd detail in the story i really like that pen and uh it's a tombow anyway so and there's nowhere for me to write i don't even know what i'm gonna write but i know i need to write at this point in my life it's not even like i was a writer you know what i mean so i just kind of like wander around the back of the hotel because i'm so afraid to see anybody because i look crazy carrying a notebook and a pen and sobbing hysterically and uh so i finally figure well enough time has passed surely all these people have left the conference and there was a table right outside the venue so i sort of sneak over and there was nobody outside i was like score so i sit down and i open my notebook and i take my very fancy japanese pen and i write dear god comma like i'm writing a letter to god and then i just start crying again like all this grief that i'd sort of like buried over losing god and my parents collapsed marriage it was all just this toxic sludge in my psyche it just it's geysering out of me now and and i write a letter to god and i can't read it as i write it because of the tears i mean it's as hard as i've ever cried in my life and um and i closed a notebook and uh this this methodist pastor named sarah comes out and sits with me and just holds me um welcomes me back and i remember thinking what do you mean welcome back welcome back to what this i don't know what happened i don't know what's happening i think i hallucinated you know what i mean like it wasn't just this automatic there was no resolution the bible still seemed ridiculous yeah i still thought that jesus methodists were pretty compelling i just ate a piece of bread and had an auditory hallucination you know what i mean yeah like this is the uncut version guys so um now you don't get this part live so so i go out uh drinking with these pastors and i realized one drinking pastors are awesome because everybody just has like a beer and nobody gets wasted and you get wasted on a beer though well i can but most people can't and the other thing is when you have a large group of plain looking men in a bar who are not drinking very much but look like they're having a blast that's like the most powerful evangelism possible because all these people are just attracted to you and i remember all these amazing conversations with people who weren't in the club they weren't christians um but they felt the solidarity with us because they didn't feel judged by us really amazing stuff and so uh they all have to like go to bed at some point because i got flights the next day so it's like 2 30 in the morning and i don't feel i can go to bed yet i have that same seven-year-old unresolved feeling it's back so i walk down to the beach and it's dark it's really dark it's laguna dark so there's still like an la light dome but if you just came from the street it seems very dark and i remember not being able to see where the sky stopped in the ocean began but i could hear the waves and i could see the surf when it was close to me and i realized like all i could see was one of the most powerful forces on earth but i could i i could sense it but not see it like the pacific ocean there's a lot of energy physically in the pacific ocean so i thought as a metaphor for god goes that's pretty good so i on the spur of the moment decided to start praying to god and like it was a throw down i said god you know i don't i don't know anything about you i don't know if you wrote the bible or the bible means anything i don't know if you interact with the universe or not um i know that if you do interact with the universe and you have consciousness or will or agency you've got some explaining to do because my mom prayed that i would know you again and a new york times best-selling pastor gave me personal attention and you know what i mean like it's crazy and at the same like literally right now some mother in a war-torn country is praying that her children will die and her prayer is not getting answered god that's that's evil i don't get it it's ridiculous so i can't tell you i'm gonna like follow the ten commandments and just pick up the gospels and and be what i was yeah i can't i can't say that to you but who is it good to talk to you again i don't ever want to not talk to you again and i never want to feel like we're apart from each other again so let's make a deal i will devote my life to serving you whatever that means [Music] i will do everything in my power to make life on this planet better i will study the bible again and see what remnants of you i can find in its pages all i know is that tonight [Music] i met jesus again and when i said jesus here's the second crazy part of the story i was standing kind of high up on the beach and the pacific rushed forward and soaked me up to mid calf and washed all the sand off my shoes and i was reminded of rob saying christ's final act of service was washing feet of his followers and i remember very clearly very vividly saying is this really happening and then the world fell away it was the opposite of the trapdoor [Music] it was like i don't know if like you when you're a kid you would ever hide under the blankets and if the blankets were stretched tight you could see through to the other side a little bit but it was hazy [Music] reality did that and on the other side of this stretched veil is what i can only describe as the glory of god and believe me skeptics i understand your confusion at that phrase but when you experience that like using a different word than god is like it's too weak it's too weak god is the only word that we have that is for that is intended for this experience like that's big enough when you talk about the incomprehensible mystery the incomprehensible uncontainable infinite god and you that's that's good language it's good language and i i get frustrated because there's a pretty sizable group of folks online who are atheists and skeptics who a try to figure out if i was ever really an atheist and b then want to say my mystical experience was just a naturally induced neurological state that comes from being outdoors a sense of grandeur i know what a sense of natural grandeur and awe is i've looked through a telescope and had that i've had that in the forest i've had that out in the as an atheist as an atheist what i'm talking about is something different science calls them mystical experiences and they have documented characteristics and i nailed all of them without even knowing what mystical experience was i had no sense of time or place i had a sense of transcending physical reality i had a sense of oneness and connection with all life and the final characteristic common to mystical experiences is that people report that their life was forever changed by it um and that has absolutely been the case with me now here's the thing like it did i didn't suddenly like oh here's what the bible means you know what i mean yeah oh here's the oh yeah i get it no this is why i know for sure jesus was a real person it was just the power of that experience was undeniable and changed the way i understand and relate to god because now anytime i pray every time i pray there's an echo of that moment by the pacific every time this this divine light bathes me every time it's powerful and so that's what i had this experience and i started to try to figure out what in the heck happened to me so instead of going to the bible again because i was kind of afraid of the bible at this point in my life sure like not kind of like almost phobic um i studied um neurologists who have studied faith sociologists anthropologists white-coat non-christian academics who study religious people because i wanted to understand what happened to me and i didn't want to cop out just by saying god and from that experience i'd learned a lot about the science of faith and i found that kind of the popular narratives among skeptics aren't necessarily the most scientific or certainly aren't the consensus of the scientific community right there's like all this great research about there's benefits to religion and um that belief in god does certain things of the brain and just boom boom boom thing after things i found them but at the same time i had this tendency to pick apart my own experience even immediately doubt was still an acid that wanted to erode that moment on the beach and to give you some idea like the next morning i was so convinced i made it all up i went out to the beach to find the spot i was standing on and there was this ring way up from the tideline way up from the waveline of this seaweed in a circle centered around where i was standing and i took a picture with my cell phone and even that sometimes i'm like well enough waves happen some of them will be improbable life probably still there for 30 minutes you know what i mean like i was convinced to take this thing apart so that's where those axioms came from is i had to i had to create an empirically based justification for pursuing faith so that i couldn't self analyze myself into feeling stupid about pursuing god wasn't that this is who god is or this is the ultimate answer it was just enough to keep myself to give myself a hall pass to pursue faith because it felt so silly and so archaic at times because i really had been an atheist wow okay so the story we're in the middle of this story in this discussion um but it's getting long so what we're gonna do is we're gonna divide this one up into two so thanks for listening we'd love to hear from you how this is impacting you and about your own story so you can join us on allergist.com podcast and leave a comment on this episode you can see us and talk to us on facebook.com the liturgists or you can hit us 140 characters at a time at the liturgist on twitter thanks for listening i'm michael gunger i'm science mike