For years after my deconversion, I found myself at loose ends about how to view the universe and my place within it. Christianity had given me a simple cosmology, but Christianity’s claims had turned out to be false. After deconverting, I wanted to build my worldview on claims that were true—and only claims that were true. But I still lacked the ability to think critically about religion and cosmology. Today, let me tell you how I finally began to find real answers.
These answers were for questions like the meaning and purpose of life, what was most important, what happens after death, how to know what’s right and wrong, and more.
(This post went live on Patreon on 7/15/2025. It’s available there now! This post originally appeared in Ex-Communications on January 12, 2015. It’s been adapted for modern readers. Also, I’m still sick, so please accept my apologies for there being no voicecast.)
Sammy put words to the yearning that so many of us felt years ago
At the emotional peak of The Wedding Singer, the hedonistic, brash Sammy breaks down. He makes a shocking confession: His macho, hypersexualized bravado is a total act. He’s actually deeply lonely and afraid of being single forever. Even though he says he’s “miserable,” though, he doesn’t have the emotional skills needed to move past his own façade. Finally, Sammy exclaims:
What I’m saying is all I really want is someone to hold me and tell me that everything is gonna be all right.
When I saw it, I instantly recognized that sentiment the second I heard it. It wasn’t an uncommon thing to hear back in the 1980s. I’d even said it myself. I had often heard friends saying it. It was the quiet ache of our day.
To quench it, we sought the reassurances we were taught to crave.
A religion that teaches people not to trust themselves to find answers
In childhood, trusted adults taught me that I had a thirst that only something external could quench. Sometimes you’ll hear this thirst called “a god-shaped hole.” I learned that people desperately needed our faith system to feel complete. Some of my teachers thought that our god had created human beings to serve him. Others thought that he’d created humans to worship and praise him. Others still thought that we shouldn’t worry about it at all. Instead, we should focus on doing what we were told. After we died and presumably went to “Heaven,” we’d find all the answers we’d ever wanted.
Obviously, this notion isn’t true. Nobody’s ever found a “god-shaped hole” in anybody, much less one that is shaped like the Christian conceptualization of the Bible’s particular deity. Just by talking to non-Christians—particularly atheists—Christians can easily discover that plenty of people are doing perfectly fine without their god or their take on his religion.
But at the time, I had no reason not to trust the people teaching me these things. They manufactured a need in my psyche, just like any marketer does. And once that need was in place, I needed a cure for it.
Remarkably, Christianity offered the perfect cure for the need its evangelists had created! The need and the cure were right there in one convenient package.
When I internalized that programming, though, I learned to distrust my own intuition, judgment, and discernment.
And like Seligman’s dogs eventually stopped even trying to escape their torture, I stopped even trying to figure things out for myself. I believed I succeed. Instead, I trusted that someone far smarter had already worked everything out for me. I just needed to find that person.
Here’s what happens when someone takes the party line too seriously
So I grew up into early adulthood and, having foolishly taken my authority figures’ word for the matter, sincerely believed that Jesus would fill the “god-shaped hole” I thought I had in my heart.
The problem was, the Catholic church sure wasn’t doing that.
I know a lot of people find fulfillment in the Church. I have relatives who are clergy in it, after all. My extended family is very deeply religious. But for some reason, Catholicism did not resonate with me. I didn’t even know exactly what I sought. I just knew that I wasn’t finding it there. In Catholicism, I felt spiritually starved, lonely, and frustrated. They kept saying that a god was there and that this god loved and craved my attention and devotion. But I wasn’t feeling it.
The obvious reason why I wasn’t feeling it—there’s nothing to feel!—did not occur to me at all. Instead of thinking that maybe there wasn’t a deity out there really communing with anybody, I thought that maybe I was just doing something wrong. I tried getting more fervent about my devotion to Catholicism. I briefly even considered becoming a nun. But that didn’t help. In the end, I abandoned Catholicism and sought answers and fulfillment in Protestantism.
But there, too, I found only more emptiness and more questions than answers. I ended up plunging deeper and deeper into the murky end of far-right, extremist Christianity. Thankfully, I realized Christian claims weren’t true before I got drawn into anything really dangerous or life-altering.
However, once I deconverted, I now had a whole new set of problems.
An existential crisis that never needed to happen
My deconversion sparked a huge existential crisis.
I knew Christianity’s claims were false. But I thought it was the only path to finding answers—like the meaning of life. So I floundered for a few years, almost falling prey to conspiracy theories like AIDS denialism and nearly joining a multi-level marketing scheme.
At some point after my deconversion, I told someone:
“I wish that there was just some guru on a mountain somewhere, so I could climb the mountain, reach the top, and ask my questions and get real answers.”
Thinking about those words later on, I had one of those glorious epiphanies that nobody ever forgets.
This was like when people say “all I want is for someone to hold me and tell me it’ll be okay,” not realizing that they are the ones who have to do that for themselves.
It can certainly be comforting to have others do that for us, yes. But it just doesn’t mean as much as when we, ourselves, love ourselves and tell ourselves it will be okay and we mean it. We’re not really convinced otherwise.
In that Wedding Singer clip, after Sammy makes his confession of vulnerability, immediately a fellow barfly does exactly what Sammy says he wants. This sweet old man puts his arms around a total stranger and tells Sammy what he says he’s wanted to hear all along. Though Sammy’s really nice to the old guy in turn, you can tell that the experience wasn’t quite the huge, life-changing experience that he’d thought it’d be.
That’s because the only person who can give that reassurance to Sammy is, well, Sammy. But he doesn’t know that yet.
Answers, bespoke and cherished
That’s the answer. It’s the base-level truth. Nobody else can take the place of ourselves even if we’d like them to. Nobody else can love us as well as we ourselves can. And nobody can reassure us like we ourselves can.
And the next epiphany tripped right along behind the first one like a kitten:
Maybe meaning in life is the same way.
There was no guru at the top of the mountain. Or more to the point, yes, there was a guru at the top of the mountain. My guru was me.
All my life, I’d been going at this thing all wrong.
I wanted some external way to find meaning in life. I wanted there to be some physical effort I could make to get answers, some action I could take, or some belief I could hold that would fill that hole I’d been taught was inside me. The world wasn’t cooperating with my desires, but I still wanted what I’d been promised.
But if the hole didn’t really exist, if I could fulfill my existential needs by myself, then I’d been set up to fail.
The hungry ghost never gets answers
That day I had this vivid image suddenly that I had been, all my life, flitting from place to place trying to fulfill a falsely-created hunger. I was like a “hungry ghost” from Buddhist lore. No wonder I’d failed! I’d been going through more and more drastic measures trying to make the world look like my religion said it should look. At the end of all that effort, all I had to show for it was a string of idiotic ideas and self-destructive deeds, a broken marriage to a violent narcissist, and the loss or near-loss of every decent relationship I’d ever had.
Maybe the problem was the way I’d been going at finding meaning and answers.
I’ve said many times before that apologetics is the attempt to make the world look like how Christianity says it should look. “The god-shaped hole” is only one of these attempts. So is the idea of externally-sourced answers being the only real ones.
As I look back at that time of my life, I think that the people who said they’d found fulfillment in Christianity were just people who had found answers, but misattributed their source. They cloaked what they found in religious terms. Perhaps they were just lucky enough that the “meaning” that Christianity offers just happened to work for them, in the same way that a 1950s model of marriage just happens to work for some couples. It’s not the model itself that works, it’s just that they happen to fit into it.
To those who are deconverting or who are thinking about it, please don’t be afraid. What we were taught to fear as Christians is a false fear. It’s based on the empty threat of losing a false hope in a false promise. You are all you need. You already have everything you need to figure out your answers.
NEXT UP: If my health starts cooperating, we’ll tackle a new trend on TikTok: Speaking in tongues and tangling the results with ChatGPT! See you soon! <3
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