The main reason for this entry is that last Friday, April 8, was the 1-year anniversary of the night I lost my faith in God.  So I wanted to reflect on the past year and how it's gone since I left my religion.  First, I just wanna say, to all those who didn't think I would make it, Ha!  It's been a whole year and I'm better than ever!  I didn't need to come running back to religion in order to cope with life!  Not that Jesus ever helped me anyway.  It's just that my whole structure of meaning was based on Christianity.  I think that's why I struggled a lot with depression when I left.

So, a brief summary of the past year:  Actually, April 8 was not when I left the religion for good.  It was the night when I suddenly realized I didn't believe in the Christian God anymore.  I'm not going to get into why it happened, because I've already talked about it in the past.  Anyway, I realized I didn't believe in hell anymore, so I could finally leave the faith!  But a week later, my fear of hell came back -- it was too strong, it had been taught to me as a young child -- and I returned to the faith for about a month.  I was very reluctant about it tho.  And my faith continued to be just a negative thing in my life.  But I think during that month, I had a distance from my faith, so that I could examine its effect on my life from a more objective standpoint.  And I saw how it was making me miserable with guilt and driving me crazy with paradoxes.  I really couldn't stand the fact that I had to love God in order to not be put in hell.  That just seemed totally wrong to me.

So finally one night, I decided to have it out with God.  I would sort it out, one way or the other.  I would either be a Christian and submit myself to all the crazy ideas in the Bible, or I would make my own path.  And after a time of anguished prayer, I decided, "That's it.  I'm not going to do this to myself ever again.  It's over.  I'm going to find my own way, and see how it goes.  If I come back, so be it, but I have to do this for myself."  A huge factor in my decision was that I found the evidence for Christianity so lacking that the odds that it was true were no greater than those for any other religion.  I wasn't going to dedicate my life to something because of the ever so slight chance that I might go to hell.  I value my life more than that.  And if God is going to send me to hell because I don't -- can't -- love him, then he is the one who is unjust.  Might does not make right.  Christianity is supposed to be about right and wrong, absolute moral principles, and "the big guy makes the rules" does not fit with that.  That was in the middle of May 2004, so I have another anniversary to celebrate.

After that, I can't remember most of the next month or two.  I wasn't really comfortable with my decision, so I think that I was trying not to think about anything.  And then sometime that summer, I went to some websites for ex-Christians (most notably exchristian.net), and started coming to terms with my status as a leaver of Christianity.  I started trying to figure out what the heck I was, and trying to flush all the Christian junk out of my system.  I told my sister about losing my faith, and soon after I told my parents.  I still regret doing that because I know it's very sad for them.  But on the other hand, I don't think I could lie to them about it forever.  I could have stopped going to church, but they would have nagged me about it incessantly.  My mother is also very good at weaseling the truth out of me.  Also, I have a strong belief in the power of truth, and that if there weren't so many lies in the world it would be a better place.  So they know the truth.  But I just can't convince myself that it's for the best.

It's hard for me to remember much else about 2004.  I do remember one day in the summer being incredibly depressed for no reason, and then I watched a movie that somehow cheered me up enough to carry on.  I remember doing a pretty crappy job on my co-op at Xerox that summer, and hating myself for it.  I was just so damn lazy.  I was lonely too.  I watched a ton of movies that summer, it was pretty much all I did.

Toward the end of the year, I started getting more and more depressed.  I started this xanga on a really depressed day, then I got better, and then it came back and hung on.  I was getting pretty desperate, saying that I should see a psychologist, when I happened across a book on Buddhism in Borders Bookstore.  It was a book on emotions by Thich Nhat Hanh.  I clung to that book like life itself.  The words on its pages were like water from a mountain stream trickling down my throat, my face, my hands, cooling and refreshing me from the inside.  Through his gentle introduction to Buddhism, I recovered from my depression in about two months, starting sometime in December.

I also finally started reading about a month ago.  I haven't read a book outside of school since I was like 13, and I wish I had not stopped; it would have really helped me out last year!  I think as I make use of my mind to contemplate the things I read, it will make me happier, because I hate it when I feel like I'm wasting my abilities, especially mental.

So, can a Christian put me in the tidy little box of the "worldly person looking here and there for the happiness they never find"?  I would say, first, that most people are like that, and it's not neccessarily a bad thing.  I think we are wired to always be looking to the next thing to give us happiness.  It keeps us active, keeps us trying new things.  I'm also self-aware enough to know that it's ok not to feel completely happy and at peace all the time.  There's also a sense of peace that I often feel when I'm alone, and I never had that as a Christian.  It's the simple peace of knowing that I'm on this earth for the purpose of enjoying my life and making my contribution to the world, nothing more.  And that "whatever happens here, stays here" -- that is, no hell to worry about.  Even if the entire human race becomes extinct, so what?  We're just a marble in an ocean of galaxies.  It's all a joke, really.  Life is beautiful because we experience it as beautiful.  As long as you enjoy your slice of life, the cosmic concepts (or lack of them) doesn't really matter.  It doesn't matter where the universe came from or where it's going, all that matters is the here and now.  And art is a huge part of the human experience, because art is perception and creation, two of our greatest abilities.  What I'm trying to say is... I have a pretty balanced perspective on life now, and I believe in the beauty and goodness of the world.  What could Jesus possibly offer me?