Life Beyond Belief: Introduction

Prologue

Before all this happened, when I was still a pastor, I was sitting in a chair with my eyes closed, doing my best to meditate. A dark, foreboding passage appeared, like the entrance of a cave. Something was tugging at me to go through. I somehow knew that to enter that passage would mean the loss of everything. But there was a promise: life on the other side. It was a simple choice: Give up everything. Get everything.

Over the next decade, that vision, or premonition, or whatever it was, came true. I was stripped of all my beliefs and accomplishments. The very ground beneath my feet crumbled. The promise was also true: There was life on the other side.

There is a lot of interest these days in deconstruction, the painful work of releasing toxic beliefs. Deconstruction is necessary; in fact, I consider losing my faith to be the greatest achievement of my life. But that’s not what this book is about.

This is about the life that appears at the end of faith—the life beyond belief. I write with sincere desire for you to discover this life.

Lake Tahoe, April 2025

Introduction

Our lives play out in the shadow of three dark specters, three phantoms that frustrate our search for meaning, ruin our happy endings, and leave us at each other’s throats.

The first specter is Ignarus—Ignorance. Ignarus reveals that we are lost. After all these millennia, we have no answers to the questions we most desperately need to know: What is this place? How did we get here? Where are we going? Is there any point to it all?

The second specter is Vanitas—Vanity. Vanitas ensures there will never be a happy ending. The problem isn’t the “happy.” It’s the “ending.” We may arrive at a moment of pleasure but time marches on. Every Paradise becomes a Paradise lost. We can taste. We cannot be satisfied.

The third specter is Rapax—Rape, or Predation. Rapax devours our most cherished illusion: that we are good people who live in a good world. But nature is red in tooth and claw and we are part of nature. When God commanded Adam to kill and eat, evidently he hit “Cc all.” Our world is more like the Hunger Games than Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. We are all cursed with teeth and appetite.

Ignarus, Vanitas, and Rapax. We cannot escape these specters so we hide from them, mainly by distractions. We eat. We shop. We drink. We binge. We take a vacation, start a business… But the specters are always there in the background, an ominous cloud hanging over our lives.

The darkness hit me with force during my sophomore year of high school. I had been demoted on the basketball team. The girl I was trying to impress wanted nothing to do with me. I came home from school and plopped down in a black bean bag chair. I was so desperate that I opened the Bible to read. What happened next set the course of my life for the next forty years.

As I read, the Christian teachings I had absorbed over years of Sunday School and church services triumphed over the specters and filled me with joy. It felt like God was speaking directly to me.

To Ignarus, God said, “Of course you feel lost. You don’t have the whole picture. I do. Trust me. To Vanitas, God said, “Of course you are filled with longing. This would is not your home. Heaven is the place you seek. In the face of Rapax, God offered his Son to die for my sin and walk through life with me. To the cruelty of high school rejection, I had a triumphant reply: Jesus loves me.

I leapt to my feet and marched around the room pumping my fist. I was saved. I eagerly gave my life to God. As the old hymn put it,

All to Jesus I surrender

All to him I freely give

I will ever love and trust him

In his presence daily live

I surrender all. I surrender all.

All to Thee, my precious Savior

I surrender all.

I had found the answer the world was looking for. I was genuinely sorry for my classmates who had not experienced this, who sought life in popularity and parties. They were lost. I felt compelled to share the good news with my fallen world. As another popular song from the 70’s put it:

That’s how it is with God’s love

Once you’ve experienced it

You spread his love to everyone

You want to pass it on

I can still conjure this feeling of certainty, of security, of belonging. I wish it had been real. My life would have been so much simpler. But as the decades passed, my faith started to slip. At first, I wasn’t alarmed. Faith was supposed to be a fight. I reinforced my position by surrounding myself with Christians who shared my views. I read C.S. Lewis. I studied theology.

My loss of faith was not dramatic. It failed like the paint on an old house, slowly oxidizing in the hot sun and peeling off. When I resigned my church in 2013, it was from exhaustion. I collapsed more than I resigned. If you want the gory details, I describe them in Facing Up: The Story of My Fall but here are the Cliff notes of how the specters defeated my faith.

Ignarus eroded my certainty that the Bible was God’s word. The more I studied it, the more obvious it was that my simple evangelical beliefs did not come from its pages. I went to seminary and even learned to read the Bible in ancient Greek, but the closer I looked, the more inescapable it was that the Bible is a diverse collection of religious writings spanning many centuries. The idea that a simple, single message can be found in it is simply false.

Vanitas eroded my confidence that all would be well in in the end. What heavenly sense could be made a young man in my youth group who drowned on a water skiing outing? What future benefit could arise in heaven from children on earth being with cancer? And how could I worship a God who, in the end, would cast nearly everyone into hell?

Rapax devoured my cherished illusion that Jesus was a friend by my side, who heard my prayers, and guided my path. I labored to explain the events of my life though this lens, but this became harder and harder to do. Eventually, I had to face the fact that I was making it up. Life was random. The church, which was supposed to be filled with people who had been transformed by Jesus, was a cesspool of petty conflict made worse by the fact that we had to hide it under the rug and sing songs about how much we loved each other.

After I resigned, Julie and I sold everything and hit the road. I had to resurrect my faith. If you have never had a belief system that answers all life’s questions, fills you with hope, and makes you feel safe and loved, it might be hard to understand why I had such a hard time giving it up. I could not quit without exploring every possibility.

I took my Bible and started from scratch, trying to forge a Christian faith I could live with. I wrote a book called Hard Reset where I exposed the contradictions of my evangelical faith and presented my alternative. When I stepped back and surveyed this, I was proud. My new version of Christianity had more depth and substance than the jumble of oversimplifications I grew up with. The problem was that I was just another person, picking pieces from the Bible to assemble a system of belief. My newly-minted Christianity might be easier to swallow but I had to admit that it was a construct of human ingenuity, not a discovery of Divine revelation.

The Hard Reset came to an end. I needed to shut up. I committed digital suicide. I took down my website, deleted my podcast, erased my Facebook page, and removed my books from Amazon. We moved to Seattle and lived in one of my brother-in-law’s rentals while working at his hardware store. After my heady days of being a pastor and professor, it was humbling to rise at 4 a.m. to stock shelves for minimum wage.

One evening, I was teaching my final online Greek Class, savoring the rush of being a professor. I closed the laptop, entered the kitchen and said to Julie,

“It’s weird being so good at something you know you can’t do anymore.”

She looked up wearily from the sink and said,

“How did you lose your faith?”

It was a question, not an attack, but it hit like the words of a Old Testament Prophet. How had I lost my faith? I guess like I lost my hair. It just started falling out, piece by piece. One day, I looked in the mirror and it was all gone. I would have to find a way to live without it.

As I looked back on the smoking ruins of my faith, Ignarus gloated, “Welcome to nihilism.” As I unwillingly faced the fact that every end is a dead end, Vanitas cast me into despair. I didn’t care whether I lived or died. Rapax alienated my from my old friends whose love for me could only take the form of trying to bring me back to the faith.

You can imagine how much fun I was to live with during this time. I have to give a shoutout to my wife, Julie. She walked with me without judgment, giving me space to rant and rave and work things out. Julie is the best thing in my life.

The first part of my vision of the dark passageway had come true. I had been stripped of my beliefs and accomplishments. Over the next few years, the second part came true as well: I found life that was promised. The rest of this book is about that life but to whet your appetite, here are seven ways my life is better because I lost my faith.

I see wonders. The Apostle Paul said to “fight the good fight of faith.” That’s a good description of what being a Christian was like. Faith was in need of constant fortification. Now, there is nothing to defend, just more to see. I have moved from faith to wonder.
I am less self-righteous and more content. Imagine a man who enters a restaurant. The place is empty so the hostess tells him to sit wherever he likes. He chooses a corner table but quickly realizes it is near the bathroom. It stinks. It’s poorly lit. It’s ugly. He gets up and moves to a seat by the window. A fresh breeze blows on his face and he looks out on the sun setting over the ocean. Was he a good person for moving? No. He just chose a more desirable situation. In the same way, I don’t consider myself a better person for changing my way of being. I just found a better place to sit.
I found my one human family. I could never come up with a faith that produced the one human family I longed for. The moment I believed, I was surrounded by unbelievers. Now, my bond with other people has nothing to do with beliefs. The one human family is not found in a common creed, but in a common predicament. We’re all in the same boat, facing the same impossible questions, doing our best to live our lives. Hello, sister. Hello, brother.
I feel closer to the Divine. I no longer have to explain or understand whatever it is that lies beyond my existence. Releasing the necessity to explain or understand the Divine has freed me to touch it. The connection is existential, not conceptual.
I no longer fear death. Now that I accept the mystery of life, it is easier to face the mystery of death. Life is mystery. Death is mystery. If I can accept one, I can accept the other.
I can be authentic. I no longer have to comply (or pretend to comply) with external rules about who I should be or how I should behave. I am free to discover my authentic self and express it as I choose.
Life has more meaning. I no longer have to search for meaning. I have the power to create it.

This week, I spent time this week with my friend, Jim. Jim is the only person other than my wife who walked all the way through the dark night with me. He made an observation.

“You’ve been though the dark night and have returned with maps.”

Nothing could have made me happier than those words because this is exactly the how I see it. I am like Lewis and Clark. I set out on an journey of discovery and recorded what I saw, as faithfully as possible. I claim no unique perception or special insight. There was no divine revelation along the way. I just recorded what I saw. I counted this morning: I filled twenty-nine journals with observations.

The maps I brought back from the dark night are imperfect, like any explorer’s map. That’s okay. Maps are not sacred. They can be revised and improved. What is sacred is the mind-blowing experience of being human.

In the next chapter I will show that this common humanity is our truest bond. We will then embark to three islands where we will explore three dimensions of human existence. This will force a decision: To be or not to be? I will show why choosing “to be” is natural, honest, and desirable. Finally, I will offer a daily practice of facing up.

There is no claim anywhere in this book to have discovered the answers to life. There is nothing to join and nothing to believe. What I offer is a way to live while honestly facing the specters. This means: 1) Facing up as in facing what we see. 2) Facing up as in saying “yes” to our life.

No one can face the darkness for anyone else. Each person must navigate their own way. But I think it possible to profit from each other’s experience. I hope what follows will make your journey a little easier and help you move more quickly to the life beyond belief.

One thing for sure: You don’t have to to go alone. Loneliness was the hardest part of my dark night. I didn’t think anyone could understood what I was going through. I would love to be your friend in the dark. You can connect with me at facingup.club. I hope to meet you soon.