Free Godless by Dan Barker

3:11) But 2,000 years is not “quickly.” It slowly dawned on me—duh—that something was very wrong with what I believed. “Oh,” I thought. “I guess I am growing up here.”
     
    Gradually, I began to swing across the theological continuum, becoming less and less fundamentalist and more of a moderate evangelical. I was accepting invitations to preach and sing in a variety of churches, mostly evangelical, but also in some moderate and liberal congregations that had performed my music. My sermons began to have less hell and more love. I talked less about the afterlife and more about living this life. (I was raising four growing kids by now.) I was still a strong, committed believer, but preaching less evangelism and more “Christian walk.”
     
    I vividly remember driving the freeways of southern California and running all of this through my mind, talking with “God,” talking with myself, arguing, rebutting, weighing emotion against reason, asking what it was all about. One thought kept rising to the surface, as if spoken from somewhere else: “Something is wrong.” I couldn’t figure it out. I couldn’t really articulate the questions properly, but a voice in my mind kept saying, “Something is wrong. Admit it.” I think that was the voice of honesty—I knew it was not the voice of God.
     
    I think it was at this point that I made the leap, not to atheism, but to the commitment to follow reason and evidence wherever they might lead, even if it meant taking me away from my cherished beliefs. As the months passed, that voice kept getting louder: “Something is wrong.”
     
    After a couple of years of this process of reevaluation, I had migrated into a more moderate position, where I still held the basic theological beliefs but discarded many lesser doctrines as either nonessential or untrue. I remember the way I was thinking then: every Christian has a particular hierarchy of doctrines and practices, and most Christians arrange their hierarchy in roughly the same manner. The existence of God is at the top, the deity of Jesus just below that, and so on down to the bottom of the list, where you find issues like whether women should wear jewelry or makeup in church. What distinguishes many brands of Christianity is where they draw their line between what is essential and what is not. Extreme fundamentalists draw the line way down at the bottom of the list, making all doctrines above it equally necessary. Moderates draw the line somewhere up in the middle of the list. Liberals draw the line way up at the top, not caring if the bible is inerrant or if Jesus existed historically, but holding on to the existence of God, however he or she is defined, maintaining the general usefulness of religion, and valuing rituals to give structure or meaning to life.
     
    As I traveled across the spectrum, I kept drawing my line higher and higher. I read some liberal and neo-conservative theologians, such as Tillich and Bultmann. These authors, though perhaps flawed in this or that area, appeared to be intelligent and caring human beings who were using their minds and doing their best to come to an understanding of truth. They were not evil servants of Satan attempting to distract believers from the literal truth of the bible. I came to respect these thinkers and even to admire some of their views, without necessarily embracing the whole package. After a couple more years of evolving theology, I became one of these hated liberals, in my own mind, though few people suspected it. God did not spit me out of his mouth.
     
    Interestingly, during this waning of faith, I could still “talk with God.” I prayed and spoke in tongues and it felt the same as always. I was not an atheist yet, but since I was doubting everything else, I began to wonder if I should question my own inner experience. After all, followers of other religions report mystical and spiritual trances, so maybe I should not trust my own subjective emotions. Maybe