Christian Athiesm Guy, London Copyfighters’ Drunken Brunch and Talking Shop, Speakers’ Corner, Hyde Park, London

Flickr photo taken by gruntzooki (Cory Doctorow!). Shared under a Creative Commons license that permits redistribution and derivative works with attribution.

This post is dedicated to all you church-going unbelievers out there. You know who you are. I salute you.

Some of you are relative newcomers to the life of uncertainty and are trying to figure out what it means for you. Maybe you’re only atheist on some days, but fall back on faith on others. Perhaps you are feeling black despair or secret freedom or are cycling between the two. Maybe you are scared to tell your partner, parents, children, friends for fear of rejection, alienation, or simple misunderstanding.

Some of you are deeply embedded in the faith communities you grew up in and that define your families. Perhaps you find this social environment comforting, frustrating, or some combination of the two. Maybe you feel that even without belief, your religious culture defines who you are and how you relate to the rest of the world.

Some of you may be more or less open about your skepticism, but have worked out with your spouse to raise the children within a particular religious tradition. Maybe you have a partner or child who is deeply attracted to or involved in a religion, and you want to be supportive of their choices (even if you don’t agree with them).

You may feel trapped and suffocated by your religion. Or you may feel a deep sense of belonging and affirmation.

I empathize, because I’ve been there. I am there. I have mixed Shinto, Buddhist and Christian cultural background that I treasure (and sometimes criticize). I joined, married, and had children in the Mormon Church (the greater institution, not a specific building, in case you were wondering), but spent more time in it as an unbeliever than I did as a believer. My transition from belief to unbelief was not a sudden or even gradual, but a gut-wrenching, years-long roller coaster ride. I kept my doubts silent for a long time because I was afraid that the revelation would crush Jana–which it did, for a painful while.

When we made the decision as a family to leave the LDS Church, we began attending the local meeting of the Religious Society of Friends–one of the least dogmatic and hierarchical, most open and affirming spiritual communities you can find. It’s a choice that works for our family. I can enjoy many of the communal fruits that are some of religion’s great strengths without compromising my integrity as an atheist (most of the Quakers I am close to are atheists, agnostics, or people who don’t think the God question is relevant to them).

Atheism is much, much more than an intellectual exercise for me, and I think that skeptics do a disservice when they make blanket condemnations of religion. There is a human element that muddies otherwise clean arguments of God or no God, religion is bad or religion is good. We live complicated lives embedded in webs of complex relationships in a messy world, and Mind on Fire has always been as much about our personal stories as it is about impersonal, rational argument.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge all of you freethinkers out there who are embedded in religion, whether by choice or circumstance or something in between. I acknowledge and affirm your journey. I’m glad that we are fellow-travelers.