What is this?

This, this blog/journal thing, this '10 plus years', is, first and foremost, a letter; a letter to some dear old friends of mine. People I've known for over 20 years now, which is longer than I've known, and stayed friends with, anyone (excluding family). It's a letter to try and somehow explain what the hell happened to me; what happened to my faith. I used to be a true believer. A faithful, bible-believing, bible-memorizing, evangelical Christian. Now I'm an atheist. I've always wanted to try and explain to them how that all came about. I know they weren't exactly expecting it. Hell, I wasn't expecting it. They didn't even hear it directly from me, which I was glad for at the time. (It's really, really hard to come out as an atheist to your Christian friends and family when you've been a Christian yourself, especially if you've been one for many years.) For a very brief time, I wanted to try and sit down with them and explain everything. But I quickly realized that wasn't going to happen. Not because of anything that they would say or do, but because for one, I'm not what you'd call 'good with words'. There's no way I could effectively communicate all the things I wanted to say in person over a couple hours or so. Even over several meetings of a couple of hours. Even if they didn't ask a single question and just let me spill my guts the entire time. I'm just not that good at communicating things. So then I thought that I'd write them a letter (this was about 10 years ago, before blogs and the internet are what they are today). With a letter, I could take as much time as I wanted, and even wait a month or two after it was written and go back and read it and see how I felt and make any changes I felt were necessary, and then wait some more and then read it again and maybe finally mail it out. And I've been wanting to write that letter for about 10 years now (it's really hard to get started). So maybe this will be that letter. Maybe now, ten-plus years after losing my decade-long faith, I'll finally be able to tell my good friends the things I've been wanting to tell them, and explain why I'll never again be able to believe the things I used to. Or maybe not. My plan is to write it all down, say everything I've been wanting to say, and then at some point, send them a link to this place so they can read it. I'm pretty sure I'm going to write it, but as for letting them know about it, we'll see when the time comes.

The writing- that's the other part of what this blog is all about. It's been over ten years, and I can never seem to stop thinking about it all- the questions, the doubts, all that crap. I'm pretty sure it's like that for everyone who's gone through this sort of thing. So hopefully, just writing it all down somewhere will help me get it out of my head and maybe I'll stop thinking about it so much.

I can't imagine many people will find this blog worth reading, but then again, in the early days of my loss of faith, I would have. I would have loved to read stuff like this, and in fact did- I was on some Yahoo! group for ex-Christians (I'm pretty sure it no longer exists) that really helped me a lot. It was like therapy. So that's why I link to it when I post a comment on some other blogs that I read. Maybe someone is in the same situation I was in many years ago and might get something out of it; or not, who knows?

Here's what this blog is not: it's not a place where I try and change anyone's mind about anything. I've made my peace with life and death and the universe, with Knowing and not knowing; let others make theirs as they see fit. I'm not offering up arguments to try and refute Christians or convince anyone that what I believe is the right thing to believe. I don't give two shits about all that. There's a million other places on the web that cover all that and more. As I mentioned earlier, all this really is is a letter to some friends, about me; so if you're going to spend any time at all reading this, it's best to think of it in that light. And because it's mostly a letter to some friends and I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything (not even them) comments are closed. If you really, really feel the need to contact me about something, you can email me at: myowndamnpath@... (well, I'm not going to tell you where at exactly, but I'm sure you can guess. It's pretty easy to figure out. And if you're the owner of a blog I commented on, then you obviously already know). Keep in mind everything that I mentioned above, and also that I have a low tolerance for bullshit. Another way to contact me would be to comment back on whatever comment I made on whatever blog, which is probably how you heard about this in the first place.


A couple more things...

I'm not on any sort of timetable with this thing; new posts could be very infrequent and random. I have no idea how or when this will wrap up, but when I get to the point where I feel like it's my last post, you'll know. Also, things may seem a little jumbled at times, i.e. just random thoughts being posted randomly. It's just stuff I need to get out of my head. I'll probably go back and review it all at the end and and rearrange it better, and probably even delete some stuff along the way.