Believing Again – A Testimony of Unbelief

When I was eighteen, I was preparing to get baptised, and part of the service included me sharing my testimony. The testimony of how I became a Christian, how God had changed my life, and why I was choosing to get baptised. The purpose of this was partly evangelistic, to share what had transformed my life in the hope it might lead to a similar transformation in somebody else. It was also really helpful for me as a self-reflection, to enable me to work out for myself exactly why I was making this decision, and to give me a written record to look back at in the future. I’ve blogged a lot recently about the ways my faith has changed and deconstructed. But I still get a lot of people asking me what happened. What caused my deconstruction, and the changes in my faith and beliefs? This post is an attempt to answer that question, a ‘Testimony of Unbelief’ if you like.

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Feeling Empty

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post. I’d meant to blog regularly about my journey doing atheism for lent, but I’ve found it extremely difficult to put into words what’s been going on. The readings have been extremely interesting. Honestly I’ve found a lot of them to be extremely difficult to read and get my head around, but perhaps that’s just because I’m not used to reading philosophy. I’m really looking forward to having some more time to read them again once the course is finished and understand them even more.

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Loosening My Grip

I love travelling, as I write this I’m sitting in ‘Jardin Majorelle’, Marrakech. I’ve spent the last three days travelling through the Atlas Mountains to the Sahara Desert. In the mountains we saw the snow and threw some snowballs, before travelling to some traditional Berber villages and drinking copious amounts of tea. We then travelled to the desert (frequently stopping along the bumpy roads for cigarette breaks, chicken tagine and more tea), took a camel two hour camel ride from Merzouga into the Sahara and settled to camp for the night before heading back to Marrakech the next morning.

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Christmas

If you hadn’t noticed it’s that time of year again. The trees are up, decorations are everywhere and all over the world people are buying presents for their loved ones. In amongst the parties, food and festivities, there’s a story that we like to tell. Whether we are religious or not, whether the story is the centre of everything we believe or just a fairytale, we tell the story of the birth of a child some two thousand years ago. The child who would grow up to become one of the most famous figures in history, a rabbi named Jesus, who came to bring hope to the world.

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God’s Graffiti

One of my new favourite places to go in London right now is Leake Street. If you have never heard of it, it is a tunnel that runs underneath Waterloo Station, and is one of the few places in London where graffiti is legal. In 2008, Banksy used this tunnel to, in his words, “transform a dark forgotten filth pit into an oasis of beautiful art”. Since then, dozens of amateur and established artists meet there every day, to create new stories and adventures in a dark tunnel underneath the busiest train station in the UK…

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Sex Shops and Christian Acronyms

I recently travelled to San Francisco. One afternoon, we were shopping around Union Square. There are hundreds of shops there, from Apple to Levis, all the way to vintage book stores and eight floors of Macy’s. Just as the sun was setting and we had finished our burritos from Chipotle, I found myself in a shop unlike any I’d been to in my whole life. It was a little store called Good Vibrations and, from the outside, looked like most other shops, but the inside was a whole other story – it was a sex shop.

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The Most Important Meal in History

Meals are important. Putting aside the fact that our bodies need for to function, we place a lot of importance in eating together. From Christmas Dinner to that first date, or the traditional Sunday Roast with the family to the obligatory trip to McDonalds after a night out, meals mean something. When we gather together and food is involved we make great memories, and usually post those memories all over Instagram. But no meal in history is more momentous and significant to our lives than one which was eaten about 2000 years ago by Jesus Christ and his friends on the eve of his death…

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Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned

In every culture or society, we have a concept of right and wrong. It is something that is fundamental to our understanding of the world. We know that helping an old lady to cross the road is morally right, and stealing an old lady’s handbag is morally wrong. Whatever your background, religion or ethnicity, we know that there is some kind of standard that we should be living by…

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Come to me

The past few months have been tough. I’ve felt apathetic, angry and far away from the faith I grew up with. I’ve been doing more and more for God than ever, helping to lead a connect group, worked for a church, seen amazing answers to prayer and had some great friends around me. Yet it feels like the fire has gone out, I’ve got more questions and doubts than ever and I feel like my life has been flipped upside down and crashed to the floor like the last time I attempted to flip a pancake…

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