Who’s behind this?

I was raised all the way inside it

I’m a preacher’s kid. I grew up in a small town in the middle of the country, in a church that met three and four times a week, and for the first stretch of my life it was simply the water I swam in. I didn’t question it, because there was nothing outside it to question it with. Everyone I loved was inside the same story, telling it the same way.

The questions started early

I was about sixteen when I began asking the ones that wouldn’t leave me alone. They weren’t clever. They were obvious. If the earth was six thousand years old, why did it so plainly carry billions of years of history in the rock? If a flood had once covered the whole planet, where was the evidence that should have been lying everywhere?

I asked the people who were supposed to know. What came back was “the will of God,” or “we can’t know the mind of God.” Even at sixteen I could feel that these weren’t answers. They were a door being quietly closed, and I was being asked not to notice.

The guilt was the hard part

Here is what the arguments never prepare you for. The hardest thing was never the evidence. It was the guilt. Every question felt like a betrayal: of my family, of my friends, of God himself. So for a long time I only asked them in the dark, to myself, and said nothing out loud. I stayed quiet for years, in no small part to protect the people I love, and that silence carries its own weight.

It took me most of my life to say it plainly

It took me until my late twenties to admit, without flinching, that I didn’t believe there was a higher power. It took most of the twenty years since to work out what I actually think, which is this: there is no good evidence for any god, and the idea that a magical being is watching over us may be the most extraordinary claim our species has ever agreed to carry on faith alone.

Why this exists, and who it’s for

I built this for two people. One is the teenager lying awake at two in the morning with a question they’ve been taught to be afraid of. The other is the adult who has carried that same question quietly for thirty years and is only now letting themselves look at it. I was both of those people, decades apart.

If you were raised the way I was, you were taught that people without faith are lost at best and evil at worst, something close to devil-worshippers. That teaching is one of the church’s oldest and most effective locks, and it is a lie. I want to show you, calmly and with the receipts, that it isn’t true, and that neither is a great deal of what you were handed alongside it.

I’m not here to take anything from you. I’m here to tell you that you’re allowed to look, that the looking was never the sin, and that the evidence has been sitting on the table the whole time. Read it for yourself. Then decide for yourself. That is the one thing I was never quite allowed to do, and it is the whole reason this site is here.