The Deconversion of Anthony Part 5: Maybe one Day

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The Deconversion of Anthony Part 5:
Maybe one Day

Over the past year, I've gotten myself into quite the number of arguments and debates concerning my faith or lack thereof. Obviously these usually end with both sides feeling like they've been heard and people obviously changing their long held beliefs because of a few witty comebacks and links to Wikipedia articles!! Or at least that’s what we think will happen. More often than not it just ends up in people being more firmly entrenched in their position than before. Minds have been changed before, but I doubt many of them were changed in a public forum.

So I just stopped. Stopped giving in to the temptation to debate every single point raised in opposition to a comment or status update that touches on the religious. It’s refreshing to truly not give that much of a fuck anymore. Not to feel like you must answer  every single point.

Not giving a fuck. Now that’s a mind set many people claim to have. Although it strikes me as a bit odd that they need us to know how much they don’t give a fuck. These are usually the same people that must address their haters. As though having people that disprove of your lifestyle and choices qualify as ‘haters’ and that having them serves as a form of achievement.

Now when it comes to my life after faith, I cannot say I don’t give a fuck about the things of God. I really do care still but not as much as my early days of ‘de-conversion ‘ . Much like someone who leaves a small town to make his fortune in the big city but still reads the local press from his home town and probably visits now and then(Yes I know, this 19440’s reference is timely). I study the word now and then as if to find what it was that so enamored me at one point in my life. I listen to people in my life give great propitiation (and donation) to the Great Spirit in the sky via his earthly representatives on earth and I am baffled. Gradually my concern is fading, my memories becoming cast in a stone narrative.

Maybe in ten years I will have forgotten what it was like to feel the calling on your life; to find nothing else worth having than the clear conscience of having served your master. Of being in a community of people who believe exactly as you do.  Maybe I won’t remember what it meant to me to filter all my ideas, philosophies and opinions on issues through the good book. If God told those guys back in the days of yore that said thing is wrong, then it is really wrong and that settles it. None of your fancy arguments designed to confuse me with science will work. You may torture me, persecute me but I will never let my Jesus go.

Perhaps one day I will not care that I let some people go because I thought they were a danger to my salvation. Forget that I tried to be chaste and succeeded and therefore lost a lot of prime time. No 22 year old should be "unsexed" unless he is Isaac Newton or has a nickname for his penis. Maybe one day my own genitalia will forgive me for neglecting them for so long and then trying to catch up fast!!






Nostalgia may one day sweep up my memories of popping and locking for Jesus, of band practice and hours upon hours of fellowship trying to remain pure in this godless world and I will think that I was truly happy-which I was and that I had no doubts-I did. Maybe in these moments I will miss it. Miss the surety of purpose and clarity of life’s meaning and not care that when I say it out loud it just seems silly. Maybe one day I will come to terms with the fact that I will never go back there and that don’t make me happy or sad. It just means that season of my life  is over.

Read other pieces on the Deconversion of Anthony : Part 1|Part 2|Part 3|Part 4