I’ve never felt grief like I felt when I realized I had lost my faith. And this grief was soon accompanied by fear. I was a Southern Baptist deacon and Sunday school teacher. All of my friends were Christians. Coming clean about my newfound atheism could cost me everything I cared about. So I pretended to be a Christian. I continued teaching Sunday school, kept serving the sacraments in our worship services, even led my older daughter to Christ — all while believing none of it and congregating online with atheists and skeptics to talk about what I really believed. It was exhausting.
But then, two years later, a miracle happened. I was in California for a conference, and God appeared to me one night while I was standing on the beach. I saw a bright light and felt God’s love emanating through the very fabric of reality. This was a bewildering moment for me, because I didn’t believe in God at all. I was so thrown off by the experience that I requested a CAT scan when I got home, thinking that maybe a brain tumor was behind my miraculous vision. My neurologist didn’t find an explanation, so I had to look elsewhere for answers.
I spent the next few years furiously studying cosmology and neuroscience to learn about what created us and why it is that humans experience what we call “God” in such powerful ways. I learned there’s a name for the kind of moment I had: a mystical experience. I also discovered that belief in God affects the human brain in profound ways. Believing in God can lower your stress levels, boost empathy and compassion, and even improve concentration, as neuroscientist Andrew Newberg (in “How God Changes Your Brain”) has noted. Along the way, I found the most amazing insight of all: I am not alone.
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