I didn't mean to cause you pain

There are consequences for everything you do. You know that. You accept that. And yet, we are rarely prepared for the consequences of our actions. They are hard to calculate and harder to foresee.

I said in my last post that I was not fully prepared for all the consequences of coming out as an unbeliever. I knew that some who had known me would be surprised, maybe shocked. Some would be angry or disappointed. All of that happened. I was prepared for that. I foresaw all of that. 

I did not appreciate fully the extent that some would be hurt by it.

I'm not talking specifically about those who feel that I lied to them in the past when we talked about our faith. I carry some level of guilt about that myself, especially in light of the fact that I carried on teaching Bible class and speaking in meetings while I was internally questioning everything I was saying. Even then, I tried to couch what I said in a thin layer of scepticism by playing devil's advocate in any discussion, a position I found more comfortable than the 'party line'.

The reactions that have troubled me most are of those family and friends who are now worried that I have damned myself to hell. There are people I care about that have cried and told me that they fear for me. It makes no difference what *I* believe, the fact that they believe that by turning my back on God and everything I've been taught and professed, I may have talked my way out of heaven and into eternal punishment, is what causes them pain. And there's nothing I can say to heal that. These are people I love and care about, and I'm causing them pain. That's a hard place to be.

And yet, I can't do anything else. Important as it is to me that I am never the cause of anyone's pain and never a source of concern for anyone, I cannot be dishonest. To their credit, my family and friends agree. They don't want me to lie simply to make them feel better. For that, I'm thankful.

I have learned, more than anything else, that we do not live our lives in isolation. Everything you say, do, agree to, promote, share or pass on strengthens the social connections between you and those that you share your life with, however transiently. People come to rely on those connections to communicate with and relate to you. Anything you do to the foundations of those connections will have consequences for the people at the other end.

Be thoughtful about how you feed and nourish your relationships and connections to others. Take time to think about what your relationships are built on. For the people that really matter to you, make sure those connections are based on multiple foundations, because the day will come when you or they will change and something you once related to will be gone. Only relationships based on more than a single thread will survive that.

The story of my conversion

This is one of those posts that sits in your head for a long time, scratching at the door every now and then wanting to be let out for a pee. Dodgy metaphors aside, I've never sat down and given myself the time to commit this post to the virtual page. I'll give it a go.

I would say that this post might never have been written had it not been for the growing number of  conversations I've had recently where I've broken cover and spoken my mind more openly and honestly than I've ever felt comfortable with before.

So, I should get down to the title of this post (it was going to be 'Coming out', but I thought that may have set me up for accusations of baiting the trap).

I am no longer a believer. A believer in what? In most of what I was brought up to believe. In God, the Bible, the myths and stories that have shaped my life and character since I was a youngster. I am no longer a Christian.

First, in the style of all testimonies, and more for those who don't know me that well, a little background.

I was born into a Christian family. A pretty fundamentalist lot, my grandfather was one of the founders of the Baptist church my family attended for all of my childhood. I was sent to Sunday School there from the time I could stand. My father and mother were, I thought at the time, pretty strict. No TV or shopping on a Sunday. Prayers and Bible before bed. That sort of stuff (I did watch 'normal' TV during the week, so I did get my fill of The A-Team and Airwolf too). I can't remember having been taught it explicitly, but I pretty much grew up with the notion that everything was bad. Only God was good and we couldn't consider ourselves or anything we did as good or wholesome or particularly worthwhile. Getting saved was the number one priority. Once that was out of the way, getting everyone else saved became your number one priority.

Now, don't get me wrong, I had a happy childhood. I had toys. Went to school. I had friends. But church was the centre of everything. Looking back on it now, I wouldn't say my parents were hardline fundies. They certainly believed and wanted me to as well, but I can't say that they preached to me themselves. Preaching was left to the professionals. But I grew up 'knowing' that sex outside of marriage was sinful; gays were, well, sinful; drinking, smoking, swearing were .... you get the idea. God created the world. He created me. He loved me. He wanted me back but I was, you guessed it, sinful.

I was saved at age 5. Yes, I knew what I was doing. I understood what it all meant. I wasn't coerced. You may say, and probably quite rightly, that given my upbringing, the chances of me becoming a christian were pretty high. My path was probably already laid out for me (God has a plan for everyone, don't you know).

After that, I joined in and did my part. I sang the songs and learned the memory verses. I went to meetings. In later years, I taught Sunday School and even 'spoke a wee word' at the odd prayer meeting. I was involved in outreach and evangelism.

It happens to most christians. You'll live your life quite happily the way your parents brought you up, but, eventually, inevitably, the two enemies of the faith will creep in: How? and Why?. For me, these two showed up pretty early on. One thing that you're taught and is repeated often within evangelical circles is that you will have doubts. Everyone has doubts. It's natural. And in evangelical circles natural equals sinful. They are synonymous. But, none of my doubts were being addressed by any teaching I received. Nothing I read or discussed could quite scratch the itch that was building in my mind.

I won't claim to have had any original problems or issues. Just the usual stuff: the problem of pain (why do bad things happen to good people?) and the problem of good (why do people, who are all sinful, do good things?). Why and how did a good, all-powerful, all-knowing God let sin come into the world in the first place? Where *did* sin actually come from anyway? Did God create it? If so, how can he be good? If not, does that mean that there was another being capable of creation? Who would that be? Satan? But surely the Bible teaches that God created Satan and if Satan created sin then, ultimately, God created sin. (I could go on, but I'll maybe take separate posts to outline some of the issues I have with the teachings taken or interpreted from the bible). Needless to say that those questions led to much deeper questions. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the fact that God, if he existed at all, was certainly not like how he had been taught to me.

Over the years, all these questions started to form into a different view of the world, one that didn't require a god to explain goodness or pain or justice or life or happiness or sickness. But I couldn't embrace that new view of the world because of one teeny little thing that every christian child has slotted into their heads between the bedtime stories and prayers: fear.

I was scared to let go, not so much the idea of God, I had surrendered that quite early on, truth be told, but of everything else that went with it. Not certainty or assurance. I wasn't scared of hell. I was scared of what people would think. I knew I had been a sham christian for a long time. Now, everyone else would know too. To be honest, I still face that. There are still people I have known for years that I've never openly discussed this with.

I've had a couple of abortive attempts at 'coming out' over the last few years, but finally, I came to the point where it was more important to be honest than to be respected. The first person I told was my wife. I simply came out with it one evening. She, still a believer, took it rather badly. And that's when something that I never appreciated really hit me. Something that I never considered but which has made things more difficult.

You simply don't appreciate how much people associate what you say and believe with you the person. To others, what you believe is integral to who you are. I had been aware for years of the struggles that had been going on inside, but those around me knew nothing of that. I felt that I was the same person I had always been, but now I simply was admitting to something I had known for a long time. To those around me, I had become a different person. I had changed. I know people are worried about me. It doesn't matter that I don't believe they have any need to. Any reticence to post this has more to do with the feelings of others than anything in me That has been the hardest bit of coming out.

The best bit is the freedom. Freedom to be honest. To be yourself. It's the feeling of having been in a cramped, airless room and finally stepping into the fresh air. I really wouldn't trade that feeling for anything. Honesty is a liberating thing.

Since I've come out to friends, I've had, what I can only suspect, is the standard set of questions asked: "What purpose does your life have now?"; "How can you be happy?"; "You don't believe in evolution now, do you?" etc. etc. etc. I'd like to give my responses to those questions and more in later posts.

I know this post is not even close to the way it sounded in my head. I might still be tweaking it for a while yet, but I'm happy that it's done.

A week with the Devil

I've finished my first work week in the tenure of the Devil, aka, Oracle.

For most people that know me, family, friends, spouse, that means very little. They didn't know where I worked before (or what I did there) and they still don't know, even now that I'm in the pay of one of the world's largest software companies (say Number 1 to me one more time, I dare you).

And that's absolutely fine.

Really. Because of those from my social circle that are left who know who Oracle are, most of them will either pity me now or will get that right-on-the-edge-of-barfdom moment when a little smidge of sick is catapulted onto your tongue in reaction to your body having encountered something it finds repellant.

Oracle doesn't have a great name among the geeks. (and the great names it does have, it keeps to itself.)

So, I've been a little apprehensive, shall we say, about the coming of March 1st, the date that will hereafter be known as LEC - Legal Entity Combination being the impressive sounding missive applied by legal eagles to, what amounts to, consummation of an arranged marriage. The groom finally gets to lift the skirt and have his way. And she loses her name. Miss ATG became Mrs Oracle on March 1st, 2011.

So far, so ... ordinary. We've got our new email addresses, but I'm using the same StinkPad to read the mails. We have new procedures for holidays, sick leave, expenses, peeing but none of them have, as yet, had any impact on writing code, creating bugs or committing the fixes. Nothing much has changed. The sign at the door still says ATG and I still drink from my chipped ATG coffee mug.

Of course, it can't go on like that. Surely. Larry is going to decide that the Belfast crowd should be coming to work on donkey-drawn shillelaghs, singing jaunty little ditties while dancing a reel.

There is no real sense that we belong to the same company as 100 thousand other little demonettes. Looking at the org chart, I'm 7 levels of management away from the world's sixth richest person (I'm not expecting a card mind you). But it's actually a little frightening to see the reach that Oracle have in all aspects of ... everything. We are more than likely in ur payroll messn wiv ur figrs.

Let's see how this big adventure plays out. I hear the jet is free next week. That might be nice.

Something worth doing is worth doing now.

I live in Northern Ireland. I was born here. I like it. Mostly. The glens, the coast, the potatoe bread. What's not to like?

Well, there's the mindset.

I've had a few conversations lately with people where the same theme, the same old moan, keeps cropping up: why is there no innovation coming from Northern Ireland? Where are the makers? The geeks? Why are our graduates coming out of university without the knowledge they need or the drive to find it for themselves? Why aren't we investing in the future? Or more importantly, why are we creating the future?

The same answers are wearily proffered. The same fingers pointed in the same directions. It's the universities' fault. They're not keeping up with new technologies required by the market. We're not doing a good enough job of marketing ourselves to the world. We're not investing enough in the creative industries.

Yada yada yada.

All that may be true, but I humbly offer another, more fundamental reason. Faith. Or more precisely, faith that believes in an after life. Minds in Northern Ireland are still strongly influenced by the notion of a life hereafter. Paradise. Heaven. A place we need to strive for. A notion that, whether we want it to or not, informs our view of this life. I believe that in Northern Ireland we are crippled with a fundamental, implicit, pervasive view that this life is of little value, relative to the life to come.

If we hold this view, consciously or, more likely, sub-consciously, why would you invest in this life? Surely, only the things you do that affect your eternal life have any *real* worth. As the old hymn triumphantly proclaims:

"Only one life, 'twill soon be past. Only what's done for Christ will last."

The irony for me, is that this thinking leads almost inevitably to a sort of nihilism itself. The thought flows from this notion that we're really only enduring this life until we get to the next. That *real* life waits for us. We're just "passing through". This view of life on earth as a test, a waiting room, a journey to the real life beyond will stop us from valuing what's around us. Here and now doesn't matter compared to there and then.

Northern Ireland will never be an innovator until we break free from the bondage of the Presbyterian long view. This life matters, whether you believe there's another one or not. I would argue that the belief in another life will always hold you back in this one, and in every aspect of it.

Not until we learn to value the preciousness of the life we have, the only life we're likely to have, will we see any need to invest in it.