front matter

I am an atheist, or perhaps an agnostic, living (mostly) closeted within the church.  Now before you judge me or say you've heard that one before, hear me out. 

I grew up in a fairly nondescript evangelical church.  We didn't speak in tongues.  I wore jeans and cheesy print shirts to church.  We had a cool band that played up to date worship songs.  I connected with the youth pastor on a philosophical level, but not so much with the other youth most of the time.  I wondered why everyone didn't sell everything and give the money to the poor, why we did anything other than street evangelism to keep as many people from going to hell as we could.  I imagined Jesus looking at me sadly me while I masturbated.  I prayed long prayers with lots of "just's" in the school Bible study.  I kissed dating goodbye but had entirely too serious emotional relationships with girls from said Bible study.  Blah blah blah.  

Right about here in the story, I either become the guy in church with the goatee and cool glasses (or whatever) and the Rob Bell book urging everyone to be a little more radical, or I become disillusioned with God and/or the church and leave.  Well, two things actually happened.  First, I found an answer to my big question with Christianity that I alluded to above – how do we reconcile living the fairly normal lives that almost everyone in the church lives with the apparent metaphysical reality of an eternal hell?  Is everyone other than traveling evangelists and missionaries just lazy, lukewarm Christians?  I’ll try to explain this question better and an answer I found to it that deeply impacted my thinking in future posts.  Secondly, it occurred to me that there is very little evidence of God in the world that I observe as well as reasonable materialist explanations for the evidence of God that is present. These leave me in a place where I find Christianity meaningful and useful without necessarily believing in the core reality, a place I feel is fairly unique and possibly worth sharing with others.  

I’m trying to preface something I don’t know I can preface, something that makes sense in my head and hopefully will eventually make sense on a page but may be a little difficult to understand from somewhere other than my immediate perspective.  Ultimately, my goal in this (other than just expressing my thoughts) is to help reconcile, not Christianity and atheism, but rather Christians and atheists.  Hopefully this goal works itself out through the course of this blog.  

I'm very interested in feedback on my thoughts and genuine questions, although the subject matter lends itself easily to conflict, so let's all try to be respectful.