Faithless: step one

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"You can't put your faith in anything man says."

During my first summer as a college student, I took a Cultural Geography class. This class, marks the point at which I started out on my journey away from God, the Church, Christianity, and overall religion. Most specifically, it was the discussion of the Dome of the Rock that really set it all in motion.

This rock is seen by both Judaism and Islam as a sacred location. For the Jews, it is this location that the Holy of Holies of the Jewish Temple supposedly rested. For Muslims, it is from this location that Mohammed traveled upward into Heaven on his Night Journey. In this moment of the class lecture, I found myself dumbstruck. It baffled me, for whatever reason, that these two different religions could share the same sacred location. Suddenly I thought, maybe they worship the same God. Maybe there isn't more than one God, maybe he's the same God to everyone.

Though I still sometimes entertain this theory, more important to this piece, it was the fact that I was expanding my thoughts on God that really fueled my journey away from it all. It wasn't until I let go of my very black and white stance on things. It wasn't until I had entertained other ideas about God and religion, that I was able to further let go of the shackles of Christian doctrine.

It was within moments of this class lecture that I allowed my faith to slip between the cracks of questions and explorations of what else there is to the idea of 'spirituality' and 'religion'. I remember the building, room, and even the seat I sat in on my University campus. This moment was pivotal to the development of my beliefs. I don't think many devout religious people could claim to know the very freeing, open feeling that came with this allowance of my faith to slip away. The logical side of me had suddenly blossomed and I was quite literally a new person in many aspects of my personal thought processes. Many ways of thinking which I had never given credence to before were officially valid options of exploration. It was very much like I had the whole world ahead of me to learn about and discover.

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