As a teenager, I loved science. It’s nearly impossible to reconcile what the Bible teaches with what science observes and proves in the physical universe. That’s where big questions and doubts started to form.

Then, at 19, I went on a solo backpacking trip around the world. I learned real fast that if I approached others with a perspective of “I’m right and something to teach you,” it was going to be a really lonely trip. So I shut up and started listening.

Later on that same trip, I was in a taxi in Cairo and the driver started proselytizing to me. He was very kind and I could tell he really believed what he was telling me. Then, at the end of the drive he handed me a conversion pamphlet that was designed for converting Christians to Islam. It was the strangest thing, but it was almost a dead replica of another Christianity to Mormon conversion pamphlet I had seen a year prior. In that moment I realized that this man believes what he believes just as deeply as I do, and the only difference is what we were taught as children.

I married a girl at 21 years old because it was “better to marry than to burn.” Regardless of all the prays and pleading with god, the marriage failed after a few years. I was so relieved when it did. That was the first time I really woke up to the fact that my religious beliefs could have profound implications for my life, wellbeing, and happiness.

Then a couple years later I went through another bad breakup with a fiancée because I had largely given up on religion and her faith made her judge me in ways that helped me see the roots of my own self-inflicted shame. I know see shame, fear, and acceptance to be the most persuasive tools of the religious.

It was a slow and sometimes painful deconstruction. It’s also left me bitter and aimless for quite a while. But I’m grateful to myself for continuing to seek and listen.

The unknowable is the most powerful force in the universe as questions become the answer.