I became an atheist in 2011 while writing my first novel, Alex.  I went through the “angry atheist” phase, wherein I realized precisely how much of my life I wasted believing bullshit and how many opportunities I had passed on because I feared they were “sinful.”  For awhile, I was having a new revelation about how contorted my religious life had been on a near-weekly basis.  I remembered destroying my D&D books because they were evil. I remembered seeing a paper cutter at school and fighting the urge to cut my hand off (because I had masturbated with it, and of course, if your hand offends you, you should cut it off).  I remembered believing for several years that I was demon-possessed because there was “lust” in my heart (in the heart of a normal 16-year-old?  Say it ain’t so!).

The hardest part, though, has been realizing the lost opportunities.  Coming to the realization that returning some of the advances I had gotten from girls while growing up would not have damned my soul to hell, for example, or that enjoying anything that wasn’t primarily concerned with the worship of Jesus was okay.

If you didn’t have this experience and can’t really comprehend it, just chew on that last phrase for a second.  Any game, any book or movie, literally any form of entertainment that didn’t have Jesus in it was impossible for me to fully enjoy.  I felt guilty and ashamed, on some level, the entire time I experienced it, because I wasn’t giving sufficient glory to God.

The breaking moment for me—the instant I decided to admit I didn’t believe in gods any more—was triggered by my children.  After that, my love for them and my desire to spare them the hell I went through as a child has fueled a lot of my decisions on what to teach them and how to interact with them.  I feel very protective of them, and I don’t want them to experience the things I did.  But as is often the case with kids, they surprise me.

In trying to spare them from harm, I find them healing me in the process.

I love music.  It is a secret language that speaks in emotion, a unique expression of the human soul that has the power to transcend culture and experience.  So deep is its power to communicate that we included it—along with speech samples, mathematics demonstrations, and the sound of a human baby’s cry—as proof of our intelligence to prospective alien life.

To whatever degree an atheist can consider something sacred, surely this qualifies.

Good music can create a sense of euphoria or melancholy; it can trigger the imagination; it can color your mood for an entire day or week.  I listen to something catchy in the morning in lieu of drinking coffee—I call it “aural caffeine”—and whenever I have a long drive I relish the opportunity to let my inner 8-year-old run wild in the back of my head to whatever music will stimulate him the most.  Music is one of the absolute greatest things about my life, a drug without peer.

So it should be no shock that Christianity nearly ruined it for me.

Dancing was fine, but only if done at church to church hymns.  Singing was fine, but only if done to worship or spread the word of God. You weren’t allowed to love music. You were allowed to love God, and use music as a tool to that end and only that end.

Understand, it was a zero-sum game.  A given activity was either glorifying God or insulting him.  There was no neutral.  You didn’t have to be rapping along with Dr. Dre about bitches and hos—you could merely be singing Madonna’s Material Girl and it was as good as blasphemy.  (Like a Virgin was right out.)  I skirted this restriction by seeking out the closest thing I could find to subversive Christian music—I was such a rebel.  (In fairness to Steve Taylor, I actually still enjoy a lot of his music.  Apparently he got a new band together in 2013, and the video for the kickstarter was pretty funny—he’s still a talented guy.)

Can’t you just feel the rebelliousness?

One of the clearest examples of this dichotomy was the raising of hands.  I was taught that you raised your hands to give worship.  What you were worshiping was the only open question.  It was a-okay (and even expected; indeed, nearly mandatory) to raise one’s hands at church while singing worship songs.  Your intent was clear, there: you were giving praise unto God.  To raise your hands pretty much anywhere else, at any time, to any piece of music, was essentially worshiping the devil.

I remember going to a Def Leppard concert (I know, I know, I heard some of the band members were Christian so that made it okay), seeing the audience with their hands up, and being utterly appalled.  I was surrounded by people that were either ignorant of what they were doing, or worse, willfully offering praise to either the band or the devil.  There was no possibility that they were simply exulting in the music.  Like I mentioned in an older post about the movie Woodlawn, the Christian mindset I was raised in was that non-Christians couldn’t possibly be making their own decisions for their own, valid reasons, and that mindset was the only one I had.

Are they worshiping God? Or worshiping the devil? No other options.

I never felt the urge to raise my hands while listening to secular music, and I never wanted to raise my hands while listening to Christian music, because it felt conspicuous.  Any time I listened to music, there was a section of my mind completely devoted to managing what my body did during the experience.  As you can probably imagine, I was a great dancer and really comfortable at parties.  (Yes, that was sarcasm.)

This automatic self-monitoring didn’t stop when I became an atheist. Weirdly, it intensified in some ways. After cutting faith out of my life, I started to feel the urge sometimes to raise my hands to music—something that had never happened to me before, in or outside of church. I stifled it, because it was a leftover product of my religion. Some weird template that said I had to lift my hands while listening to music, that there was no other way to properly enjoy it. It made me severely uncomfortable.

At the same time I tried to make a point of playing music around my children, especially when we were in the car. Different styles, different genres. I wanted to foster a love of it in them, the pure love that I was never allowed as a kid, the love of music for music’s sake.

Flash forward to 2014 or so. My daughter Rydia was 6 years old. We were in the grocery store parking lot, with Florence and the Machine on the iPod. The song was Shake It Out. Only as I write this do I realize how apropos the song itself was for the moment. It has elements of a hymnal. The lyrics are about overcoming the chains of the past. Florence’s voice is beautiful and fierce, filled with longing.

If you haven’t listened to this woman’s music, do yourself a favor and click.

I loved watching and hearing my daughter sing to music like this, to see it move her like it moved me. But that day she surprised me. Around the three minute mark, Florence launches into this held note—not an ostentatious, look-at-how-long-I-can-hold-this-note kind of thing, but a soaring, gorgeous cry that interweaves beautifully with the rest of the music and elevates all of it. Listening to it feels like flying. It is my favorite part of the song, possibly my favorite fifteen seconds of Florence and the Machine’s entire library.

And when it came on, my daughter closed her eyes and raised her hands.

Not because anyone told her to. Not because she had something to prove or something to hide. Not for any reason at all other than the sheer joy of the music, the spiritual connection to another human being’s art.

It brought me to tears. It’s bringing me to tears writing about it now.

In that instant I realized that Christianity had never owned the concept of raising one’s hands to music. It had co-opted that, just like it had co-opted every piece of entertainment I had ever enjoyed, just like it had co-opted my own private thoughts when I’d found a girl pretty in high school. I could raise my hands if I felt moved to. God had nothing to do with it.

My 6-year-old girl had shown me how.

When I hear that Apple is worth one trillion dollars it makes me want to scream. That is the kind of money that could buy everyone an electric vehicle and convert whole swaths of the world to green energy. It is the kind of money that could solve global poverty if applied correctly. But we have a system that instead silos that money for the sole purpose of making more money. So it sits there replicating itself while the world burns and people starve. That’s a stupid system.

[Please note what I did not say, namely, “We should take their money and use it to fix the world.” I did not say those words.)

I think I just figured out why it can be so incredibly hard to start writing in the morning.

See, when I’m on a roll or on a tangible deadline, I can get into a rhythm. Wake up and write. Write whenever I have the chance. Push forward.

But most days I don’t have that. And when I’m starting a new piece, it’s particularly hard. I sit down and stare at the screen, and my mind SCREAMS reasons at me not to start writing.

I’m thirsty. I need to get up and move to stretch my back. I have a stack of mail on my desk that needs to be dealt with. There are dirty dishes upstairs. I have something in my other business that needs immediate attention. The taxes shouldn’t wait. The car needs a carwash. I need to cancel an old subscription before I get billed another $9. It’s been too long since I updated my Facebook page. I should review my advertising dashboard; I could be bleeding money while I sit here.

It is a rapid-fire assault, a fricking machine gun of excuses. The fact that I ever start anything in the face of this onslaught is, frankly, a miracle. And it is happening today. Right this moment, in fact, I am giving in to it by writing this post instead of working on the second chapter of SHAUN (working title). I am justifying it by telling myself I’m trying to address the underlying issue, but I still feel guilty as sin.

Recently I started asking myself, “What are you afraid of?” Because clearly, I am scared witless. I can’t think of any other reason I would enter a state of mental paralysis every time I try to do this. For awhile I decided I was scared of success. I had a plan to start pushing books out a little faster, and I must have been scared of actually succeeding at that. Since that was such a stupid fear to have, I felt good about that answer. It made it theoretically easier to push past it, and maybe it worked for awhile.

That ain’t working this morning. Being scared of failure may be a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason.

“But how can you be scared of failure, Adam? You’ve written six books and a bunch of short stories. You haven’t gotten rich off them or anything, but you’ve made more than most. You’ve done this before and you can do it again.” Even that statement, even me making that statement to MYSELF, sounds like an accusation of failure.

It’s funny. Take anything you’d expect I’d be proud of in my writing career, and I can tell you the reason it doesn’t count. ALEX doesn’t count because I didn’t follow it up fast enough and REBECCA didn’t do as well. Finishing half of a million-word epic fantasy series doesn’t count because I didn’t release them fast enough and as a result they haven’t sold well, and the covers aren’t targeted to market. Getting approached about the film rights for ALEX doesn’t count because it didn’t go anywhere either time. Licensing the audio rights to ALEX doesn’t count because I got ripped off. The glowing reviews on CHILDREN OF A BROKEN SKY don’t count because there aren’t enough of them, and I still have reservations about the quality of the book (and, of course, it’s not selling enough—that particular failing is omnipresent for all the work I’ve done).

Hitting word count today doesn’t count because I didn’t hit it yesterday. Hitting my release date target for this quarter won’t count because I didn’t hit it last quarter.

I sit down and look at that blank page and my mind just SHRIEKS about what a failure I am. Not in so many words, of course; it shrouds everything in that barrage of excuses. But the cacophony is deafening. No effing wonder I have trouble getting started.

Maybe it’ll help to rip the excuses away, like I just did, and expose the quivering terror underneath. Maybe it can move to the back of my brain, instead of the forefront, and sit there gibbering quietly while I get the words down. I really want to put out two novels this year.

I just hope to god someone wants to read them.

My daughter told me existence was too big for her.

She is ten years old and is overwhelmed by the inevitability of death, the seeming futility of life, the impossible demand to achieve something so that she can outlast death. Again, she is ten. I was the same at ten — or I would have been, if I hadn’t had the security blanket of heaven.

That’s a security blanket we never let her have, because it can keep you warm, but it can strangle you too. It doesn’t just cover your body; it covers your eyes. And we wanted our little girl to have her eyes open. But with your eyes open, sometimes you see scary things, like the vastness of the universe.

When I became an atheist I struggled with these same ideas. Every now and then I still do. I think about how I’m going to die and turn to dust, and my kids are going to die and turn to dust. The world—the only place of existence I have ever known, the sum total of my experience—will die and turn to dust. It is a suffocating thought. It can kill you if you let it.

Like I so often do, I wrote a book about it to get my thoughts out. Running from it wasn’t working, so I plunged into the reality and inevitability of death, and I managed to find some meaning, if not resolution.

The other morning, when my daughter was gasping for breath as those same relentless waves buffeted her, I knew I owed her something. I had taken her blanket. I owed her something. Whatever I could find.

So I shared with her the same idea that eventually helped me get my feet. It goes like this:

Imagine a vast desert. A place of death so large it has no endings and no barriers. In it you cannot breathe. You cannot survive. There is no food or water or love. It is endless devastation.

And then, somewhere in that horrible place, imagine a little oasis. Water and cool air. Oxygen and family and hugs. A walled place, a place of safety.

Through sheer luck or cosmic providence, we are in the oasis. Right now. And dwelling on death and inevitability is choosing to leave the walls of the oasis and go into the desert, where all we can do is die. We have the power to stay in the oasis. All we have to do is exercise it.

How long will it last? What’s the point if the end is inevitable? Even asking these questions is leaving the oasis. The universe is full of unanswerable questions, and worse, answers we don’t want to hear. We can’t change those answers. But dwelling on them is ignoring the single most beautiful, precious gift the universe gave us: the existence we have at this moment.

I don’t know if it helped her. Later that day she said she had developed her own analogy—not just like mine, but maybe inspired by mine—and now she felt better.

That was enough for me.

The Facebook post is about the slaughtered children in Texas today, and a Democratic Senate candidate going on the air to demand action. Most of the responses are Likes. At least one is a laughing face.

A laughing face.

To the user who posted it, I have to say, your response makes me wonder. How broken, how monstrous, must you be to laugh right now? If it had been your child slaughtered today, would you still find this Democrat’s outrage funny?

It is a particularly brutal response to post publicly, because Facebook, presumably, added that laughing reaction as a way for people to share joy. Laughter is one of the most fundamental of shared human experiences. It can break the tension of a hard situation. It can bring enemies together. It can dispel tears and conquer grief.

To twist it this way, to turn it into a thing of scorn in a time of such deep sorrow, is a repulsive abdication of empathy.

I wonder if you could take a step back and truly examine what it is, exactly, that you find so humorous about this situation. If you could take a look in the mirror and say to yourself: “I am a person who laughs when children are slaughtered.” Is that really something you’re comfortable with? Does there come a point when you realize that perhaps your philosophy has led you astray? That it’s transformed you so thoroughly that empathy and compassion appear to be powers you’ve lost?

Or is the philosophy so ingrained, the indoctrination so complete, that no amount of bloodshed will wipe the smirk from your face?