Graceful Atheist Podcast

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Thomas. Thomas is a Missionary Kid. He was very close to his mother who passed away in her 40s when he was in middle school. Thomas went through real depression for years after losing his mother and losing his faith. We discuss the hardships of grieving a loved one without comforting beliefs. He went through bouts of...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Brette. Brette was so serious about her Christianity in junior high her goal was martyrdom. In her young adulthood, she followed her pastor's advice and attended Master's Commission, similar to a discipleship training program. Her experience there was nothing short of psychological torture. Her faith began br...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Arline. Arline became a Christian in early adulthood. She went to a Christian college where she met her now-husband. Her faith tradition was a severe version of Calvinism. She taught complementarianism. The roles allowed for women and complementarianism were not a good fit for Arline's inquisitive personality. He...

Janice Selbie on the Conference on Religious Trauma (CORT) The Conference on Religious Trauma (#CORT) online May 11 to 16, 2021 Links Conference on Religious Trauma https://pheedloop.com/CORT/site/home/ Twitter https://twitter.com/cometocort Face Book https://www.facebook.com/ConferenceOnReligiousTrauma Godless Moms Podcast https://www.godlessmom.com/podcast Friends of the podcast presenting at CO...

My guest this week is Michael Marvosh. Michael is the podcast host of Dead Man's Forest and is working on his book Reality Knows the Truth: The Art and Artifice of Being Human . Michael and I discuss what it means to be human and the human experience of spirituality. Michael tells us his deconversion story that he no longer sees as deconversion. He describes his rediscovery of a rational spiri...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Sarah. Sarah says she may have one of the "longest deconstruction stories. She grew up in a fundamentalist Baptist church in an area where there were not that many Baptist churches. So she felt different from an early age. She was constantly attempting to live in the "will of God" but struggled to determi...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Carly. Carly shares her story with a great deal of vulnerability and emotion. Carly was a Christian Scientist. While studying philosophy and the Bible Carly was introduced to Christian Science. She was impressed with its logical arguments and internal consistency. Carly was more evangelistic than the church she atten...

This week's show is a  Deconversion not so Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Rachael Parsons Svendsen. Rachael is a Licensed Marriage and Family Counselor at RCPS Therapy . Rachael became a Christian at three years old. She went to Biola University and studied philosophy. Later in life, she experienced the effects of Religious Trauma: just setting foot in a Church she would break down...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is G.A.P. editor, Mike T. Mike grew up in the South and went to a Catholic church. Everyone in the South went to one church or another and this was just in the background for Mike. After a charismatic Evangelical friend encouraged him he began to explore charismatic churches. The big draw was the opportunity to play mus...

My guest this week is Ian Redfearn. Ian deconverted over 12 years ago. Since then he has continued to obsess over his deconversion. He is still asking the why? and how? questions. Ian is concerned with the deep questions of life and continuing to find ways to make meaning. Ian has experienced the full force of the chaotic world we live in. His 24-year-old son has Cystic Fibrosis which is particula...

My guest this week is Leah Helbling. Leah is the host of the Women Beyond Faith podcast and an incredibly important voice in the secular community. Leah has a long history of secular community building. Post-deconversion she started a chapter of Women Beyond Belief. She now is a team leader of Bart Campolo 's Cincinnati Caravan . "Leah is often referred to as 'The Great Connector '...

My guest this week is Brian Blais, professor at Bryant University and IBNS, Brown University. He is the author of A Measure of Faith – Probability in Religious Thought and Statistical Inference For Everyone . Brian is an expert in Bayes' Theorem and how it applies to philosophy, theology, and apologetics. In this episode, I take the restraints off myself and express the reasons why I think apo...

CG grew up in strict religious home in Nigeria, where everything was banned except Christian media. His family was heavily influenced by the Pentecostal Word-Of- Faith/Prosperity movement. CG attended a tyrannical, authoritarian, and punitive college in Nigeria. CG, later on, moved to London, UK. In London, he saw that the world was bigger than the Christian bubble that he had been raised in his w...

My guest this week is Troy Moore-Heart. Troy grew up in an Evangelical family in Texas and described his childhood self as a "true-believing born-again Christian" who was baptized by his father at 6 in his grandmother's church. Troy experienced religious trauma, the natural childhood fears given the purported reality of a spiritual realm all around him. Later in life, when he acknowled...

My guest this week is Meir-Simchah. Meir-Simchah Panzer lives in Jerusalem with his wife and their four children. He co-hosts the podcasts  Two Christians And A Jew , with Frank M. Taylor and Dr. Jennifer Brown Jones, where the team dives into how Christians and Jews read the Hebrew Scriptures differently and what difference it makes for our lives, and the  Artifact Podcast with Nachliel Selavan w...

My returning guest this week is Alice Greczyn . Alice has written a new memoir called Wayward: Spiritual Warfare & Sexual Purity . In it, Alice tells the harrowing story of growing up in an Evangelical family that attempted to live by faith. They moved from place to place believing the "Lord would provide." Alice describes it as being "homeless." Alice came of age under the opp...

My guest this week is Logan Thomas who blogs at Beyond Belief . Logan interned at St. Andrews, a famous church in the UK. He went on to Bible college and eventually perused a Master's degree in theology where he studied biblical studies, biblical languages, history and textual criticism where he began to question. After discovering his sexuality, Logan came out during his internship at St. And...

My guest this week is Erin. Erin is working toward her chaplaincy and her Master's degree in Practical Theology. She describes herself as "religious, but not spiritual." Erin grew up in Northern Ireland. She was raised to respect all people. But when she was accepted by an Evangelical Presbyterian church she became in her words "the worst kind of fundamentalist." This included...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is James. James is a former missionary to Haiti who was a part of the Pentecostal and Charismatic traditions. James took his Christianity very seriously and was sensitive to God speaking in his life. Through a series of realizations and life difficulties, James began to doubt what he had been taught about God matched re...

My guest this week is Jon Steingard, the lead singer and guitarist for Hawk Nelson . In late spring of 2020, Jon posted a gut-wrenching confession on Instagram that he no longer believed in God . He is one of the more prominent recent high profile deconverts. Jon risked more than most by publicly acknowledging his lack of faith as his career was tied to the Christian music world. This confession a...

My guest this week is my wife, Michelle. Though I have deconverted from Christianity, Michelle is very much a dedicated Christian. We still love each other and we are making it work in an "unequally yoked" relationship. We have an honest conversation about how we got to now and how we go forward in the future. Michelle does work that is social work adjacent. She is a better practicing huma...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Colin. Colin absorbed his mother's Evangelical Christianity. He has mostly good memories of the people in church. He bounced from his mother's to his father's families never quite fitting in. He hung on to his Christianity long after he recognized it no longer brought him "positive results" out of...

My guest this week is Suandria Hall. Suandria is a trauma informed counselor specializing in faith transitions. Her practice, My Choice My Power , is online and she offers mental health counseling to residents in Colorado and life coaching sessions online, by phone, and email for anyone. Suandria tells her story of being groomed for ministry in a very Charismatic community with rigorous honesty. I...

My guest this week is Randal Rauser. Randal is, in his own words, "a systematic and analytic theologian of evangelical persuasion." He is a professor of systematic theology, apologetics, and worldview at Taylor Seminary. Randal has written a number of books on apologetics and atheism. I first became aware of Randal's work around 2017 when I read " Is The Atheist My Neighbor ."...

This week's show is a  Deconversion Anonymous  episode. My guest this week is Jimmy. As early as the beginning of 2020 Jimmy was still in the closet trying to determine how he would come out as an atheist and humanist. By mid February he had told his family and was bracing for his church to find out. Jimmy was a serious and dedicated Christian drawn to Calvinism by family and the intellectual...