Dan Barker: "At least with atheists you know here they stand. Attempting to learn what a liberal Christian believes is like trying to nail jello to a tree. To my amusement I had become one of those liberals."
In November (1989) I accepted an invitation to preach in Mexicali, a Mexican city on the California border. I like that town. Even though I no longer believed what I was preaching, I still enjoyed the travel and the many friends I had south of the border. The night after the service in an adobe mission in the Mexican valley south of town, I went to bed on a cot in the Sunday School room that doubled as a guest room for visiting preachers. I didn't sleep much that night. I remember staring up at the ceiling as if I were gazing right up into outer space, contemplating my place in the universe. It was at that moment that I experienced the startling reality that I was alone. Completely and utterly alone. There is no supernatural realm, no God, no Devil, no demons, no angels helping me from the other side. There is just nature, and I was part of nature, and that is all there is. It was simultaneously a frightening and liberating experience. Maybe first-time skydivers or space-walkers have a similar sensation. I just knew that everything had come to rest, that the struggle was over, that I had truly shed the cocoon, or snakeskin, and I was for the first time in my life that "new creature" of which the bible so ignorantly speaks. I had at last graduated from the childish need to look outside myself to decide who I was as a person. This was no mystical experience, but it was refreshing. I suppose it would be a similar exhilaration to learn that the charges against me had been dropped for a crime of which I had been falsely accused. I was free to put the matter aside and get on with my life.
