Why are you not a Christian? It's good that you support it, along with Judaism, but why don't you follow it? What reasons make you do this?

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The ultimate, TL:DR answer to this is very simple. I was not brought up to believe. My mother did not take me or my sister to church, and I was not taken to Sunday School to study the Bible and Christianity.

Had she done this, it would not have prevented my later rejection of Christianity, or my atheist period. I would have had a very similar search for meaning and truth that I would pursue throughout my adult life.

But I would have landed squarely back in the flock when I was done, rather than still be muddling my way back. I would be able to easily translate the ideas that I have now, to Christian ideas.

Because I am somebody who always looks for an easy way, and Christianity is nowhere near easy for me right now. I spent much of the Christmas holiday examining myth through a recent Christmas Carol remake, the one with the Dreamworks-looking animation; the new Star Wars movie, and Polar Express. Myth is much easier to get into than the Bible.

You see, being able to call myself a Christian again is on my list of life goals. I have no idea if I’ll ever be able to actually pray, but for now, appreciating the beauty and symbolism and myth of Christianity while still keeping Jesus himself at arm’s length is enough for me. This slight discomfort with Jesus is, I’ve observed, quite common, Handel’s Messiah, does not say his name once across 53 movements.

Belief is and has always been a really tricky thing for me to do. Really though, it’s hard for everybody. I sought out a way to believe without actually believing in anything. My search ran the gamut of the New Age. I learned the nuts and bolts of spirituality, what it is, why it was shaped into religious forms, and how it meets the real world. I’ve built a view of the world that I believe is truly universal, back-ended by a form of logic that I had to invent in order to make sense of it.

It took all of that for me to really get religion, to appreciate it for what it is at its very core, a shared set of beliefs. Religion is the quickest and easiest way to make spirituality real, to make it real the way I made it real is to spend over a decade searching for something you may never really find.

As with all the other ways in which I’ve made my life hard before it could be made easy again, this is God’s doing. When this is all said and done, I believe I’ll be able to speak a spiritual language that all people will be able to understand. I hope to use this to add something truly useful to humanity.