Rather, the feared fate I am speaking of now is the loss of a basis for our values.

I never thought of it this way, but yes that is the thing that held me in Christianity.

In college I was part of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist movement of the seventies. This group consisted of many of the largest churches in America at the time, driven solely by intense “soul-winning” in which we went door to door getting people to repeat a prayer and thus become one of the born-again insiders. By the time I graduated I realized I had been duped, but I had nothing to put in its place. I knew that I had some purpose in life when I was “soul-winning” but now I lost my purpose. Apathy set in. And I knew that this apathy was worse than the dogmatism I had been exposed to. So I set out to piece together a more reasonable Christianity that gave me purpose and freed me from the apathy. I convinced myself that I had found something better than both dogmatism and apathy, but in the end, it could not address life’s problems. In the end, I left the faith, and only then developed a philosophy of life that gives me a real purpose to live. I tell the story at https://mindsetfree.blog/dare-to-question/how-questioning-changed-me/ .