Not explicitly Christian (exclusively, at least) but I went through the belief-atheism-belief path. I came back by the same path I left: reason.

Arbitrary dogma was my reason for leaving. There are so many faiths in the world, which all frame themselves as the True Faith ordained by God, all with equal evidence. If the Muslims and the Hindus and all the other faiths are heathens misguided by Satan, but there’s no objective evidence to support Christianity over them, what makes it different? Additionally, the conception of God as a bearded man in the sky judging you for kissing members of your own sex, or eating shrimp, or not supplicating before some guy in a funny hat, just seemed petty and ridiculous behavior for the Creator of the Universe.

And it’s exceedingly obvious to those with eyes to see that basically every religion has been co-opted over the centuries by power-hungry individuals who recognized the authority available to those who secured influence in the religious hierarchy. Plenty of reason to reject the claims of such a compromised institution.

But, my rational, materialistic atheism hit a snag when confronting consciousness. I leaned heavily toward scientific objectivism, which led me ultimately to two explanations of the subjective experience of consciousness:

1. Consciousness is an emergent property of complex interconnected systems; once a system is sufficiently complex, with connected subsystems dedicated to sensation, analysis, and action, it becomes “aware” of itself and its environment.

2. Consciousness is some external phenomenological “field”, which those sufficiently complex systems develop the ability to “tap into” and channel like a radio.

I cannot conceptualize any other model which doesn’t reduce to one of those. In the first case, the universe as a whole is obviously more complex and interconnected than the human mind, and we should therefore expect the universe itself to exhibit some form of consciousness, which we may as well term “God”. In the second, this field likely permeates the universe, not unlike electromagnetism or the Higgs field. Our “tapping into” it is not unlike the concept of being imbued with the Holy Spirit.

In either case, common base religious ideas of man’s relationship to God are not wholly inaccurate explanations of these interpretations.

While these interpretations may not, in and of themselves, obviously yield a personal relationship with God through prayer and devotion and whatnot, there is another consideration.

In my philosophical wanderings, I’ve explored the concepts of magick and ritual. Psychological study has proved the human mind to be deeply associative and symbolic, and has demonstrated some part of the relationship between the conscious and subconscious aspects (the conscious being our “active” mind dealing with concepts, and the subconscious mind translating raw sensory data into those concepts).

If you’re familiar with “The Secret”, manifestation, or magick, you’re familiar with the basic principle of ritualistically aligning your subconscious with your conscious goals; when you ritualistically establish your desire for a new job, your subconscious assigns higher significance to noticing Help Wanted signs and potential job opportunities in your conversations. It’s the same mechanism which causes you to notice a specific make and model of car everywhere right after you buy one. The trick is approaching it from a position of true belief. Your subconscious can be reprogrammed to believe most things, but if you don’t actually believe it can tell ; you can’t really lie to your own mind.

Even without delving into the cosmological basis of consciousness, “God” is still a useful concept if only as a symbolic stand-in for the subconscious. Pray to God for a new job, and suddenly you’ll see opportunities all around you. Even if there is no God, at least not in a personal sense, the ritual still works.

So, cosmologically and practically, I believe. Even if I don’t ascribe to the particular dogmas of any single individual religious institution.