One of the factors that keeps people in a belief system is the amount of investment that goes into it. No one likes to think that they’ve wasted their time or done something wrong.

Call it an artifact of the sunk-cost fallacy. The more effort you’ve invested in a thing, the harder it is to look objectively at it. And abandoning the thing becomes unthinkable. If you can just hang in there a little longer and invest a little more, perhaps you’ll get the payoff! And if you stop now, you’ll lose all you’ve worked for.

You may recall the story of a Parisian couple who wanted to buy an condominium. They found a property owned by an elderly woman, and (as is customary) they paid her a bit every month for the right to buy the property upon her death. It looked like a good deal. She was ninety years old. What were the odds of her living to 100? But she did.

Time passed. She lived on to the astonishing age of 110. She sent Christmas cards to the couple, adding her apologies for still being alive. The elderly woman, Jeanne Calment, became the oldest living person at 122 years of age, even surviving the husband. The couple paid many times the value of the property. Talk about rotten luck!

When I first heard this story, I wondered how the couple could have gone on so long in such a rotten deal. They must have wondered whether they should pull out and abandon their investment. But the sunk-cost fallacy helps us undertand why they didn’t: the longer they went, the less likely they’d be to pull the plug. Imagine their thinking when Ms. Calment turned 100: Why get out now? She’s a hundred years old! If she’d been likely to die soon ten years ago, surely it would be even sooner now! And then at 110: Well, I’m certainly not getting out now, after paying for twenty years! And every day holds out the tantalising possibility that your investment will be rewarded.

Joseph Smith once said

A religion that does not require the sacrifice of all things never has power sufficient to produce the faith necessary unto life and salvation.

What he described is simple to understand if we consider the effect of investment in belief systems. High-commitment belief systems attract low numbers of converts because, honestly, most people don’t want to do all that stuff. But the ones who do join will be fiercely loyal, in large part (I think) to the sunk-cost fallacy. Many religious people feel their investment in faith is worth it, and I have no doubt that to them it is. But being invested in a point of view is a sure way to prevent yourself from being able to examine it clearly. And the greater the investment, the harder it is to re-evaluate the belief.

For my part, my deconversion required me to invest less in the Church emotionally. I identified strongly as a Mormon. It was part of who I was. But recently, whereas I’d always thought that allegiance to the Church was an ultimate good of itself (‘Faith of our fathers, holy faith, we will be true to thee till death’, as the hymn goes), I began to realise that I wanted my highest allegiance to be with truth. Not that I thought there was a difference between the two. I’d always easily glossed over conflicts between doctrine and facts, partly because I could think of clever ways of harmonising them, and partly because my investment in the Church allowed me to stop thinking about them a bit sooner than I should have. Blackout.

At some point, these conflicts became more troubling because I was torn between being faithful and being honest. The one idea that was most influential during this time was this: I don’t have to be afraid of knowledge because if there is a God, he doesn’t want me to believe anything that’s wrong. That phrase seemed true enough to work with. Ironically, it was this idea that allowed me to feel safe enough to notice the glaring flaws of LDS and Christian doctrine, and finally to reject theism altogether.

Now the tricky bit: not becoming attached to atheism! I realise I still need to stay open to new facts. But my understanding of science has given me better tools to evaluate them.

I was talking to a good believer the other day. “I had the worst allergies last week,” she said. “But then I got something at the health food store that really worked.”

Health food store?

“Yeah, it was these white pills. They really worked! I just put a few under my tongue every hour, and when I woke up the next morning, my nose was clear!”

“It wasn’t homeopathy, was it?” I asked.

“It might have been,” she said. “Yeah, I think it was.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I said. “I have to say, though, that homeopathy isn’t what it seems. Can I tell you my experience with it?”

“Sure.” She’s patient.

You may remember that in order for me to be deconverted from my particular brand of Christianity, three conditions had to be met:

• It became important to me that my beliefs be grounded in fact.
• It became clear to me that my beliefs were either not supported by fact, or contradicted the facts directly.
• I lost the fear of what might happen if the belief system were false.

My rejection of ‘alternative medicine’ and new age horsecrap ties into my emerging skepticism about religion, and falls under Point Number Two. Here’s the story.

In my undergrad days, I worked in the university library. I soon came down with terrible allergies — I think it must have been the dust. One older couple, seeing my distress, suggested I try some chalky white pills they used. I put two under my tongue and — amazingly — my symptoms stopped!

Magic! From then on I was a homeopathy believer. Harmless, natural, and not in the grip of Big Pharma. Ha! Take that, you money-grubbing traditional doctors! The fact that I never managed to replicate the amazing results of the first time didn’t faze me at all. I knew what I’d experienced.

From there, I got into other alternative therapists for my persistent acne. One was the Zinc Guy. He always prescribed the Zinc Drink to me and my friends, even though we all had different conditions. Hm.

Another was the Electric Acupuncturist. He liked to stick people with needles attached to big batteries. Not painful, but twitchy. He said that many of his patients only needed to see him once; they never came back, so he presumed he’d cured them.

Homeopathy, massage, and chiropractic all failed to clear up my very aggravating and embarrassing problem. The naturopaths were short on results, but had no shortage of explanations for the delay. For one thing, they claimed to heal the whole person from the inside out. Do you have any idea how long it takes to heal a whole person? Patience! And the practitioners were never wrong. If I showed any signs of improving, they took credit. If I got worse, it wasn’t that their methods were bogus. I was having a ‘healing crisis’. If I just kept at it, I’d be better in no time. This went on for years.

In desperation, I went to a real live dermatologist, who fixed everything with simple antibiotics in a matter of weeks. That was a pisser. I realised that I’d been had by an entire industry of quacks.

From there I read everything I could find debunking alternative medicine, homeopathy in particular. I found out that scientific studies (e.g. on PubMed) showed either negative results or weak positive results that weren’t replicable. I found that people (including me) are naturally clueless about issues of health and medicine because it’s so complex and multi-factorial, and our brains have problems reasoning under those conditions. We are especially susceptible to the placebo effect and anecdotal evidence.

Of course, just because I’d had a bad experience didn’t mean alt-med was a con job. That would just be trading one set of anecdotal evidence for another. What did matter was that naturopathy in general has not been able to establish its claims empirically.

“So,” I concluded to the believer, “when it came down to my own experience versus scientific evidence, I had to be a bit humble and accept that I’d been wrong. Which is hard to do, because we accept our experiences as fact. They’re what make up our lives! But our experiences don’t always mean what we think they mean.”

Now to the religious tie-in. My religion placed a heavy emphasis on having a personal spiritual experience with God, the Holy Ghost, what you may call it. And I have had many experiences I would describe as ‘spiritual’. Yet these fall under the heading of ‘feelings and experiences’. They may be enjoyable and personally meaningful, but they do not qualify as good evidence to establish the existence of a supreme entity or the truthfulness of a proposition.

People at church are hoping that if I pray, I’ll have some kind of spiritual experience and believe again. They miss the point. If that did happen, it would only prove that I could be swayed by bad evidence just like everyone else.

My run-in with alternative medicine helped me to realise that our feelings and experiences can be wrong. And if you use placebos, medicinal or religious, the consequence is that, unless you get better by pure chance, you just stay sick.

I remember the Sunday that I became an atheist. I was in church trying to sort everything out. The temple of faith was feeling creakier than usual, and the usual amount of plaster wasn’t covering the cracks. Truth be told, I actually resented having to resort to ad hoc justifications in the face of inconvenient facts. So I didn’t go to the adult classes. I went to the Primary classes for kids. I thought if I could just start from the beginning, maybe I could build again without too many contradictions.

What were my options? Maybe I could be a deist. That seemed plausible for about five seconds. You can’t be a Mormon deist.

What got me here? Partly a realisation that the claims of religion were either not possible to evaluate or just plain counterfactual, but that was only one part of the story. A religion isn’t just a set of beliefs; it’s a philosophical worldview with a built-in social network. Deciding to leave takes a bit more than just changing your mind.

My deconversion story has three elements to it, three conditions that had to exist at the same time for deconversion to take place. I suspect that these three conditions are necessary not just for me, but for anyone who is going to get out of a belief system that they are deeply committed to.

It became important to me that my beliefs be grounded in fact.

Not desire, not faith, and not wishful thinking. In short, in order for my beliefs to be worthwhile, I decided that they had to be true in a factual sense.

For most of my life, I believed that it was more important to keep believing in the Church than it was to believe the facts. I didn’t think of it that way at the time because I didn’t think there was any difference. The Church taught eternal truths, science taught earthly truths, and any discrepancies would be ironed out in the fullness of time as scientists learned more and prophets revealed more. In the meantime, I accepted Church teachings as definitive. I am somewhat ashamed to say that if I ran across a fact that contradicted a cherished belief, I kept the belief and tossed the fact. After all, facts are always up for reanalysis, aren’t they? That I never did the reanalysis didn’t seem to bother me much, but at some point it began to.

This brings me to two:

It became clear to me that my beliefs were either not supported by fact, or contradicted the facts directly.

This required education into what constitutes good evidence and good arguments. I’d learned about fallacies long ago, but had given religion a pass. A renewed interest in the scientific method and an intense skepticism were instrumental.

Still, these two facets of deconversion were not enough to convince me to break free of religious doctrine. There was an emotional component.

I lost the fear of what might happen if the belief system were false.

Beliefs have consequences, as any believer will tell you. Just expressing a belief can get you into a community of faith — or out. All my life, I was taught that an eternity of blessings was waiting for me after my death, if only I could have faith in the meantime. But if that wasn’t so, I was wasting my short life. The stakes were huge. And so for a long time I avoided looking into the abyss. It was too painful and I had so much invested in my comforting faith.

The consequences would extend to my human relationships, as well. Would people at Church say, “Well, looks like old Brother Midgley couldn’t hack the program”? Though I’m strong enough to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous calumny, it still bothered me that some would take my deconversion as a sign of weakness. And would I be able to give up the network of religious support in favour of… nothing?

But with my knowledge of defense mechanisms defeating their own usefulness, and the cognitive dissonance growing, something had to give. That day in the chapel I said to myself, “I’ll be an atheist, then.”

Something clicked. I felt a rush of fear, holding on to nothing, ground gone. Then, amazingly, the universe failed to fall apart, and I kept on living. And I have kept doing so up to now. I gave up on faith, and got a knowledge of things as they are. Or as close as I can get.

In this million-part series, I’ll be exploring aspects of my own deconversion story along the three conditions above. I’ll be looking forward to your stories as well.