My post yesterday, about the Jehovah's witnesses, started me thinking about how I got where I am.

The strange thing about the Jehovah's Witnesses post is that the territory was not all that unfamiliar to me.

Sure, I have no idea why it's important to them to distinguish between a cross and a stake, but as far as the big picture goes, their worldview isn't so different from the fundamentalism I grew up with.

So how did I get from there to here? What moves a fundamentalist to become secular over the years?

There are many answers to that question, but I think the key answer is a sense of responsibility. Somewhere along the line, perhaps by degrees, I realized that, where I thought I was being carried, I was actually walking.

It's sort of the opposite of that old "footprints in the sand" thing.

I realized that the idea of believing a fact—any fact—on "faith" was simply nonsense.

I don't mean that it's a stupid thing to do—I mean that it's an impossible thing to do.

I've touched on this idea before. In a religious context, belief really means abdicating any responsibility for what you believe. I "surrender", I "take the leap of faith", and agree to act as though I know something that I—or anyone—could not possibly know.

The problem with this is that it can't be done. No matter how often, or how forcefully I tell myself that I am not responsible to use ordinary common sense and my best intelligence and reason to determine what to believe, I still am responsible. I can't escape that fact.

In the end, I choose my beliefs—my world-view—and I must take responsibility for that. I can't lay that responsibility on someone else, whether it's the Pope or the Bible or the local pastor. I can choose to ignore my responsibility—or even deny it—but I can't, in the end, escape it. It just is.

That realization—that I am responsible whether I like it or not—led eventually to others. I could no longer just close my eyes and trust the tradition or the pastor or the bible.

A great many things that I had always taken for granted were no longer obvious.

I found myself on scarier, but much more honest, ground.