Beyond Belief:

Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind

My book, Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind, is a different sort of take on spiritual development. The title is of course subject to change if I actually get a publisher - as opposed to having to self-publish) but I can't see how there could be a better title than the one I came across already.

If Piaget called his stages Pre-Operational, Concrete Operational and Formal Operational, then this book is about Post-formal Operations as it applies to religious belief. If Kohlberg’s moral stages included the Pre-Conventional, the Conventional and the Post-Conventional , then this book describes the Post-Conventional stage of faith. If philosopher and theologian Paul Ricoeur described a First Naïveté *, a Critical Distance and a Second Naïveté in religious development, then Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind illustrates the post-critical stance and leads us to an understanding of that Second Naïveté.

* Naïveté is a French word with no exact equivalent in English. It means the state of being naïve.

What do an ex-Catholic, a former Mormon, a clandestine Muslim apostate and a handful of modern-day spiritual Mystics have in common?

All are “Good People” who have made a similar move “Beyond” the stage of strict “Belief” in an organized religion.

All have “Left Behind” the “Church” in which they were raised and have done the hard, sometimes painful, work of formulating a belief system that bears the owner’s signature. In each case, the reader can grasp how the move away from the traditional church demanded a higher level of personal responsibility and greater integrity than the person’s prior ready-made traditional belief system.

“Stories” used to illustrate this phenomenon vary greatly with the individual, but the resulting characteristics are always similar.

Beyond Belief: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind will be the first book to actually show what was in the hearts and minds of twelve strong and courageous people as they took bold steps toward spiritual independence.

Half of these individuals reasoned themselves out of their traditional religion and into a highly-principled form of atheism (a la Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins.) We are calling them Rationals.

The other half went a step further on the faith ladder and have developed a unitive type of faith, where differences among the religions are seen as unimportant details and the word “god” does not necessarily refer to a judgmental bearded guy in the sky, known to play favorites. We are calling them Mystics.

Some mystics use the word god as a metaphor for an Unknowable entity equally available to, and part of, us all (a la Tolle.) Others don't use the word god at all but refer instead to The Source of All Being or something like that. Other mystics do use the word God in the usual sense, are found in regular churches, and mix right in with everyone else in such a way that you would not notice the difference unless you listen really carefully. With all due respect to the Mystics in churches, BEYOND BELIEF: Stories of Good People Who Left Their Church Behind contains mainly stories of secular mystics. (Maybe my next book will be about religious mystics!)

Working off a skeleton draft provided by each contributor, the author has expanded and crafted the person’s experience, by means of interview and further cooperative correspondence, into a compellingly accurate and cohesive nonfiction narrative.

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