November 1, 2006 was a typical evening out of town on business. I had finished my business meetings with my client in Orange County, California and headed to Barnes & Noble, the large American chain bookseller.

In most regards, that evening wasn’t too different from many others in bookstores in various cities throughout the United States, Europe, or Asia. Though quite a stretch from my humble roots and Christian fundamentalist upbringing in a small town in one of the “red states” in the vast North American Great Plains, I am an executive at a large global information technology consulting firm and my business travels take me to many places.

At the bookstore that evening, I go in, sit down, and I read. I love to read. Sometimes I just read. Often I buy one book, sometimes more. Books are heavy to carry around in the frequent business traveler’s suitcase.

Over the prior four years, I had read on numerous topics – history, linguistics, cosmology, physics, biology, biblical scholarship, apologetics, faith and reason. There are so many subjects I wish I could have studied in college, so many subjects that I simply find interesting.

But it wasn’t just a casual curiosity that was driving me at that point any more; it had become an intensely passionate pursuit of truth. I was making an effort equivalent to doing a part-time extra job in pursuit of knowing why I believed what I believed: not to answer anybody else’s questions, but to answer my own. I had read one hundred books by some of the best minds in their respective fields at a pace of three books a month over the past four years. Not once during this time did I speak to a single non-theist. Not once did I speak to a spiritual leader about my “crisis of faith.”

Though my questions had increased and my answers for what I was really seeking had diminished, I did not know what was in store for the coming hours. I walked across the parking lot as the sunset made a beautiful orange sky behind the silhouette of Southern California palms.

I went into the large bookstore and straight to the religion section. The religion bestsellers are getting more and more interesting these days. So much of the religion section of the bookstore is decreasingly devotional, decreasingly self-help, increasingly analytical, increasingly scholarly.

I pull from the bookshelf all the books on apologetics. I want to double-check some things on the canonization process. Have I overlooked something? I want to know. I want to know why. I want to know why I believe what I believe; at least for what is left of my beliefs.

Having found five or six titles on Christian apologetics, I find a comfortable, green, overstuffed chair by a knee-high table. I put the books on the table and sit down. Of the books, I have already read three of them from cover to cover. But I want to be thorough.

I take the first and head to the index, looking for a reference for canonization, early church history or something related to that. I read the chapter. There’s nothing new, nothing I had missed. I take the next book and find nothing new there either. And the third. And I’m thinking to myself, is this the best they’ve got: – Sproul. Strobel. McDowell. Boa. Schaeffer. Frame. Habermas. Evans? I find nothing to answer my deepest questions in pursuit of that noblest of values from my fundamentalist upbringing: truth.

I’m flying and flipping through the pages, deeply immersed in my own world of thought. I feel my heart quicken.

My world is interrupted.

“Are you a pastor?” the man seated at the bookstore table across from me asks.

I look up.

The man across from me is gruff and in tattered clothes. His face is weathered and his salt-and-pepper beard has several days’ growth. His eyes meet mine and I see that his cheeks are reddened. Alcohol, I think.

And I think some more. Is he off the street? Is he hanging out here for the evening in comfort and safety? I’m sure he has a story. Everybody does. His question comes to the surface in my mind. What is he asking? What is he hoping? I wonder. My heart goes out to him. I wonder, what should I say?

“No,” I reply, shaking my head. Though my heart is filled with empathy for him, it’s not as though I have the answers he might be seeking. At least, certainly not tonight.

I re-enter my lone world of thought. I go through the rest of the books in a similar fashion. And no, the answers I so desperately want to find aren’t there. And I go through key aspects of each book asking myself, exactly what are these guys providing an apology for? One chapter seems to be a support of all Abrahamic faiths. Another chapter of another book seems to be an apology for nearly all forms of Christianity. Yet another just for specifically Protestant tenets. And I’m asking myself, but how would this point exclude Mormonism? Or how would this point not support Deism as well? Or simply, what kind of circular logic is that?

After all, I had not just read the Christian authors but had also read Armstrong, Ehrman, Pagels, Hawking, Greene, Dawkins, Diamond, Pinker, de Waal, Dennett, and Harris.

I look up. My fellow customer is there picking the dirt from under his fingernails.

I go back to my own world of thought. And then it hits me. In that instant I reach the tipping point of cognitive dissonance. Where for 35 years I had faith that could move mountains, it just cannot move this mountain of evidence.

I put the books back on the bookshelf, go out to the car, and drive back to my hotel alone: alone, as I had never felt before in my life.

“What will I do?” I ask myself. There is no second voice in my mind in reply – not even the one that I might have attributed to the Holy Spirit in my previous half-lifetime.

The next day, I put in my day’s work at the client site. After work, I head to the airport.

During the flight I thumb type a message on my Blackberry to my pastor who I have known for 17 years – about me and my intellectual pursuits; about reason: about the point of skepticism which I have reached. It is a “coming out” email, drafted in haste, not completely thinking through the implications that it might have for me with my family. In flight, I can’t send it as there is no cell phone reception at 35 000 feet.

The plane lands, and rather than send the email that night, I decide to send it in the morning. I drive home and crawl into bed at around 1:00 am, after a long work- week and after one of the most emotionally and cognitively stressful experiences of my life.

“Daddy, Daddy!” my blue-eyed six-year-old son cries as he jumps into bed. It’s 6:00 am. The children are excited to see their father after nearly a week of absence on business.

I head to the kitchen, enjoying the children’s excited attacks. It brings joy to my heart. But only for a moment, because I know that for me everything is now different. No, I tell myself, not everything is different. Everything is the same. I am still me. The same me I was yesterday, and the day before, and for my life. But I know something is different, or at least will be different in the months, years and decades to come.

I don’t bother sending that email to my pastor but instead that night in my journal I write…

Too much reading,
Too much reasoning,
To accept the drivel,
Not one day more.

A moral life.
A fundie wife.
All fundie friends.
Now what's in store?

Foundation shaking,
Worldview remaking.
My heart cries out!
Damn you, Dawkins!

With mind set free,
Who will I be?
Seeker of truth!
Thank you, Dawkins.

Dean Fritzmeier accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour as a child, 24 April 1971. He is a Christian university graduate, short-term Christian missionary, long-term fundamentalist church lay leader, husband and father of four. He reached the tipping point of cognitive dissonance 1 November 2006.