Almost parallel trajectories

I spent a while on Tuesday chatting with my best friend from high school. We don’t talk very often any more, but we are still good friends. I got up the nerve to ask him a question that had been floating around in my mind for a while now – whether or not he’s still a practicing Mormon. It turns out that he’s now a self-described “militant/evangelical atheist”! I didn’t see that one coming!

I didn’t learn his whole story, but it turns out it was a little bit like mine. What I found interesting about the whole thing was that we have been friends since 1996, and we lost touch for a while somewhere in 2005, and in between then and now we’ve both turned away from our childhood religions and are now atheists. Back in high school we were both fairly committed to our different faiths, mine Lutheran, his LDS. I just found it way cool that we went through similar changes in faith while we weren’t in touch, and now it seems like we have added another layer to our friendship through a “shared” experience that wasn’t even really shared!

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