I've been mentally examining my former life as a christian, and one of the questions that always used to trouble me was: why am I here?

If you assume the truth of the Bible and biblical history, there seems to be very little point in us all hanging out in a fallen world waiting for a savior to come. This is especially true if you're a Calvinist and believe that people are predestined to be saved or not, but it's really true of all christians since the omniscience of god effectively castrates our "free-will."

I spent 20 years wondering (too bad it wasn't spent thinking... *facepalm*) what god wanted me to be doing, and how I could dredge up the energy to care since we were all going to die so soon anyway and then our "real life" in heaven could begin. As a child, my father used to tell me about all the possibilities of doing god's work in heaven in the most glowing terms. Judging the angels, co-rulers of the universe with Christ, daydreaming that we may have missions in other parts of the galaxy, etc.

Suffice to say, it was difficult to get excited about working a mediocre job and paying the bills with that sort of eternal fantasy to look forward to.

I'm aware that not every Christian (its autocorrect capitalizing all these words, and it's just not worth me going back to fix them) had the same focus on eternity drilled into them, but for those that did, much of the motivation for the mundane realities of life were stripped away.

In moments of real difficulty and darkness in my teenage years, just the thought that I could be in heaven instead of here was enough to inspire suicidal thoughts, except of course for the question "Does suicide preclude one from heaven?"

The purpose of life, which seems to me to be to just bloody live it and be happy with yourself and those around you, was totally removed from my Christian reality and superseded by the artificial purpose of serving god (hopefully in sci-fi level interesting and exciting ways) for eternity.

I just now (literally in the last five minutes) consciously reached this understanding of my years-long struggle with purposelessness and it's slow abatement since my de-conversion and thought I'd share.