Explaining the loss of her religious faith, Michelle Syba emphasizes that her story is not just about “reason’s triumph over emotion,” but rather coming to appreciate “the kinds of emotions possible before and after faith”:
If anything, losing faith made possible not an efflorescence of rationality, but instead new kinds of emotion. Where once there was anxiety at uncertainty (am I damned?), now there is the bewildering thrill of living in the face of uncertainty. …
Now that I’m damned I’ve discovered a new capacity for wonder. I was never able to feel the right kind of awe at the thought of God creating my best friend down to her pinky toe; the scenario felt at once too grandly calculated but also trivial, scripting God as some conscientious plastic surgeon of the cosmos. Now I marvel at having met my best friend in the first place, despite our disparate backgrounds and lives. Wonder has become a riskier, more provisional business, less a preview of eternal magnificence than the fleeting, local emotion of a mayfly striving in early summer before it dies.
The Dish 