Over the years I have had conversations with many religious skeptics. I’ve heard all types of expressions of doubt and unbelief. A great example of this is a letter written by a seventeen-year-old student to a friend.

“You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies, to give them their proper name, are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki … Superstition of course in every age has held the common people, but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceded to it for convenience . . . Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world: considering the discoveries that are always being made, this would be foolish . . . Whenever any new light can be got as to such matters, I will be glad to welcome it. In the meantime, I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (and already decaying) superstition.”

This letter could have been written by any number of modern people who live with a godless worldview. It is amazing how intellectually superior they believe they are to Christians. They seem to easily believe that Christianity is nothing more than myth or superstition. In their minds they could never believe such nonsense.

However, you should know that the letter written above was penned by C.S. Lewis, who upon becoming a Christian described himself as “the most dejected convert in all of England.”

Lewis truly believed he was traveling in the right direction, confident in his atheistic belief. He describes his life in an incident that occurred the first time he traveled to Oxford to begin teaching. He reports that he came out of the railway station loaded down with luggage and headed down the street in the wrong direction, away from the colleges. He kept walking, increasingly disappointed by the frowzy houses and shops he saw, until he came near to the edge of the city. Only when he saw that he was on the outskirts of town and entering the countryside did he turn around. There spread before him, “never more beautiful since, was the fabled clusters of spires and towers of Oxford.” At that point he realized he had gone the wrong way, turning his back on his true destination. In recounting this episode Lewis concludes that “this little adventure was an allegory of my whole life.”

As you consider your spiritual life, are you headed in the right direction or have you turned your back on life’s true spiritual destination?

Richard E Simmons III is the founder and Executive Director of The Center for Executive Leadership and a best-selling author.