Skip to main content

Living a lie

By Rachel ~

Religion was really something decided for me as a child. My grandmother had been a preacher so religion had been thoroughly ingrained in my father. My parents had met at a church camp as counselors. See where this is going? By all means I should have ended up as one of the herd. I wore the church clothes, sung the songs, read the stories, but something never felt right. I'd ask questions and never get straight answers, but even though that might have led me on this path, it's not what made me quit being a Christian.

As a child I was rather hyper. More hyper than your average kid. Eventually I was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder, which I didn't receive proper meds for until about third grade. By then the abuse had become a normal way of life. I couldn't sit still in church, so to my father I was a bad child. I'm sure you know what happens to bad children when they are the child of a fundamentalist pentecostal. I was beaten and abused after church just about every Sunday. I would try so very hard to behave and not fall asleep or be loud, but I couldn't. I started to think about how I couldn't be the perfect Christian my father wanted. I would wonder how a kind and loving god would want children abused and would make me this way. My father's scare tactics about religion might have worked if he himself had never acted hypocritical.

My father began drinking sometime around when I was six or seven. He was considered by many to be a respectable and faithful man at the church. There was not a single person that didn't like him there. He was always well liked, but yet the abuse was escalating at home. Every time I went to church it was like I was living my father's lie. Everything felt fake. The speaking in tongues, the dancing, the music. Everybody there seemed to smile all the time, but I couldn't escape the feeling that they were all suffering in silence along with me. Sure this was their life, but I saw the problems all the time. I watched screaming children carried out of church for beatings, and heard the way the so called faithful people spoke about each other when no one was watching. I had to submit to my father's wrath because it was god's will that I be punished and I believed I was a horrible person.

When I was 13 my family got their first computer and it opened a window of opportunity. I learned I wasn't alone and there were other things out there. There were so many suffering in silence like me. During that time we also weren't attending church as frequently. For awhile I had peace on sundays, but then my father decided it was time we go back. This time I fought back and tried to escape when he wanted to force me to go. I no longer believed him a man of faith or those people to be anything but hypocrites. Still I remember the day I tried to run and my father pulled the truck onto the sidewalk in front of me, blocking my path. My spirits sank and this brought on a ton of research for the truth. If I couldn't trust a church to tell me the truth, I couldn't trust any of the people I knew to determine my own morality. I spent all my time in the library those days and more and more I became curious about the occult. It was something that had interested me before, but that I had turned away from, believing it would send me to hell.

So a year later I was Wiccan. I told no one and that same year my depression and other problems caught up with me. I ended up in state custody because I finally had the courage to rat out my father for the abuse I'd endured over the years and was now considering suicide because of it. I spent a year in a mental hospital. The people were overtly religious there even though they tried to tone it down. I was not accepted because of it and was told I was not in my right mind for picking paganism. Some how they believed it was more twisted to believe in a goddess than to believe in a man that walked on water and turned water into wine. Group after group I attended had so many religious over tones that I was sick of Christianity by the time I got out of there. I was placed in a series of therapeutic foster homes and kicked out of two just for not being the right religion. I wasn't a bad kid. I'd never been arrested. I didn't do drugs and I certainly wasn't shoving my religion down anyone's throat. I kept to myself. However, because they felt I didn't fit their ideal, they tossed me out. Some people have no idea how much christians discriminate against other people that are different. I didn't hurt anybody, and yet I was cast aside at the time I needed someone the most. Just because I wasn't the right religion.

By the time I was in college I'd cast off paganism, finding it too time consuming. Religion is a commitment and I wasn't about to commit to something when I couldn't. There were monthly rituals, and you needed to buy incense and candles. I didn't have time or money for that. So I knew it was kind of disrespectful to do religion half-assed. In the end I said enough was enough. By graduation I wanted nothing to do with organized religion anymore. It did more harm than good.

These days I'm much happier as an agnostic. I don't have to shun people or judge them for doing something considered religiously immoral. My morality is pretty decent thank you. So there you have it. I've lost my religion and I'm not a criminal or more of a failure than religious people. If anything religion has been the cause of most my problems in 24 years of life. My father has since dropped his religion last I heard, cheated on my mother multiple times before obtaining a divorce, and married another woman a year after. So much for the faithful.

The moral of the story is that christianity is a breeding ground for lies and abuse because it expects impossible behavior that no one can live up to. It can hide horrendous crimes in the guise of purity. It's followers are friendly until they find out you are different, and religion won't miss you when you're gone.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

THE FRIGHTENING FACE

By David Andrew Dugle ~ O ctober. Halloween. It's time to visit the haunted house I used to live in. When I was five my dad was able to build a big modern house. Moving in before it was complete, my younger brother and I were sleeping in a large unfinished area directly under the living room. It should have been too new to be a haunted house, but now and then I would wake up in the tiny, dark hours and see the blurry image of a face, or at least what I took to be a face, glowing, faintly yellow, high up on the wall near the ceiling. I'm not kidding! Most nights it didn’t appear at all. But when it did show itself, at first I thought it was a ghost and it scared me like nothing else I’d ever seen. But the face never did anything; unmoving, it just stayed in that one spot. Turning on the lights would make it disappear, making my fears difficult to explain, so I never told anyone. My Sunday School teachers had always told me to be good because God was just behind m

The Blame Game or Shit Happens

By Webmdave ~ A relative suffering from Type 1 diabetes was recently hospitalized for an emergency amputation. The physicians hoped to halt the spread of septic gangrene seeping from an incurable foot wound. Naturally, family and friends were very concerned. His wife was especially concerned. She bemoaned, “I just don’t want this (the advanced sepsis and the resultant amputation) to be my fault.” It may be that this couple didn’t fully comprehend the seriousness of the situation. It may be that their choice of treatment was less than ideal. Perhaps their home diabetes maintenance was inconsistent. Some Christians I know might say the culprit was a lack of spiritual faith. Others would credit it all to God’s mysterious will. Surely there is someone or something to blame. Someone to whom to ascribe credit. Isn’t there? A few days after the operation, I was talking to a man who had family members who had suffered similar diabetic experiences. Some of those also suffered ea

Reasons for my disbelief

By Rebekah ~ T here are many layers to the reasons for my disbelief, most of which I haven't even touched on here... When I think of Evangelical Christianity, two concepts come to mind: intense psychological traps, and the danger of glossing over and missing a true appreciation for the one life we know that we have. I am actually agnostic when it comes to a being who set creation in motion and remains separated from us in a different realm. If there is a deistic God, then he/she doesn't particularly care if I believe in them, so I won't force belief and instead I will focus on this one life that I know I have, with the people I can see and feel. But I do have a lot of experience with the ideas of God put forth by Evangelical Christianity, and am confident it isn't true. If it's the case god has indeed created both a physical and a heavenly spiritual realm, then why did God even need to create a physical realm? If the point of its existence is to evolve to pas

Are You an Atheist Success Story?

By Avangelism Project ~ F acts don’t spread. Stories do. It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads. Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up. It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light. Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization. When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief. Results Determine Reality The thing is when we opt to bury our

Christian TV presenter reads out Star Wars plot as story of salvation

An email prankster tricked the host of a Christian TV show into reading out the plots of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Star Wars in the belief they were stories of personal salvation. The unsuspecting host read out most of the opening rap to The Fresh Prince, a 1990s US sitcom starring Will Smith , apparently unaware that it was not a genuine testimony of faith. The prankster had slightly adapted the lyrics but the references to a misspent youth playing basketball in West Philadelphia would have been instantly familiar to most viewers. The lines read out by the DJ included: "One day a couple of guys who were up to no good starting making trouble in my living area. I ended up getting into a fight, which terrified my mother." The presenter on Genesis TV , a British Christian channel, eventually realised that he was being pranked and cut the story short – only to move on to another spoof email based on the plot of the Star Wars films. It began: &quo

Why I left the Canadian Reformed Church

By Chuck Eelhart ~ I was born into a believing family. The denomination is called Canadian Reformed Church . It is a Dutch Calvinistic Christian Church. My parents were Dutch immigrants to Canada in 1951. They had come from two slightly differing factions of the same Reformed faith in the Netherlands . Arriving unmarried in Canada they joined the slightly more conservative of the factions. It was a small group at first. Being far from Holland and strangers in a new country these young families found a strong bonding point in their church. Deutsch: Heidelberger Katechismus, Druck 1563 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I was born in 1955 the third of eventually 9 children. We lived in a small southern Ontario farming community of Fergus. Being young conservative and industrious the community of immigrants prospered. While they did mix and work in the community almost all of the social bonding was within the church group. Being of the first generation born here we had a foot in two