Skip to main content

Confused

By LB ~

I was raised as a Christian, but it was the type of Christian that went to church, prayed, etc. I was never VERY religious. My dad died when I was only 14 and then things started to change for me. I didn't want to go to church anymore and kicked against God because he took my dad away. I did eventually finish sunday school because of my mother's pressure. I got married, had two kids, got divorced. I re-married, had three more kids. Through all this, I could probably count on my hands how many times I've been to church. My kids got christened because of pressure from the grandparents, but it never really bothered me.

Well, after my last child was born, I started to suffer from depression. It was so bad that I tried to commit suicide five times in a period of two years. I felt something was missing in my life (I even experienced with metaphysics for a while), it didn't work, so I turned to a church. Our whole family started to go to church on a regular basis. I felt it uplifted me, it made me feel whole and I felt like I found the place where I belong. I stopped using my anti-depressants and didn't have a bad episode of depression again. I became VERY religious and wanted to do all things good and tell people about Jesus and I did just that, but one thing I couldn't do was stop smoking.

I got baptised and wanted to change my life, be a better person etc. etc, but the smoking got me down. I started to question everything, like if it is really so bad that I will burn in hell forever! For months I felt condemned, I felt guilty, I tried to stop smoking and still want to, but until now, I just couldn't.

With this questioning,  I came across interesting things for example that some things in the bible is mistranslated. That Christianity was not the first religion.

Now I lean more towards the fact that Christianity was made up to control people. That the bible was written by people, and through the years it has been changed so much to fit what people MUST believe, or what they want people to believe.

At this stage, I am very confused, mostly because of the punishment that hangs over my head - not that I believe it so much anymore, but I am scared of the what if I am wrong. I cannot fully explain why I felt so much better belonging to a church and attending services. Maybe I looked outside myself to be healed? Maybe I believed that the healing must come from a higher power and so it manifested? Maybe someone can give me more clarity on this. I also wonder sometimes why people say their prayers do get answered if Christianity is fake?

I don't know what to call myself at this stage, but through all the things I have read and went over in my mind, I don't want to be a Christian - it just seems you can't enjoy anything without feeling guilty about it!

I do believe that every person has a soul, so I am not an atheist. I do believe there is life after death, but I also tend to believe that your soul goes through stages to learn lessons. I also do believe that there is a Higher Power, the beginning of it all, I believe there is other spirits around us, but how it all ads up, I still have to figure out.

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

How to come out to your parents as non-religious

By Marlene Winell ~  A fter going through your own deconstruction of religious belief, it can feel like a challenge to reveal your change to your religious parents.   You might have a lot of fear about their reaction – anger, hurt, disappointment in you, and so on.   You might fear being disowned.   This is a common concern because our families mean a lot to us.   It’s natural to want approval from your parents.   When you were young, you depended on them for your life; you absolutely needed their love, care, and approval.   So, even in adulthood, we long for our parents to love us unconditionally.     However, in terms of human development over the life span,  it is necessary for   everyone   to outgrow their parents.   Growing up to maturity involves becoming the authority in your own life and taking on the job of self-care and self-love.   This is true even if you aren’t recovering from religion.   Personal health and well-being, in other words, means that your inner “Adult” is tak

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

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

So Just How Dumb Were Jesus’ Disciples? The Resurrection, Part VII.

By Robert Conner ~ T he first mention of Jesus’ resurrection comes from a letter written by Paul of Tarsus. Paul appears to have had no interest whatsoever in the “historical” Jesus: “even though we have known Christ according to the flesh, we know him so no longer.” ( 2 Corinthians 5:16 ) Paul’s surviving letters never once mention any of Jesus’ many exorcisms and healings, the raising of Lazarus, or Jesus’ virgin birth, and barely allude to Jesus’ teaching. For Paul, Jesus only gets interesting after he’s dead, but even here Paul’s attention to detail is sketchy at best. For instance, Paul says Jesus “was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” ( 1 Corinthians 15:4 ), but there are no scriptures that foretell the Jewish Messiah would at long last appear only to die at the hands of Gentiles, much less that the Messiah would then be raised from the dead after three days. After his miraculous conversion on the road to Damascus—an event Paul never mentions in his lette

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