Skip to main content

Escaping the Brainwash

By Lauren D ~

I can proudly say that I escaped the Christian brainwashing that I endured for over 25 years. My parents were religious, especially my father who tried converted everyone in path to become a born again Christian. Going to church every Sunday was boring and always left me feeling like a guilty sinner. As much as I hated church and all the strict rules, I tried my very best to follow the “straight and narrow path” that God had for me. My main motivation to be a good Christian and go to church was the fear of hell. And boy was it scary!

The foundation of my faith first started to crack when I took a Philosophy course in college. My teacher was an atheist and he provoked the class with some great questions that really had me thinking if Christianity was wrong. I went home after school and asked my Dad some of the tough questions I was facing and he always had an answer. Most of his answers included verses from the bible and minimal logic. After the semester ended I brushed all my questions under the rug and decided that I would just have faith and move forward.

It’s ironic that the Bible calls Jesus the truth, when in fact it he couldn’t be further from it.Three years passes and I was once again forced to reconsider my faith in Christianity. During this time I got back together with one of my ex-boyfriends, who happens to be Jewish. He doesn’t practice much, he eats pork and never attends synagogue unless it’s a holiday. Nevertheless, he was very proud to be Jewish. As the relationship progressed we would talk about how to raise our children if we got married. He demanded that we raise them Jewish. Obviously I was very scared that my children would go to hell. I tried converting him in the past and I realized that there was no use. I just didn’t understand how the Jews didn’t see Jesus as the truth. What about Isaiah 53? What about all the other foreshadowing in the Old Testament? I always wondered why they couldn’t catch on. I immediately went to my computer and googled a bunch of stuff. I soon realized that the bible started making less and less sense to me. I came to the shocking realization that there were many mistranslations/misinterpretations in the bible. Then I started to wonder what else I was misinformed about. I googled again, this time for 2 days straight. I read stories from exchristian.com, read blogs, watched youtube debates with guys like Dawkins, Harris etc. At the end of the week I called my two brothers to tell them that I was no longer a Christian. At first I was scared to make this bold claim but then I felt freedom and a deep sense of peace and happiness that Christianity could never bring.

Since then I have also helped one of my brothers de-convert and he has never been happier. I’m lucky enough to have a family that semi-respects my decision and doesn’t disown me. I am hoping that one day the rest of them come around, although I highly doubt it. I currently call myself Agnostic. For some reason don’t like to call myself an Atheist. I worry that some people might judge me. I also seem to associate the word “Atheist” with the word “hell” and I don’t like that feeling it gives me. I know that might sound funny and just plain stupid, but it’s true. I hate admitting this but sometimes I still get scared. There is still about 5% left of me that still fears hell. I know that hell doesn’t exist but I have a hard time shaking that feeling because of the deep brainwashing that I underwent. It’s only been 4 months since my de-conversion. I’m sure it will take some time to settle into my new beliefs.

Overall, my new beliefs (or lack thereof) have brought me great happiness that is hard to describe. I no longer feel the guilt and shame for meaningless things such as not reading my bible enough. I don’t waste my time praying and going to boring church services. And I no longer waste my time waiting for God to answer my prayers and guide my life. I’ve come to realize that I am in control of my own life, not some imaginary guy in the sky. De-converting has changed my life for the better. I finally feel like I have found truth. It’s ironic that the Bible calls Jesus the truth, when in fact it he couldn’t be further from it.

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

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

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

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