Skip to main content

Clinging Hard to Faith...For What?

By American Apostate ~

I must first start off by saying how grateful I am that this forum exists. I have been encouraged by the fact that I am not alone in this very personal journey. The fear, anxiety, and loneliness that accompanies walking away from a religion you've had your whole life can be overwhelming at times. It is during those times I have come here for encouragement, and keep the fear at bay.I have read many, many stories here, and now I feel confident enough to share mine.

I was six years old when I first prayed the sinner's prayer. My family are Christians, so I became one too as soon as I understood that I was going to go to hell if I didn't accept Jesus into my heart. Seriously. That's what prompted me to do so that first time. I was taken to see this evangelical drama designed to "win souls" for the Lord. It was called, "Heaven's Gates and Hell's Flames." It was basically an anthology of stories featuring people discussing Christian Theology right before they died. Unlikely, yes, but it got the point across. Some people went to heaven to be with Jesus and others were dragged to hell kicking and screaming. Imagine a young first grader sitting there, watching this. It was absolutely terrifying. I remember sitting in that pew, curling my knees to my chest, shaking, praying desperately to Jesus, begging that he wouldn't send me to hell. And that was the start of my Christian experience.

As I got older, I had some trouble dealing with stress at school. Also,my hormones were out of wack and I was frequently depressed and I went through a rebellion phase, as many 14&15 year olds do. I still went to church, but not as much. My parents weren't sure how to deal with my getting into trouble and my bouts of depression, so they sent me to therapy. The Therapist put me on medication, and that's when things got worse. I suddenly had thoughts of suicide and obsessed with harming myself. After being sent to the mental hospital when I got caught at school cutting myself in the bathroom, my therapist decided to take me off the medication. My condition immediately improved. The suicidal, self harming thoughts were gone but I still felt very lost and in a fog of confusion. Teenage hormones have a way of producing that lost, foggy feeling....but I didn't know that. I needed a refuge, a place of peace amidst the chaos in my life. So I turned back to God.

I went to Bible college and decided I was going to be a pastor. It was there that things started... I went to this Baptist Tent Revival in town, and that was where I was told that Jesus loved me, and he wanted me to love him back. I was told that he didn't want to send me to hell, but that he wanted a personal relationship with me. It was that moment that I truly felt the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life. I felt very peaceful and very happy for the first time in a very long time. I felt like I truly had the answer to every problem in my life: Jesus. I immersed myself into hard-core Christianity. I was a complete, total Jesus Freak. I went to Bible college and decided I was going to be a pastor. It was there that things started to get a little strange for me. I took several theology courses and I started to see some strange inconsistencies in the Bible. My theology stated that God is a loving, merciful God, and never changes. But He also committed mass genocide and had His people do the same. The God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, was angry and violent. I was taught that this was the same God who incarnated himself as Jesus and died on the cross for our sins because he loved us. Logically, it didn't add up. God incarnated himself....to make a blood sacrifice....to himself.....to appease himself....because we are a flawed creation and He is so Holy and just. Okay. I did some mental backbends to reconcile this, as I was always instructed not to think too deeply about it,lest I "reason my way away from God". Yeah. People told me that. I noticed other believers got really uncomfortable when I asked too many questions. They told me to just pray and let the Holy Spirit reveal the answers to me whenever I asked super hard questions. Questions like, how did Noah fit 100 million species of animals on his ark, and how did he take care of 12 tons of feces a day, and what did everyone eat for a whole year? Why did God destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for sexual immorality, yet immediately afterward, Lot's two daughters got him drunk and raped him....not once, but twice (Genesis 19:30-36)...why was God completely silent about it? I searched for answers, prayed, and got nothing.

So, with doubt's creeping in, I plunged deeper into ministry and church, accepting a Youth Pastor job at a small church. O figured the doubt's were from the devil and the only way to get rid of them was to push harder spiritually. So That's what I did. After a couple years, I got fired from the youth pastor job, because the pastor's wife accused me of looking at pornography on the church computer. That was absurd, because I never was interested in pornography back then, and even if I was I would have used my own computer, not the church computer, duh. I was later vindicated when the pastor's daughter confessed that she was the one, not me. I was still heartbroken from the ordeal and left that church anyway. I continued seeking after God and was active in ministry for several more years, but similar situations kept arising. I was always under the thumb of a controlling pastor and something would happen where I would get really hurt. Burned out, frustrated, and sick of ministry, I just quit.

Lately, I have been revisiting my doubts,and I have been immersing myself in my real passion, science. I always had an aptitude for it and I love reading research papers and watching the science channel. I have given serious thought to the problems Christian theology has, and I have decided to walk away from Christianity completely. I still have faith in God, but I find myself clinging very hard to this faith, but I don't know why. I struggle with fear and anxiety from time to time, and that may be part of it. Letting go of a faith I've had my whole life is very difficult. I think back on the pain this religion has caused me and that makes it a little easier. In the end, common sense and rationality tends to win over everything. I figure that of God is real, all the things I have been told about Him is a lie and he's not going to be angry at me for waking away from this religion. He wouldn't want me to be so afraid all the time and cling hard to something that makes no sense. These thoughts put my mind at ease when I wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat from a nightmare of burning in hell for being an apostate. Hopefully over time, all of these fears will fade and I can continue living my life to the fullest, religion free, faithful, or faithless.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

ACTS OF GOD

By David Andrew Dugle ~   S ettle down now children, here's the story from the Book of David called The Parable of the Bent Cross. In the land Southeast of Eden –  Eden, Minnesota that is – between two rivers called the Big Miami and the Little Miami, in the name of Saint Gertrude there was once built a church. Here next to it was also built a fine parochial school. The congregation thrived and after a multitude of years, a new, bigger church was erected, well made with clean straight lines and a high steeple topped with a tall, thin cross of gold. The faithful felt proud, but now very low was their money. Their Sunday offerings and school fees did not suffice. Anon, they decided to raise money in an unclean way. One fine summer day the faithful erected tents in the chariot lot between the two buildings. In the tents they set up all manner of games – ring toss, bingo, little mechanical racing horses and roulette wheels – then all who lived in the land between the two rivers we

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

Morality is not a Good Argument for Christianity

By austinrohm ~ I wrote this article as I was deconverting in my own head: I never talked with anyone about it, but it was a letter I wrote as if I was writing to all the Christians in my life who constantly brought up how morality was the best argument for Christianity. No Christian has read this so far, but it is written from the point of view of a frustrated closeted atheist whose only outlet was organizing his thoughts on the keyboard. A common phrase used with non-Christians is: “Well without God, there isn’t a foundation of morality. If God is not real, then you could go around killing and raping.” There are a few things which must be addressed. 1. Show me objective morality. Define it and show me an example. Different Christians have different moral standards depending on how they interpret the Bible. Often times, they will just find what they believe, then go back into scripture and find a way to validate it. Conversely, many feel a particular action is not

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