Why I’m no Longer a Christian

From infancy, I was raised in the Christian Church. I was born to parents who were Southern Baptists and believed that children should be brought to church. There’s nothing wrong with this I don’t suppose. There are lots of things worse than church.

I, like most other Christians, was sold on the basic beliefs of the Christian faith, for if you are immersed in a belief system from infancy, it is only natural to believe what you are told. Aren’t our parents perfect, after all? I mean, they believed what they, the preacher, and the Sunday School teachers were saying, so why shouldn’t I have believed it as well, right? All these people couldn’t be wrong could they?

So, on it went. I grew up in the church from an infant, to a toddler, young boy, teenager, and finally young man. It was what I had always known, and it was a part of my life.

But the Christian story just didn’t feel right to me; it just didn’t seem so. This loving God they talked about couldn’t be too damn loving if he could even consider the idea of an eternal torment in hell. As Carl Jung would say, “Consciously, I was religious in the Christian sense, though always with the reservation: ‘But it is not so certain as all that'”. Yeah, something about what I was being taught just didn’t seem to click for me on a subconscious level.

So, let me begin with a simplistic – a disrespectful as many would say – explanation of the basic Christian belief system. Here goes:

The Greatest Story (or Scam) Ever Told

There is a deity – a God – who lives “out there” or “up above” somewhere in some other dimension or realm or something. It was once believed that this deity lived just beyond the sky, just beyond the limits of what we human beings could see. This deity lived in a place called Heaven, and you could get a glance – a vague glance – of heaven each night if you looked up into the sky. Those things we now call stars were once believed to be holes in the partition that separated our world from Heaven.

This deity is an old man who wears a white robe, has a white beard, and sits on a throne in his Heaven. This deity’s name is YAWEH; but most folks just use the term “God”.

This God/deity has existed from before the beginning of time; that is, He has always existed, which pretty much ends the debate as to how this God came into being. He never had a beginning and will never have an end. He is all-knowing, immortal, all-powerful, holy, and perfect.

This deity created holy beings to reside with him in heaven. They are what is known as angels. God’s chief angel Lucifer decided he wanted to replace YAWEH, so there was a war in heaven. Lucifer had accomplices – other angels who were sympathetic to his cause – who sided with him and fought against YAWEH and his angels. Well, YAWEH won this battle, as could only be expected, and threw Lucifer and his angels out of heaven and put them in a place of eternal torment and fire, a place called Hell. This was the punishment for rebellion against the Almighty. And so it was for many millenia I suppose.

At some point in the history of all that is, YAWEH decided to create stuff. So, he created the heavens, which are basically outer space with all the planets and stars; but more importantly, He created our planet, which up until just a few hundred years ago, was thought to be the center of all existence around which the Sun orbited each day to bring about night and day.

Upon this planet YAWEH brought forth all plant and animal life, but He was not satisfied. For YAWEH wanted a life form in his own image, so He created humanity. He did this by taking some dirt, spitting on it, and forming a human out of it – a human male who he called Adam. Later on, He decided that the male needed a companion; so He put Adam to sleep, broke one of his ribs, and formed the first female human – Eve. He gave them a special place to live called the Garden of Eden.

This whole process of creating all that is took YAWEH six days. On the seventh day he rested.

Now, YAWEH gave instructions to Adam and Eve about various things; and one of his instructions was not to eat any fruit from the Tree of Life because He didn’t want them to know too much and didn’t want them to live a long time. Ignorance and a not-too-long lifespan, according to YAWEH, was what was best for his creation.

But one day something bad happened: this Lucifer fellow took the form of a snake and talked Eve into eating from the Tree of Life. She did so and talked Adam into eating of it as well. This pissed YAWEH off because he told them not to and they did anyway. As punishment for their disobedience, they were ordered out of the Garden of Eden, where they had it so good. They would have to toil and work in order to maintain their existence.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, oh no. Also as punishment, when human beings died their spirits/souls would be required to spend eternity in that big pit of fire called Hell which was originally reserved just for Lucifer and his angels, better known as demons. Yeah, for a screw up on the part of two people EVERYBODY had to burn in Hell when they died. This would go on for centuries.

God eventually got tired of these wicked human beings he created and their evil ways. He only found a small group of people on the entire planet who acted half-way decent. This group was Noah and his family. So he told Noah to build a great big ship – an arc – and put his entire family and two of every animal on it because God had decided to destroy the entire living population – human and non-human alike. He was that fed up with us and our nonsense.

And so He did. He sent rains to flood the Earth and destroy everyone and everything except for Noah and his family.  Isn’t it odd that a God who is opposed to abortion, would kill so many millions of unborn babies with the flood?

The arc that Noah built came to rest on Mount Ararat when the flood waters receded. Everyone got off the ship and began the long business of re-populating the Earth.

Its important to note here that when people died the were still required to spend eternity in Hell though. Noah’s and his family’s goodness didn’t get them or future generations off the hook when it came to this burning-in-hell-for-eternity stuff.

Some more centuries passed and one day it occurred to God that this dying-and-going-to-Hell-and-burning-in-torment stuff just didn’t seem right anymore. Also around this time, a certain group of slaves – the Hebrews – caught God’s eye, and he decided that they were his special, favorite people. “Chosen” would be a good word for the Hebrews. They were God’s chosen people.

But the Hebrews were slaves – property of the Egyptians – and God didn’t like that; so he sent Moses to lead them out of slavery and into the promised land of Israel, but only after forty years of running around aimlessly in the dessert because they pissed God off by making a false god and worshiping it – a bull made of gold.

During this forty year running-around-in-the-desert-business time span, YAWEH also decided that He would give his chosen people a way out of this going-to-hell-when-ya-die stuff. He devised a scheme through which, if they sacrificed certain animals to God, their “sins” would be forgiven, and they wouldn’t have to spend eternity in Hell. This, however, only applied to the Hebrews. If you were an African, Asian, European, or whatever, your ass was still gonna burn for eternity. This was the scheme of things up until 2000 years ago.

Eventually, God came to the realization that this whole going-to-hell-except-for-the-Hebrews way of doing things was just not gonna do. Just think, most of his human creation was burning in Hell after death. That just had to stop. He had to devise a way to save face and still allow His creation to forgo all this torment.

He came up with an ingenious plan. As it turned out, YAWEH had/has a son whose name is Jesus. Now remember, He had already given the Hebrews a way out with animal sacrifices. The new plan was to send His Son to Earth to be a sacrifice for everyone. The plan was so simple…how could He not have thought of it in the first place and avoided all this torment and suffering. Here’s how it works:

God sent Jesus to be born of a virgin (Well, the Holy Son couldn’t be the product of us filthy, evil humans now could He?) – Mary was her name. God impregnated Mary, and she gave birth to Jesus.

Jesus grew up, lived as a human, and eventually announced his mission to his disciples…well, anyway let’s fast forward. The bottom line is this: God sent Jesus as a sacrifice for the whole world, not just the Hebrews. All that is necessary for entrance into Heaven and avoiding Hell is for us stupid mortals to believe this.

At some point in the future, Jesus is gonna come back from heaven; and he’s gonna gather up and take with him all the Christians and leave behind all the non-believers.

And last of all, when the end of the world comes, there will be a judgment day on which the Christians will be admitted into heaven and the sinners will be thrown into the torment of Hell.

So there you have it. That is the Christian story. This is what one must believe in order to be a “true believer.”

Internal Discontent

Well, the fact of the matter is that none of it is true. Its not true for two reasons: (1) Scientific discoveries in the fields of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology over the past few centuries have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to those of us who have the open-mindedness to accept new ideas that the biblical account of creation and how the world works is simply nothing more than a myth; and (2) With the birth of modern-day biblical scholarship and the various critical analysis such as form criticism and historical-method criticism, we now understand the various genres that were in play when the authors of the biblical texts created them. That is, the entire Bible is a human invention, a collection of myths if you will, written for the sole purpose of communicating underlying truths in a style of writing common to the authors. The Bible was never meant to be taken as literal history or literal fact.

It was these two aforementioned facts that were always subconsciously in the back of my mind all through my childhood, teen years, and early-to-mid twenties. I was afraid not to believe in what I had always been taught; and though I didn’t quite understand why, somehow I knew that this whole bag of goods that I had been sold had holes in it; and the holes seemed to be getting larger as the years went on.

But…on I went. Afraid to believe otherwise for fear of going to hell, I tried my best to be a true believer. I got pretty good at self-deception, convincing myself that I actually believed this nonsense I had been taught taught all of my life.

There was a problem with this doubt that I tried so hard to ignore though: You see, in order to be a true Christian, you can’t have any doubts – at all. Since I had doubts about the truth of the Christian story, didn’t that mean that I was not a true Christian? If I wasn’t a true Christian, then the only logical outcome of such a doubtful mind is hell after one dies. That’s what they teach in the Baptist Church: If there is any doubt whatsoever, then you are not saved; and you are going to hell.

This internal conflict caused me great anxiety and stress. I was a nervous wreck for a year or so. There were nights I could not sleep because I knew I was going to hell when I died; and since I couldn’t truly force my mind to accept the Christian story, there was no hope for me. I was going to hell; and there was not a thing that could be done to stop it.

Think of it like this: A friend says to you “Hey, I’ve got an organization I’d like you to join. Here’s a list of all the benefits of being a member of this group and a list of detriments if you don’t belong to the group.” You take the list and read over it. After seeing the consequences of not being in your friend’s organization, you decide you had better damn-well be a member. So you say, “Hell yeah, I want to be a member.” The friend says to you, “Okay. I’ll sign you up. Oh…there’s only one thing I forgot to mention: In order to be a member, you have to believe that pink elephants exist on a planet called Fantasia and that these pink elephants are able to both fly and and turn into grasshoppers at will. If you can’t accept this, then you simply can’t be a member. Oh…and we can tell if you really believe or not: We have a way of reading people’s minds.” You think for a second and realize that you are gonna have to believe this nonsense in order to avoid the consequences of not being a member of the organization. You say, “Yeah, I believe it.” Deep down inside though, if even that far, you know there ain’t no such a damn place as Fantasia and that there is no such a thing as a pink elephant that can fly and turn into a grasshopper. You’re in a catch-22: You know what you have to believe is not true; but you have to believe it in order to avoid the consequences of not being a member of the group. You’d be between a rock and a hard place, and it would cause you great stress and anxiety.

A Breath of Fresh Air: The Beginning of Reason

It was in my mid-twenties – around the age of 24 – that the beginning of the end of this anxiety and the birth of a new way of looking at things occurred. It was sometime in 1990 or 1991 that I began going back to church. As fate would have it, the good people at the Baptist church I attended had, in my years of absence, hired a liberal preacher. His name is Don Morris. Don didn’t believe the standardized Christian story either, but he had to tip-toe around actually coming out and saying so in his sermons because this would have caused much controversy. I, however, was able to read between the lines; and I could hear what he was saying. He presented the possibility that God wasn’t the mean, punishing, hell-creating son of a bitch that traditional Christianity had made him out to be. This was liberating, and listening to his sermons began the slow process of freeing me from the anxiety and stress I suffered from the catch-22 I was in.

Don was eventually forced to resign from the Baptist church. He later became a Methodist minister and is still one to this day.

Shortly after Don left, I did too. Not only because he left but also because I got married and the wife was an Episcopalian. I too became Episcopalian.

The Episcopal Church is a left-leaning organization and does not preach hell and eternal punishment. They too have enough sense to realize the standardized Christian story is not entirely the Gospel truth. So I felt comfortable there, without having to deal with some hick preacher telling me I was going to hell (implicitly of course) each week for not believing all that nonsense. I stayed in the Episcopal Church for about sixteen years; and, for various reasons (I will not get into them here), I eventually left it as well.

Early into my time as an Episcopalian I discovered the writings of Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong. Spong is a real liberal and exposed the Christian story for the ridiculous nonsense that it truly is. My father and I would read his works and discuss what we read. I was finally free of the chains and shackles of Christianity.

There came a point toward the end of my stint as an Episcopalian that I began to question what it was I really believed about the great scheme of things. I gravitated toward Buddhism and almost got to the point where I would have called myself a Buddhist. Buddhism, however, like all religion has myth attached to it that I simply could not believe; so I was in a state of “limbo” for a while so to speak.

I have now come to the point where, if I were to call myself anything, I would call myself and Agnostic Buddhist; and that’s pushing it.

So…here’s what I believe about the great scheme of things:

1. There is no deity out there watching over us who created all things and causes all things.
2. The laws of quantum mechanics/physics have provided a logical explanation as to how things came into being and why there is anything instead of nothing.
3. Human existence is the outcome of millions of years of evolution.
4. Life in general seems to be the logical end result of energy.
5. If pressed to answer the question, “Well, how did your Big Bang happen?” I would answer, “Well, how did your God come into being?”
6. The human personality and the human condition are the result of the id, ego, and superego. The degree of suffering and the degree of contentment and happiness we experience in this life can be traced back to a too-powerful ego and weak superego or a controlled ego and controlling superego. We are the source of our own contentment or sorrow; we make our own Heaven or Hell.
7. When we die, that’s it. There is no reward or punishment waiting on us.

In short, the Christian story is just too unbelievable and is just flat out incorrect. It is based upon ancient myths that have been taken literally and not seen for their original intent: to convey an underlying truth that the authors of the myths saw in a particular person or event.

It is impossible for the heart to worship that which the mind finds unbelievable. A God that would create a place of torment, torture, and punishment for another sentient being to endure for eternity is not a God that is worthy of worship. It is a God controlled by the ego, which has as His primary motivation the desire to regain a perceived lost worth that occurred when Adam and Eve broke His rules about eating fruit off that damn tree he shouldn’t have put in their presence in the first place.