I was confronted by my grandmother the other day who wanted to know why I no longer attend church. She just didn’t understand. If my parents raised me to be a Christian and to be in the church how could I go against that?
Telling her that I respected Christians didn’t work. Telling her that I felt there was a much bigger picture didn’t work. Telling her that I disagreed with the doctrine and didn’t see the Bible as infallible didn’t work, neither did telling her that I respected the Bible as one of the most brilliant, literary masterpieces ever written. I tried telling her that I had taken on a more scientific perspective but that didn’t work either.
“How oh how can you turn away from or question the word of God?” is all she could muster, and she repeated this over and over throughout the entire conversation. There were four points I used in an attempt to reason with her despite it being futile and in vain.
1) I walked away from the Bible after reading it front to back. Many Christians assume I was influenced by other writers to change my mind about the Bible. No. The only thing that turned me off from the Bible was the Bible. When I tell Christians this they say I should have had a ’spiritual guide’ go through it with me, also that we are not to ‘lean upon our own understanding’.
When I was a child I watched a movie about the plagues in Egypt when Moses was on a quest to set his people free. I was fascinated by the water turning to blood, the locusts and toads etc. (especially the toads since I have ‘toad-phobia’) and inspired by the determination of Moses. However I was horrified by the first-born massacre. Imagine what it was like as a child to watch an ‘angel of death’ sweep through the villages and snuff out the lives of first-born boys and babies who did not have blood smeared on their doors. I watched a cartoon recently that literally had the sound of the children taking their last breath. It was horrible and haunting. When I was a kid the final moment that cemented my doubt in religion was when the movie showed the pharaoh weeping and holding his dead son in his arms. I thought that was the cruelest thing I had ever seen on TV and yes I had nightmares of my little brother dying in his sleep from the angel of death. My parents explained the Egyptians being evil etc. My mother used to say, “It may sound like a fairy tale, but it isn’t.” and I used to think in my seven-year-old mind, “Or it may sound like a fairy tale because it is.” I put it out of my mind out of fear of being struck down by lightening, but the more I grew the more my questions grew.
Why was the Bible so ruthless and violent? Why was it that church folk seemed indifferent to the atrocities? Why were there fossils found of strange human-ape species yet no mention in the Bible? Why wasn’t there information in the Bible about the other species of human which is so darn interesting? I mean…other species of human? It doesn’t get more enthralling then that. Why was God such a blood-thirsty, jealous, tribal, warring and ruthless God in the Old Testament, yet a loving and compassionate God in the New Testament? Regardless if Jesus came and changed everything, why would God himself change? Why would his nature and personality change? Either he is the supreme God or he is not? The sudden and abrupt personality shift just didn’t make sense.
One evening I was sitting in on a ‘business meeting’ at church. The issue of female elders came up. The young pastor proposed it and was aggressively opposed by the congregation. They kept quoting some text in Timothy that says something along the lines of men being head of the household as God is the head of the church and that women are not allowed to speak aloud in church but should have their husbands speak on behalf of them etc. The breaking point for me was when an elder stood to his feet. He had printed out a list of female leaders, including Oprah and Hillary Clinton. He held up the Bible in one hand then held up the list and declared, “THIS is not of God.” The congregation agreed and some applauded. I was aghast. I was raised in the Seventh-Day Adventist church. In Bermuda women are not allowed to be ordained in leadership positions such as elders or ministers. The most outrageous and ironic thing about this is that the Adventist church was more or less founded by a woman and continues to be led by her prophetic writings. Ellen G. White was prolific and is usually honored alongside the Bible. She was never ordained.
Anyway, despite being raised in the church I had no idea that the Bible gave the impression that women are supposed to be somewhat inferior. I never realized it was written in the Bible so blatantly. I left that meeting in a rage and decided to read the Bible in its entirety to see what the heck else was in there. I read it exactly like it was literature or a textbook. I devoured all of the information with a completely unbiased mind. My oh my. Before I could complete the Old Testament it really hit me like a ton of bricks that the Bible-God was a vengeful tyrant. By the time I completed the Old Testament I could not believe how very human and tribal its contents were. It almost seemed like a complete insult to God for him to have such petty human emotions. Halfway through the New Testament I realized that the Bible-God was literally a projection of this tribal culture. I was astonished by the violence, especially violence against children. Old feelings from childhood resurfaced and the horror and discomfort I felt when I first watched the Moses movie and saw the Angel of Death snuff out the lives of those hapless innocent children. Moses completely lost all credibility as an honorable man. When I read that when the people of Israel took up war against the Midianites and he instructed them to kill the women, the men and the ‘little ones’ I was shocked that of all the years I had been in the church I had completely glazed over this genocidal massacre. When his army spared the women and children he was pissed off. “These people were heathens!” he said “And have even led some of the Israelites to worship their idols!” He ordered them to kill the women and boys and to leave the virgins for themselves. (Islamic ‘paradise’ resonates).
The reason why I tore up – and it angers me that Christians are desensitized by his and glaze over it – is that if God instructed Christians right now to take up war against India would they do it? Hindus would be ‘heathens’ according to Biblical doctrine. They are idol-worshiping heathens. What if God instructed us to take up war against them and take over their land? Can you imagine? Going over there with our weapons….looking into the face of a three-year-old Indian child and…stabbing her? Why do Christians glaze over this? I asked my grandmother, “Doesn’t this bother you at all? At all?” Her reply, “He is God and it is not our right to question his actions.” Her response was typical of all the responses Christians have always given me in regards to Biblical genocides and massacres.
Well let it be known. I’d rather burn as a martyr for goodness than to subscribe to the violence and atrocities detailed in the Holy Bible. Children are innocent and defenseless. It is the responsibility of adults to protect and nurture them. There is no justification ever for murdering them. Christians have rolled their eyes when I explained this, scoffed and exclaimed that I am too dramatic. It saddens me that they have become so brainwashed that they are cold, disinterested and unfeeling when it comes to this.
God threatens to wreak havoc on those who walk contrary to him, causing them to eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters. There are threats of killing children, slicing open pregnant women and dashing their infants to pieces with the sword. I tell my grandmother this and she says, “That is not of God. My God is supreme, loving and all-knowing. Someone else wrote that.” I said, “But grandmother, it says right here…thus saith the Lord…I am the Lord your God.”
“I don’t believe in twisting the words of the Bible.” she said “Or questioning the words of God.” I read the various texts again, emphasizing ‘thus saith the Lord’. She continued shaking her head. Continued accusing me of misinterpreting the scripture and was adamant that the Bible was true and inerrant and is the golden and holy words of God.
If this isn’t an indication of brainwash, I don’t know what is. I read the various texts to her word-by-word straight out of the Bible and she still shook her head and refused to acknowledge it.
All of the Christians do the same thing. They twist it and turn it to make it fit, but the book simply says what it says. They accuse me of not using spiritual discernment, but I think ’spiritual discernment’ is another component of brainwash. These Christians, who close their eyes and close their minds to the atrocities are tragically, tragically brainwashed.
It is worth knowing that since leaving the church I have gained a greater appreciation for the Bible. Once it is seen as a literary and very human piece of work, it all makes sense. No more justifying. No more making excuses. No more arguing over the inconsistencies. No more dogma. No more bigotry. No more ignorance. No more stagnation. What we have here are stories of war, poetry, love, vengeance, passion, sacrifice, terror and general human joy and anguish. A brilliant literary masterpiece, that is what it is. It is insulting to reduce a supreme God to its pages. It is too human. Any kind of God or omnipotent creator of the entire beautifully complex universe will be completely transcendent to the tribal, human, middle-eastern stories of the Bible. The Bible-God is a projection of feeble human minds, which brings me to the second reason why I walked away.
2) The church is too anti-science. I am aware that science is considered to be too anti-religious. Science doesn’t have all of the answers though. Science uses rational thought to test and explore the evidence that the universe gives us. If there are gaps in scientific research, science is okay with saying ‘I don’t know’ until they do know. There is no need to use supernatural reasoning to fill in the gaps of what we do not yet understand. As the poet Bukowski says;
“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered. But for those of us who can’t readily accept the God formula, the big answers don’t remain stone-written. We adjust to new conditions and discoveries. We are pliable.”
Religion teaches that everything that can be understood about life, nature and the universe can only be found within the pages of the Holy Book. There is no regard to the advancement we have made in regards to astrobiology, genetics, biochemistry, astrophysics and biophysics, evolutionary biology or astronomy etc. If it contradicts what is written in The Book, then fundamentalists have no interest. Again I feel this is unfortunate. How limiting to not be able to marvel and educate ourselves on the mechanisms of the grand universe, or worse yet to not have an interest. How are they possibly able to ignore or reject such incredible advancement and knowledge in favor of the Sesame Street-style explanation that ancient writers wrote in an attempt to explain what they did not yet understand? Creation in a week? ‘On Tuesday God made the trees, on Thursday God made the birds’…come on. There is no beauty or complexity in that. And believe me, God would have to be scientific, complex and very mathematical if we were to study His ‘creation’ that we are sitting in. Thus perhaps, the best way to explore ‘God’s mind’ is to pick up a science journal instead of picking apart Middle-Eastern scribblings. I think some Christians are somewhat aware of the lunacy of a one-week creation. I’ve heard the proposal of one day being equivalent to 100 years or 1,000 years or whatever. This is another example of Christians blocking what their rational minds are trying to tell them. They are so accustomed to making excuses for the Bible they don’t even realize it. They can’t help it. It has become such an ingrained habit they are almost oblivious to it. It boils down to the fact that the Bible simply says what it says. Either you believe it or you don’t. ‘The evening and the morning were the first day’. It takes a lot of stretching to make the equivalence fit.
Bermuda has amazing caves. Breathtaking and hauntingly beautiful. Our Crystal Caves is about 120 feet underground and has a clear lake that is about 55 feet deep. It is truly remarkable. I revisited the cave the other day for the heck of it. The tour guide informed us that stalactites grow 1 cubic inch every 100 years. Imagine the columns that are taller than me! (I’m almost 6 feet), how many years do you suppose it took those to grow in light of the fact that it grows 1 cubic inch every 100 years! I bumped into a Christian relative after that and was going on and an on about how beautiful the cave was and that I didn’t realize it was millions of years old. The Christian scoffed and said that is impossible because the world in only about 6,000 years old.
Now I don’t know if radiometric dating was used to determine the age of the cave or stalactites but I’m thinking 1 cubic inch every 100 years can’t be that difficult to measure. Surely it would only take a couple of generations to measure that accurately. But most importantly…so what if the cave is old or the world or universe is old? Wouldn’t that make this universe all the more incredible? Wouldn’t it make it more overwhelmingly amazing? The complexity of it makes it more astonishing, wondrous and mind-boggling. Instead of giving the measurements any credence, this Christians was adamant that the world was most definitely created circa 4004 BC. Why would you close your mind to the possibility of this being an ancient universe? To just…blindly close your eyes and refuse to consider it seems very limiting.
3) The third reason why I walked away from the church is because a personal God just doesn’t make sense. Perhaps the Spinoza God makes more sense to me, but certainly not the Christian God or any of the other sky gods that are born out of organized religion. Of course I don’t blame God for the suffering in this world, perhaps we have only ourselves to blame. But you have to wonder…as I type this, a woman is holding her dying child in her arms and watching him wither away. Perhaps this woman is a devout Christian? As she cries and begs God, why is He silent? Somewhere as I type, a child is being molested or physically abused. She is curled up in her bed or shivering beneath a table and she is crying and begging God to spare her. Why is God silent? Across the world millions of children literally starve to death. If you can fathom that…if you can think about skipping a couple of meals because you’ve been busy or even fasting, you can imagine how ravenous you are by the time you get your hands on food. But imagine if day after day drags by and there is little hope of ever getting food? Every day that goes by you slowly die and it is a painful death. Starvation hurts. It is probably the most brutal way to leave this world because it is a slow and agonizing death. Every year 15,000,000 children die a slow death due to starvation. That is about 44,000 every day. About 2,000 every hour which means about 30 or so children died of starvation during the time I wrote the last paragraph of this blog. Does anyone ever wonder why God is silent? I am not angry at God, I am angry at the notion of God.
People chastise me about my doubt all the time. They tell me that when they needed groceries because they were broke, money miraculously appeared. Or someone was cured of a supposedly incurable disease and doctors are baffled so it must be a miracle. Or someone was unemployed and suddenly an opportunity for a job fell into their laps, not just any job but an amazing job with better pay or benefits than they have ever had. Surely God answers prayer. I’ve heard of tanks being dry and God provided rain, being lonely or lost and God provided the way. Someone once even told me that they urgently needed a hairdresser before the weekend for an event and they prayed to God and He provided one that had space at the last minute.
These things just make a mockery of the millions of prayers that go unanswered. Groceries provided for one person yet millions starving every year. A disease miraculously cured yet 400,000 people die of cancer every day. Cancer is the leading cause of death. 27.5% of all deaths are cancer-related according to Centers of Disease Control and Prevention in the US alone. Heart disease kills 25% annually. Someone dies of heart disease every 34 seconds. Worldwide, coronary heart disease killed more than 7.6 million people in 2005. So what is the big deal with the stats? If God cures some and not others what does it matter? We do not know God’s mind and we do not have a right to question, right? Problem is those who are cured of disease by prayer seem rare. Meanwhile millions and millions of prayers go unanswered. Either God is not a personal God or we are completely off-base when it comes to who He is supposed to be.
The final reason why I walked away from the church;
4) Religion seems to be fundamentally driven by self-interest. Hear me out here. The entire system is based on two factors; Reward and Punishment. These factors introduce two sub-factors; Security and Fear. The entire Christian or religious experience is driven by these factors. You cannot sit in church or talk to a Christian without hearing about ‘the kingdom’. It seems their entire purpose of life revolves around pleasing God so that they can have access to ‘the kingdom’. They look at the world through pessimistic eyes and they see the ugly and not the beautiful. All they can think is, “Someday I will no longer have to be a part of this world. Someday there will be no suffering and pain. The wicked will perish and I will live for all eternity in paradise, the New Jerusalem.” They are so latched on the idea of a heavenly paradise that they find it difficult to have any appreciation for the world that we live in right now. Heaven sounds like the most ideal experience one can ever conjure up in their mind. There will be streets of gold and pearly gates, there will be mansions. Imagine…an abundance of material wealth instead of the daunting day-to-day toiling here on earth. There will be peace and no more suffering. This is a refreshing thought. We have all struggled to accept the ugly tragedies of this world. A perfect heavenly paradise is the ideal form of escapism. You get to sit at the feet of Jesus and pet lions etc. I cannot recall the exact Biblical details of Heaven but it seems I hear something different everything I talk to people. We will be able to walk on clouds or meet our personal assigned angels or fly through space and visit other planets. A perfect, paradisiacal and otherworldly existence is a big contributing factor in clinging to Holy writings and rejecting rational thought. It is escapism. It is hope.
Humans for the most part have a need to feel wanted and loved. It seems we tend to be creatures that thrive on companionship. We all need to feel accepted despite our failures and faults. We need to feel that we will always be secure, that we will always be okay, that everything will work out just fine. Religion encourages people to debase themselves in the name of humbleness so that their consciousness can extend to accept a deity who will love and save them despite their unworthiness. I watched a documentary called ‘Jesus Camp’. After being drilled on how unworthy they are and how God loves them and wants to save them, these children had tears streaming down their faces. Some of them sobbed uncontrollably. It was just a collective frenzy of emotions gone amok. They spoke in tongues and raised their arms in the air and praised God for loving and accepting them despite their unworthiness. We hear the old adage that no matter what we do, God will forgive us as long as we repent. That we are absolutely nothing without the love of Jesus. It is that primal, emotional need for unconditional love, acceptance and safety that make Holy writings so compelling. It is fulfilling and euphoric. It is like being in love. The doctrine of religion fills an emotional, human need. This is why I feel the Bible is a brilliant masterpiece. Its writers knew exactly what they were doing. It captures the depth of human nature so artfully and so brilliantly that it is almost impossible for it not to invoke mass control. The urgent need to feel love and forgiven is another attractive component of religion, as well as the urgent need to be saved from emotional pain.
Sometimes God can almost be misconstrued as some kind of divine genie who will fill us with an abundance of blessings if we are faithful to him. In terms of tithing the Bible says; :Bring ye all the tithes into the storehouse, that there may be meat in mine house, and prove me now herewith, saith the LORD of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it”. The text was repeated every single week at church when it was time for offering and tithe. I’ve heard it 1,000 times. No…literally, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. God says to give him 10% out of love for him, but also if you do he will bless and bless and bless, reward, reward, reward. At mealtime Christians thank God for blessing them with a meal because there are many without a meal. It is like a child approaching his parents with a plate piled with food and saying, ‘thank you for providing such a hearty meal, especially since my brother only got scraps.’ Thank you for giving me a job (millions jobless), thank you for providing me with shelter (millions homeless), thank you for my family (millions grieving), thank you for giving me this and giving me that, and thank you for loving me and thank you for saving and thank you for forgiving me and me and me, me, me. Maybe this makes me unpopular but I had to stop and look at the bigger picture. Wait a minute…why am I so special and millions of others insignificant? Of course I am grateful but….something doesn’t stack up. Am I so self-absorbed that I am desensitized and numb to the millions of prayers that go unanswered? Do I really have to pray for the right hairdresser, knight in shining armor, new job, money, happiness etc when other people seek nothing but survival and their prayers go unanswered?
What about the factors of Punishment and Fear? You seek salvation or you burn in hell. You accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior because he loves and wants you to love him, if not you will burn in hell. There can only be two masters – God and Satan. If you do not adopt the teachings of religious doctrine then you are of the world and are following Satan. You will burn in hell. God does not intervene with all of the trouble in the world because he is compassionate and fair and he wants to give us a choice. He wants to us to choose him out of free will because he loves us so much and will burn you in hell if you don’t choose him. The Bible details hell…wailing and gnashing of teeth, an eternal fire that never dies out…an eternity of burning alive…by the hottest fire imaginable. Damnation and abandonment. However, if you choose God and the teachings of religious doctrine you will be spared by God’s passionate grace and will be able to live in a heavenly paradise because he loves you and truly doesn’t want you to go to the hell he created….just for you….if you don’t choose him.
I wonder if Christians ever ponder this;
If there was no promise of paradise and no fear of scorching damnation, if there was no salvation and no punishment, if there was only life and this universe with all of its ugliness and beauty would it change a single thing about our behavior? Not mine, not mine at all. Christians have told me that without the Bible or God as their moral guide they might become wicked. I’m afraid I cannot relate to that, however it does explain why so many people need religion. If no one dictates to them what is right or wrong they are clueless or helpless to know. The Bible isn’t the most prime example of morals and unconditional love. Christians are inclined to ignore the ugly and unfathomable because they need moral guidance so passionately. There is a deep and primal need for love, escapism, forgiveness and salvation. There is a gut-wrenching and terrified dread of eternal hell’s fire.
Compassion and love has always been my ‘religion’. I could not in good conscience remain within the walls of religion. I had to walk away from it. The clarity of it was the most enlightening, liberating, joyful experience I have ever had.
