It began in 2020, like a lot of xtians, as my disgust with the churches response to COVID and George Floyd, reached an apex of intolerance, anger, and hate. I was disheartened to by the xtian claiming a right to not wear masks, practice social distancing, or get the vaccine. As xtians the second greatest commandment is to love your neighbor and refusing, and even shaming others who were following the recommended guidelines, to me was a direct violation of the 2nd greatest commandment as given by Jesus.
Then on October 26th 2020 my mother climbed into her bathtub and ended her life with a firearm leaving my father to discover her mutilated body when he came home from bible study. There are parts of the xtian faith which adhere to the belief that suicide is a sin which condemns the individual who commits it to an eternity of conscious torment (ECT). At the time I was a calvinist, and as such I adhered to the idea of double predestination. So, god had predestined, before time had begun that my mother would be ordained to suffer ECT. The problem was that she had lived 40 years of her life in supreme devotion to god, even going so far as to forgive her husband (my dad) for thirteen years of infidelity with multiple women. Her reasoning? How can I expect god to forgive me if I don’t forgive him? She home-schooled her six children and made sure we all went to church every Sunday. A picture perfect (from the outside) example a dutiful xtian housewife raising her children to love the Lord. Yet her ECT sentence will never end.
How can a loving god torture his “children” forever?
In an effort to understand how a loving god could do this, I explored other facets of xtianiaty. Arminianism & universalism were at the top of the list. It was then that I discovered there is a lot of theological evidence for these (and other) positions and that everyone claims their’s is the true interpretation of the bible and that all others are wrong. In terms of the afterlife there is ECT, annihilation theory, and universalism. Again everyone claims they’re right and that the others are wrong.
How can the god who created the universe make things so muddy and open to such a wide array of interpretation? As I sought to balance out and navigate these wildly diverse opinions I discovered the bible is rife with problems.
There are two different creation stories. Two different genealogies of Jesus. Different portrayals of god’s essential character – is he peaceful or violent? Direct contradictions of god’s actions. It’s rife with mutually exclusive claims. Same events, opposite causes. Contradictory doctrines of salvation. The whole Exodus story is impossible. Ordering and justifying genocide. Prophecies that don’t come to pass. Then there is all the justified rape, hate, and anger — all these things god condemns and yet simultaneously exhibits in his character.
I’m not a stupid person — but how could I be so stupid to not see all the problems in the bible?
So, I jumped ship. I need space away from xtianity to try and make sense of all these problems. Watching xtians in America falling head over heels in love with MAGA has only cemented my confidence in keeping as far from the church as I possibly can.
So, that’s how it all went down from mid-2020 until early 2023. Since then I’ve become enamored with Buddhism & Taoism. My next blog post will be a book review of Alan Watt’s This Is It and Cloud Hidden but first I felt it essential to summarize my journey out of the cult of christianity for posterity sake…