Leaving Christianity Behind - Atheism Is Not The End Of My Story

 

Millennium Bridge - A Random Photo To Break Up The Text!

Leaving Christianity behind wasn’t easy.

It was fantastically liberating though. It was enlightening too in human terms as I discovered more about myself and others over the course of the last decade. Much of my life during the last years couldn’t have been lived had I never challenged my faith or the beliefs about myself that added extra bars to my religious prison. I couldn’t be more grateful that my life now, both outer and inner, has been so transformed by the process through harsh landscapes, wrong turns, points of exquisitely immense or intimate beauty, friendships with those I’d have previously judged as sinners, and a growing and deepening friendship with myself. Myself. Transgender. Autistic. Plural. Creative. Curious. Very weird. Emotional. Bigger on the inside. Anxious. Torn and traumatised. Hopeful. Intelligent. Sometimes unable to function beyond survival. Determined. Questioning. A mess. Problematic. Loving. And currently exhausted and in pain due to my physical health.

So I come to this final piece, for the moment, on leaving Christianity. It’s been an oversimplification of course. It’s only been part of the story telling only pieces of what’s gone on in my head and what’s gone on in this world. In reality there’s been no cut off point between Christianity, other spiritualities, and atheism. Everything merges together. I mentioned a man getting messages from nine dimensional Venusians. That happened eight years ago today long before I resigned membership of my last church. I wrote at the time about how strange it was. I also wrote about appreciating the “energies” in the place and how there was a feeling of reality once everyone finally shut up and let the silence in a shared space do all the talking. In the silence all the beliefs didn’t seem to matter. There was only humanity and some kind of spirituality. I’d still say the beliefs were delusions of course. Nine dimensional Venusians rocking up in Wallsend? It’s unlikely!

I also wrote on Facebook how if there hadn’t been the bizarre new age meditation group, to which I never returned, I’d have been at a bizarre and very conservative charismatic Christian meeting that night full of “spirit manifestations,” prayers of faith, prophecies, extremely enthusiastic worship and claims of miracles. I still keep an eye on that group sometimes. The last claimed miracle was the recovery of a woman from an illness. Okay so it wasn’t instantaneous and people recover anyway but who am I to doubt?! The last prophecies, straight from the mouth of the Holy Spirit himself, were that in storms last winter nobody would be killed and that no property would be damaged. People died. Property was damaged. I watched the next session. There was no apology for the “British Council of Prophets” doing something that would have got them stoned to death for their blasphemy in the Old Testament.

Eight years on I find myself in a surprising position. There is no way I could ever return to either version of faith from that night, the fundamentalist or literalist Christian nor to those New Age claims that aren’t merely non-rational but utterly irrational but which nobody in the groups questions. Philosophically I still agree that literal theism belongs in the past and that the ways many religious groups treat their scriptures need to change or die. I read New Testament passages now and wonder how I could have believed as I believed. I lost the ability to ask the questions because in my vulnerable state I was, for want of better words, brainwashed by a one-way religion which allowed no place for questions or for honest doubt or for any insights that the faith might be wrong in some way, no matter how well attested those insights were.

I was a contradiction though in some ways. While I never believed in a literal six day creation I did believe Adam and Eve were our literal proto-parents and I managed that while simultaneously accepting the insights of evolutionary theories such as humans and monkeys having a common ancestor. A complete contradiction. I believed for example that the temptation narratives in the Gospels were literally and exactly true. Even though Matthew and Luke disagree about the order. I couldn’t begin to form questions about the disciples. Not even to wonder how the first ones were called both after John was put in prison and while he was still baptising in the Jordan, if we’re to trust either narrative. The Bible was true. Apart from an obvious story like the creation in Genesis chapter one. Brainwashing and emotional cultic control are powerful things.

There is no place for any of that in my life and I’d love to see all belief systems like that die. I profess it here. I do not believe. Not in the literal Bible. Not in a literal God who created the universe in six days or who has maintained the universe for 13.8 billion years. I don’t believe in the virgin birth, the nativity stories, the resurrection or that Jesus was the incarnate eternal God through whom all things were made whether in exactly the way he’s God in the Nicene Creed read in perhaps a million churches each week or in any of the ways believed by the so-called heretics who were condemned at Nicaea and elsewhere. There are many beautiful and many horrendous things in the Bible but I could never again believe that God wrote it or that he told people what to write. I don’t believe that the blood of Jesus won my salvation or that one day I’ll be taken to heaven to worship him forever. I don’t believe there’s a listening God who we can pray to and petition to change us or offer supplications to so he’ll jump in and suspend the laws of physics. In short, I disbelieve almost everything I ever believed about God and I disbelieve many of the things I was taught to believe about myself too. Those things are in my past. They’re gone. I have left Christianity behind. God is dead. God was never alive.

Except that’s not the end of the story.

This was to be the final post about definitively leaving Christianity but it needs to be followed by a sixth post to bring this long tale from the past to the present. A sixth post that contains the end of season twist with dramatic music leading to the dreaded caption, “To be continued ...”