Falling from Cloud Nine

The hardest part of becoming an atheist isn’t admitting that god isn’t real. It’s admitting that it was never real.

For so long, all I had was my faith. As a child when I laid in bed, shivering under a donated sleeping bag in our un-heated and un-insulated house, and I talked to Jesus. When my parents were “upset” I talked to Jesus. When I was suicidal, the only thing that kept me alive was the fear of hell. When I recovered from each episode I gave credit to Jesus for “delivering me”. As a teenager my whole world was church, my future plans were ministry and I lived for the high intensity services when “heaven came down”.

I can recognize that so much of that was harmful, when I talked to Jesus as a child, most of the time I was repenting for being rebellious and making my parents upset. After each suicidal episode I felt overwhelming anxiety that if I had another, I was “a dog returning to its vomit” or would be “possessed seven times over”.

However, it’s hard looking at my child self and telling her no one was listening. Her only friend and solace was a figment of her imagination. No one was coming to rescue her. No one cared. She was alone.

For the first time in my life I look at the stars with wonder, not certainty.

There’s a decided beauty in not knowing, not having the answers to the giant existential questions.

The stars, which previously stood as a testament to the power of a deity, now represent endless mystery and possibilities. The world around me comes alive with wild intensity.

Leaving religion felt like the end. The night sky felt empty. Life felt incomplete. I had been taught and believed that there was no reason for living for aside from Christ. But now I’m discovering that I don’t need a reason. I’m alive. Be it by god, or aliens or chemical miracle, I’m alive. I don’t need justification for my existence. I don’t need to apologize for my humanity. Despite all odds, in defiance of abuse, in rebellion to depression, I continue to exist. And that, that my dear friends, is fucking divine.

My story is no longer dictated by a book, or a man, or a religion. It is an empty page with infinite possibilities. The certainty I lost is replaced with adventure. Stepping into the unknown was terrifying. IS terrifying. But the freedom of being able to dream without restraint is exhilarating.

Slowly, I’m reclaiming the wonder I felt as a child. Falling in love with the glorious, terrifying, beautiful mystery of life.

And when I sit and look at the stars, I see endless possibilities.

“Simon Peter replied, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life” – John 6:68

I wish I could have the kind Jesus.

The Jesus that spoke to the woman caught in adultery. The Jesus who healed the sick, simply because he had compassion on them. The Jesus who stood against the powerful and religious in defense of the outcasts.

I remember the illustrated bible story book I read as a child of when Jesus called the little children to him. I always wanted to be one of those children. There seemed to be such safety and serenity in sitting in Jesus arms.

I wish I could have that Jesus.

I wish I could just stop reading at the Gospel of John. I wish I didn’t have to continue into Paul’s epistles. I wish I didn’t know of the misogyny and injustice endorsed in those writings. I wish I had never ventured into Revelation and I wish I didn’t know that the kindness of Jesus is only one candlestick away from turning into wrath. I wish I didn’t have to read that the same Jesus in whose lap I desperately wanted to sit, takes pleasure in slaughtering nations.

I wish I could stop caring.

I wish that now, seeing the cruelty of the scriptures with open eyes, I could walk away and not look back. Yet every time I try I pause, and I don’t know if it’s fear of hell or fear of losing my friends and family, but I can’t just let go. If I’m being honest, it’s hope. It’s hope that I’m wrong, that all of that cruelty, all of that suffering can be explained away. Because something inside me comes alive when I read the scriptures. Something which I don’t know if it’s real or if it’s a learned emotional response, but it’s something that nothing else can fill. It’s the deepest parts of me, that still want to believe in the God of the green pastures and still waters.

I just wish I could find a way to not see.

I want the god of the green pastures, but not the god of the lake of fire. I want the god who’s plans are to prosper and not to harm, but not the god who will laugh at my calamity. I want the compassion without the cruelty. I wish I could un-pull the strings, un-think the thoughts, un-chain the reaction. I wish I could just have blind faith that “God is love” without having to learn that that definition of “love” includes torturing his creation in order to gain glory for himself.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope all the progressive Christians are right and the bible is simply a fallible book that points us to the compassionate god.

I hope that someday there will be room for me in the arms of Jesus.

But deep down I know that hope is false.

If the bible is right, then there is no place for me in heaven. I refuse to stand with the oppressors while the weak are tortured for all eternity. I refuse to worship a god that takes pleasure and glory from that torture.

I don’t know where to go. But I guess I better start figuring it out.

“Woe unto those who call good evil, and evil good” – Isiah 5:20

Dear Christians,

It’s official. I am that reprobate. The one of whom the Bible warns. The one who dares to think that maybe being gay is okay and child abuse is not. Who believes in sexual autonomy and that those who “cover the sin” and “forgive” rapists should be held accountable. A member of the great falling away.

You look at me with emotions that range from pity to outrage. You heard me preach, you believed in my future ministry. Now, I’m the enemy. Now, I’m a cautionary tale to scare the youth group. Someday, you’ll ask me where I “went wrong”, allow me to answer to the best of my ability.

I don’t have a date, or a time. Maybe it was when I watched my sister pull her head out of the drywall one of the many times one of my parents decided she was too rebellious, or immodest, or out of order. Maybe it was watching my mother so internalize the blame for her own assault, that when she beat us for a cape dress that was “too tight” she genuinely believed it was loving. Maybe it was when I watched my own faith twisted to strip me of my autonomy. Maybe it was when my pastor refused to help the rape victims in his church, but invaded the lives of anyone he thought “might be gay”. Maybe it was when I escaped that church, only to watch my new pastor wish he could “round up all the gays and set them on fire”, then sit on my couch and explain how rape is a woman’s fault. Maybe it was when I watched the church refuse to care about people suffering and dying in the streets, all because their new god Donald J Trump said not to. Maybe it was when I saw “Jesus Saves” signs and “Six Million Wasn’t Enough” tshirts at the same riot. Maybe it was when I read history, and all the genocides and evil committed by the church.

Or maybe it was when I looked to the Bible to condemn the evil I saw in the world, and found only support of it.

Maybe it started much earlier. Maybe I began to lose faith when I read in all five books of the Law, that if an engaged woman is raped in the city, she is to be stoned, and if she isn’t engaged she has to marry her attacker. Or when I read in those same books the God-approved process of buying wives. Or in 1st and 2nd Kings, or in Titus 2, or 1 Corinthians 11, or 1 Peter2 and 3, or 1 Cor 14, 1 Timothy 2, when women are consistently presented as second class citizens or less than human. Or again in 1 Peter 2 when the divinely inspired apostle wrote to servants to unconditionally submit to their abusive masters. Maybe it’s the biblically endorsed genocides. Maybe it’s the fact that the Bible does not have a single prohibition against pedophilia and child marriage (provided it’s straight), but has whole chapters dedicated to killing anybody who doesn’t worship your god.

You say that I am twisting morality to fit my worldview, while your highest ideals bully children into suicide.

Your faith is stained with the blood of nations. People whom you killed because they worshipped the wrong god, or loved the wrong person, or had the wrong mental disability. But because I think children don’t belong in cages, I’m the reprobate?

Maybe I don’t know what good is. But I know evil. I have looked it in it’s face. I’ve seen it on the news and in history books. And every time I’ve seen it, it looks like cruelty. It looks like gas chambers and mass graves. It looks like swastikas and burning crosses. It looks like abusers standing with God’s blessing on platforms, secure in their piety.

I am simply disillusioned with American right-wing Christianity? Maybe. But what am I to do with the Bible it’s based upon?

If your morality has done nothing but steal and kill and destroy, what am I to make of it but that it is evil.

And what am I to make of your god but that he is a liar.

There he stood, awkwardly holding up a bible while journalists and photographers took pictures. The “leader of the free world” walked 157 feet from the White House to St. John’s church, reportedly having ordered protestors to be removed using any force necessary.

While the official report denies it, eyewitness accounts and homemade videos record tear gas and batons used to drive back peaceful protestors.

To me, however, it doesn’t really matter what force was used. The message, is what I take issue with. One of the most powerful men in the world silencing the voices crying out for justice and equality with a bible. A bible he himself doesn’t read. A bible that simultaneously condemns injustice while also condemning anyone who rises up against “God appointed authority”.

It’s a tale as old as time itself. From the blood of religious dissenters of the Middle Ages; to the blood of Nat Turner and the early anti slavery fighters; to the blood and tears of the suffragettes; to the blood on the Edmond Pettis bridge, there has always been someone, standing in opposition of the oppressed people, holding a bible. We see them in the pro-slavery sermons of Jonathan Edwards and other preachers of “the great awakening”; in the anti-Semitic writings of Martin Luther; in the religious wordings of the confederate constitution, where sentences like “the god-ordained subjugation of the n——” are frequent; in the conservative Christian opposition to civil rights; in the numerous sermons stating that a woman is created inferior to men; and even in Hitler using religious wording and church leaders to further his twisted agenda.

This silencing of hurting humanity, this promotion of oppression is ingrained in the Christian faith.

And once again, we looked on in unsurprised horror as a powerful man stood, silencing those who would defy abusers, holding a bible for a photo shoot.

I want to find faith. But after so long, one begins to wonder if the problem lies, not with the men holding it, but with the book they use to wield control.

I recently read a post by the Christian comedian/speaker, Chonda Pierce, in response to the news of yet another Christian celebrity announcing they had lost faith. In it she stated that while she had been in situations of doubt there had always been an “and then” moment. A song, a message, a bible verse which seemed to dispel the doubts and give her reason to believe.

Growing up in church, I’ve had many “and then” moments. I’ve struggled with doubt and anger almost my whole life, but there always seemed to be something which “kept me going”. Now, I’m beginning to wonder if that’s enough.

Is a song about the love of God enough to drown out the fact that the Bible calls lgbtq+ people “abominations” but encourages child abuse? Is a sermon enough to erase the ingrained abuse of power in the church?

I’ve lived on those moments. I’ve clung to faith because it’s helped me in the past and I’ve been taught that leaving means being doomed to hell. But I can’t reconcile the wrong I see in the world and the church with the God I once believed in. I’ve tried to find answers in the Bible, but it only seems to side with the abusers and oppressors. It explicitly endorses authority regardless of morality, and condemns victims.

I’m left with a choice; believe in a god who intentionally created me inferior to men, approves, or at least won’t condemn, abuse, blames victims and demands obedience regardless of who it hurts; or, believe that religion was created by humans to enforce societal morals.

It’s almost easier to believe it’s all a lie than to believe that the god I loved is unjust.

What do you do when “and then” isn’t enough?

I don’t have the answers.

I don’t know that anyone does.

But I can no longer pretend I don’t need them.