Questioning Religion

Unlike many Christians, I did not discover Christianity early in my life.

 

Yes, I was baptized, and yes I went to Sunday school. However, being three years old, all I remembered was that Church was yet another place where I had to wear itchy tights and use scissors and paste and crayons and be quiet. I told my mom I didn't want to go anymore, and being a hippie she never made me. I was a very polite, generous child, so it wasn't like I didn't have morals and she had no reason to be concerned that I wouldn't be a good person.

 

My first actual Christian experience was when I was about seven years old.  I was extremely ill and in a hospital around the crack of dawn waiting to be seen.   There was this old brown storybook sitting on a desk beneath a lamp.  We had already been waiting for a while, so I asked my mom to read it to me since I was sick and wanted some comfort.

 

Mom started with Genesis, and she told me after reading the creation myth that many people, including her, believe this is how we came to be. It sounded like a nice story, mostly because I had no idea what it meant.  I just liked the idea that there was light and that it was good, but I didn't take my mom that seriously. After all, at this point I knew what cells were.  I knew about atoms.   

 

About a year later a childhood friend of mine, Erica, was killed in a fire.  When I went to her funeral, I was given a card with her photo on it.  On the back was The Lord Is My Shepherd.

 

Her death was extremely traumatic for me. Previously, death had been a beautiful and sad goodbye to very old people who were very ill. Erica's death was different. Erica was only five years old. I had known her for about four years and played with her often. I have never been able to reconcile this death as being a part of reality.  For years, I seriously thought that maybe she was kidnaped instead.

 

Secondly, my mother risked her life trying to save her before the fire department finally responded to our calls. She took a large rock and smashed open a window in Erica's bedroom trying to get her to wake up and get out while I waited nearby across the street, hiding behind a tree.  When they finally showed, my mother rushed me to house on the next block so I couldn't see them try CPR on Erica and fail, so I couldn't see them load the rest of the people in the house into the MVC to shock trauma.  I spent the rest of the day watching them gut the house to put out the fire, talking to reporters, talking to neighbors, in complete denial that my friend was even dead, telling everyone they were wrong. There was a time I disassociated, just stopped being me, so I would stop thinking about it. For a year afterward there were times I looked in the mirror and forgot who was there.

 

Thirdly, I spent about four years with the view of that gutted house as all you see in our front yard. Previously our family spent many evenings on our front porch.  All of that ended that day. Suddenly, our windows stayed shut.  Everything moved to the back yard whenever possible for a long time. When I was home alone, I stared at that house.  And when I was locked out of my home because I lost the key, I hid from that house.

 

I started reading the Bible a lot that year. I wanted answers.  I wanted to know if I prayed hard enough that it would erase what I felt. I wanted to know that if I knew all the words whether anything would change.  I wanted to know if bad things happened because I was a bad person. I wanted and needed the innocence of magical thinking.

 

A couple of things happened in the next few years.  Eventually, the house was remodeled and the family moved back in, without Erica.  Many of my friends moved away from the neighborhood. I was picked on at school and threatened on a daily basis. Sometimes I came home with bruises. Sometimes I came home with worse.

 

When I was almost twelve, no amount of reading the Bible had improved my life. I felt worse than ever, and in addition I felt horribly guilty.  There was so much suffering in the book.  So much mistreatment. It was the worst book I had ever read.

 

I started writing suicide poetry. I thought my life was over. I retreated in my life and became fearful. So I put the book down, focused on my friends at school, ignored my bullies, talked to my friends about my bullying, and decided to bring silliness into my life. Over a few months, I soon felt a lot better.

 

I actually began attending church on a regular basis for the first time when I was 13. I got a new Bible meant for teens which made me feel a lot better about things.  I began realizing that interpreting the Bible is really hard, and that there was a lot of love in it to live by. Unfortunately, the Church I attended was a fundamental Baptist church.  The sermons were just full of misogyny and politics.  The kids I hung out with were some of the most stupid people I ever met. I tended to hang out with the nicer, smarter people who still believed in things like evolution and such. By the time I was fourteen, though, I was done. While I was still super Christian, I felt like religion should be private and that I had gotten all I needed out of Church.  The last straw was how they treated my mother when my parents separated.

 

Over the next ten years, my magical thinking kept me believing in God, and kept me flipping through the Bible for comfort. However, I wasn't really sure why I still had faith. I was a lady of science and history, and by the time I was sixteen I realized I didn't really buy the whole Jesus thing. I felt more comfortable believing in an afterlife without being told that being a woman made me inferior or being told that my fluid sexual orientation means I should be put to death.

 

Shockingly, my father, who had hardly ever attended Church with me, who never so much as discussed religion with me, was super pissed when I told him at sixteen that I didn't believe in God anymore. He cried out in a rage, asking where all of our dead relatives were if there wasn't a heaven. I felt ashamed and never brought it up again.  He had enough problems to have to deal with any more of mine.  That was hard to deal with.  He had been the one person I had always been able to be myself around, and suddenly that was gone.

 

I was in an abusive relationship with a Satan worshiper during this time.  After the last time he hit me, I spent three months not sleeping.  I spent some time in inpatient care so I could sleep again.

 

I tried really hard to be a Christian after that. I read the Bible daily.  I sang the hymns. I spent hours a day in prayer. I didn't date.  I just wanted to be better.  I wanted to be a good person.  I wanted to feel better, be healthy. I thought briefly about what life would be like if I gave up all my belongings for a chance to become part of the church, or to be in a position of power in the Church in some of the protestant branches.

 

I failed so much!  I kept coming back to it, but I failed and failed.  However, after age 18 I gave up on it for a couple of years. I'd go back to it briefly at times, but most of the time I felt better if I ignored it.

 

By the time I was 25, I was so upset that my heart felt like it was screaming constantly. I was out of my mind with severe depression and anxiety. I called my mother sobbing for answers, and she told me to pray.

 

I prayed intensely.

 

For a while it worked. I felt like it saved my life, bringing a little peace into my life. It was like I was eight again, so I tried searching for answers in the Bible again.

 

However, all the anti-woman and anti-gay messages were still there.  And nobody could agree on the why of them, what it meant, the right way to interpret it all.

 

So at age 28, I was like, well, eff the Bible.  I'll be a Christian without the Bible! Right? I could still love Jesus, yeah?

 

I attended Church every Sunday and I had honestly never felt more loved, more accepted, happier.

 

Until I slowly realize I just didn't believe in it.

 

I just didn't.

 

None of this was real.

 

And it was the cause of too much violence worldwide, too much hate worldwide, and too much unhappiness within myself.

 

For the first time in my life I feel like a worthy person on my own.  I feel like other people are more loveable.  Life feels more precious to me.

 

I feel like giving it up gave me the answers I need.  It's okay to not know things without creating answers that are false. It's okay to say, "You know what? I don't know what happens after my brain dies.  I don't know if there's an afterlife.  I know what I'd like to happen, but it's okay to not know if it's true.  I rather not know than impose it on anybody else."

 

I promise not to scream at anybody for being a believer. If that's what brings you what you need in life to get by, who am I to tell you it's not true?  I am here to say I do not have the answers.  I am here to say that everyone's answers are personal to them, and that what works for one person may not work for someone else.

 

This is why I'm glad religion is not law.