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Goodbye Jesus

It's Easy To See Why I Was So Attracted To It All...


Aiyana

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So as if it wasn't enough that my OCD personality has been missing the structured, perfectionist aspects of Christianity lately, tonight I had to go to my old church for the first time in a long time. I have briefly entered the building a few times to pick my kids up, but tonight I was there for three hours attending a dinner and missions trip debriefing for my 15-year-old's dance ministry group thing. I was walking through the building and saw a verse they had stenciled on the wall. I don't remember the exact verse, but from one of those books like Ephesians or Colossians or something, one of the warm-and-fuzzy Apostle Paul books. Then I walked past some photos of mission trips to India and stuff, and I remembered how much I used to want to go on a missions trip for Christ.

 

A big part of what drew me to the religion was the historical, first-century church aspect of it. I love to think about "olden days", (many different eras, not just 1st century A.D.), and I loved being part of what almost felt like this "secret club". I attended an Assemblies of God type church, and we were all about being "on fire" for Christ, being "radical", and shit like that. And it all just felt so real, you know?

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Yeah, I think I know what you mean.  I would find it quite challenging to go into my old church building now.  I think I need some more time to pass, so that it's further back in my memory.

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I admit, despite all the pain I endured there, I still go back to my church once in a while, on a weekday morning, to play the piano in the sanctuary. The light through the chancel windows is stunning, and the sound on that mighty piano is amazing in that pristine sanctuary. Besides, it gives me a little naughty feeling that the music people chewed me up and spit me out, but I can still go find peace by myself with my music. It's more than they will ever find, stuck in the drama and games.

 

As for mission trips -- just know that they are bogus. Yes, you did miss out on the touchy-feely part and the fun travel with a group of comrades. But I've read reports that constant mission trips (eco-tourism) are harmful for the orphans or others they portend to help. Think about it: Nice people come for a week and bond with the orphans, then leave. Later, another group of nice people come and bond with the children, then leave. Apparently, it causes attachment issues as the kids grow, which makes sense. So all the people from our church come home all rah-rah about it, showing pictures of all the hugs and the poor little brown kids, but did they really "help"?

 

Things sort of blew up at my last church after about the third mission trip, always to the same place. Our group raised tons of money, and went to help build a bathroom and paint the kitchen in the mission building, plus do vacation bible school and (not to sound crass but...) slum with the poor brown people. When they came back and showed photos of the place, the kitchen was larger than the one at our church, filled with beautiful stainless steel equipment like some kind of fancy restaurant. Mumblings ran through the church that their kitchen is nicer than ours -- and mind you, we are a wealthy little church with a fabulous kitchen. (I'm not saying those folks don't deserve a great kitchen, but they're not quite as desperate for money and support as they advertise, know what I mean?) Turns out, the guy in charge was a bit of a scammer, luring churches to send tons of money and volunteers. Our church actually had to pay rent for our volunteers to stay at the mission, like some kind of hotel fee. Wth? With the money we raised to fly all of our people there ($17,000 just for plane tickets), they could have employed several local laborers for a year based on their economy and the power of the dollar there. But the lure is the eco-tourism, and feeling good about spreading the love of god and shit like that. Whatever. Support for the missions drastically declined after that.

 

Sorry to ramble here. I'm just pointing out that all those trappings are bogus. Don't pine for it too much. You're better off outside. Moving on is good and healthy.

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Christianity has a way of making you feel that you are special (as worthless and disgusting as it tells you that you are) and a part of this great thing to save the world. You end up feeling like a badass superhero if you are the dramatic type, and every Sunday is a convention of the chosen ones. I repeatedly heard that Christians are royalty because gawd is their father, and got the idea that I was a princess. For a while I wanted to go around wearing a tiara, though I never did, thank heaven.

 

When did you become Christian, Aiyana? How long did it last?

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RenaissanceWoman, you're right, about it being too fake to be true. And you're right about the "poor little brown kids" stuff. As a deconvert it really disgusts me that Christians go to foreign countries and try to tell them "we're right, you're wrong". But man, I tell ya... I sure did want to go on one. I wanted to go to Uruguay when it was our spring, their fall. I wanted to wear sweaters and drink mate and shiver in delight in the fall air at how romantic it all was.

 

Lilith, I was raised a Catholic, but it was when I was 14-15ish that I heard of evangelical Protestant Christianity (AKA "getting saved", "giving your heart to Christ", etc. I was incredibly drawn to all of it, but kept on in my heathen teenage ways until I was a young adult. I spent about 18 months at age 20 and 21 as a "seeker", and I "got saved" one May morning in 2001, when I was 21 years old. I dove into it hard core. I was already a mother to a toddler, and a young wife (in a horrible marriage). I dove big time into the church, and was extremely passionate about all of it. There were always some intellectual doubts, but my emotional need to believe was so strong that I pushed those doubts down, until I couldn't any longer. Some stuff happened in my early 30's that really disillusioned me to all of it, and put deconversion into high gear. It unraveled like a ball of yarn. I fought it for awhile... I went even more hardcore fundamentalist for a little bit... I tried other denominations out... but it kept unraveling. I tried desperately to hang on... I would go to concerts and things like that just for the temporary high that would return for a few hours. I pored over Scripture to find answers for these questions... I had long conversations with other believers and with pastors... but finally, one day around New Years' 2014, it hit me: The Bible was written by man. It isn't "God's word". And it was all over from that moment forward. I came out publicly with my deconversion in April 2014 at the age of 34.

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Good for you for getting out. That sounds like me: struggling with doubts, but pushing them down, and I had a similar moment where the nonsense "hit" me and that was it. Did you know about any of the negative things before converting: treatment of women, anyone who doesn't worship god, massacres of non-Israelites, rape- and slavery-culture, and the rest? What were the doubts that made you want to leave?

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No, I didn't really know about any of those negatives at that point. I very much fell for the "marketing department" of Christianity.

 

It's hard to remember what my doubts were in the beginning. I just remember being at Bible studies and being the "pot-stirrer", the questioner. Later on, as deconversion really kicked in, it was a lot of different things. The whole topic of hell was huge. I learned in early 2011 that my dad was an atheist. I was 31 years old and had never known this, and it hit me like nothing ever had before. I thought I needed to work to save him, you know? But then it just started to seem so ludicrous. My dad is a hard worker, ethical, faithful husband, good dad... never does anything but contribute positively to society... yet, hell? WHAT??

 

Divorce was another. I divorced and remarried... my ex-husband cheated, and I'd always believed that was the biblical loophole to get out of a marriage. But then I started learning that there are denominations that believe, nope. If your marriage is bad... even if he/she cheats... too bad. You're fucked. You're stuck with that dude/chick for life. It just didn't make sense. My first marriage was horrible. Drug addiction, alcoholism, cheating, verbal/emotional abuse... and I should stay with him for life?

 

I think, though, if there was ONE thing that really caused my doubts to grow, it was meeting a person who took the Bible really, REALLY literally. I had never known anyone like that before. I only knew your typical American Christian, that cherry-picks. Meeting this person that believed the Bible 100% literally really opened my eyes to the fact that the Bible is full of a lot of crazy, bad shit. I eventually realized that God and Jesus were kind of dicks. I realized that the goodness and love and hallelujahs that are sold to the public are not the whole story.

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Christians who go trying to "save" people make me so angry. They always talk about god's so-called goodness, justice, love, mercy...and they never say a thing about the controlling part of it, having to accept all the crap god did and Christians did in god's name. They never say anything about the 32,000 or so women that the Israelites were told they could take when they conquered the Moabites. "Kill all the men and boys, and women who have slept with a man, but save the girls for yourselves...." I think that's in Numbers 31. They never say a word about Israelites being allowed to have slaves from other regions, but not from among their own people as Israelites were god's chosen people, and they could beat these slaves within an inch of their lives as long as the slaves did not die directly as a result. They forget to mention that fathers could sell their daughters, and that girls who were "proven" not to have been virgins the first time they had sex with the new husbands were stoned to death. And that people with some sort of deformity or people whose parents were not married, were not allowed in the temple because they were unclean. (So much for churches being about compassion.) I could go on and on. When you find that stuff out after converting, you're already hooked.

 

I talked to a Christian woman who said that she and her church never convinced people not to be gay. Becoming normal the way god intended just naturally happened to a woman they converted after receiving the holy spirit. I thought, you didn't tell her about any of the horrible things in the bible, did you? You didn't tell her that god commands gay people to be killed, did you? You just let her believe all the bullshit about his love and mercy, so she ate up a lie about who she is being sinful.

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As a deconvert it really disgusts me that Christians go to foreign countries and try to tell them "we're right, you're wrong".

 

I have the same disgust. But I have mixed feelings about it too, because there are some missionary groups that do more than just spread the gospel. Groups like World Vision, for example, go in and dig wells for clean water, distribute mosquito nets to combat rampant malaria, set up schools, donate goats or chickens or sewing machines and teach women to support their families. And those missionaries actually stay in the communities they serve, rather than the revolving door of wealthy (by comparison) tourists from safe healthy countries who want to massage their egos by thinking they are helping for one measly week of their easy lives. I wonder a little about colonialism, but I also appreciate alleviating suffering, so it's a dilemma for me. And I cringe to think that these folks are distributing bibles and teaching that nonsense.

 

To their credit, churches in America jump up when natural disasters hit, and donate all kinds of supplies, water, money. However, I also think this is a basic humanitarian impulse, and we don't need god to compel us to help alleviate suffering. It's just that the churches are organized and can make these things happen quickly and en masse. It's easy to give through them. Now, for example, when a natural disaster hits and I feel the urge to donate in some way, all that comes to mind is the Red Cross (although of course there are plenty of other secular groups out there -- just not on my radar, top of my mind.) If I want some other non-faith-based organization, I have to actually go online and research a bit, whereas before I could just write a check at my church and be done. Secular or Christian-based, we still should research to make sure our help is actually reaching the recipients, and not being skimmed or squandered or diverted, which is a whole other can of worms.

 

Well, here ends another rambling response, a bit off topic. I just wanted to clarify my different feelings about missionary trips versus true humanitarianism.

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I talked to a Christian woman who said that she and her church never convinced people not to be gay. Becoming normal the way god intended just naturally happened to a woman they converted after receiving the holy spirit. I thought, you didn't tell her about any of the horrible things in the bible, did you? You didn't tell her that god commands gay people to be killed, did you? You just let her believe all the bullshit about his love and mercy, so she ate up a lie about who she is being sinful.

I'm glad you're out, Aiyana. It's amazing what hellholes we can be in when we're in our twenties. And they want to lay on us a whole life of being unhappy?

 

Lilith, was that woman saying that gays and lesbians just become heterosexual after they get saved at her church? This is pretty clearly simply false, unless maybe it really only happened to one lesbian because she decided to adopt a different role with a guy.

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It was a few years ago, so I don't remember exactly what she said. I don't think she meant her church specifically (which ironically had a female preacher on occasion, according to her); although she and her Christian buddies went saving people, possibly at the church. I think she meant to say people become straight after getting saved.

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People can become straight after converting? Wow. Maybe for a bit, but I just don't see how that is sustainable over time. The cognitive dissonance would have to eventually accumulate to a point that it could no longer be maintained. Repressing basic human instincts is damaging enough for us straight folks, so the guilt and shame and self-hate would have to be even more intense for them. How long could someone live like that? I would think there would be a painful deconversion in their future.

 

I shudder to think.

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All the poor gay and lesbian evangelicals who consider the hetero-only sex only in hetero marriage "lifestyle" as closed to them - and who struggle on with celibacy because they're told to - are proof that the lady in Lilith's story was wrong.

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I know. It's insane. She hears from these people that they're de-gayed, and she thinks, "Yay! All better now!" It's like when I was in middle school and brought a non-Christian friend to the summer Jesus camp, and believed that she got "saved" when she agreed to go pray in the hall outside with Jesus. Of course she did. The adult leader asked the kids if any of them wanted to ask Jesus into their hearts (after a few days of bible stories and some crafts? Seriously?) and anyone who did was to raise their hand. Of course the kids would bend to pressure from an adult and might have felt that they owed the leaders something in exchange for having fun. Of course my friend did that to make me feel good, since I had brought her, we were in the same room, she knew I was a super-committed Christian, and I was looking at her hopefully. But I couldn't see that then. It was all "Friend got saved! Whoopee!" because I was led to believe in magical conversions after which the person was totally into Jesus. And of course the kids wouldn't come close to understanding the commitment that the bible leaders wanted from them. They thought they were just having fun and the prayer was a one-time thing that they could forget about later. Grrr, thinking about it pisses me off--leading kids like that so they don't know what they're expected to get into. Needless to say, Friend was not a devout believer after that; she went on living life, and I was disappointed.

 

Okay. Rant over. My original point was, Christian Lady knew nothing of what was really going on with the gay person she tried to convert, and took "getting saved" and maybe giving up the "gay lifestyle" for a time as proof of the holy spirit working in her heart. Christianspeak. Lol. Christians are so naïve.

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Guest Furball

 I still go back to my church once in a while, on a weekday morning, to play the piano in the sanctuary. 

 

I am curious if they bug you at all for only coming back once in a while. I remember when i would take a sunday off, they were on me like white on rice asking where i was and if i was losing interest in their church. 

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Ew, Catt, that's creepy. And kind of needy. I went to a "teen night" at another church once when I was 17, not interested in actual church but hoping to meet some people around my age in my town where no one lives. There was one kid there who was maybe 13 and the rest were nine, ten, eleven or so. Not to mention the bible discussion was years below my level. And we played kickball, with the girls (except me) wearing skirts. Ugh. I think the pastor and his church and family were pretty conservative, which would explain the skirts. So when I didn't go back, the pastor and a kid showed up at my house asking about it. I think I tried to give some evasive answer, and they didn't come back.
 

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As for mission trips -- just know that they are bogus. Yes, you did miss out on the touchy-feely part and the fun travel with a group of comrades. But I've read reports that constant mission trips (eco-tourism) are harmful for the orphans or others they portend to help. Think about it: Nice people come for a week and bond with the orphans, then leave. Later, another group of nice people come and bond with the children, then leave. Apparently, it causes attachment issues as the kids grow, which makes sense. So all the people from our church come home all rah-rah about it, showing pictures of all the hugs and the poor little brown kids, but did they really "help"?

 

 

I used to wonder about this myself.  I had a cousin who went on a mission trip to Russia for a week to play with/cuddle little Russian orphans and abandoned children.  She loved it and sent heart-breaking pictures.  But I wondered how useful this was.  Group after group of nice people coming in to cuddle and play with young children?  How could this not create attachment issues?  These are children, human beings, not kittens and puppies that need socialized to people.  On the other hand, if nobody comes in and the Russian staff is overwhelmed with work and nobody cuddles and plays with the orphans, then that outcome could be even worse.  Other than access to excellent birth control and safe abortion (which of course doesn't help with young children who are orphaned by parents' deaths), I see no good answer to this.

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