Where I Was And Where I Am Now

[diggindiddy]

Hi everyone. Thank you for this website. It is a goldmine, a breathe of fresh air. I found a lot of comfort reading other's testimonies, but now I feel like I need some more direct support to continue my journey and therefore I decided to share a bit of my story. Please excuse my english (not my first language).

I will try to make it short (for the time being at least), because it is difficult for me to keep focus right now and I am easily lost in details and I could end up rambling for hours.

I 32 years old. I was raised christian by my mother. My father was christian when they god married but lost faith before I was born. Family on my mother's side is deeply religious. For some time, my grandmother and my aunt even were in some kind of cult (a woman from their church pretended to have a lot of revelations from god and started to have some followers).

I had a troubled life. My childhood was stressful, I was an anxious child. Both my father and my mother have type of personalities which make other people nervous. As their only child, I was deeply affected by their behavior. I started a dissociative disorder before the age of 6.

As a teen I started to put everything in question and I was rejecting most of my christian education. I was just building my own personality. It did not last long : at age 16 I experienced a destructive relationship which made my fragile psyche collapsed and voices in my head started to get aggressive and scary. My mother and her parents got me see an pastor who prayed to exorcise me, which was a very disturbing experience (feeling something coming out of me and trowing up, the whole package). I was taken to see a psychiatrist only after that, because I did not felt any better, even worse.

It was this experience I think who made me go back to being an evangelical christian. I think I believed that all the pain I was going through was because I went away from the right path that my family reached me. It made some sense at that point : if I had been a good christian girl and I had not been dating a non-christian boyfriend who turned out to be a narcissistic pervert, I would not have been manipulated nor abused and would not have suffered so much. I believed that if I went back to being that perfect little angel, the pain would go away.

My mental health went had its ups and down until at 19 it started again, out of nowhere. This time there was no boyfriend to blame. I thought I was possessed by a daemon again, so I went to my pastor. We had talks for a while, we did not pray so much. At some point he convinced me that my problem was not spiritual and addressed me to a psychiatrist.

7 years later, at 26 years old, I started to feel a lot better. I finally had the courage to ask myself some deep questions about what I believed, and I turned to a less fundamental vision of faith. I stopped putting myself pressure to wait until marriage to have sex and I started to listen to metal rock again (finally relieved of the fear that some daemon into the music would take over my soul). 3 years after that, I could go off meds.

2014 was the year my companion and I started to try conceive our first baby. We learned that I was pregnant very soon (10 days !) and less than a month later we learned that we were expecting twins. We were so happy, we looked for another place to live and planned to tell our families as a surprise during birthdays parties that were planned when I was two month pregnant. I was such a joy to announce that to everybody.

Then comes 14 of November 2014. This is the day my faith collapsed. I think I did not realized it at the time, but now I know. On 14 november 2014, I saw on the echography's monitor that one of the twin I was carrying since 14 weeks stopped growing a few weeks before. I immediately called my companion, who was travelling for his work. He was supposed to be back for the echography, but that morning he overslept and missed his flight. He had never had the chance to go to one with me before. It was supposed to be the first day for him to see his twins on the screen.

I could catch him on the phone just before he went on his plane. We could not see each other for the following hours. I got support from the ladies in the hospital, then a friend, then my mom came by. He was alone. I was just waiting for him to come home so we could cry together.

Something definitely broke in me that day. Was it to lose one of my babies, or the additional pain to be separated from my companion to learn it ? I was very anxious for this pregnancy. I prayed a lot, and saw the news of twins as a sign of God, as if he was telling me "it's ok, don't be so afraid of the 20% of miscarriages of the first trimester, you are getting twins which has an even lower chances to happen. Stop worrying of numbers !". I also felt like it was a way to get in peace with my family history because my grandmother had a twin sister and it felt to me like it was closing some thing… like if I could finally connect in a positive way with them. The 12 weeks passed and I had no sign of bleeding, nor pains, so I thought everything was going fine. Turned out that one of the babies stopped at 11 weeks and that in this kind of situation, there is not sign of issue. He is just "absorbed" by the body. The other baby continues to grow just fine.

On this day, I just understood that there was nothing there. No sign, no message, nothing to understand. It is just how Nature decided to deal with the perpetuation of our specie. It's cold, heartless, pure logic. How could a loving father ignore my repeated supplication to take care of the two small things in my womb ? How could he let my companion not wake up on that morning, adding these unbearable hours of separation to something that was already unbearable by itself ?

Now I think that the answer is "there is no He. He did not do that, he's just not there".

This is it for past story. It took me a long time to process that I don't really believe any more. It only started to be clear to me three weeks ago. My life has been turned upside down by the pregnancy, moving, birth of the most perfect little girl in the world and 8 month of post-partum depression. Now I feel the urge of figuring all of this out.

It's pretty clear for me know that I think that there is probably no god, and if there is one he is not like the god that is described in the bible. He does not interfere.

My biggest issue these days is that I feel guilty. I read stories of other christians who begged God to give them their faith back and doing everything they could to be believers again, and I feel guilty because I don't want do that ! Since as long I can remember I was never confortable with christianity. As a child I felt like there was something dark inside me, I did not understand why faith seems to be so good and simple for other family members but not for me. Now I now that when I started dissociate as a child, there was a part of me who was gullible and believed everything my mother said, and another part who was not ok, saw contradictions and was scared all the time because she felt that the world around her was something that she could not rely on and was impossible to understand. I felt this tension inside my mind and I did not know what it was. I was asking so many questions, thinking all the time. I can't count all the times that I was told to stop thinking so much, and the sad part is that I even tried ! Never succeed though. Right now I just would like to feel free and ripe off all this judgmental education. I feel like I am an hypocrite and that I an dis-evangelizing myself, avoiding reading or listening to arguments that could lead me to believing again. That's the reason I feel guilty, and the precise point on which I would appreciate feedback from other ex-christians. Did any of you avoided any source of christian influence, scared to get converted again ? Did that make you feel like you were forcing your de-conversion in someway ? How do you look back on this from where you are now ?

Thank you very much in advance. I am kind of stuck at this point and I could really use my sleep back. I am very happy to be here.

[♦ Fuego ♦]

Wow! Welcome to Ex-C. When believers tell you to quit thinking so much, it is out of fear. They know if they think things through that their faith will probably tumble, and emotionally they feel that that will be dangerous (miss heaven, burn forever), even though that doesn't make any sense. Because of that tight little loop of mental/emotional programming, we have thousands of churches across the world. But you saw through it and understood that there is no god, no answers to prayers, and found us on the Internet who reached the same conclusion. Good job!

 

The "something dark inside me" is a common feeling for humans. We all have what Jung called the shadow self, or the abyss (if i remember correctly). Our minds are complex things that can sometimes seem like a bunch of personalities crammed together in one body, and when someone religious gets into your head at an early age, it is easy to think of those personalities as demons or spirit guides (or God). There are no good arguments from their side, just condemnation for not believing, accusation for "wanting to sin" which again assumes their invisible world of angels and demons and god is all true when it is simply a silly child's pretend world that you have rejected.

 

I told some strong pentecostal friends that I deconverted. They really didn't have any arguments. The matriarch just wanted me to look her in the eyes and tell truthfully why I left, so I did. I told her that she would have no problem with a Muslim deconverting, but a Christian is somehow different. To me all of the gods ever imagined are all the same. She was satisfied that I was telling her the truth from my perspective, not running off to enjoy rebellion. I spent a long time pondering my faith, the reasons I first believed, and wrote a non-published book to sort it all out and get it off my chest. I know that all religions like this are untrue, and I have not looked back because of that (in the same way that I don't worry about 2+2 might somehow equal 17).

 

Please continue to peruse the postings here and make yourself at home!

[qadeshet]

You will find a lot of help and support here. Welcome!

[directionless]

Welcome, @diggindiddy

[AbsolvedOfFaith]

diggindiddy, from one new member to another, welcome to Ex-C! My heart goes out to you, truly, in solidarity, for what you've experienced. 

 

To the point of feeling guilty, you needn't be. What you need is time to heal from all the hurt you've experienced. Like with any hurtful person, object, or thing in life the solution isn't to continue exposure to it but rather the opposite. Certainly not to force it if that's not what you want. 

 

I do understand those feelings of guilt, though. I did have them myself, usually coupled with deathly fear of being wrong.

 

My journey wasn't a straight line from belief to unbelief, but peaks and craters. I'd yell out at God in anger, and as some sort of pitiful creature be sobbing for forgiveness in the next moment. When I began to doubt God's existence, fear of being wrong would wash over me and I would force myself to believe. I'm fairly certain I've said the "Jesus Prayer" over 50 times in my lifetime because of it. I even went through almost a year of pure torment where I was convinced I was damned. 

 

And as for thinking too much, I suffer from social anxiety and generalized anxiety disorders, so I fit the definition of the negative part of "thinking too much" perfectly. If there's anything I've learned, there is always a positive form of "thinking too much" and a negative form. 

 

The positive form is critical analysis, or being a critical thinker. People tend to level the "you think too much" comment against this form of thinking precisely because they don't have any better answer other than to attack you and not your arguments. I echo Fuego's comments on this.

 

The negative form I often experience when I am second or triple-guessing a healthy, positive decision I have made through said critical thinking above to separate myself from something harmful or hurtful. In my personal opinion, I think that's the key thing to remember when feelings of guilt rear their ugly head. 

[diggindiddy]

Thank you for your answers. It is really helping. I kinds of freaks me out when I read ex-christians talking about months and years of anxiety before being finally free and fine with leaving religion. I've already been anxioux all my life and feeling very bad for almost 15 years and I'm sick of it. I just want to have a normal life and feel ok, and it seems to be so far away... I don't know if I can make it.

 

I wish there was a shortcut I could take to process all of this and cure quickly.

 

I am not afraid of dying anymore. The idea of afterlife was scary to me. Now that I think that if I die there will be nothing, I feel relieved... and I also feel danger. There are these dark moments when I think a lot about killing myself and really the only thing that keeps my for doing it is my companion and my 10 month old daughter who will be miserable if I leave them (at least in the beggining). Until now, I was afraid of killing myself because I believed that I would continue to exist and be able do see their pain and feel guilty... but now there is this dangerous idea that if I am just dead-dead, there will be not guilt and no matter how much they suffer, it will not affect me anymore.

 

I still don't want them to suffer though. I'm not that self-absorbed. Their love will probably be ehough to help me resist the temptation when I feel very bad. However this new way to consider death scared me and I felt like it would be a good idea to share.  I always talk about these feelings when they come because I know that it is the best way to prevent me from doing something stupid.

 

All my childhood I was lied to. I was told a buch of farytales about someone always being with me, miracle always possible when no hope is left and life never ending. I was told that everyting would be fine, I just needed to be confident and obeidient. None of this was true. Life is not ok. Bad things happen. People die. We suffer. We never really know if good things will last and if bad things will end. There is no way to know if things are going to be ok know, there is nobody to turn to and no miracle to hope for when all hope is gone. I don't know what my life will be made of and I don't know if it will be ok. I don't know if my daughter will grow up ok or will die suddenly. There is just life with all its uncertainty, and nobody in my entire life had ever bother to taught me to deal with that. Everytime I came to my mother with these fears she answered with religion and most of the time it was comforting. I do not know how to comfort myself another way. I don't know if I will have the courage to learn this lesson at this point of my life when I am so tired of everything.

 

The future seems so scary right know.

[yunea]

Welcome to the forum diggindiddy, that's quite a story you told. I dissociate as well due to a difficult childhood, and some of the things you said about it resonated with me quite a bit. 

 

I was terrified when I lost my faith. Indeed I could no longer count on miracles, no one to walk with me, no one to hear my every thought. Then again bad coincidences stopped having meaning, as well. The world just sucks sometimes and that's it, the random bad stuff is not punishment, no need to sit down and ask god what he is trying to teach me through this pain. 

 

I have also lived through the fear of going "crazy" if I read Christian apologetics or watch videos of speaking in tongues. It passed eventually but it was a very strong fear, almost like a phobia. 

 

Figuring out that I am able to support myself after all because "my own power" is NOT futile and wicked, and that my "god" and "jesus" were actually parts of my broken mind and the love I felt from them was really me loving myself - those have been the two best steps about my deconversion.

 

I hope to hear more from you.

[rjn]

 

The negative form I often experience when I am second or triple-guessing a healthy, positive decision I have made through said critical thinking above to separate myself from something harmful or hurtful. In my personal opinion, I think that's the key thing to remember when feelings of guilt rear their ugly head.

 

This. As someone who suffers from OCD and GAD, I can totally relate. There's thinking and there's thinking, endless circular arguments with oneself isn't it though, it's purely destructive.

[PragmaticIdealist]

Being aware of negative triggers and avoiding them is a good thing; for you and your daughter. Having a child and experiencing unconditional love for possibly the first time will do wonders for your emotional health in the long-term. Best wishes.

[hockeyfan70]

Thank you for your answers. It is really helping. I kinds of freaks me out when I read ex-christians talking about months and years of anxiety before being finally free and fine with leaving religion. I've already been anxioux all my life and feeling very bad for almost 15 years and I'm sick of it. I just want to have a normal life and feel ok, and it seems to be so far away... I don't know if I can make it.

 

I wish there was a shortcut I could take to process all of this and cure quickly.

 

I am not afraid of dying anymore. The idea of afterlife was scary to me. Now that I think that if I die there will be nothing, I feel relieved... and I also feel danger. There are these dark moments when I think a lot about killing myself and really the only thing that keeps my for doing it is my companion and my 10 month old daughter who will be miserable if I leave them (at least in the beggining). Until now, I was afraid of killing myself because I believed that I would continue to exist and be able do see their pain and feel guilty... but now there is this dangerous idea that if I am just dead-dead, there will be not guilt and no matter how much they suffer, it will not affect me anymore.

 

I still don't want them to suffer though. I'm not that self-absorbed. Their love will probably be ehough to help me resist the temptation when I feel very bad. However this new way to consider death scared me and I felt like it would be a good idea to share.  I always talk about these feelings when they come because I know that it is the best way to prevent me from doing something stupid.

 

All my childhood I was lied to. I was told a buch of farytales about someone always being with me, miracle always possible when no hope is left and life never ending. I was told that everyting would be fine, I just needed to be confident and obeidient. None of this was true. Life is not ok. Bad things happen. People die. We suffer. We never really know if good things will last and if bad things will end. There is no way to know if things are going to be ok know, there is nobody to turn to and no miracle to hope for when all hope is gone. I don't know what my life will be made of and I don't know if it will be ok. I don't know if my daughter will grow up ok or will die suddenly. There is just life with all its uncertainty, and nobody in my entire life had ever bother to taught me to deal with that. Everytime I came to my mother with these fears she answered with religion and most of the time it was comforting. I do not know how to comfort myself another way. I don't know if I will have the courage to learn this lesson at this point of my life when I am so tired of everything.

 

The future seems so scary right know.

My fear of dying is gone as well. But yes, please don't kill yourself. It really sucks for those who are left behind. My brother committed suicide a year and a half ago and I'm still dealing with the shockwaves, both with myself and my daughter who doesn't know it was suicide but still struggles with missing him.

[diggindiddy]

Thank you a lot for all your kind answers. Your support is just what I need right now. Your words really help me answer all the questions that pop to my head and make me go further.

[hockeyfan70]

There are definitely ups and downs in the deconversioning process. But I have such a sense of freedom, that in the times when I am down I remind myself how constricting religion is.

[diggindiddy]

Wednesday I "came out" to my cousin (we are kind of close). She took it well, but still couldn't avoid some of the annoying typical answers I read on stories of other Ex-C. One of them was "I think you never really had a real relationship with Jesus". To that I answered that I could only agree with her, as I now believe that he is not there, I sure cannot say that I had a real relationship with him. She seem to didn't like that answer I understand that she needs to believe that in order to keep up with her own beliefs. If she starts to admin that christianity did no good to me, she would need to admit that it is not absolutely good for everybody and that would put everything into question. Therefore, she has to think that something is wrong with me, as long as she remains a believer.

 

What irritated me most was what she said when I told her that I did not want any proselytism around my daughter, and that if it happened anyway the concerned persons will have 1 or 2 warnings tops, and afterwards will not be authorised to see without supervision any more. According to her, that is a "extremist point of view" ... Yeap, I'm the extremist now. Our grandmother cutts off the stories with the witch from the Picsou Magazines and refuses to wear the J'adore from Dior perfume because God may be offended, but I am the extremist.  

 

She also told my that telling my daughter that we don't really know if some God exists or not and that everybody has different point of views will make her insecure and that children need to hear a clear "yes" or "no" from their parents otherwise they will be anxious. We argued over this for a long time. For some reason, she seem to believe that because she babysits foster kids of a family in her neighbourhood for two years she is now some kind of professional in childbearing. It is already annoying enough to get advices from other parents, I am not going to take them from a girl who has no children... If my kid gets anxious everytime I told him that I don't know something, I will took him to a child therapist because something is definitely disturbing him at another level, don't you think ? If we were not talking about religion, I am conviced that she would never said anything like that.

 

In fact, about one month ago I tricked her. We were talking and I was not ready to tell her my faith was on the spot, so I told her that I was putting into question some things in my education, from the family (we talked a lot in the past about how our family is wrecked and we rejected a lot of things already, not specifically religious things). I told her that I had the feeling that maybe the family would prefer me to stay mentally ill than let me think differently. At no point I said that it was about faith so she had no clue and she said : what are you afraid of ? Getting better ? Being yourself ? Let go what you have to ! She even send me a postal card with a bunch of frogs, all green except one and saying "be yourself". I knew all the time she would never have been that supportive if she knew what I was talking about. I feel sorry for her.

 

I thought that this discussion did not bugged me but it still did. It was not easy being told that I was the problem in not believing. It is what I believed all my life and it hurt me. I did not realise it until thins morning when I started being angry for no reason and my companion had to help me figure out that it was this phone call. It is also probably because I have been through some papers and I found a lot of things that I wrote back when I was a believer and it disturbed me. Who am I ? Did I really wrote these things with the same brain ? How can I be the same person ?

 

Tonight I plan to do some kind of symbolic ritual. It is the new moon, the beginning of a new lunar cycle, and it is a good time to think about new projects and make plans. I an willing to burn my baptism certificate together with a bunch of other related papers and bury the ashes in a circle of soil to symbolise the death of my old beliefs and a clean place for something else to grow now. I hope I will be able to do that, because we have a party tonight and I will have to put my daugther to sleep somewhere that is not home and I don't know how it will go... I really would like to perform this little ceremony, I always have been really into symbolic healing gestures. I find it empowering and it helps me think and get closure.

 

Happy new moon to everybody thank you for reading me.

[GuyGone]

I think there are three reasons we find it hard to leave faith.  First is that we really want there to be a God because we want there to be a powerful being who is completely on our side.  Second is that we like certainty.  If there is a God, then we know the future.  Maybe not our specific immediate future, but the ultimate future.  We have certainty that all wrongs will be righted and all evil will be put in its place.  Third is fear - what if we decide there is no God, but there is, and he's really ticked?

 

Maybe the first thing to do is decide which of those is the biggest factor for you.  Have to identify the problem before we can deal with it.

 

I suspect that most of us here (me, certainly) would believe in God again if he did something unambiguous to make himself known.  As I've said before, nobody can prove God doesn't exist, but only God can prove he does.  Christians have all kinds of excuses why God doesn't do that today ("it would be coercive" is one), but in the Bible, people got sufficient evidence to believe and trust God. They didn't have to make it up in their minds (I'm describing this as if the Bible stories are real, I realize that).  I don't see why it would be coercive now if it wasn't then.  So I finally concluded that if my faith wasn't important to God, why should it be important to me? (I'm repeating concepts from my book here). I finally decided that if God does something that I can recognize as real, without having to interpret it, read tea leaves, or twist something normal into something supernatural, I could believe again.  But that hasn't happened so far, and I consider the ball to be in God's court (whether God is real or not).  If God only loves people who are capable of blind superstition, then he isn't much of a God.  God should be capable of more love than we are.  And if he really wants people to believe in him and trust him, he should provide at least as much evidence as was recorded in the Bible, at least for those who want to believe.  I just don't see that happening.

 

I don't know if any of that is helpful or not.

[diggindiddy]

Thank you for your answer.

 

Third is fear - what if we decide there is no God, but there is, and he's really ticked?

 

That is definitely my main issue. Truth being, I really want him Not to be there. All of this heaven/hell/judgement/devil/eternity stuff bothered me all my life. All I want know is to care only for what can bee seen and understood until the day I die and cease to exist. Some people may find it sad and not enough, but I find it comforting. Therefore, the idea of God suddenly deciding to reveal himself to me and giving me proof is frightening me, because then I would have no excuse anymore and I would have to believe again !

 

... and I like to much being free. I am sick of being told what is good and what is bad. I want to decide by myself and trust my guts, just be me.

 

And yes, sometimes I feel hypocrite, because of that. All my life I felt like a bad christian and now I feel like a bad ex-christian because I would not give God a warm welcome if he revealed himself. A part of me is telling me that even if he was there I would not be able to see him, precisely because I don't want to !

 

Maybe guilt is like a drug for me and I'm addicted to it...

 

XXX

DD

[diggindiddy]

Ok I just got a breakthrough I think I got it. I was thinking : If only I could want to stay christian and loose my faith despite my will, I would not feel guilty !

 

That's it : responsibility. That is a big lack in my education. All I was ever taught is that I am supposed to fulfil God's will. As long as I fulfil his will, I don't have to feel guilty for anything, because it is not my will but his. That is the reason why you absolutely can't argue with my grandparents about anything : they don't have a point of view, they have God's point of view. They have absolutely no responsibility in what they think, they just think whatever God thinks.

 

That is probably why I fear so much to think for myself. I was taught that everything that comes from me is bad and that I should ignore all of that and act like an empty bottle just waiting for God to pour himself inside of me...

 

I need to learn to assume my choices.

[GuyGone]

What I used to tell people when I was a pastor is this: In the absence of a clear direction from God, you make the best decision you can with the information you have.

 

Let's assume for the moment that there is a God and the Bible is factual.  So now look at Moses and David. Both were heroes of the Bible. Both were leaders of Israel. Both had specific, recorded interactions with God (or God's prophets) to give them specific direction.  But as administrative, religious, and military leaders of the nation of Israel, each of them had to make thousands of decisions affecting themselves and the people around them.  These decisions ranged from trivial judicial decisions to nation-impacting decisions.  There is no evidence in the Bible that God directed every one of those decisions or even a majority of them.  Unless we assume things that aren't there, both of those people (and Saul, and Paul, and Peter, and everyone else in the Bible) lived most of their lives making the best decisions they could with the information they had.  Now, in their case, "information they had" included what they believed about God, what they believed about right and wrong and their previous interactions with God.  But unless we insist that God told them everything they were to do each day (a theology that is found nowhere in the Bible), 99.999% of their decisions were theirs to make.

 

Same with us.  Even if there is a God, almost all of our decisions are ours to make.

[Jeff]

Welcome.

Don't worry. You have a lot to work through but just be patient and educate yourself. I still read things that solidify my decision to leave foolish faith behind.

Your daughter will be much happier if she doesn't have to worry all of the time about some invisible person watching here.

Hang in there and get involved here as you can.

[diggindiddy]

What I used to tell people when I was a pastor is this: In the absence of a clear direction from God, you make the best decision you can with the information you have.

 

Let's assume for the moment that there is a God and the Bible is factual.  So now look at Moses and David. Both were heroes of the Bible. Both were leaders of Israel. Both had specific, recorded interactions with God (or God's prophets) to give them specific direction.  But as administrative, religious, and military leaders of the nation of Israel, each of them had to make thousands of decisions affecting themselves and the people around them.  These decisions ranged from trivial judicial decisions to nation-impacting decisions.  There is no evidence in the Bible that God directed every one of those decisions or even a majority of them.  Unless we assume things that aren't there, both of those people (and Saul, and Paul, and Peter, and everyone else in the Bible) lived most of their lives making the best decisions they could with the information they had.  Now, in their case, "information they had" included what they believed about God, what they believed about right and wrong and their previous interactions with God.  But unless we insist that God told them everything they were to do each day (a theology that is found nowhere in the Bible), 99.999% of their decisions were theirs to make.

 

Same with us.  Even if there is a God, almost all of our decisions are ours to make.

 

Thanks you. You helped me realise that it is probably what most Christians believe. It was not my case, somehow in my family they seem to think that you have no decision of your own. If you pray everyday and let the holy spirit guide you, he will be with you every second of your life and therefore every decision you make is god-approved. My mother told me that once, she went so far with this belief that she found herself standing still in the supermarket asking the holy spirit "should I buy rice or pasta ? rice or pasta ?". That's when she decided that for some things, God doesn't care and she gets to decide... but the fact that she went this far with this nonsense gives you a small idea of how things were twisted in my family.

 

After I did my little burning-baptism-certificate-under-new-moon ritual the other night, I got the same fulfilling sensation that when I was very thankful to God back when I was Christian. This morning, I was disturbed that I still had the impression of his presence. That's when I told myself "hey, if He is still happy with you and getting around you after that very heathen burning ceremony you did, either he is not there and what you feel has a full scientific explanation, either he is definitely not what you were told he is and he doesn't give a fuck about what you do and believe !"

 

[diggindiddy]

Welcome.

Don't worry. You have a lot to work through but just be patient and educate yourself. I still read things that solidify my decision to leave foolish faith behind.

Your daughter will be much happier if she doesn't have to worry all of the time about some invisible person watching here.

Hang in there and get involved here as you can.

 

Thanks education and patience. That is the path I chose to take and I will keep going on. It's good to have support here and have these reminders

 

XXX

DD

[GuyGone]

The problem with believing that God directs everything you do is that it can easily lead to a kind of religious arrogance.  I'm doing what God wants, so if you disagree with me, you are opposing God.  Because I'm so in tune with the Holy Spirit that there's no chance I'm wrong.

 

Few people go to quite that extreme all the time (although I've heard at least one pastor express that basic idea) but people do it when they want their way.  If people want to believe that they are led by God every minute of every day, that's fine.  It's a problem when they want to use that to coerce everyone around them.