Squareone's Deconversion [Part One]

[SquareOne]

Hello everyone.  I have been a member of the site for a few months now.  I am very glad of the supportive community on this forum, and I am now ready to share my deconversion testimony.  It comes in three parts. 1. My Life; 2. My Objections to Christianity; and 3. Deconversion.

 

It is quite long, so it is better to present it in a few parts I think!  This is Part One, My Life - up until the point of deconversion. 

 

My Deconversion Testimony

By SquareOne

Introduction

 

On 1 January 2013 I began my life as an atheist. 

 

This is my deconversion testimony.

 

I have written this testimony for five reasons.

 

Firstly, I want to lend encouragement and support to fellow ex-Christians in the same way that I have been encouraged by others.  I want to reassure ex-Christians that they are not alone, and their experience is one that is shared.

 

Secondly, I write this for any Christians who are struggling with the pain of deconversion, whether or not they know it yet.  For the Christian who sincerely and constantly cries out to God but receives only silence, who reads the Bible but finds unsatisfactory answers to the deep questions of life, and wonders at their lowest ebb – is God really there?  This testimony is for him or her.

 

Thirdly, to my Christian friends, so that they may know that my belief in God was sincere, and that my deconversion is also sincere.  To such readers I warn that if you read this with the expectation that you will find evidence that I was never a ‘true Christian’, you will probably be able to find a poor turn of phrase or badly explained concept to justify your foregone conclusion.  This is a regrettable consequence of language.  Mere words are an insufficient tool to describe the depth of the feeling of ‘knowing’ God that I felt.  Therefore with this obstacle in mind I have not strived too hard to convince people of the sincerity of my former beliefs.  Though, if at any point my choice of words seems inadequate to explain a true personal relationship with the creator of the universe, and from this you draw the conclusion that I had no true relationship with God, I would challenge you to come up with a form of words that adequately explains the depth of your own relationship with God.

 

Fourth, for people who have never been Christians, so that they can understand why a person becomes a Christian, and why such a strange set of beliefs manages to take root in the mind.

 

And finally, for me.  The process of writing this has helped me to analyse my own mind, and understand how I came to be Christian, and to understand how I came to deconvert from Christianity.  It will stand for the future, so that I never forget how I felt as a Christian, and why I deconverted.

 

 

PART 1 – My Life

 

1.Childhood

2.Early Teenage Life

3.Conversion

4.Born Again

5.Church

6.University

7.Spreading the Gospel

8.The Highs and the Lows

9.On the Cliff Edge

10. Unrequited Love

 

Childhood

 

My parents were both Christians.  When I was born, my mother was twenty six years old, only two years older than I am now.  My father was thirty three years old.  They were, and still are, wonderful parents to me.

 

They raised me to be a Christian, like them.  My parents taught me that God was the king of the Universe, powerful, almighty, and loving.  From birth, I was taken to a free evangelical church, the Saviour’s Fellowship (not its real name).  I went to Sunday School, and I had a children’s book of Bible stories, which I loved to read.  I knew the stories well: Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah and the Ark; Moses and the Ten Commandments; David and Goliath; Jonah and the Whale; and of course Jesus – his birth, life, death and resurrection.  I accepted these stories as historical fact, without question.

 

Young children are impressionable, and defer to the authority of their parents.  It is no surprise that I took on the same belief in the Christian God as every other child in every other Christian household the world over.  If Mummy and Daddy say that God is real, then of course he is real.  It is presented as a fact of reality, not a matter of opinion.  There are no alternative opinions.  So to the child, everybody in the world believes in God.

 

The existence of God was hardwired into my brain from the year 1989.

 

I was a bright child.  I loved reading about science, particularly astronomy.  My parents encouraged my interest, and bought me science books to read.  Real, secular, science books.  I was encouraged to learn, and to think about ideas for myself.  My parents led me to believe the same things that they believed, but did not force those ideas upon me.

 

Christianity was a fact of life.  Yet, though it was at times interesting, and at times mundane, it was never particularly relevant to the way I lived.  I had no concept of a personal relationship with God, nor a conviction of my sinful nature and the need for a saviour.

 

My parents switched the family to a Methodist church when I was about six years old.  When I was about ten years old I stopped going to church altogether.  I stopped going because I found it boring.  I believed in God, but that belief did not yet affect my life. 

 

Early Teenage Life

 

I lived a regular early teenage life outside of an overtly Christian belief system.  I attended a secondary school from the age of 11-16 (2000-2005).  It was a standard British state school, without official religious affiliation.  During that time I rarely stepped inside a church.  In fact, neither did my parents.

 

I read my Bible from time to time.  I discussed theological questions with my parents.  These questions were not concerned with whether or not God existed.  At that time for me God’s existence was a fact, not a mere possibility or opinion.  I therefore asked questions about the nature of God.

 

I remember asking my Dad why the Bible said the world was made in six days, if scientists have concluded that the world was billions of years old.  My Dad said that one interpretation of the Bible is that the six ‘days’ of creation may be interpreted as six long periods of time; beginning with the Big Bang, and resulting in the formation of the Earth.  My Dad could have been described as an ‘old-Earth creationist’, who read the creation story metaphorically rather than literally.

 

This is my first memory of the concept that the Bible might not be completely literally true.  This meant that the Bible was to be read carefully, and to be considered in conjunction with other observable facts about the known universe.  I nevertheless believed that the metaphorical truths of the Bible and the observable facts about the Universe must be ultimately compatible.

 

On the subject of biblical interpretation, I found the book of Revelation to be of particular interest.  I found it to be powerfully evocative.  It seems to me quite likely that its stirring apocalyptic imagery appealed to my youthful imagination.  On recognising that the language used was of a symbolic nature, I found it interesting to consider what message God might be conveying.

 

So it was that during these years I found the Bible to be a complicated text, of general interest as an intellectual challenge, but in many ways above my comprehension.  This type of thinking about the Bible contrasts against the way in which my view of God and the Bible altered in my latter teen years.  Whilst I had previously held a passing interest in the idea of God’s grand scheme for the Universe, it was only as I grew up that the message began to speak to my personally.

 

Conversion

 

Around the time that I reached sixteen years of age, in 2005, my parents began attending a new church, the Liberty Foundation, (not its real name).  The Liberty Foundation was run by a husband and wife pastoral team, who were old friends of my parents from the Saviour’s Fellowship.  The church was two or three years old, and its membership was holding steady at around seventy members.

 

My parents attended an adult Bible study group once a week.  In the spring of 2006 at the age of seventeen I began attending with them.  I cannot remember whether I requested to attend, or whether I was invited to attend.  Either way, it was my general interest in the Bible as an intellectually stimulating source of information and revelation that caused me to attend.  I wanted to think more about its big ideas.  As time went by, I became curious to learn more, and I began to attend the Sunday morning service.

 

I heard a new message about God.  It was a message that was more personal and relevant than I had previously heard.  I heard the gospel.

 

Whereas before I had conceived as God as a transcendent, unknowable being; I was now introduced to God as a relational being: a creator who is intimately concerned his creation; a father who seeks to have a personal, individual relationship with every one of his children.  I was taught that the character of God as a relatable person was revealed to us through Jesus, who was not just a man, but was God himself incarnate.

 

I read the gospels and was awed by this man Jesus who was presented.  He taught love, and forgiveness.  He taught that we should treat other people the way that we would wish to be treated.  He taught that when we are struck, we should turn the other cheek and not seek vengeance.  He taught us not to be hypocrites.  He taught us to love our neighbour.  He lived a selfless and blameless life.  He was the paragon of what it meant to be a righteous human being, a role model.

 

Yet more than this, Jesus was God himself.  It was amazing to know that the God of all creation had made himself low in order to teach us how to live, and to suffer alongside us; a God who knew our struggles completely, because he had experienced them personally.

 

Jesus was inspiring because he:

 

‘being in very nature  God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;  rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.'

Paul of Tarsus, Letter to the Phillipians 2: 6-7

 

I considered all of the wrong things that I have done in my life, and compared myself to Jesus.  Next to him, I was wicked and impure.  How could an almighty creator, infinitely good and holy, be interested in loving me?  I deserved death for my disobedience to the creator.  Yet such was the grace of God that he had made a way for human beings to be reunited with him.  Jesus, the perfect man, the perfect God, had allowed himself to be crucified in my place, so that God’s just wrath against me could be satisfied.  This was amazing grace.

 

I prayed to God to forgive my sins, and to send his Holy Spirit to dwell in me so that I could be like Jesus, and know my almighty Father in Heaven.

 

Born Again

 

‘I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:

not only because I see it,

but because by it

I see everything else.’

C.S. Lewis

 

This profound and moving statement of faith by C.S. Lewis reflects the way in which I now began to feel about my Christian faith and my relationship with God.  It was as though I had once seen the world through a veil, but now I was seeing clearly.  As John Newton wrote, ‘I once was blind, but now I see’.

 

I understood what Jesus meant when he said one had to be born again.  My outlook on life changed.  It was a gradual, but real, process.  At church, and in my youth group Bible study, and through reading the Bible, I discovered what it meant to live a life for Jesus.  I was to be humble, generous, kind, and righteous like Jesus, as an example to other people.  I was to share the good news of the gospel with other people, so that everyone could come to know him too.

 

I was taught of the importance of having a personal relationship with God.  So I prayed to God.  I asked him to use me for his Kingdom.  I asked him to make me courageous and bold, like the apostles, willing to give everything I had for his cause.  I asked him to give me direction in my life, guiding me along the path that he had chosen for me.  My life in his hands.  I felt him answer me.  I heard no audible voice.  But I felt a sense of security about my own future that I had never felt before.  I would apply myself well to my studies, I would go to university and study hard, and I would enter a working life through which I was able to honour God, and give generously of my skills and my money to help other people.

 

I felt held by God’s embrace.  He was always there, faithful and true, protecting me, guiding me.  In church I sang God’s praises in worship songs, crying out my love and devotion to him.  I sang, ‘How great is our God!  How great is our God!  My heart will sing how great is our God!  ‘I’m falling on my knees, offering all of me, Jesus you’re all this heart is living for.’

 

I hope that I have conveyed the sincerity of my born again experience here.  I would ask a Christian, if it does not sound genuine, could you communicate your own born again experience more adequately with mere language?

 

Church

 

During my years as a Christian I attended four churches; five if I include the church-like fellowship of the Christian Union.  The story of my movement from church to church maps my changing understanding of God, and the deepening of my relationship with him.

 

The Liberty Foundation was the church which brought me to faith in God.  I was baptised there.  It was there that I first read a lot of the Bible.  I was very much in favour of a lot of what was taught by the pastor.  He taught a hard, tough message.  A serious message.  Living for God was important, and we had to devote our time and resources to furthering his Kingdom.

 

He was right, of course.  If we all had an eternal destiny that was either in Heaven or in Hell, then we had better make sure we were truly saved and living for God, and we had also better make all efforts to spread that message to other people.

 

On the other hand, I felt that the church community was quite hollow.  At seventeen, I was younger than the student members of the church, and had trouble fitting in with them.  I suppose this is understandable from their perspective.  Nevertheless I certainly felt rather isolated within the church community.  I wanted to be more involved, and have better friendships, but there remained a superficiality from other people.  I prayed to God often, that he would help me to make friendships, so that I could share in fellowship with other Christians.  But despite prayer, and my best personal efforts, I was left on the outside of the community.

 

With time, I became sceptical of the way the Liberty Foundation leadership taught about supernatural events.  The leadership of the church encouraged a belief in supernatural healing, experiences of angels, and other gifts such as prophecy and speaking in tongues.  Initially I accepted such things as plausible, but with time I began to become deeply sceptical about the claims that were made in church about such things.

 

I believed that supernatural events could happen, because I was sure that they occurred in Biblical times.  However, I thought that in my church community people were claiming to see the supernatural when nothing supernatural had occurred.  To me this seemed to be a blasphemy against God.  This came to a head when the church leadership endorsed the Lakeland Revival as a genuine move of God, and I refused to accept it as such.  I cover this in more detail in Part Two.

 

I felt a deep conviction that that God was moving me to speak about against hypocrisy and false teaching in the church.  I felt deeply convicted that I was observing wrongdoing, and I felt duty-bound to raise God’s objections to the leaders of the church.  I studied the Bible, and I prayed, and felt led by God to speak about that which he had shown to be important.

 

‘For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform signs and miracles to deceive the elect--if that were possible.’

Jesus

the Gospel according to Mark 13:22 (NIV)

the Gospel according to Matthew 24:33 (NIV)

 

My youth pastor told me that whilst he understood my concerns, I was wrong to distrust the lead pastors.  He said that the female pastor had a particular spiritual gift for discernment; she believed that Lakeland was a move of God; so I should trust that and accept Lakeland as a move of God.  I told him that was absurd.  I said Jesus Christ was the leader of the church, and he speaks to us through the Bible, and what was happening in Lakeland was at odds with the Bible.

 

When I spoke to the lead male pastor about these issues he lied to my face and said that he had not adopted a position in support of Lakeland.  This was not true, I told him, and recounted the occasions on which he and his wife had spoken in affirmation of Lakeland in church.  Eventually, in the Summer of 2009 I told him in a long email that I could no longer be part of a church that supported false prophets who blasphemed God, and I left the church.  He made no further effort to reach out to me.

 

I later heard through my best friend at the church that the pastor had told others that he and his wife had made many efforts to reach out to me during these difficulties.  I do not know whether it is true that they made this claim, though it would not surprise me.

 

This was my first taste of the exclusivist, dishonest and arrogant attitude that Christianity can cause in people; and the wilful blindness that Christians have towards the gross misdeeds of others that flock to the same denominational banner as they do.

 

University

(or Living as a Christian, with Christians)

 

In September 2007 at the age of eighteen I left home and went to University.  This was almost two years before I finally left the Liberty Foundation, but I hope that the reader will forgive the non-chronology in favour of straightforward narration.

 

I had been going to church as an adult, and calling myself a born again Christian for about a year and a half.  I felt that I was maturing in my faith, and my newfound independence gave me a sense of duty to live a Christian life as an adult and to spread the goods news of the Gospel.  I started attending a church in Leeds, that I will refer to as Motion.

 

The congregation at Motion were mostly students and young professionals.  It was a free evangelical church like Liberty Foundation.   It was youthful and vibrant.  The church had, and still has, a significant ministry to the poor areas of the city, actively involved in community projects for the benefit of the city.  I attended a student Bible study group, and made some good friends.

 

In 2009 in my second year at university I moved into a house with friends that I had made through a friend at Motion.  Two were Christian girls; two were two non-Christian girls, and one was a non-Christian boy.  We were all nineteen years old, and were hard working students.  I lived with this household for two years and we got on well, and all remain friends today, albeit over distance.

 

Living with these five others over two years gave me an insight into a very important truth.  On the whole, the Christians and non-Christians with whom I was friends, were very similar.  When one meets Christians at church, the personal relationships can be quite superficial, and people may seem more ‘Christian’ than they actually are.  Christians are good at putting on a happy face over tea and coffee, and are good at sounding spiritual and thoughtful at a Bible study.  But when you’re living with people every day, you can see much more of the ‘real’ person.  You can see exactly how much or how little, they are affected by their Christian faith in the humdrum of daily life.

 

My two Christian housemates were, and still are, wonderful friends to me.  They are kind and generous, much more than myself.  Yet, so were my other non-Christian housemates.  That similarity is telling.  It seems to me now that for all of them, their faith – or lack of it – was not the cause of their inner goodness, or the cause of mistakes they made from time to time (and of which I made the most!) – it was their own nature.

 

The same can be said of my housemates in my fourth and final year of study.  There were five Christian boys in the house, and one non-Christian.  We were aged between 21 and 24.  I was struck day to day by how little our Christianity seemed to affect our daily lives.  We went to church, went to Bible study, and each of us we would have professed to have a true knowledge of and relationship with God.  I was very strong in the faith at this time.  And yet, in the house we rarely spoke about God, or prayed together.

 

A Christian might point to this as evidence of the fact that we did not really know God, were not really born again Christians.  They might say that if we were true believers, God would have been at the forefront of our lives under the same roof.  To them I would say this – if you have lived with Christian friends – did your daily lives as a community of friends revolve around God?  Or did God remain mostly an individual pursuit?

 

Spreading The Gospel

 

At University I studied law.  Learning law as an academic discipline equipped me with new skills.  I learned to use evidence to build an argument.  I learned how to spot the flaws in the arguments of others, and expose those arguments.  I also learned how to spot and correct the weaknesses in my own arguments.  These are not skills limited to lawyers, but they are certainly developed through legal education.

 

My interest in debate and rational argument led me to an interest in apologetics.  I wanted to use my skills of argument to persuade other people that belief in God was right, reasonable and necessary.  In my second and third years of university (2008-2010) I became involved with the activities of the university Christian Union.  In particular, I enjoyed representing Christianity in religion debates and discussion groups. 

 

The University Atheist Society regularly held panels and discussion groups where people of all religious faiths were invited to speak.  These were an opportunity to spread the gospel to people who genuinely wanted to hear religious views.  I could not miss that opportunity.  I felt that I was doing good work for God and the church by being brave enough to face tough questions from sceptics.  I prayed that God would lead me to say the right thing, that he would use my voice to communicate his gospel to others.  I believed that he would work through me to reach others.  I was aware that people would probably not be converted on the spot, but it was my strong wish to sow the seeds of thought and belief in the minds of others.

 

My focus was to communicate the message that God loves every one of us, and wants to have a personal relationship with each of us.  I said that this was made possible by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross, and through prayer to our Father.  I emphasised that God was not a distant, disinterested deity; but rather was close to us, and knew our suffering, because he had suffered himself in the person of Jesus.  He was intimately involved with us, and his love for us is perfect.  I said that when you know God, your eyes are opened to see the world as it really is, and you are set free from the oppression of guilt and sin to live life in the way God intended.

 

The atheists were welcoming, though I found them to be mostly quite sad, bitter and cynical.  Their jokes about religion and religious people were crass.  Their dismissal of arguments in favour of God’s existence was disheartening.  This was in stark contrast to the joy and happiness among Christian fellowship.  I longed for the atheists to turn to God, and would find real happiness and peace with him.  I was not successful.

 

Looking back, I can see that the atheists were quite easy on me.  They did not go to great efforts to try and crush my faith.  Looking back, I wish that perhaps they had done so, because if they had pointed me towards certain sources of information, it might have saved me from two more years of Christianity.  On the other hand, their words might well have fallen on deaf ears because I was not ready to hear it.

 

Nevertheless I now understand their reluctance to expose the critical weaknesses of Christianity.  I myself have no great desire to attempt crush the faith of people who remain Christians.  Firstly, it would probably be futile in most cases; and secondly, because I fear the consequences of someone having their world-view shattered.  It has not been a pleasant experience for me, and I would not wish the pain of the process of deconversion on my friends.  Nonetheless, I do hope that they get there in their own in time.

 

The Highs and the Lows

 

In the Spring of 2010, at the age of twenty one, I stopped attending Motion.  I had become dissatisfied with the church for a few reasons.  First, I was not happy with the style of worship at the church.  I felt that the worship seemed to be more about experiencing states of euphoria and meditative peace, and felt that people were wrongly attributing their mental experiences to works of the Holy Spirit.   I go into this in more detail in Part Two.  Secondly, I was not happy with the church’s endorsement of a Faith Healer who spoke at one Sunday service.  I go into this in more detail in Part Two.

 

I began attending a new church where a lot of members of the Christian Union went to church.  I will refer to the church as St Michael’s.  This was an Anglican Evangelical church.  It was a slightly more liberal church than the Liberty Foundation or Motion.  For example, it supported the ordination of women.  It also had a similar worship style, with a band, and contemporary worship songs, though did not encourage a collective euphoria and meditation to the same extent.  The congregation of the service I attended included a lot of students, ranging up to middle age.

 

By this time in my Christian life I had noticed a high and low pattern across months and years.  My commitment and passion for my relationship with God ebbed and flowed; rising and dipping like a roller coaster track.  With each climb, the crescendo was higher, but each fall took me crashing down much lower.  There would be times in life when they felt so close to God, and other times when he felt distant.  The churches I attended recognised this pattern, and pastors spoke in sermons about how we must work hard to maintain a close relationship with God.

 

I felt very close to God when I first became a Christian; and when I was baptised; and when went to University; and when I challenged the leadership of the Liberty Foundation about Lakeland; and when I witnessing to sceptics about God.  Yet between these times I would feel lows, when despite my prayer and reading the Bible, and community with Christians, I did not feel a passion for bringing God’s kingdom.

 

During childhood and early teens, I was sure of God’s existence.  When I was born again, I was assured of God’s direct presence in my life.  Yet, as years went by, as my relationship with him felt empty, the question came to mind more often - was God even there?  Was it possible that I was simply deluded?

 

I graduated from University in 2010, and passed the Bar of England and Wales in 2011.  I began working within the legal profession.  I moved away from my university town.  This meant finding a new church community to join.  I had been happy in the Anglican community at St Michael’s, so began to attend another Anglican church in my new town. 

 

The new church, which I will call St Andrew’s, was a conservative evangelical Anglican church.  The vicar was in his late forties, married with five children, very intelligent, and a overall a warm, welcoming person.  The church had a wide membership, some older people, some families, some students.  The church was 160 years old.  It felt stable and secure. After my experience of young churches and inexperienced leaders, I was grateful for this stability.  The gospel message was the same evangelical message with which I was familiar – salvation comes through faith only, by accepting that Jesus died as atonement for sin.

 

I was happy to find that the vicar taught from the Bible, methodically, not skipping over or glossing over the more seemingly unpleasant sections of the Bible. I thought this was an excellent improvement on some of my previous experiences of bullet-point theology.

 

I was also glad that in over a year attending the church no-one ever spoke in tongues, and discussion of supernatural occurrences such as angel visions and faith healing were thin on the ground.  I was glad to be in a place that was free of such distractions.  This was a church that put God’s word first, and that seemed good to me.

 

Christians from a more charismatic church background, like I had for many years, may suspect that I died a spiritual death in this final church because it focussed less on the more fantastic gifts of the spirit.  In other words, that I was not experiencing God.  But on the contrary I would say that this church is the one with the highest fidelity to God, through strict reference to the Bible, which was taught verse by verse.

 

Yet in truth, it seems to me that these two aspects – the less charismatic style; and higher Biblical fidelity – were key to my deconversion.  Gone was the smokescreen of high emotional experience, giving me the illusion of connectedness to God, and in its place was closer examination of the Biblical text... in all its contemptible ugliness.

 

On The Cliff Edge

 

By the Autumn of 2012 I had matured a great deal from being the naive seventeen year old who believe that he had been born again.  I believed firmly in God, but looking back along my journey, I noticed how much of my initial faith had been jettisoned: miracle healing, supernatural experiences, connection to God through worship, the sufficiency of prayer.  I saw Christian hypocrisy everywhere.  I saw people not inspired by a divine being, but living selfish lives.  I looked around at the world and saw suffering upon suffering and it disgusted me to my core that God did not stop it.  I considered the other wild religions of the world, and asked, how can I really distinguish the extraordinary claims of my own faith from the other religions?  (All of these points and others are specifically addressed in detail Part Two.)

 

I had become very frustrated with God for not honouring his part of our relationship.  I had given myself to him, but he never spoke to me, and despite prayer and contemplation of hs word, my life was without direction.  Where I had once trusted him and felt guided, I now trusted him but felt unguided.

 

The culmination of these things meant that I had to make a decision.  I could not go on living my life with one leg in the faith camp, and the other in the doubt camp.  I knew that I would never be satisfied unless I sought answers to the big questions that had always troubled me:  Why was God so bloody in the Old Testament?  How could he let innocent people suffer extraordinarily cruel amounts of pain?  How could we trust the authority of the Bible – where did it come from?

 

I went to speak to my vicar.  I asked him about the Bible, how we could be sure of its truth and authority.  I wanted to be reassured.  Yet his answers were weak and circular.  I did not hold back in challenging what I saw as faulty logic in his arguments.  He said we know that the Bible is God’s word because God says so.  How do we know that God says so?  It says so in the Bible.  That seemed to me to be utterly absurd logic.  I deal with this in more detail below, but suffice it to say for now that I failed to see how an all-mighty God could allow his written authority on Earth to rest on such poor grounds.

 

...

 

Through the years of my life, my objections to Christianity had mounted, but they had been suppressed by firmer reliance on other foundations of my faith.  Now, I had insufficient faith in the Bible, and it felt as though there was no safe ground left.  I did not trust any argument or evidence in support of Christianity.

 

One by one, they had all crumbled.

 

 

Unrequited Love

 

‘Ay me! for aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth;’

William Shakespeare

 

To be a Christian is to be a central player in the greatest love story ever told.

 

As an individual, you are God’s child, created to know him, and be loved by him, and to love him.  You are also a member of the Church, which is the Bride of Christ, whom God loved so much that he would lay down his own life to save her.

 

Christianity becomes different from all religions because to you it is not a religion.  It is a relationship.  A personal relationship between you and your creator and redeemer.  What greater love can there be than this?  That the most powerful being of all, who hung the stars in the sky, would love you and reach out to you, infinitely patient and loving?

 

I loved God.  I loved God because of my understanding of his character.  God the creator, God the suffering servant, God the forgiving father.  But – suppose that my understanding of his character was wrong, because it was based on misinformation.   Could my love be sustained if I came to doubt what I had been told about God?   What if my understanding of God’s character was based on a lie?  Could I still love him?

 

To borrow a phrase from prplfox, a modern day deconvert and critic of Christianity –

 

‘Is it possible to know something to your deepest foundation as a person,

that you could only understand and explain spiritually?

And if you know something that deeply,

is it possible to still be wrong about it?’

 

After six years, it was time to entertain that possibility.

[Positivist]

Brilliant, lovely, painful, and familiar... Thank you for sharing the story of your journey. I could relate to many points, as you and I have struggled in similar ways. I truly believe and affirm that you were a True Believer. Find peace, friend. Life is good.

[Burny]

Thanks for sharing! Looking forward to the rest of it...

[Sk0606]

Looking forward to part two! Thank you for sharing.

[SquareOne]

Thanks guys!  The first part of part two can be found in the General Christian Theological Issues entitled "Miracle Healing" - if you're interested.

[Faithless]

Wow..I can relate to so much of that.I remember the Lakeland revival...that was a turning point in my life.I was very vunberable.I was 14,very lonely,and depressed.My bird (who had been my best friend,haha),just died.And people at church had started talking to me,after me being dragged there by my mom for years.I started going to youth group..I still have a CD of Lakeland...

[SquareOne]

Lakeland really angered me.  Todd Bentley with his stories of violence.  My personal (un)favourite was when he said that God told him to kick a woman in the face.  How he was not instantly discredited from that moment on, I do not know.  But the crowd loved it!  They laughed!

 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhpFbjfmK6E

[◊ crazyguy123 ◊]

It was definitely interesting to see how much your faith changed throughout your life until your deconversion. If anyone who reads this tries to accuse you of never being a sincere believer, they would need to lie to do it.

 

I also liked how organized your deconversion testimony was, divided into short chapters. The short chapters combined with the interesting quotes made testimony more interesting than it would have been without them.

[ExXex]

Holy carp, so much of this rings true! Thankyou so much for sharing.

I had a similar approach to faith as you I think, I enjoyed questioning various aspects of the general teachings but I also believed passionately and never really gave unemotional thought to the validity of my belief. Now the memory of that belief and how real it felt is something that makes my new-found lack of it so disconcerting, so it's good to hear from someone who's gone through similar extremes!

[TheRedneckProfessor]

"...because I fear the consequences of someone having their world-view shattered.  It has not been a pleasant experience for me, and I would not wish the pain of the process of deconversion on my friends.  Nonetheless, I do hope that they get there in their own in time."

 

What a powerfully truthful statement!

[RaLeah]

Oh good -- I'm glad you're sharing your de-conversion story on here.

 

I really enjoyed part one, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest.