SRWOFB

It’s incredibly ironic that I’m writing this on Christmas day.

I am no longer a Christian.

Just so I’m clear on this; I do not believe in the Christian God. I do not believe in Jesus Christ as the resurrected son of God who died for our sins – I no longer believe in the concept of sin, original or otherwise. I certainly don’t believe the bible to be the literal word of God.

This has been building for a while. It wasn’t something I woke up one morning and decided to do, it’s been building in me for a while. I’m just now honest enough to admit it.

There are a bunch of reasons, but the central pillar of my apostasy is that I just couldn’t go on trying to reconcile Christianity with my own experience.

I never felt God. I never witnessed a miracle. I never had a personal revelation in my life that I couldn’t put down to natural causes or my own mind.

As a Christian, I always had trouble dealing with the obvious surface contradictions in the bible, like why God seemed to change so much between the old and new testament.

I kept reading the bible though, trying to make sense of how things fitted together. I kept expecting that one day I would read enough, and understand enough that I would see the hand of God at work. Instead, I just kept finding that less and less of it made sense.

I listened to other people talk about how they talked to God, and occasionally, I would add my own two cents in about what I heard. But at the back of my mind, I always wondered if I’d actually heard from God, or if I was just using his ‘voice’ as an alter ego. And why was the voice of God, that sounded suspiciously like my own, so hard to hear, unless I practically forced it into existence?

People in Church would talk of God being love. I confessed to a friend that I didn’t feel loved at all. When people reminded me of the footprints poem, I said that rather than feeling carried, I felt like I was being kicked in the ribs. I constantly felt that I wasn’t good enough, that I didn’t measure up.

But I kept on believing. I prayed, asking for something from God that I could hang on to. Some sign, some evidence. Something I could hang my hat on and say ‘there was God’. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept not finding God. In my prayers, I would say that I kept sliding further and further down the rope. Then, I hit the end of the rope, and stared into the abyss, knowing I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I had started looking at why I believed. I opened the door to look at my foundations, and found to my dismay, that I had built my house of belief on sand, rather than rock. Close scrutiny showed cracks that could not be mended. I finally turned to the bible, buying the latest book by Karen Armstong titled ‘On the Bible’. Instead of finding a historical basis to a true faith, I found a manufactured religion, twisted and turned at every point. Where was the magic consistency I had been promised? Why when I read the words of Paul did I find a delusional bigot instead of a near-prophet?

In the two weeks leading up to Christmas of `07, I hit the tipping point. I talked to a Muslim convert at work, and he described the exact same feelings when entering a mosque that I had heard many Christians speak of. How could that be? Surely he was fooling himself. Right? More to the point, where were my feelings? Why had I not experienced this feeling of joy, happiness and hope that everyone else did? All I found in church was emptiness, drudgery, and expectation.

I heard how three Christians I respected, who said the right words and did the right things, had completely failed to walk the talk. When temptation came calling, they went willingly. Rather than trusting in the Lord they claimed to know so well, they didn’t even try. Instead, they made plans to fail and executed them with frightening speed.

This was when I started getting angry. These people weren’t even trying! I had tried. For three and half years I had tried. I had been baptized. I had lead a cell group, and been involved in youth work. I had geared up to go on a missions trip for six months, giving up excellent job opportunities, believing it to be a call from God. I had prayed, read my bible, bought books, been to conferences. I had repented my sins over and over again. I had confessed a bunch of embarrassing lies in front of my friends and family. I had got on my knees and begged God to let me understand. I had pulled myself up again and again, willing myself to go on.

And still, I heard nothing.

I gave up.

I let go the rope.

And… I didn’t fall. My feet were on solid ground all this time. The rope didn’t exist. I had simply been willing myself to believe that it was there.

I kept waking up each morning, expecting to feel the ‘God-shaped hole in my life’. But there wasn’t one. Instead, I felt… free.

Free. Free from expectation. Free from guilt. Free from fear.

Where was the great unraveling in my life? Where was the emptiness I’d been lead to expect? I looked at my beliefs again, this time without the fear of divine wrath. Why was everything good was God’s doing, and that everything bad was either the devil tempting us, or a trial to grow us? Why couldn’t it just be good luck, mere statistics? Why should I suffer for Adam & Eve screwing up? Why couldn’t God just start over? And if I didn’t believe in Creationism, what sense did the entire concept of original sin make anyway? And why did God never heal amputees? Why did every single prayer always feel like I was talking to the ceiling?

I hit the Internet, and discovered many people exactly like me. And the answers to their deconversion always came back to the bible. I had tried the bible. I found it lacking.

The church failed me, my own experiences failed to bring me to God, and the bible didn’t ring true.

So, I stopped being a Christian.

Please don’t quote scripture at me. Unless you can give some good referenced reasons about why I should trust the bible, don’t bother.

Please don’t ask me if I’ve thought about this, because I’ve thought about little else for near on a month now.