My Long-Ass Deconversion Story
Aug. 8th, 2008 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
crysthewolfA Disclaimer:
I have Christian friends now. They are open-minded, loving, caring people and I adore them. Their beliefs serve them and I RESPECT THAT. I want to warn those people, however, that I do not follow Christian doctrines and I don't necessarily respect Christian beliefs. I respect people, but not edicts and doctrines. If you find those edicts and doctrines to be personal issues, I'd suggest not reading under the cut.
There are those who, upon reading this, will say that I turned away from Christianity because people were assholes to me. This is partially true. Them being assholes made it easier, and I DID turn away from Christianity because of people. I turned away from Christianity because of people, inasmuch as I came TO Christianity because of people, and my entire Christian walk was ABOUT people. Everyone's is, whether they like to admit it or not. Religion is a part of culture, and culture is people. Religion is communal. Christianity is communal.
As to my personal relationship with Jesus? The one-on-one private faith stuff? Jesus (or, rather, Yeshua) was a person. Other people said he was the son of God. He might have too, I don't know. I never met the guy. I know about him because of a compilation of books put together by people, a long time ago, with a lot of political agendas, that are used nowadays by people, some of whom are devout, loving people, and some of whom have a lot of political agendas. Do I pray? I suppose you could call it that. Once in a while, I talk to no one. I imagine that someone is listening. I don't have a lot of confidence that, if they do exist, they have any control over the events of mine or anyone else's lives, but I think it's possible for me to influence those events in ways that aren't physical. I used to call that someone "God", and now I call it/him/her/them a lot of different things. Mostly I just do it because it makes me feel less alone. In that sense, I don't think it really matters much whether someone is listening or not. It makes me feel better.
That's how I feel about religion. If that offends you, then you REALLY shouldn't read the rest.
Frighteningly enough, that's not the whole story. There are a lot of details that I left out and a lot of sub-plots. But, in essence, that is how I became not a Christian.
Thanks for reading. I welcome responses as always (or most ways), but any attemps at re-conversion will be deleted and be warned that I may not engage in much conversation on this issue. It's not because your opinion isn't TOTALLY valid, but because this is still a somewhat sensitive issue for me, and I may or may not be interested in entertaining opinions on it. Because, in the end, it's MY faith, MY beliefs, and MY, if it exists, soul.
Love,
Crystal
I have Christian friends now. They are open-minded, loving, caring people and I adore them. Their beliefs serve them and I RESPECT THAT. I want to warn those people, however, that I do not follow Christian doctrines and I don't necessarily respect Christian beliefs. I respect people, but not edicts and doctrines. If you find those edicts and doctrines to be personal issues, I'd suggest not reading under the cut.
There are those who, upon reading this, will say that I turned away from Christianity because people were assholes to me. This is partially true. Them being assholes made it easier, and I DID turn away from Christianity because of people. I turned away from Christianity because of people, inasmuch as I came TO Christianity because of people, and my entire Christian walk was ABOUT people. Everyone's is, whether they like to admit it or not. Religion is a part of culture, and culture is people. Religion is communal. Christianity is communal.
As to my personal relationship with Jesus? The one-on-one private faith stuff? Jesus (or, rather, Yeshua) was a person. Other people said he was the son of God. He might have too, I don't know. I never met the guy. I know about him because of a compilation of books put together by people, a long time ago, with a lot of political agendas, that are used nowadays by people, some of whom are devout, loving people, and some of whom have a lot of political agendas. Do I pray? I suppose you could call it that. Once in a while, I talk to no one. I imagine that someone is listening. I don't have a lot of confidence that, if they do exist, they have any control over the events of mine or anyone else's lives, but I think it's possible for me to influence those events in ways that aren't physical. I used to call that someone "God", and now I call it/him/her/them a lot of different things. Mostly I just do it because it makes me feel less alone. In that sense, I don't think it really matters much whether someone is listening or not. It makes me feel better.
That's how I feel about religion. If that offends you, then you REALLY shouldn't read the rest.
It all started with "The Talk".
Now, I knew where babies came from... obviously. I've had one (sortof.) So perhaps I should rephrase. It wasn't so much "the talk" as it was, "the question". And the first time I asked it, I was seventeen. I had just given my life to Christ a few weeks before, and I was on a bus with some friends from choir (who'd taken me to the event where the big emotional conversion experience had happened), and I was trying to figure out what I should tell my boyfriend.
You see, we were having sex. But I was pretty convinced that Christians weren't supposed to have sex before they were married. What I didn't understand, was why. And the pastor at my church, who'd studied Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic, who knew the Bible backwards and forwards and was wary of Christian cults that could spring up asserting that you were allowed to do this and you weren't allowed to do that, always said that if there was a "rule" that you weren't sure about, you should ask someone to back it up with scripture.
So I asked my friend, "Where in the Bible does it say that you can't have sex before you're married?"
You see, I'd searched for the topic and only found things about adultery (and an assertion that having sex before you were married WAS adultery, albeit I didn't know whose rules that was according to.) Eventually that was the answer that my friend gave too, after doing some research (at least she gave it a shot.) At some point, I shrugged my shoulders, figured that my long-time Christian friends probably understood more than I did, and told my boyfriend that we couldn't have sex anymore.
Considering that we were both incredibly sensual and passionate people and that we'd ALREADY been together (and there is the whole hormonal teenager thing), and we had another year to year-and-a-half to wait before we could get married (which, when you're in high school, tends to feel like FOREVER), the pressure of the situation broke us up.
To a degree I don't regret this. My ex boyfriend is now happily married to a wonderful woman with 1.5 kids. ;) They have a great relationship and I think she's a perfect match for him, and our teenage love affair had gotten to a co-dependant/unhealthy place. We fought constantly. You'd think we hated each other if we didn't spout "I love you" at every turn. And, my crazy Mom hated him and wanted me to find someone else, which put a major cramp on us actually spending any time together (considering neither of us had a car.)
Unfortunately, the WAY we broke up tore him apart in a lot of ways, and in the meantime (before he met his current wife) he went through a lifestyle that was dangerous and painful and suffered a nasty divorce and custody battle. He's happy now I think, and we're good friends now, but we weren't for a long time.
Because of sex and Jesus.
Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with people deciding that they want to remain virgins until they're married. However, I spent eight years fighting with who I am in every single relationship that I was in, because someone told me that it was "more holy to remain pure". And I didn't have anything to back it up except for someone's opinion and interpretation of the Bible. Tradition. And every once in a while someone would turn a verse inside out and find some speck of evidence that God really DIDN'T want people having sex before marriage.
Unfortunately, all of those inside-out-Bible-verses had other legitimate explanations that made a lot more sense.
Things like this didn't matter to me during the times I wasn't dating anyone. After all, I've never been a very promiscuous creature. Yes, I LIKE sex, but I don't generally bounce from one partner to another. There's something very personal about sex to me, and I like sharing it with someone I feel very close to, and even committed to. Which brings up another issue for me, actually...
I hate the assertion that people should wait until they're married to have sex because they should have a "solid commitment" before they have sex. Not only is that downright silly, but it's bullshit. Marriage is the only "solid commitment"??? Someone should tell that to the 50% of divorced people IN THE CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. I find it difficult to believe that putting my name on a government piece of paper which states that my sex partner now has possession of half of my assests and that I will have to fight him for them if I don't want to be with him anymore makes me any more committed than looking deeply into my lover's eyes and telling him that I adore him and I want to be with him forever.
Now then.
Going back a few steps, things like this never mattered when I didn't have a boyfriend. Why? *shrugs* I had more interesting things to do. I get passionate about someone I'm in love with, someone I care deeply for... I don't really get that interested in sex all by itself. And that's not to put down anyone who DOES, by any stretch of the imagination. There are some GREAT things about sex... not the least of which is that it feels good. It also offers health benefits, can boost your self-esteem (if you're doing it right), and is a GREAT stress-reliever. And, maybe someday I'll loosen up a bit on my own sexual interests. *shrugs* Let's face it... I can't boast of having had a very healthy attitude about sex for the entirety of my adult life. I still have some growing to do.
Which is funny, because among my current set of friends, that actually makes me kinda conservative. Whereas in my last group of friends, I was a self-destructive slut. Go figure.
For eight years I fought with this issue. I had my sex-life paraded before a group of pastors, most of whom I didn't actually KNOW, when I was 20 years old. I was kicked out of choirs, booted from worship teams, had a music pastor yell in my face when I was 4 and 1/2 months pregnant, was treated like property by my son's father because he felt like "we should get married because you're pregnant", was scared into silence one month after losing my son and didn't tell the woman I lived with for another THREE months that I'd ever actually BEEN pregnant (it wasn't my roommate's fault. I was advised by my Sunday school teacher not to tell her right way. Looking back, I'm absolutely certain that I could have told Kandice about the pregnancy right away without any judgment, and she very patiently waited for me to tell her when she knew that "something was up". Have I mentioned Kandice's inherant coolness?), and was told I was self-destructive when I admitted to having a sexual relationship with a friend of mine (not to mention being berated for supposedly stepping on a casual dating relationship that I didn't actually KNOW about, and being accused of trying to steal someone else's man. *rolls eyes*).
And then, after all of this, I met Stephen.
Yep, it's his fault. The fiend. ;) Okay not really.
Stephen and I were both Christians when we met. But Stephen was a rare breed of Christian that I'd never seen. He believed, that sex before marriage was okay. No twisted Bible verses, no standing on his head in holy water... he just thought the whole idea of premarital sex being bad was bullshit. Because.. and get this... nobody'd ever been able to give him any solid biblical evidence to the contrary.
Now, contrary to popular belief, Stephen wasn't some kind of Incubus. He wasn't a porn-addict and he wasn't going to boobie-bars or sleeping with hookers. He was, and is, an upstanding, respectable human being (not to say people who go to boobie bars and look at porn AREN'T upstanding respectable human beings, understand, but even by my fundy standards at the time, Stephen was pretty respectable.) He went to church, read his Bible, hung out with pastors... there was no reason to believe that he was some kind of heretic.
After some long conversations, much consideration, and even QUITE a bit of my own prayer and Bible reading (keep in mind that I'd already been through the Bible front-to-back at least five times, and probably a thousand bouncing around from one verse to another), I decided to take the question to some (I thought) open-minded Christian friends of mine. I posted the question on their message board.
I know. You interwebz veterans out there are screaming "WTF DID YOU DO THAT!?" My answer to that is two-fold. Number one, I trusted these people. I knew almost all of them offline and went to church with a good number of them. And number two? I WAS NAIVE! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!
I don't remember the whole conversation. I remember that, in lieu of answers, I got a lot of people telling me that I was only asking because I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend. Looking back, this was partially true, and as Stephen pointed out, "Duh, what other reason would someone have to ask? Pure curiousity?" Fed up, I aired some of my pissed-offed-ness at a woman I didn't know offline and whose responses to my questions had been particularly snotty and held an air of superiority. "Oh, you poor uneducated soul. Let me shower upon you the wealth of knowledge that I've gained in my self-proclaimed priestesshood." In response my friends, whose beliefs were aligned with hers on the issue, came quickly to her defense. And then proceeded to mock me.
I'll leave out the parts where they ripped me apart and talked about me behind my back, as well as the weight I put on my relationship with a friend of mine whom I was visiting out of state at the time the whole thing went down. Suffice it to say, the issue affected everything.
One might ask why. It was because these people were my friends and I trusted them. Some of them I looked up to, others I just enjoyed being around. And they were angry at me, essentially, because I disagreed with some paper and someone that agreed with them. This was my faith, and my life, and they were making fun of it because I disagreed with them. And because I wanted to know, after having been humiliated, called self-destructive, treated like a slut, and emotionally and spiritually abused over this issue, what the justiifcation was for this behavior.
I went back and forth with them for a long time, still never getting an answer to my question, until finally one of them suggestion I ask a mutual friend of ours, a pastor, whom I had a lot of respect for.
I looked up to him. I called him my Web-Pastor. I'd followed his blog for years and eventually, through some mutual friends at the church he'd once preached at, we became friends. So I sent him an email, asking him about it.
The responses I'd gotten previously, which I think he had been keeping track of, had to do with tradition and with twisted Bible verses. He spoke a little more about the importance of church tradition, and then he said something that took me off guard. I don't remember it verbatim, but it essentially said that if I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend, I should just do that and admit that it was wrong. He said we all do things that we know are wrong, we lie, we gossip, etc., but there was no point in lying to God and trying to justify it. Have sex, ask for forgiveness, and move on. It was just part of being human, and fallen. But what I was doing, trying to justify it, was lying to God.
I was flabbergasted. Admit that it was wrong? Just do it and ask for forgiveness?
I don't have a problem admitting when I'm wrong. But before I do that, I like to try and make sure I actually AM wrong. The assertion here was that I already knew the answer to my question. I knew it was wrong, or I wouldn't be asking. I knew it was wrong, or I wouldn't have struggled with it. Right? So just admit it, and go on with life.
But if I'd known it was wrong, I wouldn't have bothered asking in the first place. I knew gossipping was wrong and I didn't ask anyone about that. I knew killing people was wrong and I didn't ask anyone about that. I knew that lying and betraying a friend and having sex with a married man was wrong but I didn't do that. So what was the issue with sex?
Various sources would, and will, try to say that sex is at issue because of media influences, fallen humanity, lustful hearts, etc. But those issues should all play in to any given "sin" one can think of. Premarital sex is at issue, because no one can figure out why the hell it's supposed to be so bad. There's a question, because no one actually KNOWS.
You could have found my jaw on the floor when I read his email. He threw in some things here and there about doctrine that I don't remember (although I remember that none of it had any base in the Bible itself), but all of it sounded very well reasoned and intelligent. Everything he ever said did. And that's the first time the thought really, truly, painfully hit home;
he was making shit up.
This pastor, that I'd followed, that I'd looked up to, that I'd respected, that was, in his own way, a father figure to me... pulled an answer out of his ass, to protect a doctrine that was integral to his belief system because... because... because what, exactly? Because he hadn't slept with his wife before they were married? Because he had but he felt REALLY crappy about it? Because he condoned teenagers getting married so that they wouldn't be "impure"? Because of Tradition?
I wasn't sure, although I'd bet on that last part just due to his rhetoric before that point. But that wasn't really the issue. The issue, was that he had been making shit up. I don't even think he knew he was doing it, nor would he have perhaps even if it had been pointed out. And then I realized...
I'd been making shit up.
I'd been making shit up to help me keep believing in something that didn't make a damned bit of sense to me after examining it at all. I'd been making shit up to justify the way that I lived my life, to justify judging myself, putting myself down and thinking that I wasn't good enough... I'd been making shit up to support the idea that all human beings are fallen and fucked up and that's why we do bad things, and if we just try, we could be good, or at least CLOSER to good, and if we accepted Jesus into our hearts he would cover up the stuff we DIDN'T do good so that we could still be in God's good graces, because without him, we just didn't deserve it. We were too awful.
I was never an incredibly judgmental person. I was worried, often cried, about friends whom I thought were going to Hell, but I wasn't convinced of just what Hell was. But I didn't often focus on other people, even as a fundamentalist. I figured (at least after my faith had matured a bit) I probably didn't have everything right, and the Bible was a confusing book. I would live my life how I thought best, and other Christians would do what they thought best. And maybe, *maybe* people who weren't Christians might go to Heaven when they died, but I doubted it... at least, not if they knew about Jesus and what he'd done. But I didn't think that I was better than them, I thought that I maybe understood something that they didn't.
Until I sat down with myself and got a little introspective. And then I realized... I'd just been doing my best to ignore things that didn't make sense, keeping from asking too many questions of myself, and going forward into whatever felt right.
But the things that felt right were tearing me up inside. I thought that I was a bad, soiled person because I wanted to be physically intimate with a man that I was in love with. I let people look down on me, let them judge me, because I thought that I deserved it. And I believed that God judged me too... not that he hated me or didn't want me around, but that I made him sad, because I was being so bad to myself.
But the things I thought and did that I was convinced were bad, didn't actually HURT me. It was the believing that they were somehow wrong, dirty, or bad that hurt me.
I don't remember the moment when I stopped calling myself a Christian. I didn't bust down the tower of my faith in a single go. I systematically pulled it apart bit by bit and examined it. I asked myself why I thought certain things, and whether or not they were really psychologically and emotionally beneficially to me. Needless to say, the belief that premarital sex was wrong got tossed out pretty quickly... as well as those friends that judged me or said that I was only tossing it out because I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend.
Because, you see, that's judging too. You don't actually have to believe that someone's going to Hell to be judging someone. All you have to do, is believe that you know their motives, their bests interests, and their thoughts and feelings, better than they do. And real friends, don't judge you. (Incidentally, I know a lot of people who don't even BELIEVE in Hell who are judgmental.)
Do I judge sometimes? You betcha. But I try really hard not to. And I'm consciencious about what judging really is and what it entails. I don't look for loopholes. If I think that making a judgment is the right thing to do, I'll make that judgment. But if someone says that I'm being judgmental just for the sake of being judgmental, I'll disagree. *shrugs* Doesn't mean they'll give a shit. And there's the paradox of judging. ;)
I called myself a Christian up to the point where I had to admit that I didn't wholeheartedly believe in the divinity of Christ. To me, that was the dividing line... and, to be honest, that's probably the most inoccuous belief in the religion. Believing in the divinity of Christ doesn't really demand belief in any other Christian doctrine, and I don't see anything wrong with it. I simply maintain agnosticism on the issue. *shrugs* I don't have any reason to believe he's God, but I suppose it's possible. Of course, then you have to ask yourself exactly what you think "God" IS. And that's a whole other discussion. ;)
As to the other stuff, though, most of the doctrines of Christianity aren't a part of my belief system. Like I said in the disclaimer, I sometimes pray, but only because it makes me feel less alone, not out of any dedication to any particular deity or any belief that anything actually comes from it beyond psychological relief. I'm a highly evolved animal who feels more secure thinking that someone else is there because my survival instinct maintains that it is better to be in a pack than to be alone. Do I believe in evolutionary theory? Meh, to a degree I suppose, but to another degree I don't really. The fact of the matter is, I don't hold to the tenents of Christianity, and I don't think that any creation story has any more merit than any other. I think, that there's too much we don't know, and that there was a skull found in Africa of a human-like creature that was several billion years old, and that that was a long damned time ago. I'm hesitant to believe that someone has a specific track on what happened in the meantime, whether they're Christian or scientist. And I don't think that it's all that important in day to day life.
Now, I knew where babies came from... obviously. I've had one (sortof.) So perhaps I should rephrase. It wasn't so much "the talk" as it was, "the question". And the first time I asked it, I was seventeen. I had just given my life to Christ a few weeks before, and I was on a bus with some friends from choir (who'd taken me to the event where the big emotional conversion experience had happened), and I was trying to figure out what I should tell my boyfriend.
You see, we were having sex. But I was pretty convinced that Christians weren't supposed to have sex before they were married. What I didn't understand, was why. And the pastor at my church, who'd studied Greek, Hebrew, Latin and Aramaic, who knew the Bible backwards and forwards and was wary of Christian cults that could spring up asserting that you were allowed to do this and you weren't allowed to do that, always said that if there was a "rule" that you weren't sure about, you should ask someone to back it up with scripture.
So I asked my friend, "Where in the Bible does it say that you can't have sex before you're married?"
You see, I'd searched for the topic and only found things about adultery (and an assertion that having sex before you were married WAS adultery, albeit I didn't know whose rules that was according to.) Eventually that was the answer that my friend gave too, after doing some research (at least she gave it a shot.) At some point, I shrugged my shoulders, figured that my long-time Christian friends probably understood more than I did, and told my boyfriend that we couldn't have sex anymore.
Considering that we were both incredibly sensual and passionate people and that we'd ALREADY been together (and there is the whole hormonal teenager thing), and we had another year to year-and-a-half to wait before we could get married (which, when you're in high school, tends to feel like FOREVER), the pressure of the situation broke us up.
To a degree I don't regret this. My ex boyfriend is now happily married to a wonderful woman with 1.5 kids. ;) They have a great relationship and I think she's a perfect match for him, and our teenage love affair had gotten to a co-dependant/unhealthy place. We fought constantly. You'd think we hated each other if we didn't spout "I love you" at every turn. And, my crazy Mom hated him and wanted me to find someone else, which put a major cramp on us actually spending any time together (considering neither of us had a car.)
Unfortunately, the WAY we broke up tore him apart in a lot of ways, and in the meantime (before he met his current wife) he went through a lifestyle that was dangerous and painful and suffered a nasty divorce and custody battle. He's happy now I think, and we're good friends now, but we weren't for a long time.
Because of sex and Jesus.
Don't get me wrong, I've got no problem with people deciding that they want to remain virgins until they're married. However, I spent eight years fighting with who I am in every single relationship that I was in, because someone told me that it was "more holy to remain pure". And I didn't have anything to back it up except for someone's opinion and interpretation of the Bible. Tradition. And every once in a while someone would turn a verse inside out and find some speck of evidence that God really DIDN'T want people having sex before marriage.
Unfortunately, all of those inside-out-Bible-verses had other legitimate explanations that made a lot more sense.
Things like this didn't matter to me during the times I wasn't dating anyone. After all, I've never been a very promiscuous creature. Yes, I LIKE sex, but I don't generally bounce from one partner to another. There's something very personal about sex to me, and I like sharing it with someone I feel very close to, and even committed to. Which brings up another issue for me, actually...
I hate the assertion that people should wait until they're married to have sex because they should have a "solid commitment" before they have sex. Not only is that downright silly, but it's bullshit. Marriage is the only "solid commitment"??? Someone should tell that to the 50% of divorced people IN THE CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN CHURCH. I find it difficult to believe that putting my name on a government piece of paper which states that my sex partner now has possession of half of my assests and that I will have to fight him for them if I don't want to be with him anymore makes me any more committed than looking deeply into my lover's eyes and telling him that I adore him and I want to be with him forever.
Now then.
Going back a few steps, things like this never mattered when I didn't have a boyfriend. Why? *shrugs* I had more interesting things to do. I get passionate about someone I'm in love with, someone I care deeply for... I don't really get that interested in sex all by itself. And that's not to put down anyone who DOES, by any stretch of the imagination. There are some GREAT things about sex... not the least of which is that it feels good. It also offers health benefits, can boost your self-esteem (if you're doing it right), and is a GREAT stress-reliever. And, maybe someday I'll loosen up a bit on my own sexual interests. *shrugs* Let's face it... I can't boast of having had a very healthy attitude about sex for the entirety of my adult life. I still have some growing to do.
Which is funny, because among my current set of friends, that actually makes me kinda conservative. Whereas in my last group of friends, I was a self-destructive slut. Go figure.
For eight years I fought with this issue. I had my sex-life paraded before a group of pastors, most of whom I didn't actually KNOW, when I was 20 years old. I was kicked out of choirs, booted from worship teams, had a music pastor yell in my face when I was 4 and 1/2 months pregnant, was treated like property by my son's father because he felt like "we should get married because you're pregnant", was scared into silence one month after losing my son and didn't tell the woman I lived with for another THREE months that I'd ever actually BEEN pregnant (it wasn't my roommate's fault. I was advised by my Sunday school teacher not to tell her right way. Looking back, I'm absolutely certain that I could have told Kandice about the pregnancy right away without any judgment, and she very patiently waited for me to tell her when she knew that "something was up". Have I mentioned Kandice's inherant coolness?), and was told I was self-destructive when I admitted to having a sexual relationship with a friend of mine (not to mention being berated for supposedly stepping on a casual dating relationship that I didn't actually KNOW about, and being accused of trying to steal someone else's man. *rolls eyes*).
And then, after all of this, I met Stephen.
Yep, it's his fault. The fiend. ;) Okay not really.
Stephen and I were both Christians when we met. But Stephen was a rare breed of Christian that I'd never seen. He believed, that sex before marriage was okay. No twisted Bible verses, no standing on his head in holy water... he just thought the whole idea of premarital sex being bad was bullshit. Because.. and get this... nobody'd ever been able to give him any solid biblical evidence to the contrary.
Now, contrary to popular belief, Stephen wasn't some kind of Incubus. He wasn't a porn-addict and he wasn't going to boobie-bars or sleeping with hookers. He was, and is, an upstanding, respectable human being (not to say people who go to boobie bars and look at porn AREN'T upstanding respectable human beings, understand, but even by my fundy standards at the time, Stephen was pretty respectable.) He went to church, read his Bible, hung out with pastors... there was no reason to believe that he was some kind of heretic.
After some long conversations, much consideration, and even QUITE a bit of my own prayer and Bible reading (keep in mind that I'd already been through the Bible front-to-back at least five times, and probably a thousand bouncing around from one verse to another), I decided to take the question to some (I thought) open-minded Christian friends of mine. I posted the question on their message board.
I know. You interwebz veterans out there are screaming "WTF DID YOU DO THAT!?" My answer to that is two-fold. Number one, I trusted these people. I knew almost all of them offline and went to church with a good number of them. And number two? I WAS NAIVE! LEAVE ME ALONE!!!
I don't remember the whole conversation. I remember that, in lieu of answers, I got a lot of people telling me that I was only asking because I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend. Looking back, this was partially true, and as Stephen pointed out, "Duh, what other reason would someone have to ask? Pure curiousity?" Fed up, I aired some of my pissed-offed-ness at a woman I didn't know offline and whose responses to my questions had been particularly snotty and held an air of superiority. "Oh, you poor uneducated soul. Let me shower upon you the wealth of knowledge that I've gained in my self-proclaimed priestesshood." In response my friends, whose beliefs were aligned with hers on the issue, came quickly to her defense. And then proceeded to mock me.
I'll leave out the parts where they ripped me apart and talked about me behind my back, as well as the weight I put on my relationship with a friend of mine whom I was visiting out of state at the time the whole thing went down. Suffice it to say, the issue affected everything.
One might ask why. It was because these people were my friends and I trusted them. Some of them I looked up to, others I just enjoyed being around. And they were angry at me, essentially, because I disagreed with some paper and someone that agreed with them. This was my faith, and my life, and they were making fun of it because I disagreed with them. And because I wanted to know, after having been humiliated, called self-destructive, treated like a slut, and emotionally and spiritually abused over this issue, what the justiifcation was for this behavior.
I went back and forth with them for a long time, still never getting an answer to my question, until finally one of them suggestion I ask a mutual friend of ours, a pastor, whom I had a lot of respect for.
I looked up to him. I called him my Web-Pastor. I'd followed his blog for years and eventually, through some mutual friends at the church he'd once preached at, we became friends. So I sent him an email, asking him about it.
The responses I'd gotten previously, which I think he had been keeping track of, had to do with tradition and with twisted Bible verses. He spoke a little more about the importance of church tradition, and then he said something that took me off guard. I don't remember it verbatim, but it essentially said that if I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend, I should just do that and admit that it was wrong. He said we all do things that we know are wrong, we lie, we gossip, etc., but there was no point in lying to God and trying to justify it. Have sex, ask for forgiveness, and move on. It was just part of being human, and fallen. But what I was doing, trying to justify it, was lying to God.
I was flabbergasted. Admit that it was wrong? Just do it and ask for forgiveness?
I don't have a problem admitting when I'm wrong. But before I do that, I like to try and make sure I actually AM wrong. The assertion here was that I already knew the answer to my question. I knew it was wrong, or I wouldn't be asking. I knew it was wrong, or I wouldn't have struggled with it. Right? So just admit it, and go on with life.
But if I'd known it was wrong, I wouldn't have bothered asking in the first place. I knew gossipping was wrong and I didn't ask anyone about that. I knew killing people was wrong and I didn't ask anyone about that. I knew that lying and betraying a friend and having sex with a married man was wrong but I didn't do that. So what was the issue with sex?
Various sources would, and will, try to say that sex is at issue because of media influences, fallen humanity, lustful hearts, etc. But those issues should all play in to any given "sin" one can think of. Premarital sex is at issue, because no one can figure out why the hell it's supposed to be so bad. There's a question, because no one actually KNOWS.
You could have found my jaw on the floor when I read his email. He threw in some things here and there about doctrine that I don't remember (although I remember that none of it had any base in the Bible itself), but all of it sounded very well reasoned and intelligent. Everything he ever said did. And that's the first time the thought really, truly, painfully hit home;
he was making shit up.
This pastor, that I'd followed, that I'd looked up to, that I'd respected, that was, in his own way, a father figure to me... pulled an answer out of his ass, to protect a doctrine that was integral to his belief system because... because... because what, exactly? Because he hadn't slept with his wife before they were married? Because he had but he felt REALLY crappy about it? Because he condoned teenagers getting married so that they wouldn't be "impure"? Because of Tradition?
I wasn't sure, although I'd bet on that last part just due to his rhetoric before that point. But that wasn't really the issue. The issue, was that he had been making shit up. I don't even think he knew he was doing it, nor would he have perhaps even if it had been pointed out. And then I realized...
I'd been making shit up.
I'd been making shit up to help me keep believing in something that didn't make a damned bit of sense to me after examining it at all. I'd been making shit up to justify the way that I lived my life, to justify judging myself, putting myself down and thinking that I wasn't good enough... I'd been making shit up to support the idea that all human beings are fallen and fucked up and that's why we do bad things, and if we just try, we could be good, or at least CLOSER to good, and if we accepted Jesus into our hearts he would cover up the stuff we DIDN'T do good so that we could still be in God's good graces, because without him, we just didn't deserve it. We were too awful.
I was never an incredibly judgmental person. I was worried, often cried, about friends whom I thought were going to Hell, but I wasn't convinced of just what Hell was. But I didn't often focus on other people, even as a fundamentalist. I figured (at least after my faith had matured a bit) I probably didn't have everything right, and the Bible was a confusing book. I would live my life how I thought best, and other Christians would do what they thought best. And maybe, *maybe* people who weren't Christians might go to Heaven when they died, but I doubted it... at least, not if they knew about Jesus and what he'd done. But I didn't think that I was better than them, I thought that I maybe understood something that they didn't.
Until I sat down with myself and got a little introspective. And then I realized... I'd just been doing my best to ignore things that didn't make sense, keeping from asking too many questions of myself, and going forward into whatever felt right.
But the things that felt right were tearing me up inside. I thought that I was a bad, soiled person because I wanted to be physically intimate with a man that I was in love with. I let people look down on me, let them judge me, because I thought that I deserved it. And I believed that God judged me too... not that he hated me or didn't want me around, but that I made him sad, because I was being so bad to myself.
But the things I thought and did that I was convinced were bad, didn't actually HURT me. It was the believing that they were somehow wrong, dirty, or bad that hurt me.
I don't remember the moment when I stopped calling myself a Christian. I didn't bust down the tower of my faith in a single go. I systematically pulled it apart bit by bit and examined it. I asked myself why I thought certain things, and whether or not they were really psychologically and emotionally beneficially to me. Needless to say, the belief that premarital sex was wrong got tossed out pretty quickly... as well as those friends that judged me or said that I was only tossing it out because I wanted to have sex with my boyfriend.
Because, you see, that's judging too. You don't actually have to believe that someone's going to Hell to be judging someone. All you have to do, is believe that you know their motives, their bests interests, and their thoughts and feelings, better than they do. And real friends, don't judge you. (Incidentally, I know a lot of people who don't even BELIEVE in Hell who are judgmental.)
Do I judge sometimes? You betcha. But I try really hard not to. And I'm consciencious about what judging really is and what it entails. I don't look for loopholes. If I think that making a judgment is the right thing to do, I'll make that judgment. But if someone says that I'm being judgmental just for the sake of being judgmental, I'll disagree. *shrugs* Doesn't mean they'll give a shit. And there's the paradox of judging. ;)
I called myself a Christian up to the point where I had to admit that I didn't wholeheartedly believe in the divinity of Christ. To me, that was the dividing line... and, to be honest, that's probably the most inoccuous belief in the religion. Believing in the divinity of Christ doesn't really demand belief in any other Christian doctrine, and I don't see anything wrong with it. I simply maintain agnosticism on the issue. *shrugs* I don't have any reason to believe he's God, but I suppose it's possible. Of course, then you have to ask yourself exactly what you think "God" IS. And that's a whole other discussion. ;)
As to the other stuff, though, most of the doctrines of Christianity aren't a part of my belief system. Like I said in the disclaimer, I sometimes pray, but only because it makes me feel less alone, not out of any dedication to any particular deity or any belief that anything actually comes from it beyond psychological relief. I'm a highly evolved animal who feels more secure thinking that someone else is there because my survival instinct maintains that it is better to be in a pack than to be alone. Do I believe in evolutionary theory? Meh, to a degree I suppose, but to another degree I don't really. The fact of the matter is, I don't hold to the tenents of Christianity, and I don't think that any creation story has any more merit than any other. I think, that there's too much we don't know, and that there was a skull found in Africa of a human-like creature that was several billion years old, and that that was a long damned time ago. I'm hesitant to believe that someone has a specific track on what happened in the meantime, whether they're Christian or scientist. And I don't think that it's all that important in day to day life.
Frighteningly enough, that's not the whole story. There are a lot of details that I left out and a lot of sub-plots. But, in essence, that is how I became not a Christian.
Thanks for reading. I welcome responses as always (or most ways), but any attemps at re-conversion will be deleted and be warned that I may not engage in much conversation on this issue. It's not because your opinion isn't TOTALLY valid, but because this is still a somewhat sensitive issue for me, and I may or may not be interested in entertaining opinions on it. Because, in the end, it's MY faith, MY beliefs, and MY, if it exists, soul.
Love,
Crystal
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Date: 2008-08-09 03:13 pm (UTC)Also, nice icon ; )
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Date: 2008-08-09 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 03:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 04:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 05:31 pm (UTC)I thought you also had some very good things to say about Christianity. That label has become so diverse, I've often wondered what you can say about the entire spectrum, other than bits about the divinity of Jesus Christ, which don't, as you say, get to the core of the practical belief system. I think this is a good starting point: all human beings are fallen and fucked up and that's why we do bad things, and if we just try, we could be good, or at least CLOSER to good, and if we accepted Jesus into our hearts he would cover up the stuff we DIDN'T do good so that we could still be in God's good graces, because without him, we just didn't deserve it. We were too awful.
I think this may be the core, or at least *a* core, of the Christian belief system.
Except that I'd say: We are all flawed beings. We can always be better, but we can never attain a perfect state. But even though we can never reach our goal of perfection, the quest to improve ourselves is special and worthwhile in itself. We can never earn our way into God's good graces by eradicating the flaws in ourselves, but the quest itself draws us closer to Him.
(I'm leaving the reference to God in there b/c we ARE talking about a religion, but I think you could get a perfectly acceptable philosophy with no higher power in the above statement.)
What's the difference? I believe my phrasing doesn't have the guilt and self-hatred you sometimes find in Christian groups -- and than I read in your account here. I think that, on the other side, believing that we are perfect is arrogance, and it can only lead us to be stagnant and closed to new ideas.
It seems like the real problem, though, is how you define "flaws," "imperfection," and "sin." This is where the pitfalls are. And I want to say something really profound here about how you define sin, but the truth is I haven't really figured it out either.
I get really offended whenever conservative Christians talk about how good Christian marriage "has always been one man and one woman" -- when Old Testament Jewish tribes involved all sorts of marriage traditions we find offensive: polygamy, the expectation of a man to marry his brother's widow, a huge emphasis on women bearing sons for status, and I'm sure I missed something really stomach-turning. Culture has changed, and it seems like we define "sin" partly in bits from Biblical tradition and in large part by whatever our current culture says is bad. And part from something else entirely.
This has been a long musing, and I'm not sure I really said anything I'm thinking clearly. But I guess the big point is that I was really in to your account here. I can just imagine how difficult it was for you. And yet it seems to me that everyone is a better person for asking "Why?" I wonder why it seems to be so terrifying for so many people.
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Date: 2008-08-09 06:35 pm (UTC)I also agree with you COMPLETELY about the Old Testament and marriage, by the way. There is absolutely nothing biblical about the modern view of the "traditional marriage" unless you start getting into Paul's preachings about how the pastor of a church should be the husband of one wife... which is actually much more likely to have been a practical issue rather than a spiritual one. Much like the verse that most often gets taken out of context in regards to premarital sex which speaks of whether or not a widow should remarry, and Paul says that she should remarry instead of "burning with desire", but that if she can control herself instead then she should remain unmarried. This most likely had far more to do with the structure of the cultures that Christians lived in and the ways that the ROMANS handled marriage than it did with whether or not consenting unmarried Christian adults should be allowed to have sex with one another. Or hell, for all we know what's translated to "burning with desire" might actually have meant "starving", considering that it was nearly impossible to survive as an unmarried woman at the time without a husband to bring home the bacon.
Which, after Peter's vision, was perfectly fine for Christians to eat.
See? I know my Bible. ;)
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Date: 2008-08-09 06:55 pm (UTC)It seems to me that to know the Bible to is to bury yourself in ambiguity. It is to appreciate how culture has changed over the years, how our values have changed, and to realize just how alien so many Biblical figures are. It is an exercise of balancing old values with new. What you're not going to get, IMHO, is a road map to modern life. And I'm sure there are plenty of Christians willing to shoot me for saying it just as much as they'd like to shoot you for leaving your faith.
I completely agree with your failed quest to find a justification for banning premarital sex in the Bible. It's pretty clear that sexual immorality is a big theme in the Bible. But, looking back over thousands of years, you have to ask, "What IS sexual immorality?" You find lots of examples of temple prostitution and adultery. You get a few examples of predatory sexual behavior (Biblical sodomy doesn't bear much resemblance to modern homosexuality either). Consensual unmarried sex? Not so much. I'm sure that, in their rigid word of marriage, sex outside of a marriage contract probably wasn't a good thing, especially for women. But the Bible doesn't spend a lot of time railing about it.
I think the Biblical era clearly had plenty of sexual taboos. But I think a lot of our current sexual taboos evolved long after the Bible was written. Catholic priests weren't celibate until somewhere around the first millennium, or so I recall reading. And we've gone through long periods of ascetic Christianity where any indulgence in the physical world was believed to take us away from God -- and sexuality is the ultimate physical indulgence.
But what does this mean about actual Christian doctrine? I have a hard time believing in sins where I can see only positive gains. Nothing in the Bible says that, but at some point you have to break out on your own.
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Date: 2008-08-09 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-08-09 06:38 pm (UTC)So I can't really blame people for not questioning their own faith. I can't even blame them for freaking out when someone ELSE questions their faith. What I CAN blame them for, however, is being assholes, shooting darts of blame and scorn, and taking their fears out on the person who is ALREADY facing the loneliness and insecurity of questioning their own faith. That, to me, is a fucking cop-out.
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Date: 2008-08-09 06:34 pm (UTC)I think that the biggest problem that I have with the whole "sin" issue from my own history with the Christian tradition is that God has such a problem with us in the first place. To me it's kindof like saying that our kids can be snots but we won't even speak to them because they're not adults.
HOW. EVER. This is only one version of the Christian tradition. It's just one that sticks in my mind as being a problem. The idea that someone perfect had to die so that God could be okay with us.
There are, on the other hand, a TON of variations on that idea that I find far more respectable. There are a million possibilities, and when you boil it down, one could almost attribute it to a kind of science. I think that the way that I eventually accepted the idea when I was still a Christian was with the idea that God was actually a creature that defined "perfection", and that, for whatever reason, if we went into his presence at all WITHOUT having that sort of perfection, it's not that he had a problem with us, but that his very presence would actually destroy us. Kinda like in Dogma where when God talks people's heads explode, so God has to talk through the Metatron? Similar deal.
Again, despite all of my bad experiences, the reason that I don't call myself a Christian isn't because of not wanting to identify with those beliefs or because of any sort of bitterness. I don't call myself a Christian because I don't believe in the Divinity of Christ wholeheartedly. And, I know people who DO call themselves Christians without believing in the Divinity of Christ, and I think that that's perfectly fine. In the end, I think that the name of your belief system is up to you to decide. It's a lablel and nothing more. Now, whether OTHER people in that belief system will consider you "one of them" is going to be entirely dependent upon what THEY believe. I know plenty of Christians, though, self-proclaimed and widely accepted in their churches, whom other Christians I know wouldn't consider Christians. For me, the divinity of Christ was the dividing line. That doesn't mean that I don't consider someone a Christian if they don't believe in the divinity of Christ. I'll call them whatever they want to be called. If they follow teachings that they attribute to Christ and that's what they believe makes them a Christian, they're a Christian. More power to 'em.
And, I don't think that it's impossible that Christ was Divine, but I also think that if Christ was divine, he didn't have a corner on the market of divinity, and that it doesn't mean that all the stuff that is attributed to him in the Bible is stuff that he really said, or had anything to do with. Does that make sense? I think that if there IS any sort of God or Goddess or Higher Being or what have you, there's no one that really has any more evidence for its existence or superiority than any other, and, furthermore, they're most likely far enough beyond our comprehension that we're all going to have a different take on them.
But like you said, the Christian religion is so diverse that, in itself, it doesn't DEMAND exclusivity. I know Christians who believe that different people and cultures simply call God different things, and that their names for him are God and Jesus, and someone else's name for him is "The Goddess" or "The Horned God" or "The Goddess and God" or "Allah" or what-have-you. So I really could never say "I hate the exclusivity of Christianity" because Christianity is too diverse for that. I DO hate the exclusivity of some people's versions of Christianity.
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Date: 2008-08-09 07:03 pm (UTC)Woo. I'd love to talk about this forever -- though only if you don't find it annoying :). I like finding people who have done such deep thinking on faith, whether or not they agree with me.
My actual beliefs tend to lean toward your last paragraph, and I believe this knowing that Christ did say clearly in the Bible, "There is no way to the Father except through me." I choose to interpret this very broadly because it seems to be that absolutism is a huge trap to fall into.
The truth is that, philosophically, I just can't stomach exclusivity. If I see people who have, in very believable spiritual and rational ways, reached different conclusions, I cannot believe that this is in any way bad for them or for God. It seems that they have just as much a chance of being right as I do. I believe we all look at reality through a glass darkly. I think that ambiguity is beautiful in its own way, and therefore it's impossible for me to believe in a higher power who finds it offensive. There is a truth out there, but it may be that we all have different parts right and different parts wrong. That doesn't mean that I'm not trying to find what's right and that I don't believe that what I say IS right, but that I respect that my grounding for that belief is just as strong as anyone else's.
Now I have to go shopping.
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Date: 2008-08-09 07:12 pm (UTC)And yes, I think that "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one can come to the Father except through me" is another small place where I ended up looking at Christianity and saying "I just can't reconcile that." I'm glad you can, though. Dunno, there's just something about the way my brain works that can't find a way around it.
And I have to agree with you, ambiguity definitely has its own kind of beauty, and yeah, it's impossible for me to believe in a "loving God" who finds it offensive enough to throw people into Hell for it. But again, there are ways that you can look at Christianity that cut out that idea altogether. I had a pastor once (whom I won't name because of others who might be reading this) who believed that Christ died for everyone, INCLUDING non-believers, and that his sacrifice is so mysterious and difficult to understand that if you DON'T, you'll still be accepted into God's love because that's what the whole thing is all about anyway. To me, there's a kind of beauty to that idea. All inclusive Christianity. I dig it.
I think my favorite religion is Hinduism, if for no other reason than that Hindus believe that everybody's Hindu, it's just that not everyone knows it. They'll figure it out eventually... it just might take several lifetimes. You don't believe what they believe? They shrug it off and figure you'll get it in a few lifetimes. ;)
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Date: 2008-08-11 10:45 am (UTC)I can relate to bits and pieces all over the place. You're not alone in the wilderness.
It seems to me like you have a real sense of self, and are working your way towards happiness.