crysthewolf

A 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.

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.

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