The rot really set in as my knowledge of the Bible increased. The first time I read the Bible, I did so from cover to cover. Each time before I opened it, I prayed for understanding. I was excited about reading the Bible because I really believed that the book held all the answers. What I found instead were questions. My mentor in church encouraged me to write down my questions as I was reading, then bring them on Wednesday night for discussion. I did this. The more I read, the more voluminous my sheets of questions became. I was given the standard apologetic answers, but those didn’t make sense to me. The answers seemed circular and illogical.
My questions in that first church eventually led to trouble with the pastor. He wanted me to stop my own study and read only according to the guides given out in Bible study classes for my age group. I was accused of being headstrong, willful and disruptive. I was told that the Bible must be studied in a certain order, particularly if a person was new to “True” Christianity. But the thing is, I had promised my Grandmother that I would read the Bible and part of that promise was that I would start at page 1 and read all the way to the end. So in essence, my church was telling me to break a promise to my Grandmother. I spoke with my Grandmother (who could have very easily run theological circles around my pastor) about this and she basically said it was nonsense and encouraged me to continue reading the Bible in order. She was positive that this was the best way to read the Bible and would not release me from my promise. When I explained it in that way to my Pastor, I was summarily given a choice – break the promise or leave the church. I left the church.
I found another Southern Baptist church that accepted my reading of the Bible and encouraged it…for a while. The more I read the Bible, the less I understood faith. How could one literally believe Genesis? Creation, Adam and Eve, the flood…all these things had been conclusively disproved. Answer: Believe in God, His ways are mysterious and unfathomable. The Bible is fact, science is a lie. Ehhhhh??? These were things that were never said in my Grandmother’s church or any other Southern Baptist church I’d ever attended. The cruelty in the Old Testament horrified me. I began to see contradictions and unfulfilled or misinterpreted prophecies. I had so many questions that after a couple of months, I was not allowed to ask them any more in the new church. Once again, my questions were viewed as disruptive and unsettling. I was told to keep reading and pray. They didn’t lay down the law exactly, of not to continuing my study, but the only questions I could ask about the Bible were the one’s that popped up during Bible study classes on Wednesday and Sunday. Even then, I was limited to one question per class, and it had best not be a question that brought the class to a halt. I was told in no uncertain terms that the fault was in me and my lack of faith, not the Bible. This was so different from my Grandmother’s Bible study classes where questions were encouraged; particularly questions that engendered discussions. Sometimes those discussions would spill over after church into Grandma’s living room or on her porch. Although her church was also Southern Baptist, it was so different from the churches I was attending.
So I quit asking, and kept going to church and kept praying. Each day became more painful. Each Bible reading session began with hope that I would understand and have more strength in my faith and ended in disappointment as more and more questions came up and I couldn’t ask anyone but God…and God wasn’t answering. It took me a year to finish the Bible. By the time I was finished, I was despondent and confused. I was convinced that it was entirely my fault, my lack of faith, my sin. I spoke with my pastor about it and we had many meetings and intense prayer sessions. I repented over and over and over again. I repeatedly asked Christ into my life, begged for forgiveness and mercy. I spent many, many hours on my knees. All to no avail. The next five years were pretty much a haze of confusion and self-loathing.
In the meantime, I was watching other believers. As horrifying OT atrocities were to me, they quickly became second place to what I was seeing in my own church. Hypocrisy, cruelty, prejudice, cheating, lying, stealing, adultery and fornication. All these things I saw going on were being carried on by some of the most “pious” people. People who claimed that personal relationship with Jesus and chastised me for not having one. Now grant you, those were a small minority in the church, but still it made me wonder. Where was the Holy Spirit? What was going on that people who behaved so badly claimed the Holy Spirit? Why was it that I sensed nothing of the Holy Spirit? When I expressed doubts or concerns to fellow believers, the answer always was some variation of “You’re not praying hard enough. If you pray with a true heart, God will answer. Repent of your sins and God will answer.” I did, God didn’t.
I never lost the feeling of being on the outside, looking in. My personal and prayer experiences were nothing like what other people talked about. I found that I didn’t agree with most sermons and that often times what the pastor was preaching about was simply not true to the Bible. Many things were taken out of context. Preaching of love generally centered around your neighbor as your fellow worshipper. Unbelievers and believers in other religions were to be witnessed to and pitied as they were going straight to hell if they didn’t convert. Hell sermons just left me cold. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the all loving, all powerful God also being the creator of evil and hell. I felt like I’d been locked in a cage and that for the first time in my life, everything I said or did or wore was being judged. Not by God, mind you, because all I ever got from God was silence. No, the judgment was coming from the people in the church. And Satan? That critter just never made any blasted sense to me at all. Finally, I quit church. I just stopped going one day and never went back. I think that one of the things that hurt me the most is that I never received one phone call, one card or one single inquiry from anyone in my church, despite my prolific activity with the church including numerous volunteer hours and belonging to the orchestra. I thought I had made good friends there; I was wrong. I would see people from my church in the neighborhood, say at a grocery store or something, and if they deigned to speak to me at all, they generally acted as if nothing had happened. The fact is, most just acted as if I was the one who didn’t exist.
After I quit the church, I started reading the history of how the Bible was written. I started reading apologetic material. I started reading criticisms and answers to apologies. And like a super-saturated solution that crystallized over night, I realized that I’d lived the last five years stumbling around, blindly believing and miserable. The reason I was miserable is because it wasn’t the truth. I think that throughout that time, I was the poster child for cognitive dissonance.
For the next 15 or so years seeking the truth was my journey. I went through a few stages: fundy to liberal to agnostic and finally, just a couple of years ago, to atheist. As this is already much too long, I’ll try to summarize. I talked with many, many different people of many different faiths or no faith. I studied other religions and beliefs. And one powerful fact that tipped me over to the edge to atheism was that people generally believe the religion prevalent in their culture. So what makes Christianity right and the others wrong? Nothing that I could find. This eventually led me to the conclusion that religion is a construct invented by man to supernaturally explain what couldn’t be understood naturally. This is why the Bible includes things like Creation, the Flood and Adam and Eve. I’ve found that the Bible is not the inspired word of God. It is a collection of myths, dogma with some smattering of history thrown in. In my search through the variations of Christianity and other religions, I couldn’t find anything that convinced me that God or gods really existed. On the other hand, I kept banging my head against convincing arguments and evidence that gods and the supernatural did not exist.
It was hard to give up believing in magic and deity. But as someone once said,” When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
It’s harder, sometimes, to live as an adult. Sometimes I think I would like to go back to that time when my notions about God were warm, fuzzy and ill-informed. Sometimes I think that I would like to have skipped that whole conversion-fundy-church experience that left me damaged and bereft for a while. But as my Grandmother often said, “Wish in one hand, <deleted word for compliance with CF rules> in the other and see which one gets full first.” So like my Grandmother and my Mother and all the strong women in my family have taught me, I picked myself up, bound my own wounds and carried on. I have neatly folded my religious belief and tucked it away in a mental trunk along side the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Goodbye, God. Garnet’s all grown up now and making her own way.
My questions in that first church eventually led to trouble with the pastor. He wanted me to stop my own study and read only according to the guides given out in Bible study classes for my age group. I was accused of being headstrong, willful and disruptive. I was told that the Bible must be studied in a certain order, particularly if a person was new to “True” Christianity. But the thing is, I had promised my Grandmother that I would read the Bible and part of that promise was that I would start at page 1 and read all the way to the end. So in essence, my church was telling me to break a promise to my Grandmother. I spoke with my Grandmother (who could have very easily run theological circles around my pastor) about this and she basically said it was nonsense and encouraged me to continue reading the Bible in order. She was positive that this was the best way to read the Bible and would not release me from my promise. When I explained it in that way to my Pastor, I was summarily given a choice – break the promise or leave the church. I left the church.
I found another Southern Baptist church that accepted my reading of the Bible and encouraged it…for a while. The more I read the Bible, the less I understood faith. How could one literally believe Genesis? Creation, Adam and Eve, the flood…all these things had been conclusively disproved. Answer: Believe in God, His ways are mysterious and unfathomable. The Bible is fact, science is a lie. Ehhhhh??? These were things that were never said in my Grandmother’s church or any other Southern Baptist church I’d ever attended. The cruelty in the Old Testament horrified me. I began to see contradictions and unfulfilled or misinterpreted prophecies. I had so many questions that after a couple of months, I was not allowed to ask them any more in the new church. Once again, my questions were viewed as disruptive and unsettling. I was told to keep reading and pray. They didn’t lay down the law exactly, of not to continuing my study, but the only questions I could ask about the Bible were the one’s that popped up during Bible study classes on Wednesday and Sunday. Even then, I was limited to one question per class, and it had best not be a question that brought the class to a halt. I was told in no uncertain terms that the fault was in me and my lack of faith, not the Bible. This was so different from my Grandmother’s Bible study classes where questions were encouraged; particularly questions that engendered discussions. Sometimes those discussions would spill over after church into Grandma’s living room or on her porch. Although her church was also Southern Baptist, it was so different from the churches I was attending.
So I quit asking, and kept going to church and kept praying. Each day became more painful. Each Bible reading session began with hope that I would understand and have more strength in my faith and ended in disappointment as more and more questions came up and I couldn’t ask anyone but God…and God wasn’t answering. It took me a year to finish the Bible. By the time I was finished, I was despondent and confused. I was convinced that it was entirely my fault, my lack of faith, my sin. I spoke with my pastor about it and we had many meetings and intense prayer sessions. I repented over and over and over again. I repeatedly asked Christ into my life, begged for forgiveness and mercy. I spent many, many hours on my knees. All to no avail. The next five years were pretty much a haze of confusion and self-loathing.
In the meantime, I was watching other believers. As horrifying OT atrocities were to me, they quickly became second place to what I was seeing in my own church. Hypocrisy, cruelty, prejudice, cheating, lying, stealing, adultery and fornication. All these things I saw going on were being carried on by some of the most “pious” people. People who claimed that personal relationship with Jesus and chastised me for not having one. Now grant you, those were a small minority in the church, but still it made me wonder. Where was the Holy Spirit? What was going on that people who behaved so badly claimed the Holy Spirit? Why was it that I sensed nothing of the Holy Spirit? When I expressed doubts or concerns to fellow believers, the answer always was some variation of “You’re not praying hard enough. If you pray with a true heart, God will answer. Repent of your sins and God will answer.” I did, God didn’t.
I never lost the feeling of being on the outside, looking in. My personal and prayer experiences were nothing like what other people talked about. I found that I didn’t agree with most sermons and that often times what the pastor was preaching about was simply not true to the Bible. Many things were taken out of context. Preaching of love generally centered around your neighbor as your fellow worshipper. Unbelievers and believers in other religions were to be witnessed to and pitied as they were going straight to hell if they didn’t convert. Hell sermons just left me cold. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the all loving, all powerful God also being the creator of evil and hell. I felt like I’d been locked in a cage and that for the first time in my life, everything I said or did or wore was being judged. Not by God, mind you, because all I ever got from God was silence. No, the judgment was coming from the people in the church. And Satan? That critter just never made any blasted sense to me at all. Finally, I quit church. I just stopped going one day and never went back. I think that one of the things that hurt me the most is that I never received one phone call, one card or one single inquiry from anyone in my church, despite my prolific activity with the church including numerous volunteer hours and belonging to the orchestra. I thought I had made good friends there; I was wrong. I would see people from my church in the neighborhood, say at a grocery store or something, and if they deigned to speak to me at all, they generally acted as if nothing had happened. The fact is, most just acted as if I was the one who didn’t exist.
After I quit the church, I started reading the history of how the Bible was written. I started reading apologetic material. I started reading criticisms and answers to apologies. And like a super-saturated solution that crystallized over night, I realized that I’d lived the last five years stumbling around, blindly believing and miserable. The reason I was miserable is because it wasn’t the truth. I think that throughout that time, I was the poster child for cognitive dissonance.
For the next 15 or so years seeking the truth was my journey. I went through a few stages: fundy to liberal to agnostic and finally, just a couple of years ago, to atheist. As this is already much too long, I’ll try to summarize. I talked with many, many different people of many different faiths or no faith. I studied other religions and beliefs. And one powerful fact that tipped me over to the edge to atheism was that people generally believe the religion prevalent in their culture. So what makes Christianity right and the others wrong? Nothing that I could find. This eventually led me to the conclusion that religion is a construct invented by man to supernaturally explain what couldn’t be understood naturally. This is why the Bible includes things like Creation, the Flood and Adam and Eve. I’ve found that the Bible is not the inspired word of God. It is a collection of myths, dogma with some smattering of history thrown in. In my search through the variations of Christianity and other religions, I couldn’t find anything that convinced me that God or gods really existed. On the other hand, I kept banging my head against convincing arguments and evidence that gods and the supernatural did not exist.
It was hard to give up believing in magic and deity. But as someone once said,” When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
It’s harder, sometimes, to live as an adult. Sometimes I think I would like to go back to that time when my notions about God were warm, fuzzy and ill-informed. Sometimes I think that I would like to have skipped that whole conversion-fundy-church experience that left me damaged and bereft for a while. But as my Grandmother often said, “Wish in one hand, <deleted word for compliance with CF rules> in the other and see which one gets full first.” So like my Grandmother and my Mother and all the strong women in my family have taught me, I picked myself up, bound my own wounds and carried on. I have neatly folded my religious belief and tucked it away in a mental trunk along side the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Goodbye, God. Garnet’s all grown up now and making her own way.
